text: THE DAVIDSON FAMILY My Dear Brothers and Sisters: You have been acquainted with the stories about Granddad and his association with Butch Cassidy all your lives, so I cannot understand this sudden desire to know if there is anything about Butch Cassidy in Dad's diaries. No one ever expressed much interest in the matter before Uncle Edd's funeral last February when Karla Goodman Mitchell, the Principal speaker at the funeral, stated that her Great Grandfather, our Uncle Edd, had told her several times that Butch Cassidy had come to the Davidson ranch in Bridger Valley and had given something very valuable to Am Davidson, Uncle Edd's father and our Grandfather. I do myself remember such an occasion, and there are references to it in Dad's writings. But I wouldn't want anyone to think this was the first and only time Am Davidson and Cassidy met, for the association goes much further back than that one meeting. Not only did Granddad know the man usually called Butch Cassidy, Robert L. Parker, but he also knew other outlaws and other men sometimes called Cassidy. For the past many months I have been going through all of our Dad's diaries and all of the old papers that belonged to our Grandparents, as well as the many Genealogy books our Mother worked on most of her life. I also have a number of letters written by our brother Arlin, about a peculiar breed of horses, which are pertinent. From these sources I think I can tell you at least some of the things you have asked for. With love and kind regards, Art 1 Table of Contents Hans Christian Davidsen page 3 Amasa Davidson page 6 Mother's Lemon Pie page 13 (Photos: Car in mudhole Gravel crusher Mother and children 1918) page 17 Dead Outlaw on Top Piano page 21 A BUCKET OF BEEHIVE GOLD page 25 HORSES, HORSE THIEVES AND TOM CASSADY page 31 Queen Anne and the Devil's Imp page 39 (Munchie cookies and Book of Mormon) page 43 The Lost Josephine Mine page 44 GEORGE CASSIDY AS A RED DEVIL page 55 (Summer 1922 mishaps) (Mother's psychic ability) page 57 Cassiday Ousts Pinkerton page 64 CASSIDY IN OREGON, SON IN NEVADA page 73 2 Hans Christen Davidsen The immediate progenitor of the Davidson family in America was Hans Christen Davidsen. As much as we honor him, a more unlikely Mormon Pioneer could not be found. Hans Christen Davidsen was born on an island off the coast of Denmark on March 28, 1820, the son of Hans Davidsen who was the son of Christen Davidsen. The Family of Hans Davidsen was well to-do, and were loyal to Denmark, although they resided in the Dutchy of Schlesvig Holstein which was intermittently ruled by North Prussia. Hans Christen Davidsen was well educated. He spoke German, Danish and English. He became, while still a young man, a professor of Astrology at the Copenhagen University, where he soon became a militant radical, preaching subversion against the Prussians, and voicing opinions not in accord with the teachings of the official Lutheran Church. On one occasion he declared Halley's Comet had been torn out of the red spot on Jupiter, and that the comet's tail was composed of lice and vermin and had been the source of the plagues which the Lord had inflicted on the people of Egypt at the time of the Exodus. He stated that a later passage of the famous comet had set events in motion which led to the destruction of Jerusalem. Hans Christen Davidsen was fired from the University, condemned by the Lutheran Church and inducted into the Prussian Army from which he deserted several times. Returning to Denmark, he married Anna Marie Jensen in 1852 and they had two children: Mary Dorthea in 1853 and Hans Thomas in 1855. In 1857, Hans Christen Davidsen was arrested and banished by Prussia. In November of that year, he suddenly joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [the Mormon Church], sold what property he owned and prepared to emigrate to America, going first to Bremerhaven, and Hamberg, Germany, then to Liverpool England. According to a newspaper article in the New York Times, on April 26, 1858, Hans Christen Davidsen arrived in New York Harbor on that date, on board the ship JOHN BRIGHT, accompanied by his wife and two children, and also by another person called Ane Davidsen who may have been, I suspect, an unacknowledged second wife. The Davidsen family went by train to Iowa City, from which place the Davidsen women walked across the plains to Salt Lake City, Anna Maria earning their food by leading a horse pulling a cart owned by Captain Ivan Iverson, who had been the converting Mormon Missionary and who was the leader of the group. Meanwhile the husband and father got a job with a detachment from Johnson's Army which was taking a mule pack train of supplies and a herd of cattle back to Utah to supply the victorious United States Army which had wrested control of Utah from Brigham Young with out a single pitched battle. 3 Hans Christen Davidsen had his first meeting with any of the Parkers on this trip. While Hans Christen was getting the mules settled for the night along the so-called Cherokee Trail which the army detachment was following, Slap-Jack Dave Parker stole a small hatchet out of Davidsen's bedroll. The small, ex- astrology professor was so angry when he found out it was gone that he took out after Slap-Jack Dave on foot. Slap-Jack Dave Parker may not have been as mean as his reputation, for Hans Christen recovered his hatchet without any trouble. The only thing was, Hans Christen Davidsen lost his mule herding job and had to walk the rest of the way to Fort Bridger to rejoin his family. Without any more adventures, they arrived in Salt Lake on September 20, 1858. If you will forgive me for saying so, our great-grandfather, that banished, often arrested army deserter, and ex-professor of Astrology who had no practical experience of any kind other than a short stint at herding mules for Johnson's Army, must have presented quite a problem to Brigham Young for surely he must have wondered what to do with this new recruit to the Mormon Church once he got to Salt Lake City. No one in Utah Territory needed a professor of Astrology. Never-the-less, President Brigham Young was a wise man. He sent Hans Christen Davidsen to Pleasant Grove [at that time called Battle] to be the president of the school trustees at the unheard of salary of fifteen dollars a year, a salary that encouraged both thrift and seeking of new opportunities. It was here that Hans Christen Davidsen met the second of the Parkers. Robert Parker, who was the father of Maximillian Parker and who was to become the grandfather of Robert L. Parker, was one of the school teachers in the Battle School District. Robert Parker did not remain there very long. His skill as a weaver was needed at Beaver, Utah where he was sent to work in the wool mills, then later he went to Washington, Utah as part of the Cotton Mission, and here the two men met again. The dates are unclear from the family records, but the events are not. Hans Christen Davidsen soon moved his family to Mount Pleasant, and bought a small place. Leaving his family there, he went with a group from San Pete County to become part of the Silk Mission in Utah's Dixie. While there he renewed his acquaintance with Robert Parker and met Bishop John Parker and contractor Richard Parker. It is unclear whether Hans Christen volunteered or was drafted into the Mormon Militia but we find him next serving as a dentist in the armed forces of Utah during the Blackhawk War, with the rank of Sergeant. During the ensuing years, Hans Christen Davidsen raised a large family. Throughout much of his life he was barely able to feed his family but as the family left home things became easier for him. He worked at many things, becoming a printer, a spinner, a candlemaker and a very small time farmer. His oldest daughter, Mary Dorthea, married Neils Peter Neilsen who became Mount Pleasant's banker and the town's only Gentile polygamist. During the 4 prosecutions of the 1890's, they moved to Sigurd and at least one writer has said Niels Peter Neilsen was a member of Cassidy's Wild Bunch. Many writers do not tell the truth. The oldest son in the family, Hans Thomas Davidsen, married Elizabeth Robertson, who was the daughter of John Robertson. Hans worked on the construction of the Mormon Temple in Saint George, then moved to Minersville in Beaver County where he engineered and drilled the Davidson tunnel known to mining men throughout the world. In 1903, he and his son, Emmery, built a water turbine flour mill at Millburne, Wyoming. During the early years, the children of Hans Christen Davidsen spelled their last name to suit themselves, some spelling it with an "e" and some with an "o" while others used the abreviated name: Davis. After the death of their father in August of 1892, the surviving children held a meeting to consider the spelling of the family name. It was decided all members of the family would use the "Davidson" spelling as being more American. 5 Amasa Davidson Amasa Davidson was the fifth child and third son of Hans Christen Davidsen. He was born at Pleasant Grove before the family moved to Mount Pleasant. He was cared for by his sister Mary. For a part of two winters he attended a Presbyterian school conducted in a dance hall by Doctor Duncan C. McMullen [an alternate spelling is McMuillian). When Amasa was nine years old (1872) he went to work for Orange Seely and Cyrus Seely as a sheepherder. his pay to be his board and a few orphaned lambs. At the time Amasa Davidson went to work for the Seelys he was a cripple using crutches, for some of the other boys in Mount Pleasant had painted young Amasa's legs with a herb the indians used for war paint, and had tied him up and left him lying in the hot sun. When he was found his legs were badly swollen and blistered. The local veterinary cut the blis- ters off and painted the legs with iodoform, but the boy remained a cripple for many years. When Amasa Davidson went to work he shortened his name to Am Davis. His folks caught up to him long enough in 1873 to get him baptized as a Mormon, and after that he was gone. Reports came back to the family that Am Davis was working for Preston Nutter on the Arizona Strip, that he was working for Dr. McCarty in Grass Valley, that he had been seen with Tom Horn on some indian reservation, and finally that, in company with some Swazey and Kelsey boys, he had captured a famous wild stallion between the Green and Colorado Rivers in eastern Utah [this part at least has some historical backing, l878]. From 1878 to 1886 there is not another word about Am Davis or Amasa Davidson in any of the family records. There are the few things mother learned from Granddad during the years 1919 to 1924, but these are retained only in memory. The next portions are all from Dad's autobiography or rather the small portion of it that he managed to get written. In 1886, Amasa Davidson suddenly reappeared in Mount Pleasant, Utah as a singularly handsome young man of 23 with an equally singular reputation of proficiency with a hand gun. At once he bought into a herd of sheep as half owner, then within a year owned it all. He hired the man who was to become his brother-in -law as his sheep foreman, then continued to ride around San Pete County in a buggy seeking other sheep to purchase. Our Uncle Amber has said Granddad already owned many sheep which had been cared for in the Seely herds, and that may well be true. In 1887, Peter Hansen invited his boss, Amasa Davidson) to have dinner at his father's house. Amasa was greatly attracted to Pete's younger sister, Celeste Hansen. Amasa started going to church, started to wear his better clothes whenever he was around town, and soon asked Celeste to marry him. She agreed, but before the marriage took place Celeste became sick and died. 6 Before Celeste Hansen died she told her younger sister, Annie Elizabeth Hansen that she must promise to marry her betrothed. There was no chance the fourteen year old Annie could do so, because Am Davidson disappeared once more. In 1889 Amasa Davidson once more turned up, informed his parents he had just bought another herd of sheep and, almost overnight, became engaged to marry Annie Elizabeth Hansen, now sixteen. Am Davidson was 26. Amasa Davidson and Annie Elizabeth Hansen were married in the Manti Temple by Daniel Wells [one time mayor of Salt Lake City] on June 12, 1889. Amasa Davidson got his new bride sheltered in a shack-like house in Fairview, hired a contractor to build a new house, and then disappeared again. Dad says everyone thought he was with his sheep herds, and didn't worry about it until Grandmother was about to have her first child. Messengers were sent to find him but he couldn't be found. Mary Dorthea came to deliver the baby, our Dad. Am Davidson showed up about a month later, bearing no excuses or explanations, but carrying in his arms a fancy eight day mantel clock as a peace offering. Annie Davidson told her erring husband she would like to have the clock, but before she would accept it he had to promise that if they ever had another child that he would be present for its birth. Here Dad comments that Granddad kept this promise for the birth of Uncle Arthur in February of 1892, arriving a few hours before his birth, and leaving two days later. Thereafter Dad's writings go on to comment about the enormous amount of sheep range Granddad controlled. Dad's autobiography picks up the story again, later, when he tells that Granddad sold all his sheep during the Cleveland Depression [I take it to have been in 1893], and returned home with a large valise full of golden Eagles and Double Eagles and a considerable number of large de nomination Gold Certificates stuffed in on top. The next statement Dad wrote is a little hard to believe. He said that Granddad paid off a small mortgage and a few current bills, and then he was broke. [Total $543.30]. At this point it might be well to remind you of what our dear brother, Arlin, learned from France Nielsen of Mount Pleasant. France Nielsen claimed he had been one of Granddad's sheepherders. He claimed he had been one of the men Granddad sent out to find the Golden Treasure Butch Cassidy had given to Granddad before Butch went to South America. France said he had seen and ridden the grey stud horse Granddad caught on the East Desert, and that its name was King Of The Mountain. He said he himself had bought the great leopard horse Cassidy rode in the Castlegate Robbery. He said it was first called Grey Eagle, but he renamed it Mine Guard in honor of Cassidy's new profession. France Nielsen said that Granddad and Butch Cassidy had ridden together for several years and that the reason he and Pete Hansen had not looked for the 7 treasure was because they believed Cassidy could outshoot Granddad if it came to a showdown. France Nielsen said everyone in Fairview and Mount Pleasant thought Granddad got his start by riding with the Wild Bunch, and when asked about it, Granddad never denied it. [All of the above material is contained in letters Arlin wrote to the author of an article about horses printed in the Appaloosa News]. Now, perhaps, I should add a little more about Granddad's Treasure. Dad wrote a little about it in his first draft of his autobiography. Each one of his brothers has verified some parts of the story. The treasure was golden in color, but was not gold. Butch Cassidy did or did not give it to Granddad. It was assumed to be near the Drum Mountains of western Utah, but Uncle Kermit says that when he, Uncle Amber and Uncle Edd were going to look for it, Granddad said it was in southern Utah and looked like a three storied Indian dwelling. Dad said Granddad only saw the place after the treasure was removed. Next I should remind you of what old John Weltner had to say, or maybe I don't need to remind you for you were old enough to remember that for yourselves. We lived on his ranch in the 1930's. Almost everyone in that part of the country was still fighting the Johnson County war of forty years before. John Weltner got his start in the mines around Central City, Colorado. He moved to northern Wyoming about 1882 in what is now Sheridan County. Here he started the first permanent sheep ranch in that part of Wyoming; his brand was the Half Circle L which he used for cattle, sheep and horses. John Weltner told his stories often and well. Before the War, under lined & capitalized, he knew Am Davidson and his side kick, Butch Cassidy, who was only a kid at the time. They were stock detectives and fine examples of a faltering breed. He had even traded Am Davidson a fine half-blood Morgan mare for a spindley legged leopard colt, turned out fine though, splendid horse, rode him for years. Davidson was a tight one, had to give him two dollars boot. Didn't lose nothing by it, the mare belonged to that Englishman, Lord Montcrieffe. Davidson's side kick had a cousin or something named George. Turned up about the same time, on the dodge he was, same name different spelling**, stole a dogie someplace they said, took up a homestead on that Collins quarter, give him hundred fifty to do it, give him a beef to eat, just as well, he'd got it anyway. Left in the night when the War started, dirty shame, between me and the wife and brother Fred we had sixteen sections except for that quarter. Joe Collin sneaked and staked it before we got someone else to file on it. Nobody available, all wanted to fight. **John Weltner's brand, was carved into the stock of Wm. Phillips hand gun, c.f. Pointer: In Search Butch Cassidy. 8 Yore paws a school teacher, huh. Probably never make a go of it, school teachers never do, wouldn't lease the place to him if it wasn't for your brother, reminds me of Am Davidson, he does. He was a tight one, must have been a jew or a scotchman, talked a little broken, fine fellow though, only man ever skinned me in a horse trade, crazy fellow, thought him and his side kick could stop the War. Way it was going, Christ couldn't have stopped the War and then that damned kid stopped it by just holding up his hand, funny thing, never did understand it, didn't have a gun, held up his hand and says they was playing games. Wal, gotta go. Break your leg. Tommy! Tommy, bring that damned truck over here so I don't have to walk. *** I have enjoying remembering old John Weltner, but John Weltner in northern Wyoming and France Neilsen in central Utah, both talking of Am Davidson, were worlds apart. It cannot be proved they were talking of the same man even though they thought they were, in each case about our Granddad. While each of them associated Am Davidson with Butch Cassidy, in one case Butch Cassidy was a stock detective and in the other case an outlaw. So far it seems that Am Davidson could have known Butch Cassidy before 1892, the year of Uncle Arthur's birth, but there is no possibility Granddad ever rode with Cassidy after that date, for the day by day life of Am Davidson is faithfully recorded until 1909 when he decided to move away from Utah. Although Am Davidson was considered the most farsighted and prosperous farmer in Fairview, Utah, he had long wished to escape the confining environs of Fairview. He was prevented from leaving by the refusal of our Grandmother to leave while her ailing mother was alive. There are several different accounts of the move to Bridger Valley. Seemingly Dad did not trust his own memory of just what occurred, for he wrote to his brothers, Hans Arthur and Peter Edward, asking what they remembered about the event. Uncle Arthur replied in some detail and the account in Dad's biography is largely as Uncle Arthur stated it. The letters to Uncle Edd were answered by Aunt Agnes, and vary somewhat. The greatest variance is in Dad's small pocket notebooks, which he carried constantly all through his life. In writing this part, I am placing my trust more in the little notebooks than in the biography, even though Dad had not been home. He was in Canada, and had been there for about two years. He only returned home when he heard of the impending death of Anna Marie Jensen (his grandmother) on September 7, 1909. Two or three weeks after the burial of his mother-in-law, Am Davidson boarded the Denver and Rio Grande branch line passenger train at Fairview, intending to go to Idaho where his brother Lorenzo had settled. He took with him his two oldest sons, Amasa Leonzo (our father) for company, and Hans Arthur 9 who was to go to school in Logan. [Please do not be upset when I say our father's name was Leonzo when you know very well it was Alonzo.] Reaching Salt Lake City in about three and a half hours, they disembarked at the brand new Rio Grand Western Depot at 455 West Broadway, prepared to walk the three blocks to the Oregon Short Line (Union Pacific) Depot on South Temple. In the depot they met Mat Warner, a former outlaw, who was about to take the Rio Grande to Price, Utah. Mat Warner told Granddad that the Pinkertons had just reported that Butch Cassidy and Harry Alonzo had been killed in Patagonia and did he want to contribute to a fund to send someone down to South America to check the story out. There is no indication as to whether Granddad made any contribution, although brother Arlin used to say he did. In any case meeting Mat Warner caused Granddad to change his plans. He gave Hans Arthur some money and sent him on to Logan alone. He and Dad then boarded the Union Pacific and went to Bridger Valley. They first got off the train at Leroy Station where Granddad went over to a small refinery and talked to Charles O. Richardson whom Dad described as a crook. They then caught the next east bound passenger train to Carter Station where a nephew and cousin, Emmery Davidson met them with a team and buggy, and took them to Millburne, Wyoming. During the next several days, Hans Thomas Davidson drove his brother and nephew around, showing them several places which could be purchased. They got as far as the Mormon settlement at Lyman, where they saw the Meeks Gang, led by the one legged bandit, Bob Meeks [Henry Rhodes Meeks, Jr. J, shooting at a "poor pilgrim's" feet and making him ride on a mule mounted backwards. Granddad went over and spoke a few words to them and they turned the pilgrim loose and shook Granddad's hand. Dad did not hear what they said. It is quite apparent from Dad's account that Granddad knew Bob (more usually called "Bub") Meeks previous to this time but there is no record of where or when. Granddad always said Bub cut his own leg off after he escaped from the Idaho Pentitentiary in 1901. The official records of the Idaho Pentitentiary at Boise do not show that to be the case. Those records state that "Henry Wilbur Meeks" was sentenced to the Idaho jail for the robbery of the Montpelior Bank for a period of 32 years. The records state he tried to escape from the mental institution was hounded in the attempt, had his leg removed in a hospital, and was discharged from the penal institution in 1916. His tombstone in the Lyman cemetery states that he died in 1912, and living members of his family state the 1912 date is correct. *** After several days, Am Davidson decided what he wanted to do. After looking at the Murdock Place, about two and half miles from Fort Bridger, and where they found a Tom Osbourne in residence as a caretaker, he went to the Jarmon 10 school to talk to Mrs. Gertrude Thomas. Murdock never did own the place, but had once squatted there. Tom Osbourne had once been in prison for murder and owned a ranch near Kemmerer, it is said. After talking to Gertrude Thomas, Granddad paid her cash for two homesteads of 160 acres each. One had been taken up by Gertrude and the other by her daughter, Edna Thomas McIntosh, wife of Archie McIntosh who worked for the First Security Bank in Ogden. Neither woman had obtained the patents for their homestead at the time Granddad bought them. You may remember that Mother used to say that Archie McIntosh was the A. N. Mackintosh of Montpelior who railroaded Bub Meeks to jail in place of Wilbur Meeks. Mother ought to know, she went to school in Montpelior, but on the other hand living members of the Thomas family cannot verify it now. Strangely, Granddad had appropriated water for the Murdock place in 1903. *** Am Davidson, after paying for the two homesteads, went to the nearest neighbor on the north and bought two large stacks of hay which were in a well fenced stackyard against his fence. This man was named George E. Roberts, but was always called "Daddy" Roberts**. Daddy Roberts had a large family, the most important from the veiwpoint of this writing being three sons who were called according to Dad: Dangerous Dan, Hood and Holly. Like Daddy Roberts, almost all the Mormon settlers in Bridger Valley at that time had come from southern Utah, but some had returned from Canada, some had come from northern Utah. They had occupied first the Lower Bench, then the area around Millburne and Three Mile. Once the Fort Bridger Military Reservation was opened for homesteading in 1890, and the Lyman Canal built by banker Bigelow of Ogden and the Fort Bridger contractor, South, the southern Utah emigrees spread over the rest of the benches, so the country was mostly settled before Granddad moved to Bridger Valley. Granddad went back to Utah that fall of 1909, leaving his son, Amasa Leonzo, to stay with Uncle Hans Davidson and to walk every day over to the Thomas (Murdock) place to make sure no rabbits had broken into the stackyard to eat the hay. An incident happened that winter, an incident Mother often told and with which Dad always agreed. Hood was working near Lone Tree as a cowboy for Gene Hickey. One time a man riding the grub line happened to stop at the Hickey Ranch, and gave his name as Jack Egan. Some time later Jack Egan decided to drift on over to Browns Park and Hood rode with him. Once at the Park, they went into the store operated there by elderly John Jarvie. Immediately John Jarvie began a verbal attack against Jack Egan, accusing him of having been **In a separate place Dad writes the hay was owned by McPhie. The Roberts boys were George Daniel, Ernest E. and Harold. 