Note: This is entry is a work in progress (currently requires QuickTime)
1 Pneumonia
2 Jones
3 Grandfather Roper
4 Orson Oather Sheets
5 Will Roper
6 Wimmers
7 Ross Roper
8 Learning to Work
9 Oather Roper
10 Death of Ross Roper
11 Oather Paying Bills
12 Ornal Oather
13 Watermelons
14 Swimming
15 Indians
16 Oaks Bull Fight
17 Morris Movies
18 Turkey Swim
19 Old Pudge
20 Dog Sled
The following is a transcript of an Audio Recording of Voit James Roper (1919-1982) at the home of his brother Marv Roper in Longmont Colorado. The audio clips are in QuickTime, if can’t hear the audio download quicktime by clicking here.
Pneumonia
The Jones Family
Grandfather (William) Roper (1861-1927)
Orsin Oather Sheets
Will Roper (1886-1915), Brother of Ross Edwin Roper
The Wimmers
Ross Edwin Roper
Learning to Work
Oather Ross Roper (1912-199?)
The Passing of Grandfather Ross Edwin Roper (1890-1941)
Paying For The Doctor Bills
Ornal And Oather Pay A Great Debt For The Family
Watermelons
Swimming
Indians
Bullfight With The Oaks’ Bull
Morris And The Movies
Have You Ever Seen A Turkey Swim
Old Pudge
Voit’s Dog Sled
I remember on one occasion when three members of the family were down with pneumonia all at one time. That was right after the youngest member of the family was born, Darson. He had pneumonia, Marvel had double pneumonia, and Amy also had got sick at that time, we though that Amy was going to die.
Father had been out and had gotten her out of bed out in the tent with her brothers, the other boys at that time we were sleeping in the old wooden grainery outside and he came and got us to come in and see her before she died. When I came into the house Amy was lying on the bed with Mother at her side raising her arms up and down trying to keep her breathing.
I remember that the Relief Society presidency were there and they were begging my mother to let her die. Saying that if she kept her alive she would probably have brain damage or something of that kind, it would be better to have her die. Mother of course couldn’t do that.
All they had for medicine was mustard plasters. They were made with flour paste. The was mixed with water and mustard put it and then that would be spread on a cloth, folded over and that would be put on the chest and the back of the patient. My mother kept those on the children who were sick and then they would give them quinine, powdered quinine was very bitter and by that time they had these little clear caps that you can buy, a box of them, fill your own capsules and so Mother would fill those but in the process of filling those there would be some of this powder on the outside of the capsules and so they’d be bitter, they would taste bitter, and children as you know would have a difficult time swallowing things anyway and they would get a taste of that quinine and it would make it all the worse. So in order to get these down it would take about three people to force these capsules down the patient. Someone would hold the arms, somebody would hold the head, and somebody would hold the legs, and somebody would hold their nose, pinch their nose shut. So they couldn’t breathe through their nose. They would force the mouth open, put one of these capsules in the mouth and pour water in and the patient would have to swallow and get the quinine down. It was very upsetting thing for them and I question whether that it did as much good as it did harm. In the process of getting them down. But anyway that was the medicine.
They had the idea then that liquor was a stimulant to the heart and so every little while my mother would place a few drops of liquor on my sister’s tongue, thinking this would stimulate the heart and keep her alive. We know better than that now.
But any way my sister would go into these comas or have a fainting spell, she would kind of go unconscious and we would think she was dying and that’s when these relief society women would try to get them to let her die in peace. They used to try the arguments that God wanted her, and that if they kept her alive they would regret it in years to come and that it would affect her mind and things like that. Father couldn’t accept that and just kept on working until she would come finally out of these spells.
Well at that same time Marvel had pneumonia and I can remember that his lungs, his skin all across his lungs on both sides turned black from the infection in the lungs that showed up clear out on the outside. We were certain that he was going to die too at that time. But, I don’t think my mother closed her eyes for three or four days she just constantly doctored them, and of course she carried the burden of the load because we had many chores to do, cows to milk and all kinds of things.
My father had to keep that running on the Colton Ranch He took care of them. He spent what time he could there at home helping, but my Mother should have most of the credit for pulling them through. We exercised the priesthood, administered to them, and they were blessed and they came through.
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The Jones, the earliest that I knew them they had a nice farm over on the north side of Ashley valley. That farm had been cleared by my grandfather Jones and by my mother and her sisters and brothers. It was virgin land having large sage brush on it. They used to cut the sage brush in the day time and pile it into great piles. Then at night they would go out and set it on fire and have a great time burning that brush off on the farm. So they cleared most of the land that way and then plowed it up and started the farm.
