At the ranch when those storms would come up that summer, I would get Roland on my lap and stay quiet until it was over. I was so afraid lightning would strike me and that would leave him there all alone. Sometimes we would be a week or two or more with no one coming by. If it got me, I wanted it to get him too, and thought if he was with me and on my lap it would happen that way. I learned later that even him on my lap it could have killed me and not him. The lightning struck close that year. It struck a tree in the back yard. That is when I realized that what I had been smelling was electricity. It struck a bull which then fell over the pasture fence, letting in stray stock. It almost never failed: let Daddy be away on a job and I got stray bulls in the fields and pasture. Never happened when he was home.
Another job he had that was disagreeable was a week of road building on the other side of the Allegra mountains. There were no jobs, no money. The State started a road job to give men a few days work. They would give a man a week’s work, then he had to go home and let some other fellow work a week. Daddy and John Russell went over together. It was higher altitude over there than even Horse Springs was, so there was snow on the ground. They had to camp out with nothing but a tarp for protection. Had to cook their meals out in the open. He said they were the most disagreeable living conditions he ever had to endure.
When we left Santa Rita in September of 1932, the Depression was really starting to be felt in that part of the country. I had been laid off in June and Daddy knew a few more weeks would be all he had, so he quit September 15th 1930 and we moved to Horse Springs. We lived with Mary and Frank Dumas for a month. There were no improvements whatever on the land. This land was 160 acres of patented land we bought from Montague Stevens in June of 1930. The first thing we had to do was build a house. It was a two-room pine lumber building. We did put wall board, “beaver board” it was called, on the inside of the living room, but the kitchen had nothing on its walls or ceiling. We used it that way for years.. We also had to get a chicken house and a corral built before winter, along with a little fencing. Frank helped with building the house, but the rest of it Daddy and I did ourselves.
Daddy had always wanted a fireplace, so he left an opening for it at the end of the living room. He put a tarp over the opening until he could get to the fireplace. We moved in as soon as there were doors and windows and planned to do the finishing as we had time. It is cold at that altitude in the mornings and evening at that time of year and it wasn’t long until we could see there wouldn’t be time that fall to get a fireplace built, so he boarded up the opening. Years later, after we had sold out, that little house burned down, still without the fireplace.
During those Depression sdays, food or the lack of it was an ongoing problem. We always had something to eat, but it was sedom what we wanted or needed. The fall of ’21 we were without any shortening or grease of any kind. This same year the acorns and piñons were so plentiful that the ground under the trees was covered. A wild burro that was running in the hills near us was living on the acorns and piñons and was rolling fat. Daddy and Frank Dumas decided to butcher the burro for the tallow to use for soap grease. We were all out of soap. When they butchered that burro the found layers of pure white leaf tallow and we rendered sever gallons of “burro lard” for each family, but we didn’t use it just for soap – we cooked with ours. It had no odor or strange taste. In fact, it was almost tasteless. I baked a Christmas cake wit it using piñons for the nuts. We took this cake to a Christmas “carry in” dinner at a neighbor’s house where I got very nice compliments on it. We never did tell anyone it was made with burro fat. We were ashamed to tell. I wouldn’t be today. A large spoon of this tallow cooked in pinto beans made the soup on the beans so thick and rich – really good. At that time there was a family a few miles north of us from Illinois and our house was about halfway between the post office and his house. He often ate dinner with us on days that he rode horseback to Horse Springs for his mail. He thought those beans were so good and couldn’t understand why the soup on their beans wasn’t thick. Again I wouldn’t tell what I used for bean seasoning. I remember so well the hams from this burro. The meat was quite red and looked so nice, but even thought we had no meat to eat and really did need more protein in our diet, we wouldn’t eat any of it. Why we thought we could use the fat and not the lean meat is more than I can understand now. Given the same circumstances now, I would cook it and we would eat it. Instead we sued it for hog feed. The soap we made with burro fat was pure white and very mild. We even used it for face soap. I’m still making soap from that recipe over 50 years later.
We were overly particular about what meat we ate. We had doves feeding off a stack of millet. They were so fat but we wouldn’t eat them. We had wild ducks on the water tank (dirt tank), but we didn’t eat them. Grandma Barger and Mr. Miller came out to the ranch for a few days and, while on a picnic up the Alamocita, we found a family of young porcupines. Grandma wanted us to kill and cook some of these young porcupines. She could remember her father who, while hauling freight over the Old Santa Fe Trail, had to eat porcupines in the winter. He had said they about saved their lives at one time. So she and Mr. Miller cleaned them and she fried them. The didn’t smell particular cooking. Daddy didn’t taste them; I didn’t either.
