Interview with Roy Wilhelm, October 31, 1993
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| - | + | [[Carl LeRoy Wilhelm|Roy Wilhelm]] Talks Family History | |
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| + | From an interview with his son [[John Vincen Wilhelm|John]] on October 31, 1993 | ||
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| + | '''John''': Clarify the events following the wedding, like where did George and Naomi live, Maude says on Dick Gibbons place in Vernon. Then built on homestead. Where did George live 1900 to 1905? When he got married I guess in 1905, huh? Lets start with those questions. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': She's wrong, Dick Gibbons lived on the 7-bar-T Ranch, it's a mile square, that big open place that side of Vernon, that and that corner, it's a school section. | ||
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| + | '''John''': That's kind of south-west of the cross roads station? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, that's right. And Pa lived, you know where you, the road that goes to Pinyon out of Vernon there, when you cross the little wash over there, by Uncle John's homestead that was there on the south, in fact the west half of the town was on John's homestead, cause Haight bought it after John died and he give that part then you come to the fence between the end of Johns and between there and the hill over there was grandma Wilhelms homestead. | ||
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| + | '''John''': When did she buy that? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': When did she buy it? | ||
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| + | '''John''': Yeah, she moved there after her boys had already located in Vernon didn't she? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Oh yeah, you see you got to kind of use a little detective work here and make a decision. She homesteaded over there at Concho, the Roman Candelaria place. She did that cause the old man had already wasted his up at that spring up there, so she filed that. In other words he had that and they figured on proving up on it too so she filed down here and then he went to the border and they lost that and it's on forest service now and uh what was the point? | ||
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| + | '''John''': We was trying to figure out when she sold out in Concho and went to Vernon. About what period of time, did she go up there, maybe I should say who went first, George or his mother, who went to Vernon first? Haight went first of all of them didn't he? He got married and went up there in 1891 or something like that ? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah he filed a homestead up there and she went up there and got that place west there. John, her youngest son homesteaded between Haight and her, but I don't think hers could have been a homestead. They had a thing they called script you could buy and put down on something and I think she bought script, now script was expensive as hell, the government made a lot of money on it the other way they didn't make anything on it. | ||
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| + | '''John''': And I think you told me that hers was just 40 acres wasn't it? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': I think it was 80 acres. The way they fenced it, it had to be.......how many acres did you say you thought it was? | ||
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| + | '''John''': I thought you said it was 40. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': I think it could have been. And that leads me more to the script deal. I know it didn't go up the hill. So that would be a half of 40, over to the hill and twice as long made 40 acres out of it. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Now she already had that place when your dad had trouble getting water over at his homestead, right? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah. | ||
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| + | '''John''': But we don't know exactly when she sold out? I guess we could search land records for the Concho place. Whenever she sold that that's when she went to Vernon, right? Are we able to pin a time frame to when that apostle released those people from their call in Concho? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No. Here's what figures into it. She was married to the old man, he took that woman and went down on the border. | ||
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| + | '''John''': And we know when that was because of the letter. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, now after they broke it up he come back and I guess he come back there again I'm you see he lived for a long time they did together, down by Uncle Art's place down on the Gila River and I think they must have moved from there down, he must have come back to this wife when he got through there. Nobody's ever told me that. | ||
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| + | '''John''': But we know that would have been back to her place in Vernon, right/ Cause she had it when your Dad was trying to homestead in Vernon, right. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Now when Pa got married, he didn't take his wife to live on that homestead, took his wife up and he built a log cabin there not too far from Grandma's place. | ||
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| + | '''John''': OK that was the other ruins that we looked at and it was a log structure then, huh? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah....... | ||
