When Mattie learned that Fannie and her family were visiting us, she wrote urging all of us to come to visit Henry and her. Fannie and Alice thought it too much of a trip to make in the winter but Father and Mace went by train to Vernon, where they were met and taken to Navajoe. After a stay of two weeks they returned, praising with enthusiasm the beauties of this part of Greer County.
As spring approached, the Hutchinsons returned to Nebraska but Father continued to talk about Navajoe and Greer County. A born pioneer, he was always eager to go to a new land. When Jay wrote that he had resigned his job in Mexico and settled on a claim half a mile south of Navajoe, Father decided to rent the farm for a year and spend the winter in Greer County.
We all approved of this wholeheartedly. It was now around the first of September and the cotton must be picked, the corn gathered, and livestock disposed of before we could all leave. It was therefore decided that Alice and I should go by train to Vernon, where someone would meet us, and Father and George should stay until the crops were harvested, and then come out by wagon.
Alice and I left late in October. The trip was most interesting to a nine-year-old kid who had never been on a train but once before, and then only to make the round trip from Keller to Fort Worth. The Fort-Worth-and-Denver train on which we traveled was slow, but it seemed to be moving at dizzying speeds and the day coach with red plush seats was to me most luxurious. When we saw our first prairie dogs I was certain that we had reached the real West.
When we arrived in Vernon at about 4:30 P.M., we were met by Jay with a wagon and team to take us to Navajoe, forty-five miles to the north. We camped on the prairie the first night and reached our destination late the following day. Mattie, Herbert, and Henry all seemed delighted to see us. The Acers-and-Dale store seemed to me very big. Mattie and Herbert and their baby daughter lived in an apartment attached to the north side of the store. Henry boarded with them but slept on a cot in the store in the part partitioned off in one corner for the Post Office, as he was postmaster.
Alice stayed with Mattie until Father and George came about the latter part of November, but I “bached” with Jay, who had built a half dugout on his claim half a mile southwest of the Navajoe townsite. We were quite comfortable, for although halfway underground Jay’s little place had a wood floor and a half window on either side. It was furnished with two beds, a couple of chairs, a small cookstove, a table, and a cupboard containing dishes and cooking utensils.
Jay was building sheds for his horses, fencing a pasture, and otherwise improving his claim. This was done in leisurely fashion and I helped as much as possible. Every evening after supper Jay would slip his forty-five Colt’s revolver inside the waistband of his trousers and go “to get the mail,” though I cannot recall that we ever got any mail. Jay would usually sit on the counter and visit with other men, while I would usually go in and talk with Mattie and Alice or read, for to my delight Mattie had a great deal of wonderful reading matter.
As the arrival of Father and George created a housing problem, a large dugout room was quickly built joining Jay’s half dugout, and a door was cut connecting the two rooms. Alice then came to keep house for Father, Jay, and George, while I replaced her in Mattie’s home. The new dugout was finished none too soon, for about this time my brother John came in from North Dakota, where he had remained working as a cowhand when Jay left for the job in Mexico.
Probably I would have preferred staying on the claim in order to spend more time with George, but it was fun to live with Mattie too. She was a subscriber to the Youth’s Companion and had many back numbers, which I read with much pleasure. In addition, she had a number of books which were most interesting. Among them were Surry of Eagle’s Nest and a sequel to it called Mohun, both by John Esten Cooke. They were Civil War stories dealing with the campaigns of Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. I “ate them up” and from them learned a great deal.
Unfortunately, not all of Mattie’s books and magazines were of the caliber of these two or the Youth’s Companion. Many of them, such as The Trappers of Arkansas and the saccharine effusions of Charlotte M. Braeme and Mary Cecil Hay, were sheer trash, but I read them all. Many were published by the F. M. Lupton Company and sold for a few cents each, including such titles as Lord Lisle’s Daughter, Reaping the Whirlwind, A Mad Passion, Thrown on the World, and a host of others. Because one volume, which I found very interesting, lacked the covers and title page it was impossible to know the name of either the author or the book. Many years later I learned that it was Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea.
