Chapter Three
Frontier New Mexico: Getting Settled

So here we are getting settled on the New Mexico frontier. The homestead was left in fair condition by the renters who had just moved out to turn the place over to us. They were farm people from the midwest, Oklahoma or Kansas. They were proud people and they did everything they could to take care of the place while living there and leave it in as good a condition as they got it. The house was not very big, just a pioneer cabin it would be called now. But it was a little better built than the general run of frontier cabins. As it was a full frame house and very well built, of all lumber construction. It wasn't very large as houses went back in the cities in Texas that we left. Being a fully framed house it was something really better than most of the soddys that were built on most homesteads at that time. It only had two rooms, however they were fairly good size. The living room was about 16 feet square and the kitchen built across the back, was of course 16 feet across and about 10 feet wide. So it seemed a very very substantial kitchen for those days. There was no fireplace as it was to far from a source of wood, even though we did use wood for cooking and heating. But it was burned in heavy iron wood stoves, which made it fairly comfortable. But I will go into the source of wood supply later.

As outlined before we were fairly well set up with the necessary furniture since it had been separated from the furnishings from the two homes of Grandfather and Uncle Johnny that they shipped out from Jack County when they came to New Mexico in 1910.

It was not long after we got settled in until the old hens started to lay eggs again, and with the milk cows giving even more milk than we could drink up, before it soured, my Mother skimmed the cream off the top of the milk each morning from the milk we milked the night before and the morning milk would be skimmed each night. As the cream accumulated we soon had enough sour cream to make all the butter we could eat and soon learned that we could sell a few molds of butter every Saturday when we went into town shopping for necessities. The man in the general store was glad to get the extra butter as it was very difficult for him to get enough butter to take care of his demand. He just had to depend on the settlers around to bring in any extra they produced above their requirements. We did not have any pigs at that time, so we just saved up the extra milk after the cream has skimmed off and let it clabber and fed it to the chickens.

Although the folks brought some more sow belly bacon when they came to help us get started, it did not last us very long. So we were soon back on cotton tail rabbits again. The renters had left us a fair supply of stove wood when they left so all we had to do was cut it. By the first of February we were pretty well lined out to start plowing. We had repaired the fences around the garden and the field. The field was 20 acres which had been broken out when the first people settled there. The garden was about one hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long and it was completely surrounded with a rabbit proof fence so all we had to do was straighten up the wire and drive a few new staples, and we were fixed to start plowing when the last snow melted off and the ground was warm enough to plow. We had a single row turning plow, that the two mules could pull, and a small single row cultivator plow that we could pull with old Jeff the little saddle horse.

In the meantime Dad had gotten well enough known in San Jon that he was getting a little carpenter work around town, doing repair work mostly. So Mother, Avalon and I went at the plowing. Avalon was large enough to handle the turning plow, so he hooked-up the mules to start plowing the field and get it ready to plant. Mother and I took old Jeff and the little plow and just turned furrows about two feet apart in the garden and did not try to turn the whole thing with the plow. We couldn't give it a complete turning until the next fall after the garden was all finished for the year. Mother and Clyda planted every kind of vegetables you could think of that we were able to get seeds. It wasn't long until the neighbors learned of us, the new comers, and they started soon to bring us all kinds of seed. We borrowed our farm seeds from them on a deal to replace them, to each person who supplied us, with new seeds in the fall when our crops were in and stored for the next year. We got corn and maize, sorghum cane, and watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and pumpkins. The watermelons we planted in the same row as the corn as the corn had to be planted so far apart that there was plenty of room between the corn plants for the melons. The melons were planted a little later than the corn so the vine would not get too big for us to plow the corn until we were ready to lay it by for the rest of the season to mature. By the time we laid the corn by, the vines were getting so big we couldn't plow the corn anymore.

We had pretty good season every year until 1917. But more about that later. Since Clyda and Avalon were both going to school in San Jon and we lived three and a half miles a little south of east from town, they had to walk in five days a week. The school did not take up until 9 O'clock and it took them about an hour to walk it. They had to get started no later than 8 O'clock so as not to be late. The teacher was very strict about being tardy. So in the winter time they had to start a little after day light and it was past sundown before they got back at night.