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| + | '''John''': You were saying that when he got married he moved to a log cabin there near his mother's place on account of a water shortage at his place. That's what Maude said. When she said log house we hadn't ever heard that part before and it sounded a little off the wall. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': He never had a log house over at the other place. He took some of those logs over there, what the hell did he do with them? He chopped them up I guess. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Well, now over at the other place didn't you tell us that originally he just had a bunk house and he later added on to it to make it into a house? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, it was there and he built the house right in front of it like you did with your.... | ||
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| + | '''John''': Yeah, In phases kind of. When did he build the bunk house and when did he make it into a house? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well, now you see, give me a pencil an I'll show you...... | ||
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| + | '''John''': When did he actually make the house there out of the bunkhouse? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': That was after my Mother died. When we went up there from here to live we all slept in this little (cookshack) thing it had a cook thing in the front this if you had cowboys working for him, they'd bunk down out here , but the cookin' was all done here. There wasn't any heating in there (the bunkhouse) but we had heating in here (cookshack) the old wood stove, kitchen stove, so we ate in here. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Did he build these original buildings or put them there before he was married? The granaries and cookshack and that sort of thing? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Just down here. (When George first homesteaded he set up a semi-permanent camp. He had a chuckbox, a corral and an old granary. The camp was 1/4 mile north of the eventual site of the house.) He had these 2 granaries at his permanent camp and he just camped out and put the grain in the things. But he pulled the granaries up here and faced them to each other (with a walkway in between) When we went up after my Mother died we moved into this (the cook shack) but they had lived here in the summertime, I guess right from the start. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So in the winter time they lived at his house here in St. Johns? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''John''': Was that on the northwest corner of the Pioneer school block? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah. | ||
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| + | '''John''': How long had he had that place? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': He bought it after he was married. It had a house on it. So he bought it for her, needed a home. And this up here (the Vernon Homestead) was more a camp, that's the way he looked at it | ||
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| + | '''John''': A minute ago you said he moved into this log house by his mother's place when he got married. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Oh, Yeah. | ||
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| + | '''John''': He must have moved into that first, until he bought the place in St. Johns? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well this was also a summer deal, well no, no it wasn't. | ||
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| + | '''John''': That's what we're trying to get smoothed out in the story, the sequence there. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': You see school had a lot to do with it. But I went to school in Vernon, down at Pulsipher's place when they had it there. But we just did that until the steers was shipped, then we come to St. Johns. Same year. But when we went up we went to school south of Haight's place over the hill there, Frank Whitings homestead. His little old homestead shack there was the school house, he just moved out when they moved in. They paid him rent on it. Now is it makin' a picture? | ||
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| + | '''John''': So the log house by his moms was just when it was convenient during the summer time, cattle season or whatever. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''John''': And he had the place in St. Johns to move to in the winter. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Right. | ||
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| + | '''John''': You know on that forest service report we saw on the homestead it said he was living on the homestead from 1900 to 1907 Did he actually or did he just tell them that to fill the requirement? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well yeah, he was living there after a fashion, he had that camp there. | ||
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| + | '''John''': But he hadn't actually built that house there until after his wife died? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah. That's right. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So from the time he was a teenager he was in the cattle and sheep business, right? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, he was away from home all the time. Was out in camp, camped out. | ||
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| + | '''John''': That was his livelihood, right He was a stockman?..... | ||
