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corrals to eat as soon as they finished drinking – except Apricot. He got about halfway back and stopped. There he stood all humped up with his collar and hames falling up around his head and ears. Even though he had worked hard and was hungry, there he stood. Daddy had to go get him.

One summer evening, Maureen, Roland and I had worked until almost dark in what we called the lower garden. It was between ¼ and 1/3 of a mile from the house. The house and garden both laid along the creek. As we were starting to the house, we saw an animal drinking at the creek. It slipped quietly away when it saw us. I always supposed it was a coyote, but now that Roland is older, he thinks it was a wolf. It could well have been – there were quite a few wild animals in that country that many years back.

Earlier when I was writing about the house Daddy and I built when we first moved out there, one unique thing about it was a door. The partition door between the living room and kitchen had several bullet holes in it, along with being all scarred up. This door had come from the abandoned Z-P ranch house. Years before we moved into that country it had been a wild and woolly place. We moved there in 1930, and not too many years back of that it had been Indian country, so there is no telling how the bullet holes got in the door. Frank Landavazo once owned that place. Jack Hulse said Frank had worn out several saddles moving cornerstones around there. That probably wasn’t too much of an exaggeration. When we first moved onto our place, we borrowed surveying equipment and surveyed our original 160 acres of patented land. We found cornerstones all over the countryside. We borrowed the surveying instruments from Juan Correjo. Roland will remember him.

There were no barbers or barber shops within miles of us out there to take advantage of and, besides that, Daddy didn’t have the money to spare most of the time, so I started cutting his hair. I’m still cutting it after 53 years. When Roland was a year old I started cutting his hair and continued cutting it until he went away to college – and did then when we could manage to be together. One time, when he was growing up, Daddy took him to the barber shop. We didn’t want him to grow up not ever having a barber cut his hair. My only trouble cutting Roland’s hair when he was small is that he would go to sleep on me. In the beginning of my hair cutting, I used hand-operated clippers, but when we started the store and had electricity we got an electric pair.

In writing these notes on the Depression years, I wrote all of the different jobs Daddy had worked at. I think I’ll write of just two or three that I during that time that seem a little unusual to me. Of course, mine were all at home on the ranch. I helped string barbed wire along a fence line when I was five or six months pregnant. That wasn’t on flat ground. It was up on hill and down another most of the time. A roll of barbed wire weighed 100 pounds. Daddy would put the roll of wire on a crowbar; he would carry one end and I the other and as we walked the wire strung out. He would take the lower side of the hill to make it less heavy for me. That was just before Roland was born. (Barbed wire was $2.50 a spool back in 1930. Today, in 1983, the Montgomery Ward catalogue lists it at $45.99 plus freight.)

Four years later I was again pregnant, and we had a field of hay down. Daddy needed someone to help haul and stack it. He could have gotten someone to help him for a share of the hay but we really needed all of it for ourselves, so I stacked it on the wagon as Daddy pitched it to me from the ground. Then when we got into the fee lot, I stacked it in the stack as Daddy pitched it to me from the wagon. I guess the thing about his particular job was the shoes I had. I had ordered this pair from a mail order house where they offered a variety of styles – you had no choice – for a certain price. The ones I got had leather soles. You’ve seen leather that, instead of wearing, would just get slick. That is what these shoes had done. I slid from one side to another on those hay stacks.

Another time I wished for a doctor in those early years. There was one evening when Roland was five years old. He always loved to try to use an axe, and every chance he got he tried to cut wood. I, being the over-protective mother that I was, did my best to keep him from it. I was busy getting supper and Daddy was at the barns. I could hear Roland at the wood pile chopping. I stuck my head out the door and yelled at him to put that axe down. It made him so mad he slammed the axe down. When he did, it hit a slender piece of juniper wood that snapped in two, with a piece of it flipping just right to hit him in the eye. It made a long cut across the eyelid just above the eyeball. The blood just flowed. I don’t know who was the most scared, he or I. He came running to me and I put a wet cold cloth on it, which soon stopped the bleeding, and then I gave one of my yells that Daddy says I’m famous for – he came running! The cut along his eyelid was a long one, and I wanted us to take him to the doctor – 65 miles over dirt road was the closest – Daddy didn’t think we needed to. I thought the cut needed stitches and a doctor would have put some stitches in, I think. But he went to the store at Horse Springs and got tape and bandage. I used Vick Vaporub salve on it and it healed quickly. He still has the scar.

Daddy says I must include this little story. He had been working on a road job near Magdelena. Since he was bache-ing it he had bought some canned foods to make meal fixing quicker and easier. He had some of this canned stuff left over when he came home late one night. Roland and I had already eaten our supper, but Daddy hadn’t, so when I went to fix him something to eat, he told me “there is some groceries in my chuck box you can fix.” I opened a can of chili con carne with beans. When Roland heard the word “groceries,” it was a new word to him. He thought that was some special food, so even though he had eaten, he wanted to eat again with Daddy. We put some chili beans on his plate and, after taking a bite, he asked “Is this groceries or just plain beans?”