They had a bunch of cows and they also planted a big orchard, something that was unusual in that area. The orchard being over next to those hills had some protection and produced well and so they sold a lot of fruit there in the valley and also shipped some over into wyoming.
When I first knew my grandparents they were living there happily, and it was an excellent situation. I remember they had several mulberry trees, both white and purple mulberries. The grand kids would all come over there on Sunday and there would be about ten or twelve of them in each tree like a bunch of robins eating those mulberries. They were real fun times.
I never did know at the time what happened and didn’t even know that my grandparents had divorced. I do remember that my grandmother, I walked in to see her a time or two when I was just a little fellow before I went to school. She was a very kind woman and very nice. She died though when I must have been seven or eight or nine years of age when she died. I can just remember the day of the funeral, I didn’t get to attend, but she died of tuberculosis, after having been sick for quite a long time.
Then my grandfather Jones used to come to our home quite often, stayed there quite a lot. A very kind old man as I knew him. It never occurred to me, of course I don’t think they talked about it, what had happened, that he and grandmother had divorced. That’s about all I knew about them.
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Grandfather (William) Roper (1861-1927)
Now as to our grandfather Roper. He and my grandmother had divorced when my father was 18 months old. I saw him just before he died. I went with my father to pick him up. Let see what did they call the automobiles, the stage line. I went to pick him up at the stage station and brought him home. I never remember ever seeing him before that. I understand that he used to come to the home in years past.
But let me get back to what I originally said, he and my grandmother divorced when my father was about 18 months old and broken hearted and saddened, disillusioned, he left. My father don’t think ever saw his father again, never saw my grandpa Roper until he was 18 years old. My grandfather had gone off up into Montana, Wyoming and places like that, he herded sheep and cattle. I understand that on one occasion a horse fell on him, he was nearly killed and spent months and months in a hospital.
Eventually he came back and after our father had married he used to come and and stay there. He would always bring his tent and pitch it, he was a very neat camp keeper. He kept things clean and neat. He used to play with the children, he brought a little indian d gave it to my older brother Oather. It had a real long mane and long tail and had a racking gate. It was evidently a very beautiful pony and just a really nice one. Oather was just really proud of it.
I never knew him until about the time of his death when I went with my father to pick him up. I understand he had been out around Price and had gotten sick and had no place to go and so he finally came back to our home. That was the first that I remember, I was out of school with a broken arm when they brought him there. So I got to see him, he was a heavy user of tobacco when he came there he had done a lot of drinking and had smoked heavily and had just thrown his life away pretty much, a disillusioned man. He had a violent temper I understand and he dissipated in those ways and lived a rather unfruitful and useless life. He had trouble with quite a lot of people because of his bad temper.
My father never did get a doctor for him, I never did know why, he didn’t take him to a doctor, he probably knew that he was near death and of course we were having a hard time financially anyway. My grandfather had no money so he couldn’t pay for it. I remember the morning he died, my father had just gone out on the farm to go to work, and my mother happened to look in the bedroom and saw that he was dying and she ran out of the house and called to my father to come back. He died then within a minute or two and was buried in the Rock Point Cemetery there.
Grandpa Roper in spite of his violent temper had a great love for children. He was kind to children he used to pass the schools occasionally over on the reservation, he would always bring candy and distribute it to the children there.
Why he left and never came back to see his own children for that long period is somewhat hard to explain, but yet maybe not, maybe he couldn’t stand the feelings he got when he came and had to leave them knowing that his home had been broken up and everything. I don’t know that I should go into any of the details concerning the reasons for their divorce, I have heard them explained.
My father was always hurt deeply about it, he told me one time, that he thought his parents loved each other, he thought they were foolish on some things and had some disagreements and wouldn’t talk them over, wouldn’t get together hence things kind of festered. Finally they divorced.
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After grandfather and grandmother Roper divorced soon he left. She sometime later married a fellow by the name of Orsin Oather Sheets. She had one child from him ??? there by??? that’s how my parents got the name for our oldest brother Oather. I think they had a child named Oather Sheets, their only child died, and they got the name from that.
