Emma Hamsher, Thoroughly Modern Twentieth Century Teacher - Part IV

    

New Mexico Institute for the Blind Campus

 The 1919 school year at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind began without a hitch.  Emma met her students and their parents at their designated train stations and they easily transferred trains in El Paso to Alamogordo with the help of the Pullman Red Caps who were friends of Emma’s by now.  For the first few weeks, it seemed they were all settling down to a wonderfully productive year. Then suddenly children started becoming ill; everyone feared another flu epidemic.  It wasn’t flu, it was worse -- smallpox! 

    The school was put in quarantine. Fortunately,  a new health center had been built on campus during the summer and a nurse from El Paso had been hired. She was well-versed in nursing smallpox - there was little to do but comfort the children who were sick, try to keep their fevers down, and clean up the bodily messes from diarrhea and throwing up.  

    Small children and Natives were especially vulnerable to this virus.  Thirty percent of its victims would die, be blinded, or have short term syndromes, horrible facial and bodily scarring, or lifelong illnesses from the disease.  In the Native population, the mortality rate was much higher; the European disease had killed 90% of the first Americans within the first hundred years Anglo settlers set foot on Eastern shores.

    Few of the children had been vaccinated; the nurse lined students and unvaccinated staff up to be given the vaccine. If the injection site didn’t form a blister within the first two weeks, they would be re-vaccinated.  The dime size scar on a person’s arms was their proof of vaccination.  Meanwhile, the strange little nurse scrambled around the medical center mumbling to herself, tilting her head and answering herself.  She was always busy, but never seemed to mind. 

    Emma went to the health center to talk to the children through the windows. They were greased down with oil from their heads to the bottom of their feet to keep them from developing scars.  This was probably the best treatment to apply because when it was all over, the children suffered little scarring. 

    Small Pox Victim

During all this time, everyone was in complete quarantine, even the dog. No one could leave campus, and the fence was the limit, even though the school was surrounded by desert. They were all becoming tired of each other and then finally, three days before Christmas, when everyone had been successfully vaccinated and the health center was child-free, the quarantine was lifted.

    Arrangements were hurriedly executed and the activity of getting home for Christmas was exhilarating.  If home was too far away, teachers and staff found places to go where they had a change of scenery and could relax. 

    Emma delivered her charges north and decided to spend her holiday in Santa Fe.  She loved the farolito lights, colorful decorations, the red pork tamales, religious processions like the La Posada, posole, biscochitos, and piñon bonfires. She thought everyone should spend at least one Christmas in Santa Fe during their lifetime. 

    But Emma was not one to rest on her laurels.  She had heard of a child with eye problems at a mining camp near Gallup. She arrived around noon the day after Christmas and was directed to a rough building that held a large dining room. Because of the holiday, the miners were not working, and many of them were having lunch there. There was a little 11-year-old girl who was serving bowls of food to the tables. She was being paid 50 cents per week for a seven day work week that began at dawn and ended in the dark.    

    The child’s eyes were extremely red and oozing. Emma located the girl’s father, a large, rough Polish miner who told her he did not know the whereabouts of the mother and the girl had never been to a doctor.  Emma convinced him that she had State authority to take her to get treatment and go to school. 

    The father got his daughter’s coat and the few other pieces of clothing she owned. They got in Emma’s waiting car and the driver took them to Gallup. At the hotel, she bathed her and with some washcloths and warm water, greatly improved the appearance of her eyes, although they were still inflamed.

    After breakfast the next morning, they wandered over to the station to await their train. Suddenly, two men appeared - - one who  came up only to Emma’s shoulder with a face twisted into perpetual anger- the other was a big man wearing a Stetson, a badge and a gun at his belt. The cruel looking man ran the restaurant at the mine and according to him, Emma had no right to take the child. She asked him if he had the 11-year-old under a contract. He said he didn’t need a contract and was taking her back where she belonged. 

    “Over my dead body,” Emma said. Words flew between the two.  Finally a big, hearty laugh came from the sheriff. He said, “Come on man; I'm taking you back to camp - - you're not getting anywhere here." He steered the mean, diminutive man back to the mine, and Emma and the girl boarded the train to El Paso for an ophthalmological appointment. 

    At Mr Pratt's request, but much against Emma’s resolve, she was told to carry a revolver in her satchel. She was often offered advice that the place she was headed was dangerous; she said she could predict what words the warning would begin with,”I have a daughter of my own…” 

    She said she had  never needed her revolver, and never used it except for target practice, but fantasized this time of bopping the child’s raging employer on his noggin with the grip of her gun. Fortunately, she did not act upon it.

