Edited by Kristine Halls Smith
Dad traded for an unbroken burro, and I decided to train him. Well, the burro began to bray and buck, and landed me in a ditch of water, and that was the end of me riding the burro. Dad traded him off.
In the fall of each year, a family of Navajo Indians would come to the back of our field and camp in the cedars and pinions to gather pine nuts. One old squaw who had no children of her own made beaded moccasins, gloves, and jackets for me, and when she went to Mancos, she would take me on the back of her horse and take me to town, and buy oranges and peel them for me. The best oranges I ever ate!
My first year in school was in a little board building about a mile from our home. My Aunt Emma (that would be Grandfather’s second wife’s oldest daughter) was the school teacher. So I had a real good start for an education. After that year, Dad moved to what they called the “Lemon Ranch.” It was a ranch just south of Mancos town, and was owned by a company. They hired Dad to run it. It wasn’t too far from the school, probably about three-quarters of a mile from the ranch to the school. The teacher there was a Miss Shackley. By that time I had learned to write, at least enough to write notes to the girls. It seems the teacher didn’t like the notes that I and two other boys were writing, and she sent us out to the oak brush to gather six switches each. That was where I wasn’t smart. The other kids cut circles around their switches, and they broke easily. But not honest Earl! I selected good strong switches, and still smart from the effects of them. But as time went on, I got wiser and wiser.
One night after school when I arrived home, Dad was chopping wood. He said, “Earl, carry some wood in the house.” I said, “I won’t do it.” Well, Dad threw a stick, hit me on the head, and I was out. When I awoke, he had me almost to the house, carrying me in his arms, but never again did I tell Dad I wouldn’t do it.
A school friend of mine by the name of Jimmy Richter used to play with me at recess and noontime at school, and on our way home at night we’d fight, just as we parted. Jim always sent me home with a bloody nose until one night when Mr. Taylor, the storekeeper, set me on, and I licked Jimmy. That was our last fight. On my last trip to Mancos a few years ago, while we were waiting for the rest of the family to come down from Mesa Verde, we parked on the hill just south of Mancos town, and that was near the side of the Mancos cemetery. While we were waiting, I walked around through the cemetery, looked at the headstones, and remembered the names of a lot of the old people that were there when I was a boy. Among the headstones I found the name of Jimmy Richter. I think the fight had all been taken out of him.
For two or three years after moving from the Lemon Ranch, we lived in a small settlement one mile or so south of Mancos called “Dogtown.” My sister, Ruth, was born on January 6, 1893 and Maude joined the family on January 21, 1895. My brother, Clyde, was born on February 23, 1897, then another sister, Nina came on March 7, 1899. They were all born in Mancos.
My second sister, Maude, had what they called at that time, meningitis, when she was eighteen months old, and we, the rest of us kids, had to move out because she was so nervous and she couldn’t even stand for the dishes to be washed in the house. I remember sneaking in and seeing how her head was drawn back as a baby. The disease left her deaf. When she was seven years old, Father and Mother left Mancos and moved to Huntsville where they could send her to the deaf school in Ogden. Maude later married, and she had two boys. She and her husband later divorced and she as then married to James Smitham. Later she married Paul Wardell. Last year, 1967, Maude passed away from a stroke that had left her in a wheel chair for the last fifteen years.
My parents decided to move back to Huntsville so Maude could go to the School for the Deaf and Blind. In the winter of 1899, my father and Peter Frandsen, who was a brother to Grandfather’s second wife, went by wagon through the mountains to Huntsville. Mother and us kids stayed in Dogtown, and later went on the train which we had to take at Mancos on the narrow gauge railroad, and change at Grand Junction to the wide gauge, then made our way to Ogden by rail, arriving there on January 1, 1900, the first day of the new century. Ruth and I didn’t go to school that winter, but started to the Huntsville school the next year.
Ruth was baptized on January 6, 1901 in the icy water of the South Fork, by Jens Winter, my wife’s father. Jens’s wife had diphtheria at the time and died a few days later, leaving four children, including Eliza, who later became my wife.
My second brother, Dale, was born on July 24, 1901 in Huntsville.
The following years after moving to Huntsville were hard ones. Father worked for his brothers on the ranch for thirty dollars a month in the winter and forty dollars a month in the summer. Of course, he had to board himself. Mother cooked for men in the summertime at a rate of eight cents a meal, and later they raised it to twelve cents. Of course, that was a big raise. Squirrels were very plentiful on the ranch, and I had a single-shot gun which Mother used more than I did. The county paid a bounty, but the stores would allow five cents a tail to pay on grocery bills or buy things at the store. We could use them as cash. Well, that’s a tale for you! It was at that time quite a business to trap squirrels and get the money we could out of that, either in clothes or whatever we could buy at the store, or we could take them down to the Weber County Court House and get five cents apiece for them. Later they started to poison the squirrels, and that spoiled that game.