This Sheets had a ranch in Wyoming, on one occasion he had my father in the wagon with him, he was just a little boy, my father was and he had him out with him on the ranch and he went to head some horses and he threw a club at the horses and it bounced and hit my father in the head and cut his head clear from the hairline clear down between his eyes and across his nose. My father said that his stepfather wouldn’t even take him to a doctor, his mother took him and had him stitched up, sewed up. His stepfather didn’t really care to see if he was taken care of. I talked to my uncle Argyle one time about that and he kind of refuted he said it was all an accident and that sheets wasn’t mean to them at all.
I remember my father telling a story that one incident when this Sheets man picked my uncle Argyle up and was going to stand him on a hot stove barefooted to punish him or something and my uncle Will the oldest boy of those children picked up a pistol there, he was only I think about eight years old. Picked up a pistol and aimed it at him and said if he touched him on the stove he would kill him. And sheets put Argyle down again. He didn’t do it. Now Argyle refuted that but I don’t think my father lied about it. Argyle sometime polluted the facts too.
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Will Roper (1886-1915), Brother of Ross Edwin Roper
(MARV) How long did Will live?
(VOIT) Will Roper, my uncle Will? Well he remarried, he and my father married sisters, the Jones girls, Will married Jenny, and our father Ross married Lacy. Will had three children, he was 28 years old when he died.
Something that might be interesting to these children in connection with that is that he got pneumonia, it was in the summer time and he caught pneumonia and got terribly ill, so they took the children to their grandmother Jones which was only about a block and a half away.
Now it was out in the country so they weren’t blocks, but it was about the distance of a city block and a half away and she had her children there and my uncle had been in sort of a coma for quite a while and there were quite a few family members there. Grandfather Wimmer as I remember was there, that was my Great Grandfather Wimmer and my father and mother were there and one of… I think it was Will Wimmer who was there. There was several people people there and he woke up out of this coma, and said to them, “I’m going to die, please get my children here quickly so that I can I bid them goodbye.” So somebody ran for the children and they ran down that block and a half and got these little kids and hurried back up there to their home.
During that time he said to them, he named the people who were there waiting for him. Now wait a minute I think Grandfather Wimmer had died just before that. I’m a little confused on that. But it seems to me that Grandfather Wimmer had died just before that and he said, “Grandfather Wimmer is here for me” and he named others who were there with him, waiting, and they brought these children in and he kissed them goodbye and he said, “It’s a beautiful place to which I’m going. I don’t mind going except leaving all my family.” Then in a moment or two he died. My mother was sitting there holding his hand, sitting beside the bed, when he died.
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Now the Wimmers were out around Price, Huntington area out in there. That’s where my Grandfather Roper grew up. He met Maria, Maria Wimmer out there and they courted were married there. Then the Wimmers heard there was good opportunity out in the Uintah Basin. So they came to the Uintah Basin.
Maria was very attached to her parents and she persuaded her husband Will Roper to come with them, follow them and they came out into the Uintah Basin. They settled up in a little place called Mountain Dell, which was later called Dry Fork. Spent some time there and then later they moved over into Star Valley Wyoming.
But evidently things didn’t go too well so they moved back to Vernal and then my Grandmother having divorced my Grandfather brought her children and lived in with them. Then Grandfather Wimmer, that’s my Great Grandfather Wimmer got a contract over at Fort Duschesne, Utah. That’s where they had the army fort… Soldiers there, to control the indians. He got a mail contract to carry the mail from Fort Duschesne down to the Ouray Valley and up into Whiterocks and some of the settlements around there. So my grandmother followed them over there and moved in with them. So my father was raised in great measure by his Grandfather Wimmer.
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When he was about eight or nine years old he took up the habit of Tobacco. He was required to drive one of those mail routes. He would leave Fort Duchesne early in the morning with a buggy and horse and ride down to the Ouray Valley which was down on the Green River south east of Fort Duchesne. It took all day to drive down there. He had a little one room… it seemed like it was in sort of a barracks building. It had a little stove in it. He’d have to go there and unhitch his horse and feed it. Take care of the horse and then go in and start a fire in the stove all alone at the age of about eight or nine, preparing something to eat. The next morning he’d get up, hitch his horse up, hook it to the wagon, pick up the mail and drive back to Fort Duchesne that next day. Well being young and alone a lot and most everybody smoking in the area, the soldiers and everybody, he took up with the habit of tobacco and smoked until our oldest brother Oather was about four or five years of age.
This might be of interest to them… my mother had tried to persuade him to quit tobacco and he said to her, just leave me alone. When I get ready to quit this habit, I’ll quit it. I don’t want to be hounded about, just keep still about and I’ll quit it when I’m ready. Well, on one occasion in their home he was sitting there, he had the stove door open, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke into the stove to kind of suck it out of the room.
