Interview with Roy Wilhelm, February 28, 1993

'''Roy''':  Well they left us with Grandpa and Grandma and [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] got interested in out there.  It was an old doc in Winslow, the guy that tried to take my, Doctor Oscar S. Brown, he was a Santa Fe doctor down there and he was,  people went all over from everwhere to, cause he was a good doctor, good surgeon and so forth.  When he started to take my tonsils out he cut into one of them and, boy, he liked to never got the blood stopped.  I was a bleeder.  Scared the hell out of him, thought he'd lost me there for awhile.  I was just a little bit old kid.  I just vainly relect that experience, but anyhow, he had the ranch, he's taken his railroad money here and invested it at lake Elsinore. And had some farms and California ranches, don't have to be very big to be a ranch out there.  And so he had a string of well drills and the guys that he had runnin' 'em, that's kind of hard for him, he had to trust somebody where he was out here, he could just go back there once in a while. They were takin' him for a ride, shortin' the books and everything, so he wanted my Dad to come out there and run the well auger for him.  [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] says,  "I don't know a thing in this world about well drills."  "Well," he says, "just see where you got them beat, I trust ya."  And [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] thought about that.  That meant that you can learn how on the job, I can stand your honest mistakes but I can't stand what these guys are doin' to me.  So [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] spent a quite a bit of time out there at lake Elsinore, while they was there that winter, and he got interested and was goin' to buy a place there.  He had to have a little, he needed $800 to sign the thing up and he didn't know just, he had that trip on his hands and he didn't want to run too low, they sold the steers once a year and he didn't want to run his finances too low.  He thought his credit was good for $800 bucks.  Anyway, [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] was what they considered one of the rich Apacheans and the banker turned him down on the grounds that [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] didn't know anything about that country out there and "those slickers are going to get to you and just for your own good I won't let you have it."  I don't like a banker like that, do you?     

'''Roy''': Well, [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] didn't like that one for the same reason.  Changed banks  but the deal fell through on that account, cause [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] was goin' to move out there and take that job, figure out somethin' to do with his cattle, maybe sell 'em.  But that's right on the San Andreas fault and the lake, a beautiful lake and they had a big white hotel there for people to, it was built right on the edge of the lake, today it's down in the lake, there's a glass bottom boat you can buy a ride on and look down at the beautiful hotel in the bottom of the lake.  Fault opened up, see, water run into the fault.  The hotel just settled down slow proposition, water raised. [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] got interested in bees while he was out there.  Doc Brown's boy, just a high school kid, got him a couple of hives of bees, then he got to sellin' honey, then he got to increasin' the bees.  And he got to buyin' honey off of other people and  got to be a dealer and he had a thousand gallon tank back of Doc's house right there in the mountains there.  That was his honey stuff.  He'd spin the honey out of those combs and pump it up there and he'd gallon it out.  So [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]], he was goin' to try, the kid was encouragin' him to.  There was plenty of flowers there and plenty of bees and he was going to try that and a lot of other stuff, run Doc's well drills.   

'''John''':  We believe that was right shortly after they got here, huh 81 or somewhere?   

'''Roy''': Yeah without a doubt he was a gettin' away from that Concho sheep, ya see the guys that owned the water hole owned the grass.  And Concho being the center, all the big wigs, all but Sol Luna.  Sol Luna was a pioneer attorney and a sheep man and a gambler and a gun man and ever' other damn thing.  He got his clutches on Malpai and built big dippin' vats there and he had, when he'd drive 'em in the dippin' vat there, that summer they had just completed dippin' forty-thousand head.  They'd run the sheep around and dip 'em as they come by  from New Mexico.  Well, that takes lots of grass and the Candelarias and the Ortegas and oh there's a whole slew of 'em there, Spaniards that married Mexicans and had their sheep.  Well, they didn't mean to sell the Wilhelms a cattle right too, when they bought that place to build a town there, the Flake-Wilhelm deed.  So he was reachin' out there to get some fresh feed up on the mountain.  They took Jackson's lake, that was little Ortega lake.  The Ortega boys built that lake so they'd have the bunch of grass there.  Those that were down below like the Greers by the (Little) Colorado river, well they wasn't much they could do about it, only just claim it.  The people that owned the water and those Mexicans had diverted the water at quite a bit of an expense to fill that Jackson lake out there and on over the hill there by the Y right off the mesa there is big Ortega lake, had a real big one there they diverted water into that a regular sump hole and so that's why the Wilhelms, they were good friends until  the grass got to gettin' short, see so they was a reachin' out and gettin' grass that wasn't bein' used and that was over on the Apache land, nobody wanted to have headquarters over there.   

'''Roy''':  As I took it, it was just a, possibly a two room deal, cook shack with a bunkhouse.  As far as I've ever known or listened to the old man tell the stories, it couldn't have been over, just what they lived there one summer.  You fit that into the time frame that there was to do these things and it couldn't have been only just something one summer.  But he was an ambitious old rat to do what he did do. And his profession, his being in the cattle business was accidental, but his profession was carpenter, he took training at that. 

'''Roy''':  Yeah.  

'''John''':  Well now, some of those carpenter tools that your [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Dad]] owned, that you inherited, suppose those belonged to B.H. originally?   

'''Roy''':  Yeah, then I don't know what became of the jack plane..........................

'''John''': you mean when your [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Dad]] bought it   

'''Roy''':  Yeah, when my [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Dad]] bought it.  But he had had one, kind of a blacksmith made thing.  You see, every guy in the team and wagon days, he carried an auger, twist drill, hand operated auger.  They would drill a hole, say yea big, and he carried a plane and he carried a good sharp axe and went to town, we went to cross the Vernon creek up at 20 foot falls and he broke a double tree.  Hell, that didn't stall him atall.  He just went out beside the road where some of that second growth oak was, picked out a good one, chewed 'er down, you know you had to have a saw too and within forty-five minutes or an hour he had a damn good double tree.  We was back on the road again.  Had a draw knife, the old man always carried it in the jockey box.  Along the front of the wagon box was a box about that deep and they were three and a half feet, about like that, cause that's how much a wagon box was, and it had this lid down.  

'''John''':  Were they 3 1/2 feet or were they 42 inches?