11 in the Park eight years before, when he had been using the name of Tap Duncan and when he had, Jarvie said, shot harmless old Jesse Ewing, a copper mlner. Jack Egan listened silently to all the elderly Scottsman had to say, then he pulled his gun and killed Jarvie dead in his own store. Turning his gun on Hood Roberts, Jack Egan told him to carry Jarvie's body out and dump it in the Green River, and then to clean up the store. Hood returned to Bridger Valley to tell his folks that Harry Alonzo, alias the Sundance Kid, hadn't been killed in South America after all. This is a story I have always known, and always believed because the folks told it so often. But I have to be truthful. Dad did not write the story, as such, in his autobiography, nor record it in his diary. It is only possible to reconstruct the story from small bits and pieces in his notebooks, such as where he notes "Jarvey killed, 1909. Hood played for sucker." Grandad moved his wife and family to Bridger Valley in April of 1910. He put them all to work, sowing the crops. When Fall came he sent his son, Hans Arthur, back to Logan to learn to be a blacksmith, and he told Dad to go find himself a job. Dad thought of the hard winter coming, and of the difficulties of finding any kind of a job during the winter. Then he thought of Charles O. Richardson and his nice warm oil refinery at LeRoy Station. It was only about fourteen miles to LeRoy so Dad walked over to the refinery to ask for a job. Charles O. Richardson, out of his friendship for Granddad, offered Dad a job in his oil mine. Many people do not know what an oil mine is. It is just a hole dug in the ground into which oil seeps and from which oil can be withdrawn in cans or buckets. Dad did not like the job because of the large amount of gas in the mine and because of the purpose for which Charles O. Richardson used the oil. Dad said Richardson was drilling many shallow oil wells, most of which were completely dry. Richardson would have his men take the oil Dad bailed out of the mine and pour it into the dry oil wells to make them appear valuable to any possible investors. Dad worked for a while, but he got too much gas in the mine, carne down with pneumonia and had to go back to his fathers new place. Dad spent several pages in his diary describing the underground dug out Richardson had built for himself and his men. He had installed filters and water baths for the air entering the dugout. He had stored a quantity of food and fresh water in the dugout, and had installed air tight doors on it. Richardson had expected that when the earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910 many people would lose their lives. Richardson did not intend to be one of those who died. It sort of makes me think Charles O. Richardson had been listening to the theories of our Great Grandfather, Hans Christen Davidsen. When Dad recovered from his pneumonia, he went to Logan to go to school to finish the eighth grade. He did it in three months. 12 MOTHER'S LEMON PIE My Dear Brothers and Sisters: I am very sorry it has been so long since my last letter, but I have been doing a little more research between then and now. I quit my last letter at the time Dad got pneumonia in 1910. Perhaps I ought to take my story up at that point, but you have all heard a hundred times how Dad and Mother met and were married on June 4, 1912. It seems to me you know as much about it as I do, and as much as Dad tells in his diaries. So I think I prefer to go now to 1919. In the summer of 1919, Dad decided to go to Washington D.C. to see if he could interest the United States Army in an invention he had dreamed up which would enable ships to detect German submarines underwater. As Dad described it afterward it was something like Sonar, but the Army didn't want anything to do with it and the Navy said the war was now over so it was no longer needed. Dad himself described his trip as "a damned fool idea." Anyway Dad was gone, so the rest of our family went up to stay with Granddad. Fortunately there were not too many of Granddad's family at home or there would never have been room for us. As it was, Mother and Aunt Beatrice had to sleep together with our baby brother Howard between, although on this particular night Aunt Beatrice was out somewhere with her boyfriend, Hugh Wayman. Aunt Vennes and Aunt Vayanna slept in the lean-to on the back of the house with our sisters Edna and Jessie poked in somewhere. Arlin and I slept in the bunkhouse with Uncle Kermit, the bunkhouse being the north part of the ice house and it had only one bed at that particular time. In order that I will not need to interupt this small tale while telling it, let me mention our mother's name: Henriette Ellingford. Mother did not like her given name because her father, John Ellingford, had named her after his first wife. So all the time she was young she said her name was Etta. When she first came to Millburne to teach school in the fall of 1911, she started using the name of Riette. Grandmother Davidson called her Retta and the girls called her Retty. Dad always called her Ray. *** The stranger rode in just at dusk. He rode straight over to where I was standing, hidden by the doorway to the engine room of the milk house. He wrapped his reins around the hitching post outside the door and stumped down across the barnyard to where Granddad was putting some barley to soak in the skimmed milk barrel. They stood there talking for quite a while. Meanwhile, Uncle Kermit and Aunt Vennes finished separating the cream from the milk given by forty milk cows, then they, brother Arlin and I went to the house. Everyone had gone to bed. 13 I remember I was down under the piano bench, looking at the pedals which operated the player piano, when Granddad brought the stranger in by the kitchen door. Granddad looked around, then told Uncle Kermit to go down to the ice house and make a bed on the sawdust, and take brother Arlin with him. I knew what that meant. We would have to sleep on the cold sawdust and the stranger would sleep in the nice warm bed in the bunkhouse. I decided to stay where I was and sleep under the piano bench. Grandmother hadn't been feeling well, and she had been in bed all afternoon. Granddad went into their room and spoke to her, then he stepped into the next room and asked Mother to get up and fix some supper for the stranger. As soon as she had her dress on, Mother went out to the kitchen to start his supper. Granddad and the stranger sat in the living room, talking about the Johnson County War. After a while they started talking about some mines in southern Utah, and then the stranger took a piece of yellow rock out of his pocket, gave it to Granddad and told him it was a wing broken off of a Deseret. I was only about five years old, but I knew that Deserets were honey bees, and they aren't made out of rocks. Granddad didn't crack a smile. He only said so this is what all the fuss was about and he was glad to have it and would keep it forever. Granddad got up and turned around to put it on top of the piano, under the stuffed owl. I thought he would step on me and then send me down to sleep in the cold saw dust. But just then, Mother said supper was ready for the stranger The stranger ate like he was hungry. Mother stood with her back to the kitchen range. Granddad got out his pocketknife, sharper than his razor, and pared off thin slices of corned beef for himself. About the time the stranger finished off his supper with a slice of bread and jam, Granddad stood up and said he had to go outside and water his dog. The stranger stood up, walked over to Mother by the kitchen range, took her hand in his, and said: "Thank you, little sister. Those were the best fried potatoes I ever tasted." Mother seemed to find it hard to speak. Finally she got something out. "I didn't know you. I mean, are you,,,are you Lee…Are you Brother Anonymous?" I didn't think it was right, what the stranger did then. He reached right over and gave Mother a big kiss. I thought Dad would punch him in the jaw if he was home. While I was wondering if I should punch him in the jaw, being as Dad was 14 in Wani-something D. C., the stranger laughed and said Minnie wouldn't like to have her little sister call him something petrified like that, so maybe she had better call him LeRoy. Just then Granddad came back in through the kitchen door and Grandma bustled in from the bedroom in her nightgown. She pushed past me without seeing me, shouting: LeeeeeeRoy! Is that you, LeRoy, where have you been, why didn't you write, where are you going, what why when, LeRoy. Then she threw her arms around his neck and smothered him with kisses. Granddad didn't punch him in the jaw, he just stood and smiled. I climbed back under the piano bench. LeRoy stood with his arm around Mother, called her little sister Etta, and all four of them stood there talking forty to a dozen. I must have gone to sleep for when I woke up the stranger had me by the arm. He said "Maybe you better git to bed, Little Pard." I went into Mothers bedroom and crawled up on the foot of her bed. When Aunt Beatrice got home, she kicked me in the jaw, but she didn't kick me out. The next morning the stranger was gone. In the middle of the morning Mother took our baby brother, Howard, outside in a basket to give him some sunshine. Granddad came by, poked his finger at the baby, saying Kitchee, kitchee, kitchee. Howard grabbed onto his finger and held on hard. Granddad turned to Mother and told her she had to name him LeRoy because he was a tough little fellow. Just then Grandmother appeared and said she wouldn't allow it. She said Granddad was always naming people and things after his old buddies, and she would not stand for it. She said he had named her buggy team** after two scarlet women in Texas and he had named their oldest son, Amasa, after that dirty murderer Harry Alonzo when she had already picked out for him the honest name of Amasa Leonzo. Granddad said he didn't do it on purpose, he had just got mixed up. On the following Fast Sunday, after Dad got back from D.C. he blessed his young son Howard LeRoy Davidson, even though all us kids wanted him to have the name of Little Red Hot Temper. Dad checked up on what Grandmother said about his name and found he had been named Amasa Alonzo. He managed to get the records straightened out, but he missed on a few. On the Wyoming State birth certificate for our sister Annie, her father is listed as "Amas L. Davidson," and a newspaper account of the birth of brother Raymond lists A. L. Davidson as his father. I think Dad always used his initials instead of his names because he was ashamed of being named after Harry Alonzo. In 1930, a few months after Granddad passed away, Grandmother came to visit us at Sheridan, Wyoming. She brought with her a memento of Granddad for **Fannie and Black Bess. Whenever Uncle Hugh drove the team, he would say "Giddup, you old whores." 15 Dad and for each of his grandsons. She brought for me a piece of yellow rock and told me Granddad had always said I should have it. He must have known I had been hiding under the piano bench. I used to keep it in a pocket of Dad's overcoat. Dad saw it there one time and noticed that it glowed in the dark. He said it must be a piece of Balogna Stone. [c.f. any enclycopedia]. I am sure that yellow stone was the valuable object Uncle Edd told Karla Mitchell that Butch Cassidy gave to Granddad in Bridger Valley, part of the Golden Treasure in southern Utah. I recently looked up Mother's family tree in her personal Geneology Book. I found her sister Minnie was born on October 5, 1886 and she died on October 3, 1887. Later, in one of Dad's notebooks, I saw an entry that said "Ray's cousin Minnie died on way to Zion. She was eight years old and all alone. Ray's sister was named after her." In another notebook, Dad wrote, "Did Minnie die? I will have to ask Aunt Cindy." Aunt Cindy Meeks must have answered Dad's letter, because the next entry says: "Aunt Cindy says Minnie didn't die, but she changed her name." In another notebook is an entry which reads: "Aunt Cindy wrote she might have changed her name to Eva." Then I found a reference to Minnie in Mother's handwriting. Between two blank pages lightly stuck together near the back of Mother's first Geneology Book, there was a small sheet of paper. On it Mother had made a copy of a letter. It said: "Dear Hrs. Davidson: In reference to your questions concerning Minnie A. Clark, we can only advise you that we have no list of the several morganic alliances of the son of Queen Victoria, euphoniously referred to as Lord Ingerfield. "President Heber J. Grant has asked I tell you the story about Brother Anonymous is apocryphal." [There is no indication of date or signature, and the next page has been carefully removed]. The day after Dad got back from Washington D.C. we moved back to our own two roomed log cabin north of the Lincoln Highway right where it crossed the Lyman Canal. Dad got a job on the rock crusher not much more than a quarter of a mile west. The county was going to put gravel in all the mud holes along the Lincoln Highway. There was a nice big mud hole right in front of our place. Most farmers had a mud hole if they had enough water, but we didn't have to pour water in ours because water leaked out of the canal. None of the local people got stuck in our mud hole because they knew enough to stay in the ruts which had a hard bottom. It was only the tourists, driving heavy, big, shiny cars that got stuck. They would try to straddle the ruts so they wouldn't get their cars muddy and then they would be stuck. 16 17 Some farmers charged five dollars to pull a car out of their mud holes but Dad only charged a dollar. He said if you charged too much the tourists would tear up the bridges to put under their wheels. So this one day we were sitting on the porch when along came a tourist and got stuck in our mud hole. We were hoping he would stay until Dad got home to pull him out. But this tourist got out of the car and went right to work prying planks off the bridge. He had two or three of them pried loose when there came a troop of cavalry from the east. The Captain made the tourist put the planks back on the bridge so the horses could cross, but anyone else would have waded the horses across the canal, and let them have a drink while they were doing it. Once the horse soldiers were gone, the tourist started taking the planks off again. It looked like his car was sinking deeper all the time. He was trying to work one plank under his back wheel when along carne a company of infantry doughboys straggling along, dragging their bandage-like green puttees in the dirt. They made the tourist put the planks back on the bridge, but he was trying to get them to push his car out of the mud hole. Just then back from the west came half a dozen riderless cavalry horses, with another dozen cavalry men chasing them. The doughboys tried to head the horses by the canal, and one horse jumped right on top of the tourists car. It was better than a country fair. Uncle Edd lived on the other side of the Lincoln Highway on the Mocroft place; his house was about two hundred yards up in the field. We saw Uncle Edd running down the lane toward the highway. I thought he was coming down to look at the excitement, but he pushed through the doughboys, jumped our irrigation ditch and dashed into the house. Uncle Edd talked fast. "Retty, you got to come cook supper. I got threshers coming. They are at the top of the dugway now. I'm not ready for them. I haven't got all the grain stacked, I haven't got enough wagons, Agnes can't do it. Hurry." Uncle Edd was gone, and yes, there was John T. Fields and his steam engine powered threshing machine lumbering up the road, followed by Sam Booth on the water wagon and Jim Lee on the coal wagon, and gingerly escorted by the rest of the cavalry. Mother dragged us back inside, told us we had to be big boys, take care of little Howard LeRoy and don't hit our sisters. We could look out of the window, but don't go outside. Shucks, a little boy pretending to be a big boy can't see very much out of windows when you have to stand on your toes. After a while I went outside so I could see better. Arlin can out to drag me back in. In the scuffle, I hit him in the eye, and then I was afraid he would beat me up, so I went running up to Uncle Edd's. I went in the door real quiet. John T. was just getting up from the supper table. 18 "Retty," he said, "That was a passably fair snack you fixed for supper, except for the coffee. Threshers has got to have coffee." The crew filed out with only Jim Lee remaining. Mother looked in the cupboard and found a new ten pound can of Schillings Best and then she sank into a chair. "Jim," she said, "How do you make coffee?" "Use a lard pail. Three double handfulls in any size pot." The next morning, John T. pronounced his benediction on Jim Lee's recipe and on Mother's adherance to it. "Fine coffee, Retty. What kind of pie are you fixing for dinner? Threshers always like lemon pie for dinner." "If you want lemon pie for dinner, John T., you will get it." Mother looked in the cupbords for lemons. No lemons. She asked Aunt Agnes if she had any lemons. No lemons. She called Willie Carter's store at Fort Bridger. No lemons. She called Joe Guilds at Urie. NO lemons. She called Grandmother. No Lemons. Mother sat down and cried. Then she got up and called Grandmother again and told her if Aunt Vennes was coming down to help with the cooking, to have her bring that bottle of Tartaric Acid they used to clean milkstone out of the cream separator, and a bottle of yellow cake coloring. When Aunt Vennes got there, driving a team of work horses hitched to a needed bundle wagon, she and Mother started to make lemon pies. They put in two heaping tablespoons of tartaric acid, a couple of pounds of corn starch, a whole bunch of tapioca, the yolks of all the eggs they had, the remaining bit of lemon extract in an old bottle and half a bottle of yellow cake coloring. They put the mixture in the pie shells and put them in the oven. About this time, Grandmother arrived in her buggy. She looked at the potatoes, already done, at the gravy setting on the warming oven, at the browned chicken in the roaster on the back of the stove, and at the beautiful golden lemon pies baking nicely in the oven and said all was well, she couldn't have done it any better herself. Then she went into the bedroom to talk to Aunt Agnes. The threshers ate a hearty meal, and then waited for the meringue topped pie. Mother took their plates and Aunt Vennes served the pie, both of them proud of what they were serving. John T. took one bite and pushed his dish aside. He started talking about Butch Cassidy. 19 "Jim, I hear Butch Cassidy is back in the country. All us fellows from down Beaver way knew Butch when he was a boy, but I guess you know him better than I do. What do you think?" "Depends." "Depends on what?" "Depends if you eat your pie." "What has that got to do with it?" "Best lemon pie I ever tasted," said Jim Lee. "Cassidy would say the same. You ordered it, you eat it." Grandmother, seeing something was amiss, surged in to sooth things over. "You boys talking about Butch Cassidy? I guess I know Butch Cassidy as well or better than any of you. I have known him ever since I married Amasa. I have fixed supper for Butch many times, and so has Retta." "Oh, Mother Davidson. Don't say that." Mother sounded embarrassed. "Yes sir, John T. Not much over a month ago. He said Retta can fix a meal as good as me…and her lemon pie is every bit as good so why don't you taste it?" "I did taste. Its got lots of lemon in it." "Hell, then, don't be bashful. Go ahead and eat it." Each man in the threshing crew manfully swallowed his lemon pie, refused seconds and gallantly declared it was the most flavorful lemon pie he had ever "tasted." Jim Lee, as usual, was the last man out. Mother caught him by the sleeve. "Jim, what was wrong with the lemon pie?" "Hasn't no sugar in it." He paused, looked back. "Thinks he's smart, wouldn't let me start up the steam engine. Damn Jack-mormon, five miles from home and he's got to have coffee. You served him right, Etta, damned if you didn't." Mother told Uncle Edd if he ever said anything about the lemon pie to Grandmother or Aunt Agnes, she would shoot him. That night, after the threshers were gone, Mother, with Dad's help, delivered Aunt Agnes of her second child, our cousin, Alfred C. Davidson. Doctor Thompsen didn't make it because he was over at Lone Tree treating a man for gun shot wounds. 20 DEAD OUTLAW ON TOP PIANO Writing about Doctor Thompson not being able to attend Aunt Agnes because he was treating a gun shot wound in Lone Tree, Wyoming, reminds me of another story both Mother and Dad used to tell about Lone Tree. You all know Dad was a school teacher, but he did not have the education usually required to teach school. He had graduated from the eighth grade, and he had been coached by Gertrude Thomas, the school teacher from whom Granddad had bought the two homesteads. Then he had taken a test and qualified as a teacher for the younger grades, but the only teaching jobs he got, previous to 1917, were at schools where younger female school teachers had run into trouble. It was that way at Lone Tree in the fall of 1912. A young lady school teacher, fresh from a Utah Normal School, had come to Lone Tree to be the only school teacher in a one room frame school in which there were thirty five students in all eight grades. Some of the students were older than their teacher. She was unable to maintain control over two of the older boys. She accused the two boys of unspeakable indignities and left the valley in fear for her life. Ivy Thomas Irish, a daughter of Gertrude Thomas, was the County Superintendent of Schools for Uinta County. She called Dad on the telephone and asked him to go take over the Lone Tree School. He went over there about the first of November. The students soon settled down, and Dad planned a dance in the school house for Thanksgiving. If it wasn't for the Thanksgiving Dance, there would be no story to tell. Up in the Idaho area where Dad's Uncle Lorenzo lived, four outlaws had stolen a herd of horses and driven them out onto the Lost River Desert. The posse chasing them shot two of the outlaws but the other two escaped and appeared to be making their way back to Wyoming. It was expected that the two men would go up the Bear River and then cross the divide in an effort to get to Browns Park. From what Dad wrote, it appears the sheriffs in Uinta County and in Sweetwater County were not at all interested in apprehending the two fugitives. However, during the afternoon before the scheduled Thanksgiving Dance, a Pinkerton Detective came to the H. J. Gregory store in Lone Tree and organized a posse to go out and capture the outlaws at Hole-in-the-Rock Springs. I only know two of the posse members, Josh Gregory who ran the store, and a cowboy working for Eugene Hickey who ordinarily played the fiddle for the dances. The posse, led by the Pinkerton, went up to Hole-in-the-Rock to ambush the two horsethiefs, one of whom the Pinkerton man said was also a train robber, wanted far and wide under the name of Harry Longabaugh. 