Earl & Eliza Halls
EARL AND ELIZA TOGETHER
Edited by Kristine Halls Smith
The crickets came one summer. Their noise was deafening and continued all day long. It was so quiet when they stopped at night. They were so thick that some of the young chickens would die of too many cricket legs in their craws. They were around long enough to shed their coats and then went back into the ground to come back again. I think they were called the seven-year crickets, meaning they came out every seven years. If they did, we were not there to see them.
Then there was the skunk. While gathering the chickens, Earl saw him drag a hen under a big rock that hung over. He didn’t know how to get to him, so decided to dynamite him out. It got the skunk, also the fresh air, but it was that or the chickens. We didn’t have many and we needed them more than the skunk did, at least we thought so.
Occasionally we had a cow. The first one was from a far neighbor. He wouldn’t sell her to us, but let us take her. As she was used to the arid country, she was no trouble, but we made the mistake of leaving a sack of wheat under a tree by the house while we were away somewhere. Earl said, “I wonder if I should put this wheat in the house?” I said I had never seen the cow by the house, so foolishly, we left it under the tree and that was the day the cow came by the house. We paid for a dead cow. She cost more dead than alive, if we could have bought her then. The next one was all right until she dried up. She wouldn’t freshen and practically went wild. I don’t remember what happened to her. The next one was one that June Parson, a man Earl worked for, let us take. As far as milk was concerned she was fine, but she wouldn’t let it down unless the calf was feeding also. When she freshened, I was going to show her who was boss. I found out. When she had her calf, she managed to have it as far away as she could, back in the cedars. I left the kids while I hunted her down, brought her and the calf in, put the calf in the corral, and fastened the gate up tight. But next morning I found out who was boss. The cow and the calf were gone. There was no hope of milking her without the calf now. I can’t remember how long we had her or what became of her. I presume she went home.
The horses – those beautiful horses. I have a faint memory that there were four of them. I asked what he was going to do with them, having in mind the feeding end. He said he was going to sell them, which he did, but it must have been with trade for other horses. At least he came up with a couple of ornery ones. One would have stomped him down if it had got a chance, but Earl was wise to horses and knew what he was doing. Another one would not pull a load of three barrels of water up the hill. She would stop and pull back when the other one started. She absolutely refused to go forward, so he turned her around and hitched her backwards. I think the horse got the message. One of the big horses he sold to a homesteader. Like our cow, it got into the wheat and foundered. We thought we were not going to get paid for her, but after a year or so he paid in cash.
Earl worked around grubbing sage for a few people and during harvest he could always get work in Monticello. It was a twenty-mile drive and he worked in Blanding also, which was further still. Later, he got a motorcycle. Now he also had something he and Glenn had to fix.
When he was gone, I always had the kids in and the door closed by dark. There was nothing around but a lonely coyote that would howl in the night and sounded so close. One time when Earl was gone I decided to take the three kids and go visit my neighbors, the Doyles, across the canyon. So we walked down one side and up through the cedars and pinions, about one mile in all. Mrs. Doyle insisted that we stay and eat, which I was glad to do. But when supper was over, it was almost dark, so it didn’t take much persuasion for us to stay. But across the canyon in the night drifted the sound of something that was after my hens and I wondered, “What now?” Mrs. Doyle also heard them. We had breakfast, then I helped clean up, and headed home. There were one or two hens dead on the floor. There was no way anything could enter the coop except under the canvas that was stretched over the top for cover. Next night I heard the hens again. I got dressed, lit the lantern, picked up a club, and bravely proceeded through the dark to the coop. I opened the door and there, blinded by the light, was a big, beautiful owl. I did not want to kill him and I did not want him to keep coming back, so I gave him a hard blow on the head with my club. He didn’t take any more chickens. I think his wing spread measured about seven feet.
(Earl) We had our troubles with cattlemen. They would cut our fences and turn a big bunch of cattle into our crops. One or two hundred cattle can clean out a homesteader in one night. But we hung together. One neighbor shot two bulls worth two or three hundred dollars each. One day the cattlemen drove a herd on his land, and he drove the bunch out, down the canyon. I should say here, that we farmed on the top of a plateau. We were on top, the canyons below us. These cattlemen would bring a bunch of cattle up a draw with ledges on either side, cut the fence, let them in, and ride on. On this particular day, as we dogged the cattle out, we met McCabe and his sons pushing another bunch in. I rode up to the ledge where I could see McCabe down below and asked him which way he wanted his cattle to go, up the canyon or down. In answer, he got off his horse and pulled his rifle out of the scabbard and I rode back out of sight and set the dog on the cattle. They went down the canyon and into his other bunch. Another time a neighbor sent word that cattle were in my corn. I had ten acres. I got on my horse and rode over. The field was across the canyon from our house and the rest of the land. There were some thirty or forty cattle in there. I drove them out, but one little long-horned cow refused to go. I could hear her running between me and the canyon rim. I jumped off the horse and waited until she came in sight. I shot and got her in the backbone and down she went. Another shot in her ear finished her, and I pulled her, one end at a time, until I was able to push her over the ledge, down 40 feet. I guess she is still there.