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| + | ''(tape end) (New tape)'' | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': That was his pretense of living there, but he had the excuse that he didn't have water there. They dug two or three wells and they didn't hit water. But he had a good corral and I know he built this log house, I guess he built that and undoubtedly him and his cowboys lived in it. He didn't build that, just he moved his wife there, to the existing house but that leads me to think that she (Lydia) didn't homestead at the same time Haight did. But that she when she did homestead, they built her a house there, she couldn't live out there in the world alone, a wilderness, so Pa built a house there . Just a quarter mile over to his ranch, see | ||
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| + | '''John''': So that leads you to believe that it was closer to the time that your dad filed on a homestead. Around 1900. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No I think he already had his homestead. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Well I got that off the forest service thing, that's when he filed papers on it and got title in 1905 or 1907 or something. | ||
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| + | '''John''': How did George make a living after he married Naomi? He continued to be a stockman, didn't he, for several years. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': That's right. '''John''' | ||
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| + | : In fact wasn't he in the stock business up until he sold out to go into the contract plowing business? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''John''': Do you recall when that was? Maybe you should just give us the rundown on the whole big tractor story. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well Pa had a tract of land that looked like it might be good farm land for dry farming, it was on that Cap Naegle ranch and it was between Ortega lake, that you drive by out of Concho and Caps Ranch there's a big flat along there. It was deep soil and everything and he wanted to get a couple of sections of that or three or four maybe. It was all in one piece and it would be a big farm, if he had the horsepower to do it. And he was a gettin' a idea of buying that of the Santa Fe Company and the price was right -- 13 cents an acre. | ||
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| + | '''John''': That was railroad section huh? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah But they had 13 sections there besides that that they wanted to lump in that was those two big cinder knolls on it and the old crater that whole business and this was the days of the open range and you didn't buy stuff for range you didn't cause you could use it anyway, see. But they wanted to get rid of it this group of railroad sections was there on a kind of a trade or something they had so many sections they had a right to and they just put them down right there, see. You'd have to see the railroad how that come but there's several places where they did that. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Where they weren't checker boarded? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, they had some left over or they traded the government some and the government gave them that. Well he had that in mind and he had,...this Denver outfit come in....and moved to town, he'd come down here, course I wasn't born then or maybe I was and he got acquainted with Parks and Johnson and they got along with Pa cause they were outsiders. Pa was never accepted as a St. Johnner. And neither were Parks and Johnson. And Uh, I'm not accepted here a hundred percent It all comes with the old days when they had to stand back to back. But anyhow they fell right in, see. They smoked black cigars and Pa smoked a pipe and they were outsiders. And so they got him a contract that if he wanted to he could plow; they'd just keep him plowing from then on. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Now who was this outfit? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': The Denver Company. The Denver Company come in to..the Mormons was financing the Dam there and they wasn't gittin' anywhere and pullin it off their dinner tables they didn't have any cash and so the Denver Company come in and they was gonna it was their way of doing like these guys are doin' on sub divisions, but you had to have something to sell people in those days, some irrigated land that was all people were interested in. You didn't have to pay for non-irrigated land you'd just go out and squat on it. And so they got an agreement that he could... and so he bought that big tractor had the dough to do it cost him thousands and thousands of dollars with this big set of plows and he went down to... now he still had this deal hangin' fire with the railroads he was tryin' to get um', I guess he'd a swung that too, but he had two ways to jump there and so they went down and they hammered this contract out in the Merchants and Stockgrowers Bank, this was Parks and Johnson representing the Denver Company. Denver was goin' to furnish their half in cash and the Mormons would furnish their half in work so that would lift the burden on them quite a bit and they was finishin' up on the dam they got her all done and Pa was goin' to start plowin' the next day | ||
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| + | '''John''': Was this the original dam? Or after a washout? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': They had one washout. The first one was the Salado Dam down river this way and this was the first Lyman. | ||