When I moved to Mattie’s home Father decided that it was best for me to attend the Navajoe school, which began early in November. The school house, made of boxing planks, was in the northwest part of town. The children sat on long wooden benches, while a wood-burning stove supplied heat. There were about thirty-five pupils ranging in age from six to seventeen years.
The teacher, Miss Anna Davidson, was a maiden lady of uncertain age, who lived with her widowed mother in the southwest part of the little town. She had an excellent library as judged by the standards of the region. Among her books were most of the novels of Dickens, Scott, and John Strange Winter, the poems and some prose works of Bulwer-Lytton, and books by George Eliot, Hawthorne, Cooper, and various others.
She soon learned that I liked to read and began to lend me books. As a result, during the winter and spring of 1888–1889 I read a number of Dickens’ novels, including David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop, and some others. Also, I read several of Scott’s Waverly novels, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, and several other books by various authors. Plenty of time was available in which to read, for my school studies were easy and I had little to do except for helping Mattie with the housework.
George remained in Greer County only about three months. As spring approached he received a letter from Tom offering to pay him eighty dollars to return and help him on the farm during the spring and summer months. As this seemed important money to a fifteen-year-old lad, George gladly accepted the offer.
Naturally I missed him a great deal, for we had never been separated except for the six weeks between my departure with Alice for Navajoe and his arrival with Father. During those weeks there had been so many interesting things for me to see that there was little time left in which to get lonesome. Now I began to get a little homesick for our Cross Timbers home and the kids that I had played with, but especially for George!
There was still much about life in the little town of Navajoe, however, to interest me. The Indians, wearing red blankets and beaded moccasins, with their hair in long braids tied with red yarn, especially fascinated me. Hardly a week went by without a few of them coming from the Reservation beyond the North Fork to pitch their tepees at the edge of town. Usually they would stay two or three days, coming to the stores to buy groceries, bright-colored calico, and other merchandise.
Few of them could speak much English, but Henry knew a little of the Comanche language. He taught me a few Comanche words and to count “in Comanche.” This information I treasured carefully to spring on the neighbors’ kids when we got back to our home in the Cross Timbers.
Early in May, 1889, Alice was married to Henry Roach, a young widower, who lived in Henrietta, Texas. I am not sure where she first met him but it was probably in Dallas when she was working in a hospital in that city. He was a contractor and builder, who also was an expert bricklayer and stonemason. He came to Navajoe for the wedding, but immediately took his bride to his home in Henrietta.
With George and Alice both gone, my father grew increasingly restless and early in June decided to return to the Cross Timbers. We could not regain possession of our home until the tenant had harvested his crops, which would be in November, but we could live with Tom and Lucy and help with the farm work. Probably the chief factor in Father’s decision was his church. He missed the old friends and neighbors, but especially he missed his brethren in the Primitive Baptist Churc
h, and the association with them in their homes and at worship.
At first he considered leaving me with Mattie for a few months but finally decided to take me with him. We left Navajoe early in June in a covered wagon drawn by a pony team. Our route was to Doan’s Crossing on the South Fork of the Red River and to Vernon, Texas. From there we followed roads paralleling the Fort Worth and Denver Railway.
We reached Henrietta about ten o’clock one morning and stayed long enough to have noonday dinner with Alice and her husband. It was characteristic of my father, however, that soon after dinner we continued our journey. We were both pleased to note that Alice had an attractive home and seemed to be very happy.
We reached the western edge of the Upper Cross Timbers at Bowie and emerged from them near Aurora. Just ten days after leaving Navajoe we rolled up to the home of Tom and Lucy. Our ten-day trip would now be considered only a half-day’s drive by car.