Another farmer about five miles west of us put a 30-30- bullet in a post by the elbow of a cowman who had just cut the top wire of his fence. He had his sons holding a bunch of cattle in the trees ready to put them in a farmer’s field. The cowmen soon found out the homesteaders weren’t to be fooled with, and became friendly. A year or so later, a neighbor and I ate dinner with McCabe at his cow camp and were treated royally. I also cleared some land for him in exchange for a horse.
One summer I took a contract to build a mile of barbed-wire fence nine miles from home. A friend of mine, Roy Stevens, who lived next to the fence line, had told me to come over and stay with him. He was a bachelor. Just bring my food, and sleep and “batch” with him. I knew that Stevens was having trouble with Charlie Bradford and his nephew, George, over a road Stevens had to travel to get to some land. In fact, when I went to Monticello one trip, Charlie had gone with me. He carried a 30-30 rifle. When I asked him why, he told me that when Stevens and he met, one of them would eat breakfast in hell the next morning.
When I went to fence, I got to Stevens’s cabin about nine o’clock at night. The door had a log chain around it and was padlocked. There I was, no bed, tired, and nine miles from home. So I cut the chain with a cold chisel, put my box of food in the cabin, put my team and wagon in his barn, and went to bed. About one o’clock I woke up with the flicker of a match in my face, and a .38 revolver pointed at my head, and Stevens said, “It’s you, is it?” Well, I stayed there and fenced my mile of fence with cedar posts and all, and got along fine. I will say here that the hole in the end of a .38 revolver looks pretty big, even by the light of a match, at one o’clock in the morning.
Later that winter, with a foot of snow on the ground, the Bradfords had gone to Monticello in a two-horse buggy. When they returned, Stevens was waiting for them with his pack horse and provisions. When the Bradfords came through the timber about a quarter mile away, Stevens started to shoot, first striking Charlie, and the team ran. He shot through the back of the seat, hitting Charlie again. George got out, but was hit, and got back of a log. The team ran home with Charlie still in the buggy. Stevens walked up to the log and finished George. Stevens headed for the canyons and a posse tried to locate him, but didn’t want to, I think. After two weeks he came to the county attorney’s home one night, about three in the morning, and gave himself up. He was put in jail and in a week or so was let out on bail. He is still out on bail. Apparently no one ever tried to find him. Everyone in the county that knew the Bradfords knew that they had it coming.
(Eliza) One day as I was picking peas under a cloudy sky with a baby on the ground, Earl had the others, I not only heard, but felt a big clap of thunder. I picked up the baby and went to the house. When Earl came, he said that a stray horse near the barbed wire fence was badly paralyzed and had to be shot. It didn’t rain. When the moisture was plentiful, we really raised a good garden.
One year, we had a wagon load of squash. No sale. The pigs got them. Another year it was dried beans. No sale. They lasted a long time. Another time the sweet corn grew taller than Earl. I dried a good deal of that and the pigs and horses got the rest. Then there were the watermelons. They were so beautiful, clear across the length of the garden. The boys didn’t have any idea what a watermelon was. Lyle thought they looked good, so brought one in to see what gives. I explained to him that they would not be ripe until they were pink inside. One day in late summer, Earl came home late and had to leave early the next morning. He didn’t like the idea of having to hunt the horses at the far end of the cedars, so after a brief discussion, we decided that the horses would not eat watermelon. Next morning when we looked out, there were all the melons beautiful and pink, split wide open. The horses had eaten the insides of all of them. We sure learned the hard way.
Earl was not home much in summer, but he had to come home on weekends to haul water, and he was home between crop harvests. Sometimes he had clearing to do, close to home. He cleared ground for Parson and Chris Christensen who had bought a school section joining our place on the west. He did some blacksmithing and horseshoing. He helped on any public project in our area.
