An Interview With

Bartley H. & Lilly E. O'Toole





An Oral History conducted and edited by

Robert D. McCracken





Nye County Town History Project

Nye County, Nevada

Tonopah

1990





COPYRIGHT 1991

Nye County Town History Project

Nye County Commissioners

Tonopah, Nevada

89049





Bart and Lilly O'Toole

June 1987





CONTENTS



Preface



Acknowledgments



Introduction



CHAPTER ONE

Bart's parents, Bartley and Mary Winters O'Toole; Grandfather O'Toole's travels and his arrival in Nye County; Grandfather O'Toole's marriage and family; buying the Welch Ranch; Grandfather O'Toole's sheep business; gardens in the Reese River Valley; ranches in the Reese River Valley before the 1930s; the climate in the valley; an outbreak of rabies; cattle drives.



CHAPTER TWO

Further discussion of cattle drives; social life in the valley; Bart's mother; schools in the valley; original homesteaders; the Welch family; buying the Welch Ranch in the mid-1920s; remarks on working with horses and on haying and natural hay; the Reese River Valley in the late 1800s; social life in the valley in the 1940s and 1950s; remarks on walking.



CHAPTER THREE

Grandfather O'Toole, Jack O'Toole and a shooting; Indians in the Reese River Valley in the old days and the current Yomba Shoshone Reservation; the effects of the Depression on valley ranchers; purchasing the Whooley Ranch; the creation of the Yomba Reservation; Lilly's family background - ranching in Dixie Valley and then Fallon; Lilly and Bart net in high school; their children.



CHAPTER FOUR

Thoughts on various styles of range management; the Taylor Grazing Act; financing a ranch; growing up as the only child in a group of adults; school in Ione and boarding with the Cislinis and other families in Ione and Fallon; an earthquake in Ione Valley; the strength of the old-timers.



CHAPTER FIVE

Further discussion of the old-timers' toughness and stoicism; uncles George and Arthur O'Toole; the O'Toole brothers in general; social life in the Reese River Valley in the 1940s and 1950s; food on the O'Tooles' ranch.



CHAPTER SIX

Further discussion of ranch food; modernizing the ranch; roads and high water in the Reese River Valley; smoking meat; more remarks on ranch food; telephones in the valley, past and present; working outside the ranch; mining in the area during the Depression and in the 1950s and 1960s.



CHAPTER SEVEN

Further discussion of area mines; lost gold mines and lost gold; Mr. Whooley - stonemason and bricklayer; practical jokes; some of the houses Mr. Whooley built; the stage route through the valley; building a corral; adobe construction; catalog shopping.



CHAPTER EIGHT

Shopping in bulk; the Hiskey Stage and the Gandolfos; families in Ione in the 1940s and 1950s; Billy Cislini's store in Ione; mining in the Ione area; haying with horses, then with motorized equipment.



CHAPTER NINE

Raising horses; the weather in the Reese River Valley; cattle rustling; methods of breeding cattle; predators killing cattle; wildlife in the valley; raising a family in an isolated area and travels to schools; observations on cattle behavior.



CHAPTER TEN

Further discussion of cattle behavior; thoughts on man's relation-ship to the land; Bart and Lilly's children; a photo shoot with Time magazine; the wild horses in Nevada and animal rights advocates.



Index





PREFACE




The Nye County Town History Project (NCTHP) engages in interviewing people who can provide firsthand descriptions of the individuals, events, and places that give history its substance. The products of this research are the tapes of the interviews and their transcriptions.

In themselves, oral history interviews are not history. However, they often contain valuable primary source material, as useful in the process of historiography as the written sources to which historians have customarily turned. Verifying the accuracy of all of the statements made in the course of an interview would require more time and money than the NCTHP's operating budget permits. The program can vouch that the statements were made, but it cannot attest that they are free of error. Accordingly, oral histories should be read with the same prudence that the reader exercises when consulting government records, newspaper accounts, diaries, and other sources of historical information.

It is the policy of the NCTHP to produce transcripts that are as close to verbatim as possible, but some alteration of the text is generally both unavoidable and desirable. When human speech is captured in print the result can be a morass of tangled syntax, false starts, and incomplete sentences, sometimes verging on incoherency. The type font contains no symbols for the physical gestures and the diverse vocal modulations that are integral parts of communication through speech. Experience shows that totally verbatim transcripts are often largely unreadable and therefore a waste of the resources expended in their production. While keeping alterations to a minimum the NCTHP will, in preparing a text

a. generally delete false starts, redundancies and the uhs, ahs and other noises with which speech is often sprinkled;

b. occasionally compress language that would be confusing to the reader in unaltered form;

c. rarely shift a portion of a transcript to place it in its proper context;

d. enclose in [brackets] explanatory information or words that were not uttered but have been added to render the text intelligible; and

e. make every effort to correctly spell the names of all individnals and places, recognizing that an occasional word may be misspelled because no authoritative source on its correct spelling was found.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS




As project director, I would like to express my deep appreciation to those who participated in the Nye County 'Town History Project (NCTHP). It was an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to obtain oral histories from so many wonderful individuals. I was welcomed into many homes—in many cases as a stranger--and was allowed to share in the recollection of local history. In a number of cases I had the opportunity to interview Nye County residents whom I have known and admired since I was a teenager; these experiences were especially gratifying. I thank the residents throughout Nye County and Nevada--too numerous to mention by name—who provided assistance, information, and photographs. They helped make the successful completion of this project possible.

Appreciation goes to Chairman Joe S. Garcia, Jr., Robert N. "Bobby" Revert, and Patricia S. Mankins, the Nye County commissioners who initiated this project. Mr. Garcia and Mr. Revert, in particular, showed deep interest and unyielding support for the project from its inception. Thanks also go to current commissioners Richard L. Carver and Barbara J. Raper, who have since joined Mr. Revert on the board and who have continued the project with enthusiastic support. Stephen T. Bradhurst, Jr., planning consultant for Nye County, gave unwavering support and advocacy of the project within Nye County and before the State of Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office and the United States Department of Energy; both entities provided funds for this project. Thanks are also extended to Mr. Bradhurst for his advice and input regarding the conduct of the research and for constantly serving as a sounding board when methodological problems were worked out. This project would never have become a reality without the enthusiastic support of the Nye County commissioners and Mr. Bradhurst.

Jean Charney served as administrative assistant, editor, indexer, and typist throughout the project; her services have been indispensable. Louise Terrell provided considerable assistance in transcribing many of the oral histories; Barbara Douglass also transcribed a number of interviews. Transcribing, typing, editing, and indexing were provided at various times by Jodie Hanson, Alice Levine, Mike Green, Cynthia Tremblay, and Jean Stoess. Jared Charney contributed essential word processing skills. Maire Hayes, Michelle Starika, Anita Coryell, Jodie Hanson, Michelle Welsh, Lindsay Schumacher, and Shena Salzmann shouldered the herculean task of proofreading the oral histories. Gretchen Loeffler and Bambi McCracken assisted in numerous secretarial and clerical duties. Phillip Earl of the Nevada Historical Society contributed valuable support and criticism throughout the project, and Tan King at the Oral History Program of the University of Nevada at Reno served as a consulting oral historian. Much deserved thanks are extended to all these persons.

All material for the NCTHP was prepared with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy, Grant No. DE-FG08-89NV10820. However, any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of DOE.

--Robert D. MCCracken

Tonopah, Nevada

1990





INTRODUCTION




Historians generally consider the year 1890 as the end of the American frontier. By then, most of the western United States had been settled, ranches and farms developed, communities established, and roads and railroads constructed. The mining boomtowns, based on the lure of overnight riches from newly developed lodes, were but a memory.

Although Nevada was granted statehood in 1864, examination of any map of the state from the late 1800s shows that while much of the state was mapped and its geographical features named, a vast region-stretching from Belmont south to the Las Vegas meadows, comprising most of Nye County--remained largely unsettled and unmapped. In 1890 most of southcentral Nevada remained very much a frontier, and it continued to be for at least another twenty years.

The great mining booms at Tonopah (1900), Goldfield (1902), and Rhyolite (1904) represent the last major flowering of what might be called the Old West in the United States. Consequently, southcentral Nevada, notably Nye County, remains close to the American frontier; closer, perhaps, than any other region of the American West. In a real sense, a significant part of the frontier can still be found in southcentral Nevada. It exists in the attitudes, values, lifestyles, and memories of area residents. The frontier-like character of the area also is visible in the relatively undisturbed quality of the natural environment, most of it essentially untouched by human hands.

A survey of written sources on southcentral Nevada's history reveals some material from the boomtown period from 1900 to about 1915, but very little on the area after around 1920. The volume of available sources varies from town to town: A fair amount of literature, for instance, can be found covering Tonopah's first two decades of existence, and the town has had a newspaper continuously since its first year. In contrast, relatively little is known about the early days of Gabbs, Round Mountain, Manhattan, Beatty, Amargosa Valley, and Pahrump. Gabbs's only newspaper was published intermittently between 1974 and 1976. Round Mountain's only newspaper, the Round Mountain Nugget, was published between 1906 and 1910. Manhattan had newspaper coverage for most of the years between 1906 and 1922. Amargosa Valley has never had a newspaper; Beatty's independent paper folded in 1912. Pahrump's first newspaper did not appear until 1971. All six communities received only spotty coverage in the newspapers of other communities after their own papers folded, although Beatty was served by the Beatty Bulletin, which was published as a supplement to the Goldfield News between 1947 and 1956. Consequently, most information on the history of southcentral Nevada after 1920 is stored in the memories of individuals who are still living.

Aware of Nye County's close ties to our nation's frontier past, and recognizing that few written sources on local history are available, especially after about 1920, the Nye County Commissioners initiated the Nye County Town History Project (NCTHP). The NCTHP represents an effort to systematically collect and preserve information on the history of Nye County. The centerpiece of the NCTHP is a large set of interviews conducted with individuals who had knowledge of local history. Each interview was recorded, transcribed, and then edited lightly to preserve the language and speech patterns of those interviewed. All oral history interviews have been printed on acid-free paper and bound and archived in Nye County libraries, Special Collections in the James R. Dickinson Library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and at other archival sites located throughout Nevada. The interviews vary in length and detail, but together they form a never-before-available composite picture of each community's life and development. The collection of interviews for each community can be compared to a bouquet: Each flower in the bouquet is unique--some are large, others are small--yet each adds to the total image. In sum, the interviews provide a composite view of community and county history, revealing the flow of life and events for a part of Nevada that has heretofore been largely neglected by historians.

Collection of the oral histories has been accompanied by the assembling of a set of photographs depicting each community's history. These pictures have been obtained from participants in the oral history interviews and other present and past Nye County residents. In all, more than 1,000 photos have been collected and carefully identified. Complete sets of the photographs have been archived along with the oral histories.

On the basis of the oral interviews as well as existing written sources, histories have been prepared for the major communities in Nye County. These histories also have been archived.

The town history project is one component of a Nye County program to determine the socioeconomic impacts of a federal proposal to build and operate a nuclear waste repository in southcentral Nye County. The repository, which would be located inside a mountain (Yucca Mountain), would be the nation's first, and possibly only, permanent disposal site for high-level radioactive waste. The Nye County Board of County Commissioners initiated the NCTHP in 1987 in order to collect information on the origin, history, traditions, and quality of life of Nye County communities that may be impacted by a repository. If the repository is constructed, it will remain a source of interest for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years to come, and future generations will likely want to know more about the people who once resided near the site. In the event that government policy changes and a high-level nuclear waste repository is not constructed in Nye County, material compiled by the NCTHP will remain for the use and enjoyment of all.

--R.D.M.





This is Robert McCracken talking to Bart and Lilly O'Toole at their home in Reese River Valley, Nevada, May 1 and 11, 1990.




CHAPTER ONE



RM: Bart, why don't we start by you telling me your name as it reads on your birth certificate.



BO: Bartley Henry O'Toole.



RM: And when and where were you born?



BO: I was born December 23, 1940, in St. Mary's in Reno.



RM: And could you tell me your father's name?



BO: Bartley, Augusta O'Toole, and the grandfather was Bartholomew.



RM: And when and where was your father born?



BO: He was born in Washington Canyon or Austin, in July 1889.



RM: And what was your mother's maiden name?



BO: Mary Louise Winters.



RM: And when and where was she born?



BO: She was born in Elko in 1908. Her family had a ranch in White Rock, Nevada, up north of Elko.



RM: I understand that your family has very deep roots in Nevada and in the Reese River area. Why don't we begin by you giving me kind of your family history. I assume you're Irish, right?



BO: Well, people claim I am. I don't know.



RM: [laughs] Bart O'Toole has got to be one of the best names I've ever heard.



LO: You mean you think that's obviously Irish?



RM: Oh, I think it's a great name. It's a name you'd find in a novel or something.



LO: We understand that O'Toole is as common in Ireland as Smith and Jones are here.



BO: We're going to find out - we hope - one of these days.



LO: What we understand from the family is that Bart's grandfather came from Ireland to the east coast in the 1860s. He apparently landed in New Jersey and traveled around Cape Horn twice.



RM: Twice?



BO: Yes. He came and then he went back and then he . . .



LO: He's going to have to have been brought here in the 1850s then, because he landed in Austin in 1864.



BO: But he came and then he went right back.



RM: He came to Nevada or just to California?



BO: Came to California and then came over and helped build the railroad over the Sierras. He got the money from there and went to California and bought a bunch of sheep and drove the sheep from there to here and [went into] the sheep business.



RM: Was that after he went back?



BO: That was after he vent back. Then he came over here and they just settled. He had the Joaquins down here, and he had the camp up here at Mohawk, and . . .



RM: Now the Joaquins are what?



BO: There was a Joaquin family, and he had the Joaquin field that he bought from them.



LO: To this day, there's a piece of ground down here by Tony Testolin's that everybody calls the Joaquin field.



BO: He had that and a little place in Washington Canyon.

RM: Now, where is Washington Canyon?



BO: It's about 15 miles north of here.



LO: Parts of it are in Nye County, parts of it are in Lander.



BO: It's right on the Nye/Lander County line.



RM: Is it in the Toiyabes or the Shoshones?



BO: It's in the Toiyabes. It's on this side. And then he married my grandmother.



LO: It's kind of foggy in my mind how they met. We know that she was married before and that she had 2 daughters and they both died, one as about a 20-year-old (she's buried in Austin) and the other as an infant.



RM: What was her maiden name, do you know



LO: That I don't know; her first name was Margaret.



BO: Her maiden name was Kelly.



RM: Where did she come from?



BO: New Jersey.



RM: Did she come out here with her family, or . . . ?



BO: Not that I know of. I don't know what she came out here for.



LO: Was it with her first husband, maybe?



BO: Maybe with her first husband, I don't know. But I know that her name was Kelly.



RM: And you say she had 2 daughters by her first marriage?



BO: Yes.



LO: Tessabel is the one who was not much older than your dad, because he had that picture.



BO: Right, she was just 2 years older.



LO: Is she the one that was married to Clifford?



BO: Right.



LO: And she died when she was about 20. It was the older child who died as an infant.



BO: Right.



RM: OK. She had these children, and they died before she married your grandfather?



BO: No. Tessabel was only a year older than my dad.



LO: Right. She would have lived until your dad was 18 or 19 years old.



BO: She lived up into the 1900s - about 1910, I would imagine.



RM: Oh, OK. What did she die of?



BO: Scarlet fever, I think, or rheumatic fever.



RM: Which of the Cliffords was she married to?



BO: I really don't know that. All I know is that she was married to the father of Doc Clifford in Fallon. His dad's first wife would have been Tessabel, and when she died he remarried this other lady who is Doc's mother.



RM: And who's Doc, now? (I guess I don't know all the Cliffords. The only Cliffords I know are at Stone Cabin.)



BO: They're related to the Cliffords at Stone Cabin.



RM: Bore did Margaret Kelly meet your grandfather?



BO: I don't know. I think they net in Austin, but I don't know how.



RM: And about what year would they have gotten married?



BO: That I don't know either.



LO: Well, we can figure that is was close to the time . . . your dad was born in the 1890s.



BO: It had to have been in the 1880s - I would say '80 to '87 or '86, somewhere in that neighborhood.



RM: OK. And meanwhile your grandfather had a small ranch here?



BO: Well, he ran a lot of sheep. He had 12,000 head of sheep.



RM: Wow. And where did he pasture them?



BO: They just were on the open range. There was no BLM, there was no Forest [Service] . . . He summered them in the mountains here and to the east of us on the Toiyabes, then in the wintertime he went down into Ione Valley and down around Gabbs and Lodi and that area and wintered the sheep down there.



RM: Oh. And he had his home here.



BO: Yes. He lived down here at Washington.



RM: At Washington. OK. And he lived with your grandmother after they got married.



BO: Yes.



RM: How many children did they have?



LO: Well, your dad was the oldest . . .



RM: Let's go through their names then, can we?



LO: OK.



BO: All right. You want to count just the ones that lived.



LO: Your dad - Bartley Augusta.



BO: And then there was John Joseph and George Washington and Arthur Eugene and then . .



LO: Billy.



BO: What's Alice? I can't think of Alice's middle name.



LO: I can't think of it either.



RM: Anyway, Alice O'Toole.



BO: OK. And then there was Lawrence William.



RM: And could you give an overview of what happened to them? For instance, did they all stay in the valley?



BO: They all stayed in the valley until they died.



RM: So they spent their lives here.



BO: All their lives were lived right here in the valley.



RM Is that right? Did they each have their own ranch?



BO: Well, they all worked together and bought the ranches. They started out with the Washington - they homesteaded down there on the valley. They had a little• place in the canyon, and then they homesteaded down on the valley. It had to have been somewhere around the 1890s to 1900 and so on because my dad could remember it. He told me that he went out with my grandfather when he cleaned all the sagebrush and stuff off the ground.



RM: Is that right? Wow.



LO: He used a grubbing hoe - they grubbed them off with a grubbing hoe.



RM: What is a grubbing hoe, just for the record?



BO: It's an ax on one side and a hoe on the other. Today I've seen the kind the Forest Service has - they call them a polaski. They're built a lot lighter than the old grubbing hoe.



RM It was a heavy thing?



BO: It was a lot heavier thing.



RM: Did all of your grandfather's children have their own families?



BO: None. My dad was the only one who married. Well, my aunt married and 'moved to Alaska, but nobody ever told me what happened or anything. She came home within a year.



RM So they just weren't the marrying kind.



BO: Yes.



LO: They kind of went in pairs because Billy and Alice (we call Lawrence Billy) stayed down on the home place where the original homestead was.



RM: And that was at Washington?



LO: And the Washington property. Then Bart's dad and Joe (Joe was John Joseph) bought this place in1924 or '25.



RM: Now this place is known as what?



LO: We call it the home ranch.



BO: It was bought from Joe Welch.



LO: And Joe Welch had apparently shot himself here in the corral.



BO: Right. He accidentally shot himself right here in the corral. There was a coyote out in the field, and he went down to get his horse and reached down to get the gun, and after he got on the horse it went off and shot him right there at the shed.



RM: Wow. Did it kill him?



BO: It killed him. And his sister was here - I don't know what year that was.



LO: Who did they buy the place from?



BO: They bought it from the sister, Annie. She went to Los Angeles and I don't know [what happened to her].



RM: Could we talk a little bit about what kind of operation they had up until about 1924? What crops did they grow and what animals did they raise and . . . ?



BO: Ever since my dad was 10 or 12 years old, when Berlin was going, he ran a freight wagon. He was a teamster. They raised grain, lots of grain, down on the home farm.



RM: Which grains did they raise?



BO: Mostly wheat and barley and oats - a lot of oats. Then they combined it and harvested it and stored it, and in the wintertime my dad would haul it to Berlin and Ione and Austin for the mines and the teams and so forth. My dad told me he would leave home at sunup headed for Ione and Berlin, and the way the old road went, by noon he was just straight across from where the house was - he had to go clear around to come back up.



LO: You might get an indication . . . from the house at Washington Canyon, how many miles would it be to Ione?



BO: Well, from Washington to Ione was . . . it's 16 from here to Ione, and Berlin was another 6, so that would have been about 22 . . .



LO: And another 15 that way.



BO: About 15 that way, so 37 miles from there to Berlin, where he hauled the grain.



RM: That was at the Washington place.



BO: Yes, which is north of us.



RM: And how far north of you is the Washington place?



BO: About 15 miles.



LO: Can I interrupt to ask Bart to tell how his grandfather lost all of his sheep in Ione Valley when it was too cold?



BO: It was in the winter of '89. He went to Ione Valley with 12,000 head and came back with 1100. The snow covered everything up down there. And that was the winter my dad was born.



RM: Did they starve or did they freeze?



BO: They starved to death and froze to death.



RM: Oh my God.



LO: So basically he started over again.



BO: Yes, he went broke that winter and started over again.



RM: How long did they stay in the sheep business?



BO: Well, if I get to thinking about it, that's when he went broke and lost this place and the Joaquin field and Mohawk. After that they homesteaded down on the flat and started over. That would have been down below Washington.



RM: Which places did he actually homestead himself and which did he buy?



BO: I don't know [about the areas other than] on the flat and Washington.



LO: I got the idea all of that . . . didn't they do something up in the canyon?



BO: No, the canyon part of it was, I think, my grandmother's own.



LO: OK - that came with her when she married him?



BO: Right. Her first husband must have had something there when they were mining.



RM: Oh, now where was that?



BO: Up in Washington Canyon itself.



RM: So he got some of that when he married her?



BO: Yes.



RM: I see. So maybe [her first husband] was a farmer or rancher or something too?



BO: To start with he might have been, yes. Or he might have had a farm there. Maybe he had a garden up in there, because there were a lot of gardens in a lot of the canyons. In Crane Creek up here there was a dairy



RM: Is that right? We're talking 1880s, right?



BO: Yes - in the 1800s.



LO: There was a lot of mining in this area.



BO: And there was no way to get stuff in here, so everything was raised locally.



RM: Which other canyons were they growing in at that time?



BO: Oh, they had gardens up in Washington and Crane Canyon and Mohawk.



LO: And obviously where your dad used to raise his garden, in Stewart Creek And down here on the flat there's a place you told me where there were gardens.



BO: Oh yes, but that's down at the mouth of Riley out on the flat. There was a garden there, and the post is still there. I can remember the early '40s when they still did a few things there.



RM: Now, where was this?



BO: Down here on the flat. It's about 3 or 4 miles from the house.



LO: It would be out of the mouth of Riley Creek.



BO: They did a lot of gardening and [raised] beef. I can remember being a kid and when I was 5 and 6 years old my dad and the others used to butcher a beef every other day and haul the meat to Penelas and to Grantsville, which is over by Berlin, until they shut down in '46 and '47.



RM: When your grandfather lost his sheep did he stay in the sheep business or did he switch to cows?



BO: They always had sheep and then they got cows, too, and started in the cow business. My uncle and dad and so on started more in the cow business.



RM: Were there other sheepmen in the area at that time?



BO: Not that I know of. There were lots of cattlemen. There were a lot of ranches in this valley in the early times: The Keoughs and the . .



RM: Why don't we start south and work north, and give me the names of the ranchers in the valley?



BO: OK. I'm going by what my dad told me, so this would be in the '20s or '10s, [in those years].



BO: There were the Bells . . .



RM: Were the Bells the farthest south?



BO: Well, there was another person farther south but I can't think of his name right now. This side of the Bells were the Keoughs and then this side of them were the Schmallings and then this side of them were the Derringers and then the Worthingtons and . . . this had to have been all prior to the '30s, because they all went broke in the '30s and left. Then we got this place so we would have been here in 1925. And then there were the Bowlers . .



RM: How many acres did your family have here?



BO: There were 800-and-something here.



LO: You've added some.



BO: Yes, but I think it was 820 or something originally. And then there were the Bowlers and then the Whooleys and the Heaths . . .



LO: Is that who Mrs. Hayden is, a Heath?



BO: Right. And then there were the Wallaces and . . .



RM: Tell me when we're at the Nye County line.



BO: The Wallaces went past the Nye County line.



LO: The line goes like this, so when . . .



RM: The line goes diagonally.



LO: It's kind of kitty corner, so part of Washington Canyon is Nye County. The piece of ground that your grandmother had originally would have been in Nye County, and the Wallaces would have been the end of Nye County.



RM: Oh, OK. Could we talk a little bit about the growing season here and the conditions that these early farmers must have experienced? Could you name some more of the crops that they grew?



BO: I don't know hardly anything that they grew because of the frost thing here. They grew a lot of things in the canyons. Lilly can probably tell you better; she can still grow just about what they grew then.



LO: All root crops: wonderful potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets . .



RM: The root crops do better than the leaf crops?



BO: Yes. And lettuces do fine.



LO: We have good head lettuce here because of the cold. weather. But you always tell me that your dad grew some corn up in the . . .



BO: Up in the canyon he did grow corn.



RM: Why can you grow things in the canyon that you can't grow out here [in the valley)?



BO: Because the wind comes down through there, I think, all the time and they're just a little bit higher than the valley and all the cold settles.



RM: I see. So it's a little warmer up in the canyons than it is out in the valley.



BO: Oh yes. I can remember going to school in Ione and staying with people over there. God, we had strawberries all the time at Easter over there, and over here you don't get them.



RM: Wow. What is the growing season here? When can you put things out?



LO: Well let's . .



BO: Be honest, Mom.



LO: Be honest? [chuckles] Well, I've planted my garden as late as June 1st and I've lost it sometimes. But I'd say June 1st to August 30th is probably about it, and you're apt to get a couple of freezes in that time frame.



RM: Do you mean in early June or late August?



LO: Both. Once, years ago, we had 5 degrees on the Fourth of July. The kids were small so that's been about 25 years ago.



RM: Do any fruit trees grow here?



BO: Yes. There are apple trees up in Washington Canyon, and there used to be apple trees in Stewart Creek . . .



LO: There's a winter pear.



BO: There are winter pears down there in Washington. So up in the canyons you can raise fruit.



RM: What are the challenges that you face with stock, aside from losing all your sheep in a bad winter?



LO: Several times we've had disease outbreaks.



BO: Yes, they had blackleg and things like that.



RM: What exactly is blackleg?



BO: I don't know. It's a disease that kills them, that's all I can remember. When I was a little kid a couple [of sheep] died, and we went out and their skin felt like paper.



LO: Anthrax was another thing.