    In El Paso, two doctors examined the child and came up with the diagnosis: trachoma. The doctors turned her eyelids inside out and scrubbed them with a medicated brush. Each week she was to go to the nurse at the school clinic where she would receive the same treatment. It took four months before her eyes were infection free. Some of her vision was saved, but her eyes were badly scarred.

    Around this time, a former teacher at the school visited the Institute. She was Elizabeth Garrett. Her mother was Spanish from Northern New Mexico, and her father was the famous sheriff, Pat Garrett. Pat was renowned for having captured the notorious Billy the Kid. In fact, he captured him twice! The first time, Billy was jailed and sentenced to be hanged, but managed to escape. Patrick followed Billy to Fort Sumner and there, shot him. Pat was known as a tough man when necessary, but always very gentle and kind to Elizabeth.

    Emma was enchanted with Miss Garrett who then lived in Long Island, New York and earned her living by singing. She told wonderful tales of growing up in New Mexico Territory and of her parents, particularly her father. In the evenings, the students and staff would sit around Garrett on the lawn and listen to her tales, some exciting, some sad, but most of them a living history lesson of New Mexico.

Pat Garrett and Elizabeth's Youngest Sister

    The evenings during the few weeks Elizabeth visited were glorious. Her entourage would sit on the lawn while the sunset crept behind the San Andres Mountains. Then the moon rose followed by millions of stars. Under the expansive sky, Elizabeth told stories and sang song after song, all in Spanish. Emma’s favorites were “La Paloma” and “La Golondrina.”

    In 1915, three years after New Mexico was admitted to the U.S. as the 47th state, Garrett wrote ”O Fair New Mexico.” Written in the form of a tango, it was officially adopted as New Mexico's state song in 1917. John Philip Sousa, famous military march composer, made an arrangement of the song in 1928. 

    Garrett was in the process of moving to Roswell, where she would teach piano, continue writing songs, devote her time to serving as a Board of Regent’s member for the Institute for the Blind, and perform around the country. 

    Elizabeth was friends with the blind/deaf author and political activist Helen Keller and her former teacher and lifelong companion, Anne Sullivan. The two would visit the “Songbird of the Southwest" at her home in Roswell and in Santa Fe to help Elizabeth lobby for the Institute in Alamogordo, and for the blind in the State of New Mexico. 

    Their lobbying activity to convince legislators to give state taxpayer money to her causes often began with a joke from Elizabeth Garret.  She said she was there to fight for the blind and deaf in New Mexico.  She quipped, “Quite frequently, my father had to bring harmony with a gun. I always have tried to do so by carrying a tune.”

    Around the time Garrett’s visit ended, Emma began to receive letters from her fiance, Harold Minturn, with a return address of a post office box in New York City.  Since German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s grandson, abdicated and the war ended at 11 o’clock, on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, Emma had received no correspondence from Harry.  She assumed he was in Europe and was cleaning up the mess the “Huns” made with their destructive war.  “Huns” was a derogatory term used by the Allied forces to define the barbarism of the German forces.

    Harry explained that he had not been sent to Europe but had served as a mechanic in upstate New York. Now he was in the city trying to make his fortune as a salesman. Minturn had grown up with his parents and brother in boarding houses in Kansas, Missouri, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and several places in between, so he knew that a post office box was the best place to receive his mail while he was “transient.” 

    Emma’s tall, slender, dark haired, blue eyed soldier had been mustered out of the Army with no missing limbs or eyes, no mustard gas respiratory problems or chemical burns that disfigured his face or caused blindness. Unlike many soldiers who returned from Europe, he had not suffered from the loss of fingers or feet from trench foot, frostbite, or gangrene infections. 

    He was not one of the disfigured  “gueules cassées,” - “broken faced men,” missing noses, jaws, cheekbones, ears or eyes. These men often went to a Tin Nose Shop to have custom, thin copper masks made. The prosthetic masks, crafted by sculptors on painted copper, were designed to resemble the soldier's pre-injury appearance as closely as possible with eyes, eyebrows, cheek definition, mouths, and ears painted over a base coat matched to the soldier's skin tone. 

    The copper coverings were held on by a tin wire or a ribbon and kept civilians from recoiling at the sight of the veterans’ disfigurements of missing cheekbones, jaws, noses, or eyes,  but did not always cover the psychological trauma the wounded had  suffered from the Great (horrible) War.

  Tin Nose Masks to Cover Missing Face Features

 Emma was far away from the consequences of World War I.  Her brother had been drafted, but like her fiance, stayed state side and was now safe and sound back in Chambersburg.  The nearest Emma had come to the war was when an  incident occurred during the Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa and his Villistas had raided Columbus, and General Pershing from El Paso’s Fort Bliss was ordered to keep Pancho Villa out of New Mexico and back where he belonged. 