21 Not very long after the posse rode out, families from up and down the Henrys Fork of the Green River began to arrive for the Thanksgiving Dance, unaware that the fiddler had gone with the posse. The women and children went into the school house, but some of the men went across the road to the Gregory store, which Mr. Gregory had left in charge of Bill Donohue who had a crippled arm. The two outlaws hadn't done what the Pinkerton man expected them to do. They hadn't gone by the upper trail past the springs, but in stead had followed the main road from Robertson (former home of Uncle John Robertson) to Lone Tree. Bill Donohue was the only man that looked up when the two outlaws entered the Lone Tree store, and he found himself face to face with the man who had murdered John Jarvie at Browns Park only three years before. The next moment one outlaw lay dead on the store floor and Harry Alonzo was in custody. Meanwhile, across the road, the dance could not begin because there was no fiddler. Time passed and people wandered back and forth between the store and the school house. In the meantime, the women had learned that Mrs. Luckey (whom no one thought could do anything) was able to chord the piano, but she couldn't play a tune. After a time the uninjured outlaw, Harry Alonzo, offered to fiddle for the dance if they would turn him loose. No one trusted him that far, but it was finally decided to carry the dead outlaw over to the school house and put him on top of the piano. One of his wrists was then chained to the wrist of Harry Alonzo, who was then able to fiddle for the dance, only slightly hampered by the upheld wrist. Mrs. Luckey chorded the piano for accompanyment. missing a beat now and then. When the dance was finally over, Harry Alonzo demanded he be paid for fiddling. When he was told it was a school dance and the school board had no money to pay fiddlers, he said he would consider he had been fully paid if he be permitted to dance one dance \with the woman of his choice in the school house. At last it was decided the men could keep him from escaping, so he was released from the dead outlaw. When Harry Alonzo was released, he strolled twice around the room, looking each woman over, as if he were trying to pick out a horse that he would like to purchase. On the second trip around the room, he stopped and asked Grandma Stohl to dance, but she said she was too old. Next he asked the wife of Corey Hanks to dance, but she replied that she never danced because her crippled and blinded husband was unable to dance. Then Harry Alonzo stopped in front of Mother, bowed low like a Frenchman, and asked is she would dance with him. Mother refused, but just then Mrs. Luckey announced that while she could chord passably well and did not know any other dance tunes, she could play La Varsuvvienne. At this all the people in the school house began to clap, and urge 22 Mother to dance. Reluctantly she agreed, while Dad looked like black thunder and shook his head. As Mother began to dance with Harry Alonzo to the faltering strains of La Varsuvvienne, the other people began to sing the words of the tune: Do you see my, do you see my, do you see my new shoes? With Buckle and Bow, and the hole in the toe? Dad was about to begin "weepin and wailin and G-nashing his teeth" and there would have been "Hell to pay", except---,except... . When the dancing couple was down near the outside door, and while the crowd was still singing, the door was pushed open and the Pinkerton Detective entered the school house. Harry Alonzo abandoned Mother there on the dance floor, grabbed the detective's gun and was out the door. He shot at two members of the returning posse, mounted a horse and disappeared into the night. The posse members remounted and chased him up on top of Cedar Mountain (once called Phil Maas Mountain). Riding east, two of the posse saw a rider go by in the half light of the coming dawn. They riddled the rider with bullets, and then found the downed man was the Pinkerton Detective. This appeared to be a ticklish situation for several people, so, for the good of all, it was decided to bury the Pinkerton man as Harry Alonzo. His grave, covered with rocks, can still be seen on top of Cedar Mountain. No one expected to ever see Harry Alonzo again. *** School was over for the year on the first of May. Will Stoll drove Dad and Mother across the badland roads to Mountain View, and from there into Millburne. Dad rented a house from Uncle Hans Davidson, and he and Mother moved in the day before our brother Arlin was born on May 7, 1913. Dad worked with his father that summer, and then went to Summer School in Logan to improve his chances of getting another school in the fall. Dad ordered a new Fox typewriter from Sears Roebuck in Chicago during the summer. It arrived at Carter Station just after school started, so Dad took Mother and Arlin with him when he went to get it in Grandmother's buggy. A rainstorm came up while they were returning from Carter. Dad put his coat over brother Arlin to prevent his catching cold. Dad got wet himself, came down with pneumonia again, and so lost out on his chance to be Principal of the Millburne school that fall. He spent the next few months trying to learn to operate his new typewriter. Wyoming was trying to enforce the law that anyone up to eighteen years old had to go to school if they hadn't graduated from the eighth grade. At Christmas time, the young lady school teacher at Burnt Fork announced she could no longer put up with full grown cowboys in her class room and she was returning to Utah. Once again, Ivy Thomas Irish called Dad on the telephone and asked him to take over the Burnt Fork school. Dad rode the stage to Burnt Fork, and after a 23 time, rented a small log cabin from Grandma Stohl, then telephoned Uncle Edd to bring Mother, and also a stove, a lamp and a bed, over to Burnt Fork. Many years before this, a Mrs. Eleanor Pruitt had moved to near Burnt Fork from Denver to be a housekeeper for Clyde Stewart. During the years since that time, she had maintained correspondence with a friend in Denver, and had kept copies of her letters, but she had also married Clyde Stewart. In January of 1914, Mrs. Stewart was negotiating with a firm in Denver to have her letters published under the title of "Letters Of A Woman Homesteader." As soon as Mrs. Stewart learned Dad had a type writer and knew how to type, she asked him to make typewritten copies of all her hand written letters. When Dad began to copy Hrs. Stewart's letters, he was "aghast" (his word) at the frankness with which she discussed her neighbors affairs. During many conferences, Dad and Hrs. Stewart worked out ways to let the neighbors know about the embarassing circumstances, without giving the actual names of the parties involved. In one of his writings, Dad tells of two in particular that he thought should not be printed. The first one, really one of the earliest although it is not so placed in the book, told how Mrs. Stewart had gone to visit another woman who managed a sheep ranch. She was camped at Buckboard crossing on the Green River, when their camp was invaded by Sheriff John Ward and Deputy Bob Calverly leading a posse in search of Harry Alonzo, H. B. Murdock and "Bub" Meeks who were supposed to have stolen thirty five head of horses. Dad got Mrs. Stewart to eliminate the name of Harry Alonzo, to delete the initials of Murdock and to leave off Bub Meeks nickname. The second letter Dad objected to most violently was one in which Mrs. Stewart told a complete account of the murder of John Jarvie at Browns Park, laying the blame equally on Hood Roberts and Harry Alonzo. Mrs. Stewart then went on to give a detailed account of the dance at Lone Tree, naming Dad and Mother along with all the others in complete honesty. Dad finally got Mrs. Stewart's approval to eliminate this letter entirely by asking her what would happen to poor, crippled Bill Donohue if it ever became known he had shot the outlaw without waiting for provocation. Dad used to have an autographed copy of "Letters of a Woman Home- steader" presented to him by Mrs. Stewart. It has disappeared, but I purchased a newer edition recently from the Utah Historical Society. I was surprised to find the story Mrs. Stewart told is nearly identical with what many recent authors have told about the theft of horses, but using the names of Butch Cassidy and Al Hainer instead of the names she used. Some writers exaggerate. 24 A BUCKET OF BEEHIVE GOLD My dear Brothers and Sisters: It seems, from the responses I have been getting, that I have been writing things which do not agree with what you remember. It may be that I am coloring some of the events with my own memory of how it happened, but for the main part I am relying on what I find in Dad's note books and diaries. Of course I have not been telling everything he wrote. That would take too long. All I have been doing is selecting those portions that seem to have something to do with Cassidy or with other outlaws who rode the outlaw trail with him. If a person were to believe everything he read or heard about the people who lived along the Henrys Fork (which would include Lone Tree, Burnt Fork, McKinnon, Antelope and Manila) all of them would be outlaws. A person might say almost with some justification. Consider the members of the School board at Burnt Fork at the time Dad taught there. One was George McCarthy. I have heard it said he was George McCarty and a brother of Tom and Bill McCarty. Another was Charles Richardson. It might be thought he was Charles O. Richardson whom Dad said was a crook. That isn't true, but Charles Richardson's wife was Ruby Despain and somehow related to Ruth, our Stepmother. The third member of the school board was Clark Logan and it has been said he was a cousin of Harv Logan, the most bloodthirsty of all the Wild Bunch**. In this case the relationship is true, but the cousin was not the infamous Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry. There is another instance. Dad wrote that at one time Charles Olsen had a price on his head, and that if he had ever appeared along the Henrys Fork he would have been killed. I think it would probably upset Aunt Margaret (our Uncle Hans Arthur's wife) if she knew Dad wrote that about her father. And yet the statement is no doubt true, and has a very simple explanation. Charles Olsen and his brother were sheepmen, and operated the Olsen Sheep Company. Both of them had ranches along Henry's Fork to raise hay for the sheep, but because Charles was the brother who handled the sheep, he was not allowed on Henrys Fork. His brother, who operated the farms, lived there all the time. Charles and Celinda Olsen were forced of necessity to live at a house at the far northeast point of Phil Mass (Cedar) Mountain which had been once known as the Phil Maas Horse Ranch. It is now known as the Old Ringdahl Ranch, but that is the place where both Aunt Margaret and her twin sister, Mable Fields, were born in 1898. **Compare BRIDGER COUNTRY by Wallace V. Shurtleff 25 If I were not sticking pretty close to what Dad wrote, I would feel justified in saying that Celinda Olsen was the woman Mrs. Eleanor Pruitt Stewart visited at the time Murdock hid in one of her employee's bedroll, because everything seems to fit that conclusion. But Dad did not say that and Mrs. Stewart did not say that, and therefore I cannot say that, but I cannot help wondering if that first corrected letter might not have been more corrected than Dad indicated. At the time the corrections were made Uncle Hans Arthur and Aunt Margaret were not yet married, but they were going together. As for the other complaints some of you have voiced, I am guilty of not reporting the fine examples of faith and religious feelings all our family histories have so well reflected up to this time, but I am not guilty of deliberately prolonging the length of time Dad taught school at Burnt Fork. The fact of the matter is that Dad taught there for two and a half school years, but Mother only was there two winters. Our sister Edna was born in February, 1916, during the last half of the last school year at Burnt Fork, and like the birth of our Cousin Alfred, Doctor Thompson did not get there to attend her birth. He was a busy man, and the only doctor in a hundred miles. Edna's birth was attended by Grandma Stoll (Stohl), the mother of Will Stoll. Our Uncle Edd wrote a song about Will Stoll and George Hereford, which Dad always called "Edd' s Song." Maybe you remember it. It refers to a meeting they had with Cassidy in Chicago. Edd's Song Two cowboys from Wyoming To Chicago went one day. They got into a big fist fight, This is what they heard him say. Oh, I'm from old Wyoming. I'm here and here to stay. I'm from old Wyoming, Let her buck, I'll win the day. They fought him in the night time, And they fought him in the day He was one tough Hombre, And they could hear him say. The "Song" goes on for another dozen verses in which Will Stoll and George Hereford beat Cassidy into a bloody pulp using demented gangsters and Chicago lampposts. It has no value, except for the fact that The Phillips Manuscript, written in 1934 and published about 1978 tells of a similar meeting in Chicago between Butch Cassidy, Will Stoll and Tude Hereford. 26 *** Dad learned something while he was teaching at Burnt Fork, early in January of 1914. It was something he wrote about in his notebooks, but something he never told about to any great extent. The story is far reaching, extending over seventy years. I think if Dad had told what he learned that year, sister Jessie would never have broken her collar bone, I wouldn't have nearly frozen to death, our family would never have moved to northern Wyoming, and Uncle Emery would have been saved several years effort and thousands of dollars. The story starts long before Dad knew about it. It seems that about 1899 one of the Cassidys stole $85,000.00 (this portion is line through by pen) in Beehive (Mormon) Twenty dollar gold pieces from the east bound Union Pacific Flyer at Bryan Station in Wyoming. The story has been published several times, in one book and several magazines, and hundreds of people knew about it, but strangely enough there is no historical record of the robbery. The robbers escaped and no one seemed to know what happened to the money, and yet a number of people around the Linwood-Manila area of Utah looked for it. Two negroes, whom Aunt Margaret knew and remembers well, used to stay with her father at the Maas Horse Ranch while they were looking for the booty. Later on they camped nearer to McKinnon, in a place called Coon Hollow, and later still they camped up on the Mountain above China Meadows, where they dug many holes around an old mine tunnel at "Coons Cabin." Then, in 1913, the Bennion Sheep Company moved into Bridger Valley and set up their sheep headquarters on Cottonwood Creek at the place which came to be called The Christensen Place. One of the men who came in with the Bennion Sheep Company was named Hiram Bennion, and he soon began to pal around with a man named Ben T. Sinclair. Like many other men who herd sheep Sinclair liked to drink, and while drinking he liked to talk. Before long the rumor was going around that Hiram Bennion was the man who had held up the Union Pacific Flyer in the first place. It must have been about the same time that another Pinkerton Detective named Swigert came to Greenriver, Wyoming and then began to ride up and down Henrys Fork asking what had happened to the first Pinkerton, and where was Harry Alonzo? Naturally he heard the agreed upon story: Harry had been killed and was buried up on top of Cedar Mountain; and the dectective had gone about his business. Then Swigert would whip out a picture of Harry Longabaugh, and ask if that was the man who had been shot? Well, no it wasn't. It wasn't the same man at all. The picture looked more like Hiram Bennion, and Bennion was in Bridger Valley. But Bennion wasn't in Bridger Valley. He had heard of Detective Swigert and had left the country. The Christensen family took his place. 27 Now we come to the place where Dad's notebooks take up the story. The two negros who had lived at the Charles Olsen home at the point of Cedar Mountain, were called Nigger Turner and Nigger Dan. Nigger Turner was an attorney from Illinois who had been told where the Beehive gold was buried. Nigger Dan was supposed to be half white, but had a mat of wool-like hair that Aunt Margaret liked to comb for him. In 1913 they were joined by another black man called Nigger Carter, who was said to be the son of Willie Carter who ran the Carter Store at Fort Bridger. That story is probably totally false, but it was often told that Judge William A. Carter, the sutler with the army at Fort Bridger had gone into the cattle business. He built new stock corrals at Hampton and used them to ship his cattle, instead of those at Carter Station. One time his son, Willie Carter, was supposed to have gathered many of his father's cattle, and shipped two trainloads of prime beef to Chicago. Willie Carter sold the cattle, collected the money and then went to Paris, Venice and Rome on a vacation. Before long he was supposed to have gone to Ethiopia and acquired a harem. Judge Carter hired Pinkerton Detectives to bring him back. The Pinkertons were supposed to have kidnapped Willie Carter and his infant half-black son, and returned them to Bridger Valley about the time Judge Carter died. But, never-the-less, there was a black man called Nigger Carter. Nigger Carter was more proficient at finding buried gold than were his two partners. Near the end of December in 1913, they found the proceeds of the train robbery up on the hill above Charles Olsen's place. They loaded the loot on a couple of Olsen's horses and headed for Browns Park. They were going through the Glades toward Goslin Mountain when they ran into Detective Swigert. They escaped from him, back to Linwood where they put the gold in a wagon load of wheat headed for Hans Davidson's flour mill at Millburne. The three black men followed along close enough they could keep an eye on the wagon, but far enough away not to be thought as with it. At McKinnon the three men learned the Davidson mill at Millburne had just burned down. They caught the wheat wagon and removed the gold before it got into Burnt Fork. The two Olsen horses used by the black men were distinctive. Named France and Fly, they were white mares with leopard spots. The only other horses with a similar appearance belonged to Grandad. The similarity soon brought the Pinkerton man to Bridger Valley. But to go back to Dad. It happened after Dad went to Burnt Fork, and while he was boarding and batching with Will Hanks. A number of people had been digging fossils along the face of Cedar Mountain to sell to eastern museums. Will Hanks had found some fossils near Turtle Bluff. He invited Dad to go look at them. They had examined the fossils, and were looking for others when Dad saw what appeared to be the petrified remains of a mammouth, a mastadon or possibly a Uintatherium. While they were examining the hugh creature, they 28 happened to notice the three black men leading the two white mares on the badlands below them. While Dad and Will Hanks watched, the three black men butchered a calf, then went to a small cabin by a small spring and helped themselves to a sack of oats, leaving a gold coin on top of a post to pay for it. Next the men rode around the west side of Cedar Mountain and hid something they had been packing in one of the stone monuments which marked the Deadline between the sheepmen and the cattlemen. Dad and Will Hanks had climbed on top of the flat topped mountain, and followed around the Rim Road in order to watch. The last they saw of the men, they were riding across the flats toward the cabin on the north end of Sage Creek Mountain where Charlie Hienz and Eddie Stutz used to hang out during the winters. I well remember that sometimes when money was short, Dad used to say that he had missed the boat at Burnt Fork, but someday his ship would come in and when it did, he and Mother would have all the things that Beehive Gold would have bought them. But that is nowhere near the end. In the summer of 1914, the three black men went up on Thunderbolt Mountain, almost straight south of Millburne. They stayed there quite a while, and when, toward fall, they went back to Cedar Mountain to get their gold someone had taken it. After the blackmen left Thunderbolt, a sheepherder named Harvey Nieburger noticed a pine tree had been sawed off and buried upright in a hole ten feet deep. Harvey got some friends to come help him dig up the tree to see if the gold had been buried there. Many years later, in 1937, our Uncle Emery went into partnership with Dan and Pete Hatson of Fort Bridger and Andrew Armstrong of Ephraim, Utah, to go back into the old hole and dig it to a depth of eighty five feet on the supposition that the negroes had buried the gold coin in an old mine shaft dug by Thomas Rhodes, who was a brother of Bub Meeks grandmother. Uncle Emery dug there, off and on, for a period of many years, and eventually involved Uncle Edd and Cousin Edwin in his search. I helped him the first year, and almost froze to death while returning to Ephraim. That is why I said, if Dad had told that the gold was never buried on Thunderbolt, it would have saved quite a bit. But other events may have convinced Dad it was better not to do so. One of the events could very well have been this one. During the summer of 1916, after we moved to the Wells Place beside the Lincoln Highway, the Pinkerton Detective Swigert came to the place while Dad was not at home, and asked Mother about the dance at Lone Tree. He showed her the picture of Harry Longabaugh and asked if he was the man she had danced with, but of course he was not. Then Swigert asked Mother if she was Etta Place. Mother got out her 29 Geneology book and showed him who she was. Then he wanted to know who Minnie was, and Mother showed him in the book that her sister Minnie died nearly a year after her birth, and was buried in Round Valley near Morgan, Utah. Then Dad came home and Swigert asked him if he had stolen the gold? Dad got mad and beat the hell out of Swigert. Granddad said if Dad was going to start something like that, he ought to finish the job while he was about it. I don't believe Swigert stayed around very long after Dad beat him up, but if he had done so he might have found the man he was looking for. *** When Swigert returned to Bridger Valley two years later to help Detective W. Edward Davison burn out the Bennion Sheep Company on Cottonwood Creek, he was too late and Harry Alonzo had gone to Mexico. 