Another year we had a very fat hog to butcher. To make our meat go farther, we planned to kill a deer at butchering time and make sausage using about half pork and half venison. We had the meat all ground and were mixing it in a No.2 wash tub. It was almost a full tub of meat. In seasoning it, I had put in sage, pepper and what salt we had right then, but I was sure it needed more salt. We were three miles from the store, so instead of going for more right then, we decided I could just add a little salt as I cooked it. As it turned out, it had exactly the right amount of salt. If we had had more salt when I was mixing it, I would have ruined the whole tub of meat. This venison pork mixture makes delicious sausage, but does get an “old” taste quicker than straight pork. No one had refrigerators in those days, so we fried our and sealed it in glass jars. It would last way up into the summer. By the way, we ground all that meat on a small No.2 hand grinder – I think maybe they called them a food mill. We still have it.
During the summer we were using this canned sausage, a dispute arose over our water right to the Alamocita creek water, so we had a surveyor from Santa Rita come out to do some surveying for us to establish our water right. The water right came with the deed to the land, but hadn’t been used for several years, so we had to have it re-surveyed and re-recorded. This surveyor was Jewish and I cooked pork venison sausage for a meal while he was there, not realize he wouldn’t eat pork. We also had to make him a bed on the floor for the one night he had to stay over. I know he was happy to get that job done.
Money was hard to come by in the early 30’s, so we had to manage to get some things by means other than paying cash. Butter, eggs, and vegetables were traded for salt flour coffee, etc. The coffee we used was called Sheepherder coffee, a cheap grade of coffee beans which we ground as we needed it on a wall-mounted coffee grinder. It made coffee with a very distinct flavor of its own, but we soon got used to it and enjoyed it. We paid 25 cents for two pounds.
When Roland was five years old and in his first year of school, he went to a little one-room log schoolhouse a couple miles from home. Mrs. Jess Goble, his teacher, asked him to fill in an incomplete sentence. The word that would have completed the sentence was “money”. He couldn’t think of a word for that, so she thought she would give him a hint, and asked, “What do you buy things with at the store?” Right quick, he said “butter and eggs.” He had seen very little money in his young life.
It was this school teacher that brought me some flour sacks and red dye and asked me to make a Santa Claus suit – Jess Goble, her husband, was going to play Santa at the school program. I got it made. The night of the program, Jess went outside to put his Santa suit on and, as he was coming in the door, he told the men sitting back there that he never played Santa Claus in his life that he hadn’t either been bitten by a dog or set on fire. He did impress those first and second graders. None had ever been any place to see a better dressed Santa Claus.
This log school was built by the men of the community. The county school superintendent said the county would give us a teacher, but we had to build our own schoolroom. The men who were working some other place and couldn’t help, contributed money for nails and roofing, flooring, windows, etc. Three years and into the fourth was as long as we had a school up there. This was a one-room school. The teacher were May Tipton, Mary Goble and Mrs. Justin from the Las Vegas area. These teachers were each there on year. Mrs. Tipton first year, then Mrs. Justin and then Mrs. Goble. It was Mrs. Justin that gave me a primer and first reader to start teaching Roland to read.
When the kids had their night-time program up there, the different mothers would bring lamps (kerosene) to place about the room for light. One night Mrs. Lonie Wright broke the globe for hers by bringing it in out of the cold and lighting the lamp too soon. In later years we owned the little school building and used it to store feed in. One day while using it for feed, Mr. Charley Hobbs came by our house saying he had seen a big rattlesnake run under the schoolhouse and for us to watch out for it. We were going to work up there the next day. Daddy went up with his team and wagon and Roland, Maureen and I went up in the pickup and took the .22 rifle. First thing we looked for was that snake. Sure enough, Roland saw it first stretched out in the sun along a log in the wall in the sun shine. Didn’t take long to kill that one.
We had our share of rattlesnake confrontations out there. The most frightening one to me happened when Roland was about eight months old. We had planted a field of beans up on a mesa in the spring. It didn’t rain enough to get a good stand up , so Daddy didn’t even bother to plow the beans that were up. Consequently, the furrows between the bean rows were quite deep and had grown up pretty much in a weed we called fireweed. It turned red when frost hit it. Late in the fall Daddy was off on a job and I decided to take Roland up there with me and pull and stack a lot of what beans had come up and made. I got Roland fixed on a palette where I could watch him and started pulling beans. As long as he was in sight I thought he would be all right. A little later, maybe thirty minutes later, I went over to check on him and there stretched out in the furrow in front of him was a large rattlesnake. How long it had been there watching Roland, I don’t know. I grabbed Roland and started looking for something to kill it with. There wasn’t a rock big enough but there were some fence posts nearby, so I used on of them.