He turned and my oldest brother Oather was standing there by the arm of the chair watching him blow this smoke into the stove. Father said the funniest feeling came over him that he ever had. He looked at Oather and talked to himself, boy of all the things I don’t want is for him to take up with this dirty habit. So he just got up took his whole tobacco supply, he smoke a pipe part of the time. He had quite a few cigarettes or loose tobacco.
He took the whole thing and threw it in the stove. My mother saw him and she said to him, you darn fool, now somebody going to have to go to the store for you for some tobacco before the night’s out. He said, just keep still about it. I told you when I was ready to quit I’d quit. Just keep still about.
That’s how he quit smoking tobacco just all at once. My Father Grandpa Ross Roper. He said that sometime later he was going up the mountain to get lumber and stuff and he was just… as you were going up the mountain you could just tie your lines up and the teams would go a ways and rest and go a ways and rest without even having any guide and they just take it slow up the mountain. Whoever was on the wagon could just lie back against the bed roll and you know relax as they went up the mountain.
He said he was just lying there half asleep and kind of looking around, and he just happened to notice a full pack of ready rolled cigarettes out to the side of road. Before he hardly knew what had happened he was off the wagon and had that package of cigarettes and had one in his mouth and he got back on the wagon. He couldn’t find a match to light a cigarette.
He thought to himself, you darn fool coming up on this mountain without a match. He thought about it a minute and he couldn’t find one. He went through all his pockets and couldn’t find a match. He though to himself, you darn fool, what are you doing with these things anyway. So he took the whole package of cigarette’s and just threw them out to the trees, cedars, as far as he could and settled down on the wagon again.
He said he hadn’t gone a quarter mile when he just reached in to his jumper pocket and there was a whole pocket of matches. That’s how near he came to taking up cigarettes again.
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One of the things that I’m grateful for is that my father learned how to work over the years. He was a real working man. Knew how to work. He worked hard all of his life. When we were on the Colton Ranch he had lots of work. So we boys had to help, we milked lots of cows by hand, and we raised horses for the army, so there were a lot of horses to take care of. We did all of our farm work with horses. We had a couple of thousand head of sheep. That took a lot of work.
We boys had to really learn to work. Our living was made mostly from what we raised. The most money our father ever made was ninety dollars a month. When you have ten children, raise them and take care of them on ninety dollars a month you don’t have much money to throw away. So we lived primarily on what we raised in the gardens.
My oldest brother used to work with my father in irrigating and that kind of thing and the rest of us took care of the gardens and especially my brother Morris that did the boss. He was quite a go getter, he’d knock the whey out of us if we needed it. What he said was the law pretty much when it came to raising gardens. He was real smart about it. He’d take us out and step off so many rows of garden and say all right we weed this before lunch. And so we’d fly after it.
You didn’t do a sloppy job. Either you weeded it clean or you had him on your neck and you weeded clear down to the end, there wasn’t a lot of weeds at the end of garden. Then we’d have lunch and go back out. Then he’d say, now lets see we do this many rows and then we can go swimming. That was real fun, swimming in those open streams naked.
We didn’t know what swimming suits were back then. We fly after it and weed those gardens for a little while, then we’d go swim for a while in the stream. We always had the most beautiful gardens in the community. We’d cultivate and water them, well, I look back on it and it was real fun. We had our little fights as boys but we still learned how to work.