RM: They had anthrax here?



LO: They had anthrax. They also were bothered by rabies. Tell about the cow getting rabies and chasing them. And they had the coyotes look in the window and several things like that. His dad used to always warn us about rabies - he didn't really take this rabies vaccine as too reliable. I've never seen an animal with rabies, have you?



RM: No.



LO: I don't think Bart has, either.



BO: No.



LO: His dad said that the coyotes had an outbreak of it, and they would come and look right in the window of the houses. Because when they have rabies they're not afraid of anything and they're terribly thirsty. And the cows got it and weren't afraid. They were so crazed by the rabies that they chased them.



RM: When was this, about, would you say?



LO: This has got to have been in the '20s and '30s.



RM: Has there been a problem with rabies in more recent years?



BO: We haven't had any, but we vaccinate for everything; and for rabies, it would be coyotes or dogs and [the animals are] all vaccinated, so I don't know of any.



LO: Well, a couple of years ago there was that deal with the guy in Austin who got the bat that had rabies.



RM: Are there many-bats around here?



BO: We have quite a few around here in the evenings in the summertime.



RM: What are some of the other problems of raising stock?



BO: We've never had really particularly bad luck with cattle. They used to run a lot of cattle over in Ione Valley years ago. They quit because they lost a lot to the winter and to rustling and so forth.



RM: Oh really? Back in the '20s?



BO: Twenties and '30s.



RM: Is that right? Is rustling a problem for the ranchers here?



BO: Oh, I think yes. I think it's a bigger problem today than it was then.



LO: People have so many more ways of getting them out of here - little gooseneck trailers, portable corrals and portable chutes and things like that.



RM: Have you lost stock to rustlers?



BO: Oh yes. They've gone somewhere. We've never been able to find them or account for them, and when you lose 10 or 15 head or so, you know that they went someplace. My folks used to have a cattle drive for everybody in the valley. They started right here at this place and brought all the cattle together in the fall and then they drove them from here to Fallon.



RM: Oh really? Was that just your family or was it all the ranchers?



BO: That was all the ranchers in the valley.



RM: And this would be their head point?



BO: Yes, their starting point. They would leave here with 1000 to 1500 head and take them to Fallon.



RM: Could you describe the route that they would take?



BO: They went from here just straight west and up over the head of Barrett Canyon. Up in Barrett they took the right fork and then went up and down Gold Park. They left here at 4:00 in the morning and the first night they would make it to Camel Creek.



RM: Which is on the other side of the Shoshone Mountains?



BO: Yes. I don't what they call them over there.



LO: It's whatever mountain range Green Springs is in.



BO: And that would be it. Then they went from there over the top of Carroll Summit. They did this when it was still considered the Lincoln Highway. And then they went to Eastgate the next day.



LO: Tell about the place where your dad cooked breakfast.



BO: My dad cooked breakfast on this side of Carroll Summit. There's a cave up on this side right on the turn, and you can still see the smoke and chimney and everything where he cooked breakfast for them as they went - he ran the chuckwagon. This was the '20s and early '30s. From Eastgate they went to Middlegate and they pumped water for them at Middlegate - there was a well there. Then they went the rest of the way without water into Fallon. Her dad and some other people drilled a well at Frenchmans, but that was later on, so they went that far the one time. And then the next day they would get out and go on over. On the other side, over by Sand Mountain, there was a boardinghouse, but they charged a nickel a head to water the cattle so they wouldn't water them - they would just let them be dry and go on in the next day.



LO: How many miles did they go dry, do you suppose?



BO: Oh, 40 miles.



RM: Is that a longways for a cow?



BO: I guess it would be, the way they talked. Then they took them and trail drove them to the railroad at Mina and loaded them, too. When they did that they sold the guy the cattle here and he had it set up for them to move them. He [said] he would have water at all the places going, but he never had water anywhere and they never got any rest or anything. By the time they got over there my uncles and dad told me that the cows were really far out because of no water. They were hard to handle.





CHAPTER TWO




RM: You were saying that cows lose their thinking when they get dry.



LO: Also their eyes turn terribly red. Now, tell us who was on the drive. It was George and Arthur and your dad . .



BO: And Joe.



LO: So 4 of the brothers were on this particular cattle drive.



BO: And they had one young kid then who fell off the horse [when he went to] sleep, who later was your state comptroller, George McGowan.



RM: Is that right? He was so tired he fell off his horse?



LO: He was 16 or 17 years old.



RM: But they would drive a herd of 1000 head or more over to Mina?



BO: Yes. But they only did it that way one year. The buyer didn't fulfill his part of the deal so they wouldn't go that way again. It was too far without water.



RM: Is that farther than Fallon?



BO: No, it's closer. Well, I guess it would be about the same distance. From here to Fallon as they drove the cows is only about 75 miles. And from here to Mina you drive down to a brand inspection and it's about . . .



LO: Well, I always figure it's 50 miles right to where I turn to go to Finger Rock. I don't know past there. It's about 30 miles from Gabbs to Mina, isn't it?



BC: Yes. So it'd be about 80 miles - about the same distance.



RM: What kinds of cattle did your grandfather run?



BO:, Shorthorns.

RM: Why was that, do you think?



BO: I don't know. My folks always liked shorthorns. They said they produce more milk and so on.



RM: Do you know what kind of sheep they ran?



BO: I have no idea.



RM: Do you still use shorthorns?



BO: We have shorthorns, but we cross them with Herefords and Angus.



RM: When did you bring in the Herefords and Angus?



BO: I don't know. They had a shorthorn-Hereford cross ever since I was a little kid. My dad and his brothers started that.



RM: One thing I wanted to ask you about is the social life in the valley when your dad had the ranch. What kind of social life was there?



LO: I think they had a lot, because his mother was a schoolteacher. She played the piano. I think that was a big thing. They would gather at the schoolhouse and there were several schoolhouses, not just one.



BO: There was one just north of us 3 miles and then there was another one down here at Dutch Flat, which is just a little bit south of Stewart Creek behind the Keough place. So they would go to one or the other.



LO: I think they did a lot of dancing and she always played the piano. Everybody gathered and . . .



RM: How did your dad net your mother?





BO: He met her as a schoolteacher when she came by Welches' down here to teach school.

RM: Where did she come from?



BO: She came from Reno. She graduated from the university and then she was over in Smoky Valley and taught school over there one or two years and then she moved over . .



RM: And what year would that have been?



BO: That was in the '30s.



RM: And then she came over here to teach?



BO: Yes, at Welches' down here.



LO: She was an unheard of thing. She was a divorced lady raising a child on her own. So she supported herself by being a schoolteacher and that's how your dad…..



RM: Did she live with the ranchers?



BO: Well, they had little houses right there for them. At the school that was just north of us - at the Whooley place - they had a "teacherage" for them. That little wood house that's out by the old trailer - where that kid's living now - was the teacherage. And the other one was at the Hess Ranch.



LO: Didn't she teach at this school, too?



BO: No. It was down here 3 miles. I don't know what they called it, but she taught there. I can remember when she taught school there in the '40s.



RM: OK. Starting south and moving north, what were the schools in the valley?



BO: The first one would have been the Dutch Flat school.



RM: And how far is that from your place?



BO: About 10 miles.



LO: Whose place was it closest to?



BO: Well, it was close to the Keough Ranch and the Schmalling place. And then this other school wasn't that old of a school. I think it was built in the '30s or whatever - when everybody went broke here and they made this a reservation. They built that little one-room school there, so it wasn't that old of a school. Then the other one would have been clear down there by the Hess Ranch - by our old home place.



RM: Out by Washington, you mean - about 15 miles up?



BO: Yes.



RM: And they were all one-room schoolhouses?



BO: Right - one-room schools.



RM: Is it fair to say that what has happened in the valley is that there used to be a lot of families on small places in the valley and that the ranches have gotten bigger and there are fewer families here?



BO: No, in the south part of the valley they were all fairly good sized, even in the old days. (One ranch that I couldn't think of a while ago was the Warner Ranch, which would have been further south past the Bells'.)



LO: What we call the head of the river.



BO: Yes. The head of the river was Indian Valley.



LO: It was before you drive over into Indian Valley.



BO: Right. Well, the Keoughs owned Indian Valley. I don't know who they got that from. But then the next one would have been Warners' and then Bells' and it came right on down the back.



RM: So there aren't fewer families in the valley now then there used to be?



BO: I don't think so. Counting the Indians, I think there are more. But when you got down into Lander County, which was still close to this end of the valley, there were a lot of little places - the Dyers' and the Hesses' and the Wallaces' and . . . I can't think of all the names of those fields. There are some down in Gandolfo's field and along there that belonged to individual people.



RM: And people owned these little places and they were making a living on it and raising a family?



BO: Right. And then a person by the name of Pat Welch came in here and sued them for the water rights because he had the Home Ranch. He said all the water spread out down there originally, and they took it to court, and from the county line on north, he won the water rights on that land, so he forced all those homesteaders out of business.



RM: When was that?



BO: I couldn't really tell you. It had to have been in the 1880s.



RM: Is that right? So then he controlled all that?



BO: Then he controlled everything. And he was related to Warners. All of these people were related to them.



LO: That brings to mind something interesting - this place was originally called the Barrett Ranch. The Barretts were the original homesteaders.



RM: So the Barretts homesteaded your place?



LO: Yes. And then right due west of us is Barrett Canyon, which is named for them also. Welches got it after Barrett and then Bart's folks picked it up after them.



BO: So it's only been a 3-time owner since [it was homesteaded].



RM: What do you know about the Barretts?



BO: Very little.



LO: Aside from their name on the deed, nothing.



RM: When did they homestead, in the '80s? Are any of the buildings here ones that they built?



BO: No, the Welches built the buildings. The original Barrett house was at the lower end of the field, where we're working right now. (They homesteaded about 1860.)



LO: The buildings here are pretty interesting, though. The house itself - this house - was built in 1904.



RM: And the Welches built the house?



BO: They had it built; I think Whooley built it.



RM: What were the Welches' first names?



BO: I don't know that. [Their son] Pat Welch had everything, then there was Joe, and they had another one they called "Wild" Bill - I think his name was Lawrence; I don't know how many kids they had.



RM: Do you know when the Welches bought this place??



BO: It had to have been around 1900. Pat's dad built this house and gave it to him for a wedding present in 1904.



RM: Oh. Do you know who he married?



BO: I have no idea who he married.



LO: Why did the wife not end up with it instead of the sister?



BO: Because the wife died in this room that we're in right here - of career.



RM: Is that right? When?



BO: In 1915 or 1920, somewhere around in there. Then he shot himself in the corral, accidentally, and that . . .



RM: After the wife died?



BO: Right. And that left it to the sister and her brother. He passed away and then . . . I don't know if she's alive anymore or not.



RM: They didn't have children?



BO: No.



RM: And then your father acquired it in 1924 or '25?



LO: Yes, along with his brother John Joseph.



BO: All of them bought it together. In order to buy it, my dad went to work over in Stone Cabin with the Cliffords, mining, and Joe stayed here and worked for the Bowlers and took care of it. And George and Arthur rode for the rest of the people in the valley on the winter range after Arthur came home from the First World. War.



LO: Arthur broke horses for the cavalry in the First World War.



RM: Is there anything about the construction of this house in 1904 that would be interesting or historically noteworthy?



BO: All the outside bricks were made and fired right here.



RM: So the clay came from here?



BO: Right here on the place. They had a pit within a mile of the house where they dug the clay and fired all the bricks in this house. We still have the molds today that they used to form all the bricks with when they poured them.



RM: And they probably used wood from the hills to fire them?



BO: Yes. And my dad told me that when they built it . . . if you look at these old houses there's black brick in them. They built them in an arch and then they built the fire in there, and the ones closest to the heat are the darkest. That's why you have the dark red bricks. You look at the bricks on this [side] and they'll be black; they're the ones that were closest to the fire.



RM: How many square feet is your house?



BO: Twelve hundred per story - it's 30-by-40 - so it'd be 2400 feet total.



LO: Well, the top floor's not as big as this one.



RM: How many rooms are there?



LO: Well . . . what do you call the pantry and the bathroom together? BO: They used to have 2 pantries.



LO: Not counting them, you have 8 rooms.



RM: How many bedrooms?



BO: Five.



RM: And a living room and a kitchen and a bathroom and a dining room.



LO: The room we're in now was actually what they used for the parlor or the sitting room. The bigger room toward the front, which we use for the front room, was their dining room, and they had the dining cupboard that goes through - you can get dishes from either side. That was their dining room because they used to feed - how many hay crewman - 20 or so.



BO: I it up hay with horses when I was a little kid. We used horses on this place putting up hay until the '60s.



LO: I came in '62, and you must have done the buck rake maybe 2 years after that.



BO: I never had a baler while my dad was alive.



LO: Nibs Jackson, an Indian living here in the valley, came and ran the buck rake for you for a couple of years.



BO: But we still stacked hay loose, because we never had a baler until '68.



LO: That's true. Your dad wouldn't hear of it, would he?



BO: He would not hear of anything modern.



RM: Why, was that?



LO: It was no good. Be just came from the era of the horse. He always told Bart, "You young kids aren't worth a damn. You flip the coin to see who gets the gentle horse." He said, "When we were kids we flipped the coin [to see] who got the wild horse."



BO: I can remember breaking horses and riding on the horse when they broke them. They had a lot of horses and a lot of people working when I was a little kid.



RM: How many people would you have here when you were putting up hay?



BO: When I was a little kid and they did it with loose hay?



RM: Yes.



BO: I'll have to count them. There were always 2 mowers and 2 rakes - there was always the main rake and the scatter raker - and there were always 3 buck rakes and the derrick and then there were generally 2 or 3 guys stacking. So that would be 12.



LO: Then they always hired 2 ladies for the kitchen.



BO: They always hired 2 people to cook. So they'd have 14 at the least.



RM: And would they stay here?



BO: Yes,



RM: Did you have a bunkhouse for them?



BO: Well, some stayed in the bunkhouse and some stayed out . . .



LO: Some were in the barn. Jerry Alberson always stayed in the barn.



BO: They just stayed everywhere. Some came in every day.



RM: What was a day's pay then?



BO: The guys that stacked hay got $7 because everybody didn't like to stack hay. My dad said that was the easiest job, and everybody thought it was the hardest. The rest of them, I think, got $5 - $4 or $5.



RM: Is your hay alfalfa or native grass?



BO: It was native grass. Now, we're raising alfalfa.



RM: Why the change from native to alfalfa?



LO: Well, we can raise about 3 times the crop of alfalfa than we can raise on meadow hay. And we had more of a saleable product with alfalfa until the last few years. But now wild hay has really picked up. Everybody and their aunt has a horse in their back lot, so wild hay is [very desirable].



RM: Why do they want wild hay for their horse?



LO: It's a lot better for them than alfalfa is.



RM: It is? Alfalfa isn't good for a horse?



BO: It isn't good for them. They just get rolling fat. On grass hay they get hard. A horse is in a lot better shape with grass hay.



RM: I'll be darned. But you can't get the tonnage from the wild hay?



BO: No.



RM: Once you plow up your wild hay can you go back to it?



BO: Oh, just don't do anything and it'll be back in about 3 years.



LO: This is grass country. All you have to do is turn the water on it and it'll turn into grass. I have pieces in my front lawn that I have never put a seed in. Just turn the sprinkler on and you've got grass.



RM: Is that right? Native grass?



LO: Whatever comes on the wind. But this is really grass country. If Bart wants to make more meadow . . . there are several places around here where he's arranged the ditches and turned the water out, and eventually you get a nice little meadow.



RM: Is that right? Of native grass.



BO: It's clovers and . . . yes.



RM: Is that right? So you have to kind of fight to keep the alfalfa in

there?



BO: You have to fight to keep it in.



RM: Do you have to irrigate all of it, or is some of it naturally watered?



BO: No, you have to irrigate all of this place.



RM: Is that pretty much true for the valley?



BO: Yes, pretty much for the whole place.



LO: Well, the Whooley ranch had some nice . .



BO: Yes, it's a lot of subbed ground. Not a lot, but quite a few acres.



LO: Some of what we would call, I guess, wetlands now.



RM: Oh. So when the pioneers first came in here there were few natural meadows?



BO: Well, I was telling you how Welch won a lawsuit. There was a big natural meadow down there where the water had spread out by Austin - about 5000 acres. He got that and that's where he won the lawsuit. But the water right on the lawsuit only came to the Nye/Lander County line. He didn't have control of the water in this area because . . . I don't know how it was set up. That was done on a county-by-county basis, I guess. It had to have been because he only got it to the county line.



RM: So the homesteaders were taking the water.



BO: Right.



RM: So this big natural meadow was not . .



BO: It was there but he wanted more.



RM: He wanted more so he basically got all the water there?



BO: Right.



RM: That's interesting. What kind of tonnage do you get per acre out of meadow hay?



LO: We cut usually 3/4 of a ton; if we fertilize it's 1-1/2 ton.



BO: But they didn't fertilize in the old time.



LO: If you fertilize it you'll double it.



RM: Is the quality the same if you fertilize?



BO: It seems to be. You've got to watch, though, because when you do fertilize you can get grass tetany.



RM: What's grass tetany?



BO: It gets toxic when it grows too fast.



LO: It has something to do with the balance of calcium in a cow's body. If grass grows fast and then freezes, it forms a toxicity that has something to do with calcium deficiency for a cow. It'll make her blood so thick it won't pump.



BO: And then they die.



RM: Is that right? But it has to freeze? And what kind of tonnage do you get with your alfalfa?



BO: We get between 3 and 4 on the average, with 2 cuttings. We're 6500 feet high right here in our yard.



RM: Is that right? What kind of fertilizer do you use?



BO: We don't fertilize alfalfa. On the grass I use nitrogen.



RM: Let's talk some more about the social life they had back then. Were there little communities in the valley?



BO: I guess Washington had quite a few people, but that was prior to when my dad and his brothers were kids.



LO: So before 1900.



RM: Was there a town called Washington there?



BO: Yes.



RM: Was it a fanning community or were they mining there?



BO: Mining.



RM: And the community was at the mouth of the canyon - what was at the top?



BO: You had Ione. That's supposed to have had 3000 or 4000 or more people in it at one time where you come through today in Berlin. And that was all the towns there were.



RM: There wasn't anything you could call a town in the valley itself?



BO: No.



RM: Were there any stores that you've heard about that would have been in the valley?



BO: Nothing - only. in Washington Canyon.



RM: How about any churches or anything like that?



BO: There were no churches at all that I know of. Even when I was a kid there were no churches in Ione.



RM: They just weren't too religious, were they, in those days?



BO: I don't think that they weren't religious.



LO: I thought the priest came around.



BO: He did, I think. I think he came to the houses.



LO: Bart's family were all Catholic.



RM: Would you describe Bart's grandfather and father as religious?



LO: I don't know. I have a lot of different opinions of religion . . . [but they] were good, honest people. What constitutes religion, you know? [They fulfilled] the basic things that I think of in terms of religion: They were honest; they worked hard; they were faithful, loyal

to you.



RM: They were probably more religious in those terms than people are now even if they go to church.



LO: I think so.



RM: Did they have get-togethers - dances and parties and things like that?



BO: Yes.



LO: They had rodeos.



BO: Up at the Bell Ranch they used to have a rodeo when I was little.



LO: And you have talked about that collapsible dance floor they were always putting up. You had it around here for the longest time - a couple of pieces of board that they stuck together and put up for a dance floor.



BO: Yes, they hauled it around on a wagon and then they'd put it together.



RM: Is that right? How often did they have the dances?



BO: I have no idea.



RM: I wonder where they got the music.



LO: People played the fiddle and . .



RM: Did anybody in your family play a musical instrument?



BO: Just my mother - she played the piano. And when my grandfather came here he played the violin.



LO: That was Grandpa Winters, though.



BO: But that was in the '40s.



RM: What other things could we say about social life? Do you know anything about how holidays were celebrated - New Year's, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July . . . ?



BO: For my dad and his brothers holidays were just another day. They still had to feed the cows and do the chores. The only thing was that, if nothing else, he always shaved on Sundays if he didn't do anything else.



RM: Did he shave any other time of the week?



BO: No.



LO: Unless he went to town.



BO: Other than that, no.



RM: Did you know your grandfather?



BO: No. He passed away in the early 1900s - I think in the '20s or in the teens, I guess, before Arthur went to the war.



LO: There are several things you always say about your grandfather. One was that he really liked to walk.

BO: Oh, he would rather walk . . . he felt buying shoes was cheaper than buying a fare. He would walk from Virginia City to here in 3 days. RM: Oh! That would be what - about 180 miles.



BO: And my dad said he never liked to ride a horse. He would get up and get on the horse, and if they went 200 yards and came to a gate he would get off and open the gate, and he would walk and lead the horse the rest of the day. He'd never get back on. And he could run and keep his hand on the stagecoach for 6 miles. Or he would take after a cow that was running, and he would run it until it dropped. He could just run it. RM: I've heard of that.



LO: It had to have been something akin to these guys who go on the marathons and whatnot, really.



RM: Yes.



BO: I think the old-timers would make these people on a marathon today look sick. On a marathon they're on flat ground and they've got nice shoes. He would go from here to Camel Creek and Smith Creek and talk to a man about a sheep or something and come back in the day.



RM: And how far would that be one way?



BO: Oh, probably 20 miles.



RM: A 40-mile round trip in a day.



LO: He must have been really hiking along.



RM: God, I guess. Especially from Virginia City. If that's 180 miles away, that's 60 miles a day.



LO: Yes, he did that in 3 days.



BO: He used to go to Austin from the place down there and back in the day.



LO: That would be 25 miles in and 25 miles back. And then, of course, they always told us a story about him holding his hand on the stagecoach and running along with it for 5 or 6 miles.



RM: I heard a saying once - maybe you can shed some light on it. They said in frontier America that a neat-fed man could walk a grass-fed horse into the ground.



LO: I think that's probably true.



RM: Pretty soon the horse has to stop to graze, and after a few days, he's done.



BO: Right.



LO: I've come to believe that probably the Indians had it down to a science of what the diet was that you should eat to be physically fit. And probably the mountain men and all the people who settled [here] really had it down to a science.



RM: Yes, I think you're right. The Hopi Indians down in Arizona used to say, "Hey, let's run down to Winslow and watch the train," and it was 60 miles. So they were just like your grandfather. Was he a big man? Did he look Irish?



BO: I don't think he was very big. I don't know if he looked Irish or not.





CHAPTER THREE




RM: OK, we were going to try and talk some more about your grandfather. Tell me some more things about his character - what kind of a person he was.



LO: The thing, I think, that sticks in my mind is your dad said that he didn't take care of himself; he allowed himself to become run down and that was why he died of pneumonia.



RM: How old was he when he died?



BO: I have no idea.



LO: We must be able to come up, with some sort of a guess. That picture was taken in 1894 and he must have been, I would guess, 40 years old by then.



BO: He came here in the 1860s, so he had to have been in his 40s.



RM: So he might have been 50 in that picture?



LO: He could have been . . . Didn't he look like he never smiled once? I mean, he was really a stern . . .



BO: I think he was very . . . his word was law.



RM: Now when did he die?



LO: What are you thinking - about 1910, 1915?



BO: Somewhere in there.



LO: He's buried in Austin, right?



RM: So he would have been about 70 when he died.



BO: Somewhere in that neighborhood.



RM: Yes. And his wife - your grandmother - must have been Irish, too. Didn't you say her name was Kelly?



BO: Yes. She came from Dover, New Jersey, when I get to thinking about it.



RM: Do you know much about her?



BO: I don't know anything.



LO: Who did you tell us was buried in Tonopah?



BO: My grandfather's brother, Jack. O'Toole.



RM: Your grandfather didn't come here alone - he came with family?



BO: He came alone, and then the other one came. Then there was another one who went back, and I don't know what his name was.



RM: I see. So there was more than one O'Toole in your grandfather's generation in the valley . . . or did his brother go to Tonopah?



BO: No, he was here. My grandfather had sheep, and the Heaths didn't want him in this area - the Heaths used to run all of his sheepherders away. So my [grand]father wrote to his brothers, or whatever, and one of then came, and that's when he shot Heath.



RM: Your grandfather killed Heath?



BO: His brother Jack did.



LO: (Is this the Jack that's buried in Tonopah?)



RM: What were the circumstances of the shooting?



BO: Heath came up and did what he used to do to the other ones, my dad said, and shot at Jack. All the other sheepherders ran off, but this one didn't run. Jack didn't shoot back, he just started walking towards him, and then Heath got panicky and he shot all of his shells; then Jack shot his horse as he was getting on it, and the next shot he shot him. And that was the end of the feud right there.



RM: What a story.



LO: Now, why was the brother buried in Tonopah?



BO: He got killed in a mine.



RM: I'll be darned. But he was a miner then, as opposed to a rancher. And Heath was shooting to scare and missing?



BO: Yes. And my grandfather's brother didn't dance and he didn't run.



RM: And so he shot all his shells and that way . . .



BO: Then he tried to hit him, you know, when he didn't run. This is what my dad told. me. And he showed me approximately where it happened up there when I was a kid, on the flats. He just went up and Heath kept trying to hit him then and Heath was scared then. He just walked up to him and then shot the horse and killed him and that was the end of the feud. I think he spent some time in jail or something. They had a trial and it was self-defense. It had to have been in Belmont.



RM: That's a neat story.



BO: How much truth there is to it, I don't know. But this is the family story.



LO: Oh, those things maybe have been embellished on, but don't you think there's a basis of fact to all that stuff?



RM: Yes, I do.



BO: And Jim Butler, who founded Tonopah, was related to my mother in some way - he was a cousin or something.



RM: I'll be darned. That's interesting. I've been finding out some interesting things about Jim Butler.



LO: Was he quite a character?



RM: Well, he was married to an Indian Later he killed Belle's [his second wife's] husband. Belle's husband was beating her up one day in a bar and Butler stepped in. And then later, Butler and another fellow were walking down a street in Tybo, and her husband came out of a bar or something and shot at Butler, missed and hit the other guy. And Butler killed him.



LO: Goodness.



RM: But Butler had children with his Indian bride and everything. It's kind of a mystery, what happened to the children. They may be related to some of the Shoshones in the area.



LO: His dad used to tell about how the Indians camped along the river and how they died of measles or typhoid or . . . Up behind the Whooley Ranch there are a couple of little mud shacks and things that they had.