30 HORSES, HORSE THIEVES AND TOM CASSADY Granddad used to have some very good saddle horses. Some of them were white, leopard spotted horses, all descendants of the horse he caught in Southern Utah in 1878. Our brother Arlin was always crazy about horses. He could spout off the stud lines of horses like nobody's business, and it always seemed he thought horses were more important than people. I owe all I have learned about Granddad's horses to him. According to him, these leopard horses originated along the Green and Colorado River canyons. He claimed the horses were incompatible with the spanish horses brought to America by the Spaniards, and the breed had almost died out before it was found the breed was compatible with the with the red roans and the blue roans bred by the Nez Perce indians. The United States army tried to kill all of the Nez Perce horses, and the only ones remaining after the defeat of Chief Joseph were a few stolen by army officers. He said that when the two breeds interbred, the progeny were almost identical with Appaloosa horses, but were not the only Appaloosas. As for myself, I only remember the last of the "Wa-kara" or San Rafael Horses Granddad owned, a young stallion called "The Imp". In 1916, Granddad only had one white stud horse left. He was a remarkable animal, three years old, green broke, white with so many small dime sized spots that he appeared almost black. Granddad had given him the name of: The Kid [after El Cid, a Spanish hero]. Detective Swigert had been to see Granddad several times, claiming he was working for a circus, and was interested in buying some of Granddad's leopard horses for his circus. While he was visiting he had asked all about the history of the horses, and had asked about all of the horses Granddad had ever sold. I do not know the dates of his visits, but in 1916 he came again, stated he was a Pinkerton Detective, and asked if Granddad had received the stolen Beehive gold? Granddad invited him to leave, and I'm not too sure Granddad wasn't wearing his guns. The way things turned out it seems likely that Swigert told Marion Meeks, a brother of Bub Meeks, that Granddad had stolen one of Marion Meeks' calves. Anyway, Marion Meeks came to claim his calf and Granddad wouldn't let him have it, saying he had never seen the calf. The next day Granddad noticed his prized spotted stud horse was gone, and he suspected it had been stolen by Swigert rather than by Marion Meeks. He figured Marion had been set up by Swigert, to make it appear as if Meeks had taken the horse. As it turned out, neither one of them had taken it. On the ranch next to Granddads, Holly Roberts was suddenly smitten with an acute attack of patriotism. Down on the Mexican border, Pancho Villa had ridden deep into New Mexico in connection with the exodus of the Mormon Saints who had fled to Chihuahua during the polygamist troubles of the 1880's. General 31 Black Jack Pershing had been sent to the Mexican border to punish Pancho Villa, and Holly knew if American independence was to be maintained, General Black Jack was going to need more help than he could get from the regular army. So, being as they were all friends anyway, Holly just borrowed The Kid and rode over to Cokeville to talk to one of his buddies about enlisting in the Army, just to help old Black Jack. Holly was just so interested in his own affairs he forgot to tell anybody, or it may have been that Granddad was so concerned with Swigert that he forgot Holly asked him if he could take the horse. When it was learned Holly had taken the horse, that possibility always existed. Holly claimed that is the way it was and Granddad could not remember, so it was left that Holly "borrowed the horse." Holly Roberts and five or six other young men went to the Mexican border and enlisted in the United States Army. They had expected to get into some sort of a cavalry unit similar to Teddys Terrors in the Spanish American War, but they were assigned to Company A of the l67th Infantry. Once they had whupped the socks off of Pancho Villa, and because they were in the regular army, Holly and his buddies were among the first to see action in France during the first world war. Holly was shell shocked so badly, he was never quite right afterwards. Do you remember that Dad used to go and get him at Fort Mackensie and bring him out to the Weltner Ranch for Sunday and Thanksgiving dinner? He never seemed odd out on the ranch, but he used to tear the cells all to pieces at Fort Mackensie. Even though Holly admitted he "borrowed" The Kid, Granddad couldn't get him back, because Holly no longer had him. When Holly got to Cokeville he went into the saloon to meet his buddy. While he was there he told his buddy the horse he was riding was a grandson of the Cassidy Stud named Grey Eagle [actually he was], and that this horse was named after the Sundance Kid. Two other men in the saloon, Al Hainer and Al Akers, heard what Holly said. They looked at each other, and went outside to wait; they knew Holly would soon come out to show off the horse. When Holly came out of the saloon, the two former outlaws jumped him, beat him up and left him more dead than alive. Then they rode off with The Kid to give him to Harry Launabaugh who was a brother of an attorney at Sheridan, Wyoming. [I always suspected Arlin wasn't correct in this statement, but I find the same thing in Dad's notebooks. Both Dad and Arlin spelled the name the same way. ] Am Davidson had some reward notices printed up at the Bridger Valley Enterprise, offering a reward of $500 in gold for the return of The Kid, unaltered, no questions asked and payment guaranteed. There was no word so Daddy Roberts offered a similar amount, and then the two men combined to jump the reward to $1500 in gold coin. 32 Old Joes Henry was a rancher at Robertson, who had been an Indian interpreter. Through some of his indian friends he learned the horse was up in Jackson Hole. Hoping to earn the reward, Joes Henry left for Jackson Hole, and he did succeed in recovering The Kid, but on his way back to Bridger Valley, he ran into an ambush at Twogetee Pass. He shot and killed Al Hainer and his brother, but Al Akers got away with The Kid once again. Joes Henry was himself wounded in the battle, but managed to get back to Robertson. Then young Joes Henry, son of the older man, got another young man named Cole Roberts (unrelated to Hood and Holly) to go with him in an attempt to avenge his father and get the horse at the same time. They found the outlaw camp in Jackson Hole. They tried to sneak into camp and get the tethered horse. Al Akers came out of the tent and blasted Cole Roberts. Cole was wounded slightly, but he fell off of his horse into an icy stream, made good his escape, but later died of pneumonia after telling old Joes Henry what had happened. Young Joes Henry killed Al Akers, then approached The Kid to get a different lead rope on him. The horse kicked young Joes Henry, knocking him down. While he was helpless on the ground, Harry Launabaugh stepped out of the tent with a small sledge hammer. Harry Launabaugh hit young Joes Henry in the head, killing him instantly. Then Launabaugh sat down and wrote a letter to Old Joes Henry telling him Young Joes had been kicked in the head by the horse and needed help in a bad way. Cole Roberts and the letter both got back to Robertson on the same day. Old Joes Henry did not know whether to believe Cole or the letter, but he didn't take any chances. In spite of his wounds he saddled up and rode for Jackson Hole once more. When he got there he was told Harry Launabaugh was riding The Kid to Mexico. He may have been going to Mexico but he went by way of Bridger Valley. Harry rode by the Roberts ranch, saw a small boy playing in the yard, picked him up by his heels, bashed his head against the well curb and then calmly tossed his body into the well of drinking water. That was Harry Launabaugh for you, but the story left me a little uncertain whether he was Harry Alonzo. Two years later, in 1918, Granddad got word that The Kid was in a livery stable in Cheyenne and was being held for a board bill. Granddad took Uncle Marion with him and went to Cheyenne on the train. Marion was going to ride the horse home. But when they got to Cheyenne, they found out The Kid was gone, but not before Granddad had paid part of the reward. Granddad never tried to find The Kid again. He returned to Bridger Valley and swore he wished he had killed Swigert while he had the chance. After that Granddad pinned his hopes on The Imp, a pinkish colored colt with two coats of hair which had been foaled by Uncle Emery's mare, Pussie Cat, in 1917. If you remember, sister Edna, you and Arlin rode the mare, Puss, to school the year we 33 lived on Granddad's place. I know you remember for I have heard you talk of how Dad's worn out saddle pinched blisters on your bottom as you rode behind our brother. *** We lived on the Wells place all during 1917 and 1918. Dad taught school at Urie the first year and at Lyman in 17-18. Those were the years of the first world war, and many of the young men from Bridger Valley were either being drafted, or were volunteering for the army. V R Kelly, who married our Aunt Nona, came to visit us with her just before he was drafted. Dad thought he only married Aunt Nona so he wouldn't be drafted. Grandmother Ellingford came to visit us in the summer of 1917, also. That is the only time I ever saw her after I could remember anything. At the time she came to see us, Dad was trying to enlist in the armed forces. He had applied to the draft board, and had been turned down. Then he wrote to Washington, trying to get an appointment to some board of War Times powers. Grandmother Ellingford scorched Dad's hide verbally, then turned him over and cussed him again for thinking war service was more important than taking care of his family. Now that I know the circumstances, I think Grandmother Ellingford was right in what she said. I am sure most of Dad's patriotism was inspired by what people were saying about Uncle Edd. And I don't think that was nearly as much Uncle Edd's fault as it was Granddad's. Uncle Edd's interests lay more in farming than did those of any of the other boy's, and Granddad must have realized that. Granddad turned the whole ranch over to Uncle Edd, giving him a Quit Claim Deed to the whole place. Then he turned about half of his cattle over to Uncle Edd, to make up to him for the winters he had put in on the ranch when the other boys were off working someplace. Edd had had little opportunity to earn any money, and had practically no life of his own apart from the ranch. Uncle Edd married Agnes Graham in December of 1917. She was going to High School in Lyman, at the time. The fact that she got married and continued to go to school afterwards caused quite a bit of talk, and it was all Dad could manage to keep her from being expelled. If I judge rightly from Dad's notes, it was another school teacher named Kelly who wanted her expelled, and the Principal, Baldwin, who permitted her to remain in school. The total result of the two things, Am Davidson's turning the ranch over to Edd, and then Edd getting married to a High School girl, caused many people to say Uncle Edd was a draft dodger. It was said even more after the war was over and Granddad reposessed his ranch and most of his cattle. The Wells place, where we lived, was likely one of the worst places on the Bridger Bench. But just south of it there was a very nice place, the Mocroft Place, which had good barns and corrals and a very good frame house, painted 34 white. Bet Bull lived on the Mocroft Place. He had two boys named Lantern and Leonard and two girls named Ima and Ura. It was a poor choice of names for the girls, for the other children used to tease them about their names. Bet Bull was more cut out to be a business man instead of a farmer. In the Spring of 1918, he decided to go into business, and give up the Mocroft Place. Dad at once made arrangements to lease it. But then, Grandmother objected. It may have been that she was finding it hard to fit her new daughter-in-law into her own family, or it may have been some thing else, but in any case Grandmother insisted Dad should release the lease on the Mocroft Place in favor of Uncle Edd. And Dad did it. In spite of what Granddad thought, Grandmother was the boss of the Davidson family. Dad's resentment about giving up the Mocroft Place shows up all too plainly in his diary for 1918, but in spite of his resentment, he went to put up the hay on both places. While he was working on the ranch, during the summer of 1918, old Charley Richardson of LeRoy brought a middle aged man down to Granddad's ranch. His name was Thomas Cassady and he was a Flying Ace who had downed eight German Fokkers in Europe. A member of the Lafayette Escadrille serving with the French Army, he was wounded in an air battle at Chateau Thierry and repatriated to the United States for convalescense. A few days later another man came to see Granddad. He gave his name as W. E. Davison, said he was from a prominent Detective Agency, and that he wanted to question the Army Air Ace, Tom Cassidy, because his photograph in the newspapers bore a striking resemblance to the photo of Harry Laungabaugh, the train robber. Granddad told the detective that Tom Cassidy was not the man he knew as Harry Alonzo. With that as a beginning, a whole series of previous incidents took on a whole new significance to our folks. Uncle Edd was not the only person in Bridger Valley to be thought as not contributing his fair share to the war effort. There were others who were thought to be German Sympathizers. One of these was Joe Hatch, a sheep man. Because he wore a beard shaped something like the one the Kiaser wore, Joe Hatch was said to be a German and a German Sympathizer. Joe Hatch had run his sheep previously on the range the Bennion Sheep Company took over. There had been a little name-calling between him and the Christensen Family, but nothing serious. Joe Hatch hired a sheep herder named Al Murdock. In 1916, Murdock let the Joe Hatch sheep go south across the Deadline between the sheep men and the cattlemen. The third night after the sheep crossed the Deadline, Murdock and all 35 his sheep dogs were killed. It was only natural that Joe Hatch would have blamed the cattlemen along Henrys Fork for the murder. But Lou D. Christensen thought Hatch blamed the Christensen Family--for one Christensen home burned down, the fire closely followed by a threatening letter from Cheyenne, signed with a skull and crossbones, giving the Christensen Family three months to get out of Wyoming. In quick succession, there occurred fires around the country east of Lyman and Mountain View. The log cabin on the north end of Sage Creek Mountain (where the negroes camped) burned down and the house at the Point of Cedar Mountain, where Charles Olsen had lived, burned. There were haystack fires at Granger and Millersville. Then the Carter Stockyards at Hampton burned to the ground. There were several attempts to fire the stacks and buildings at the Christensen Place on Cottonwood. On October 2, 1917, during one of the attempts, C. I. Christensen was shot by his own son, who said he thought he was shooting at the arsonist. Sheriff Lowman at Evanston thought he had inside information about the fires. Thomas G. Cassady, aka Harry Longabaugh, was the firebug but the sheriff didn't worry because Detectives Swigert and Davison were on the job. The bar- flys, the sheep herders and the coyote trappers also knew who was setting the fires. They were being set by Edward Davison. The beer-drinkers said such subversion was about what you could expect from a Draft Dodger. Bishop Fred Kilburne rode down from Millburne to ask Uncle Edd if he was sure he was living according to the Principles of the Gospel. The neighbors, always more practical, kept a constant eye on Uncle Edd to prevent the young man from going astray. Uncle Edd never got further from the ranch than Agnes Graham's home, but the fires continued unabated. Finally, in March of 1918, the County Commissioners ordered the Sheriff to stop the killings and fires in the eastern part of the County. Sheriff Lowman brought with him all his deputies, the County Attorney, the Pinkerton Detective W. E. Davison and a very famous criminal attorney from Salt Lake City, one Sam King. Sam King had a reputation dating clear back to the Castlegate Robbery and to the heydey of crime, killings and robberies at Goldfield, Nevada. The mere fact that Sam King came to Bridger Valley showed the affair to be much more than a casual fight between two neighboring sheep outfits. Dad's writings do not explain the situation, but then neither do the many articles printed in the Bridger Valley Enterprise published in Lyman by Mel and Lorraine Rollins. Judging by the articles in the Lyman newspaper, Detective W. E. Davison took charge of the raid. With no opposition, he arrested the Hatch Family and 36 the son of Doctor Hathenbruck of Provo**, and took them into Evanston for trial. Lou D. Christensen profited by all the publicity. He ran for, and was elected as Unita County Sheriff in the next election. He spent most of the next eight years chasing and/or abetting bootleggers. To all appearances, from the given dates, Detective W. E. Davison did not catch the Army Flying Ace, Tom Cassady, or Hiram Bennion if that is who he was. He caught an even bigger fish--Robert Tonto--and let him go. The next time Tom Cassady was seen in Bridger Valley, he was about to give Butch Cassidy an airplane ride. But just a note of caution before you believe it. Detective W. Edward Davison claimed he put Tom Cassady in San Quentin Prison in 1919. And after Lieutenant Thomas George Cassady flew away from Bridger Valley in 1922, Tommy Thompson came flying back to give airplane rides to anyone "ho had five dollars. [George W. Thompson]. **William Earl Hathenbruck in SLC, brother-in-law of Joe Hatch. Explanatory notes: 1. Samuel A. King wrote the foreword for Tom McCarty's Autobiography, published in Ephraim, Utah by Mat Warner's father. [Charles Kelly's papers in archives of the Utah Historical Society]. 2. Samuel A. King was one of the defense attorneys for the murder trial of Mat Warner in 1896. [Kelly's papers]. 3. Samuel King, with his brother, contracted to build a toll road along the Colorado (Grand) River in 1899. When the contract was delayed, King was threatened by the District Court, and he was saved from going to prison by Apostle Reed Smoot. [Grand Memories by Phyllis Cortes]. 4. S. A. King had law offices in SLC and in Provo. Following the robbery of the Castlegate Mine by the Cassidy Gang, King represented the Greek immigrants who came to work in that mine. During the heydey of Goldfield, King had law offices in both Goldfield and Bullfrog, Nevada. *** During the trial of Harry Orchard at Boise, Idaho for the murder of Governor Frank Stuenenburg at Caldwell, testimony was presented that W. E. Davison poisoned Johnny Neville at Goldfield, Nevada in 1905, on behalf of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency who had brought Harry Orchard to trial. It has been reported that S. A. King represented W. E. Davison in his trial, but I have not been able to verify it, or even find a record to that effect. 37 38 QUEEN ANNE AND THE DEVIL'S IMP There is not a great amount of information in Dad's diaries for the year 1920. He missed writing anything on many days, and on the days when he did write the information is rather terse and non-informative. At first glance, most of the information concerns a radio he had purchased at Toledo, Ohio the year before. The radio was supposed to be the first one in Bridger Valley, and it only had an ear phone to listen to. Before long someone else got a radio which had a loud speaker, so then Dad bought a speaker from the Baldwin Company in Salt Lake, and hooked it to his radio. Every time he wanted to use it he had to take the battery out of his Chevrolet car. In 1920, our brother, Arlin, worked for Granddad all summer. We were living on the Mocroft Place that year and Dad ran the two farms. When Arlin had to come home to start school (his second year) Granddad gave him a new winter cap and paid him five silver dollars. Arlin always claimed Butch Cassidy came to Granddads ranch three times that summer. I thought he meant LeRoy, but he said it wasn't. It was a totally different man. I couldn't say, I don't think I was up there. Then in July Dad ran over me with his 1916 Chevrolet 490. Dad never drove that car again. He just hauled it down to the Wells Place behind the team, and left it out behind the corral. Doctor Thompsen wouldn't treat me. He just told Dad to get me to the hospital as soon as possible. Dad had to go down to the store at Urie and borrow fifty dollars from Joe Guild before we could go. Later he borrowed another two hundred and fifty to pay my hospital bill, and he wasn't able to get it all paid back before we moved up to the Sheridan Country in 1925. I was in the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake for a month. The doctors would have a consultation each morning, and then decide to "wait and see." They never did anything for me, and wouldn't give me anything to eat except...I'm sorry, it is of no interest to anyone but me that I weighed fifty nine pounds when I went into the hospital and only twenty two when I got out. Flieshmans yeast cakes are not very nourishing. I made a mistake when I said we didn't go up to Granddads in the summer of 1920. Dad had to go up there about the Fourth of July to stack Granddad's alfalfa, so we went with and stayed until after Mamsie's funeral. One morning a white topped rig pulled into the yard. In it were Frank Willis and his new wife, Queen Anne Bassett. They had stayed over night with the Charley Zufelt family over on Poverty Flats east of Mountain View. They were going to take the train at Carter to go to New Mexico or California, so they wanted to borrow a hundred dollars from Granddad, and then have him haul them and their luggage to meet the train. Charley Zufelt and Mat Warner were going to take the white topped rig back to Browns Park. I think Mat's wife, Elma Zufelt, was related to Charley. I do remember that Mat and Charley came to get 39 the rig about a week later, and Mat came back several times later, often enough that I knew him when I saw him. Mat lived in Price, and Granddad didn't like him. Granddad gave the hundred dollars, five gold double eagles, to Anne and said he would have Uncle Marion take them to Carter in the Ford truck after supper so they could catch the midnight train. Queen Anne was the only woman I ever knew who was as crazy about horses as Granddad Has, so Granddad took Frank and Anne down to the corral to see The Imp. Granddad was proud of the young stud and he was just breaking him to ride. They came back from the corral just as the haying crew was going back to the fields after dinner, so they were just in time to sit down at the second table. While they were eating Queen Anne starting telling Granddad all about the Cassidy robberies, and then she said there were two Butch Cassidys, G. L. Parks who was the main one, and Little Parks who had once pretended to be her brother. I thought someone ought to ask which was which, but no one did. Grandmother brought in some lemonade, and everyone continued to sit there in the living room. Just as Granddad was about to drink his lemonade, Queen Anne said she was thinking about why Granddad called his horse The Imp. Did he think there was anything to that old Indian Legend? What legend was that, Anne? The one old Joe Smith stole to write the Book of Mormon. The one about the tribe of white indians who brought a golden covered statue to Browns Park and hid it in a cave. Granddad didn't say anything. He just sat there holding his glass, but I noticed the temperature in the room had dropped about ninety degrees. Then I looked behind Queen Anne, and I saw Mother and Grandma glaring at Queen Anne as if they would like to kill her. Anybody that said something bad about Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon to a good Mormon was in bad trouble. Our Mother recovered quickly, but her voice was still chilly when she said "Why don't you tell us about it, Mrs. Willis?" Queen Anne did tell about it. She really knew her Indians. She told about the five civilized tribes, who had a constitution and spoke Roman and had Senators and lawyers. She told of the white indians told about in Virginia newspapers long before Joe Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, and before Sage [Rufus B.] came to Browns Park to find the "Munchies" in 1842. Queen Anne told of the Mandan Indians, who talked Old Irish, of the cliff dwellers in Arizona who could understand Welsh and of the Colombian Indians who could talk Basque good enough some of the Spaniards could understand them, part of the time. I am not going to pretend I can remember all Queen Anne said, but only that she said The Indians in Colombia had a treasure they called Shinob which they 40 sent north when the Spaniards tried to get it. The Spaniards called the missing treasure "The Man dusted with Gold", and later changed the name to El Hombre Dorado (El Dorado). The point of Queen Anne's story was that sometime in the past Mexican Joe Herrarra had come to Browns Park looking for a golden treasure, and a few years later her uncle, Sam Bassett, had heard the story in Taos, New Mexico and had followed the story north to Browns Park about 1852. Sam Bassett called what he was looking for "the image of the Devil's Imp." From what I have read, Queen Anne's story appears to be quite historical, and neither proves or disproves Joseph Smith's account of how he wrote the Book of Mormon. But there is one thing in the historical accounts which was not in Queen Anne's story. A legend of the Ute Indians in eastern Utah says "Seven men with white faces came from the East and carried the SUN ROCK away." Not yellow, not gold, but warm like the sun. Do you remember the "Munchies"? The cookies Mother used to bake, five little Indians marching in a row? The year 1920 was not a good one for our family. For the first time Dad was trying to farm without a winter job to provide some cash reserve. Just at the time when he should have been spending all his time irrigating, he had to go help Granddad. Then Grandmother Ellingford died, and Dad had to share in the expenses of her funeral, which he was able and willing to do, but it was found the burial expenses of Grandfather John Ellingford and Aunt Emma Ellingford had never been paid, and they had to be paid before Grandmother Ellingford could be buried. Dad's money was mostly gone by the time I got run over by the car, so he then had to borrow money from Joe Guild to pay my expenses. There was another constant drain of money Dad could ill afford. The Farm Bureau was trying to organize the farmers of Bridger Valley. Tom Brough of Lyman had been elected State Chairman of the Farm Bureau, and Dad had been elected Treasurer of the Uinta County chapter. The Farm Bureau was trying to convince the residents of Bridger valley to diversify their crops, to spread manure on the fields, to raise chickens and milk cows as well as sheep and beef animals. Dad, as County Treasurer of the Farm Bureau, was required to attend two or three meetings a week. Then, as if the expenses were not enough, because of unrestricted irrigating up above, white crusted alkali began to rise on the Wells Place and Dad harvested no crop at all on that place. 