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One thing I want to mention, is concerning my oldest brother Oather. He was always really close to our father. My father was proud of him and Oather never did much to give him any heartache. Oather was a real hard worker. When we went on the Colton Ranch he was relatively young, but he did a man’s work, from the time that he was a boy. He was strong, physically, mentally too. We put up lot’s of hay and we were always hunting ways to put that hay up, with more speed. Finally they came out with what they called slings. They were nets, big nets that you’d pick up a whole load of hay, all at one time. So we built large hay barracks. They my father built two hewd hay slicks. He took old automobile wheels, without tires. He mounted those on these big hay slicks, which were eight feet wide and fourteen feet long. They were low to the ground then they could pitch the hay on them with pitch forks much easier than they could on those big high wagons. They could pitch a lot more hay consequently. Well, my brother began to stack that hay at fourteen years of age. Now everybody else with those put two full grown men on the stack to handle those. But my brother Oather stack alone at fourteen and from there on with those big nets. We put in, oh, sometimes a hundred and twenty five tons of hay in one stack. He did a tremendous amount of work. He accepted responsibility real young, father used to send him with the sheep herds long distances when he was really quite young. You wouldn’t dare do it with most boys. I remember he sent him out to the White River, now that’s southeast of the Green River, and sent him out across what they call Dead Man Bench. It was called that because several men had died out there. They’d get turned around. You get out there in certain places and can’t see the mountains. It’s easy to get turned around, you don’t know which direction you are going. Particularly in the winter time when the skies are overcast out there. But he would instruct Oather on what to look for if anything happened. I remember him telling me that on one occasion he was out there and the coyotes you see like to kill sheep. One night he’d gone to bed and he heard the sheep run. We had bells on the sheep so you could hear they run. He heard these sheep run and of course you have to get up and round them up again. He just jumped out of the wagon, I don’t know if he even had any trousers on. He ran out around these sheep and got them to stop running and settled down and then he couldn’t tell which way it was back to the wagon. It frightened him and said he just started to run for a minute. Then suddenly he remembered what father had told him. So he sat down and waited and thought well I wait til morning if I have too. It’s quite cold out there though. He said he sat there for best a full hourm and didn’t know which way the wagon went. Finally he heard one of the horses stomp its foot. He was not very far from his wagon and he got back in. Well big responsibility for a young man.
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The Passing of Grandfather Ross Edwin Roper (1890-1941)
I want to tell you when our father died, he died of a brain tumor. Doctors couldn’t diagnose those brain tumors early then. Particularly out in those little communities. They didn’t have the equipment to tell. They thought he had sinus problems. This one doctor was doctoring him all the time for sinus problems. By then I was nineteen years old I think. I needed to find my way in the world somehow. I had heart trouble and couldn’t work. We had tried to farm that summer and was in the middle of a drought. Nineteen fourty, thirty-nine and fourty the drought was still on. Our crops had pretty much failed and I told father that I was going to go to school. I remember that made him very unhappy, but I didn’t know he was as sick as he was at the time. The night before I left home, he and mother sat up most of the night and cried because I was leaving home. I didn’t know he was as near death as he was. But after I had gotten out to school, he went to another doctor and this doctor had suspected what he had. So he sent him into Salt Lake. I remember he came to my apartment in Provo and then on to Salt Lake. This doctor for the first time diagnosed, he name was doctor Harold, he diagnosed he had this brain tumor. Well as the months dragged along naturally he became incapcitated and the doctor bills were heavy and it really disrupted the home, and was a terrible ordeal to go through. They couldn’t afford to keep him in the hospital, he didn’t have the money. They did take him out to Salt Lake one time and the doctors said, well nothing can be done. You’ll just have to take him home and let him die. But he got studying the case and he finally phoned back out there and said, I think I can do something for this. Bring him back out to the hospital, they took him to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake. And he performed surgery on him. Now Oather during all that time carried the full responsibility of all that. We had no money, he took the responsibility of seeing that the family was taken care of. Toward the end though when my got go so bad, they did operate on him. They operated and when he got in there he could see that he could not do anything. He cut part of the tumor off. My father made some progress for a little while, for a short period of time. They thought maybe he would get well, but the tumor grew and he began to get real bad. My mother just simply was not strong enough herself to take take care of him and face it alone. So my oldest brother pretty much served as the nurse. Now he couldn’t well work, see because they had to give him the morphine shots to kill the pain. So my brother would give him those. My mother wasn’t trained in it, she couldn’t do it. My brother had to do it. They he got so bad they had to put tubes up through his nose and down into his stomach to get any nourishment in him. Periodically you would have to take those out and clean them and put them back in. That really quite hard for somebody who hasn’t trained in medical practices. Maybe you remember this, one time Oather tried to get those back in and they wouldn’t go in. They couldn’t get water in him or anything you see. They weren’t giving water through veins then I guess, like they do now. But here he was just shriveling up for lack of water and no food or anything. My brother just got desperate to get those in. He tried pushing them up through and they would catch somehow. My father would just scream with pain you see. Finally my brother thought, oh he’s just being super sensative, I’ll push in spite of everything. He grabbed my father and pushed quite hard and they wouldn’t go and I it just nearly killed my brother. He said he walked out in the back yard and broke down and began to cry. He said he went up by the canal where those trees were and knelt down to pray and ask for help. He went back in and tried again and it went down. He lived then until March the fifth. After he died we had no money, no credit ratings like they have now. So what to do to bury him. He went down to the mortuary and asked the mortician if he could get a casket on time, on payments. She said no, I know some of your relatives, I won’t bother naming them. She said they haven’t been honest and I can’t let you have that on time. So what do you do? Take him out in the backyard and bury him? My brother see, had not had an experience with death Discouraged he came home just desperate as to what to do. Finally he went over to the neighbor and told him his plight and this neighbor said to him, I’ll sign it darn it. So he went, this neighbor went with my brother, and he signed for this casket.