BO: Yes, that's where they stayed when they worked there.



LO: His dad said that once when he visited them they had dog meat. They ate dogs. And he had . . .



BO: . . . puppy dog stew.



LO: He said it was good. He liked puppy dog stew.



RM: I've heard of it. Were there a lot of Indians in the valley when your grandfather arrived?



BO: Not really in this valley, I don't think. The Indians came into the valley with the white people in the 1800s, because there was nothing here for them, really. I mean, they were a transient type people. And then back when Welches got that place down there and all of the homesteaders were there they had a little colony down there.



LO: You don't think that the river and the game and the pine nuts supported a band of Indians?



BO: Most of them came out of Smoky Valley; maybe there were some here. LO: I've never thought about it. You tell us - maybe you know about that.



RM: I've read that there were quite a few Indians here. I've looked at maps of how the Indians were distributed in Nye County, and there were more in Reese River than any other area.



BO: That might have been down farther, then, because my dad told me it was cold. Maybe in the wintertime they went over to Smoky and other areas where it's lower and then back here in the summer. They had that place down there at Welches', but Noonan destroyed all those houses. He got in there with a Cat and destroyed that whole colony.



RM: But there were a number of houses there?



BO: Oh, there were 20 or 30 houses there when I was a kid.



RM: And they were Indian houses?



BO: Yes, they were willow and mud houses. Do you remember them?



LO: I really don't remember them at all. I do remember the one behind George and Arthur's because it's still there.



BO: They were just like that one, but there were 20 or 30 of them down there.



RM: What were they - one-room affairs?



BO: Just one little room, maybe half as big as this room.



RM: Do you recall your grandfather or your father telling you about Indians and any tales or anything like that?



BO: No. My dad told me all the old Indians were good Indians but the young Indians weren't. He said the old Indians felt that the white man did them a favor and the young Indians feel that they didn't. The old Indians told him when the white man came to this country they just were starving to death, and all they had was a rabbitskin blanket and froze to death in the winter. He said the white man came and they had food and clothing the year round. The old Indians would have been the 1850 Indians



RM: Yes, when the whites first came here. I'll be darned. When you were growing up, were there many Indians who worked for ranchers?



BO: A lot of them worked. Our neighbor down here, Joe Jackson, worked for us and all the old Indians in the valley worked for us at one time or another.



RM: Where do the Indians live?



LO: When you came you saw the houses. You came from Ione, right?



RM: Yes. The mailboxes and some buildings - is that the reservation?



LO: Part of it.



BO: And it's north of us and south of us. We're the only white people left.



LO: We're in the middle of it.



RM: You're in the middle of the Yomba Indian reservation?



BO: It's an assignment; it isn't really a reservation. But we're the only white people left.



RM: What is the difference between a reservation and an assignment?



LO: Well, I think the ownership of it has not been totally given to the tribe. An assignment moms that the government holds it in trust for the tribe and basically, if it was a reservation it would have been turned over to the tribe, and they would have rights to do everything that they went with it.



RM: Does it have the same status as the Duckwater reservation?



BO: I don't know; it might.



LU: Tell us how Duckwater works - then maybe we can . .



RM: Well, at Duckwater they bought a ranch there in 1940 and they parceled it out and each Indian got a part



LO: OK, that's what they did here.



BO: But do the folks over there own their parts?



RM: They don't own them, no.



LO: Then it's the same as here. They can pass it down in their family, but that's not absolute.



RM: But I don't think they can sell it or anything like that.



LO: Right. It's the same thing here. That's what they did here. They bought out the ranches during the Depression. And this ranch and the Schmalling Ranch, which we own, and part of the Keough Ranch are the only ones left. And no one lives at the Keough Ranch (it's part of the R.O. Ranch with headquarters in Smoky Valley) and the Whooley Ranch.



BO: They all went broke during the Depression and my folks and the Keoughs were the only



LO: Warners would have been the last place. That place is part of the R.O. now. Then it's Indians all the way to the Keough Ranch.



BO: Which was the Bell Ranch. Next was the Keoughs' and then the Schmallings' ranch, and then it was Derringers', which is all Indians now, and then the Worthingtons'.



LO: That's up the canyon, up Clear Creek. That's all Indians now.



BO: And the Bowlers' place is all Indians now, and that was it.



LO: That's below us; between us and the Whooley Ranch it's all Indians.



RM: So you're the only whites left in this valley - or, in the Nye County part of the valley?



LO: Tony's left. He has what was called the Heath Ranch.



BO: That's Tony Testolin. That was the Heath place, but it isn't included in the reservation and he's not an old-timer.



LO: No, that's on the other side [of the valley].



BO: Testolin came here in '54.



LO: And he bought it from Hayden, who was Heath's daughter.



RM: Why did the ranchers go broke in the '30s?



BO: I don't really know. My folks had their money in the bank in Eureka and that's the only bank that never closed.



RM: Is that right? So the other ranchers had their money in other banks and the banks went bust and they lost it.



BO: Yes. The bank in Eureka, my dad told me, never got word to close until after it was all over, so it never closed.



RM: They didn't have a run on it?



BO: Nobody made a run on it.



RM: Is that right? How did he happen to have his money there?



BO: I don't know. There used to be the Nevada Bank of Commerce in Austin and . . . what was the one in Eureka?



LO: I don't know, honey. By the time I came they were in Austin.



BO: This is the Lander County Bank.



LO: That's kind of neat.



BO: It's the Austin, Nevada, Lander County Bank. You'll have to dig it out.



RM: Lilly is showing me a check here drawn on the Lander County Bank for $4,866.



LO: This check is by the O'Toole brothers and it's dated October 30, 1928.



BO: That was the payment on this ranch, I think. It says, "payment and interest for 1928."



BO: To Kerney?



LO: Yes, to Kerney.



RM: That's the banker they bought it from?



BO: I think so.



RM: So he financed it when he bought it from Welch.



BO: Yes.



RM: So it was the banks that made the ranchers go bust? It wasn't their markets, in other words?



BO: No, it was the banks. When the banks folded during the Depression in the '30s, that's when all of them lost it here. They lost all of their money, and they couldn't finance them to come back and recover. The only ones who recovered were my folks. They ended up with the Whooley place, which we don't have anymore. The Whooleys hung in till the '40s. Then they lost it and my folks were able to buy it. And then they bought the Schmallings' place in '38 or '36.



LO: Your dad had good friends he was able to borrow money from.



BO: Mrs. Shiketty, a lady in Austin, had beaucoup dollars, and she financed my dad on buying the Schmalling place. That one went up for bids when they went broke, and my dad was the executor of it, so he couldn't bid on it. So Mrs. Shiketty in Austin said that she would give him the money to buy it. And he said, "Well, I can't."

She said, "Well, I'll take care of the whole thing for you." So she went and got - I think it was her son-in-law - John Laborda at Iowa Canyon to bid on it for my folks. They went to the auction up here and the Keoughs wanted it and my folks wanted it and John Laborda bid on it and made the opening bid of $4000. That was the opening and only bid, because Charlie Keough saw right away that Mrs. Shiketty had the money behind it, and she had more money than anybody in the country, so he felt that if she wanted it there was no sense in even bidding it. Charlie didn't know that my dad and [his brothers] would only go to $5000, so that's the way we got it.



RM: And the Schmalling place is south of here?

BO: Yes.



LO: On Stewart Creek.



RM: And how many acres is it?



BO: About 600.



RM: What are the Indians doing with the ranches now? Those ranches used to support families - do they do that now?



BO: No. I would say that with the reservation, the valley has slipped 90 percent from what it was when I was a kid.



RM: In terms of what?



BO: When the government took it over in the '30s the old-time Indians came in. They were fairly old then: Dan Brady, Dixon Jackson, Jim Bobb, Joe Jackson, Art Hooper, Archie Hooper, Henick Smith and Duman Hooper. The government came in and gave them 30 head of cattle and planted them each 15 acres of alfalfa and they did well. They worked hard. All the people I just mentioned were hard workers. And their kids and the generation since then have just gone down to where they don't [work]. They don't raise any hay and most of them don't even have any cows. And the places have gone from hay ground back to sagebrush.



LU: Well, Indian people here now do have some cattle, but they've just this year lost their forest permit. That was part of this deal where the Indians are suing for tribal land, and they wanted the land and not money, you remember, for the treaties. So they came upon a plan where they wouldn't pay their forest fees and their BLM fees to go out on the public lands.



BO: The Shoshone nation told them not to. Now the Shoshone nation has backed out of it and these guys are left holding the bag and have lost everything.



LO: They've lost their forest permits. They haven't taken the BLM permit yet, but . . .



RM: What will happen? Can they get it back?



LO: It's closed for 5 years. I don't know what'll happen after 5 years.



BO: I think if the government gives it back to them after 5 years, the government's opening a great big bowl of worms for other people that they've taken it away from. Because they haven't given it back to other people. I think that if they do this it's really going to be something. It's something that we're going to see at the end of 5 years.



LO: We did understand that they might offer it on an individual basis rather than a tribal basis. The tribe held the permit so they may offer on an individual basis.



BO: And it's a shame. Ruth Worthington, for instance, didn't want . . she has a lot of history in this valley. She is, I guess, the oldest old-timer that I know of who's alive.



RM: Is she's from the valley?



BO: Well no, she was from Smoky originally and Belmont, I think. But she was married to Carl Worthington, who was Sam Worthington's son. They had the place right up here at Clear Creek and they lived there for years.



RM: It sounds like the valley has basically had an Indian history since the '30s.



BO: Yes.



LO: We and the Keoughs are it [for non-Indian history].



RM: Let's talk a little bit about your background, Lilly. Why don't you tell me your name as it reads on your birth certificate?



LO: My name is Lilly Elizabeth Stark. I was born in Fallon.



RM: What's your birthdate?



LO: June 17, 1944.



RM: And what was your father's name?



LO: My father's name was Clyde Banus Stark, Junior. He was, I believe, born in Sacramento; they moved to the mining town of Fairview over in Churchill County [when he was] a 2-year-old.



RM: His father was a miner?



LO: Actually, he homesteaded in Dixie Valley. My grandmother was a schoolteacher in Dixie Valley, and he mined on the side to support the ranch like Bart's folks did - to keep things going. And they homesteaded in Dixie Valley in 1915 - my dad was 2 years old, and he came to Churchill County in 1915.



RM: And what was your mother's name?



LO: My mother's name is Norma Cecile Conrad. Her parents came to Churchill County and homesteaded in Stillwater in 1911.



RM: So both sides of your family came into Nevada as homesteaders.



LO: Yes.



RM: And your father was a miner and a rancher?



LO: My own father was a rancher. He and my mother began in Dixie Valley when they married, which was in 1935, when she was 18 (she was born in 1917). In the meantime, my grandfather had bought a piece of the Williams property in Fallon.



BO: Williams went broke in the Depression - the same thing. He died, or whatever, and lost it in the Depression.



LO: And my grandfather had bought a piece of ground in Fallon so my dad and mother moved to Dixie Valley to take care of the Dixie Valley property when they married. They lived there for about 10 years until just before I was born. Then my grandparents retired and my parents moved into the property in Fallon.



RM: Was the property a farm or an acreage or . . . ?



LO: I want to call it a ranch and a farm together, because they raised cattle, they fed them out, they grew alfalfa and some grain.



BO: He had a little feed lot.



LO: Yes, he had a little feed lot. They didn't have outside range like we have.



RM: I see. So you grew up in Fallon?



LO: Yes.



RM: And how did you net Bart?



LU: He went to high school there. School was a problem here - he went to school through the sixth grade in Ione and was boarded out then to stay with some people named Cislini in Ione. They had the store and the bar, and then in the sixth grade they sold their property to his uncle Joe, left and went to Fallon, and he basically went the school year in Fallon staying at their home until he was a freshman. I don't know what you did. You kind of lived on your own didn't you?



BO: Yes.



LO: But he finished . . . the school situation was poor.



RM: So when did you guys get married?



LO: In '62.



RM: And how many children do you have?



LO: We have 4 children. We have a daughter, Mary Lynn, born in '62, a son, Bartley Mitchell, born in 1964, a son, Michael Stark, born in '67, and a son, Kevin Henry, born in '68.



RM: Did they all stay in the area?



LO: No. Our daughter lives in Fallon and Michael lives in Yerington. Kevin is going to the university at Reno and Bart is in the Air Guard. At this moment - as we're speaking - he's in survival school for the Air Guard. But both Kevin and Bart, I think, will come back.



RM: Yes. What more can we say about Bart's father? Could we talk a little bit about what kind of a man he was?



LO: Let's see, he was, I think, civic-minded. Bart was always saying that he went down to Tonopah pretty often . . .



BO: He went to a lot of meetings - on brand inspection and a lot of different things. [He was involved in] the early part of the Taylor Grazing Act when it started coming into the country.



RM: How did the Taylor Grazing Act affect the ranching here?





CHAPTER FOUR




RM: I was asking how the Taylor Grazing Act affected ranchers like yourself in the area.



LO: Basically, we think they just turned out whatever cattle they wanted before the Taylor Graze. I think that there were 10 times as many cattle running this valley as there are now. There were lots of cows.



BO: Oh, definitely.



RM: When did the Taylor Graze come in?



LO: In the '30s, wasn't it?



BO: Yes. I know this place here, when my folks first took it over, had over 1000 head.



RM: Were they over-grazing?



BO: I don't know, because they ran all over in the deserts and everywhere. I don't think it's over-grazed today. I think it was poor management of the range.



LO: We've come to the conclusion that we can run just as many cattle, but we have to do it at different times of the year, and you have to be careful that you're not over-grazing growing plants. You have to use a plant that's already matured, already seeded and that sort of thing. But we don't know what they did. We are getting kind of ecology-minded, but we just don't really know what they did. His dad always said, though, that in the early part of this century there was a lot more white sage, as opposed to the sagebrush that we see now.



RM: Do you call the kind you have black sage?



BO: I call it black sage.



RM: And white sage is better feed, isn't it?



LO: It is good feed, yes.



RM: Why do you think there's less white sage?



BO: I have no idea. My dad said that a lot of this country, he felt, was over-grazed - in this valley and a couple of other places around here where he'd been. I think it was just grazed at the wrong time of the year and it was killed. I think everything here was just mismanaged, with grazing done at the wrong time of the year. I don't think it is over-grazed. I think that it would support more animals.



LO: But I'm of the opinion that we had a little bit wetter cycle toward the first part of the century than we've had recently.



RM: Maybe that's part of the white sage situation?



LO: Yes.



BO: I was born and raised right here and when I was a little kid there seemed to be a lot more water than we have today.



RM: Yes. A lot of people have commented on that all over the county.



BO: I can remember everybody putting up hay - all of the Indians and all of us. And everybody grazed a lot of stuff here and there was an abundance of water. Now the Indians don't raise anything and we're the only ones [who do], and we don't have the water that we had back then.



RM: You're just not getting the snow in the mountains?



BO: I think that's a lot of it. And mismanagement. And my dad told me that years ago the Indians used to burn all the canyons and all of the mountains. They kept everything clean. He said that they had the theory that with everything clean the snow could blow and drift and build good snowdrifts all winter. He said after the Forest Service came in here in 1917 and stopped all of this that the big sagebrush came in and all of the snow couldn't drift. Your snow bank [is like] money in the bank.



RM: You get more evaporation now? Is that the bottom line?



BO: Yes. It can't pack and it just goes in or blows or evaporates. So I think that might have a lot to do with it.



RM: The Forest Service came in, in 1917? Was that when they set up the national forests?



BO: I guess that's when they set it out through this area.



LO: That's not the same thing as the Taylor Grazing Act. The Taylor Grazing is under the BLM.



BO: No, Taylor Grazing came in, in the '30s.



LO: They still allowed [the ranchers] to go onto the Forest Service land with their cattle in '17?



BO: Yes. That's when they changed everything, though. They had to go out at a certain time of the year and all of this stuff. And then they fenced all of the ranchers' allotments.



RM: Oh, I see. So in the '30s when Taylor Graze came in they gave everybody an allotment - is that it?



BO: Yes.



RM: How did they decide those allotments?



BO: I have no idea. I think everybody had a certain place where they ran their cattle historically, and they just said, "All right, well this is yours," and they fenced it.



RM: So if you'd been running your cattle up some canyon then they fenced it and that was your allotment - and then basically they started telling you how many cows you could run, didn't they?



BO: Right. For instance, they cut the herd number for this place. When my dad and his brothers got it they had 1000 head; over the period of years up until probably the '60s they cut it back to 309.



LO: That's what it was when We got here.



RM: How much did that have to do with all the ranchers going belly up here?



BO: I think it had a lot to do with it.



RM: It wasn't just losing their money in the banks? It was [also] the Taylor Graze caning in and the Forest Service cutting their herds?



BO: Yes.



RM: How did you guys survive with one-third of the cows you'd had before?



BO: Well, everybody went to work outside and one person stayed home until they bailed it all back out again. And then when everybody else started going broke this lady, Mts. Shiketty, financed them and they bought the Schmalling place. Then they bought the Whooley place . . .,and my dad managed the Welch outfit down here for about 10 or 12 years.



LO: In the Lander County part of it.



RM: So it was outside labor that kept the places going. And without it they couldn't have made it.



BO: No.



RM: Is that true today also?



BO: Pretty much so.



RM: So you're the only farm left. And your ranch is subsidized with outside labor?



BO: Oh yes. We do outside work.



RM: Yes. It's the same way in the Amargosa Valley.



LO: Everybody has their plot but they work outside to support it. Yes. [chuckles]



RM: Yes. In the Amargosa, they may have a section of alfalfa (they



don't have anything now, but they did up until a couple of years ago) and

they were working at the Test Site or someplace. It was the same way in

Pahrump.



LO: And that's kind of the thing that goes on in the whole valley?



RM: Yes.



BO: You go over in the Smoky Valley and all the historical people in Smoky Valley are all gone. The only ones left are the Darroughs. The Rogers are gone, Farringtons are gone - all the old-timers are gone. And all of the new-timers over there are into something else and [the ranching is] a hobby.



LO: What runs Nye County - the Test Site?



RM: No, I don't think BO. I saw some figures and it's about 10 percent of the Nye County economy, but don't quote me on that.



LO: What part is ranching and farming?



RM: That I don't know.



LO: That'd be really low, I bet.



RM: Yes.



BO: I'll tell you what supports Nye County: Round Mountain, Gabbs and Manhattan - the mines.



RM: Yes, that's a big chunk of it. I think a lot of people in Pahrump - which is, you know, more than a third of the county population - work in Las Vegas.



BO: Right. It's a bedroom for Las Vegas. It's just like Fernley and all the other [communities around Reno].



RM: Yes. How do you see the future of this valley?



BO: Well, she and I have mixed feelings. If she had her way we'd probably be gone by tonight.



RM: Is that right? You're tired of it?



LO: No, I'm not that anti-the-valley. I - perhaps from a woman's standpoint - would like to live a little closer to a community, you know.



RM: Yes. Find of lonely here with no [female] companionship . . .



LO: I'm always busy. I don't find that [I'm lonely] too much. But I'd like to go to the community college. And Fallon or Reno are about the best places for us to shop or to go to the doctor. To drive 100 miles every time you want to go to the dentist or the doctor or get groceries . . . because we don't really do our shopping in Gabbs or Austin.



RM: So you relate to Fallon and Reno as the place to go. You never go to Tonopah?



LO: Almost never.



BO: No, there's nothing in Tonopah for us. I mean, if I need parts for our equipment I've got to go to Fallon.



LO: We'd probably have to go on to Bishop [if we went to Tonopah].



BO: There's nothing in Bishop, I don't think. They go to Reno and Fallon to get parts.



RM: Bart, tell me about growing up here. What was it like growing up in what was almost a wilderness valley?



LO: He was an only child.



BO: She can probably tell you more about me growing up. I tell her things that I think of sometimes.



RM: Great.



LO: His mother had one child when she and his dad married - his half- sister, Bonnie.



RM: Where does she live?



LO: She lives in Idaho, and she's 11 years older than he is. And so basically, for the whole O'Toole clan of Reese River, he is the only child. I think, if I had to at it in one word it would be lonesome. RM: Were you kind of lonesome?



BO: Yes. My dad had missed a generation - he was 51 years old before I was born - so we had nothing really in common the way I had with my kids.



RM: He was more like your grandfather?



BO: Yes. We never went fishing and hunting and things like that, which I have done with my kids.



RM: So you grew up with adults and not kids?



BO: Yes. Even when we went to school in Ione and things like that, as I look back, we never had basketball, baseball, football. I was 12 years old before I even knew the words or knew what those things were.



LO: And they were kind of an odd, taciturn bunch of people. Here his dad was 50 years old with a child. I think he basically didn't know what to do with him. And his mother had medical problems after he was born, so she was not on the scene a lot.



RM: Oh, she was in the hospital, you mean?



BO: Yes.



LO: And so they dragged him around from hither to post . . . well, what do you do with a child when you . . . ?



RM: What do you mean "dragged him around?" Was he shuttled around among different relatives?



BO: Oh, no, no. If they went riding I went with them. When I was 6 years old, if we went riding we were on our way up into the mouth of the canyon when the sun care up in the morning. And when nightfall hit and the sun went down, I was still on top of the mountain They would tie me on the horse or whatever and I would sleep coming home. And then the next morning we'd get up and it was the same thing over. I mean, I wasn't here.



LO: They didn't have anybody to babysit you a lot of time.



BO: Yes, there was nobody here. So I went, whether . .



RM: How do you look back on that?



BO: I don't know; I never thought about . . .



LO: It was the way it was.



RM: Well, in a way, you missed a part of your childhood. But in another way, you were doing what some people would call "neat things."



BO: I guess. I don't know; I got soured on it. I had enough horseback riding before I was 10 years old to last me a lifetime. Even today, if I don't have to ride, I don't. I mean, I get my kids to do it or something. I really don't enjoy it, where other people, I guess, enjoy it. I had enough of it because . . . it was just tough times. I've gone from here to Smoky-Valley and back in a day to get cows on horseback when I was a kid - over the top of the mountain to the R.O.



RM: Wow. You really experienced this country first-hand as a child, didn't you?



LO: They didn't adapt well to the motor age.



RM: Oh. Your dad that didn't want modern things, did he?



LO: Right. He didn't want that. So here they were in a situation where he became, at 10 or 12 years old, their mechanic. He had the moxie, I want to say, to master the mechanical. I don't think your dad thought you knew one end of the cow from another.



BO: Maybe he was right. I don't know.



LO: But they would all him to drive the car at 10 years old and that on the horse or whatever and I would sleep coming home. And then the next morning we'd get up and it was the same thing over. I mean, I wasn't here.



LO: They didn't have anybody to babysit you a lot of time.



BO: Yes, there was nobody here. So I went, whether . .



RM: How do you look back on that?



BO: I don't know; I never thought about .



LO: It was the way it was.



RM: Well, in a way, you missed a part of your childhood. But in another way, you were doing what some people would call "neat things."



BO: I guess. I don't know; I got soured on it. I had enough horseback riding before I was 10 years old to last me a lifetime. Even today, if I don't have to ride, I don't. I mean, I get my kids to do it or something. I really don't enjoy it, where other people, I guess, enjoy it. I had enough of it because . . . it was just tough times. I've gone from here to Smoky-Valley and back in a day to get cows on horseback when I was a kid - over the top of the mountain to the R.O.



RM: Wow. You really experienced this country first-hand as a child, didn't you?



LO: They didn't adapt well to the motor age.



RM: Oh. Your dad that didn't want modern things, did he?



LO: Right. He didn't want that. So here they were in a situation where he became, at 10 or 12 years old, their mechanic. He had the moxie, I want to say, to master the mechanical. I don't think your dad thought you knew- one end of the cow from another.



BO: Maybe he was right. I don't know.



LO: But they would allow him to drive the car at 10 years old and that sort of thing.



BO: Oh yes. After I was 10 or 12 years old I did all the driving - to town, in Reno, everything.



LO: They didn't care for that kind of thing, and it didn't fit in with their lifestyle.



RM: And working on the car and all that was for you, but they didn't have too much faith in your abilities on the animal end of the thing?



BO: Yes.



RM: Did you have any Indian pals or anything like that?



BO: No. There weren't [many Indian kids here]. My uncle Joe was here because he and my dad were partners, so I saw him every day. And I knew George and Arthur because when we went to town we stopped at their place. But I never even knew his other brother Billy and his sister Alice existed until I was 16 or 17 years old.



LO: Now, that's a part of the beginning of the family, too. I think Billy doesn't care for us because there was some sort of a rift between him and your dad.



BO: Probably.



LO: They lived right down there.



BO: Yes, 15 miles away.



LO: So there was some animosity.



BO: And I didn't know., who he was. One day he showed up here, and he wanted to know where my dad was. And he said, "I want," this or that.

And I said, -Well, I can't let you have it. This belongs to my dad." And he said,

"Well, I'm your dad's brother."

Well, who was I to take his word?



RM: Right - you'd never known him.



BO: I didn't know him from Adam. I didn't know he even existed. I never even heard the name.



RM: Well then, there really wasn't a whole lot of social life in the valley, was there?



BO: Not within the family, I don't think. And all the other ranchers were gone when I was a kid. We were the only one left.



LO: After the '30s, when everyone else moved out, I think that was the end of the social aspect of life here.



BO: [My father] went to Tonopah quite a bit.



LO: And they always went on the Fourth of July. That was their big holiday.



BO: Always to the Fourth and Labor Day. We went to It Spring or Tonopah. And when the Jim Butler Days started in '52, we always went to that. We never missed Jim Butler Days and we always went to Austin and we always went to Fallon for Labor Day. But I didn't know anybody. I mean, I went with them and we came home . .



RM: Tell me about going to school in Ione.



BO: Oh, it was just a little one-room school.



RM: How many kids were there?



BO: I think the height of our class got up to 24 one time.



RM: And it was through the eighth grade?



BO: Yes.



RM: And one teacher or 2 teachers or . . . ?



BO: One teacher. The school building was the store that you drove by coming in. It would have been the first house on the right coming in today. It has been moved; it used to be up on the hill. A family bought it and made a store out of it and moved it down there. But it used to be set up on the hill.



RM: And you boarded with a family over there?



BO: I boarded with a family in a brick house. I lived there in the winter and went to school. In '52 we were snowed in Ione for 6 weeks and we never got out.