41 Our own efforts toward diversification were not very great. From somewhere Mother had acquired eight Jersey cross-bred heifers which she hoped would become Milk Cows. Holly Roberts shot three of them. Holly Roberts had been in an Army Hospital for some time after the War was over in France before he came home to stay with his father, Daddy Roberts. At first Holly used to come down and talk to Dad and Mother quite often, and Holly seemed just as natural as anyone else. Holly, at first, talked only of his experiences in Mexico with General Black Jack Pershing. He pictured Pershing as a foolish, headstrong soldier who was in constant need of being saved or rescued by Butch Cassidy. He pictured Cassidy as both a seasoned diplomat and a cold blooded leader who did not hesitate to order executions if he deemed them necessary. Holly gave Cassidy credit for saving the bacon and the re- spectability of the United States Army, and credit also for getting the exiled Mormon Polygamists back into the United States. But once Holly started talking about his experiences in Europe, he seemed to go to pieces. He would take a rifle and go out in the willows along the Blacks Fork Canal, and fight the battles of the Marne and the Argonne Forest all over again. One such time is when he shot the three heifers, and also forced Mother and Arlin to hide in the willows so he would not see them. I wasn't as close as they were. I mud-crawled across the canal and went back to the house. I used to think that was when I learned to swim. Holly Roberts knew he was losing control of his mind. After one of the bad times, he came to Dad and asked Dad to get him committed to the insane hospital in Evanston. Dad wrote to Senator Kendrick and asked the Senator to have Holly treated in an Army Hospital. I should have started to go to school at Urie in the fall of 1920, but I was so small and so weak after my accident that I couldn't go. Dad didn't have a teaching job that winter, but he finally got a job building a rather large barn for Hood Roberts. While Dad was working, Granddad began to ride down to the Mocroft place to see how I was getting along, or so he said. I think it was more that he was just keeping a neighborly eye on Holly to begin with, but later I am sure he just came to talk to Mother. They started out just talking about Anne Bassett and Matt Rash, who had once been engaged to Anne, and who was supposed to have been murdered by Tom Horn. Granddad had once rode the range with Tom Horn, and he did not believe Tom Horn was the man who did the killing. Before long Granddad was telling Mother of all of his experiences during those long years when his own family did not know where he had been. The stories of how Grandad went to Oregon with Hi Bernard to drive a herd of Oregon shorthorn cattle back to Kelton Springs in Utah, with part of the herd going to Ora Hailey at Laramie; the stories of how Granddad got to know John 42 Clay, president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association and worked for Clay; the stories of how Grandad had been a detective on the Sweetwater River and at Lander all came from the stories Granddad told to Mother that winter. Those are the stories Mother dared tell no one except her own family. Even long afterward Dad's brothers and sisters did not think there was ever anything like that in Granddad's life. Not in their words, but in their feelings, Granddad was too pure, too religious, too fine a person to have ever associated with outlaws. In our own family, none of us would have ever remembered the stories if it were not for the way Mother told them. Mother didn't sit us down in a row and say our history lesson for today is going to be about Am Davidson and Mr. Cassidy. No, Mother would be sitting in her wooden rocking chair, rocking whichever baby to sleep, and the other children would gather around and one would say "Mommy, tell us about the Munchies." Then, as Mother spoke about the Munchies, they would become the Nephites and the Lamanites from the Book of Mormon, whom God loved just as much as he did us. When the story was finished, Mother would promise to make some cookies, and when they were baked there would be white cookies for the Nephites and chocolate cookies for the Lamanites. When we ate the "Munchies" we were always careful that we saved one of the chocolate ones for the last because the white Indians had all been destroyed and only the red Indians were left, because that is what it said in The Book of Mormon. ** Or if one of the children said "Mommy, tell us about when Grampaw was a detective", then Granddad would become Arthur Sparrowhawk, a knight in shining armour, accompanied always by his Pageboy who was called Jack Dempsey, but whose real name was LeRoy Kelly, but we mustn't ever tell because he married Aunt Minnie and we wouldn't want Detective Swigert to put them in jail, would we? After Detective Swigert returned to Bridger Valley in 1924, none of us ever heard of Aunt Minnie and LeRoy Kelly again. By that time you were learning about Chicken Little and Jack and the Bean Stalk and I was doing fractions. **That is not exactly what the Book of Mormon says. 43 THE LOST JOSEPHINE MINE My Dear Brothers and Sisters: I am deeply thankful that so many of you have expressed interest in this project I have undertaken. To the one who hesitantly suggested something should be changed, may I say--please do so if you find it to be more in keeping with your memory. To the younger sister who said she could remember Munchie Crunchie Cereal and the Munchkins on television, but not the Munchies I wrote about I can only reaffirm that there were stories of white Indians who were called Munchies. The easiest place you could now find a reference to them would be in the book called Flaming Gorge Country, written by Dick and Vivian Dunham. Look on page 65. I imagine the name Munchies really came from Baron Munchausen who was said to be the "biggest liar that ever lived." Baron Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and minerologist, also wrote of finding white Indians in his travels in South American between 1799 and 1804 and many people seemed to think he was as big a liar as Munchausen. It was a brother of Humboldt, Baron Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, who made a study of the Basque language who mentioned the similarity of the Columbian language to that of the Basques. There exist many examples in early Spanish literature of searches for the famed "Man dusted with Gold" and Sir Walter Rawliegh also looked for Eldorado, the golden man. To a Spaniard, a golden color always meant golden treasure; and it still does to many of us today. And to the Brother who wondered if I had forgotten to include the story of the largest golden treasure of all, I will tell it now. When Dad hired on to build the barn for Hood Roberts during the winter of 1920-21, there was no intimation of disaster, but the seeds of disaster were surely there. The events that soon transpired led to murder and the consequences haunted Dad for the rest of his life. Dad first mentions that an ex-school teacher from Lyman, who had become a cattle buyer, offered Hood such a good price for some cattle that he could not turn it down. When he sold the cattle, Hood was left with a quantity of hay, so Hood advertised it for sale. Before long Jim Chrisman of Opal came over with his foreman, Bud Tontine, bought the hay and made arrangements that Hood should feed it to a bunch of Chrisman & Petrie cattle during the winter. Bud Tontine and a helper, Robert Tonto, came with the cattle to the Roberts ranch, and helped to measure the hay stacks to determine the amount of money Jim Chrisman would have to pay. Dad was greatly impressed with the generosity with which Bud Tontine allowed Hood Roberts to measure the width of the hay stacks clear out to the eaves of the overhang, insisting only that the overthrow should start and end at the same places the width was measured to; impressed 44 that is, until he sat down and figured it out both ways to find Hood was cheating himself in his measurements. Dad wrote that he wondered if he should tell Hood Roberts, but decided to let it go. Dad soon digresses in his story to mention an unfounded rumor that at one time Jim Chrisman had been a cowboy in the Hams Fork country. Jim had gone into the Uinta mountains which lie between Wyoming and Utah, and had come back with a pack load of gold which he used to buy two thousand head of cattle. The neighboring ranchers objected to his using the public range when he owned no land of his own. Consequently, Jim made another trip to the mountains and came back with another load of gold which he used to buy several ranches along Hams Fork. Then Jim went into partnership with Petrie and bought a store at Opal**, and a store and saloon at Cokeville. Although Dad made it a point to say the story was only a rumor, other people at Hood's ranch thought Chrisman got his gold out of one of Thomas Rhodes lost mines. Hood had been fairly prosperous in Bridger Valley, in a mild way, after he once settled down. He had his own place adjoining that of his father. He bought a quarter owned by Mrs. Zieler which had been foreclosed by the Uinta County State Bank, then he got another quarter from Guy Eyre. He owned some cattle and a herd of sheep. He had married a girl from Price, Utah--Violet Warren. Frank Warren, Violet's father, had come to Bridger Valley to herd Hood's sheep, and this winter he was helping feed the Chrisman cattle. Frank Warren was a mild mannered, agreeable man who got on well with everyone. But in the recent past, Frank Warren had been a man, among the countless hundred others, who had searched long and hard for the lost mines of Thomas Rhodes and his son, Caleb Rhodes. The Lost Rhodes mines were the ultimate in lost mine stories, and the Salt Lake newspapers had followed the news of how Caleb Rhodes and one Doctor Hathenbruck of Provo had tried to get a lease on more than six hundred square miles of Uinta Mountain wilderness from the Ute Indians of Eastern Utah for at least ten years. The usual story was that the Lost Rhodes Mine had furnished the gold used in the Salt Lake Temple, used to plate the statue of the Angel Moroni and used to mint the Beehive Gold. Other versions of the Rhodes Mine story went a great deal further. One version had it that some Indians had brought the treasure from the south and left it in the care of the Ute Indians and that finally Chief Walker [Wa-Kara-Shin-Obb] had a vision telling him he should turn it over to Brigham Young for the use of the Mormon Church. A more practical version of the story was that Thomas Rhodes found an old Spanish Mine in the Uinta Mountains, then told his son, Caleb, where it was before he died. **Pronounced O-Pal. Other partners were Perry and Peternell. 45 This last was more the way Frank Warren had it, but with one addition. Frank told that Caleb Rhodes had been married to a woman named Malinda Powell and he had drawn a map of where the mine was and given it to his wife. Then Caleb had divorced Malinda and never did get his map back. Frank Warren had the map to prove his story. He also had a large piece of rock which had come out of the personal samples of old Tom Rhodes, a rock which showed no signs of gold, but if the rock were to be hit with a prospectors pick, suddenly it showed a golden streak. If you rubbed the streak, the gold would falloff. So, once Frank Warren heard about Jim Chrisman, he began to get gold fever allover again. Once a man gets gold fever, all you can do for him is listen patiently until the disease runs its course. Of course everyone looked at Frank's gold rock, and they looked at his map, and tried to point out as gently as possible that no one could ever understand a map which wasn't a map, but only a collection of symbols, although they did have to admit it had Malinda Powell's initials on it, and it did have the date 1859 on it, and it did have the word -DIG- on it. But still---unless Frank could decipher the map, it was impossible. Dad must have made a copy of Frank Warren's map for I found a page in one of Dad's loose leaf notebooks which seems to have no other possible explanation. I am reproducing it here, just in case any of you may want to look for it. One time I asked our Uncle Amber, who was sixteen years old in 1921, if he remembered the occasion. He said that in that spring he had been working with Frank Warren to repair the fence between the Robert's place and Granddad's place, and Frank Warren was so engrossed with his gold he was no earthly use to anyone when it came to work. Frank would show his gold sample to anyone who came along, and then tell them "she is bigger than any Klondike, and when we find her we will all be rich." 46 Dad's notes say that Frank spent all spring writing numerous letters and making frequent telephone calls. Then he announced he had found some one who could interpret his map. The next thing discoverable, is that eight men from Bridger Valley were to go with Frank about the tenth of July, after most of the snow was gone from the high mountains, and that he and Uncle Marion were to be two of the group. Next he says Uncle Marion backed out, and a boy from Piedmont was to take his place. Then he says a Caleb Landrith, a spiritualist from Selma, Alabama, accompanied by a "miner friend" arrived at Carter Station, that Hood picked them up and installed them in a log cabin owned by Mary Watson, widow of John Deleware Watson which was located on the meadow along Blacks Fork to the west of the Davidson and Roberts ranches. It seems that the next event was a killing frost on the First of July, a frost so severe that all the alfalfa and much of the grain was killed, not just frost-burned, but killed to the extent that it was useless to mow the fields of alfalfa as is usually done when a late frost hits. Now the men who were to be in the goldhunting expedition decided to go just after the Fourth of July celebration, instead of a week later. The next thing Dad mentions is that the interested parties went with Frank to the Watson Cabin to show the map to Landrith, but Landrith wouldn't look at it. Instead he lay down on the bed and went to sleep. As soon as he was asleep, the "miner friend" who is now called Slumgullion, began to talk to the sleeping man, asking him to view the map which Slumgullion held in his hand. The sleeping Landrith answered that he had the map in view, that it represented a vast treasure, and it was in the Mirror Lake country. This demonstration caused Dad and the boy from Piedmont, who is now called Mossy, to have second thoughts about going. After returning from the demonstration, Dad talked the matter over with Mother, and Mother did not want Dad to go. Finally they decided to go over to the store at Urie and talk to Joe Guild, the storekeeper. Dad still owed Joe Guild a large amount of money, and he had hoped to get enough out of his alfalfa that fall to pay Guild off. Now he didn't know what to do. It seemed the only chance was to get part of the lost gold from the Rhodes Mine, and it seemed as if this Landrith was in league with the Devil, and was a practitioner of the Black Arts. There isn't very much a local storekeeper does not know about what goes on in his community, and Joe Guild was no exception. Joe Guild told Dad and Mother that Landrith was a very famous clairvoyant from Kentucky who had become famous by curing many sick people, that his name was Edgar Cayce and that he had been sent to Bridger Valley by Frederick Bonfils, who was the editor of the Denver Post. Edgar Cayce was a good Christian, even if he wasn't a Mormon, and his friend was a Doctor Ketchum, a well known Kentucky 47 physician. Joe Guild suggested Dad should go on the mine hunting trip and if it didn't pan out, he would let Dad have a little more time on his note. ** So Dad decided to go after all, and so did Mossy when he learned Dad was going. Now here arises a question which Dad did not explain. It appears eight men were from Bridger Valley, Frank Warren was from Price, Utah and the other two men were from Kentucky or Alabama, but each man was to get a one tenth share. Here is Dad's list of the Bridger Valley Boys: Hood Evans, Dangerous Dan McGrew, Wayward Rover, Huckleberry Finn, Johnny Appleseed, Tom Sawyer, Mossy Brooks and the Assayer. That makes a total of eleven people and only ten shares) so it must follow that someone wasn't going to get a share. Either that, or else it was a deliberate miscount on Dad's part. The party left soon after the Fourth of July. The last thing Dad did before leaving was to put Mother's small Kodak camera in his blue jumper pocket. It is only by looking at the photos Dad took that I can verify just where they went. The group took one or more teams and wagons to haul their supplies and possibly to haul back all the gold they were going to find. Each man had a saddle horse, and Dad used Uncle Emery's mare, Pussie Cat. He also had with him a pair of solid silver hobbles which worked like a wire puzzle. He got them from Uncle Hans Arthur for the trip, but they belonged to Charles Olsen. Actually they were supposed to be a pair of Mexican hobbles the Indian chief, Wa-kara, had given to Brigham Young. The party camped the first night by the Meeks Cabin on the Blacks Fork (where the Meeks Cabin Dam is now.) The first photo shows the old log cabin. The following morning, Landrith told the group they would have to wait a while because they would soon be joined by two other men who had camped for the night on a red dugway. This first test of Landrith's powers of precognition didn't sound too favorable for everyone knew there was no red dugway on the mountain. But soon two men did arrive and confirm they had camped on a new Red Dugway, still under construction over on the West Fork of Smiths Fork. Dad at first called these two men "an old Bum and his son," but later he assigned them the nicknames of Uncle Torn and Rip Van Winkle. The Bridger Valley Boys were not too happy when the two new men expected to become equal partners. Frank Warren was all for it for he said "There's plenty for all, boys. When we find her we will all be rich." So now there were thirteen men and twelve shares. **Among Dad's papers is a U. S. Geol. Surv. topograpical map of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which seems to show Dad made an effort to check up on Edgar Cayce. 48 If each of the early photos represents a day's journey, then the men camped the second night at Elizabeth Pass, the third night at Christmas Meadows below A-1 Peak. The fourth night at an old sulphur mine east of Gold Hill. The fifth photograph was taken from the top of Hayden Pass, looking south toward Murdocks Mountain, while the sixth is a picture of Landrith standing facing the waters of Buds Lake, and apparently engaged in prayer. After completing his prayers or meditations at the edge of the water, Landrith returned to camp and said three more men were coming on the High Line Trail from the east and would arrive in less than an hour. Three tough looking characters did arrive as predicted and Dad assigned them the names of Nero, Jesse James and Sherlock. Frank Warren Has evidently expecting them for he greeted them with great joy, saying: "More's the merrier. No use to be stingy about it; when we find her we will all be rich." Never-the-less the Bridger Valley Boys didn't like it, especially since Hood recognized Jesse James as being the man who had murdered John Jarvie in 1909 and Dad recognized him as being the man who had disrupted the Thanksgiving Dance at Lone Tree. They talked some about giving up the project but decided it was as much their gold as anyone elses. Now the count stood sixteen men and fifteen shares, but Dad was beginning to wonder if it might be three men and three shares. But because of the determination of the rest of the Bridger Valley Boys not to be cheated, he spoke only of his worries to Mossy the Kid. The boy had the same worries, and he got a gun out of his saddle bag and put it under his coat. All the other men except Dad, were armed anyway. Landrith now informed the men that he was able to consult the spirit of a dead Indian Princess named Raven Camp, one who had been slain by Spaniards who had worked the Lost Josephine Mine. Raven Camp had in formed him that the gold in the Lost Josephine had been cursed by an ancient Indian Medicine Man named Ravencar so that the gold could only be used for worthwhile purposes, and only by men of pure and contrite hearts. The Spirit of the dead Princess, Raven Camp, had agreed to lead him to the lost mine, but only if the men in the party purged their hearts of avarice and greed. If anyone partook of the gold who held evil thoughts, they would all be slain by Indians watching them even now. Then Landrith told each man of evil things he had done in the past; one had stolen cattle, one had beat his wife, one had cheated his neighbor, one had thrown the body of a child in a well, while another had framed Mat Warner for a murder he had committed himself. Landrith decided Dad and Mossy were innocent, for he could not penetrate their minds. They had agreed among themselves that they would not look into Landrith's eyes, and if he looked at them, they would start counting backwards. Dad thought Landrith was a hypnotist. 49 Satisfied at last that the men had truly reformed, Landrith borrowed a compass and placed it on the ground where all could see, and told them that Raven Camp would make the compass point in the direction they should go. The compass needle swung wildly back and forth, and then steadied to point toward Scout Lake. The men backtracked to-ward Scout Lake, and found two other men camped there. They were Mat Warner and Butch Cassidy. The Bridger Valley Boys were secretly glad to meet them, but the others were not. It soon appeared that Nero and Mat were deadly enemies, and Jesse James kept making such slighting remarks about Butch Cassidy's antecedents that Dad feared for a free-far-all. But Frank Warren saved the day by saying: "There's plenty for all, boys. She's bigger than any Klondike. When we find her we will all be richer than King Midas." The teams and wagons could not go beyond Scouts Lake because there was no road, so two twin boys called Thurday and Friday were left there to care for the horses and watch for Indians on the back trail. It beats me where the twins came from, they had never been mentioned before. Dad's only comment was that they were too young to have a share. The next photograph shows a distant view of Fish and Sand Lakes. The one following that is the only one that bears a name of identification. It is labeled "Powells Camp." Among Dad's papers there is an old map of the Uinta National Forest dated 1931. It shows a Powells Camp near the junction of Dry Fork and the Weber River. If the group went that way they would have been going down out of the mountains, but it seems to agree with the photo which shows an old rock cabin with a sway backed roof and surrounded by cottonwood trees. From there the group followed a blazed trail back up hill to the north. Landrith had to continually call on Raven Camp to find the overgrown, dim blazes the Spaniards had made to mark their trail. At last they emerged from the forest to find the Spaniards ancient stockade. The mental effort had so exhausted Landrith that he needed sleep. As soon as Landrith was asleep, Nero made his move. Backed by his two companions, Jesse James and Sherlock, Nero told the other men that they were in ignorance as to how the gold was to be divided. He, Nero, was the owner of an undivided one fifth share because he was the brains of the outfit. Frank Warren deserved a one fifth share because he had brought the matter to Nero's attention, and also because he had the map. Rip Van Winkle merited a one fifth share because he was really Ed Hartzell, a man who had befriended and married Caleb Rhodes wife, Sidsie, after Caleb died. Tom Rhodes was entitled to a one fifth share because he was a direct descendant of old Thomas Rhodes who found the mine in the first place. 50 Any and all other persons who wanted a portion of the gold would have to make his own arrangements with Edgar Cayce who had agreed to find the gold for half. When Cayce was awakened, he said Nero was right. He had contracted to find the gold for half of it, and he was going to use the money to build a church, a school and a hospital at Virginia Beach. He very much disliked denying the gold to men who had counted on it so much, but surely they could see that the church and the hospital came first. If any of them wanted to become members of his group, they could talk to him privately about it. Dad was not about to became an apostate Mormon, and he needed to do a little mental arithmetic. On one side four men were to get four fifths. In the middle one man was to get five tenths for a Gentile church. On the other side were seven men, a youth and two boys who were due to get nothing. Of the other four men not named as share holders, two were on each side, but would they stay there? And what about Doctor Slumgullion, was the fifth fifth slated for him? No, that wasn't right. Stated mathmatically it would go like this: 4 + 2 = 5, 1 + 1 = 10, 7 + 1 + 2 + 2 (t /2) = O. The mathmatics wasn't right. It seemed to Dad the final answer might turn out to be: 2 = , and he doubted if one of the two would ever live to build his church and his hospital. The next morning Landrith said Dad and Mossy had not been in to see him; if they were not with him, they must be against him, and against his church. Therefore they must be kept as prisoners in the cabin, their horses would be hazed out of camp and Mat Warner would be their guard. Friendly Mat Harner kept his prisoners informed. The men could not get the silver hobbles off of Pussie Cat, so she would go slowly on her way back to the ranch. The Spirit of Raven Camp had deserted Landrith! He had called on God to help him, but God was busy. He had called on the Shades on the Night Time side of life, but they were busy too. Landrith had declared he could find the gold himself, using only mental persuasion. The men were beginning to laugh. The next day Mat Warner reported that Doctor Slumgullion had prescribed bed rest for Landrith, and when he woke up the Spirit of Raven Camp had returned. Landrith had placed a gold watch on the ground where everyone could see it, and then had told the hands of the watch to turn to the hour when they would find the gold. The hands of the watch had turned several times and stopped at four o'clock. Day after tomorrow, at four o'clock in the afternoon, they would find the mine. BUT, if anyone still harbored evil thoughts, it would mean that two other persons not now present would bring the gold into camp at four o'clock on the day after tomorrow, and they would claim the gold for themselves. 