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Now these doctor bills built up all this bill for the brain surgery and all of that. It had come to a sizable some of money back then, now you can’t understand this because five thousand dollars doesn’t sound like much now. Here we make twenty-five, thirty or forty thousand a year as a salary. Five thousand dollars then, was a real big bill. That was just more than you could climb over or think about. What’ll you do? Well as soon as my father was buried then my brother decided that he would go off to Park City. That’s a mining community, they do some mining there now, some big ore mines. He and my brother Ornal went out there and got a job now Ornal wasn’t as nearly strong a man then as Oather was and so he just got a plain job. I think he got eight dollars a day, I believe that’s what they made then. They drop them down in these mines on these big elevator things. They dropped them down twelve hundred feet. Then they would walk a mile underground and then they would drop them another twelve hundred feet. Then they would walk about a mile and a quarter to where they were mining. My brother Oather was what Ornal called a mucker. That meant they would shoot the ore down, they would drill holes and shoot this ore down. They would shoot down about twenty-five tons of that ore. If he could load that in these little cars that they had down there, now by cars I mean little ore cars, little mining cars, they don’t have an engine or anything on them, just a box on wheels. If he could ship that twenty-five tons of ore out of there and set up the drills for the next shift, he’d get forty dollars a shift. That was big money. Well, have you ever tried shovel twenty-five tons of ore in five hours? Twenty-five tons in five hours. They had to be out of that mine in eight hours. They wouldn’t pay them any more than that. They had to leave in time down there to walk that distance out to the elevators and out and walk another distance and out and they had to be out. So it really meant they had about six hours or less to ship that twenty-five tons of ore out of there and setup the mining drills for the next shift to come in. He never missed a round. I remember that he used to come and stay with me over the weekends he was just as hard as a rock in his sleep. His arms were just as hard as they could be from that hard work. But he never missed a round on that and he paid off all my father’s medical bills and all the burial bills and everthing like that. Well, a real admirable thing I think for my brother to take on his father’s debt’s that way. I could go on and on about him. Then the boys were drafted into the army that year. Five of them at that time. Let’s see you weren’t old enough then. Five of them were taken into the army. He was actually taken in yet. After he got those bills paid he came down and worked on the building of the Provo Airport, both he and Ornal built the airport at the time. ???? Dawson. Then he went out to the steel plant. They were building the steel plant out there and they dropped a big bucket on him. He was way down there digging this foundation way down in there forty or fifty feet deep. They crane operator dropped on of those big steel shovels on him. Mashed him right down into the quick sand and they called me, they put him in the ?? and they telephoned me and I went tearring out there as fast as I could. They had him in the hospital and he didn’t happen to break any bones. He had trouble all his life from that. He was taken into the military right soon after that. They had to run those obstacle courses you know and he was just so sore he couldn’t. ??? These children wouldn’t know about the military and what they did. They were during the middle of a war and it was no tom foolery and their sergeants ???. Now you’d know about that because you were pretty good about carrying a mark???. But they didn’t fool did they? They weren’t fooling so I mean you know he said he was just near death. They’d run them up over those courses and they would have to jump to the ground a certain distance to the ground it would just about kill him to hit the ground but he went through the military.
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Ornal And Oather Pay A Great Debt For The Family
I should say too in connection with that, that Ornal helped pay those off. He didn’t make as much money, but what money he made went in to help him pay those family bills off. I never participated in it, in fact it didn’t even dawn on me then about the bills, you know your young it never dawned on me about the medical expenses and all those things. So Oather was a great guy. Later on again this is my brother Darson he was about eighteen something like that, he came out around Provo area and he had an appendicitis attack, he didn’t have any money or anything. So who took care of him? His brother Oather. He took care of that, he paid for him to be taken care of. He’s always been a real responsible guy. I’ve spent I guess more time with him than any of the other brothers. I know him to be a real honorable man. I could really pay tribute to him, he served a mission after he got out of the service in Hawaii, both he and his wife after he had a daughter, they served a second mission back in Nauvoo. He served on a high council for over thirty years, and is currently in a Bishopric. A great man.