When we moved into Horse Springs county in 1930, the prairie dogs were very thick. The prairie dog towns were large and numerous all across the Augustine Plains, and we had lots of them in the flat just up the creek from the house. Rancher complained at the range grass being destroyed by the dogs. A branch of the government, I don’t remember which, initiated a plan to eradicate all the prairie dogs in that area, and it worked. Men working for the government distributed poisoned grain at all dog holes. They worked at least some areas twice and killed them out. Times have changed in the fifty years since then. Now it is against the law to kill prairie dogs in some places.

Rattlesnakes have always been thick around dog towns. There was one area on the Augustine plains that was a winter den for some small black rattlers that were vicious – they were always ready to strike. These men would come in at night telling how many snakes they had to kill in order to get the grain in the dog holes. I can’t remember exactly how many they said, but it was something like forty or fifty at the worst places. It is also against the law in some states to kill a rattlesnake now.

When the community was trying to build the little log schoolhouse that I have mentioned before, we needed a little extra money for flooring, windows, stove, etc. The men that had jobs had contributed some money, but we decided to hold an old-fashioned box supper at Jack Hulse’s place to raise some more. If some of you younger people don’t know about box suppers, you have missed something. The women and girls each decorate a box and put enough food in it for two people. The boxes are auctioned off and the man who gets it is the supper partner of the one who prepared the box. The womenfolk go all out decorating their boxes trying to have theirs bring in the highest bid. Also we kept it a secret which box belonged to which woman, so the man wouldn’t know whose box he had until she let him know after he had won the bid. I worked and worked on my box. I covered a shoe box with cloth and then made a Sun Bonnet doll to stand on the top. She had a full old-fashioned long skirt and having a sun bonnet on her head kept me from having to make a good face for the doll. My box was put up for bid pretty early and Daddy decided it was going higher than he wanted to pay, so he quit bidding. Roy Owens got my box and was my supper partner. The funny thing about it was there were more men there than women, so there weren’t enough boxes to go around. In order to have a box, Daddy had to bid on one of the last ones which were going higher than mine did, because of the shortage. I never did let him forget that. A long time later, the Owens family still had my box.

July 1988 (These are some things Charlotte thought I needed to write down) Grandpa and Grandma Barger moved to Lovington, New Mexico when Daddy was six of seven years old, around 1905 or 1906. New Mexico was just a Territory then. New Mexico became a state in 1912

They owned and ran a hotel in Lovington until Grandma and Grandpa sold the hotel. They divorced (1910 or 1911). At that time Grandma took Daddy and went to Mineral Wells, Texas. She wanted to take the mineral baths there. They stayed less than a year and then moved to El Paso. Again stayed a year or less. The next move was to Deming, NM where Grandma met and married a Mr. Allen. The next few years, Grandma and Mr. Allen had a ranch at Mule Creek, NM. Daddy spent some of his teenage years there and he returned there after his short stay in the Navy.

Some of Daddy’s teen years were spent with Grandpa Barger up in the northern part of the state. I’ve heard him tell of helping build large dirt dams with a Fresno and horses – working for some Abrier brothers (I’m sure I’ve not spelled that right) when he was sixteen years old. When Grandma lived at mule creek she had a mail route in that area. At first she drove a horse and buggy and then had a Model T Ford.

I met Mr. Allen twice, once before Daddy and I married and I was visiting Grandma, and then once more when he was at the house right after Roland was born. He seemed pretty old to me at that time.

I don’t know when Grandma and Mr Allen separated and divorced, but in 1928 Grandma remarried Grandpa Barger. They bought a farm in the Rio Grande Valley near Las Cruces. The post office for the farm was legally Brazito, but they got their mail at Mesilla Park. They had a little adobe farmhouse with a dirt roof. There was where Roland was born. Grandma delivered him.

In December 1929, Daddy and I decided we would get married, but would need to find a furnished house first. At the time, Daddy lived in the Santa Rita Hotel and I was living at Dad’s. We finally did get a house from a fellow, a Mr. Trevarrow, who had several rental houses. By this time it was January 1930. We were married in Silver City on January 9, 1930 around 9:00am. It was a bitter cold morning – cars had no heater at that time and it was 18 miles from Santa Rita to where we lived in Silver City.

The night before we went to Silver City, Daddy asked me which suit he should wear – he had a grey one and a blue one. I told him what my dress was like so he decided on his grey one. In the store where I was working we sold two types of dresses – one sold for $12.50, and the other for $16.50. I splurged and got a $16.50 dress! It was eggshell-colored crepe with an accordion-pleated skirt. It had an embroidered flower up on one shoulder about where you would wear a corsage. Even by today’s standards and style it was very pretty.

After we got back to Santa Rita that afternoon, we had to get our clothes and belongings moved into this little house we ahd rented. Daddy discovered the lock on this house didn’t work, so he had Mr. Trevarrow there working on it. Mr. T asked Daddy how long we had been married. When Daddy told him just since morning, he was surprised. Daddy had been trying so hard the past two or three weeks to get a house from him that he thought we were already married.

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