Dad did the heavy plowing when he did not have any work in town. When he had a job, Mother and I went ahead with plowing and planting as best we could. Dad was very unhappy because Mama was doing the field work but she insisted he had to take every job he could to get money for the necessary foods that we had to buy. We couldn't take time to hunt rabbits on the new place as they were not so plentiful as they had been in the sand hill place were we first lived. We had completed the plowing by the time the weather got warm enough to start planting. Dad stayed home and worked with the rest of us until we got all the field planted.

By the time it was all planted we were getting short on stove wood so one Saturday morning before day light we had everything together to go to the Caprock, which was about seven or eight mile from our place. So Mama fixed what they call a lunch. It was good enough to keep us going through the day and consisted of two cans of sardines and a box of crackers. We filled up a couple of canteens of water and took them along. This being our first trip for wood, we just had to follow the trail out to the brakes, that were covered with cedar and juniper trees that covered hills and canyons from the basin in which we lived, up about three or four miles, and went up about a thousand feet to the top of the Caprock, which was the northern end of the Llano Estacado (the staked plains), which was the beginning of the high plains of west Texas and south eastern New Mexico.

We had to search quite a wide area to find fallen trees for good dry and seasoned wood, after our arrival which had taken us about two hours to get there. So all we had to do was shed our heavy coats and take our axes and start cutting up the trees to a size that we could stack them on the wagon. We only had two axes and besides that I was a little small to chop up the trees, even though I thought I was big enough Dad soon convinced me otherwise and assigned me the task of dragging and carrying the wood, either to the wagon, or stack it along the road if that was a closer place to go with it, when we had enough to make a load. In the meantime we had unhitched the mules and hobbled them to let them graze around the wagon and rest up for the trip home about four o'clock in the afternoon.

We got a good load of wood together and started loading about three o'clock in the afternoon. We were ready to head for home before four o'clock, but we were after dark getting back to the ranch that night and Mother and Clyda were beginning to get worried about us, since this was our first experience of going for wood, and not getting back in day light, and Mama not knowing what to expect out on the frontier, as everything was so different than Texas.

But it did not take to many months for us green horns to get accustomed to the unexpected. By the end of our first year in New Mexico Mother had become acclimated to these western ways and she was becoming a tough old gal by that time. By the first of April our garden was coming along real good and we were getting radishes and little green onions. Also green beans, (which some people called snap beans). We were sure glad to get any kind of fresh vegetables by that time. They even made the rabbits taste better. Ha! By the last of July and the first part of August the cantaloups were getting ripe so we had fresh melons every day until we got tired of them, by that time the watermelons were getting ripe so we had a change of diet. We were getting to where we thought we were in hog heaven with so many good things coming from the garden. Of course by that time the farm work was all laid by and all we had to do was bring the vegetables in for Mama and Clyda to do the canning for our winter food supply.

Avalon and I were hunting for the young rabbits and learning to shoot the little 22 rifle. He was getting pretty good with it but I was not doing so good as he would not let me try very much. Cartridges for the gun were not very easy to come by so we had to be very conservative with them and try to make every shot count, so he would use the excuse to me that we could not take a chance of missing a shot at a rabbit. So that slowed down my practice when we were out alone.

Anyway we finally came into the beginning of our second year in New Mexico and things were working out pretty good for us. Grandpa had traded for 5 yearling heifers for us, so now we had our herd built up to 7 counting the milk cows that we had started with the year before.

When we started bringing in the corn and maize in October Dad traded four days work for a couple of young shoats. We started feeding them on the new corn so they would be fattened up for butchering, for our new supply of meat, some time in November when the weather turned cold enough so the meat wouldn't spoil while we were getting it all cured out and the salt pork packed away in salt. Mama was now very busy lining everything up for smoking the hams and shoulders. We did have a little more than just the house. We had a smoke house and a chicken house and the out house out behind the chicken house.

When feed became ripe and ready to harvest Dad quit looking for work in town and we all got busy and started harvesting. The maize and the cane was the first and we got a man with a row binder to come cut them and Dad, Avalon and I followed along behind the binder and stood up the bundles, like little Indian tepees, so they could cure out before we hauled them in for stacking in the feed pen near the cow lot. We did not have any farm buildings, neither stables, cow shed, hog barns or anything of that nature except the chicken house mentioned earlier. All we had were heavy barbed wire fences around the cow lot, the corral for the horses and high wire fence for the feed lot. The only thing different was the pig pen which was made up with cedar posts and a heavy hog wire which was placed about two hundred feet away from the stock pens and near the south west corner of the garden.