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| + | '''John''': The first one at the location it is now? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, It was just downstream from the one that's here . I measured it one time the stub's still stickin' out there. 80 feet I think it was. So they was already to go and they got their negotiations done and the contract all written up, it would go on and on and it was a hell of a good price he was gettin' People weren't used to gettin' that and they says we'll all meet here at 8 O'clock in the morning when the bank opens, the notary public had gone home, when they all signed, that's all they had left to do, Pa sign and these guys for the Denver Company and he could just go ahead, they had 13 thousand acres for him to start plowin' on. You know what happened that night? The damn Dam washed out. Well that throwed a crinkle in him. | ||
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| + | '''John''': And he'd already forked over cash for the tractor? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah and he didn't, he'd a had to borrow money to swing this other deal, he'd a still bought the sections he wanted but they still held out and wouldn't turn loose. Those 13 extra sections, it run up a bill that wasn't appetizing to him. | ||
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| + | '''John''': In other words he couldn't get the railroad to sell him just what he wanted. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': So his two options went down together. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So we could look in the history book and see what year the dam went out and he had bought the tractor within months of that? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''John''': What kind of tractor was it? What do you remember about the tractor? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Emerson Brandingham | ||
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| + | '''John''': That a steam tractor or kerosene? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': It was a big four cylinder and it burned kerosene. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Kind of similar to that Hart-Parr we got a picture of? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': A Hart-Parr had a pop -- pop, pop -- pop - pop it was an old two lunger, or one lunger. | ||
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| + | '''John''': I mean a similar size to the Hart - Parr? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, it was bigger than the Hart - Parr. It was a bigger tractor but it had a four - cylinder engine, a big son of a bitch. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Now to swing that tractor deal he had sold all of his livestock, hadn't he? That's where he got the cash to buy the tractor? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, Yeah. He had sold his stock. My mother she had something wrong with her, ever since she was a little girl and he took her out to some specialists on the coast and they stayed all winter out there. That's not, you don't do that for nothing out on the coast. Course it wasn't as high as it is now. But then, it all went up together. And so he had that, he bought the tractor and the plows and he bought the homes. He was pretty level headed, he was spending it for the right stuff and he bought a car, he had one of the first cars in St. Johns. You read my skit about the cars haven't you? J | ||
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| + | '''John'''hn: About having a weak machine? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, great strength on the hills. | ||
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| + | '''John''': We've been wanting to get that tractor story. What did he do with the tractor after the whole thing went sour and he didn't have his plowing contracts? Did he sell it to somebody? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No, he never could sell it. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So he was just stuck with it? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': He left it here on grandpa Gibbons' lot and when Parks and Johnson was ... now I've got it all through my mind now. When Parks and Johnson was doing their part of the dam, when they come in the old man bought that, they had their agreement about the plowing, verbal , see but they hadn't built the dam yet and when they got up about so far there and they changed engineers, an engineer what's his name from the coast, I've got a copy of it of his engineering, one of the best construction engineers in the world at that time, he come over here and took over and laid down what they had to do if that dam was going to last for over a hundred years and, uh ...... | ||
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| + | '''John''': Did Parks and Johnson have some claim on the tractor as a result of their negotiatin'? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No, but when this guy came in, this big engineer, he changed the powders on them. The main part of your work is in the base of the dam. They'd been workin' there and workin' there and the dams not very high but it's a wide son of a bitch. He come in in time to lay down a dam and he'd engineered lots of them and his dams had never gone out. He had in the down stream base of the dam and took her plum on up to the top a certain percent of the cube of the dam was what he called a rock ballast. It was so many hundred so many thousand tons of rock that he wanted piled in that dam as a big weight. Apparently that pressures great and if it just keeps pressin', pressin', why it'll take a dam out. If they had the rocks placed just so the weight is so great and it couldn't move it and if it couldn't move it at all well then it never would do it. Well at that point why the Denver Company put it out for bids to put in that ballast, and these two guys that was workin' here, Parks an Johnson took the contract, they bid on it as private individuals and they took the contract of puttin' that ballast in the dam and it was a mammoth undertaking. Their plan called for building a railroad, you can see the dugway where it come around that little hill up there now and the quarry was on the north side of the little hill that's on the north side of the dam and that's where they'd quarry their rock, load it and then pull the little train around over the top of the dam, they built the trestle up as they built the dam. When they run out of trestle they built another one and take um' off at a higher level. You notice if you go look, there's different levels of where roads went around there and that's why, they was stayin' up with the height of the dam all the time. That whole damn trestle is in that dam, it's still in there. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Only this is the dam that washed out that we're talking about? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, but they went up in Colorado and bought a little mining road a short one the whole thing, rails, rollin' stock and everything and they had it shipped to Holbrook on the railroad, then they needed to bring it from Holbrook and they finally decided the old man's tractor was the only way they could do it. So he made quite a little money on it there. Turned it over to Parks and Johnson to move all this equipment up from Holbrook. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Just leased his tractor to them? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, and that's the only job Pa ever got for it except when the dam was done and was fillin' with water they figured to use it the next year. He plowed a field or two out here on the bench for Uncle Roy Gibbons, had him plow a big one out there, him and Fred Nelson, the banker, he'd decided to make a big peach orchard out there, so Pa got a little plowin' there. Hell, at the same price that he was goin' to get for this thousands of acres. It was a good deal you can't blame the old man. He was a smart man up to that point then he was a dumb son of a bitch. | ||
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| + | '''John''': You started to tell me what happened to the tractor, he left it on Grandpa Gibbons' lot? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well, that's what he did, he left it there and finally after we went up to Vernon, us boys with him, Francis Day decided he needed that motor, that big four cylinder motor to run the grist mill that he built up at Round Valley. So Pa sold the tractor to him at a real bargain price. There it is a brand new tractor. Francis made the offer and Pa decided that was the only was he was goin' to recoup anything. | ||
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| + | '''John''': You don't remember about when that took place? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': What can I gauge it by. Well, that was pretty late, because after Pa parked it, parked it down across the street here the last time down where Judge Gibbons had an old barn, you remember the old barn that was down here. (On the west corner of Roy's lot) Well judge Gibbons' barn was about, oh a hundred, hundred and fifty feet west of there and there was high ground there, you soon run out of the bog. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Yeah, Judge Gibbons' barn was the one that they picked up and moved down to the, Byron Heap did, and it's down in the swamp now. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, well he drove it up along side of that barn, it wasn't boggy there and put some planks, piled them up and drove it up on them and us guys talked the old man into lettin' us, I was big enough, we was big enough, I was 13 when I left home, this was along about there, 12, 13. We talked the old man into lettin' us move the tractor up to Vernon, plows and all, hell we could plow the what we had there in nothin' flat, plowin' was the big thing that held us back up there, didn't have horse power, but when we come down some son bitch had stole the magneto off from it. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So you never did move it up to Vernon? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No, they'd cut the wires and we didn't have the money to, cost about five hundred dollars for a magneto for the bastard. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So vandals disabled it and it just sat 'til Francis Day got it? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yes. | ||
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| + | '''John''': But we still don't know how long it was after that that he sold it? Might have been years, huh? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Uh, it wasn't a hell of a lot longer after that. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Did your dad buy cattle again? Get back in the cattle business and that's how he made his living the rest of his life? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, he took the money that he would have bought that land out there with and put it back into cattle. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So he was a cattle man all of his life, then? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Right. He had a nice little bunch of cattle when we went up to Vernon | ||