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These kids want to know something about what we did for recreation when we were young. We didn’t have much recreation, I mean really you didn’t you made your own around the home. Almost everybody raised a watermelon patch, and of course our melons tasted better to the neighbors than their own melons did and our neighbors melons tasted better to us than our own melons. So it was a favorite sport at night to go visit your neighbor’s melon patch and borrow a few. We also did that with chickens. Chickoreeing, you know, really it was not the kind of an activity that you get put in prison for. It was done by the kids generally around, we never had ours bothered much because we kept two mean dogs all the time. We had to have dogs on the ranch and they had to be good dogs or we killed them. Our dogs were a little bit cagey, you know, people were afraid of them. So we never had ours bothered much. I don’t know about you, I’ll tell them one about me, I visited a neighbor’s melon patch one night, a full moon that night. He had just watered his garden and he came out of the house with a gun and I dropped right down in the mud and I laid there for three hours, while he stood right there by the side of his house not too far from me and I could see him with the gun. Finally he went back in the house and I took my dogs and went home. It was the kind of thing kids did, you know, you never thought of the thing a crime, it was a kid prank type of thing. That’s just about what it was considered, the cops didn’t run you in because you swiped a melon or anything. Or course there were always some who went to far, in some things.
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One of our recreations was to go swimming naked in the streams that came running through ??? they were unheated except by the sun. We started swimming in March. We’d back off and get a run, run as hard as you could and dive shallow and hope you come up on the other side. That’s the way you started out in Spring. Later in the summer it would warm up quite a bit and you could have quite a good time. That’s when swimming suits weren’t worn, of course boys and girls didn’t swim together back then. The boys went swimming and the girls went swimming. Yes in the summer time we did not have indoor water, ??? ??? ??? water out in the open stream. When you took a bath you had to heat water on the stove and that was a big hassle, bathe in a number three tub, wash tub. So in the summer time we washed in the open stream, bathed in the open stream. ???
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They want to know a little about they indians. Seems a little funny, all of this would have been between fifty and sixty years ago. The street that ran past our home was just a little dirt road, brush growing on both sides of it. The Indians used to come that way, they’d go hunting up in the mountains. But sometimes they’d just come over in there to gather berries. They’d gather what we call Buffalo berries that was off of a vine that looked much like a russian olive tree, had these red berries on it in the fall. They’d gather a lot of those and dry them. We used too for food, gather those buffalo berries, dry them and put them away for winter. They would make good pies. They could make good jam out of them, jellies, out of that fruit. The Indians used to come and camp about oh within a hundred yards north of our home. Over there where Rose Roberts home was. They’d camp there, my mother was always quite a bit afraid of them. They always came and asked for food, my mother got so she’d send some of us children over with food for them. Many times I had taken meat and milk and bread. They were still leaving in little teepees, they’d drag two poles by the side of the horse you know, one pole on each side of the horse with the hide stretched across it. Sqaws, the women would ride on that deer hide stretched across the poles and the buck would ride on the horse and the little children would ride on the hides too, and it was their transportation. But I’d gone over there been with them, seen those poor little old Indian kids ??? They never caused us any harm. Although we were somewhat skeptical of them because the Indian had at times… they had real troubles with them. In fact Fort Duchesne, the army at Fort Duchesne years ago was put there for the sole purpose of controlling the Indians. There was one old fellow there they say was over a hundred years old. What’d they call him? Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam. Do you remember him? A little old shriveled up fellow. Rode quite a large horse, but he was just a little old Indian. ???
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But anyway, we had this old bull, jersey bull, named jigs. He sawed his horns off, and we put a ring in their nose. We’d take a pitch fork and get it hot and push it through this gristle hair and then put a ring, a good size ring in there and fasten a chain to it. So that you could control him and tie him up. We lived next to Will Oaks, that is next to his ranch, our ranch joined Will Oaks’ ranch. Now that was the grandfather of Dr. Dallin Oaks who was president of Brigham Young University. Anyway we were down there, He and… Morris and Von and I were down there in the pastures one day and these two bulls were on opposite sides of the fence bellowing at each other and my brother said they want to fight let’s let them. So he said you go get our bull and bring him over here. I walked over dumb as can be unsnapped the chain out of his nose, put my finger in it and led him over to the fence, my two brothers propped the fence down and I led the bull across and we let them fight. They just tore, you’ve never seen a bull fight, they really fight. They must have been an hour there. Finally our bull whipped their bull ??? Brought him back ????