The most important job Avalon and I had to do, after the planting was finished and school was turned out, was to dig a new well for house hold water supply. We went to work digging a new well because the well that had been used before had been flooded out and caved in sometime before we came there. So that was the reason for the new well. We dug the well down nine and a half feet and struck water. We went ahead and dug a settling basin down to 12 feet. That gave us enough capacity that we never had any trouble with pulling it dry, as all we had to get the water up was a trestle and a pulley with a rope and bucket to pull the water up. It served us well for our household water, with enough for the chickens and the hogs and the saddle horses. The cattle and mules were turned loose and grazed over to a windmill a mile south of us but on the same section of land as we were on. The mill didn't belong to us and all we had to do was keep it up in working order to have water for our stock. During the summer time when the weather was good, except very hot, Avalon or I would go to the windmill in the late afternoon when the cows came in to the windmill to drink, and we would round them up and push them on over to the house. We would round up the milk cows and put them in the corral so they would be there at milking time. The mules would usually come in with the cows so if we needed them the next day we corralled them also. If we didn't need them we would leave them out to graze.

By the spring of 1915 Dad had become well enough acquainted around the area that he was getting more carpenter work. That spring before plowing time he got a job building a new jail over at Tucumcari, the county seat of Quay County. Tucumcari is 25 miles west of San Jon up the railroad track. He needed all of his tools over there on this job, so he loaded them into the wagon and told me to get a good nights sleep as I was going to go with him the next day and bring the wagon back to the ranch as he would be over there for a week or so. I was just nearly 8 years old, but in that time my age didn't make that much difference, that I was to bring the wagon back 25 miles by myself. There really wasn't much to worry about as the road followed the railroad all the way and the Indians had all been settled down on the reservations about 20 to 25 years by that time. When he finished the job in Tucumcari the sheriff put him and his tools on the train back home.

We learned our lesson in 1914, and when the crops were all laid by we started hauling our wood in for winter before the weather turned bad. We brought in three wagon loads and that fixed us up so we did not have to make any winter trips. We had a little excitement on our first trip while the weather was still hot. Dad told us to scout along the sides of the road after we got into the edge of the brakes and scout around for some good wood, but not to get too far behind the wagon. Dad got about fifty yards ahead of us, and we were sort of messing around, and we heard him calling to us. We couldn't hear what he was saying and we decided he was calling us to catch up, so we took off in a long run. He had stopped and was still calling to us and when we were about fifty feet from the wagon we intersected the road, and there was a grease wood bush right on the edge of the road but we couldn't be bothered about going around it, so we both just jumped over it and kept going. By that time he was screaming at us as loud as he could holler, but we were so close to the wagon we didn't stop to see what all the noise was about until we got to the wagon. When we got there and stopped to see what the noise was about we saw Dad sitting in the wagon just as white as a sheet. After he got his breath back he said he "should give us a licking for not paying attention to him when he was calling to us". By that time he had gotten down off the wagon and started walking back down the road and when he got almost to the bush he stopped and said "now Boys look under that bush you just jumped over." We eased up and took a look and there was a three foot diamond back rattler just having a fit because we had jumped right over him. But we didn't get a whipping because Dad was so relieved that the snake had not gotten either one of us, that he just gave us a good tongue lashing and said that be a lesson to us.

We went on about a half mile farther, after he had killed the rattler, and found a large juniper tree that furnished us a nice shade. We unhooked the mules and hobbled them and turned them loose to roll and then graze while we sat under the tree and opened our cans of sardines and the box of crackers and made out our lunch, and washed it down with some cool water that we carried in a gallon jug that was wrapped in a wet gunnysack to keep it cool.

We had real good luck that day as we were about a mile farther up into the brakes than we had gone the year before and we found a full load close enough around the wagon that we cut out a full load without having to move the wagon until we were ready to load. The trip back home was uneventful and as the days were longer at that time of year we got in home before dark.

As I mentioned before we walked to school three and a half miles each way, if the weather was good. When the weather was bad and snow on the ground Dad would let us take the horse and buggy. There was an old tabernacle about a block from the school house, and all the children that rode in during stormy weather would shelter their horses under it. We always carried a bundle of Maize for our horse to eat on while we were in school.