    After General Pershing's unsuccessful invasion of Mexico, his 6000 troops headed back to the borderland.  Several squads of his soldiers were making a summer foray into the Sacramento Mountains to train in the fresh mountain air. Pershing’s entourage of gallant cavalrymen  passed through Alamogordo to get to their destination and camped in the park under the trees which Alamogordo was named after. They were staying under the fat cottonwoods over the weekend and would head up the mountain on Monday.

    A  dance soiree was held for the troops in town on Saturday evening; the orchestra from The Institute for the Blind furnished the music and one of the students whose home was in Alamogordo attended the dance. Several months later, the teenage girl told Miss Hamsher she didn’t feel well enough to attend class. 

    Emma sent her student to the health clinic where they discovered that she was pregnant. The girl  didn’t know the soldier’s last name; she only knew that he was a homesick, terribly unhappy boy from the South who had told her that she was a wonderful dancer, how lovely she was, how he had never met a girl as understanding and kind as she was, and had asked her if he could see her again as soon as he received a leave of duty. By the time the girl discovered her predicament, Pershing and his troops had been sent overseas to France. 

    The pregnant girl’s mother had been dead for several years and her older sister had taken over raising the children.  The big sister did not allow her littler sister back in the house.  The school nurse suggested the girl go to El Paso where there was a home for unwed mothers; she remained until the baby was born and adopted. She then came back to live on the campus until she graduated.

    Emma shook her head at the girl’s naivete and the opportunism of the young man. The school was quite strict with boy/girl activity on the campus and during field trips.  The students and staff were warned of hereditary blindness and discouraged relationships between students.  Emma vowed to keep a more diligent watch on her female charges and spoke to them about piety and purity. Society placed a high value on a woman's virtue, and warnings were given against activities that were considered detrimental to a girl's moral standing.

    Meanwhile, Emma was contemplating the end of her five year teaching stint in New Mexico with mixed feelings.  She was anxious to begin a family of her own, but leaving the children with whom she lived and worked was going to be gut wrenching. This had been the most interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience she had ever encountered. Her blind children had been her teachers; she said she had learned more from them than they had from her.

    As the school year ended in 1921, it would also grieve her to leave  the land of enchantment; she would miss the grandeur of the mountains, the desert, the indescribable sunsets, the homey little adobe houses which grew out of the brown land, and the friendly population of Anglo, Spanish, and Native people.

    Emma had made close friends in Alamogordo; one was a priest who corresponded with other churches to help Emma locate blind children. The Father came from Germany for the “cure.” He had tuberculosis and the dry, desert air helped him heal and he fell in love with the area and remained.

    Emma became friends with an English couple - the husband was also a “lunger” with tuberculosis.  The gentleman was a billiard buff and they had one room built onto their adobe house which was known as the Billiard Room. They taught the young school teacher to play billiards and frequently invited her to spend an evening with them doing nothing but playing billiards after dinner. 

    Superintendent Pratt and Mrs. Pratt also doted on Emma.  The school doctor who brought his children and his  tubercular wife from New York to Alamogordo were also quite close with Miss Emsher.  Everyone wished she would stay, but understood she had extended her engagement for a long time and was at the upper end of the age for marriage. It was time to be taken care of by a loving husband.

    Before she left, she had taken a group of children for a picnic at a mountain park on top of a small canyon several miles from school. After lunch, Emma told the students she was going to hike down to the stream close by to fill a  bucket with drinking and washing-up water.  She made them promise to stay just where they were until she returned. Several of the children had partial vision and she knew they could be trusted to make sure this happened.

    As she hiked down the hill, the bucket fell out of her hand and dropped noisily, clang, clang, clanging down the rocky mountain to the stream. She retrieved it, filled it, and hiked back to the children where she found everyone where they had been, but now on their knees, some crying, with hands folded, praying for her. They thought she had fallen with the bucket. 

    She wondered how she could leave them and never see them again. It was a difficult decision to make, but she wanted to finally marry the man she had kept waiting for so long. When they returned to school, she began packing for the trip back east. Mr. and Mrs. Pratt put her on the train the next day. She found her seat and waved to them where they stood  on the platform; she had  tears in her eyes and a pain in her heart while she watched little Alamogordo, sitting at the foot of the Sacramento Mountains, and her dearest friends roll out of sight.