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| + | '''John''': Was he still raising cattle when he died in '52 was it? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well, when Pa married Alice Crosby he married a big family and he married an expensive family and they had this little girl, it was a mongoloid, but nobody knew what was wrong with her, beautiful little girl. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Ruth was her name, right. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, just a beautiful little girl, but she couldn't keep anything down, she never got over that high, lived about five years and the old man went broke, they took her all over the west. Doctors everwhere. It broke the old man. He also bought out of that the Mineral Place up there, pretty nice place. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Lets see, where's the Mineral Place? Is that the one right at the mouth of the canyon, now it’s the McClellen Place or something like that? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah. Now Alice Crosby had a homestead, her husbands homestead, out at Ramah, dry land homestead and it had gone to waste, it had gone back to pasture and that's all she had when they got married, but boy she jumped on the band wagon when the old man went broke went to claimin' half of what he had. So they finally settled out of court and he let her have the Mineral Place. Cause they had acquired that, he bought that after he married her, out of the money he had left. You know it's a good thing to study Dad's life like that; in-laws today can be outlaws tomorrow. But that was part of the Crosby kids apparently evaluated how it was, they always loved the old man, adopted him as their Dad. It was her damn brothers down there eggin' her on the LeSueur family, they were rich they didn't have hearts at all. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Did George live at his place there at Vernon most of his life or did he have a residence elsewhere as he got older? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': No, he spent most of his life there. | ||
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| + | '''John''': He was still livin' there at the ranch when he died, wasn't he? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''John''': I remember when I was just a kid goin' up there to visit and his stuff was still in there, clothes were in the drawers, food in the cupboards and all that. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Sad thing, he lived a sad life. He told me he said, "I was only really happy for 11 years of my life." That's as long as he was married ... | ||
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| + | '''John''': I always liked that story about when you were building him a stove out in the shop and he was out there ... tell the way that went. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': (laughing) Well, course me and Pa had made our peace, he had run me off the ranch once. Let me clarify this, I can see now in retrospect, he knew where I went, when I left that ranch, he knew there wasn't very many places I could go. He knew where I wound up workin' for Haight right up there a quarter of a mile around the hill there and he come up there not long after I went to work for Haight. Haight went over and talked to him, it was about a hundred yards from me, and I couldn't hear what they was sayin'. I couldn't hear what they was sayin', but I knew who they were talkin' about. Haight come back to where I was and Pa got on his horse and rode off. | ||
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| + | '''John''': What was the cause of the trouble there, a hard headed adolescent, or a hard headed father or a little of both? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Well, yeah. The old man's downfall as far as gettin' along with kids was coffee. That is the damndest drug that ever was. Because a man that drinks coffee, it frays his nerves until when he gets mad, he gets mad like that and then he's a maniac. All of them are that way. I'll bet you there've been more shoot-outs and coffee was it. Just bingo, that quick they were a firin'. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So he was kind of short tempered? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Short tempered. So, one time he got after Marion for something, there in the house. There was Ren Crosby and someone else there and I didn't like the way he was goin' after Marion. Ordinarily if Marion had it comin' he could go ahead and ... but I didn't figure Marion had it comin' and another thing even if he had had it comin' the old man was comin' on too strong. I just, the first thing I thought about was fightin' cause we were boxers. On account of fightin' with those damn Marble guys, we studied that Japanese stuff and we studied boxing and the first thing I done was dance up and said, "Now, old man if you hit that kid again, you got me to whip." Oh, that took all the fight out of him. He went and put his whip up and he says, "When morning comes, I want you to be gone from this ranch, and I don't want you to ever come back." I didn't say anything to him, I just went up and went to bed. When morning come, I was gone from the ranch. | ||
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| + | '''John''': What kind of whip was he using on the kid? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Oh, a horse whip. A quirt, that damn quirt in there. ( The one on Roy's wall.) You can tell when somebody's raisin' the hide on a kids back, goin' to leave some scars and I didn't believe in that. The old man wasn't that kind of a man, it was that damn coffee! | ||