RM: And what was the name of the family you boarded with?



BO: The Billy Cislinis.



RM: And did you get over there and home on the weekends?



BO: My dad took me in Monday morning and he'd come and get me Friday night if he could, and if he couldn't I used to care home on the mail stage Saturday morning.



RM: How did it work, with 8 grades in one room?



BO: Well, I feel that it was bad because when I went to Fallon I was so far behind that I never, ever caught up and I lost interest in school.



RM: Did you do it by rows? When I went to that kind of a school - but with 4 grades in one room - one row was first grade, row 2 was second . . .



BO: Right, we were in rows. But we had 8 rows.



LO: Did the big kids help the little kids?



BO: No. And Mrs. Newman was our teacher, and they found out after 3 years that she wasn't even a certified teacher. [laughter]



LO: So much for their checking the credentials.



BO: Right. And so I was just so far behind. when I went to Fallon I really lost interest.



RM: Did you just drop out then?



BO: No, I finished. And what I liked, I did well in. I don't know, I don't think I've really been hindered that much. I married one of the smartest kids in the classes.



LO: Right. That helped you. [chuckles]



RM: Oh, you were classmates?



BO: She was 3 years behind me, but she was in the top 10 of her class, right?



LO: Yes. But I don't think that helped you. I think you're smart on your own, without . . . there are different ways of being smart, dear



BO: She and I do very-well together.



RM: Yes, I can see that. It looks like you have a really great relationship. And you boarded with the Cislinis in Fallon?



BO: I stayed with them for 2 years and then I stayed with my half-sister for a year and then I stayed with some other friends - the Rogers family.



RM: Pete, you mean?



BO: Do you know Pete?



RM: Yes, I interviewed Pete.



BO: Oh did you? Pete and Mary?



LO: Did you interview Pete? Isn't he wonderful?



RM: Yes, he is.



BO: I stayed with them 2 or 3 years, and I stayed with Kellers one year - half the year with my sister and half the year with Kellers.



RM: It sounds like the Cislinis were almost like a second family for you. You spent a good number of years with them, didn't you?



BO: Yes, quite a bit of my time.



RM: Did you have any pals in Ione?



BO: Yes, there was a kid . . . well, they moved away. Jimmy Keller and I were the only 2 left; I never got along too well with the Indian kids. When the majority of them were Indians, it was a pretty tough situation. There were only 3 white kids at the Ione school.



LO: You and Jimmy Keller and who?



BO: And Larry Keller. That was at the end. The first year we had Bucky Worthington, Sheamus Ford, Jimmy and Larry Keller and me. Then Bucky's family moved to Gabbs - this is Ruth Worthington - in '46 or '47 when I was in first or second or third grade. And I moved down and stayed with Worthingtons, because Carl worked for my dad. Then when they moved to Gabbs, I moved down and stayed with Cislinis. And then there was just us, and that next year the Fords left. Jim and Shamus Ford moved to Fallon. And so then that just left 3 of us. Then I came home, and the other kids all lived around Ione so they were more friends with the Keller family and so I was . .



RM: . . . you were kind of isolated.



BO: And the lady I stayed with was really strict. So I had to do things in the store and so forth when other kids was playing. So I've never appreciated . . .



RM: You didn't have a childhood, it sounds like.



BO: No. I crated eggs and worked after school all my life like that. RM: That's interesting. What other things are we forgetting to discuss?



LO: I think you should tell about the earthquake that your folks were in over in Ione Valley at Finger Rock.



BO: Over at Finger Rock? That was in the '30s. When that big earthquake hit Finger Rock they'd just got there. It was in the wintertime.



LO: They had their cattle over there, right?



BO: Right. That's when they wintered their cattle over in Gabbs Valley. That big earthquake hit there in '31 or '32, somewhere right in there. They had just got in that night and it was really cold and the earthquake hit as my dad was cooking supper for then. My uncle pulled open the door and the ridge pole came down and [the roof fell through]. It was a stone house with a dirt roof and that's all that saved their lives. They all crawled out through there and then they spent the rest of the night in zero weather digging out all of their gear.



LO: Your dad and who?



BO: My dad and Joe and George and Arthur and John Casey. Do you know John Casey?



RM: I've heard of him.



BO: He worked for my dad He was 16 years old when that happened.



RM: Oh, Casey was working here as a kid.



BO: Yes. My dad said he sat in the truck, and the racks of the truck rattled all night long, he was so scared. I don't know if he was scared or if he was frozen to death sitting there in the truck.



LO: Probably both.



BO: My dad and his brothers didn't believe in buying heaters. We have the truck that they bought originally in 1931 - I still have it out here. They never got a heater in it and they never bought a new truck again until 1947. And when they bought that he wouldn't get a heater on it. He said you were out of the wind, and that was what counted. And none of the vehicles we had had heaters when I was a kid.



RM: So he didn't believe in the modern.



BO: No. When I was a kid and they fed cows and I came home on the weekends, you just went. If it was 20 to 30 below zero it was cold in those trucks.



LO: And he didn't wear anything on his ears either.



BO: He never wore anything but a hat; never covered his ears in his life.



LO: God, he was tough.



BO: None of them did. They were tough. It's amazing how tough the oldtimers really were.



RM: Yes. My dad is tough. I realized when I was about 19, I'd never be the man he was.



BO: You can't even hold a candle to them.



LO: Were you raised in Tonopah?



RM: Not really. I was raised mostly in Denver. But my dad came out to Nevada in '53 and we had a mine for several years out in Reveille Valley, and he worked for the Test Site most of the time after that. He was a miner. Oh, he was tough; there was just no holding a candle to him.



BO: No. I was a kid, 16, 17 years old, and my dad would have been going from his 60s into his 70s - and to go up and shovel alongside of him all day long . . . impossible. Impossible.



RM: Same with my dad.



LO: My own grandfather walked from Fairview down to Dixie Valley on whatever day they got off on the week - probably Sunday - and that would have been 30 miles. He went to see how it was going with my grandmother at the farm and she was teaching besides. Then he walked back in time to go to work.



RM: Sixty miles.



BO: He probably stayed one day and come back the next - probably had a day off.



LO: But it was just a run-of-the-mill thing [for them] - that's how they got out here.



BO: People talk about being tough now, and they don't know what tough is. In '48 and '49 when they had the hay lift, I can remember the boxcars going over and dropping hay in Ely. We had a lot of hay, but Jesus, we went from here to the other place - 9 miles on horseback - to feed. I mean, you couldn't get there with a vehicle. And it was cold. You just got up in the morning and fed cows here and you went up there on horseback and fed up there and then you cane home. And I went. I came home on the weekends or whatever and that's what we did.





CHAPTER FIVE




RM: Lilly, you were just telling me a really interesting story that fits in with our discussion of the old-timers' toughness.



LO: Now that I think about it, his [uncle George] cut his hand with a zipper. We were branding and he was roping calves, and he took a dally around the saddlehorn, caught his jacket zipper on his hand with the rope, and the zipper tore it open.



BO: It was just like a saw and just sawed it right down about an inch deep, I guess.



RM: Oh!



LO: Yes, between the thumb . • .



RM: Right through the web here, in between the thumb and the forefinger.



LO: Yes. It just ripped it open. And what time do you suppose it happened in the afternoon? Probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. He never bothered to do anything about it until we quit at about 7:00. That was usually about dinnertime - several hours.



RM: So he went ahead and worked for several hours?



LO: Three or 4 hours. So then he came to the house and he said to you ¬remember that day? "I need a Band-Aid."

And you said, 'What the hell do you need a Band-Aid for?" And he opened up his hand like this and it was just open right there.

He wouldn't let me take him to the doctor. I said he had to have stitches. No, that was out. So I got out my peroxide and I cleaned it.



BO: Just poured it full of peroxide.



LO: And then I bandaged it together to the finger.



BO: She poured it full of peroxide and the little kids were here and he said, "Now if that was you, you guys'd be bawling."



LO: I bandaged it like that and then, remember, the next morning he came back and he didn't like that bandage. I had to take it off so he could use his finger and I think he came every day and let me clean it. I can't remember that, but he must have.



RM: So he went home and then he came back . . .



BO: The next day. He couldn't stand having his thumb against his forefinger because he couldn't work. He said, "We're going to have to do something. I can't use my thumb if you've got it all bandaged down."

She said, "Well, it's got to stay that way to heal."

And he said, "It doesn't." So he took it off and she just poured it full of peroxide and kept it clean. That was all.



LO: I did that every day.



RM: And he was 80 years old, did you say?



BO: Pretty close.



LO: I'm sure he was 80 then.



RM: So he was 80 years old and out working with an injury like that.



BO: Oh yes. He milked and . . .



LO: Well, I had told Bob that he didn't quit [riding] his horse or roping until he was 82.



RM: So he was roping from his horse past 80. Good lord.



BO: He was a good roper. When I was young and before I was even born my dad told me that he would lay a $100 bill on the table - which was a lot of money then - and [bet] he could go down there and he would rope 100 calves. If he missed 1 out of the 100 - only got one hind foot - he'd give you the $100 bill. He could catch 100 out of 100 by the 2 hind

feet.



RM: Is that right?



BO: Yes. And then they had bare horns. The guys nowadays have great big roping horns wrapped with rope and everything. He just had the bare . . . I've got his saddle, I can show you. The horn is not covered at all. It was just a metal horn sticking up. And then they just wrapped it with a little rope because they used rawhide ropes. If you rope on these new saddles and take a turn with the rawhide rope you'll break it just like that because they've got to run - they've have to have give. A rawhide rope's got a lot of life, but they're not like nylon. They can tie hard and fast on a nylon, but on those you have to rope them and let it run.



RM: Is that right? And so his horn was just metal?



BO: Just metal and about 1-1/2 inches in diameter.



RM: Is that right? Wow. So that's the difference in the saddles now? BO: Yes. Oh, those guys could rope.



RM: And his name was George?



LO: George.



RM: And he was your father's brother?



BO: Yes.



LO: Yes, he was a dandy. He was small. Only about - what do you think dear, 5 foot 2 inches maybe?



BO: He was not quite as tall as you, I guess.



LO: But really stout. And what was it - he could lift up the fender of a car. He was really strong.



BO: Oh, in the old times now, when they changed tires on the road he'd just back up to the car and pick it up, while you put the jack under it.



RM: He actually did that.



BO: Oh yes. He was a very strong person.



LO: Did you see him do that?



BO: No, my dad told me. I've got the '24 Buick that they bought brand new sitting out here in the shed that I want to restore. He'd just back up to that and just pick it up.



RM: Good lord.



LO: He was really strong.



BO: There was a pump that I went to Ione and got with him when I was a little kid; he picked it up and just set it in the back of the pickup just like nothing. He was very, very powerful.



LO: But he didn't have any car sense at all. Several really weird things happened for us. Bart sent him home in our car, which had power brakes and automatic [transmission]. So he put the throttle to the floor and the brake to the floor on the way home.



BO: That's how he would control it - push the right for more . . .



LO: By the time he got in the yard the brakes were so hot that they were smoking.



RM: [laughs]



LO: Another time he ran over one of our own cows up here on the road. He came here a lot. He'd come here almost every day, depending on what we were doing, and he and Bart would go around together. So Bart would try to keep him in a vehicle. Well, he was taking home our pickup, and his vision wasn't the very best. God knows when was the last time he'd had a driver's license. He drove home that night and about a mile below the house he hit one of our own cows and he was going fast enough that he roared right up over the top of her and there he sat, right on the top.



RM: He got hung up on top of the cow?



LO: Killed her dead and hung up on the top of her. He was kind of a dangerous driver.



BO: They were all really tough people. They never complained. I never saw them wear anything to cover their ears. They'd be out feeding cows at 30 below zero and always had their hat on but never a scarf; never anything to cover their ears.



LO: Oh Dad, tell about Arthur, because Arthur was crippled. I wanted you to tell about that time he broke his finger. What had happened to Arthur that he was crippled?



BO: He had a stroke, but before that a derrick fell on him and it pinched a nerve in his back. When I was a kid we at up hay with a derrick. I've still got it. They were just one pole and then they had 4 guy wires. I don't know if you've ever seen them or not.



RM: I think I have.



BO: Anyway, they were moving it and it fell over and the one arm came down. It was a wonder it didn't kill him. It came across his back and knocked him down and pinched some nerves and broke a vertebra and such right in between his shoulder blades.



LO: So his right side was crippled and his hand was kind of like this, kind of pinched together. And he kind of dragged his right leg along. And still he went.



RM: And he was another uncle? One of your dad's brothers?



BO: Yes. He was next to the youngest brother.



LO: He and George lived together on what we call the Whooley place.



BO: When you came up, the Whooley place, where their house was, was on one side with trees on the other, about 4 miles down the road.



LO: It was a yard. You drove right through the yard.



RM: Yes - there's an old adobe house there. OK. That's where they lived?



LO: That was the place where they lived. Anyway, he was tough as nails. Bart and George were riding and he was always the truck driver when they rode.



BO: Because he couldn't get on the horse. He drove us wherever we needed to go and then came around and picked us up. And one time we were loading here in the morning - and they had nothing modern. So we had just a little stake racks on the truck and they never had sideboards or anything - just little ones - and the horses would ride in that. Arthur had his hand lying on there and the horse went to jump in and slipped and pressed his hand against the side of it and broke his finger. And this was on his good hand - his left hand (his right hand was crippled). So it broke his index finger and he turned real white. He never said a word and he turned white.

And I said, "Well, what's the matter?"

And he said, "Well, the horse hit my finger against the side of the truck and broke it."

And Uncle George came over and picked his hand up and he said, "Oh, it looks all right."



RM: Oh! He shook it?



BO: Oh, just twisted it around - Arthur just melted! I just held on to him until . . . we took him to Gabbs. So he had a cast on this hand and he couldn't use it to eat with, and the other one was crippled. And Uncle George would wait on him.



LO: Oh, this is terrible.



BO: We'd be sitting there eating and George would say, "You want some potatoes?" And he'd go, "Sure." And he'd go whop! and throw him some potatoes. Or, "Do you want this?" Whop! And then he'd cut up his meat, and that's all he'd help him.



LO: Arthur wouldn't let me help him.



BO: He wouldn't let her help him at all.



LO: No. That George . . . it was a miserable time. I mean, here this poor old man is crippled on one side and he can't really use the hand on the other.



BO: And he was in his 70s and the other's in his 80s.



LO: God, it was awful.



RM: Now, this would have been after the '60s, right?



BO: Oh yes. This was in the '70s.



LO: Yes, because didn't Arthur die in '79? Let's see. My dad died in '77, Arthur died in Christmastime of '78 because my dad died in Christmastime of '77. And George died the year that Bee [the O'Tooles' nickname for their son, Bartley] was 8 or 10. Bee was born in '64, so 8 years would have been '72. Something like that. So that incident would have been in the late '60s.



RM: So they were born in the 1890s?



BO: Yes, my dad was born in '89 and Joe was born in '91 or '90. Billie was the youngest and he was born in 1900.



BO: Six.



RM: Six boys, or 6 children?



LO: Your dad was first, then Joe, then George, then Arthur, then Alice, then Billie - 6.



RM: And all spent their lives right here in the valley?



BO: Yes.



LO: It was unique. Then after George died, Arthur came up here and stayed with us. He lived next door. He was the funniest one, because he didn't talk much. He came over here for all of his meals.



BO: I always sat there and he always sat right in that chair by the window there.



LO: Sometimes he wouldn't say 10 words to us for 2 weeks. I'd send the kids over to tell him when diner was ready, and he'd come over and Bart would say, "Good morning." Sometimes he would say, "Yes sir" and sometimes he would just nod. There wouldn't be any . . .

And he and I had a real ritual. If he wanted to go somewhere . . . Bart always kept him [supplied with] a truck so he could go. And if he wanted to go somewhere and he wanted Bart to service the truck, he lifted the hood. He didn't ever say, "Bart, I need oil in my truck" or anything.

He lifted the hood and stood around out there and Bart would see the hood open and he would go say, "OK, what does your truck need?" And he would fix his truck. If he wanted to go somewhere, he'd put his lunch pail out here on this table. When I saw his lunch pail, then I would make his lunch and when I got done with it I put it in the wood box. He knew that it was made. Well, you know, it was too crazy. He just did not bother to talk.



RM: A system of non-verbal communication.



LO: Yes. Everybody got used to what was going on. But if we'd been gone - a few times we were gone for 4 or 5 days - then he was real talkative. And once he bought me a present when I was gone. When we got home we had 100 you pounds of potatoes. A peddler had come by and he'd bought 100 pounds of potatoes and wouldn't they make good french fries.

So we made lots of french fries. [laughs]

I tried real hard to spoil him. He was hard. Once, I figured out something he liked - he liked homemade applesauce, so I made that a lot. Or he liked french fries or he liked certain things. And I made a lot of cake and cookies when they came because I figured, here they were, old bachelors. They lived basically all alone all their lives. But they were hard to spoil. They wouldn't ask you for anything.



BO: Absolutely.



LO: You had to figure it out.



RM: So they were very independent people, and very stoic. And last time [I was here] you used the word taciturn.



LO: Very.



RM: Do you think this was a part of being tough? Do those traits go hand-in-hand with being tough and . . . ?



BO: I don't know.



LO: I don't know. Now, George was talkative. But he would never have asked you for anything, either.



BO: No, never.



LO: It was hard to figure out . . .



RM: Never a favor or anything like that?



LO: No.



BO: No, they all had their own traits. George was a good roper and Arthur and my uncle Joe were both real good riders, but my uncle Joe was a tremendous cowman. And my dad was pretty much the boss all the time. He was the oldest. Even with the ranches all spread out, they always came to him for advice and he was pretty much the ramrod of everything.



RM: Was that because he was oldest?



BO: I don't know. They always looked up to him and [turned to him] for advice. And I don't think he ever gave them anything that was wrong. During the Depression everybody else went broke and he decided, 'Well, we'll do it this way and divide it up," and they kept everything together when everybody else couldn't.



RM: Do you think the reason they were able to keep together when others couldn't was that there were a lot of them but they weren't supporting a lot of families?



LO: I think that's true.



BO: Yes, they just supported the . .



LO: They went through the Depression and none of them were married, because your dad didn't marry your man until '39 or '38.



BO: And they could live today, probably, on $100 a month.



LO: Luxuries were not that important.



BO: They didn't want luxuries. They didn't care for a radio. We would buy them a TV and they would watch it, but for them to go out and buy one . . . absolutely not.



LO: No, they wouldn't spend the money. But they really did enjoy the television when Bart got it. When his dad got older there were certain things [he liked]. Do you remember that old . .



BO: Oh, "Beverly Hillbillies." He would come in from the field to watch that every day. And he liked "Green Acres."



LO: There was another one that had an old man who had a limp.



BO: That was Amos McCoy and "The Real McCoy."



LO: "The Real McCoys." That was it, yes. But they wouldn't have bought a television themselves.



RM: How did they spend the time in the evening - say in the winter when it gets dark early?



BO: They read.



RM: What were the kinds of things that they read?



BO: Oh, Arthur loved Louis Lamour or any kind of western.



LO: What did George read?



BO: He read the newspaper, that's all.



LO: They all read the newspaper. They got them as they turned . .



BO: Yes. They got every paper in the [area]. They got the Reese River Reveille and then the Fallon one and the Nevada State Journal and the Per Evening Gazette (when they were separate) and the San Francisco Examiner and . .



LO: Oh. And then he read the paper?



BO: Yes. And my dad did the same thing.



RM: Did they ever play cards or anything like that?



BO: No. Not that I ever saw.



RM: Why do you think they didn't marry?



BO: I don't know. I think a lot of it's the way you were raised, maybe.



LO: I don't know.



RM: Did they ever speak about it or express any thoughts like, 'Wish I would have gotten married and had kids" or something like that?



LO: No. They had a genuine affection for our kids when they were little (and always, you know). Bart's dad was terrible. When Mary Lynn was little - she was the first one - he'd come over and I'd get her laid down for a nap. If she fussed a little bit, he'd go get her out. Why, she didn't want to take a nap right now. Or they'd give the little tiny kids a bunch of money, like a $10 bill; spoiled them rotten.



RM: Were they people to show emotion?



BO: No, absolutely not.



LO: No. Whatever happened, happened, and there was no "I care for you" or "I'm sad because of" whatever.



RM: Of course, the other ranchers were gone by the time you can remember anything, weren't they? I was going to ask if the other ranchers were like that or if it was kind of a family trait?



BO: I don't know. We were the only people left.



LO: Mrs. Hayden lived down where Tony Testolin is until you were - what?



BO: Well, yes. But she was . . . she had married but they didn't have any kids, and she was tougher than nails, too. She ran you off and wouldn't let you in their canyon, and my folks never got along with her ever since the sheep deal out here.



LO: OK. You never saw them; who did you see? Did you see Charlie Keough?



BO: We saw Charlie Keough a lot, but he had left here.



LO: He didn't have any children, did he?



BO: No. Neither he nor [his sister] Inez did.



LO: And they were the only 2 in their family.



BO: And I don't remember Charlie ever getting married. She married - her name was Inez Albert.



LO: She married - what was his first name?



BO: I don't know. What was his name? He wrote that Odyssey of a Prospector. That's a book about Reese River and this area.



RM: Is it in the library?



BO: Oh yes, I would imagine. It's a real good book. I liked it.



RM: And it's on the Reese River Valley?



BO: Yes.



RM: It's not fiction?



BO: No. There are some things in it that . . . he wrote it when he was a lot older and a lot of the things he didn't get quite detailed, but I don't think that any of it was fiction. I think he just did it from his memory the best that he could.



LO: His last name is Albert. I can't think what his first name is, and I thought I had a copy but I don't see it.



BO: You probably loaned it to somebody.



LO: I'm sure I did.



BO: Somebody was reading it the other day - B. J. or somebody in Austin. LU: Yes, B. J. told us he'd read it. He [Albert] just got on a pack mule and prospected all these hills - a lot of Ione. He remembered a lot about the Phillips in Ione. And he came back across this way. He mentions the Whooleys, when they were at the Whooley Ranch. But I can't think of anyone else who would have been an old-timer here where you would have gotten . . .



RM:: So when you were growing up your family, basically, lived in social isolation because there wasn't anybody around.



BO: Yes, nobody. We had 2 holidays that we definitely went to. We always went to Labor Day in Fallon and to the rodeo, and we always went to the Fourth of July in Austin. And sometimes we did go to Jim Butler Days, but if we went to Jim Butler Days we missed one of the others. And no days off, ever. I never saw, them just take a day off and say, Well, I'm not going to do nothing today," and go do this. They shaved on Sunday, but after they got done they went and worked. The 7 days [of the week were] alike, from daylight till dark.



LO: Well, the Catholic priest came around to George and Arthur's house. I don't know if he came here.



BO: He never came here.



RM: What about holidays like Christmas?



BO: Nobody ever gave anybody anything.



RM: Did you have a tree?



BO: We did. But . .



RM: But there was no opening of presents and everything on Christmas Day?



BO: No.



RM: Did Santa Claus come?



BO: NO.



LO: I can't imagine either Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny here, when you were little. [laughs]



RM: So Christmas was not a special day really. Did you have a dinner or anything like that?



BO: Yes, we'd have a dinner.



RM: Did you note that it was Christmas Day, or was it just kind of like another day?



BO: Just sort of another day. They always had dinner in the evening, 4:00 or whatever. And you'd get up in the morning and go to work.



RM: On Christmas?



BO: Oh yes.



RM: How about Thanksgiving?



BO: The same. Just had a dinner but you always went and did something.



LO: Didn't your sister used to come out when you were littler and try to celebrate with them a little bit?



BO: Yes. But then . . . you worked. They would be here in the evening but all during the day . . . When we got married, how many days did you ever see my dad stay home?



LO: No, he still had cows to feed. I don't care, Christmas, Thanksgiving or what, the cows still . . .



RM: Yes, the cows get hungry.



BO: And he never did anything but go.



LO: But when I came here and we fixed up Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever, they really enjoyed the dinner.



BO: Oh, you went out of your way. My god, you fixed meals for them that they never ever had in their life, I would imagine.



LO: Oh, we try new things, like [chuckles] we had artichokes and George had never seen an artichoke before. And so we were trying to show him what to do. Well, at that time I hadn't cut the top off so it still had the little prickle on the top of the leaf. Bart said to him, "Well, you just eat the end of the leaf." And he already had the prickle in there. He said, "It prickles my tongue." [laughter] Or shrimp - we had shrimp, and he ate the tail and everything.



BO: He ate the whole thing.



LO: And Bart said, "Well, you don't eat that part."

"Well," he said, "it didn't taste too bad. It was just a little bit crunchy."



BO: And they liked [Lilly] an awful lot - all of them did.



RM: Probably glad to have a woman there.



BO: Yes. You know, she waited on them.



LO: I tried.



BO: If it had to have been a push or shove between me and her, I think I'd have been pushed out and they'd have kept her. They thought an awful lot of her.



LO: Well, I gave them haircuts . .



BO: They never showed any affection or anything.



RM: Even to Lilly?



BO: No.



LO: Well, but there were odd things.



RM: Never an embrace or anything like that.



LO: Oh god, no. They didn't do that. They'd shake hands with people, but that was about the extent of it.



RM: I wonder if that's an Irish trait.



LO: I don't really know. The only other person we knew who was an old Irishman like that was Bill Phillips. We used to talk to him sometimes about his family [and they] were kind of the same. And he always said that they didn't marry because it was real important for them to have made something, because the old country was so poor. It was important for them to make their spot in life - to be able to provide for their family before they ever had a family.



RM: I think the Irish man tend to marry late. I think that is fairly common in Ireland.



BO: That's something.



RM: What kind of foods did they eat?



BO: Meat and potatoes.



RM: And how was the meat prepared?



LO: Terrible.



BO: I can describe the menu for 362 days.



LO: There was not much variety.



RM: How did they prepare the meat?



BO: They'd boil it, or the steaks were fried in grease.



LO: Boiled in oil is what I called it.



RM: Did they put grease in the pan or did the meat just have a lot of fat on it?



BO: Well, it had a lot of fat on it.



LO: And they used a lot of bacon grease.



BO: And when I was a kid we got everything here. We butchered our own beef; my dad made all the hams and bacons and smoked them and cured everything. You never bought anything.