51 Mat expressed himself of the opinion, if that happened the fireworks would fly, and Mossy Brooks said he hoped it did happen. Then Mat said Butch didn't have a gun and would not use one, so he was offering one of his own to Dad. Dad hid it under his bib overalls. They split up now, two by two, to look for the mine, relying now more on observation and luck than on supernatural intervention. Then on Friday afternoon, at four o'clock, the two boys, Thursday and Friday, riding on harnessed work horses, brought into camp a piece of gold ore that looked exactly like Frank Warren's sample. Nero had Dad and Mossy brought out of the Spanish stockade so Dad could test the rock for gold. Really all that Dad knew about testing for gold was what he had learned in a small book called A Field Prospector's Handbook**. I have read the test many times. The book says to pulverize the ore, treat it with Aqua Regia [three parts Hydrochloric and one part Nitric Acid], heat to evaporate the acid to dryness, then a little more but do not ignite. When cool, treat with pure water, boil, cool, filter and treat the water solution with a crystal of Stannous Chloride which will give the Purple of Cassius. The deeper the color the more gold. No color, no gold. The test takes a long time, but is not difficult. This was the test Dad used. He held his test tube up toward the light of the sinking sun, and watched as the color first appeared, slightly pink, then red, then purple and finally a deep purplish black. GOLD, gold of a richness beyond their brightest dreams. With sinking heart, Dad put in one drop of acid, slipped in a few grains of powdered zinc, and gave the test tube another shake. As the liquid became colorless once more, Dad said: "Worthless, it is only iron pyrites. Nothing but Fool's Gold. Its nothing but Fool's Gold." Nero was not quite satisfied. He turned to Friday and asked where they had found the sample. Friday said: "We found it by the Blue Lake." "Fine. You are a good boy. Now tell me where is the Blue Lake?" "Go to hell. Why don't you go and find it?" "Yes sir. You are a fine boy." Nero turned to Thursday. "Yes sir, you are both fine boys. Now, what your brother said is just fine, but you boys are just a mite young to work the mine yourselves, so why don't you tell me where you found the gold?" ** ---- by von Bernowitz. 52 "We found it on the East Fork of Blank Creek." said Thursday. "Why, you pesky little shrimp! Where the God Damned Hell is Blank** Creek?" "You go to hell, it belongs to us. We found it and we ain't telling." Frank Warren tried to smooth the troubled waters by saying: "Now, boys, don't get hostile. She's bigger than any Klondike. There will be more than enough for everyone. After the church is paid for, we will share and share alike, and I promise you will both get your share. You can show us where it is in the morning, and then we will all be rich." Nero cursed Frank Warren, shoved him out of the way. He shot Friday first, and then turned and shot Thursday. With the two boys lifeless on the ground, everyone turned and looked at Dad. Dad knew he was next. In later years, when Dad arrived at this point in his story, he would tell his listeners he had been saved by a miracle, then he named again the three desperate characters, Nero, Jesse James and Sherlock. He named again the spiritualist and his medium. He named Frank and the Valley Boys, the two former outlaws, Mat and Butch, he named the two dead boys and he named the other two men who were related to the Rhodes family. He would mention again the discrepancy between the number of men and the number of shares, and then he would ask his audience which one of the twenty one persons they thought had performed the miracle and saved his (Dad's) life. Well, you can count and I can count. Dad's audience could count most of the time and if they couldn't, he helped them. If there were twenty one persons and only twenty were named, then surely the unnamed person must have been the one who performed the miracle and the one who did not claim a share of the Sacred Treasure. Right? [Actually Dad was cheating in his counts because he never said it was shares other than his own he counted. I have perpetuated his subterfuge.] I don't believe in miracles performed by unnamed persons so I am not going to tell about it. You all have your own ideas anyway, so I will go on with the story after The Miracle is allover. Harry Alonzo, alias Jesse James, lay dead upon the ground with twenty one **Dad said Thursday told the truth. 53 bullet holes in him. They buried him near a grove of trees. It used to be called Twenty One Graves, but it is now called Twenty One Grove. Everyone I ever talked to who knew of the shooting always told me Harry Alonzo shot himself. Some of them said five people were killed. Of those named, I can account for all except Nero and Tom Rhodes. All the Bridger Valley Boys returned to Bridger Valley. Hood died at Carter the following year of the galloping hiccups and acute colic. The symptoms were the same as those accompanying terminal lead poisoning or acute appendicitis. Edgar Cayce returned to the East and later built his church, school and hospital. Doctor Ketchum moved to Hawaii. After Hood died, Frank Warren took his younger children back to Price.** Hood's wife remarried and moved away**. Mat Warner was a marshal and Justice of the Peace in Price, Utah for many years. Butch Cassidy died years later. Ed Hartzell died at Cisco, Utah in 1924. The two twin boys have never been identified, although Martha Fields, a sister of Hood Roberts, told me she thought they might have been the Olsen twins. The only Olsen twins known around this country were Aunt Margaret and her sister, Mabel Fields. There may have been another unnamed man along on the trip. If so, it would explain this paragraph in one of Dad's notebooks. "President Heber J. Grant says Brother Anonymous is apocryphal. Under the circumstances I thought I was justified in saying he was Butch Cassidy instead of Kelly (not the cattle buyer at Lyman) . . . ." Dad and Mossy ran all night. In the morning they tracked their horses down to Hilliard Flats. The mare, Puss, still had the silver hobbles on her front legs. They mounted and returned to Millburne by way of Piedmont and the Pine Grove. The others returned the way they had gone. No one sought to find the gold again, for the others had found the old mine the morning after the miracle. Within the mine they could hear a mighty torrent of water pouring down the mine shaft, or so I was told by Lola Briggs, daughter of Dangerous Dan. [She said her father went by the name of (Daniel) Boone.] **Bernice and Bernal. They went to school at Urie the year I started and could draw Frank's map from memory. **Violet Roberts married Otto Thompson, possibly connected with man of the same name in The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost written by Pearl Baker. 54 GEORGE CASSIDY AS A RED DEVIL A great number of things happened to us is 1922, so many I am not sure I can include them all. First, I think, Mother's five heifers had calves, and Dad put up some staunchions in the barn on the Mocroft Place to hold them while Mother taught them to be milked. About the time Dad had them built, Mr. Mocroft came and said he was going to sell the Mocroft Place to Guy Eyre, so we had to move back to the Wells Place with all its crusted alkali. Dad plowed up the best of the ground, seven acres near the house and planted it to oats. As the oats began to come up they began to burn. Dad irrigated them several times to wash the alkali away. It didn't do any good, the oats burned up anyway. We didn't have a barn, nor any staunchions, at the Wells Place, so Mother had to milk the heifers in a little barbed wire corral. One of the heifers kicked Mother and broke her arm, so then Dad had to do the milking. He soon built another staunchion and bought a pair of hobbles to use on the two worst heifers. Dad was teaching school at Fort Bridger that spring, but he was home mornings and nights. In the summer of 1922, I was seven years old, going on eight, and Arlin was just past his ninth birthday, so we were able to get around more than we had ever done before. One day we went over west of the canal to visit Preston and Vaughn Eyre, who were the sons of Gene and Ida. After a couple of hours, Mother called Ida Eyre on the phone asking her to send us home. You, sister Edna, and you, sister Jessie, went out on the Lincoln Highway to watch for us, and three year old Howard LeRoy followed you. Just about the time Arlin and I were crossing the canal bridge, an eagle swooped down out of our only cottonwood tree, clutched onto the shoulders of little Howard LeRoy and began to fly off with him. If you two girls had not hung on to him for dear life, until Arlin and I got there, brother Howard would have been eagle meat. As it was, we beat at the eagle with sticks until he flew away. When the eagle dropped Howard, he got a nasty bruise on his head, and he had some bad tears in his shoulders from the eagle's talons. Dad put out some poison baits for the eagle. It wasn't very long after this until two negroes came one day and asked about the gold they thought Dad had stolen. Mother was more afraid for herself and the three little girls in the family, than she was for Arlin and I. She slammed the door and locked it, instead of answering the negroes. Arlin and I ran for the canal and hid in the willows. The negroes went out to the stackyard and forked away the last remnants of a butt of two year old hay. Then they went out to the privy, looked it over and then set fire to it. Next they carried some of the hay over and piled it against our two 55 roomed log house as if they were going to burn it down as well. Dad had been down under the hill to the north, at the Betlock place, where uncle Edd was now living. The first we knew he was back, he rode across the canal on old Clyde, one of his two work horses. Dad jumped off the horse, picked up a neck yoke from the wagon and chased the two black men clear down to Urie. Dad had let a poor Italian family live in the house on the Wells place the summer before when we weren't using it. They had burned up all the firewood and coal that had been there, then not being able to afford to buy any more, they had tried to get through the winter by burning old cow chips. Finally Vic Fillin at Fort Bridger had rescued them and moved them to Fort Bridger. Consequently, when we moved back to the Wells place we had nothing to burn, either, except a few dead willows. Now Dad decided to go get a load of cedar (juniper) wood over past Barrel Springs. He was still concerned about the blackmen coming back again, so he wanted to make it possible that Mother could call up to Granddad's place on the telephone. There were three party telephone lines in the valley. Granddad was on the Fort Bridger line, we were on the Mountain View line, which also connected through the Bell Company with all the party line users along Henrys fork. Then there was another line which went down to the lower bench and connected with the Lyman line at the place where Uncle Edd lived. This was a line Uncle Arthur had fastened to the fence posts. Dad got hold of a couple of double-throw knife switches and rigged the phone up so Mother could call either Granddad's or Uncle Edd's. It had the added advantage that Uncle Edd could also call Granddad direct if he called Mother first to have her throw the switch**. With that taken care of, we got up early one morning and went to get the load of wood. It was a good place to get wood, with lots of dry dead cedar trunks. Dad and Arlin went to work and I walked up on a ridge. I saw a hole in the ground about five feet deep, which had been walled with native stone, such as might have been made by a sheepherder who wanted to protect himself from the wind. I climbed down into the hole and couldn't get out. I hollered, and cried and bellered, but they couldn't hear me. Then Dad missed me, and sent Arlin to find me. He helped me out of the hole, and we were going back to the wagon when he stopped to look at a nest of flying ants. A swarm of ants came out of the ant nest and covered him, stinging and biting. Arlin ran toward the wagon, slapping at the ants as he ran. Dad was just trying to split a big cedar trunk with some wedges when Arlin ran up. The flying ants settled on the team, and the team ran away. When they ran, the wheel of the wagon hit the trunk Dad was splitting, the trunk rolled over and broke Dad's leg. In trying to get free, Dad also sprained his other ankle. So Dad was too crippled to walk, Arlin looked like a red faced, swollen bean bag, but I was uninjured. **This required two extra telephones. Uncle Emery's was used at Granddad's, and Uncle Arthurs phone was used at Uncle Edd's. 56 In time Arlin and I caught the team, and Arlin drove it back to where Dad was. Between the three of us, we got Dad on the wagonbed and started back toward Fort Bridger, every wagon jolt making Dad wince with pain. Meanwhile, back at the Wells place, Mother was putting the new telephone system to good use. She called Grandmother and told her I had fallen in a well. Not to worry, Retta, there aren't any wells out in the hills. Just a little later Mother called again. Arlin had been hit by numerous BB shots. Not to worry, Retta, Amasa would take care of everything and the boys were all right. Then in a little while, Mother called once again. She told Grandmother in no uncertain tone that she wanted someone sent from the ranch to find Dad and her boys, because Dad was crippled and walking on crutches, I was in the well and Arlin had been wounded by a shot gun blast. Besides that she was almost certain the team had run away and broken the wagon wheel. Still not sure Grandmother would send anyone, Mother then called Uncle Edd. Mother was always a little psychic; she always knew when something happened to us, but not always when the emergency was over. Of course in those days psychic ability was something no one talked about and was thought to be associated with the Devil, so it was politely said Mother had a woman's intuition, and no one expects intuition to be accurate. The proof of its inaccuracy was implicit in Mother's thinking flying ants were BB shots. We were back to the little Spring Creek which flows down off of Piedmont Bench, putting mud on Arlin's face, when Uncle Amber rode down from the south and Uncle Edd carne from the east. They lifted Dad from the bed of the wagon up onto the spring seat, then Uncle Edd drove the team home and Uncle Amber took me up behind on his saddle to go back to Granddad's ranch. Usually Granddad's sons and his two youngest daughters made up his haying crew, but this year it was different. Uncle Emery had been in the Navy and when he got out he took up an enlarged (640 acre) homestead twelve miles west of Millburne, and he and Juke Fields were trying to get started in the Moonshining Business. Uncle Edd had his own haying to take care of. Dad had a broken leg. Uncle Kermit had some broken ribs he got trying to throw down a steer. Uncle Arthur was working for the Union Pacific. Uncle Marion had dyed his hair what Grandmother called a "shit-Brindle color" and left for parts nknown. Aunt Beatrice was married and living in Evanston. So that left Grandmother and Aunt Vayanna to milk forty head of cows, gather the eggs, separate the cream, make the butter and cook for the haying crew. And the haying crew now consisted of Uncle Amber and Aunt Vennes. So Granddad had hired Sam Booth, from Lyman, Jim Lee from up above Robertson and one of the Eskridge boys who lived on the Mountain View road. They all slept in the bunkhouse, which now had three beds. 57 Granddad was so busy irrigating about 390 acres, feeding the pigs, doing odd butchering when the pedlers came, taking care of the sheep and the geese and the turkeys, shooting coyotes, and talking to visitors that he didn't have much time to work in the hay fields. No one could imagine how many visitors came to see Granddad. The Governor came and then a couple of Senators and the head of the Forest Service, assorted politicians and legislators, a Doctor Allen who had treated me in the hospital and who was looking for fish fossils, many ranchers from the Valley who wanted his opinion on the coming fall market, and about once a week old Charles O. Richardson, the Oil King, would come to talk or to borrow some more money. In years before, it seemed that the only place anyone ever heard of Butch Cassidy was around Granddad's place, but this year everyone was talking about him. Sam Booth told that Butch Cassidy had come into the Ford Garage in Lyman and had bought a Model T. Ford and had paid cash for it. The Eskridge boy said his father had seen George Parker in Rock Springs driving a Model T. and pulling a trailer. The two of them asked Jim Lee if Butch Cassidy had been up to see him, and Jim replied, after shifting his cud of tobacco around, "Yeah, both of 'em." Then Mr. Eskridge came with another boy up to Granddads to use his shrinker to size a wagon tire to fit his wagon wheel. He told that Butch Cassidy had been over to McKinnon talking to the Olsen Brothers and to a neighbor of theirs, Tom Walsh. He was driving a Model T. Ford. Then a United States Mail airplane landed in the Eskridge hay field, and the whole county went to look at it. Granddad let me go with. He didn't go very close to the airplane, but around us people were saying "That's Butch Cassidy talking to the Pilot." "Looks like the Army Pilot is going to give Cassidy a ride." "The pilot better look out. Old Butch will steal his mail sacks before he knows what happened." "Naw he won't. Butch never did bother with mail sacks." "I wish Butch would come back to stay. He never used to have all this crime and shooting and fires when he was here before." "Don't you believe it. Butch is old now, he couldn't handle the young punks like he used to." "Yaah, you old Utah fellows make me sick." "That's right. You fellows talk like Cassidy was omething special. Cassidy was nothing but a God Damned horse thief and you fellows act like he was a little tin god sacred to the Mormons." "Young fellow, ou just listen to me. Butch Cassidy did more for the Mormons and for the whole dam country than Teddy Roosevelt ever did." I could see the man everyone was calling Butch Cassidy. He had pulled the prop through a couple of times for the pilot, and he had then climbed up onto the wings of the plane. I could see he wasn't LeRoy, so I began to think maybe there were two different Butch Cassidys. 58 This new Butch Cassidy got back down on the ground, pulled the prop through twice more, and then again and the engine started with a lot of black smoke coming out of it. Granddad said we had to go. He drove over to Urie and went into Joe Guild's store to buy two plugs of Bull Durham Chawing tobacco for Jim Lee. Just as we were going out, here came the Pilot and the man they called Butch Cassidy in a new shiny Model T. The Pilot asked Joe Guild for some Hi-test gasoline, but Joe only had the regular white gas. I was hoping Granddad would talk to Butch Cassidy, but he didn't. We got back in the Dodge touring car and drove to the Wells place. Granddad left me there and took brother Arlin to tromp hay for him. Arlin had been milking the heifers while I had been up to Granddads, but now Mother and I had to milk them. Mother would sit on one side and milk with one hand. I would stand on the other and milk with two hands. Then Mother would finish off to get the milk I wasn't able to get. Once in a while I would walk up to Granddad's, but when I did he would put me to herding sheep off a patch of sweet clover. There was one ewe with yellow goat eyes that was always in the sweet clover, so Granddad said if I couldn't herd sheep, I just as well stay home. Arlin stayed up there most of the rest of the summer and Granddad paid him five dollars for his work. He sent me 50 cents for herding the sheep. I spent it for five little boxes of Peppermint sticks at the Lyman Merc. Mother traded two eggs for another. More than likely Arlin would have stayed at Granddads all summer, except we had another accident. One day, when we were all sitting on the porch, I was beating on a rock with Dad's prospectors pick. The needle sharp point broke off and embedded itself in Mother's good arm. Dad dug it out with a sack needle and put Lysol on it, but it got infected, and so painful Mother could use neither hand to milk the heifers. No one thought I could get enough milk the heifers wouldn't dry up, so Arlin came home to do the milking. We didn't hear anything more about Cassidy until almost time for school to start. Dad's broken leg was almost well; he could walk on one crutch, so he hitched up the team to a hand plow. We went up to the field to plow up some more alkali. Dad intended to plant some foxtail seed, knowing it was the only thing that would grow in alkali. Arlin was driving the team, Dad was struggling along behind trying to hold the handle of the plow with one hand and use the crutch with the other. I was supposed to hold the other plow handle. It wasn't going too well. Back at the house, Mother heard someone ringing Granddad's Fort Bridger ring on the Mountain View line (3-1) so she answered it. Some one told her that Cassidy and Marion Meeks were riding over from Lone Tree to have it out with Granddad about the Dogie calf. Mother was so concerned about the call that she came out to the field to tell Dad about it. Dad unhitched one of the horses from the plow and rode up to Granddad's place. Arlin and I followed along behind on foot. Dad left all the gates down, so we had to shut them. 59 Everyone at the ranch seemed to be concerned about the news Dad brought, all except Granddad. He just went about the everyday chores as if he were not concerned at all. Dad wanted to ride out with him to back him up, but Granddad would not hear of it. He told Dad to go in the house and mind his broken leg. Granddad saddled up the young stud horse he called The Imp and left him hip-shot at the hitching rail, until the two men were in sight. When Granddad and Marion Meeks had confronted each other before about the dogie calf, they had both been armed; but this time Granddad wore no gun as he rode out to meet the two men. When I saw they were going to meet on the bridge across the Lyman Canal, I sneaked across the footbridge to the potato cellar and from there to the south fence to hide in some sage brush where I could hear and not be seen. This time Cassidy turned out to be LeRoy again, and he had barely greeted Granddad before Granddad saw me in the sagebrush and told me to get back to the house. I only went as far as the potato cellar but I couldn't hear from there. Grandad called LeRoy a "Mutton Conductor." When the men finally left, LeRoy was riding on Granddad's stud, The Imp. Meeks was riding on the bay gelding LeRoy had been riding, while Granddad came back to the yard riding on Meeks' fine single-footed mare. Granddad said afterwards he had to give a worthless dogie calf and five dollars boot for the mare**: That was the only time in his life Granddad ever gave boot for anything, and it meant he didn't get anything at all for The Imp. That was the last we ever saw of LeRoy in Bridger Valley, but not the last we ever heard of him. Dad hadn't been doing very good trying to farm, so in the fall of 1922 he went back to teaching school. By this time he had graduated from the Mountain View High School, by corresponence, and he had secured his lifetime teaching certificate by taking correspondence courses from the University of Wyoming. He got a teaching job at the new Robertson School house, which was identical with the Mountain View School—much larger than it needed to be. There were three teachers, and one of the two women teachers was related to Charles O. Richardson's wife. Dad taught the eighth, ninth and tenth grades. As he always did where ever he taught, Dad started holding dances in the school house on Friday nights, and on holidays. We children did not usually go to the dances, but we did go to the masquerade dance on Halloween**. Many of the people were not in costume, but some were. The most notable of all the costumes was one of a red devil with a long tail. **Arlin claimed he gave forty five dollars boot. **We were permitted to go because Uncle Emery was supposed to be playing on the Robertson Basket Ball team. He didn't show up for the game. There were only four boys in the Robertson High School. 