We had always been told “Kill a snake and the next day you will find a mate near the same place.” That proved true in at least three places that I can remember. John Russell came by one day and said he had just killed a rattlesnake near our lower garden. I was expecting Daddy in later that day from a job, so I thought I’d play a trick on him. The road down through there had a very narrow place in it between the two trees and he would have to slow down to get by it. I took this dead snake and stretched it across the road at this place where I thought he would be sure to see it. Pretty soon he came in, but said nothing about a snake. After a shile I told him what I’d done and he decided to go back down there. Instead of a dead snake, he found a live one. Jack Owen killed a rattler at our gate up on the mesa and the next day we killed another there. And when May and Clarence Tipton were living in the “adobe shack” up the creek from us and just across our fence line, she came down to the house saying she had seen a rattlesnake crawl in a prairie dog hole near the gate. She had a .22 rifle with her and wanted someone to come up there and shoot that snake. All the men folks of the community were away working, but Helen was staying with us that summer. We all went back up to the prairie dog hole, and Helen shot the snake. The next day May’s husband, Clarence, came home telling May he had just killed a rattlesnake down there. One time just across the creek from the house Daddy got off his horse to kill a rattler and almost stepped on a second one.
There were some sad times too during the Depression, many of which were brought on by the lack of money. In 1935 we were looking for our second baby due to arrive in January. A doctor just out of school came to Horse Springs and set up an office in one of Maude Arnold’s buildings. He had an idea of trying to get the ranchers and settlers to pay him so much a month for medical care. He stayed around until late in December of 1934 trying to make his idea work, but it didn’t go over. People just didn’t have the money, and the idea of paying a doctor to “keep you well” was too new. In the meantime, though, we had made arrangements for him to come to the house when I thought it was time for the baby to arrive. But a few days after Christmas he came to see us and said he was leaving. He was going to Magdalena to start a practice. It was too late for us to make other arrangements – besides, we didn’t have enough money to do anything but stay home. Betty Hulse said she would come and help me when the time came. January 10th was a clear and very cold day – at midnight I sent Daddy for Betty. There was snow on the ground, but it was frozen so hard he could make it up to there house in the Model T. With Betty and Daddy helping, a baby boy was brought into this world. We named him Stanley Mason. On the 14th, I could tell the baby was not doing as he should. Another neighbor stayed with me and Roland while Betty and Daddy took the baby 65 miles over a dirt road to a doctor in Magdalena. He thought the baby had pneumonia and gave them some medicine. The baby died on the way home. Maude Arnold and a friend of hers made a little casket for the baby and he was buried under a pine tree across the creek from the house.
The fall we moved to the ranch, Daddy and Frank Dumas found a kitten in the hollow of a tree out in the mountains. They decided she was half bobcat, and from her ears, tail and feet she probably was. Frank and Mary already had a cat, so we got this one. We called her Kitty Bob, and up to the time I brought Roland home as a new baby, Kitty Bob had the run of the place. But after I’d been home with the baby a couple of weeks, I found a flea on his head. Kitty Bob was banished to the outside. She was no longer a house cat. In later years Daddy had a steel trap set down in the field near the tank. I don’t even remember whet he had set it for, but Kitty Bob got a back leg caught in it and had been there two or three days when we found her. We doctored her leg with a mixture of turpentine, coal oil and hog lard. We saved her leg, but the circulation had been cut off so long that all the hair came out. A little hair did grow back but the leg was always weak. Then one summer Daddy and Edwin Cawyer, a nephew who was staying with us at the time, found her at the corral with the leg broken at the place where the trap had caught it. We figured one of the horses stepped on her and broke it. The leg was damaged so badly it had to be taken off. I mixed a flower and water paste to put on it to stop the bleeding and Daddy and Edwin took her to the chopping block and with one quick chop it was off. I didn’t get to use the flour and water paste – they couldn’t hold her. She ran off into the hills for a couple of days. The leg, or stump, did fine and she lived quite a while. We leased the ranch that fall to the Hobbs and they were to take care of her. They had a dog that loved to chase cats and eventually he killed her.