LO: They did make sauerkraut.



BO: Yes, he made sauerkraut.



LO: But Bart'got kind of turned off because they would do things like, he would buy so much cheese at a time that . . .



BO: You know how longhorn cheese comes in a roll - it comes in a roll about that long.



RM: About 2-1/2 feet.



BO: All right, that's what he bought. And if that lasted a year, it lasted a year. If you never ate cheese for a month the mold would be on it that thick. You'd just cut that off a little bit and go back to eating cheese.



LO: Bart didn't care for that too much. I mean, there are better ways.



BO: No. She's seen that mold like . . . and bacon was the same way.



RM: The bacon would get a fuzz on it?



BO:. Well sure, it would get a fuzz on it from being out like that - and he'd just take a little bit of vinegar and wipe it off, and away you'd go.



RM: That's really interesting. OK, he put bacon grease in the skillet to cook the steak?



BO: Oh yes, there'd be a lot of grease.



RM: They always saved the bacon grease?



BO: Yes, and made lard.



LO: Forget about this cholesterol business. I mean, they cooked with a lot of bacon grease.



BO: And rendered lots of lard. I can remember rendering lard when we'd buy pigs - right here on the stove. They'd heat it up and render the lard. And you had a lot of eggs in the summertime so you took all the eggs and then they'd store them for the winter in water glass. Have you ever heard of water glass?



RM: No.





CHAPTER SIX




BO: Water glass is a solution that you buy in the store. It used to come in quart jars. And we'd have big crocks out in the cellar.



LO: That's one of them right there.



BO: Like that one there but bigger. You'd put the eggs in that and you'd put this water glass in there and then that made a sealing on it and they sat in that. That's where they stored their eggs all winter.



LO: And they didn't get rotten?



BO: They never got rotten. I've eaten them, honey, and I'm still here.



RM: What is water glass?



BO: I have no idea.



RM: Is it clear?



BO: Yes.



LO: And you just reached down and got the egg out and you didn't do anything to it?



BO: We just got the eggs out. Then they'd come in and rinse them off.



RM: And the egg was OK?



BO: Yes - just like a regular egg.



RM: Why did they have to do that? Didn't the chickens lay in the winter?



BO: Not as much. Ours lay well [in the winter] now, but they never went to town and got grain for them so they just kind of . . .



RM: So chickens don't lay that much in the winter if you don't feed them grain?



BO: They lay better in the summer and spring. They gathered all the eggs and they'd save them for the year.



RM: How did they cook their eggs?



BO: Fry them in bacon grease, and a lot of boiled eggs. When we went somewhere for riding or whatever, you had maybe one or two boiled eggs and you always had a good sandwich or two. A sandwich was always left over from breakfast, which would be hot cakes.



RM: The hot cake was the bread?



BO: Right. They just took the hot cake and put some jelly on it and rolled it up like a roll and that was lunch - that and an egg. A hot cake was an all-purpose thing. You made the hot cakes for breakfast, put it with jam for lunch and used the leftovers beyond that to feed the dogs.



BO: And that was a 365-day meal.



LO: Variety was not a big thing with them, either. [chuckles]



RM: Did they bake bread?



BO: No, just hot cakes.



LO: Your mother made biscuits.



BO: My mother made biscuits, but my dad made the best biscuits. But that was for dinner or whatever.



RM: Were they sourdough hot cakes?



BO: No.



LO: They didn't do sourdough; my folks did sourdough.



BO: My mother got sick when I was 8 or younger, and then she was mentally incompetent. After that my dad did almost all the cooking and that. kind of thing. So he cooked stuff that he could put on in the morning and then come in at lunch and it would be ready. Or he'd put something on at noon, so that would be something like boiled meat and boiled potatoes and cabbage.



LO: He made the most wonderful rice pudding, though. I make it yet today and we love it. You just put your oven on real low and put a cup of uncooked rice, a cup of sugar and 8 cups of milk [together] and stick it in the oven and leave it on low until all the milk absorbs. He would put it on in the morning when he went out . .



BO: It takes about 4 hours.



RM: That's good. We've got that recipe on tape now. [chuckles]



LO: Well, you want a dash of salt and a dash of vanilla. But it was wonderful and I still use it.



BO: It is wonderful. We never had anything but wood for hot water or anything. I can remember when we got our first propane stove - I was 8 years old. Up until then there were no lights but gas lights - Coleman gas lights or kerosene lights.



LO: When did you first get a light plant, Dad?



BO: We got the light plant in '48.



LO: And then you just ran it at night. And they had a gas refrigerator.



BO: We had a kerosene refrigerator - a Servel.



RM: When did you get that?



BO: At the same time. They made a big splurge - some deer hunters out of California sold them the light plant, and then some deer hunters from California came and did the wiring - Ed Richmond [was one of them].



RM: They wired the whole house?



BO: Yes, they came up from California and wired the house and put in the light plant for them.



RM: How did that change your life?



BO: None.



LO: I don't think it probably changed anybody. [chuckles]



BO: I think all they did was have a better light to read by.



RM: And we're talking about this house right here?



BO: Right here. And it never had any plumbing until she and I put the plumbing in it 20 years ago.



RM: Is that right? When did public power come into the valley?



LO: Seventy-five?



RM: And what were the circumstances that . . . ?



LO: Oh, we attribute it to the Indians They were trying to up-grade the Indians and . .



BO: If it hadn't been for the reservation there I don't think we'd have it today.



LO: I don't think, just for us, that they would have put it in.



RM: What about the roads? What were the roads like when you were a kid and how have they improved or changed?



BO: From when I was a kid until now I don't think the roads out here have improved any. They've made them a little wider; other than that, they're just as rough today as they were then. The difference is that the Forest Service used to take care of them when I was a kid and now the county takes care of them.



RM: Are they impassable much of the year?



BO: Not with 4-wheel-drives today.



RM: But a 2-wheel vehicle might get stuck?



BO: Oh, you'd have to chain up. If the 4-wheel-drives have already made a pass then you could go.



RM: Is there ever a time when you can't get through because of mud?



BO: No.



LO: We have had the roads totally wiped out because of high water. That happened last in '82. Right up here between us and the tribe it totally washed out; you couldn't go. It washed out on this side of the Hess Ranch. So the only way you could get in here from Austin was to come all the way over Elkhorn road, and then in. We could go past by going clear up to the mountains and across the foothills road - we could get to the ranger station.



BO: You know, it took you 20 miles to go 3.



LO: Yes. That year Tony Testolin's bridge washed out, and he was on the other side of the river. He had to go 11 miles to get out.



BO: Eleven miles to go one mile.



LO: Down here at Elmer Bob's was the only bridge that was up. It was just total high water. That was the same year that they had that big mud slide in Washoe Valley.



RM: I remember that.



LO: And the high water came at the same time. The same thing happened. We had a lot of snow left and right around Memorial Day, remember, it got hotter than blazes. And the water came and it came in a big bunch. That was the same year.



RM: Yes. Bart, you mentioned that your dad and uncles did their own smoking [of meat]. Could you describe a little bit of what that involved?



BO: Oh, it didn't involve too much. All he had was a little house - the one down at Billy O'Toole's is still there; the one we had here I turned around and made a pump house out of. But it was just a little house about 5-by-5, and we went and cut mahogany.



RM: Mahogany was what you smoked with.



BO: Yes, because that's what was here. We'd just build a fire outside in a little thing and run the chimney into it and out through the top and……



RM: Oh, the fire was outside.



BO: And he just smoked it that way.



RM: How long did he smoke it?



BO: Oh golly, I can't remember. Not too long - maybe 2, 3 days.



RM: And it tasted like regular bacon?



BO: .0h yes. It was good. I made some bacon.



LO: We made it one year. I was sure he was going to poison us. [laughs]



BO: She thought I was going to kill them all, but I made it from what I could remember of how dad did it, and it was good.



LO: It was. The only thing I didn't like about it is that we have gotten off of salt. They were real salt-eaters and we don't do much salt, and it tasted terribly salty to me.



RM: They put a lot of salt on it?



BO: Well, you'd put it in a brine, too, you know.



RM: Before or after?



BO: After, or whenever you had fresh things you wanted to keep. They'd make salt pork or whatever.



RM: Salt pork is just pork soaked in salt brine, then?



BO: Yes.



RM: Did they soak it first and then smoke it? Yes. Then you had that gun - you'd shoot it in the veins and you'd put all that brine through that - they used saltpeter and what else was

it? I can't remember.



LO: You buy. a cure now.



BO: I don't even know what happened to the gun.



LO: We had it. You stuck it in along the bone so that you'd get the salt solution down around the bones so it wouldn't spoil. BO: Everybody thought I was going to kill them. But as I remember, they always pre-boiled all that salt out 2 or 3 times.



LO: You had to, or else if you made a pot of beans it was apt to be salty enough with just whatever little meat you stuck in it.



RM: Did they boil the salt out of the bacon?



BO: No, not out of the bacon. Out of the hams and . . . But the bacon was good. I don't know, he just rubbed [the brine] on the bacon, I think. His bacon's not strong. But it was really good.



RM: Did he use saltpeter?



BO: Yes, I think so.



RM: How did they boil the meat? Did they just put the meat in a pot and boil it?



BO: Yes - with no flavorings at all. Just the meat and maybe some potatoes.



RM: And did they prepare potatoes in other ways?



BO: They had a lot of fried potatoes.



RM: Fried in the bacon grease?



BO: Yes. You know, you look at it today and they're always [talking about] cholesterol. All those old-timers ate more cholesterol than anybody nowadays and they all lived into 'their 80s and 90s.



RM: That's right. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?



BO: I don't think it's the cholesterol at all. I think it's the exercise.



RM: I think that's a big factor.



BO: Those people got up and from daylight till dark they went - every day. And they all went past their 80s and they were in good health right up until the end. Or, not good health but they never complained.



RM: They lived more than a normal life span and were eating all that fat.



BO: Yes.



RM: Was it really just meat and potatoes, or did they add other things?



BO: Oh, they'd have carrots, but no seasoning. Maybe a little bit of salt or pepper and that would have been it.



LO: Yes. They wouldn't have heard of an herb



RM: Is that right? Did they have the pancakes in the morning?



BO: Every morning.



RM: So breakfast consisted of pancakes and .



BO: . . . and eggs and bacon, or ham.



LO: His dad liked oatmeal mush.



BO: He always had mush - oatmeal, Cream of Wheat.



RM: Did they eat it with milk on it?



BO: Sure.



LO: They minced the cow, every day. That was the dog food, too. They used a lot of milk . . .



BO: There was always lots of milk. When I was a little kid they milked about 15 cows and always had lots of pigs and fed the milk to the pigs. And no milk on your mush - always straight cream.



LO: Oh, his dad loved cream. Yes.



RM:- And sugar on it?



BO: Yes. Sugar and cream.



LO: Coffee with cream and sugar, too.



RM: Did they drink a lot of coffee?



BO: Coffee and grounds.



LO: [laughs] His dad made the strongest coffee I ever saw. It was like cowboy coffee. You didn't use the little basket to put the grounds in.



BO: He'd put grounds and water together and boil it.



LO: He'd put the grounds in water and then he would dash a little cold water in there to settle the grounds and pour the coffee. And he never believed in cleaning the coffee pot much. You just added more grounds and more water.



RM: Oh, more grounds until it filled up and then . .



LO: Pretty soon it was like syrup. I mean, God, strong! He had lots of cream and sugar in this.



RM: Wow. And it'd really give you a kick?



LO: Oh man.



BO: I don't drink coffee.



LO: 'He doesn't drink coffee to this day. They coffeed him out. [laughs] He didn't like that type coffee.



BO: Have you ever seen one of the old cream separators?



RM: Yes, when I was a little kid.



BO: It's just round and it's got glass all the way down one side.



RM: My mom used to have one when I was a kid.



BO: You'd drain the milk off the bottom, and then you just watched the cream, and when it got down you shut it off, and the top was all cream. I'm not talking about the crank type; this is a gravity thing. I've got one hanging up in there.



LO: Well, you have. The one out in the . .



BO: That one out there is the crank type. That one out there's electric.



LO: ,They used that crank one when I first came here.



BO: Yes, we've got the crank one, too. I set it down or something and it froze up and got rusted . . . the blue one.



LO: When I first came here they weren't putting the milk in the refrigerator. They used the pantry (we've turned that pantry into a bathroom now). They had some tables in there and he would milk every morning and they would pour the milk into some pans and set them on the table and let the cream come to the top . . .



BO: . . . and cover them with a cloth and that's it.



LO: And then they would get the cream off and then . . . every day you had fresh milk, so you used the fresh milk and gave the old milk to the pigs and the dogs. And he milked 7 cows then.



RM: It seems that they were really producing the milk for the pigs. I mean, how much could a little small family use?



LO: Not very. much. Maybe half a gallon . . .



BO: They sent milk away to everybody. They used to send milk to Ione every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on the stage.



RM: Oh. As a gift or for money?



BO: They never sold it - they were just giving it away. They sent quite a bit . . . you [should] ask Reese and Elisa Gandolfo - they hauled lots of milk to everybody over there.



RM: And then-what was lunch when you weren't riding?



BO: Whatever you could . . . you'd come inside . . .



LO: Oh, Spam..



BO: No, when I was a little kid they never did that much Spam. He always had boiled meat and 2 potatoes.



RM: Potatoes again?



BO:, Potatoes. You had fried potatoes for breakfast and sometimes at lunch.



RM: So breakfast was a big meal, right?



LO: The idea was that you might not get back in time for lunch.



BO: A lot of times you didn't come home for lunch. And if you didn't take a lunch and something happened, you just had no lunch, that's all.



RM: And then supper was meat and potatoes again?



BO: Yes. And carrots; they could raise a lot of carrots and they'd put them away in the cellar in sand so you had carrots all year. Cabbage would keep and they made lots of sauerkraut.



RM: When did the phones come in?



BO: The phone came in, in the early 1900s.



RM: Really? I'll be darned.



BO: I'd say it was right after the turn of the century, maybe even before. The phone line used to go up to Mohawk and then went up to Worthingtons'. And they all left right in the '30s, so it had to have been really early.



RM: I wonder what the circumstances were for it coming in.



BO: I don't know. That's all I can remember. My dad or one of them told me one time that the guy built the whole phone line for $1000.



RM: Wow.



LO: But it was a party-line system, and everybody had their own ring. Theirs was 2 longs and a short.



RM: When did private lines come in?



BO: Private lines came in about 4 months ago.



LO: That's true. The ranchers in the valley got together in 1972.



BO: But that wasn't a private line.



LO:, It was not. It was still a party system. They built their own phone lines in 1972, and we've had better phones since then. We had a gap there of about 4 or 5 years [1965-1972] where we did not have phones.



BO: No, it had just deteriorated - it was just gone; there was nothing there.



LO: And so they built this phone and it was a 4-party system - we had one and the Indians had one phone, and the Forest Service and the Whooley Ranch [each had one]. So we had 4 people on each party line. And then just the first of the year We got this new microwave system in, and now we have our own individual phone. We don't have to share with anybody.



RM: Was there any particular reason they put the new system in?



LO: It was one of those deals where Bell had some money and the Public Service Commission decided that they had to serve the rural areas You know how those deals work.



BO: We have the newest phone system in the United States. They had it in Canada for a couple of years, but this is the first system of its type in the United States. It took Bell almost 18 months, through the FCC, to get licensed to put this phone in.



RM: Does it run on wires?



BO: No wires.



RM: You're beaming a microwave up to a site?



BO: We're microwave right out of our yard and it bounces 5 times, and our operator's Reno. To get out of the valley it bounces 5 times.



RM: No kidding. Where's the first bounce, do you know?



BO: From here it goes right down to behind the Whooley place (where you came through the yard). Then it bounces to another place, that you drove by just after you turned to come up the valley - right at the end of the pavement today - there's a ditch . . .



RM: Yes.



BO: And from there it bounces to the top of the mountain From there it bounces back into Austin and from there it bounces to Reno.



RM: Is that right? That's fascinating.



LO: And it seems to be a good system. We have had a couple of fadeouts. And if the power goes out you're out of a phone.



RM: Where does your power come from - Reno?



BO: Sierra Pacific? I don't know where. You know, Tonopah . .



RM: Tonopah is on Sierra Pacific.



BO: Well, Tonopah used to be on California Edison.



RM: Did it?



BO: Not too many years ago.



RM: I think I write my checks to Sierra Pacific now.



BO: Yes, it's Sierra Pacific now. I think our power comes . . . it's either east or west. I think that most of ours comes out of the east; I'm not sure. It bounces back and forth. It's nice to have power.



RM: I'd like to pick up on some of the things that we talked about last time. I was interested in the outside work. Apparently that made possible the survival of a lot of the ranches before they folded. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Where did you work and how often did you have to do this kind of thing and so on?



BO: My family, you mean?



RM:, Yes, and in general the necessity for ranchers to work outside.



LO: When you were young your dad didn't . .



BO: They didn't work outside.



LO: But before your dad married your mom they all seemed to have worked somewhere else.



BO: They had the ranch all put together in '42; that's when they quit buying everything.



RM: So they were expanding and they needed money up to '42?



BO: Yes.



RM: So they acquired some of the places that had folded in the '30s.



BO: Right.



LO: Well, the Whooleys sold out.



BO: They bought the Whooley place in 1940.



LO: And then Schmallings'?



BO: They bought that in the '30s.



RM: Now where's the Schmalling place?



BO: It's 9 miles further south.



RM: OK. And have you ever had to work outside, Bart?



BO: Oh yes. I work outside continuously yet. She and I are the only ones who have any equipment in the area and we do a lot outside with equipment.



RM: Do you do it because you have to or just as a friendly gesture to a neighbor?



BO: No, we do it because we have to right now. I've gone and driven a truck. We've got that truck and I drove into California - then we had hired people who'd run the truck and then I drove it in California one winter and she stayed home . . .



LO: Well, you've always done outside work with equipment. Always.



BO: Always for the last 30 years.



LO: Usually he would hire out to the Forest Service, BLM and the Indians a lot.



BO: And mining.



LO: Mining. We do a lot of that. A lot of times you'll do it because somebody needs something done and you're here close, but we can always use the money, Bob.



BO: Yes, we've got a job we need to get on right away here. We're going to try to get a start by the end of the month. We've got a leveling job like the one we just finished out there.



RM: In your field, right?



BO: But I've got one for an outside party that we're going to start between now and the end of the month.



RM: You mentioned mining. Could you talk a little bit about mining in the Reese River area?



BO: I've just kind of followed my dad's theory on mining: That's a good way to throw money in the ground. [laughter] If you've got money to throw away, go mining. That was his theory and that's . . . and he never touched it; and I never did either. I don't know one rock from another yet today.



LO: There are always people out here prospecting and having claims and it's never anything big, just little "monkey-do" mines here and there.



RM: Are there any kind of significant mines on the east or west side of the valley?



BO: Not right around here close. There was some ore found up here to the west of us back during the Depression time. A guy was hunting deer and he brought it in and put it in the window down here at the Bowler Ranch, and it sat there for about 10 years and finally they decided to send it away and get it assayed. He had chipped it off of a ledge up there, and it went $180,000 a ton back then. They spent 10, 12 years after that, and he couldn't remember where he found it. So it's still up there.



RM: So somewhere up on the east side of the Shoshones is a powerful ledge?



BO: There's a powerful one up there.



LO: Oh, you should talk about old Jim Wards. He had his little mine up there and supported himself for years and years.



BO: Oh yes. He made a good living up there.



RM: Up inside the Shoshones?



BO: Yes - 4 miles up from this house. He was a good miner.



RM: What was the name of his mine?



BO: I have no idea.



LO: We always just call it Wards'.



BO: I don't know what the name of his claims were.



RM: What kind of a mine was it?



BO: Gold and silver.



RM: And he made a living there?



BO: He made a living there all the time I was a little kid up until he died in about '52 or '53.



LO: Did he dig the tunnels up there? (There's a tunnel.)



BO: He died, I guess, before that. Arthur, his son, stayed there but he never could make it pay. He always worked for us after that.



RM: Did he mill his ore?



BO: He had everything - his own little mill, his little compressor, the whole thing. And he always made a good living.



LO: Didn't he even have ore cars?



BO: Yes. He had little ore cars that he wheeled in and out.



RM: And you say it's 4 miles west of here?



BO: Yes. And Ione was a good mine. Al Dickman and those guys out of Manteca, California, came in there in the early 60s - between '60 and '65, I guess. They made a bunch of money there.



RM: That was the Ione mine?



BO: Well, it was up at the Cinnabar. They were the Cinnabar and the Mercury mines (those were their names). They came in out of California and mined up in there in the early '60s and hoarded it all away and when quicksilver went sky high - to $400 or $500 a flask - they dumped it all on the market and closed up and left. They went out of here and then they passed away right after that, but they made $3 or $4 million there.



LO: What about old Gus Fayes over in Bonita?



BO: He bought that. That was a shyster deal.



LO: That was uranium, wasn't it?



BO: That was uranium. It was a big boom.



RM: Now what was that?



BO: Oh, a guy - a deer hunter - came in here and took another guy up there and kind of salted the mine and sold it to him for $5000. But old Gus finally got his money back out of it. I mean, he sold it to a big company for $200,000 or $300,000. They give him $50,000 down and spent a lot in there drilling. They didn't come up with quite what they wanted so they left, but he got his money out of it.



RM: But originally the guy salted it?



BO: Yes.





CHAPTER SEVEN




RM: So Bonita is up here on the east side of the Shoshones?



BO: Yes, it's about 6 or 7 miles away. A lot of that went on in this country.



RM: A lot of uranium scams?



BO: There were a lot of uranium scams here.



LO: Then there was a nickel mine over here in Marysville that never amounted to a hill of beans. What about Crane Creek?



BO: That was Hamilton, and I don't know . .



LO: What kind of ore did they have there?



BO: It was gold and silver. There was a guy by the name of Hamilton there in Mina, near Crane Canyon, and that's about all . . .



LO: There's a nice old original house in Crane Canyon that's kind of built into the rocks - this Hamilton must have made that house. And he made the tunnel that's there and everything. Some people from California that we know have the claim now, and they've maintained that old house really well. It's built right into the rock.



BO: But I think the Forest Service is going to make them destroy it because it isn't a producing mining claim now. Maybe they can't since it's a historical thing - it was built in the 1900s.



RM: Oh, that'd be a mistake to destroy it.



LO: They were trying to make those people move off of there because they were going to have . . .



BO: Yes, they were going to burn it all. I don't know if they're ever going to get it accomplished or what. There was a lot of [small-scale) mining when I was a kid. Hap and Eall Merck and Louie McGruders had a lead mine in San Juan when I was a little kid.



RM: Where's San Juan?



BO: It's back to the north of us about 8 or 10 miles on the Toiyabes.



RM: It seems that there aren't as many mines on the west side of the Toiyabes as there are on the east. Is that a fair assessment?



BO: That's true. On the other side there's a lot more exposure to rocks because it's so steep and such.



RM: Oh, so it's easier to find.



BO: Yes.



RM: Do you know any other stories of lost mines like the one up here? LO: Tell him about the nuggets in the tree roots.



BO: Oh, my folks found that. That was in San Juan. My dad and his brothers went up into San Juan when they were kids - they snaked wood off the hills and hauled it home on the wagons, and then in the winter they'd cut it up. They got all their wood off of one ridge this one winter and as they were cutting it up, in the roots, here were all these nuggets right in the dirt. They went back but they could never quite . . . He showed me the area - I know the area within a mile of where they pulled all the wood off. But to go up there in a mile area on the side of a hill to try . . .



LO: What are the chances that that was all the gold that was there? Doesn't gold settle down to the lowest spot - and if the water ran there once it could have gotten caught in the tree roots, and that would have been . . .



BO: I doubt it.



RM: Did you ever pan it?



BO: My dad and his brothers panned it looking for it after that, but they never found it. They could pan up to where it quit and they knew it was right in that area, but where on that hill they got those trees . . . So that's 2 good prospects that nobody's ever found again. I don't think the people nowadays know . . .

Then there was a time when there was a mine up over here in Becker Canyon that Stan Storm used to come up and try to go find. The Chinaman found a real rich mine and he made a living there, but he never told anybody where it was. If he'd need some money he'd go up in there and get it - he always had it marked with a shovel. But nobody's ever been able to find it, either.



RM: Is that right? And that's on the east side of the Shoshones?



BO: Yes.



RM: Is that right? When was the Chinaman up there?



BO: I don't know. This was in the early 1900s. There were a lot of old mines in this area. And then the Cliffords from Stone Cabin were camped, one time, this side of Cloverdale They had their horses hobbled and they got away one night. He was chasing them down the next morning, and he found a real rich vein. He thought he'd go back to it but he never did.



RM: And this would also have been around 1900?



BO: Yes, or later. My dad worked for the Cliffords down there at Stone Cabin. His sister was married to one of the Cliffords. He told me that they had a coffee can full of dirt that held the door open and he thought he'd just kick it out of the road and shut the door, and he said he almost broke his foot. He couldn't even budge it. And what better place to hide all your gold than in a doorstop for your door with just a little bit of dirt over the top of it.



RM: How about that. And this was at the Clifford ranch?



BO: Well, I don't know-where it was, but that's where they kept all their gold. It was just right out in plain view. They just had a little layer of dirt on it and it was nothing but gold underneath that.



LO: Well, that brings to mind what has always been the big thing at the Whooley Ranch - that they had buried gold.



BO: Yes, it's still there: $10,000 in $20 gold pieces.



RM: OK, tell that story.



BO: Well, when old man Whooley was dying he told them that he'd buried all of his money behind the house there at Whooleys'.



RM: When did he die?



BO: I don't know what year.



RM: It was before you were born?



BO: Oh yes. This was in the late '20s or early '30s. He had $10,000 in $20 gold pieces and he tried to tell them exactly where it was and he never could [explain it].



LO: But they knew that he could see it from his window.



RM: Which window? His living room or . .



BO: He didn't ever say. So they tore the rock walls all down - that's why they were destroyed, thinking that he had it stashed in the rock walls - and nobody's ever found it to this day.



RM: And obviously they've used metal detectors?



BO: Oh yes. They've done everything.



RM: Do you think it's there?



BO: I think it's there. He was the guy-who built all these [brick] houses in the valley. He made a lot of money and he had it and never trusted banks or things like that. So it was all buried.