(Earl) One day while we were working on the road, two young boys came running down to us and said a man who was digging a well had blasted with powder. He had climbed down in the well too soon after the blast, and was down there passed out. I happened to have a motorcycle down on the job site and one of the boys got on back of me. We rode up there and managed to get a rope around the man and get him out of the well where he could get some fresh air. By that time, the rest of the men were up to the place, which was about one and a half miles from where we were working. He was an awful sick man when he came out of that. He was just lucky that we got there in time to get him out or that would have been the end of him.
One winter when we had a great amount of snow, about three feet, we had to get our mail from Dove Creek and no one could get through with horses, so Harold Hodge and I took off one morning on homemade skis, and they were heavy. We went to Dove Creek. We did pretty well going over because the ground was pretty well set. Coming back, we each had twenty pounds or so of mail on our backs and the snow was starting to melt. We had quite a time keeping the snow off our skis. It would get so heavy we couldn’t move them. We’d have to reach down, push the snow off, then go a way further and do the same. It was impossible to get off the skis because we wouldn’t have been able to get them back on, the snow was so deep. At any rate, we got back to Lockerby about dark that night and I had two miles beyond there to go to get home. In all that made twenty-eight miles I had put in on skis that day, and I don’t ever want to be that tired again.
One another occasion there was a man by the name of Ray, a homesteader who lived about two miles east of the Lockerby store and had boils on the back of his neck. He’d put something on them that had turned to blood poison, and he finally died. We all had the privilege of loading him onto the back of a truck, putting cleats on each side of him to keep him from bouncing, and hauled him to Dolores, Colorado, to the undertaker. His wife went back home on the train to where they had come from, so that ended their Homestead Act.
I was the secretary of the first fair in San Juan County. We held it at Lockerby and had a promoter come in from the outside, but he didn’t help us much. He got us in trouble. He had big ideas. We had race horses, and we had a book that gave all the bylaws. A race horse came in from Colorado, and the promoter had several race horses of his own. But we didn’t have horses enough to run with all of his, so he wanted to run two of his own horses, and this would give him a cinch on the prize. Well, we wouldn’t let him, and he sued us. If the whole fair board had gone to court like three of us did, he would have had no case because our book said that no man could run more than one of his own horses in the same race. But we didn’t have the whole fair board there. So we three that tried to get the thing straightened out had to pay $40.00 each. That taught me a lesson – to stay out of public affairs and not try to be a good fellow and put things over.
(Eliza) We now had a grocery store and the county put up a small schoolhouse which was used for a church, L.D.S. on Sunday morning and for others in the afternoon. The close and faraway neighbors would get together for a bit of socializing and occasionally a dance at night, at the new schoolhouse. Earl was an assistant superintendent and I was assistant teacher in the children’s class for a short time.
(Earl) A number of homesteaders wanted a shorter way to Dove Creek. So we went down to the coal bed and laid out a road to make across it. There was quite a deep canyon there and it was narrow. The whole thing was laid up with sandstone which required a considerable amount of blasting. The boys had me take my forge down to sharpen steel for them. I put the forge under a big rock ledge as they had part of the road built, and sharpened steel while the rest of them did most of the drilling and blasting. One day when they were ready to fire six shots on the far side of the canyon, Harold Hodge and Jack Moss came across to move the horses back just before they lit the fuses. They passed my forge and said they were going to move the horses back. Well, they did. They put their horses back into the trees and why, I don’t know, but they came back to the edge of the canyon and stood there. Well after the first two or three blasts I heard Harold shout for help. I ducked out far enough to ask if any more shots were going, and they told me there wasn’t. I didn’t want to get out there when they were shooting more rock. I ran up on the hill, but of course Harold had gone back, fearing that more blasts were going. And there lay Jack on his back. I picked him up. His head flopped over in front of me. I held him up in a sitting position. Jack died in my arms and it was a pretty hard blow for all of us. We loaded him onto a wagon and took him up to Nielsens. Mrs. Nelson wrapped his head up before we took him home to his father and mother. Three of us went to Monticello and filed on ten acres of ground for a cemetery, and Jack was the first one to be buried there. Then we fenced it and put two large cedar posts up for a gateway. I furnished the sixteen-inch board to go across the top, and a homesteader who was a good sign painter made a sign, “Mountain View Cemetery.” It was often said that we had to kill a man to start a graveyard.
A few years ago when I was down in Monticello, we drove out to the cemetery. The old board was laying down by the side of the fence and they had put up a different gate. The sign had been changed. And there were at least one hundred graves in the cemetery at that time.