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| + | '''John''': And if he was married to Alice then... I presume he was, was he, you said Ren Crosby was there or was that way before that? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Oh, that made it worse. His troubles pilin' up on him. But I'd made my peace with the old man, and gone back when I built this stove. So we'd come back (Roy and Marion) and we went in business together, this was the deep days of the depression. Marion and I was in the wood business down here, but it's seasonal, so we wanted to raise something up there on that ranch. So Pa was the likely guy to have (for a partner) but he couldn't do his share of the hard work, we had plenty of that, but we couldn't be with the ranch all the time, so we formed a partnership....(Tape change)....Pa'd stood one cold winter there on the ranch, and he said "I just can't take it again, boys, You've got to get me a stove." So we talked it over. That next morning I had something to do out at the shop, I was going to build him a stove and I said, "I've got a little work to do in the shop, Pa, why don't you come out and visit with me. So he came out and all the time he was after me about, you've got to get me a stove. And I said, "Pa why in the hell don't you build you a stove?" He says, "Stoves is a thing we can't build, that's one thing we've got to buy." All the time I'm workin' on the stove. This kept on all the time, no matter what the subject was he always come back to "You've got to buy me a stove." Long about sundown he got to lookin' to see what it was I was makin' and he says, " Gee Whiz, you built me a stove." He used that stove for 30 years, I guess, as long as he was on the ranch. And he prized that more than any stove he'd ever had. He was just tickled to death, it did turn out to be a good little stove, but all I did was make it out of automobile metal which is pretty thick when you go to work with metal. | ||
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| + | '''John''': In those days it was thick. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, and Yeah, because they didn't crinkle them and use light stuff like they do now. He used it as long as he was on the ranch there and it was a good stove. I patterned it after these, you know that stove down in the shop, well we had one in the schoolhouse like that so I just patterned it like that. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Riveted together or bolted or something? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah. It was a little bigger stove than that. Yeah, I riveted it together. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Well if that was in the depression it was probably around 1930 huh? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': But I made it a good lap, rivets here and rivets here. A double lap. | ||
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| + | '''John''': If that was around 1930, he used it for another 20 years anyway, huh? Before he died. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, 20 some odd years. | ||
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| + | '''John''': I always liked that story. What other major incidents or phases of his life should we include in his biography that we haven't talked about? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Did I ever tell you how quick the old man was with a gun? He was the fastest man with a gun I've ever seen. But he wasn't a gunfighter. He was out with the sheep all that time and it was inconvenient for him to carry .... it was inconvenient to shoot a 30-30, he had a 30-30 all the time, but it cost too much to shoot 'em and so he practiced with a pistol at that time you could buy 50 cartridges in a box and you got a real break on the box, 44's not 45's just 44's. It was just almost the equivalent of a 45. So he practiced shootin' all the time and he could, hell if he went huntin' cottontails he didn't want no 22, let them have it (with the 44) blow their heads off always hit 'em in the head. Just a good shot, but he was fast and I never realized how fast until Grandpa Gibbons, I come down to stay with him here one summer for 6 weeks helping him out, and when it was gettin' about time that I was ready to go home why he give me this new 22 high-power Savage rifle. Some guys from up in Utah, one of them was grandma's brother, had broken a car down and they'd come and pulled it in right south of his house there, was in the way and he had to go and come in from the other way and everthing and let them use all the tools he had, but in appreciation, and he feed them all the time they was a fixin' this damn car, and in appreciation when the guy got ready to leave he told him, "Brother Gibbons, I just got enough money to get home, but I'd like you to take this gun as part payment at least on what we owe." Brand new, so Grandpa just turned and give it to me. And there I was, a damned 11 year old kid with a 22 high-power rifle. Oh that was a real rifle, Savage, but I took it up to the ranch. I broke loose, got Grandpa to turn me loose a week early, cause I found out I could, Fred Rothlisberger was goin' to be haulin' his family up with a team and wagon and he'd let me walk behind. (Laughter) That way, they was always afraid I'd get lost, but I walked up there. | ||
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| + | '''John''': How long did it take? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': All day, all day long cause we went straight through, didn't go by Concho. | ||
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| + | '''John''': It's still 25-30 miles, isn't it? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yep. But I got it up there and the old man kind of admired it, it was a new kind of gun. (The cartridge was a ) real bottleneck, it had a big powder thing on it and narrowed down to a 22 bullet. He kind of wondered about it and so he says, "Let me try your gun out," and I said, "Sure." He says, "We got to kill a beef, lets just go out in the pasture, I got him out there." It was a big animal, oh it was about 4 or 5 years old and says, "lets go out there and I'll shoot him with this." So when we went out there why the damn 22 high-power didn't have the knock-down power that... did you ever study guns? That old 45 pistol it was just like hittin' a man with a club, see, it had knock-down power. That old slug would just... that's the way with a 30-30 it has a lot of knock-down power. But this sum bitch didn't it had penetration