I was delighted to see George again and much pleased to see Tom and Lucy. It seemed that we had been away a long time and the familiar scenes of the Cross Timbers neighborhood looked very good to me after an absence of some eight months. While we could not occupy our own home until the old renter, Mr. Pulliam, and his two daughters, commonly called “Adar” and “Idar,” had harvested their crops, it would be fun to live with Tom and Lucy for a time.
The few months of life in the Prairie West had stimulated my imagination. I had seen real cowboys and Indians, had lived for several weeks in a half dugout, and had often climbed the Navajoe Mountains, only a mile east of the little town named for them.
Of course, after we had returned to our Cross Timbers home I was not slow in telling my boy friends of these experiences and adventures with enough details and embellishments to make my stories interesting. When asked about Indians, I assured my questioner that they often camped near town and came to my brother Henry’s store wearing blankets and moccasins, with their hair in two long black braids, and their faces painted.
Yes, I had seen the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker many times. My brother Henry had traded with the Comanches so much that he knew their language fairly well and he had taught me some words and how to count in the Comanche tongue. When my bug-eyed listeners demanded a demonstration, I began, “sem-us, wo-hot, pie-heet, ah-tery-o-quit, mah-vit, nah-vit, tie-suit, nem-o-wah-sute, wo-ma-nie, say-men.” This is one to ten.
While this boosted my stock a bit among my Cross Timbers playmates, by far the most important result of my western trip was that I had read a great deal more than I would have had the opportunity to do if we had spent the winter on the Cross Timbers farm. Some of it was trash but the major part was good literature, which, even as a boy, I preferred to read when given a choice. Reading greatly affected both my work and play, not only in my boyhood days but throughout my life.
5. “Six Days Shalt Thou Labor”
John Clark once remarked that “Heaven will be jus’ lak it is here ’ceptin we won’t hafta work.” If John was correct in his conception of Paradise there were a few men in our Cross Timbers community who were enjoying Heaven here on earth! Not so my father. He had little patience with loafers and wondered how they were able to live in idleness. Yet, I heard him say once that it seemed sometimes that there was not more than fifty cents difference between the man who worked and the man who didn’t, and that the one who didn’t got the fifty cents!
This was obviously only a joke, for up to the time of his final illness his amazing energy was noted by all who knew him. Even at the age of sixty-five he could do more work in a day than any of his seven sons. Not only did he work hard himself but he demanded that his children do the same. Summer or winter he was up at dawn and calling George and me before he started to the barn to milk our three or four cows. Winter mornings in our attic bedroom was like the Arctic Circle; we would count “one, two, three,” at which point we would toss back the covers and hit the icy floor with our bare feet. Dressing was quickly done, for we slept in our underwear. In two or three minutes we were clothed and standing before the fire downstairs, for Father always lighted fires in both the fireplace and kitchen stove before going to milk the cows.
Just when I started to do useful work and ceased to be a total liability is impossible to say, but it must have been at a very early age. Yet I cannot recall doing much before my mother’s death except help pile brush when Father was clearing land. Also, of course, I had such chores as gathering up the eggs, bringing in chips or corn cobs for the kitchen stove, running errands, and pulling up weeds in the garden.
After my sister Alice became our housekeeper, however, I gradually began to do more to help in the household work and to do some work in the fields. My father encouraged and taught me to do farm work. He had grown up in an era when a farmer raised his own help, just as he raised his own fruit, vegetables, and meat. Four or five husky sons, if properly taught, were a distinct asset. Otherwise it would not have been possible to feed and clothe a family of ten or twelve, which was not considered unusually large seventy-five years ago.
Even as a very little youngster I realized that carving a farm out of even a small tract of timberland required an enormous amount of hard work. Many times, when I was only four or five years old, my father would take me with him when he went to work in the woods. To me it was most interesting to watch him cut down the big post-oak trees and trim off the branches. It was also fun to watch him split a log into rails. For this he used a maul, which he made of hardwood, and an iron wedge to start a split of the log. Once a crack had been opened he used two or three hardwood wedges called “gluts” to widen it and at last split the log wide open. The two halves were then further divided by the same process into rails.