Glenn’s writings tell some of his memories of the events that happened at the homestead, so they are included here at the time period where they fit.
(Glenn) 1918. One incident that happened on the homestead was in the cellar that we built and where Dad had stored some wheat. Dad and I were in the cellar one day grinding wheat. He had rigged up the motorcycle with a belt to drive a hand-driven grinder, and had piped the exhaust outside with a hose. Where he got the hose, I know not. Anyway, I am told that I was in the grain bin with a one-gallon bucket feeding the chopper when I passed out and fell over the chopper. I remember coming to as I was being carried up the stairs of the cellar. Apparently there was a leak in Dad’s hose and I got carbon monoxide poisoning. I have been sensitive to carbon monoxide to this day.
Lyle and I used to go across the canyon to Doyle’s to get milk in our little one-gallon bucket. En route we would encounter blow snakes. I remember in some of my travels stopping a number of times with my foot above a big blow snake laying across the trail. On one occasion Lyle and I encountered a big one while going up the other side of the canyon on the trail and, for some reasons (I guess just being kids) we began pelting rocks at the snake. I don’t suppose we were trying to kill it. We weren’t that smart. Anyway the snake was smarter than we as it took after us. Needless to say, we left.
1919. Dad was clearing land for a homesteader and I went with him on one of his trips. We had a team and wagon, and one of the horses was rather wild. I think she was called Old Blue. In the wagon was Dad’s grub box made out of one-inch lumber. It was about as large as his tool box (sixteen inches high, eighteen inches wide, thirty-six inches long). In this box was a bunch of sugar cookies that Mother had made for this trip. There was other grub, but I only remember the sugar cookies. En route we came upon a neighbor who needed to borrow Dad’s ax. Dad stopped, put on the brake, and wrapped the lines around the brake lever. He got out and I stayed in the wagon. They were talking and I, being curious, wanted to hear what they were saying, so I got out of the wagon. Just as I got out, a limb popped and the team took off. They scattered that wagon from hell to breakfast. The box was tipped upside down. The back wheels went one way, the front wheels and team the other, and wound up tangled around a tree. That grub box ended up in an ant bed upside down, and I recall very vividly those sugar cookies scattered all over, with ants crawling all over them. It’s a miracle that I got out of that wagon, or I would have been tangled up with the rest of that mess.
(Eliza) Elden was born on January 13, 1919, a bouncing baby boy practically bald but with a bit of blond hair. Mrs. Bean was at the birth, which was an easy one. She came because they were owing us and she was reliable. She had worked with a doctor for years.
In the latter part of 1919, Earl’s mother, and Ruby came to visit for awhile. It was late in the season because Earl was cutting grain. One day we took our lunch and rode with him to the other side of the canyon. I think he wanted his mother to see the other half of the homestead, and we shocked a bit of the grain.
About this time government people came to help the homesteaders out with money to loan. Earl wanted to borrow. I didn’t, but with the thought in mind that he could pay his father what we owed him, I signed. It wasn’t a great amount; it could have been around twelve hundred dollars.
On September 23, 1919, we got a telegram saying that my sister, Margaret, had died, leaving a husband and a newborn son, Albert Winter Burton. Leaving Earl and his mother, Ruby and I, with the boys, were taken to the train at Thompson Springs, and we headed for Huntsville. I didn’t want to leave the kids for their Grandma to tend as her health was not too good, but it would have been better if I had. I would have been home before the snow. Earl’s mother had a sick spell while there. Earl said he thought she was going to die, but she got better. It was one of her usual sick spells. We think it was liver trouble. Earl took her to Mancos, Colorado. On the way they visited with a cousin who had homesteaded in the Colorado area.
(Earl) One fall I had my grain all stacked in my stack yard where I had a small granary, the crop from about sixty acres of land. We had some neighbors by the name of McDonald who had eight or ten cows and were hard up. They had run out of pasture. I told them they could run the cattle in the field if they would keep them out of the corn that was still in there. Well, they had good intentions. The children were herding, but the day was cold. It was late in the fall. They were in the granary and thoughtlessly started a fire where the straw stack had been the year before. The fire spread, and the grain stacks were all soon wiped out. Our year’s work. By the time the neighbors notified me and I got there, it was almost all gone. One man, Mr. Barton, who I had worked for when I first went to Monticello, gave me a year’s supply of flour. Others gave us a little wheat for our pigs and chickens, and we received about thirty-five dollars in contributions.