RM: And it was in $20 gold pieces.



BO: Twenty-dollar gold pieces.



LO: What would that be worth today?



RM: Oh, I have no idea. It could be . .



BO: Probably at least $100,000 today if you think of the value that a gold piece is - $150, $200 apiece, probably?



RM: I know they're expensive. That is incredible.



BO: People have looked and dug and everything, and they've never found it.



RM: What do you think of the possibility that somebody found it and didn't say anything?



LO: I never thought of that.



BO: I thought about it, but I think that if somebody had found something like that papers would have got ahold of it or something.



RM: Well, let's talk a little bit about Whooley. He's the one who built all these nice houses?



BO: Yes. He built this house and he built the Derringer house. He was a bricklayer and a stonemason.



RM: What was his first name?



BO: I don't know. My dad and the others always just called him Whooley. He had kids - Clarence and John Whooley - but I don't know that much about him except that he was a tremendous bricklayer and stonemason.



RM: When did he come into the valley?



BO: I don't know. I guess he must have come into the valley when all of the other homesteaders came in.



RM: Which would be in the [18]70s or '60s?



BO: Yes, in that area.



RM: Did he have a ranch himself?



BO: He had the Whooley place.



RM: So he had his ranch and then on the side he was building houses for people?



BO: Yes, he built houses. And he was scared to death of ghosts, and so were his kids. And my uncle younger than my dad was really a prankster. In the '30s his kids would come down riding and whatever, and one time they were all down here at the Bowler place. (They had this place but my uncle worked down at Bowlers'.) The Whooley boys were there for supper, and after supper they kept saying, it's time to go home," because they couldn't go after dark

But they told them, "Well, first play a game of cards," or do something, and they kept then. While they were doing that, this uncle and another guy snuck out and said they had to go out to the outhouse. While they were gone they went down and hung some sheets down the road a ways. And then they came back and just kept talking.

So the Whooleys said, "Well, we've got to go home." They went out and got on their horse and rode down the lane about a mile and ran into these things flapping in the wind. They came back in a big hurry and all the time my uncle and the others were standing outside watching. As they saw them caning on back, they went back in the house and just sat there. They knocked on the door and came in and said, "I think, by the way, we will spend the night."



RM: [laughs]



BO: They stayed the night and the others went down and took everything off after they went to bed so in the morning there was nothing left there, so it confirmed their belief in ghosts.

Oh, they used to do things like that or they would go out - when they were camped out riding or something in the summertime - and be talking about rattlesnakes. They'd find somebody who was afraid of snakes and 2 guys would set up their sleeping bags, or their bunk rolls, one on each side of the man who was afraid of them. Then before they'd go to bed they'd put a rope underneath his bed. They'd say, "I think there's a snake under that one guy's . . ." and then the other guy would pull it back.



RM: [laughing] Oh, that's a good one.



BO: And that poor old boy didn't get much sleep all night.



LO: Oh, his uncle was evil. He would . . . tell about that horrible trick they did on Duman Hooper with the bees.



BO: Well, they'd do that in the canyons. You've seen these yellow jacket nests . . .



RM: Yes, right.



BO: When a bunch of guys were riding up in the canyon or whatever and they'd run on to one of them, they'd hit it with their hat and run off and the guy behind him would get it.



LO: They were terrible.



RM: [laughing] Those are great stories.



LO: Or they'd get people bucked off. That was a favorite.



BO: Well, if you were a hunter . . . I saw this a lot when I was a little kid. Up until the '50s before my uncle moved to Ione, we had rodeo every day, especially during deer season. People would come in here and want to rent a horse to go deer hunting. He'd say, 'Well, I haven't got any horses."

"Oh, I can ride any saddle horse."

"Oh, by the way," he'd say, "I do have a saddle horse for you then."

And so he would go get them the meanest, rankest saddle horse he could find and give it to them. I've seen them thrown up over the top of the shed and I've seen them thrown over the gates and …..



RM: Oh!



LO: Didn't they have a horse that always came home?



BO: Yes. We had a horse that would take a person to the mountains and dump him off up on top and then he'd come home and then they'd have to walk home.



RM: [laughs] So they were always playing tricks like this?



BO: Oh terrible. It's a wonder they never got sued. Today they'd have been sued.



LO: It's a wonder that they got away with all that.



BO: I saw a deer hunter get bucked off right out here in this field - he hit flat on his back, and it knocked the wind out of him. He thought he was dead. He just lay there for 5 minutes or more before he even moved a muscle.



RM: But nobody ever got seriously hurt?



BO: No.



LO: And boy, I tell you what, you'd have to be dead before they were going to go help you, too.



BO: They wouldn't help you.



LO: No way.



BO: No. I can remember my sister's husband getting on a horse up at Schmallings' bareback - a real good horse. Every once in a while he'd buck a guy off. And Juniper - remember that horse, Juniper?



LO: You had Juniper when I first came here.



BO: He had Juniper and Ginger. Anyway, my sister's husband flew up on there bareback - he went about 20 feet, and the horse just threw him about 30 feet and he settled down on the ground. He looked up and he said to the horse, "I don't think you ride bareback." And my uncle said, "No, I don't think you do."



RM: [laughs]



LO: Terrible.



BO: Oh, they did mean things. I think of a lot of things like that I'd like to do once in a while.



LO: Well thank God you never do them. [laughs]



BO: But they used to do a lot of things.



LO: They'd set people up to make fools out of themselves and then really get a big kick out of it.



BO: Well, that was their entertainment. If you were out here and you never went anywhere, that was your entertainment.



LO: If a guy had said, "Look, I've never ridden a horse" or whatever, they wouldn't have done anything to him. But if you get a guy who's going to brag, . .



BO: That's right. When a guy comes and asks him for a horse and they say, "Well, I don't have any."

"Well, I can ride any kind of horse you've got."

"Well, if that's the case, by golly, I do have one you can use."

They did things like that all the time.



RM: Now, it's actually in Lander County, but there's a big brick house on the right as you come in.



BO: That's the Bess Ranch.



RM: Did Whooley build that house?



BO: I think Whooley built that house and this one, too.



RM: And do you know about when?



BO: It was about the same time these were built - 1900, 1904. That one down there would have been done before this one.



RM: The Hess place looks like it's abandoned now.



BO: It is.



RM: Nobody's living in it.



BO: No, it's falling down.



RM: It's almost a historic structure in the valley, isn't it?



BO: It is. It used to be a beautiful place when I was a kid. It was owned by the Welches up until '48, and they took care of it. And after 1948, Roy Visbeck bought it and he moved the hired people into it and moved his foreman into the little white house next door and fixed it up (it was the teacher's then), and from that point on it's just steadily gone downhill until there's nothing left.



LO: I know Jim hasn't had anybody living in it for 4 or 5 years, has he? BO: No. And then someone went in there and just destroyed the stable and all the old buildings - the cellar and all - just got a dozer and dozed them all in and buried them.



RM: Why would a person do that?



LO: Oh, different opinions, I think, Bob. A lot of people don't see the beauty in old things or so if they want to modernize they tear everything down and make everything new. Or sometimes it gets real hard to maintain them.



RM: Then there's another brick house coming this way from the Hess place.



LO: That was Derringers'.



RM: OK, there's one on south of you, then.



LO: Yes.



RM: And Whooley built that also?



BO: Yes. My dad told me that he built them all.



LO: It is abandoned now, too. First it was the teacherage for the school, and then they closed the school and took the kids to Gabbs and turned the whole thing over to the Indians. The Indians made the school into a church and no one has lived in the house since. We did hear this year that they're getting a grant and are going to renovate that. So we'll see.



RM: Then, what about the ranch where you come right through the yard. That was the Whooleys'?



LO: Yes.



RM: There's an adobe structure there. I was wondering if you knew anything about that.



BO: That was a stagecoach stop, and it has carvings by the drivers in it from clear back in the 1800s. That's where they changed horses and stayed as they went on.



LO: It looks like they started the house and then just continually added on and added on and never tore down any of the old stuff. The original old house is inside there somewhere.



RM: Where did the stage run?



BO: From Austin to Berlin.



RM: And that was a stop - was there another stop?



BO: I don't know. I think Derringers' up here was a stop. I know it was a freight stop but . . . when I was a kid they built that new school, and that's where the stable was. They destroyed the stable and all the corrals when they built the school. I know when my dad was driving teams Whooleys' was one stop and Derringers' was another, then Ione and then Berlin. And then coming back it would be the other way, of course. RM: With Austin as kind of the leading community?



BO: Yes.



RM: And then Whooley built your house here. Was that for your grandfather?



BO: No, for Welches.



RM: OK. Did he build any other houses in the area?



LO: Dad, who built the barn?



BO: Jakey built the barns.



RM: On these places where Whooley built the houses?



BO: Yes. I don't know what his name was. I was just sitting here thinking about it. My dad used to have a picture of him and I don't know what ever happened to it. It would have been neat. He was a little bitty guy like my uncle George and a pair of cowboy boots that you wear today came above his knees - his legs were that short. His body from the waist up, was normal, but his legs were only about yea long. A regular pair of boots like cowboy boots came up above his knees so right there would be his knees. And he was a stonemason and built all these buildings. My dad said he could go out and look at a rock and drill a hole here, drive a wedge there and split them just [right].



RM: Is that right? Could we talk a little bit about the structures on your place besides your house. The corrals were built very early on, weren't they?



BO: In the early 1900s, I would say. And a lot of the posts in the corrals are the original posts. They charcoaled all the bottom of the poles for a preservative.



RM: Oh really? Now how did that work?



BO: They're beautiful to this day. In ours the dust and stuff built up above them and they rotted off above. But if you dig down to dig them out to replace then, the charcoal stub that's still in the ground is just as good as the day it was put in there about 100 years ago.



RM: So if it's charcoaled on the outside it doesn't decay?



BO: It won't decay.



RM: How deep do they go?



BO: About 3 feet. I guess they just dug a trench about 3 feet deep and then charcoaled them. I'd like to know exactly how they did it. They burned them all and put them out and then they buried them, and the post inside of that charcoal is just as solid as the day it was put in, and that was 80 years ago.



RM: I'll be darned. Are they willow?



BO: Well, juniper and willow.



RM: And gotten locally?



BO: Yes. Everything was gotten right here. The rocks in this stable were gotten up here in Marysville Canyon 4 miles away, and all of the stuff was gotten as close to home as possible.



RM: So they dug a trench, charcoaled the poles, put them in the ground side by side and then filled the dirt back in. And then did they put a pole or something on the side?



BO: Yes, a rail.



RM: And they've been there about 80 years?



BO: Oh yes.



RM: And then you've got a stone building out there that was made by the stonemason?



BO: Yes - Jakey. I can't think of what his last name was.



LO: I never knew you to say it.



RM: And when was that built?



BO: All of this right here had to have been built right in 1900. The house was built in 1904, and I think all of the corrals and the stable and everything were built within one or two years, right in there, because the whole place moved about half a mile. When the Barretts had it they lived in the lower end of the field and when Welches bought it they built the house here and moved everything up here.



RM: Are there any remains in the lower end of the field from where they lived?



BO: Nothing.



LO: We dug up these cups there, though.



RM: Oh - china cups?



LO: I don't know. The lady that I was with said that they were coffee cups that they didn't put handles on at the time. We were monkeying around down there because there's a lot of bricks and broken glass, and I found 2 of them.



RM: Is there any adobe on your place?



BO: Yes. This house is adobe inside.



RM: Oh, you mean it's brick on the outside and adobe on the inside?



BO: The walls in here are all adobe.



RM: Oh, the interior walls are adobe.



BO: They're adobe brick - they're not fired brick.



RM: Is that right? Wow. What is next to the brick on the outside?



BO: Well, that's just plaster right on the brick.



RM: Are there anymore structures in the valley that would be worth talking about?



BO: I don't know of any.



LO: Who built the cellars, Dad? Did someone build the cellars or did your folks just do that?



BO: I don't know who built our cellar. Every place has a cellar, but I don't know who built them.



RM: A quick question on the roads. Before Gabbs was there, there wasn't a road going over to Luning, was there?



BO: No. I guess there must have been some kind of a trail through there.



RM: And then what about the road that goes up to Highway 50 - Highway 361 - that goes to Gabbs. Would that have been there?



BO: I can remember when they paved that in '46 and '47. I was little and I can remember coming out of Fallon and Hal Newman (we saw him there the other day) brought me home one time. I don't know why I was in town. My dad and uncles picked me up in Ione and we came that way and they were paving the road.



RM: In those days, how did you get to Fallon? Did you go that way?



BO: No, we went down here about 10, 12 miles and over to Elkhorn and hit old Highway 50 and went in.



RM Oh, I see. Elkhorn takes you over the Shoshone Mountains, right?



BO: Yes. We didn't go to town that often.



RM: How often did you go?



BO: Oh, maybe twice a year, or 3 times at the most. Somebody would come or they would order stuff - we did almost all our shopping by Montgomery Wards or Sears. You didn't have much equipment. A lot of times I didn't go, or just my dad would go. For instance, he would go in somewhere just before the Fourth of July and get all the parts for the old horse mowers and whatever we needed; he'd just go in and back.



RM: But you did your shopping in the catalog. Was that an item of fascination for you?



BO: No, I didn't know anything else. I never knew what stores were until I was 8 or 9 years old or older.



RM: I know that when I was a kid I just drooled over the toys in the Wards catalog.



BO: All my toys came out of the catalogs.



RM: I'd order a toy and just be waiting in anticipation for its arrival.



BO: Two weeks.



RM: Yes, right.



LO: Two weeks. God, that's a long time. [laughter]



BO: Sears was 2 weeks and Monkey Wards was 7 days. Montgomery Wards was in Oakland and Sears was in Los Angeles. Today's Friday - if you ordered it today and it went out, it would come 2 weeks from this Friday.



LO: Well, at that time too, there were a lot more things in Austin. You're forgetting that part of it.



BO: Yes, there were a lot more things, like bread and . . . and there was a place in San Francisco, California - Globe Foods or whatever. They ordered from them once a year in case lots. They came by freight to Austin, and then we would go in with our big truck . .





CHAPTER EIGHT




BO: For instance, your cornflakes now are in a box. They were in a box like that but they never bought just one [small] box - they'd buy a case of cornflakes [with] 48 boxes of cornflakes - it would be as big as that stove.



LO: God!



BO: And when they bought jams and jellies they came in cases.



LO: Where did your folks put it all?



BO: They put it all in the cellar. That cellar would be packed plum full. You could walk in there and on both sides there was nothing but case goods. And under the stairs in there and the pantry in here and out there; they just bought once a year.



RM: And they ordered it from Globe Foods and then how did it come? Who delivered it?



BO: Well, it came by freight. Nevada Truck Lines used to haul it to Austin, and then Bar Francis ran the freight office. He'd call on the phone and we would go in there and pick it up and haul it home. And if my dad needed bread or something there used to be Welches' bakery in Reno. Do you remember the Welches?



RM: Yes, I do.



BO: Every mail day they had a standard order and no matter what, so much came every mail day. We had lots of pastries.



RM: You mean the post office would deliver breads?



LO: Well, the mail carrier . .



BO: It came by Hiskey Stage - when I was a kid Hiskey Stage ran the mail. They had a stage line and they delivered it. I don't know how it worked, but every Monday, Wednesday and Friday you got bread, bear claws, doughnuts and all of this kind of stuff.



RM: And it was coming on Hiskey Stage out of Austin?



BO: Yes, and then this stage would pick it up and they'd come up the valley. So 3 times a week you'd get your bread.



RM: And then where did that stage go?



BO: It went to Ione and back.



LO: The same people did that for 39 years - the very same people. They only retired in 1984. They were named Reese and Elisa Gandolfo. Reese [was named] after Reese River, I think. They ran the stage for 39 continuous years and they were just wonderful. I mean, you could do anything. You could call up and they'd bring you a barrel of gas.



BO: They'd bring you a barrel of gas, bring you oil . . . anything that you wanted. You could call them on the phone at home and say, "Well, I need 6 loaves of bread and 5 cans of this . . . " and they would go down to the store and fill the order.



LO: His folks had a charge account at the store and the gas and all that, so they'd just charge it and the stores would send the bill. RM: Was it expensive to have him deliver it?



BO: No. He'd charge you 50 cents.



RM: Oh, because he wasn't making a special trip?



BO: No, he was delivering the mail. He'd have it picked up so he'd bring you gas and whatever you wanted.



LO: They were extraordinarily accommodating people.



BO: I don't think you'll ever find anybody today as accommodating at delivering mail and taking care of their rural postal customers as those people were. In the whole United States I don't think there's anybody left like them.



RM: And they did it for 39 years and they just retired in '84?



LO: Yes.



RM: So that puts them back in the '40s, right?



BO: Right. I can remember when they started and I can remember when they quit.



RM: And who did it before they did?



BO: His brother-in-law did it before that, but they had to get him out of there because he was an alcoholic. If you sent a C.O.D. he took the money and drank it up and you never got your order.



RM: Had he been doing it a long time before that?



BO: Not too many years. I don't know who did it before that.



LO: Who was Cap? Everybody talks about Cap.



BO: He was the postal master [in Austin].



RM: What kind of a vehicle did Reese and Elisa have?



BO: He never drove anything but Chevy pickups from the start to the end. Every 2 years he'd get a new Chevy.



RM: And he had the postal contract? But there weren't that many people, were there?



LO: He had more than this route.



BO: Oh he went down Grass Valley, that way, and over in the Smokys towards the Gunn Ranch and then he went towards Battle Mountain and . . .



LO: They had their days filled 5 days a week. Five mornings a week they went from Austin through Carroll Summit, then they came here in the afternoon on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and on Tuesdays they went north towards Battle Mountain and on Thursdays they -went down Grass Valley. They had their days lined out 5 days a week.



RM: What happened after 1984 then?



LO: We got some other people.



RM: But they're not as accommodating?



BO: They're not as regular - your mail can come anywhere from noon till whatever . . .



RM: I see. And you could set your watch with the others?



BO: You could set you watch, yes - a quarter to 3:00. And going back . . . they used to stay in Ione overnight. Then they would leave Ione the next morning at 7:00 and go back.



LO: They had a house in Ione, too.



RM: What if you needed stamps and things like that?



BO: He had them with him. He had everything that you needed. The new ones don't have anything. If you need stamps you've got to send it in . . . if you ran out of stamps today you couldn't mail your letter. You'd have to give the money to these people, they'd take it back in and then Monday they'd bring them back out. So the quickest you could get your mail out would be the next Monday.



RM: Oh. They won't put the stamp on it?



BO: No. And the old people were just tremendous.



RM: Are they still living?



BO: Oh yes. They're in Austin.



LO: They're wonderful people. They even watched out for George and Arthur in the later years. They would stop there on their way back, and if something was the matter they'd call Bart on the phone and tell him.



BO: When our children were born she was in Fallon with her mother and I was here and we didn't have a phone - the phone was down. So she'd call there after the mail route and they'd come out after hours and tell me . . . You just don't find people like that.



RM: They were your system of communication and transportation, weren't they?



BO: Yes.



LO: And they had such compassion for the people and took their jobs so seriously. It wasn't just "deliver the mail," it was what went on with everybody's family, you know. They were the ones who came and told us when Joe died. He was in the hospital in Reno and we didn't have a phone then and they came all the way out here then. Neat people.



RM: And they were bringing in the newspapers and everything that you were reading?



BO: Yes.



RM: You mentioned your dad and your uncles read novels and everything. Where did they get those, I wonder?



LO: I bet from friends that came in here.



BO: I think so. Hunters would bring them books and things from town. They always had lots of people around in the fall - deer hunters and so on - who brought them all kinds of things.



LO: Fishermen, people passing through . . .



RM: I know when we were in Reveille Valley people used to bring boxes of magazines and books and newspapers.



BO: Yes. They got a lot of magazines.



LO: I think that there was a time when people knew what it was like to live out and they did accommodating things to people who did. I can remember my mom saying that when her friends would visit her in Dixie Valley they would bring bakery bread. Because she had to bake the bread every single day so it was a big treat for them to have the bakery bread.



BO: Now it's vice versa.



RM: Yes, isn't that funny? You always want what you don't have.



LO: Really



BO: Oh, we get a lot of homemade bread. It's just that she's a good cook, and she does make a lot of bread and things. It is a good treat; we have it quite regularly.



RM: Could we talk a little bit more about Ione as you recall it? Who were some of the people that lived there?



BO: God, hardly anybody lived there all the time I grew up. Just the Indians . . .



RM: How many Indian families would you say were there?



BO: There were the Pontons - you might have heard of that name in Tonopah. Babe Ponton, George Ponton, Betty Ponton and Pauline and Walter? I think she's still around in Tonopah if she hasn't passed away.



RM: Pauline or Babe?



BO: Babe.



RM: I've heard the name.



BO: She used to live in Ione and Pauline was a year older than me and Betty was a year younger and George was a little bitty one - he had to have been maybe 3 years younger than we were. We were big kids then.



LO: These were Indian people?



BO: Yes - half.



LO: What did they do?



BO: She was the janitor for the school. That was about all she did - cut the wood and janitor at the school.



BO: And there were the Kellers. As I said before, they were white people. He worked for the Forest Service - Charlie and Edie and their sons, Jimmy and Larry. Jim Keller lives in Round Mountain yet. And then his grandfather lived there and we called him Grandpappy Copeland. What his real first name was, I don't know - all the kids in Ione called him Grandpappy. And then Orpha Snooks was there, and she took care of all of the . . . she was one of the older of the Hooper kids and she took care of Lucille and Laura and Darlene and Norman and Norma and Rosemarie. LO: She babysat all those kids so they could go to school in Ione. BO: And she did the laundry. My dad and his brothers took all their laundry over every week and she did all the laundry during the week for everybody. And then there were the Worthingtons - Carl and Ruth and Myrna and Leona and Bucky.



LO: What did Carl do?



BO: He worked at the mines and he worked here. He worked here off and on for 15 years. And then there was Mike Cislini.



RM: From the family you lived with?



BO: Yes, their brother. And then next to him were Chester and Micky Teale, and he was a miner.



RM: Who did he work for?



BO: For himself. And then there was the school and then there was Modesto Beranka, and he was another one of the Cislini's - he was Mrs. Cislini's uncle. Then there was Johnny Dick; he lived up the canyon. I never saw much of him. All the kids were scared to death of him. He was an old Indian. Honey, I don't know to this day why [we were scared of him].



LO: They told enough good stories about the poor old man that they got them all terrified.



BO: And there was Matt Kennedy - he's Cecil Cheak's wife's uncle.



LO: He talks about Ione a lot.



BO: Right. And then up above there were the Pontons I talked about, and then above that was Jim Ford, who was related to Arthur Ward. Jim Ford was married to Art Ward's sister May, and she died - I don't know what from. They had a boy, Sheamus. And then above him was George Bond. He was a drunk and he was the watchman for the Shamrock Mine. And then the Cislinis - and the Phillips were already gone - and then there was the teacherage.



RM: And that was it?



BO: And that was it. That was the town of Ione.



RM: You mentioned there were a lot of Indians in school - did those Indian families live there or did they live out like you did?



BO: They lived over here and went over there to get their mail. They used to have a post office up here at the ranger station (they closed that post office in about '48 or '49). Everybody frau Austin to where you turn to go to Ione had a mailbox. Once you got past that, everybody up the valley had to go to Ione to get their mail - Stewart Creek and all of that had to go to Ione to get their mail.

The Cislinis ran the store - it used to be Iompa and Cislini. And Cislini was a good store man. He had the store, the bar and gas and oil and so forth, and he had everything in his store. I crated eggs after school all the time. He used to buy them 36 dozen in a crate and then I'd put all of them in the little dozen cartons every night. But he went to town once a week to get groceries, and you could get anything - he had a better store than you can find in Austin or Gabbs or anywhere today. Nothing ever went bad. He went to Reno once a week so you always had all fresh vegetables every week. And he never ran out. If there were tomatoes, by the end of the week they had enough that some went to the pigs at the end of the week. But you always had everything fresh and an abundance of dairy products, candies, cookies, breads . . .



LO: Levi's.



BO: Levi's, shoes, socks, underwear - everything that you could think of.



RM: What was his market? It doesn't seen there would be that many people to support him.



BO: Well, as you said, Why didn't you ever go to town? You had Austin, you had Ione." There was a phone in Ione. If you wanted something you Called Ione and the stage brought it the next day.



RM: So that basically the valley was his clientele, and then Ione . .



BO: Yes. And the mines around Ione. There were the Newmans over at Berlin; there were the people over there - I can't think of their name - 2 old brothers who had lots of goats. Matt and something . . . And then up past Henick Smith's there were some more Indians who lived up in the canyon, and there were people who lived at Grantsville and there were people who lived over at Penelas. The Jim Corletts were over at . . LO: Penelas, wasn't it?



BO: No.



LO: I thought that was where everybody got their water.



BO: People got water where they got gas. [The Corletts lived] towards Ellsworth - at Ellsworth and across the valley.



RM: What were some of the mines that were working when you . . . ?



BO: I guess Grantsville was gold and silver. My dad delivered neat there once a week when I was a kid. And all of those people came to Ione. And the people from Penelas over across the flat that way all came to Ione.



RM: There was a mine at Penelas?



BO: Yes. They mined gold and silver there.



RM: How about around Ione?



BO: Well, there was the Mercury and the Shamrock and the Cinnabar, but there was only . . . well, DeLavegas . . . Mercury and all those kids . . . their mines worked off and on all the time. So there were always people coming in and out of there. It was quite a place. And then Cislini had the bar, and when I was a kid the Indians couldn't buy liquor. But he did have a good store. We got snowed in Ione for 6 weeks and nobody ran out of any groceries.

He had enough in stock that people went 6 weeks and never . . . You couldn't go to Gabbs or Austin today and get into a store that could hold people's groceries for 6 weeks - at least about 30 to 40 people's worth.



RM: Yes, that's amazing.



BO: In fact, one whole wall in that store was nothing but food.



LO: I can remember seeing it when Joe still had it. But he never had any . . .



BO: Yes, but he let it go. When I was a kid and I stocked the shelves, boy, they were full from top to bottom.



LO: Well, those people were like the other folks we were talking about - Reese and Elisa. The whole community was their life. They cared about everybody and what happened with everybody.



LO: How did they handle their bills?



BO: The credit was very limited. You had, I think, $50 and that was it.