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My brother morris was quite a prankster. He did some things he shouldn’t have done. We had movies each Saturday night… Friday and Saturday in our local chapel, it’s just a little local thing they started up to furnish good entertainment for people. Morris became one of the theater machine operators. There were several guys, and on this particular night, he had run the first show and then he was finished. There was a guy in our community that had never been married, but he began to date a widow woman. He was kind of shy about it so he’d bring her to this movie, the second movie, after most everybody had gone home. On this particular night he’d brought this woman and I guess he was too occupied and he forgot about his keys and left them in his car… went in the movie. Old morris came out and I don’t know why, but he got to looking through these cars and saw the keys were in this one car. He got in it, started the engine, revved the engine up to about a million revolutions, let the clutch jump and the old car just dig holes. He’d done that for several minutes and finally a guy came out of the movie and he thought it was the owner of the car. He flipped the engine off and he broke and ran this guy took out after him. He ran up around behind the church jump over the fence, and the guy followed him, got up in this grain field and the grain was cut and chocked, you know how they used to put it in chocks and let it dry. The fellow was right after him running as hard as he could he dived into this grain chock and crawled inside of it. The fellow ran right over there to where he was at pulled the grain chocks off. It was Oather. [laughing] Sure he did and he just scared him nearly to death.
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Have You Ever Seen A Turkey Swim
And on another occasion our neighbor had a bunch of turkeys and they used to come over and get in our garden. I’d knocked a few of the turkeys crazy… a time or two. I know it wasn’t hard. Anyway, old Morris decided we’d see if the turkeys could swim. We caught a bunch of these turkey’s and threw them into the canal. And we just threw them in and here came the neighbor. Old Morris broke and ran and we had ten acres of beans up across the canal and he ran up there and dived into those beans on the rows and you could crawl under them and the guy could never find them. Crawled up through there, this was really the neighbor that came over and he never got caught, he got out of them some how.
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Old pudge was a little bay pony that my Uncle Lyle Jones had given to Oather. I think Lyle was going to California, and he gave this pony to Oather. He was a great piece of horse meat. One day we decided to break him to work in a cart, we cobbled up our own cart. We took some wagon wheels and we cut some old cottonwood chaves and fastened on to it and hooked him into this thing. We never did worry about holdbacks or anything like that, didn’t think about them. When we got the thing all ready and got him hooked into it. Morris decided that I should ride the pony, until we made a round or two. We started, we were in this ten acre field. We started down there and we hadn’t gone fifty feet until that cart rolled up and hit the pony in the rear end and scared him and he took off. Morris and Von were on the cart and they jumped off. I was on the horse and when he started to run it frightened me, I tried to get off, I really don’t remember of this. I tried to get off and I went down between the chaves and they had the lines tied together and my foot caught in the lines and to this day I don’t know how I kept from getting a leg pulled off. [how far did he get?] Oh, twice around that field just as hard as he could go, just the one leg and the other one flopping, if it would have got out into the spokes of that wheel it would have pulled my leg right off, no question about it. He dragged me through cow manure. Oather and Elmo Colton were across the canal and he heard them hollering and he came running up there and that pony made two rounds of that and I’m telling you he could really lay too. They came over and finally got him stopped. Fortunately the line that tied the reins were enough crooked that it pulled him that he didn’t go through a fence. He cut close to them, but he made a big enough circle and miss the fences and come around. They got him stopped and I was out cold. They thought it had killed me. [laughing] Laid there a minute, finally I came around and never had a thing except a kinked neck of out the whole thing. [laughing] I don’t know what to say about him, we did everything on earth with him he was really a good pony. His mother died, the colt’s mother died. Lyle was riding him to high school and he must have watered her after he had ridden her home when she was too warm and it killed her when the colt was just young. They fed him with a bottle and nipple. This made a real pet out of him and taught him a lot of tricks. You could get him to kneel down so you could get on him. He took him in the house one day and his sister my aunt was mopping the floor and it was wet and had linoleum on the floor and the horse fell down and couldn’t get up because the linoleum was wet. They had to just drag him out of the house. He’d go swimming with you, he’d get out in the water and go swimming with you.
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Tell us about when the dog ??? Well, when I had heart trouble and I was required to stay at home I spent, I don’t know how many months in bed, laying around and then finally I got so I could get around. We had these two dogs and they didn’t get along so I muzzled them. So they couldn’t fight each other and tied them together and hooked them to the sleigh. I made some little harnesses and put on them and I get out on that road on the sleigh and those dogs would pull me. They’d take me back and forth along that road. I really had a good time. They’d really run and travel for me.
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