I was so upset by the fact that I was not allowed to go to school the first year, that I just went to work and studied all of Clyda's and Avalon's books right along with them, and by the time the school was out I knew their school work as well as they did. But that didn't make any difference to the teacher when I started to school with my Brother and Sister that fall. She just told me without batting an eye that since I hadn't been to school before, I would have to start in kindergarten. Of course that didn't set to well with me but I was afraid to argue with her so that's where I started. She kept me in that class for two weeks and then she called me up to her desk and told me to bring the first grade books to school the next day and she promoted me to the first grade reader. So she kept me in that for another three weeks and asked me if I thought I could catch up with the second grade students. I had gotten well enough acquainted by then, that I told her "let me borrow your second grade books for a few minutes", which she did and I opened the book and started reading out of it and she let me go on reading for a few minutes then told me that was enough. Then she asked me to add some numbers and then she told me I was promoted to the second grade, where I should have been all the time. But she gave me some other books for me to study at home, so that gave me a real good start on my education. That's all the bragging I am going to do.

Then in 1916 Dad got a job of building what we thought at that time was a "big" hotel right there in San Jon. It was big for that town at that time. The walls were all made of Adobe and Dad hired a Mexican man and his son to make the adobes, while he was doing the foundation and the first floor. Then the men that made the adobes went to work laying the walls. They immediately called in some friends to go on making adobes so they would have time to dry and get hard while he was laying the walls. The men kept far enough ahead of him that he did not have to wait for the adobes. I believe that old hotel is still there. When that job was finished he got a carpenter job helping build a new school house over on the Caprock about 20 miles south of San Jon.

By 1915 we had increased our herd of milk cows to seven and we were getting so much milk that Mama ordered a De Laval cream separator from Montgomery Ward and started selling all the cream to a cream station that had been set up there in town. She was doing well enough by then that she ordered a sixty egg incubator and started raising chickens. Then when she got that going she decided that we kids should get a little education in music so she ordered us a Edison Cylinder record phonograph and a lot of records. There were some gospel, some popular, and some of what we would call comic. One I remember real well was called Uncle Josh Buys an Automobile, and others that I don't remember. Anyway my youngest Sister Norene still has the old Edison and records.

Another piece, which is now an antique, was a medium size wall clock, that shows the time and the date, which Norene also has in the collection of the old things that Mother stored all those years. There is a little tale connected to the old clock also. One day Avalon and I got to pestering Clyda and she started chasing us. We ran out the back door with her right on our heels. We turned and circled the house and entered by the front door, this gave us a little advantage of her, as we were going through the front room she decided we were going to get away from her, so she picked up an old dry hard paint brush and as we went through the door to the kitchen she threw it at us, but her aim was a little high. The paint brush hit the clock, where it hung over the door and knocked the glass out of it. So that ended our use for the clock as it had been damaged some other way and wouldn't run any more. Norene and Buford had it repaired some time after Mother died and I guess it still runs now.

Another thing that stands out in my memory. The last year we lived in Quay County, we, Avalon and I, got into an argument with our neighbor east of us, whom we knew as Bump Atkins, about killing rattle snakes. It so happened that Avalon and I killed a very early rattler and when we were bragging about it to Bump, that started the argument. Bump told us we didn't know anything about killing rattlers. He made us a proposition that he could kill more snakes, than both of us put together.. So we started to keeping a count of all the snakes we killed. Well the contest turned out that he did beat us. We killed 139 and Bump killed 142.

That was in the summer of 1917, the second year of the drought. Where we were on the old homestead was hit unusually hard and the stock had grazed our pasture right down to the roots and our stock was getting so poor they looked like they might start falling over dead just any time. Mother decided we were going to have to move them to better range. She inquired around to find better grass and located a vacant ranch four and a half miles south west of San Jon. So we just packed up everything we had and rounded up the stock and moved out of the old homestead. This was in August and we made it a point to hurry around and get settled before school started. So now we had to walk four and a half miles to school that year, instead of three and a half that we had been doing from the old place. That was the summer of our snake killing dual and we continued right on killing them. I remember one afternoon in September, going home from school, we killed three snakes.