RM: Oh, $50 was your limit? Then he cut you off?



BO: Then he cut you off. My uncle had it after that and he never cut anybody off. When he passed away she and I went through the books and we quit after $35,000.



RM: Is that right? He was owed that much?



LO: Oh, he supported half of the valley - or just didn't bother to collect from anyone.



[Tape is turned off for a while.]



RM: Bart, we talked about it last time, but is there anything that you would like to add about the old-time ranchers moving out?



BO: There's not an awful lot that I can add to that. It's just that the Depression really cleaned them out.



RM: And we mentioned also that the Forest Service came in and cut everybody's permits. So in a relatively short time you were the only white family here.



BO: Well, here in the upper part of the river. When you talk to Homer Hooper, he might be able to [add something] because he's older. I think his family came in here first when they made this into an assignment for the Indians.



RM: Oh, OK. Another question I wanted to ask is, what were the differences that you can recall between the roles that men and women had? Were the women pretty much confined to the house and the garden kind of thing or were they out buckarooing too?

BO: I can't remember anything like that with my mom - she stayed around the house and taught school. She never went out.



LO: Your sister did.



BO: Yes, my sister did a lot of riding.



RM: Was it when the women were younger that they rode, and then when they got married they didn't?



BO: I have no idea.



LO: I don't know that Bart would remember. That 'would be something for Ruth Worthington to tell you. Julia Cislini would be, I guess, Bart's role model for women, and she worked at the store and bar and …..



BO: Yes, but when she first came here she used to come over to Schmallings' and help put up hay.



LO: Julia did? So what you're saying is, the women worked hard too, and not always in the house.



RM: Sometimes they were in the fields and everything with the men, so there wasn't a rigid division between the roles of men and women?



BO: No. And when we hayed and so forth when I was a kid I can remember that they always had cooks and they brought the meals right to the field. Not right here, but when we were at Schmallings', for instance, they brought everything every day, hot. We used to eat right there at that old house.



RM: What kind of equipment did you use to put up hay?



BO: Well, everybody used different things. You used your mowers and your dump rake. People called them a side delivery rake but they're not a side delivery. The rakes we used were called buck rakes. You know the dump rake back there? Those were what I called a dump rake - not a buck rake. A buck rake is one that had 2 horses on it, and there were different styles. The Indians around here had a buck rake that just had the 2 wheels up by the teeth and then they had a board that they walked back and forth on to raise the teeth up and down. On ours, you sat on a seat and you had a mechanism to raise the teeth. We only had 3 pieces of equipment and the derrick: the mower, dump rake, buck rake and derrick.



RM: Now, does the buck have the big teeth that rake the hay into big piles?



BO: No, that was the dump rake. (There's one across the river I've got.) The dump rake was the one with the curved teeth that raked it into a wind row. Then the buck rake had . . . I don't have one around here or I'd show you. The closest one is up at Schmallings', I guess.



LO: It had the tines in the front.



BO: It had the tines in the front that run along the ground, with a horse on each side, and then it shocked the hay. The shocks were put up by a buck rake, and then it pushed them into the stack and put them on the net and stacked them.



LO: What did you get them into the net with?



BO: A buck rake.



LO: Again?



BO: Up from the field, yes.



LO: When we got so that his folks were getting old and we weren't using the horses, he built a buck rake out of a car, and we were doing the end of the wild hay that way. He turned over the transmission so it . . .



BO: It was the rear end.



LO: Yes - it had all kinds of gears in reverse and only one forward. Oh, we loved that thing. [laughs]



BO: You just take your car and turn the rear end upside down and you reverse all the gears in the transmission.



RM: That's right, you would.



LO: And we had an Indian by the name of Delbert Decker, and he ran it and he loved it. He pushed the hay up to the stack and . . . I forget how you stacked it.



BO: We stacked it with the Jayhawk.



LO: What was the Jayhawk?



BO: That was the one that you put it on and as you drove forward it lifted it. I cut it all up, remember?



LO: OK, it lifted it and set it up there and then you drove out from under it.



BO: Right. And then we used the one down out at Whooleys' and I cut it up, too.



LO: What did you make out of it?



BO: I don't know what I made out of it. The Jenkins stacker was the other one. It picked it up here and you pushed it onto it and it picked it up and whipped it around to the side and then you had pins on . . and it would automatically trip and dump it in different places on the stack. Our Jayhawk was worn out. We had used it so many years that it was just literally worn out. There's one down at Tony Testolin's yet -that one didn't get used nearly as much as ours.



LO: Did you put up hay like that when we first came here?



BO: Tony was the last one in the valley to go to baled hay. He put everything up with tractors. He had tractor buck rakes and tractor mowers and everything, where we used horses. But he was the last in the valley to go to baled hay - one year after us. But I guess we were the last in the valley to quit using horses.



LO: Well, they still had a big old horse. What was that big old red horse's name when I first came?



BO: I don't remember.



LO: Oh man, remember he got sick and your dad had Dan Brady come down, and they thought he had red water and they bled him and did all kinds of things and he ended up dying anyway? He was huge. I mean, his back was like . . .



BO: Oh, he weighed 2200 pounds.



RM: Wow. Did you use any particular breed of horses?



BO: Oh, I don't know that much about horses. We used lots of Clydesdales. And they had some Percherons, I guess they call them (they called them "Perch"). That horse was a stud horse and he came from Welches' - it was a breed of horses that Welches had bred up themselves.



RM: Is that right?



BO: He was huge.



LO: Yes, he was huge. Was he still a stud horse then?



BO: Yes.



LO: He was as gentle as anything.



BO: Oh yes. You could do anything with him. God, he was huge. His foot was that big around.



LO: Yes, as big as a pie plate, at least.



BO: Bigger than a pie place. A guy was sleeping in the car here in the yard one night and the next morning the horse had stuck his head in . .





CHAPTER NINE




LO: He was a strawberry roan.



BO: Major was [his name].



RM: How long does a workhorse last?



BO: Oh, I don't know. If your treat them right . . . we've had them 30 years.



RM: Is that right?



LU: George's old horse Rainbow was at least 32.



BO: He was 34, I think, when he died.



RM: And still working?



BO: Yes, we rode him. Not hard, but it all depends how you take care of them. And they're just like a person. Some of them have got a long life, and some are short . . .



RM: Could we talk a little bit about the yearly climate cycle here and how it affects life on the ranch?



LO: I think the biggest thing here is that there can be so many differences. We had hardly any winter, last winter, at all - the coldest was about 17 below zero.



RM: And that's warm?



LO: Not too cold. We've had other winters where we had a month at a time where it would be 30 below zero every night and zero in the daytime. We had a whole month of that in the early '80s, and it was tough; it's hard to do. We've had winters where we didn't have any snow on the ground and we've turned around and had a winter where we had snow from Thanksgiving through Easter continuously - snow, mud, ice, the whole thing. In this country, you name it . . . it's crazy. I think I told you last time that we can have frost every month of the year. We've often had frost in July.



BO: Since you've been here it's been down to 12 [degrees].



LO: Yes, we had 12 about 2 nights ago. But basically, I think his family always did the same thing. About the first of April they'd put the cattle out on the BLM land, then the first of June they went out to the Forest Service land. They were in conjunction with one another - the BLM was the foothills, the Forest Service was the mountains. So first they went out on the BLM, then they went up to the Forest Service and they stayed on the Forest Service land all summer long. Then come about September or the first of October, they did a lot of riding. It was deer-hunting season and they gathered all the cattle in, did all the branding and sold cattle almost always by the middle of October.

Then they'd begin the cycle of feeding. They'd bring the cattle home to the private grounds here. They would use up, what feed was here and then start feeding the stored hay (that is, haystacks or, now, baled hay) and feed on, through time to turn them out again - and they'd just go again.



RM: And you had to feed them every day after you brought them off the range?



LO: Yes. We've changed it in the last couple of years so that we use some winter range - we go out with some dry cows onto the winter range. But his folks never did that. They always just used summer range.



RM: Why don't you leave them out all year? I think Fallinis and other people do.



LO: Basically, we haven't had the permit for it.



BO: They used to have the permit for it, and they did do it. They took them down where the Indians do now. They quit this at about the same time everybody went broke, because the Indians had winter range down there and [the cows were mixed] with everybody else's, and then there got to be a lot of rustling going on down there when Gabbs started.



LO: It was too far away for them to be able to watch them and be home when any . .



RM: You mean when Gabbs started you started getting rustling?



BO: Well, they had more of it around there.



RM: Is that right?



LO: Well, we still see it. About 20 years ago Bart went over to Gabbs and came back about 2 hours later. There was a cow and a calf standing alongside of the road when he went. When he came back there was a cow and a hide standing alongside the road.



RM: So you still see it.



BO: Oh yes.



RM: So when all those people moved into Gabbs, particularly during the war, when they had rationing . .



BO: Yes. That's what Alfred was telling you, Lilly. Remember they had to put gas in the diesel so they'd get some heat out of the stoves?



LO: And they lived in tents over there. Sumba* must have told you about that.



RM: Oh yes.



LO: This guy was telling us that they heated their tents with diesel, and he said, "God, it was cold." So they'd add a little bit of gas to the diesel and that warned things up. So a little was good, more was better, he said. Finally the stove got up and did a dance, it got so hot in there. So he said they quit that before they burned the tent down. [laughter]



BO: When they quit the winter range over there in the '30s they just started feeding everything at home, and they felt that they did better after that. They didn't lose as many to . . . and you stop and look at what's going on over there today with the water and everything else and listen to what the blade man says. He's pulled 10 or 12 head out of water - mud holes - this winter over there. When you lose 10 or 12 head, that's a big percentage, you know. It just didn't pay, so they quit and came home.



LO: And I figure the Indians only get about a 40 percent calf crop.



BO: Yes, your calf crop is way down.



RM: You mean 40 percent of the cows have calves, or 40 percent live?



LO: Well, they have a hard time getting bred because there is a big area where you have to have a lot of bulls to cover it. Then they're apt to get real thin and not breed well. And the death loss of the calves, I think, is extraordinary. In the end, they're going to sell 40 percent less than somebody who feeds.



BO: Yes. They're in better shape.



LO: And they're in a confined area.



RM: Do you time it for when the calf is born, or are they born any time of year?



BO: We calve 9 months out of the year.



LO: We won't calve in December, January and February



RM: And that's because you don't have bulls out 3 months of the year?



LO: That's right. We've got our bulls locked in right now.



BO: Yes. That's why they're locked in right now. They'll go out the first of the month.



RM: I see. You don't want the calves born in the hard winter.



BO: No.



LO: His folks did year-round breeding, but we just feel we do better this way. You don't have as much loss.



RM: Do you have to go out and pull the bull off the range?



BO: No. We just don't put them out there. We pull our bulls out in March, April and May.



BO: We're feeding in March, so the cattle are all home in March. When we turn the rest of the cattle out, they just stay home then.



RM: Oh, I see.



BO: They'll go out in June, and then they're out until fall.



RM: Do you lose any cattle to predators - besides human predators?



BO: I think everybody blames more on the predators than the predators really need to be blamed for. We've got neighbors down to the north of us who have people fly in to kill the coyotes because the coyotes are killing calves. I've never seen a coyote kill a calf. I have seen dogs kill calves, but I've never seen a coyote kill a calf.



RM: By that you mean you've never actually seen one with your own eyes, or you've never seen a calf that was killed by a coyote?



BO: Well, you see them eating them. But I don't think I've ever seen a coyote killing them.



LO: He's never seen the coyote in the actual chase situation where he chases something down. But don't get us wrong: They're scavengers of the first degree. They're going to get the afterbirth; they're going to finish off anything that's sick and down.



RM: But you've never seen a coyote killing a healthy calf?



BO: No, never.



LO: We think they get more of the sick and dying, or the weaker ones.



BO: I think that they'll get something that's down, but I don't think they do that as much as people think.



LO: And we're not big on mountain lions killing a lot of things.



BO: Yes. I've ridden these hills all my life, and I've only run into a mountain lion twice, face-to-face. And I've only found 2 fresh kills where I knew the mountain lion was around close because of the way the horse was acting, and it was deer both times. I really don't think that they go out and kill as much as people really think they do. This is our opinion.



LO: Now the people at Farrington Ranch, Mr. Wallace Bird, did have a mountain lion come into their yard and jump on their saddle horse.



BO: But the mountain lion didn't have any teeth either, did it?



RM: Is that right?



LO: I don't remember that that one didn't have any teeth. In the one they brought in here last winter, the teeth were pretty well gone. It was real thin.



BO: Sure, they're going to kill, but I think that the rate is not a real problem.



RM: The problem is with the human predators?



BO: Very much so. We lost 8 cattle within 2 miles of home here that were shot - by hunters - asleep. And that's more kill than I think we would lose in 2 years to predators. And we did those in one day.



RM: The hunters killed. them while the cows were asleep?



BO: Yes. And we've had this happen twice.



RM: Just to kill something?



BO: Well, I think they are out . . . our cattle are here during deer season and they were shining their lights out there at night hunting rabbits. And they'd see a set of eyes and think, "Oh bay, there's a coyote," or "There's . . ." And they killed them. Over here they killed 2 by the water tank and 5 over in another [area]. So that was 7 that were killed in one night and another one over here. And then a bunch of kids from Gabbs shot all of them under the trees up there in Mohawk that time. They shot 10 or 12 up there.



RM: Wow. They just wanted to kill something, didn't they?



LO: They're just killing things.



BO: Yes. I think you lose more through that than you ever do to any predator.



RM: Yes. In your lifetime, and thinking back to what your father talked about when he was younger, has there been much of a change in the wildlife of the valley?



BO: Well, I don't know.



LO: They were never hunters.



BO: They went in stages. They weren't really hunters. Sometimes, he said, there were hardly any deer and then sometimes . . . he said that he'd seen one time down here, about 12 miles from hare, 700 or 800 of them crossing the road in front of him. I think it's a cycle situation. I can remember back in the early '50s and that, we hardly had any game, and I can remember before that, we had a lot. And now they're coming back again. So I think it's a stage thing.



LO: The biggest thing that we're kind of partial to is the sage hen. When I first came here there were big flocks of sage hen and there are not now.



RM: Why do you think that is? Were they over-hunted, or . . . ?



BO: I think it's over-hunting and hunting at the wrong time of the year.



LO: And I think we're trespassing on their nesting area. I think maybe that helps, too.



BO: Yes. But I really think that when they had the season early they killed all the sage hen because they were all down in the meadows and they were hunted too early. I think once they moved it to a later date . . .



LO: The last couple of years they've put it way up in October where the birds have a chance to disperse and not be in the meadows and not get hunted down. They're not really a bright bird.



BO: Right. They're just like a chicken. We used to be able to shoot sage hen right off the step. Just step out the door here and shoot one.



LO: Yes, they're not particularly wild and not a real bright bird. RM: Do you have eagles?



BO: Yes, golden eagles.



RM: Do you have any bald eagles here?



BO: We used to have, but I haven't seen any. My dad said that when he was a kid there were quite a bunch of bald eagles down at the Point of Rocks.



LO: The kids saw one once going over to Gabbs to school, but it was way over by the Ichthyosaur Park, and they only saw it one time so it must have been passing by. But there are a lot of golden eagles in here in the wintertime. We see them more since they put the telephone and power lines up, because in the winter they sit on those power lines. Now that's one thing that the kids did see - an eagle trying to knock down a fawn.



RM: Oh really? An eagle trying to take a fawn?



BO: Yes, up at Marysville Canyon.



RM: Would that come under the heading of optimism?



LO: I don't know. Don't you suppose that they could probably get ahold of a small fawn?



BO: Oh, they'll get him down. They'll exhaust him, and then he'll lie down and then they'll hook on.



LO: That's what he was doing. He kept going up and diving down on him.



BO: Sure. They'll exhaust him.



RM: Is that how the dogs get a cow or calf down?



BO: Yes, they get in a pack. You get 2 or 3 dogs and they can get pretty much of anything down.



LO: We've had dogs ourselves that were just killers. They just wanted to kill something. Just like we're talking about these guys needing to shoot something. They just needed to kill something. And not because they were hungry or because they wanted to - they just needed to kill something.



RM: And no way to really predict which dog's going to be that way?



BO: No, not until they start.



LO: We're pretty soft, and we always let them have plenty of chances before we decide that they're real killers.



RM: I wanted to ask you about raising a family here. What were the challenges and benefits of that?



BO: Well, all I've got to say is, it was a big challenge, and I think we have more invested in our kids' high school education than people have invested in putting their kids through college.



LO: [laughs] That's probably true.



BO: They always had to be gone off to school. Ever since first grade they had to go to Gabbs, then we weren't satisfied with Gabbs and so we moved them to Fallon because we felt they got a better education.



RM: You mean you had to board them out?



BO: Yes.



LO: Well, they started here. Mary Lynn and our older son, Bart, started to school here when they still had the school on the river. Mary Lynn went through fourth grade and Bee went through second grade. But there's too much cultural difference. We didn't feel the kids were learning what they should learn.



RM: You mean with all the Indians at the school?



LO: Yes. And the Indian people here were kind of slow learners, so we didn't feel the kids were getting too good of an education. We went to the school board and asked for a bus, and they gave it to us the next year and they bused the kids for 2 or 3 years and let whoever wanted to ride the his go over to Gabbs. Bee went to third grade on the bus and Mary Lynn to fifth grade, and then in the sixth grade, we had to board them.

They discontinued the his after one year, and they said, "This is not feasible. You guys are going to have to go back to school out here." And we said we didn't care to have them go back to school out here. So the next year we boarded the kids in Gabbs. I took them over early on Monday morning and picked them up on Friday afternoon. Mary Lynn went to the sixth grade and Bee went to the fourth grade and Michael started the first grade living with families in Gabbs.



RM: How did you pick the families - friends and relatives?



BO: Just friends.



LO: Yes. And that was semi-all right. The next year they decided since we were going to go to those extremes they would give us the bus back again.



BO: No.



LO: No, they didn't give us a bus. We bused them ourselves. We got together with Bucky, didn't we? At that time Ruth Worthington's son Bucky came over and lived in Ione for a while. We got together with him and we took the kids from here to Ione and he was working in Gabbs and he took them from Gabbs over. And there was a time when we had Bill Rossi drive the kids, too.



BO: Yes. Bucky moved back to Gabbs and then the next year we furnished the Suburban and Bill Rossi drove the kids to Gabbs every day.



LO: So there was only the one year that they boarded in Gabbs. But then we did find . . . we felt the kids did better until they got up to about high school age. When Mary Lynn was a freshman, she was just really bright and she didn't seem to have any challenges in Gabbs. We started her in Fallon as a sophomore, and she lived with friends of ours throughout the rest of her high school and managed to go to the bigger school and still graduate salutatorian of her class.

And then when Bee got to be a ninth grader we started him in Fallon and he ended up as student body president in Fallon in his senior year, which we were really pleased with.



BO: And not only that, they have the FFA in Fallon. And all the boys (my daughter's out of joint) went through FFA, and they all held state office, and they all went back to Washington, D.C., and Kansas City and they did a lot through the FFA. So we feel that it was well worth it. But as I was saying, not joking, people bitch about sending their kids off to college and what it cost, but by the time we got our kids through . high school we had done their college education, doubled.



RM: Yes, really.



LO: Then when Bee was a senior he took the littler kids. [Michael] started as a freshman and Kevin started Fallon clear down in the eighth grade. And then the next year, Bart got Mike a special permit and he was allowed to drive from here to Fallon as a 14-1/2-year old. He couldn't drive in town, but he could take himself from here to Fallon. So he did that for 2 years on a special permit.



RM: Every day?



BO: No, no. He'd go in Monday and [home on Friday]. And by that time our daughter had married and was living in Fallon and they stayed with her. Then my mother moved back, so then the kids finished up by staying with her. So that's how we did that. But they came home every weekend. RM: Was it tough on you having the kids gone?



LO: Well . . .



BO: It was tough on Mother.



LO: The first year I was terribly lonely, when they were all gone. That took some getting used to. And I tend to be a worrier, but the kids have always been accommodating to that. They would call when they were ready to leave so I would know when they were coming and I didn't have to worry about that. But they'd been raised in the country. They're resourceful kids. So the couple of times that they broke down, they were pretty resourceful [about it]. But it was difficult.

And we've always been picky. Everybody had to have braces on their teeth, so that was off to Reno once a month forever and ever to put braces on their teeth. I think both of us were bound and determined that the kids weren't going to be . . . well, you've seen it probably yourself. Rural, country, far-out kids are a little different, a little strange. They're not subjected to all the other things that go on; we were pretty determined that the kids were going to be regular kids. And I think that the school did that for them. Going to school, being boarded out, wasn't the very best situation but it was a big thing of trust: "OK, we trust you to behave yourself" and tell them not to get yourself in trouble and they never did.



BO: Which I'm very proud of. I mean, you raise 4 kids and send them off to school . . . Some of them started in the first grade and went through high school, and they never got in any trouble. And they were on their own an awful lot of the time.



RM: Yes. That probably speaks well of the early home life.



LO: Well, we're grateful we raised them in trust and responsibility. If you trust them, they're going to be trustful. If you give them responsibility they're going to be responsible people. And yes, they've done well.



RM: One of the things I've noticed is that people who are raised around animals really know a lot about animal behavior. I was wondering if there is anything you'd like to say about the behavior of cows and horses that might relate to the range life and so on here?



LO: Something that you might find interesting is that they really do things on a consistent basis. The cattle that we have know when it is the time of the year to go to the mountains When it gets time to go the mountains, they're ready to go. And you don't have to do much more than open the gate and maybe get behind them . . .



BO: Yes, about a week before you turn them out they start wandering around the fences.



RM: They know it's time to go?



BO: They know that it's time to get out. And in the fall when it's time to come off there, they're ready to come home.



RM: So you don't have to go out and chase them down like you did the bulls today?



LO: Well, you do to a certain extent.



BO: To an extent, but you go and start them and they'll come home.



RM: Is that right?



LO: Yes, they know what you want.



BO: They'll come home.



RM: And they know where it is?



BO: Oh yes.



LO: One year in April we had gone out with the cattle and we had a big snowstorm about the 8th or 10th of April. I mean, we had 4 feet of snow. It snowed right straight down, flakes like this, for 4 days. The cattle were already up on the mountains, and they found a hole in the fence and came home.



RM: I'll be darned. That's really interesting.



BO: You always hear people say "dumb animals" - a "dumb dog" or a "dumb this . . . " But if they were raised with them I think they would be shocked, because all of these animals that they call dumb I feel are very bright in their own way.



LO: But creatures of habit.



BO: They are creatures of habit. When our cattle are out on the wheat grass, if you want to see all the cattle without driving all over, go at 10:00 in the morning, because they all come to water about 10:00. Between 10:00 and 11:00 or whatever they'll all come in and water.



RM: Is that true of cows on the range all over?



BO: Oh yes. Everywhere.



LO: Did you know that cows babysit?



RM: No, I didn't know that.



LO: We call it babysitting. [chuckles]



BO: You watch. Next time you go out on the range between here and Tonopah or whatever, and you find a cow way out 5, 6 or 7 miles from water, there might be one or 2 cows and there'll be 10 to 20 calves around her. You've probably already seen it.



RM: I've noticed that, yes.



BO: All the other cows are gone to water and that one cow's watching all the calves. When all the other ones come back, she'll go. Now is that a dumb animal or what?



RM: That's really interesting. How about dominance among cows? I've heard that there's a dominant cow and she always walks first and that kind of thing.



BO: Oh yes.



LO: That's very true. There's almost always a lead cow when you're going to go with your .. .



BO: Yes, or when you feed them or whatever. There's always one that gets the cream of the hay.



RM: The dominant one gets the best food?



BO: Oh yes.



LO: I think the best example of that is one old cow that we had. We got her from Bart's uncle Bill and she was a big, heavy, red cow and she had great, big, long horns. Well, we've never cared for the cattle that have horns, and Bart likes to de-horn them. And she was a rascal at the feeder. She would take those horns and move everything off - she was the dominant cow. He got tired of her - she was just knocking everything around - so he de-horned her. And it really took the sap out of her. She couldn't use those horns anymore to knock everything off out of the way, and she didn't know how to defend herself and bully everybody. She really fell off; she lost weight.



BO: She almost died.



RM: Is that right?



BO: Yes. Because the other ones then pushed her around, and she stood back and let everybody else eat first then. And boy, it got to where I thought I'd hurt her, but it wasn't that.



LO: She picked up after that - she adjusted. But you'll notice it too, like when you have a pen of bulls.



BO: Like those bulls today - that red bull was the dominant bull.



RM: The big one?



BO: Yes. He'll get his mind made up he is going one way and the other ones are going to follow.



RM: Oh yes. And he was the most challenging all the time.



BO: Right.



LO: There's always a boss bull.



RM: Do they divide up the cows?



LO: That part I don't really know. I think the strongest and the most aggressive probably is going to breed the most cattle. And some breeds are not as aggressive as others breeds. For instance, an Angus bull is a more aggressive breeder than a Santa Gertrudis bull.



RM: So the weak one will only get a cow when the other bulls are not around?



LO: You've got it.



RM: How do the cows decide who's boss? Have you ever seen them actually jousting?



LO: Oh yes, they do fight.



BO: Yes, they do. Always at the most inconvenient time. When you're getting ready to work them or something and you're going to part one out, somebody's got to decide who's the boss.

But they're very smart. It's just like when they're in the corral and you're parting them out - I still holler at the kids and I holler at her - if a cow is looking at the gate, she's already got her mind made up she's going. You can take and measure out from that gate to that cow ¬if it's 20 feet and you're 18 feet away, she won't try. But if you get out the same distance, she'll try you.



RM: Is that right?



BO: You bet.



RM: Now, is that on a horse or on foot?



BO: No, no. We work everything on foot, except for bringing them off the mountain. When we get them into the corral here . . . or a lot of times we'll gather them out in the fields. She won't ride, so she walks miles behind cows. Miles. We'll go drive cows, and we'll ride the horses and she'll walk 6 miles.



LO: I like to hike, though.





CHAPTER TEN




BO: Cows are very smart that way. I like the cow. When you part them out you can take them . . . we put them all in one corral, and if you want to separate all the cows from the calves you open the gate and give them a little room, and pretty quickly all the cows come out and the calves'll stay behind except for a few at the end. They're very easy to work. A cow is what you make it.