60 The Devil's costume was made out of red velvet, and the man wearing it had fastened a long bull whip, also covered with red velvet, to the back of the suit for the tail. No one could see his face because there were only holes for his eyes. The Devil didn't dance, but he was the life of the party anyway. Everyone was trying to pull the Devil's tail, then he would turn around and pop his tail at whoever pulled it. About intermission time, the Devil disappeared. The dances were always held in what they called "the music room." The door to the music room was toward the back of the school, while the stairs to the basement and furnace room were near the front door. I was out in the hall, sometime after the intermission, when I saw the Devil, no longer wearing his mask, helping Uncle Emery and Juke Fields carry Al Scrugg from Piedmont down the basement stairs, and make a bed for him behind the furnace. The Devil was George L. Parker, one of the two men they called Butch Cassidy. Al Scrugg had been wounded. He stayed there in the basement of the Robertson School for at least three weeks. Each morning Dad would carry some food over to him, and each evening the storekeeper, Ralph Jenkins, would provide his evening meal. Arlin and I used to carry dipperfuls of water for him from the bucket upstairs in the hall. He needed an awful lot of water, but I don't think anyone else ever knew he was in the basement of the school house. If Uncle Emery had not told me about it many years later, I would never have known what happened. I may not have it just right even now. There used to be a family by the name of Richardson who lived down in Emery County, Utah. One of them was named F. O. Richardson and he had been in the oil drilling business down there. Then he had moved to Wyoming sometime after Charles O. Richardson came to Bridger Valley. F. O. Richardson got into some kind of trouble, and he was sent to the Wyoming State Prison in Rawlins. In 1912 there had been a prisoners strike at the Rawlins Prison. All the prisoners escaped and spread peacefully all through the town, everyone, that is, except F. O. Richardson. He had escaped with the rest, but he went. down by the railroad tracks and went to sleep in a sheep wagon. The wardens and the sheriffs had rounded up all the rest of the prisoners, but they couldn't find F. O. Richardson. Finally someone told them Richardson was in the sheep wagon. They shouted for Richardson to come out, and when he didn't answer they shot through the sides of the sheep wagon and killed him**. **History of Wyo. State Pen by Western Interpretive Services gives name as Noah T. Richardson, date as 1912. 61 Rubbing included in margin. Shortly after this, Charles O. Richardson, the Oil King from LeRoys Station, went to Rawlins and shipped the sheep wagon to LeRoy on the train. Then he hauled it up to where he was drilling another oil well. Al Scrugg, the man who had been wounded, owned or had owned a bar at Piedmont. At one time or another Al Scrugg had shot five men, all of them in self defense. Well, Al Scrugg knew Charles O. Richardson had stolen the sheep wagon, so he stole it in turn and started to move it up to Piedmont. Charles O. Richardson followed him, and when he caught up to him they had a gun battle. Al Scrugg had been wounded, so they brought him to the Robertson school. Although I didn't know it, Charles O. Richardson had been wounded in the buttocks, and it was so painful after a day or two that he didn't go back to get his fancy sheep wagon. It had just happened that the gun battle took place on Uncle Emery's homestead. When no one came to get the wagon, he took the running gear out from under the sheep camp, set the camp on the ground and used it for his homestead shack. Uncle Emery had never had time to build a homestead shack before, because he and Juke Fields had been so busy trying to get a still set up so they could go into the moonshining Business. Uncle Emery had even bought a brand new Hupmobile car with curtains, so they could run their bootleg booze to Ogden. Granddad had never liked Uncle Emery's plans to become a Moonshiner. So he talked to LeRoy. LeRoy rode his new horse up to the homestead and had a little talk with Uncle Emery and Juke Fields. They soon saw the error of their ways. They loaded the sheep camp back on its running gear and took it down and gave it to Mary Watson, to whom Charley Richardson owed some money. Uncle Emery turned the new Hupmobile over to Juke Fields, then he moved down to San Pete County in Utah where he married Josie Mae Petersen the next year. LeRoy had been feeding some long horn cattle on the Bigelow Place. Before spring came again, Granddad would sell him two precious stacks of hay for one thousand dollars apiece. LeRoy could not raise the whole two thousand before the cattle were sold, so the Red Devil put up a Model T. for security. During the winter, Granddad and LeRoy rode over to LeRoys Station. They shot at the ground and generally raised hell for the benefit of the section workers 62 as they put Charley Richardson on a west bound train, and told him to go back to Chicago where he came from. Then LeRoy shipped his new horse on the same train, in the express car, and that must have cost him a lot of dough. So two Texas strangers, R. T. Davis and Bud Tontine, left the Bridger Valley, the first one temporarily and the other one permanently. Funny names for Texans, especially once you know "Tonto" means a stupid Indian and "Tontine" is a special form of insurance. 63 CASSIDY OUSTS PINKERTON My Dear Brothers and Sisters: Enough, enough, I cry enough. I confess. I retract. I will do anything I can to stop this flood of criticism. Actually I expected some reaction when I said Dad committed a fraud in telling about the number of shares in the Lost Rhodes Mine, but I certainly did not expect the flood of letters I have received. After all that was just a device Dad used to heighten the climax of the story he was telling. Any story teller is permitted to do that. If you want it said Dad created his own miracle by the use of his Faith and his religious convictions, so let it be. I can agree with that. But I consider a personal miracle to be personal, between himself and his God. There is no reason I should tell the details. I am not a missionary expounding any gospel. One of you said the storekeeper Joe Guild would be unlikely to know that Caleb Landrith was the Clairvoyant Edgar Cayce if nobody else did, so let us consider that first. I see no reason to suppose there were any of the men who did not know who Landrith was, but I do suppose Guild was the first man to tell Dad. It is certainly possible any of them could have known, at least any person who regularly read any metropolitan newspaper could have known it from the many articles and photographs that appeared in such newspapers. There are other possibilities. Another of you said that if you knew who the other men in the party. Here, you would be better able to form an opinion. The names Dad used to hide the identities of the local men are, in a way, self revealing, even though the men may have chosen their own names or nick-names. I think you will all agree Frank Warren must have known who Landrith was, for he was the man who found the man who was able to interpret the map by esoteric means. In case Warren did not tell Joe Guild himself, the information could have come from Frank Warren in several ways. Frank Warren's son, Glen I believe, married Katie Guild. Katie and Glen spent their first few years together, in a tent, herding the Roberts sheep. Katie was the daughter of Willie Guild and Willie Guild was the brother of Joe Guild; he worked with Joe in the store, and at one time, ran it for him. Or Joe Guild could have learned it from his daughter, Nora. Nora Guild was married to Frank Watson. They lived next door to her father at Urie, and Nora Watson was the school teacher at the Urie School when Arlin started school. Frank Watson was the man Dad called Tom Sawyer. Seemingly Dad gave him the name of Tom Sawyer because Frank was the man who sawed up pine trees for firewood at the Robertson School while Dad was teaching school there. Frank Watson represented both the Guild and the Watson family in the search. I 64 do not believe Frank was related to Mary Watson in whose cabin Landrith was first installed. I know of my own memory that Gene Eyre was the man Dad called Huckleberry Finn. Dad gave him that name because Gene Eyre had a nice little patch of Blue berries behind his house west of the Lyman Canal. The reason I remember Gene went with the party is because Ida Hamblin Eyre and Mother used to talk on the telephone each day while they were gone. One Day, during a lightning storm, and while they were talking together on the phone, lightning struck the telephone line. Dad had put a lightning arrestor on our house, but the lightning made a three inch hole in the wall of the house where the wire went through. At the Gene Eyre house, the lightning made a three foot hole in the wall, and almost blinded Ida Eyre. Down below the hill, the same bolt of lightning killed Hugo Dahlquist, who was opening a wire gate when the lightning struck. The name of Johnny Appleseed was given to Teddy Eyre, who lived across the Urie Lane from the Guild store, for Teddy Eyre was one of the few men in Bridger Valley who ever successfully planted apple trees in the Valley. Anyone in the Valley would recognize another name Dad used. Mossy Brooks, or Mossy the Kid, could only apply to Harold Moslander, who long owned a ranch above Piedmont. When Dad wrote his story in 1932, he substituted the name of Fiddlefoot Smith for the name of Wayward Rover, most likely because he thought Wayward Rover might be mistaken for Hayward Rollins, but both names were applied to the father of the two boys who were killed by Nero. Regardless of that, there was still another presence that accompanied the group. On every lost mine expedition there is always another presence, seldom friendly, sometimes sinister, sometimes appearing as an apparition. If you ever went on such a trip, you will know that such is the case. Depending on the kind of person you are, the presence would manifest itself as ghostly indians, the Devil Incarnate, or if your motives are pure, as Brother Anonymous. To a person who will not believe in such things, the presence would be felt as an uneasy apprehension. I cannot see that knowing the names of the Bridger Valley Boys will, in any way, help in assessing the number of claims to the Lost Rhodes Mine. Frank Warren was generous to a fault, and perfectly willing to give an equal share to anyone he talked to. I do not believe the Bridger Valley Boys were equally as generous, and Dad did not think so either. Dad went on the trip as the assayer and Mossy went along as the camp tender and general roustabout. Whether they got a share depended entirely on the good will of the others. Dad never counted his chickens too soon, and so he never counted his or Mossy's share 65 when making his enumerations. But he was counting the share of the man he didn't name. Nero had a different idea of how the Lost Rhodes Mine was to be divided. He assigned a one fifth share to each of four men, but he said one deserved it, one was entitled to it and one merited it. That is what made Dad suspicious, for he didn't say they were going to get their shares. Besides that, Nero reserved the remaining one fifth share for an unnamed person, and no way in the world could that share have been reserved for Fiddlefoot Smith. When it came out that each shareholder was going to give one half of his share to Edgar Cayce for finding the gold, it explained what the fifth fifth was for, because Nero had declared he was going to get an undivided one fifth for himself. But when Landrith stated that he had a contract to find the gold for fifty percent, that changed the picture. The only person Landrith could have had a contract with was Frederick Bonfils, editor of the Denver Post, for he was the man who had sent Landrith to Bridger Valley. If Frederick Bonfils had a contract with Edgar Cayce for half of the gold to go to each of them, then surely Bonfils would have sent someone else along to protect his interests. We should be able to find out who he sent, for surely their nicknames should be just as obvious as those given to the Bridger Valley Boys. Dad said one of them was named Jesse James. We already know who he was, but let's see how he got his nickname. Jesse James was an outlaw, so the known outlaw, Harry Alonzo, was called Jesse James. Using the same method, we can ask ourselves: Who was Nero? Nero was an emperor of Rome. Who else do we know associated with Rome? The answer has to be The Pope of the Catholic Church,--so Nero was a man named Pope, which is probably right because a man named Pope sent Mat Warner to prison. In a similar way, we can arrive at the identity of Sherlock. Sherlock could be short for Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes was a famous fictional dective. Do we know a Detective? Yes, we know about a Pinkerton Dective named Swigart. Who better could Frederick Bonfils have sent along to protect his interests than a Pinkerton Detective? Now you will probably ask, Why didn't Swigert, the detective, recognize Harry Alonzo? Because he had never seen him, and while he had a picture of him, everyone else said it was a picture of Hiram Bennion. So now, how about Butch Cassidy? All Dad was saying in his note regarding Butch Cassidy, was that the man camped at Scouts Lake along with Mat Warner, 66 actually Robert L. Parker, was substituted in his written story for LeRoy Kelly, who was the twenty first person**. Unlike Edgar Cayce, I am unable to contact spirits of dead people, so I shall never know whether I have interpreted Dad's thoughts correctly. But there is a record of Cayce and what he was able to do. If you are at all interested in Edgar Cayce, I suggest you read the book entitled There Is A River, written by Thomas Sugrue. It seems to be a fairly good biography of Edgar Cayce. Thomas Sugrue goes into many facets of Cayce's life, but for the years 1920, 1921 and 1922 he is extremely vague. The only really positive statement he makes for those years is that Cayce's son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, learned how to smoke. However, Sugrue does tell in a vague way that during those years Cayce was in Texas and in other places, trying to raise money to build a church, a school and a hospital at Virginia Beach, Virginia, by helping various people locate sites for oil wells, and by helping others find other treasures. Partly in opposition to, but in some part in agreement with Dad's story, Thomas Sugrue tells that Frederick Bonfils, editor of the Denver Post, did offer Cayce some kind of business arrangement beneficial to both, but that Cayce turned it down as something he did not want to be involved in. Now, momentarily, let us return to the scene in the Uinta Mountains. Nero is about to shoot Dad for telling what he thought, and what actually was an untruth about the gold. Would it have been impossible for the father of the two boys, seeing Nero's attention was temporarily divirted, to have shot Nero in the back in vengeance for the lives of his two sons? Then would the known killer and unman, Harry Alonzo, have shot the man Dad once called Fiddlefoot Smith, and so have invited the gunfire of all the Bridger Valley Boys? And then would not the Bridger Valley Boys have agreed among them selves that Harry Alonzo shot himself? And then would not Dad have said, when he told the story, that he was saved by a miracle, rather than telling that one of his neighbors started the barrage of gunfire? Once before he had saved Bill Donohue by convincing Mrs. Stewart not to put his name in her letters. That is pure speculation, and I am arguing for my own opinion, but it is more believable to me than the story that Dad murdered Harry Alonzo, for that is what he was later accused of. Dad never mentioned that part of it when he told his story in later years, and he certainly did not write it when he wrote his story for publication in 1932. Dad only said that he was one of many who fired one shot at the outlaw, and that no one knew who fired the fatal shot. I will come to Dad's written story in due time, so let me go back to our family history. **Bud Tontine 67 *** Before I got myself sidetracked onto this hypothetical dissertation about what I think might have happened in the Uinta Mountains, I had been telling of our experiences at Robertson in the winter of 1922-23. I have been trying to think of the names of the two lady School teachers there that winter, but the only one I can remember is Miss Iva Taylor**. (Dorothy Smith is handwritten in the margin afterwards). She is the one I thought was related to Charles O. Richardson's wife, but I see in Dad's notebook that it was Mother's cousin, Ivy Taylor** of Coalville who was related to his wife. Richardson's wife was named Mina E. Taylor before they were married. She first came to Wyoming to take up oil claims in the LeRoy oil field. Mina E. Taylor owned some apartment buildings in New York City which she sold to her brother. One of her apartments is where Robert L. Parker and Marion Bennion stayed before they went to South America in 1901. Oh well, that is another story. It was bone-chilling cold during the fall of 1922. During December the temperature dropped to forty and forty five degrees below zero. The coal in the basement of the school house, hopefully meant to last until spring, dwindled rapidly with the cold weather. By Christmas time, it was almost gone. The school board considered shutting down the school for the rest of the year, but the PTA organized a community effort to cut many pine trees nearby for firewood. During the Christmas Vacation many ranchers got together, cut the trees and dragged them into the school yard. Then Frank Watson brought a wood saw up to Robertson behind an old Durant car. The cut-off saw was powered by jacking up one rear wheel and putting a belt on it. The men cut up the wood while the women served sandwiches and coffee inside the school house. While the work was still going on, it began to snow, and it scarcely stopped until spring. The old car and saw stayed there in the school yard until after the snow was gone the next spring. No cars used the roads around Robertson all winter, and the ranchers got out and used sleighs and bob- sleds they hadn't used in several years. On March 29, 1923, Dad took his family from Robertson down to Granddad's place to celebrate Granddad's sixtieth birthday and, a little prematurely, his and Grandmother's thirty fourth wedding anniversary. Even as late as that, the snow was still over the tops of the fence posts, and crusted so hard we went through the fields over the barbed wire, rather than following the roads. By May the snow was gone, and we had to hitch the teams to the wagon to bring our furniture back from Robertson. We probably thought the winter was hard for us, but it was much harder for Granddad. Everyday during that long, cold and snowy winter, he had to go out **1. Father, George, 2. Father, George, 3. Brother George. 68 and feed hay to all his range cattle. He had little or no help that winter, for the boys were in school. The weather took its toll, for after all, Ganddad was sixty years old. In order to have some help, at the time of the birthday party Granddad talked Uncle Hugh Wayman, Aunt Beatrice's husband, into giving up his job to come work on the ranch. At the time of the birthday party, Butch Cassidy's Model T. Ford was parked in Granddad's carriage shed, stashed in behind Grandmother's buggy. Later in the summer, Granddad let Uncle Hugh use it. That is the first car I ever drove. Uncle Hugh gave me a licking for starting it, and Granddad gave me another one because I ran over the shafts of Fred Thompson's cutter. Dad gave me a third with a piece of rope. I couldn't sit down for a week. As soon as the roads were dry, Dad moved the family to Evanston in Granddad's Ford truck. You all moved into Uncle Hugh Wayman's house on Front Street, and then Dad got a job with the Union Pacific Bridge and Building Gang, cementing the railroad tunnels. Arlin and I stayed at the ranch, Arlin to tromp hay and I to herd yellow eyed sheep. We only went to Evanston in time to go to school. Uncle Hugh and Uncle Amber were the main workers on the ranch that summer, and it seemed neither could suit Granddad. He was getting more grouchy all the time. His legs which had been crippled when he was a boy began to give him trouble again, so that he walked with a painful limp. Grandmother was ill a great deal that summer as well, so the main burden of milking and making butter fell on the two girls, Vennes and Vayanna. In October of 1923, Uncle Amber married Sylvia Kilburne. Then Granddad decided he, Grandmother and the two girls would move back to the sunny climes of Utah for the winter. Uncle Hugh and Uncle Amber managed the ranch during the winter. Uncle Kermit stayed with and went to high school in Mountain View. Granddad, Grandmother and the girls moved into part of Uncle Emery's house in Ephraim, Utah. Uncle Amber and Aunt Sylvia lived in the "Pink house." Early in the Spring of 1924, Granddad returned to the ranch, mostly to find fault with the way the two uncles had let things go to hell. Uncle Amber and Aunt Sylvia moved down to Utah to help her father, Fred Kilburne, raise sugar beets. Uncle Hugh stayed with until haying time, then he too decided he had had enough of Granddad. Dad did not want Arlin and I to go to the ranch that summer, but when Granddad made a point of it, Dad reluctantly let us go. Arlin was promoted to running a buck rake that summer and I was promoted to tromping hay on the stack and on the hay wagon. That is until I fell off the hay rack onto the wagon tongue and frightened the team into running away, then I was demoted to herding sheep again. It was Uncle Marion who stopped the runaway team before I lost my hold on the wagon tongue. He had just returned from where ever he 69 had been. His dyed hair was just growing out; that is when Grandmother said she had never birthed a boy with shit-brindle hair. Granddad drove over to Evanston just before school was to start. He talked Dad into giving up his job with the Bridge and Building Gang by promising him that he would turn the ranch over to Dad to run from now on, for Granddad was going to retire and live in Utah for the rest of his life. Dad moved the family back to the Wells place for a month or so, until Granddad left for Utah, then we all moved up to Granddads ranch. That is where sister Iona was born. Granddad moved his wife and two girls into a house in Wales, Utah where Aunt Mary Lamb (Grandmother's sister) lived, but he couldn't stand it away from the ranch. He was back to Fort Bridger almost before he got to Utah. Aunt Margaret's sister, Mabel, and her husband, Bryan Fields moved onto the Roberts place. Kent Olsen tipped the school wagon over just before we moved. You will remember that for sister Edna got hurt. Dad and Granddad got along just fine. Granddad said many times he had made the right decision in turning the ranch over to Dad. As the weather began to get cold, Granddad began to spend more time inside the house. He and Mother redeveloped their former intimacy, and Granddad once more told Mother of his early life, riding the Arizona deserts for the Canaanite Ranch owned by Apostle Snow and Apostle Ivins who sold it to Preston Nutter. Nutter owned it when Granddad rode with Tom Horn. That may not be right, but that is the way I remember it. I used to could remember everything like that, but these last few years it is not all that clear anymore. Everything was peacefull, happy and going like clockwork, then suddenly everything changed. It was probably in October or November when it changed, but I can find no dates for it in Dad's notebooks. Pinkerton Detective Swigert and about seven or eight other strange men rode into Granddad's hill pasture west of the Fort Bridger-Robertson road, and set up three tents on the brow of the hill above the Blacks Fork meadows. They used telephone wire for tent ropes, and they shoveled dirt and rocks onto the tent flaps as if they intended to stay a while. If you walk up on the hill you can still see where they were. Before long the men came down off the hill, across the road and the Roberts Spring Run, and began to tunnel into the hill on the east side about a quarter of a mile from Granddad's house. They were digging in a place where the ruts still showed, ruts that had been made when the Russells, Thorpe and Waddell stage coaches used to go that way. The place they were digging could not be seen from the house, but it was in plain view from the mail box. Dad wanted to run the men off, but Granddad told him not to. He said the men would soon go away when they couldn't find anything. People would 70 occasionally call on the telephone and ask what the men were looking for, and that bothered Dad, but they let the men dig. Then one day Granddad rode the single-footing mare he got from Marion Meeks down to the Carter store in Fort Bridger to pick up the mail sack. Willie Carter told Granddad that Swigert had been in the Fort Bridger bar and had told men in there that Dad had murdered Harry Alonzo**. When Dad heard that he was angry. He got Granddad's old 45-70 rifle out of the bunkhouse, oiled it up and loaded it. Then he started walking over toward the brow of the hill to run the whole dam bunch of Swigert's gang out of the country. That is when Mother got into the act. Mother caught up to Dad. She asked him not to go. She told Dad that was all Swigert was waiting for. She said Swigert had planned it all just to get even with Dad, that Swigert would kill him and she did not want to be left.a widow with six children and another on the way. Dad heeded Mother's pleas, and put the rifle back in the bunkhouse. Granddad only grunted, and walked away. Granddad's cow shed was a three sided rock building with a straw roof. Sparrows always nested in the straw, and were a definite nuisance. Often times at night, the Davidson boys would take a lantern down to the shed, pull the sparrows out of their holes and then bat them with barrel staves while they were blinded by the lantern light. I thought that was great fun even though I very seldom hit one. One night while Arlin and I were bucketing some late born calves, we saw some Iantern light shining through a hole in the cow shed. We thought maybe Uncle Kermit was batting sparrows, so we went over to the shed and looked through the hole. Inside Granddad Has talking to Robert L. Parker and Mat Warner. We beat it back to the house. Granddad's temper was too short to take any chances. The next day Swigert's gang was gone. And so was Butch Cassidy's Model T. Ford which Uncle Hugh had put back in the carriage shed. Sometime later, Granddad decided to go back to Utah. Before he left, Dad wanted him to sign a lease on the place for the next year. Granddad refused to do it. He said a man who let a woman tell him what to do was no son of his. That is what tore the blanket. Granddad did not go back to Utah. Dad would work all day without saying a word to Granddad, beyond what was absolutely necessary. There wasn't any outright conflict, but there wasn't any real communication either. No more did Mother and Granddad talk of old days. Never again was Detective Swigert mentioned where any of us children could hear it. **Willie Carter wrote Dad a letter, apologizing for what he said. I still have the letter. 