and everything but you had to hit a vital part or you didn't knock him down, it didn't have knock-down power. So when the old man went to shootin', it's a wild beef, and he shot and he hit him in the head and he hit low, below the brain, just skazed under. Well one thing if you shoot an animal once nature takes over and he's runnin' on motor it's automatic from there on, he could be out, in any event that beef went down to his knees and then jumped and whirled around and when he come around the old man had 'er again and let him have it and he went down to his knees and the old man loaded, he was just whirling as fast as an animal could but ever time it'd go to his knees and the old man shot him ever time right through the head. Emptied the whole thing but the last one went right through the center of the brain or clipped the stem, nerve stem, right under the brain. Something was vital and it just knocked him out and he went to his knees for the last time. But that all happened in, oh damn I've never seen anybody go in actin' like that. Not that fast. | ||
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| + | '''John''': A few seconds. huh. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, and there he was in control all the time he was right up there; they were all in a circle that big. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Was that about an 8-inch circle? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah Well, I didn't like the damn gun for that reason, (it didn't have any knock down power) I learned to shoot with a 30-30. The old man's 30-30, I just worshipped that damn thing so to me 30-30's was the only gun cause she had knock down power and another thing the Savage wasn't a saddle rifle it was big around. It had these things in a rotary cylinder you'd punch the bullets in there and they'd wind up so it was big around like this to have a place to have this rotary magazine. Well, you put the damn thing under your leg and here you go all day long with that leg propped out cause you put that under the stirrup leather on that side. | ||
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| + | '''John''': So it wasn't a cylinder like a revolver has, it was a drum type magazine like a tommy gun has? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Yeah, you'd punch 'em in and they'd pass a place and it'd hold 'em, then as you fed 'em out the other end 'ud come up and punch like that. So I was talkin' guns with 'ol Richey down here, Addison Richey, he lived over at Walnut Grove up at Richville. He's tellin' me the different guns he had, he said he had a 30-30 she's was kind of old, but "Boy, she's the best damn gun I ever seen." He says, "What'a you got?" I said, "Well, I got a real gun, I got a 22 High Power Savage." So I could see his eyes gettin' big like that. He says "If I bring my gun over reckon we could work up a trade? I says, "We might." Over to Vernon and I forgot all about it and one day here comes Addison Richey with that most beat-up damned old 30-30 I ever seen. He was an actor a stage player and I wanted to stall a little there. I hated to trade a new gun for that. He got that hurt feeling, "You caused me to drive all this way. My old man will never let me use this car again." So finally I traded with him straight across, best trade I ever made. That damn gun was the out shootinest son of a bitch I ever seen. I could see why it had been used. Cause they could hit with it. I really racked up some marksmanship with that gun. But when Pa come to find out I traded that gun he just raised hell. I kept reminding him it was mine but he'd get mad all over again. | ||
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| + | '''John''': What ever happened to the 30-30? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': I guess I let Andy have it when I went to work drivin' truck out there. I might have even give it to him, since I owed him or somethin'. | ||
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| + | '''John''': Well, what else should we include in there? | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': You've read my history haven't you? | ||
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| + | '''John''': Yeah | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': There's quite a bit about Pa in there. | ||
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| + | '''Roy''': Pa was the best neighbor anybody ever lived by because he worked at it, he wanted to get along with his neighbors, he valued neighbors. He was a good man, but he lived by some sorry ones. Pa was quite a lady's man. He was an attractive fellow, especially in his younger years. He was king of the may in Concho. May day seemed to be their big, among the Mormons, I think it's an English holiday, May day? But anyhow the southern Utah Mormons made a great deal of fuss about it and so it was in Concho. That was the big thing, they didn't celebrate the 4th of July, they celebrated May Day. The queen of the may and the king of the may, the two best lookin' kids in the town got that. Pa was king of the May two or three times. Great honor. Remember when I was a kid why people would say, "Why your dad was king of the May." Didn't mean a damn thing to me. When you get older, John, you analyze the lives of your ancestors. They don't all turn out the way you'd have it. But it's their life and I don't hold it against them anything they've done.... It's a great thing to get old, you get a new set of values if you get thinkin' about it at all, I believe that some people don’t hardly remember what their own name was, the past don't mean anything to them. Kind of lonesome. When you get my age, you get tired of helping bury people not as old as you are. There aren't any old ones dying anymore, just young ones. | ||