RM: Is that right?



BO: If you want a wild cow you make him a wild cow.



RM: How do you make him a wild cow?



BO: You need to run them, you need to rope them, you need to drag them, you need to tease them and torment them.



LO: Run them around as fast as you can so they don't have time to look at the gate. Maybe the gate's there and maybe the gates open but if you run it enough, the poor bugger doesn't have a chance.



BO: It's watching you; it isn't watching the gate.



RM: And if you want to make them gentle?



BO: Don't run them, walk them. Oh, once in a while we get mad at one and poke it or beat it with a stick or something, but . . .



LO: We try not to.



BO: She's got a cow out in the field now that she raised on a bottle, and you can go out there and catch her and lead her in and . . . it's just a pet.



LO: She was born here on Memorial Day, and we had gone into town. We had one cow left in the corral to calf (these were all heifers) and we went into town for Memorial Day, and of course she had it when we were gone and she prolapsed - the uterus came out. And it's really a serious situation.

Well, the calf was fine but the cow was in such a form of shock that she died. So here we had the calf and I raised it up on the bottle. At that time Bart had barley or oats in this little field that we have right here, so all summer long I fed her extra good on the bottle and she grazed on that grain, and she did really well. And she just was really gentle. If the kids would go out in the field hunting, she would go ¬with the dogs, you know. Here she was just walking along. Or she'd eat my clothes on the clothesline. Just a real pet. And she still is a real pet. And Bart broke her to lead, so she leads. I can twist her tail, I can get under her feet, we can put the kids on her back - she is really gentle.



BO: They're just what you make them. If you work cows gentle and slow you've got gentle cows; and if you want them wild, just work them wild.



RM: It's a little bit like a dog, isn't it?



BO: Yes, the same thing.



RM: Yes. They say that the dog reflects its master.



LO: Yes, you make a mean dog.



RM: This is a silly question, but I've always wondered about it. Do you think you could teach a cow to ride it like you would a horse?



BO: Oh sure.



RM: I always wondered why they didn't do that in some parts of the world.



BO: Oh, they do.



LO: Not on a wholesale basis though, Dad. But we know a guy in Fallon who had a Brahma bull that he used to ride.



BO: The one that's got the Texas Longhorn.



RM: Or a buffalo. I always wondered why the Indians didn't train the buffalo.



BO: Well, I saw on TV the other night where a buffalo was racing horses in a horse race and he beat them.



RM: With a rider?



BO: Yes.



RM: Why didn't the Indians learn to ride the buffalo?



LO: God knows. I don't think they have as good of temperament.



BO: My personal opinion is that they had to be taught a lot of the things they did. They never even thought about it.



LO: Well, let me ask you this. When you have oxen and whatnot, didn't the settlers ride them to a certain extent when they were coming across?



RM: I think they might have.



BO: Yes. But they're all gentle, you know.



LO: Don Bowman used to have that . . .



BO: That Brahma bull. That was Louie Gazzini's bull.



LO: I know it was. I wonder what ever happened to him.



BO: He died, I think - got old.



LO: Got old and died. He rigged him up with an outfit and rode him.



RM: Are there any other tricks in dealing with cattle that might be interesting here? I mean, tricks like this distance thing, where the cow figures, "Well, I'm closer to the gate than he is. I'll run him a foot race."



BO: And they'll beat you. They're not going to try, unless they know they can make it.



RM: Is that right? They're not gamblers then?



BO: No. They're pretty much of a cinch thing. For 30 years I've tried to get my wife and these kids to . . . when a cow is looking at that gate you [can] change her mind. If she's looking, run her back or something and make her think of something else and then she'll forget it. If you leave her there she'll worry you and she'll eventually get through.



RM: That's interesting. Are there other things you do to psych them out like that?



LO: I can't think of anything. Just move them slow. A lot of people have real good cow dogs; we've only had one dog that was super good. They use their dogs to move them or part out one or whatever but we've never had real good luck with that.



RM: How about horses? Do you have any observations on horse behavior?



BO: No.



LO: We don't do too much with the horses. We have had some interesting ones. When Mary Lynn was little, Bart bought her a horse from an Indian up the river here. He was a relatively small horse (she was only 9 years old or whatever). We put him in the corral, and he wouldn't stay . . . he was a jumper. Man-oh-god, could he jump out of anything. And he wouldn't stay in the big corral there. As soon as he saw the other horses he jumped right out, right over the top of the high [fence]. But we don't . . . the kids ride, but we're not horse people.



RM: Well, I've got one more major question. Bart, you spent a lifetime really close to the land here, and you've spent a lot of time now, Lilly. Can you tell me about your feelings for the land and nature and that kind of thing?



LO: Well, we've pretty well changed, I think, over the years. I kind of perceived his folks as takers of the land and I think that's changed. We're kind of going with the trend that you can ruin it. You can spoil things, you know. I'm not saying that we're super ecologically minded, but we try to improve things.



BO: Yes, we put back. My folks and a lot of the older people were all takers. You reap everything you can get out of it but don't put a dime back. And it shows. We've been putting dines back for 30 years and now it's getting to the point where we're seeing it.



RM: What are some examples that you're seeing?



BO: Oh, better production.



LO: His dad really spent a lot of time with his irrigating. All summer long that's all he did, every single day. The cattle were out and he just really spent a lot of time with his irrigating. And Bart's got a newer better system where he [doesn't have to do that]. And we have leveled the ground. Bart was telling you this morning that we can use a lot less water on a lot more ground if it's leveled right.

And we've put in some structures - like, he built a dam. His dad lost his life right up there at our dam. He had on his high-waders and we think what happened was that he slipped on the bank and went into the water and it got into his waders and he couldn't get out. So he drowned up there.

Bart's made a lot of changes, to make it easier, to do it faster, to get better production and to use less people. Because there's only us. BO: Yes. She and I do what they used to always have at least 5 people here doing.



RM: Is that right? And that's because of mechanization and doing things more efficiently?



LO: Yes. And I think for us to keep up, with it it's going to have to be that way. They never really interested in keeping up with it. They always did manage to have enough people around here.



BO: Yes, they had a lot of cheap labor.



RM: And now you've had to make those adjustments.



BO: Yeah. There's no cheap labor any more.



LO: We don't compete with Austin Gold at $12 and $15 an hour [wages].



RM: Yes, you just can't.



LO: But our philosophy's changed a lot with the BLM and the Forest Service. We go out of our way to try to work with those people, to try to benefit the land as much as we can. Because we feel that we're kind of the lowman on the totem pole. We've got a lot of people wanting to use public land who really don't care whether we're here or not, so we darned well had better be accommodating.



RM: Oh, I see.



BO: And I think a lot of the people that want to use public lands want to abuse the public lands - they don't want to use it.



LO: Bart's biggest gripe in the whole world is, if you can carry a 12- ounce can of beer to the top of the mountain, why can't you carry the empty can home?



RM: Right.



BO: Not only that, you can flatten the empty can and put it in your pocket. They can't pack a full one up flat in their pocket but they can damn well leave it up there empty. It's just really disgusting.



RM: Yes, to see their trash up there.



BO: I haven't ridden anywhere in these mountains, I don't think, in the last 10 years where you can't find an aluminum can or bottle on the mountain.



RM: Is that right, Bart?



BO: Somewhere on that mountain as high as you can go, you'll find an empty aluminum can or a bottle.



LO: His folks were extraordinarily accommodating to hunters and fishermen and everything, and we don't feel the need to do that anymore, because people are so abusive.



BO: I don't think that the sportsmen today are sportsmen as they used to be.



RM: I agree.



BO: The sportsmen of longer times ago shut a gate if they went through. When I was a kid, all of the people who came out of California hunting -and all the old people I can remember - were really, in essence, sportsmen. And today it's not . . . I don't know what it is. They leave the gates open, they pack cans, litter the country . . .



RM: It sounds like a general lack of respect for the land or the people.



LO: Yes. It is.



BO: TWo or 3 years ago now we were irrigating. It was in the fall, I guess, wasn't it?



LO: Well, you'd had the water turned on and everything.



BO: We had the water across the river and the game wardens can in on that side and they were going to come across the field. Our son saw them and he went over and met them and he told them, "Well, you don't go through here. We don't all people through the place."

And he said, "Well, we're game wardens and we can go if we want to."

And he said, "Well, no," and he had a great big to-do with them.

He said that they said, "Well, this is public land out here and you don't have yours posted properly to keep me off," and so on and so forth.

He said, "If it's not posted properly, then I can go on your place and cross." And he advised them to go back before they met up with his dad at home. Finally he used the point that I had told them a lot of times. He said to the man, "Well, where are you from?"

"From Las Vegas."

"Well, do you have a place in Vegas?"

"Yes."

"Well, do you mind giving me the address?"

"Well, what do you want it for?"

And he said, "Well, I'm going to go down and camp on your lawn."

And he said, "Well, you can't do that.

"Well, is it posted?"

The guy said, "NO."

And he said, "Well then if it isn't posted I can do anything I want on it." So he finally got the point across to the guy.



RM: Yes. Now this guy was a game warden?



BO: He was a game warden.



RM: I'll be darned.



BO: So it starts clear up at the top of the line - it isn't just the sportsmen.



RM: It's a general attitude in society.



LO: Yes. Our society now, I think, is a disrespectful society.



RM: I would agree with that 100 percent. Nobody has any respect for anything.



BO: No. Including themselves.



LO: If you can't take it, let's ruin it or do something else.



RM: Yes.



BO: Yes.



LO: Now I think we perceive ourselves as trying to give back to the land. Whether we're accomplishing it or not, I guess the next generation'll find out.



RM: Yes. If there is one. [laughs] This is kind of along the same line - you live so close to the cycle of life that . . . how do you perceive life?



LO: Kind of with a . . . we're not grievers. How do I want to put this? We tend to have kind of a live and let live [attitude], but what I'm saying is, dying is natural and even the kids, as small children, have seen a lot of things.



BO: Even my grandsons.



LO: Yes, they've seen a lot of things come and die. We don't like to see things suffer. But I can't say that we grieve a long time when something happens, you know.



RM: Even to a person, you mean?



LO: Yes.



RM: You see a person dying as part of the cycle of life?



LO: Right. I don't know. I want to say that we're kind of callous at times, because we have seen a lot of things come and go and die. Well, what are we doing, Bob? We're raising things to be consumed. It's a kind of a callous . . . But yet, I don't perceive us as being mean.



RM: No, no.



LO: I don't know. That'd take a lot of thinking.



RM: Yes, it's a tough question - very philosophical. Well, have we left out anything? Does anything else come to mind?



BO: I don't know.



LO: None of the old stories come to mind.



BO: But if we'd known how [this interview was going to go], I would have liked to have had 2 or 3 of the kids here. I think they could have added to some of the things that we have done. I think the oldest boy would have really . . .



LO: He tends to remember his uncles and . .



BO: Yes, he more than any of them, I guess.



LO: Yes. He seems to be more tied to the area than the other kids.



BO: Yes. I think in the end he'll be the one who . . .



RM: He'll take it over?



BO: I hope one of them does. And I think he'll be the one.



RM: Is his name Bart?



BO: Yes.



LO: We call him "Bee." It seems a shame that after his family came in 1864, we wouldn't keep it going. The end of it would seem sad. We would grieve for that, Bob. But I can't think of anything else. It's been kind of neat to think about this stuff.



RM: Yes, and your place in it.



BO: Yes. I've been here all my life and she's been here over two-thirds of hers.



RM: Yes, that's something.



[Tape is turned off for a while.]



RM: Let's see. You were written up in Time Magazine June 6, 1988, and the title is "Stolen on the Range." How did they happen to find you?



BO: Boy, I don't know. You'll have to ask her.



LO: It's because of my being a brand inspector. They had contacted Dean Sheldon, who is my supervisor at brand inspecting (he's in Fallon). We had just gotten done turning in about 20 head - we had lost 20 head on our north range - and he knew that we had just done that. So he called me up one day and said that Time magazine was doing a little piece on rustling and would I be willing to be interviewed. I said, "Sure, what the heck." And so 2 or 3 different times I spoke to Time magazine over the phone. They didn't use much of what I said in there - I think just the beginning of the article is on that.

Then they called up and wanted to know if they could do a picture on us. And I'm going to tell you, Bob, that was the most miserable day Bart and I ever spent in our whole life. To do that one picture they took 150 pictures. It was a very sunny day and they had this darn reflector about this big, and they want the light shining on your eyes. So here we were and Kevin (Kevin, our son, is in the background here) was scattering hay around so we could keep the cows up here. And he was holding the goddamn reflector on us so that the guy could get the right light, and they were snapping the pictures. The next day I had sunburn and eye-burn and every other darn thing.



RM: Isn't that funny?



LO: God. It was quite a day. We were all day doing that one picture. [



Tape is shut off for a while.]



LO: We have real strong feelings on wild horses. Basically we are a wild horse free area.



RM: Why is that?



LO: I think because Bart had a brilliant idea in the '60s and said to himself, "We are going beyond a horse society. Therefore, let's not have all these horses." His folks were great ones to have a bunch of horses out on the range. They'd turn out the stud and then bring the horses in, cull out the horses they wanted and put them back out. And that's what they did - they did that forever.

In the '60s, the BLM was beginning to say, "You guys don't have enough feed. You've got too many horses," and so on. We just went and gathered all the horses out that were our horses - and basically, all the horses in the valley were ours except what belonged to the Indians - and sold them.



BO: We gathered over 200 head - between 200 to 300 head.



RM: So you're opposed to the numerous horses on the range.



LO: I don't think that the horse is a natural thing here.



RM: I agree.



BO: And I feel that the horse lovers who are for the wild horses, are killing them. If they love them so much, why are they starving them to death?



LO: Basically, Bart's for a situation where you might have 3 or 4 wild horse preserves if that's what they want, subsidized by wild horse people, and the rest of us don't have to suffer with the wild horses. BO: Yes. If the people want them . . . the government wastes billions of dollars in stupid ways.



RM: Yes, right.



BO: They sent out a pamphlet here to every home on AIDS. Now, if they went to do some of this stuff, why don't they send out a pamphlet to you and me - just a questionnaire, on a postcard - asking, "Are you for wild horses or are you against them?" If you're for them, you're for them; if you're against them, you're against them. The ones that are for them, next month start getting a bill for $40 apiece, or $1 a day or something.

Let the ones who want the horses support the horses. Why should you or I support them?



RM: Well, the ranchers are supporting them. That's really what it amounts to.



LO: Basically. It was a big thing, though, when Fallinis over here won that one suit.



BO: It was.



RM: But it was only for them, wasn't it?



LO: Yes, but I think that you're going to see some waves out here [as a result of it].



BO: You're going to see some waves, but everybody else who wants to do it is going to have to go to court. It's going to be a battle for every single person.



RM: Yes. I'm for public lands and things like that, but the problem is, Nevada has so much public land.



LO: What is it, over 80 percent?



BO: Eighty-three percent, I think I read the other day.



RM: And there are all these people in the East and in California and everything with all these ideas about how the land in Nevada should be managed, and they don't ever come here.



BO: They don't even know what Nevada looks like.



RM: You know, they're opposed to Round Mountain and they want wild horses and all that, but they'll never drive down the Reese River Valley or the Smoky Valley.



LO: Oh, God forbid - or get off the highway onto a dirt road.



RM: Yes. Or they won't even come down Highway 8A. They don't want the mining, but they don't care whether they ever go there. I guess they want to know in theory that they can go there and it'll look pristine or something.



LO: Yes. You've got the same idea that we do. You don't want to be dictated to by people from New York City.



RM: I believe in preserving land for future generations and all that and taking care of the earth because it is our home. But there are too many people with too many ideas which are totally out of sync with the way Nevadans feel.



LO: This is where we get down to it. When I'm saying "We are calloused," we are soft but we're calloused. For instance, Reno has a beaver problem. They've got beavers coming into the city and doing all kinds of damage.



RM: They do?



BO: Oh yes.



LO: What do you do if you have a beaver problem? We say, get rid of the beavers. But then you've got all these animal rightists saying, "Oh my God. You can't get rid of the beavers." It's the same thing with the darned wild horse. We'll leave it out here on the range and if it runs out of feed and starves to death they seem to think that that's OK. RM: Then you've got another extreme now (I don't know where this one's going to end) - that is, animal rights.



LO: Oh, aren't they something?



RM: I'm for treating animals right, but I'm for animal research.



BO: I am too.



LO: Yes.



BO: You take almost every one of these people that are on some kick, and if you get down and really look at them, they're the ones who are hurting the animals more than anybody else. I don't care if it's the wild horse people or the . . .



RM: That's interesting - the advocate winds up hurting what he's trying to help.



BO: And they do more harm to it than they've ever done good.



LO: We had a crazy thing happen here a few years ago. The Indians, at various times, have had a lot of horses on our range and we get after the BLM to try and make them clean them up. We clean them up ourselves, we do everything. This particular year Bart ran the horses himself and he got half of the unbranded ones out of the deal. Our share was a scraggly old mare and a huge old stud that must have been 15 or 20 years old. He was a big bugger.

And at that time we were going to chicken feed them. At that time horses were worth quite a bit of money, and he would have been worth probably over $500. But we hadn't got around to getting him into town yet because he was the only one, and loading him was going to be tricky. So we had him locked into this shed we had that has a roof on it and a big gate, and we were watering and feeding him under there.

Well, I was desperate for help that summer and we hired a young kid from the unemployment office in Fallon. He was, like, an ex-con. He'd been in Oregon in prison for writing bad checks or something - what the devil was he in for?



BO: I don't remember. I don't know if I ever knew.



LO: Anyway, aside from the prison record he kind of typified the kind of thinking that this type of people have. We had the horse down there and in the evening when nobody was around, he was going down there with a little bucket of grain. He was going to go in there in a closed area with this stud horse. (That's what I was telling you this morning - I think a stud horse is probably more dangerous than a bull.) So he was going in there with this stud horse and trying to give it grain; he was going to gentle it. Well, in the first place, it's a wonder he didn't get killed. But what he did was, he spooked the horse so badly that it reared up and hit the big beams on the ceiling under our shed and broke its neck and killed itself.



RM: That's an interesting example. It reminds me of the old poem, "Oh, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves."



LO: Yes, really. And basically his killing came from ignorance - not knowing what to do.



RM: Yes. Poor Hank Records down in the Amargosa Valley was growing a big pivot of alfalfa out there, and he couldn't keep the wild horses out of it and he finally just had to toss in the towel. He's not growing alfalfa anymore. He had about 20 wild horses out there grazing on his alfalfa every night and tearing up his bales and stamping on his cubes and all. He tried everything - every county, state and federal agency ¬to help him get the horses out of there.



BO: I've got a theory that the United States needs to be divided into thirds anymore. Anything east of the Mississippi is one-third, anything in between the Rockies and that is the other and everything out here is another. And we should be able to control our own third. Now, if the people back east want wild horses then they need to go buy a whole damn bunch of stuff and have wild horses.



RM: Yes, right.



LU: I think the theory's wonderful but I want to ask you, Dad, how many people do you think, even in our own state - Las Vegas and Reno, for instance - are aware of what goes on at all out in the country?



BO: Not too many. But I think that you could put enough publicity closer to home that you could help control things, where you can't back east. And the political life anymore . . . it's how many dollars do you have to give me and what return do I give you?



RM: Yes, that's what it is.





INDEX




accidents

Alberson, Jerry

Albert, Inez Keough,

Albert, Mr.,

alfalfa,

Amargosa Valley, NV

Austin Gold Co.,

bank failure,

Barrett Canyon, NV,

Barrett family,

Barrett Ranch

bats,

Becker Canyon,

Bell Ranch

Belmont, NV,

Beranka, Modesto,

Berlin, NV,

Bird, Wallace,

Bishop, CA,

boardinghouses,

Bob, Elmer,

Bobb, Jim,

Bond, George,

Bonita Canyon, NV,

Bowler family,

Bowler Ranch,

Bowman, Don,

Brady, Dan,

Brahma bull,

brand inspection,

buffalo,

Butler, Belle,

Butler, Jim,

Butler family,

California,

Camel Creek, NV,

Cape Horn,

Carroll Summit, NV

Casey, John,

Catholic faith,

cattle,

cattle breeding,

cattle drive

cattle roping,

cattle rustling,

chickens,

childhood activities,

Christmas

churches

Churchill County,

Cinnabar Mine

Cislini, Billy

Cislini, Julia,

Cislini, Mike,

Cislini bar,

Cislini family,

Clear Creek Canyon,

Clifford, "Doc

Clifford, Mr. (father of "Doc"),

Clifford, Tessabel,

Clifford family,

climate

Cloverdale Canyon, NV,

Clydesdale horses,

Collins, Walter "Cap,"

construction methods,

cooks,

Copeland, "Grandpappy,"

Corlett family,

coyotes

Crane Creek, NV,

credit

crops,

cycle of life,

dances

Darrough family,

Decker, Delbert

deer hunting,

DeLavegas family,

Depression,

Derringer Ranch,

Dick, Johnny,

Dickman, Al,

Dixie Valley,

dog meat,

dogs,

Dover, NJ

Duckwater Shoshone Reservation,

Dutch Flat, NV,

Dyers Ranch,

eagles,

earthquake,

Eastgate, NV

ecology,

electricity,

Elkhorn, NV,

Elko, NV,

Ellsworth, NV,

Eureka, NV,

Fairview, NV,

Fallini family,

Fallon, NV,

Farrington family

Farrington Ranch,

Fayes, Gus

feed lot,

Fernley, NV,

fertilizing,

Finger Rock,

firewood,

food

Ford, Jim,

Ford, May Ward,

Ford, Sheamus,

Fourth of July,

Francis, Bar,

freight hauling,

Frenchmans Flat, NV,

fruit,

Gabbs, NV

Gabbs Valley, NV,

game warden,

Gandolfo, Reese & Elisa,

Gandolfo's field

gardens,

Globe Foods,

gold,

gold (lost),

Gold Park, NV,

Grantsville, NV,

grass tetany,

Grass Valley, NV,

grazing permits,

growing season,

Guazzini, Louie,

Hamilton, Mr.,

hay (see wild hay)

Hayden, Mrs.,

haying,

health,

health care,

Heath, Mr.

Heath family,

Heath Ranch,

Hereford cattle,

Hess Ranch,

Hiskey Stage Line

holidays,

Home Ranch,

homesteading,

Hooper, Archie,

Hooper, Art,

Hooper, Darlene,

Hooper, Duman,

Hooper, Homer,

Hooper, Laura,

Hooper, Lucille,

Hooper, Norma,

Hooper, Norman,

Hooper, Rosemarie,

Hopi Indians,

horses, domestic,

horses, wild,

Hot Spring, NV,

Ichthyosaur State Park

Indian houses,

Indian Valley, NV,

Indians

Ione, NV,

Ione Valley, NV

Iowa Canyon, NV,

Ireland,

Irish people,

irrigation,

Jackson, Dixon

Jackson, Joe,

Jackson, Nibs,

Jim Butler Days,

Joaquin family

Joaquin field,

Keller, Charlie,

Keller, Edie,

Keller, Jimmy,

Keller, Larry,

Keller family,

Kennedy, Matt,

Keough, Charlie,

Keough family,

Keough Ranch,

Kerney, Mr.,

Konkel, Jakey,

Labor Day,

Laborda, John,

Lamour, Louis

Lander County, NV

Lander County Bank,

Las Vegas, NV,

laundry,

Laurenson, Bonnie Muenk,

Laurenson, Larry,

lead,

Lodi, NV,

Lompa & Cislini Store,

Los Angeles, CA,

Luning, NV

mail carrier,

Manhattan, NV,

Manteca, CA,

Marysville Canyon, NV,

McCracken, Robert G

McGowan, State Comptroller George

McGruders, Louie,

mechanic,

Merck, Hap & Eall,

mercury,

Mercury Mine,

Middlegate, NV,

milk,

Mina, NV,

mines,

mines, lost,

Mohawk Canyon, NV

Montgomery Wards,

mountain lions,

mountain men

mud slide,

music,

Nevada,

Nevada Bank of Commerce,

Nevada Public Service Comm

Nevada State Journal

Nevada Test Site,

Nevada Truck Lines,

New Jersey

Newman, Hal,

Newman, Mrs.,

Newman family,

newspapers,

nickel,

Noonan, Mr.,

Nye County, NV

Oakland, CA,

Odyssey of a Prospector,

O'Toole, Alice,

O'Toole, Arthur Eugene

O'Toole, Bartholomew (grandfather

O'Toole, Bartley Augusta

O'Toole, Bartley Mitchell "Bee

O'Toole, George Washington,

O'Toole, George Washington (cont'd),

O'Toole, Jack,

O'Toole, John Joseph "Joe

O'Toole, Kevin Henry,

O'Toole, Lawrence William "Billy,"

O'Toole, Margaret Kelly,

O'Toole, Mary Louise Winters,

O'Toole, Mary Lynn,

O'Toole, Michael Stark,

Pahrump, NV,

pasture land,

Penelas, NV,

Percheron horses,

Phillips, Bill,

Phillips family,

plumbing,

Point of Rocks,

Ponton, Babe,

Ponton, Betty,

Ponton, George,

Ponton, Pauline,

practical jokes,

priests,

productivity,

prospecting,

quicksilver (see mercury)

R.O. Ranch,

rabies,

railroads

raising a family,

ranchers (original),

range management,

reading,

Records, Hank

red water,

Reese River Reveille,

Reese River Valley, NV

Reno, NV

Reno Evening Gazette

responsibility

Reveille Valley, NV,

Richmond, Ed

Riley Creek, NV,

roads,

rodeos,

Rogers, Pete & Mary,

Rogers family,

Rossi, Bill,

Round Mountain, NV,

Sacramento, CA,

sage hen,

sagebrush,

St. Mary's Hospital,

San Francisco, CA,

San Francisco Examiner,

San Juan Canyon, NV,

Sand Mountain, NV,

Schmalling Ranch,

schools,

Sears Roebuck,

Shamrock Mine

sheep,

Sheldon, Dan,

Shiketty, Mrs.,

shooting,

shopping,

Shorthorn cattle,

shorthorn Hereford cattle,

Shoshone Indians,

Shoshone Mountains, NV, 15

Shoshone nation,

Sierra Nevada (mountains),

Sierra Pacific Power Co.,

silver,

Smith, Henick,