71 After Grandmother and the girls came back from Utah, we moved to northern Wyoming. Dad sold his little Baines wagon to Mary Watson, and used the money to make a down payment on an ancient, seven passenger Chandler car. Dad still owed Joe Guild the money for my hospital bill. The Watsons called Dad's wagon The Davidson Wagon. Virginia Watson slept in it when she cooked for Uncle Emery's shearing crew in 1937. 72 CASSIDY IN OREGON, SON IN NEVADA Once we left the Bridger Valley to go to northern Wyoming, we were no longer part of the tight knit family group which had centered for so long around the Am Davidson ranch. So, while I have gone into considerable detail in writing of Bridger Valley, it will no longer be necessary to go to that length now. I will henceforth restrain myself to writing mostly of the aftershocks that followed the events in Bridger Valley. There is nothing to tell about the first four years in northern Wyoming, except that Dad taught two years at Clearmont, and two years at Ucross; and then we moved into Sheridan, our first big town. Granddad died in Mount Pleasant, Utah on January 5, 1930. A few months later, in May or June, Grandmother came to visit us, and gave to me the piece of yellow rock LeRoy Kelly had given Granddad in 1919. As I mentioned before, LeRoy had said it was a wing broken off of a Deseret, but it looked much more like a wing of a yellow butterfly. When Dad noticed that it glowed in the dark, and said it must be a piece Bologna Stone, I went down to the Carnegie Library to read about Balogna Stone. The article I read said Balogna Stone is Barium Sulphate which has been strongly heated, and that thereafter if it is exposed to sunlight or artificial light it will glow for hours, giving off a soft golden fluorescense. My rock gave off a blue light, and it didn't need to be exposed to light. By nature, I have always been curious. Sitting on Dad and Mothers dresser was a piece of greenish-gray rock which Dad always used as a paperweight when he was teaching school. It seemed to me it would be very nice if Dad's paperweight would glow in the dark, so I picked it up and took it to the kitchen. It was heavy enough to be Barium Sulphate. Mother was just heating the kitchen stove up so she could bake bread. The center lid over the firebox was a nice red color, so I put the paper weight right in the middle to make another piece of Balogna Stone. Almost immediately the paperweight began to give off a horrible odour, and then a dark red powder began to form on the rock. Alarmed that I was ruining Dad's paperweight, I grabbed up a butcher knife to move it off of the hot lid. The rock fell on the lineoleum, and burned a hole in it, but even worse Mother's butcher knife turned an ugly black. I had to hide the evidence, so I put the coal bucket over the hole and tried to wash the butcher knife. The black color disappeared but the knife blade remained colored, as if it were plated with gold. It didn't matter what I tried to do, I always got caught and got a licking. It wasn't so bad this time. Dad's paperweight turned out to be the sample of gold ore the two boys had found on the mountain. Dad had brought it home in 73 his jumper pocket, thinking it was Mother's little Kodak camera. Dad went to Summer School at Laramie that year. He took the paperweight with him and had it tested by a professor attached to the Wyoming Geological Survey. It turned out that the rock contained Gold Selenide, a virtually unknown type of gold ore, and it was worth 17,000 Dollars a ton. Well, you can guess what I did. I burned my yellow rock that glowed in the dark to see if it had gold in it. It turned black and stayed black. When I left home, it was still in Dad's coat pocket. Finding out that the gold sample was worth $17,000 a ton must have made Dad think again about his trip to the Uinta Mountains, at least I seem to remember he told some Mormon missionaries about it, but the first record I have of it is in his diary of 1932. The following is a direct quote from his diary. THURSDAY, February 18th, 1932 A little warmer today. More students back in school today. More movie films came today. I wrote story of my trip to the Uinta Mountains. Milo read it and liked it. I hope it is good. A little later it turns out that Milo is the janitor at the Dayton School. The following Saturday the diary reveals Dad was planning to lease the John Weltner Ranch on Prairie Dog Creek. Then, less than a week later (March 1), the Lindeberg Baby was kidnapped. By Friday, March 18th, 1932, we were installed at the Weltner Ranch, Arlin had come down with the mumps and I arrived at the Dayton School to take Dad home for the week end. As I walked in he was letting the two lady school teachers read his story. In between the two dates, Dad had read his story to the Boy Scouts, and had let an artist, Hans Klieber, who was on the school board, and a Mr. Stone read his story. What he did not write is that I read his story as the two lady school teachers finished it**. The story as Dad wrote it contained all the nicknames, but no person other than himself was identified. But being as everyone knew Butch and Mat by their nicknames, rather than their true names, those two could be said to have been identified. The next notable incident occurred during the summer of 1934. Our sister Jessie was dusting in Mother's bedroom. On the corner of the dresser reposed Dad's collar box in which he used to keep both his cotton and his celluloid collars. It was ordinarily kept locked, but this day it was unlocked, so Jessie looked inside. Down on the bottom, under the collars, she found a gun wrapped in a blue and white silk kerchief Granddad had got at the Saint Louis International **One teacher was Miss Derrickson. She rode with us to Sheridan. 74 Exposition. Jessie was playing with the gun when Mother saw her. Mother nearly had a fit. The gun contained five live cartridges and one fired shell. Dad really made a killing in 1934. The two years before he had not been able to sell hardly any hay and we had only a few milk cows. In the late summer of 1934, Dad sold three thousand tons of hay to the Army remount officer for four dollars a ton. Dad didn't tell us then how much money he had made, but he did tell Arlin and I that he could afford to send us to college if we could get a part time job to help out. About the twentieth of September we left for college. Dad delivered Arlin to the campus of the Utah State Agricultural College, and then he took me down to Provo to go to the BYU. Dad then drove over to Price, Utah and returned to Mat Warner the white handled pistol he had had for thirteen years. Dad had seen some thing in a magazine or a newspaper that let him know Mat was still alive and where he was living. In 1935 old John Weltner was dead. The executor of his estate was selling the Prairie Dog place to the Holly Sugar Company for their tenants to raise sugar beets. Forty tenants with thirty acres each. To all appearances we were to be left out in the cold, and Dad began considering where to get another place or another job. It was during this time that Dad sent his story about the trip to find the Lost Rhodes Mine to Mart T. Christensen, head of the Wyoming Writer's Project, in an attempt to get on a New Deal payroll. Arlin wanted to go back to college in 1935. I didn't but I was willing to help him. He and I went down to the NYA office to borrow money for him, but didn't get it. Dad didn't think he should put up all the money in the face of no job and the tightening Great Depression. Dad said he could get along without us, so Arlin and I took the train to Spokane, Washington to get jobs on the Grand Coulee Dam. We didn't get a job on the dam, and we didn't have money enough to take the train back home, so we set out to get other jobs. There were too many stranded men looking for work around Spokane, so we went to Lewiston, Idaho and south on the Lewiston Hiway to Flora,Oregon. Arlin got a few day's work at Flora, but I didn't. No one ever thought I was big enough to do a full day's work. In Flora, we ate our two meals in a family style restaurant and we slept in straw piles. 75 One morning while Arlin and I were eating our morning meal, a man came into the restaurant, who was well known to the other people there. He was deeply bronzed, he had startling blue eyes, he was a little shorter than Dad but carried more weight**. He talked and joked with the men in the restaurant, and kidded the waitress. Anyone would have thought he was fifteen years younger than he appeared to be. I would not have payed such close attention to him if Arlin had not insisted he was Butch Cassidy. At first I was doubtful, but then I began to see in his actions the same sort of person who had masqueraded as the Devil at Robertson. We saw him several times and learned his name was Nathan LeBaron or Nathan LeBaron Parker. Arlin and I were talking about which name it was only a few days before Arlin mistook his medicine and ingested the overdose which caused his death. It is evidence, I believe, of how each member of the family was each beginning to go his own way, in that none of you now seem to remember Arlin and I ever went to Washington and Oregon in 1935. But then we were only gone for about three weeks. I do not have Dad's diary for 1935, and only a partial one for the last of 1936, so all I have is my own memory. When Arlin and I returned from Oregon, we told Dad about seeing George Parker. Sometime later there began to appear articles in the Sheridan Post about Butch Cassidy having been seen and recognized around Lander, Wyoming. Some of the articles identified Butch Cassidy as William Phillips of Seattle, or Spokane. I think this is the time the note I quoted before really referred to, so I will quote it again, just as it appears in Dad's notebook. "President Heber J. Grant says Brother Anonymous is apocryphal. Under the circumstances I thought I was justified in saying he was Butch Cassidy instead of Kelly (not the cattle buyer from Lyman). I may have been unwise." I cannot say for sure that his note refers to that time, but I do know Dad tried to get his written story back, and I am fairly positive Dad never told his Lost Mine story after that time, unless he told it after I left home in January of 1937. After that I was never around home long enough to know what did go on in the family. Looking through Dad's papers again, I find he did get a lease on the Herron place in 1935 and it appears it was before Arlin and I went to Spokane. The only crop he mentions for that year is a cellarful of apples, but Arlin did go back to college. The next year, in 1936, the grasshoppers and the Mormon crickets were so bad along Prairie Dog Creek that Dad raised no hay at all, and he cut the oats **Dad was 5 ft. 10, he weighed 165 pounds. 76 for hay when they were about ten inches high because the crickets were eating them. George Herron was more disappointed in the crop than Dad was, and terminated the lease. The Great Depression was late in hitting the Sheridan, Wyoming area, but when it was enjoined with the drought and the plagues of crickets and hoppers, it became the most depressed area in Wyoming. We were lucky to escape when we did. As it was, George Herron got all the money Dad received when he sold his farm machinery. You all moved to Salmon, Idaho in the summer of 1937. After Arlin and I returned from the northwest, I discovered girls, or to be more exact, I discovered Helen. Helen liked to dance and she would go with me if I could take her to a dance. At that time I was exactly five feet tall and weighed ninety pounds, not a most romantic character. A dance ticket at the Murphy Ranch on Piney Creek cost 10 cents. A gallon of gasoline cost 10 cents and a bottle of creme soda pop for Helen cost 5 cents. That was all I needed. If I could raise two-bits, I could take Helen to the dance. Of course it took more than a gallon of gas to drive up to the Murphy Ranch, but sometimes I could sell a ride to some other boy to get another dime. If I got that extra dime, it went, not for another bottle of soda pop for myself, but for an extra gallon of gasoline. Oh, it was deadly serious then, only amusing now. In Dad's diary for 1936 he says several times "Art is off bumming again." Or "Art hasn't been home for two weeks, don't know where he is." I knew where I was. I was trying to earn another two-bits so I could take Helen to the dance again. I was following a threshing machine around the country, just in case some farmer might need an extra hand. If I got a days work, it paid a dollar. If I didn't get a job, I could always make myself useful enough that I could get a meal. Straw piles make good beds. After the threshing was allover, Percy Roush offered me the chance to help him, working as an apprentice plumber. I grabbed the chance, without first learning apprentices do not earn pay, they only get a chance to learn. Well, learning is worthwhile. I stayed with him until I got a chance to set up merchandise in the new Montgomery Ward store in town. I wouldn't have quit Percy to go work for Montgomery Ward, if it hadn't been that Helen found someone else to take her to the dances. Eventually Percy would have given me a job, but Montgomery Ward was paying two-bits an hour and there was a chance I might get a job as a clerk in the store after the merchandise was set up. 77 I earned thirty two dollars before Montgomery Ward laid me off. I bought a wrist watch for Helen for Christmas at a cost of twenty five dollars, then she told me she was going to marry the other fellow. She didn't, but she said she was going to. So it was like Manna from Heaven when I received the letter from Uncle Emery offering me a job tying fleeces for his shearing crew at $2.50 a day. He intended to go to California at the middle of February, but I could come down earlier and help him get ready if I had nothing else to do. I told Helen about it, she was happy for me and promised to write me every week. I never did get a letter from her, and only learned much later that they were delivered to Uncle Arthur and almost caused Aunt Margaret to split the blankets. So it was, that on the 7th of January, 1937, I set off with all my worldly possessions to earn such a fortune that I could return in a few months and sweep Helen Rice off her unwilling feet. My worldly possessions consisted of seven dollars in cash, one pair of oxfords, one pair of Levi's, one pair of socks, two shirts, two shorts, two undershirts, Arlin's abandoned calf skin jacket and a Gem razor. I was like another Mormon Pioneer going to Zion in search of wealth and independence, and I had everything I owned on my back. It took me four days and 75 cents (the cost of three meals) to get to Uncle Emery's house in Ephraim, Utah. For me, that was like entering a different world. I found the townspeople in Ephraim to be secretive, unusually curious and still steeped in the traditions of the first Pioneers. That wasn't really true, but it is how it seemed to me at first. On the other hand, I found Uncle Emery to be outgoing, generous, always ready with a smile, a laugh and many a joke, both practical and subtle. If a person did not die laughing at Uncle Emery's jokes in the first half hour, it was because he had likely died of a busted gut trying to keep from laughing. Oh, the fun of it. I shall not ever forget how much fun it was. It was because he made it fun, that Uncle Emery could do the things he did. For underneath the fun, he had a mind that could calculate people, numbers, events and probabilities. Uncle Emery did not need a fleece tyer half as much as he needed a bookkeeper. All of you knew Uncle Emery, but none of you other than myself knew Gravy- Davy. That is what he was called, Gravy-Davy. That was his stock in trade. Thousands of people knew Gravy-Davy, but people didn't come to see him as they used to come see Am Davidson. Gravy went to them with his jokes and with his propositions, and he came back with their money. Davy never did seek to find a job. He made jobs, then he got some one else to do the jobs, and he collected money on the jobs and on the people who did the jobs. Davy could see ways to make money when other people could only see dispair. 78 Let me show you how it was. When Uncle Emery went to Utah to marry Mae Peterson, he was already a sheep shearer. Each spring he would go to California and work as a sheepshearer at the corrals owned and operated by the railroads. Sheepshearing was a railroad monopoly. Davy was a good sheepshearer, one of the best, but he could see that if he could get part of the profit the railroads were making, he would make more for himself. So he constructed a portable sheep shearing plant and took it to the sheepmen on their own range. Then he hired the best sheepshearers and the cheapest good corral help, and underbid every railroad shearing corral. All Davy wanted was The Margin. Davy could even find a Margin in ice. When the six largest construction companies in the United States went into a joint venture to build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River about twenty five miles from Las Vegas, Nevada, Las Vegas could hardly be called a town. It had been only a hamlet settled by the Mormons in the 1850's, and called Stewart's Ranch. In about 1901 it had become a section on the Salt Lake and San Pedro Railroad. At the time construction started on the dam, Las Vegas was a one-horse mining, stockman and railroad center. It was certainly not prepared to handle the thousands of construction workers that flooded in to work on the Hoover Dam. The one thing the workers didn't have and wanted most was ice, ice for drinks, for refrigeration and for cooling. Using his sheep shearing profits, Davy built an ice plant in Las Vegas. He sold his ice plant to others, with an overriding Margin and with a stipulation that he could use the ice plant to keep his milk, eggs and butter cool. Nothing out of the way at all, just a few pounds of milk and butter. Next Davy bought a panel truck with wire mesh around the box. He then went up to Wyoming and bought eggs and chickens from coal Miners around Rock Springs, particularly at Dines, Reliance and Superior, setting up a regular run of these products to Las Vegas. Next he bought a dairy herd in Pahrump, Nevada, moved it into Las Vegas, and began to sell milk, butter and eggs to many homes around town. Although the new owners of the ice plant objected, Davy used the ice plant to keep his dairy products cool, because he did have the agreement permitting him to do so. So large did Davy's business become, he had to hire his brother, Hans Arthur, to run the business for him while he continued with his shearing runs. Next Davy went to Colorado, where near Juniper Springs he leased a few sections of ground from an individual for grazing purposes. There he built the largest stationary shearing plant in the world, on the last remaining sheep drive- trail in the country. He had made his plans carefully. He built the plant, not on the privately owned ground, but on Federally owned ground immediately adjoining it. The individual thought the plant was on his ground until he tried to 79 raise the rent, then he found it wise to continue the lease because the sheep would have eaten all his feed anyway. The Bureau of Land Management (or whatever it was then called) didn't find the plant was on government property for more than twenty years. When they did find out, they burned it down. But Davy had had the use of it for twenty years without it costing one cent for rent or taxes. Gravy-Davy did shade the odds in favor of his Margin, and there were some people who thought he was slightly more or slightly less than halfway crooked. But there was never a one who came to find out which way it really was, that didn't go away laughing at another good joke. I was closely associated with Gravy-Davy, and until the War, I kept his books for him, so I knew he was honest to the smallest penny. During all the time I was associated with him, I knew of only two things which marred his happiness. The first was the early death of his first son. The second was the death of a young man who had come with the 100 head of dairy cattle from Pahrump, and who had remained to work in the Creamery in the Spring of 1933. Before long this young man decided he wanted to get married, too, so he left Uncle Emery's employ, to take a high paying job with one of the big construction companies working on the Hoover Dam. Two or three days later he was killed in an accident. The young man was the son of the man who had masqueraded as the Devil and helped Uncle Emery and Juke Fields carry wounded Al Scrugg down the basement stairs. Because I was so closely connected with the affairs of Uncle Emery, I looked up the record of his death in the Nye County Courthouse. The body of Charles C. Topping, son of Robert L. and Marion Bennion Parker, was claimed by Ella McKreig who, stating she was the nearest living relative of the young man and from Laramie, Wyoming, shipped the body of her son to be buried at the School House Cemetery in Asotin County, Washington. Pages 123-142 of paper copies are missing. The following page is numbered 143. 80 And, now, before I forget, here is a photograph of a painting which hangs on my living room wall. Sometimes I tell people who notice the painting that is a picture of Granddad's Golden Treasure which was not gold. Sometimes I say that it is a picture of WA-KARA, the Indian Chief, and sometimes that it is a picture of WAH-KEERA-SHIN-OBB, the Sacred Treasure of the Ute Indians. Sometimes that it is EL DORADO, the man dusted with gold. 81