Everything went along fairly good that winter, during the war, except we became very tired of having to eat OAT MEAL bread twice a day as the ration of wheat flour was so small Mama could only make biscuits once a day. So we ate oat meal biscuits and sorghum molasses for desert. We also used white Karo syrup instead of sugar. One thing that was in short supply that didn't bother us was coffee as nobody drank coffee except Mama.

Dad of course was of military age and subject to the draft and had registered when the conscription law had been passed after the United States had declared war on Germany. He was not called right away as he was in the upper age group. But there was a real demand for men to enter essential work to help the war effort and there was so much pressure for the wheat harvest in 1918. He requested exemption and was advised he could be exempted if he went to the harvest. This was of course in the early summer of 1918.

The grass was by then in very poor shape, by April 1918, as it still had not rained and drought had extended to the range in our new location south west of San Jon, and stock was getting poorer by the week. In the latter part of May one of the older cows got down and we were not able to get her up to graze and in a few days she was dead. Soon another one got down and could not get up by herself but Mama and Avalon tailed her up as quick as we found her down and she was able to gain a little strength and keep going. By this time Mother was getting desperate. The closest ranch was seven or eight miles south west of us and closer to the brakes on the south and they had a little better conditions than we did as they had gotten a little snow during the winter and a few showers in the spring and their grass was some improved. The ranch owner was a Mr. Brown and he passed by our place two or three times a week in his Model T and occasionally stopped and visited to see how Mama and us kids were getting along. So she told us to keep a watch on the road for Mr. Brown on his way back as we had seen him go into town that morning. One of us flagged him down and told him Mama wanted to talk to him. When he came in Mama sat him down at the kitchen table and gave him a cup of coffee and after they had passed the happenings of the day, she propositioned him to buy our cattle. He and Mama both knew they were going to all die if we didn't get them on better graze right away. He admitted that his pastures were better than ours and since our herd was so small, only seventeen, they agreed on a deal and he paid Mama $8.25 a piece for them. He sent a couple of his cowhands over the next day and gathered them and drove them off to the better range.

By that time school was out and we children were home all day and so all started discussing what we were going to do. It was so dry that we had not even been able to get a garden going that spring and we didn't have any milk cows left for milk. All we had left was a few chickens, the two mules and a saddle horse and old Mike our big collie dog. One of our previous neighbors over in the sand hills had given us Mike when they were frozen out by the drought, and they were going back to Kansas on the train and couldn't take him with them. He was a smart dog. We could tell him to go bring the cows, and off he would go and pretty soon he would be back with the whole herd. He was also smart with the chickens. When we lived on the Homestead and Mother was raising a lot of chickens, we always had some nice frying size roosters and enjoyed fried chicken quite regularly. So when Mama wanted to catch one of the young roosters, she would call old Mike and say "come on boy, lets go get a rooster for lunch", or dinner as the case might be. They, Mama and the dog, would go out around the chicken house and Mama would start calling the chickens and pretty soon they would be flocked around her and Mike. She would point out the chicken she wanted, saying "that one right there Mike", and he would run over and grab the chicken and hunker down and hold him between his front legs with his chin on top of him until Mama went over and picked up the rooster and wrung his head off. Old Mike would stand there and watch until the chicken quit flopping and then he would turn away and go find him a cool place in the shade just like he had not anything to do with it.

In the mean time Mama had written to the last address she had for Dad, in the fields, and had not heard from him, so she wrote to Grandpa Cox over in the little town of Hondo, New Mexico, in Lincoln County, fifty miles west of Roswell. Hondo was a little Mexican village at the head waters of the Hondo River, where the Bonita and Ruidoso River came together to form the Hondo. Grandpa and Uncle Johnny had sold out their ranch in Quay County and moved to Lincoln County in 1916. By that time it was around the first of July and Grandpa wrote back and told Mama to make arrangements to come to Roswell on the train and Uncle Johnny would meet us there in his Model T and take us on out to Hondo. But when Mama checked with the depot agent, there in San Jon, she found out that we would have to go back to Amarillo on the Rock Island and transfer to the Santa Fe there and go to Clovis, New Mexico, and transfer again to a branch of the Santa Fe from Clovis down to Roswell. After all that she decided we could go from Quay County to Lincoln County just about as quick in the wagon as we could make all that round about trip on the train and a lot cheaper.