Even at that early age I could help a bit by piling brush or taking Father a drink of water. Our large peach orchard usually furnished us with far more fruit than we could use. Father had a light spring wagon commonly called a “hack.” He would load this with peaches about wheat-harvest time and peddle them out among the wheat farmers on the prairie, who seldom tried to raise fruit of any kind on their black, waxy land. Their wives needed fruit very much at harvest time because threshing grain, and sometimes even cutting and shocking it, was a cooperative enterprise. This meant that a threshing crew of a dozen or more hungry men had to be fed and every housewife sought to outdo all the neighbor women in feeding them.
Wheat harvest, however, seldom lasted over three or four weeks at most; moreover, many of our peach trees were seedlings that produced the small freestone type of fruit that was hard to sell and therefore had to be dried. For weeks almost every summer “all hands and the cook” worked at cutting peaches in half, tossing the seeds aside, and setting out the peach halves with the cut side up on any flat surface to dry in the sun. Since, obviously, even a small child can cut a peach in half and put it out to dry, I very early put in weeks every summer helping to dry peaches. We also had about a quarter of an acre in blackberries, and picking blackberries was part of the work for George and me to do every summer.
When Alice became our housekeeper, I helped quite a bit in the house by washing and drying dishes, doing the churning, and bringing in wood and kindling.
One day George and I were in the orchard when peaches were ripe and we saw a woman and a little girl in a buggy drive up to our yard gate and go in the house. Neither of us knew them but presently I heard Alice calling me. George grinned as he said, “I’ll bet she wants you to bring that little girl out to the orchard and get her some peaches.”
I was sure that Alice wanted me to bring in some wood so I leaned back and stuck my chest out, answering, “Not me. If she asks me to do that I’ll tell her to let th’ little dickens go and get peaches for herself if she wants ’em. I’m not waitin’ on any baby girl like her.”
When Alice called again I yelled “Comin’” and started for the house in a lope, secure in my certainty that she wanted some wood.
“Ed,” said Alice as I came in, “take this little girl out to the or
chard and get her some peaches.”
I swallowed a couple of times and replied, “Yes Ma’am!” Thinking back over three-quarters of a century to this little incident it seems plain what sort of kid I was, but I am hopeful that the child is not always “father to the man.”
Our equipment for farming consisted of one breaking plow, a “Georgia stock” commonly called a “bull tongue” plow, a double shovel used to cultivate crops, a big farm wagon, the hack which Father used to peddle fruit and sweet potatoes, and that was about all. In addition, we had an axe, rake, pitchfork, two or three hoes, a grubbing hoe called a “mattock,” a crosscut saw, handsaw, hatchet, and claw hammer. It is doubtful if all the farming implements and tools cost much over $150.00 when new.
Power was supplied by a small sorrel horse named Pompey, a little bay mare called Net, and a larger, older mare known as Old Nell. All three of these animals could not have been sold for a total of $75.00, including the harness and old saddle. Old Nell died, apparently of old age, before we made our visit to Greer County. While out there Father sold Net and bought from an Indian for $14.00 a little yellow mare, that George and I promptly dubbed “Comanch.” She was a typical Indian pony with an evil temper which was probably due to being teased by some papoose, for she bit my arm the first time I sought to put a bridle on her. As compared with the agricultural machinery most farmers have today, our equipment seems most meager and primitive. One modern tractor alone would cost two or three times as much as all my father’s farm implements, tools, and horses were worth.
Even before our western venture I had done a great deal of work in the field chopping cotton, thinning corn, and cutting sprouts that sprang up in any newly cleared field. Like most children in the South, I had also done a great deal of cotton picking; therefore, by the time Father and I returned from the Prairie West late in June, 1889, I was fairly experienced in both field work and household duties, including a little cooking.
The Cross Timbers Page 5