  Alamogordo Train Depot Grounds

  Emma was married in Chicago in August of 1921 in a civil ceremony in a courtroom, no family nor friends attended.  Her husband, Harold Disney Minturn, was reported as being a stockbroker in the Windy City. Emma’s achievements were listed extensively in the Chambersburg newspaper wedding announcement - graduate of Temple Baptist College, teacher, field officer, accomplished public speaker.  Her father was the late artist, T.O. Hamsher.  He had died of tuberculosis when Emma was five years old.  

    Unbeknownst to his bride, Harry had been married before in 1917 in Kansas City to a young, local woman. Harry worked as an advertising man while living at the Densmore Hotel when he married Roby Singleton, daughter of the recently deceased Dr. J.M. Singleton; she had inherited a healthy fortune.  They were married for less than a year during which time, the man of the house (Harry) typically controlled the household purse strings.

    The tumultuous alliance ended in a lawsuit which was eventually settled with his first wife’s family. Harold Minturn had accused his spouse’s household of alienation of affection and sued them for $50,000, over $1,250,000 in today’s money.  They reached a settlement just to quell the town gossip and he was paid a secret sum and given a motor car to leave town. 

    Toward the end of the divorce settlement, Harry was drafted at age 29 (just missing the 30 year old cut-off) and preparing to leave for Pennsylvania where he would soon be introduced to Emma Hamsher.  

    When the judge overseeing the divorce trial told Mr. Minturn he had to leave Kansas City, Harry replied that the U.S. Government had superceded that command and that he was a former Cavalry soldier and was glad to be going back to the military. As he was catching his train bound for boot camp in Pennsylvania, he lied to a newspaper reporter that he was leaving to attend Officer Training School in Illinois.

    There are no military records of Minturn serving in the U.S. Cavalry.  Census records showed him working as a messenger and a stenographer in Kansas while living with his parents and brother in a boarding house.  His father worked in a department store and his brother Raymond went to business school and was drafted the same time as Harry; Raymond would later become a successful engineer.

    Near the end of 1919, Harry’s address changed from a New York to a Chicago post office box.  Harry wrote that the job prospects there were much better and that he was working as a stockbroker.  He said he would live cheaply in a boarding house until they married and he would be looking for an apartment for them in a nice area - near the Loop.

    Apparently, when Harry mustered out of the military, he moved to Manhattan where he married a woman six years younger than he was, Beatrice Bovee, who had a peddler’s licence at a pier in Brooklyn.  The couple moved to Chicago in 1920 for financial reasons; they lived with his wife's mother, Belle Bovee, a dry goods saleswoman who also took in boarders to make ends meet.

    Harry Disney Minturn married Emma Hamsher in August of 1921. He had found them an apartment on the fashionable North side of Chicago, walkable to Lake Michigan and not too far from the elevated train known as the “Loop.” Chicago fascinated Emma; it was beautiful, exciting, interesting, and enjoyable. A year and a half later, a son was born, Raymond Hamsher Minturn.  He lived for nineteen days. A year after that, a daughter arrived stillborn.  

    Emma took a job with the Chicago Public Schools as a teacher after the painful experience of losing two babies. The rules had relaxed and married women could teach in Chicago as long as they did not become pregnant or have children. 

    Emma had come into the marriage with a savings account from her five years of teaching and summer field work duties. Harry began to work on a project as a contractor, becoming a founding member building a private country club with a 26 acre lake.

    In 1928, Emma resigned from her job when she discovered she was pregnant.  She had a healthy baby girl, Anne Leigh Minturn, who required every bit of Emma’s attention.  Six months after she was born, her parents took her with them on a celebratory cruise from Florida to Cuba. 

    The year 1929 was a banner year for Cuba until the Wall Street Crash in October.  Gerardo Machado, President of Cuba, was willing to pocket any bribe from any foreigner who wanted permits to own and operate hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, and brothels. Tourism increased markedly in Cuba and tax revenues allowed for a  central highway to be built; money for public education spending increased, and investment in industrialization began - until it all crashed along with the Stock Market.

    The Great Depression ended the bubble of the Roaring 20’s. Emma was not working and slowly became a “grass widow.”  A “sod widow’s” husband is six feet under; a grass widow’s husband stops coming home.  But Emma announced to all that she had in fact become a “widow,” to avoid the shame of whatever there was to be ashamed of with a husband who had disappeared.  

    Emma eventually became the manager of an apartment/hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. She and Anne lived there until Anne matriculated from Chicago Girls’ Latin School and then attended Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1949. 

    Meanwhile, Harry married Helene Smith in Panama City, Florida in 1937 and five years later, a Florida newspaper's legal posting ran for four weeks announcing that Helene Minturn of Panama City, Florida was divorcing Harold Disney Minturn of Biloxi, Mississippi who had vanished.  

    After World War I, divorces increased notably during the Roaring Twenties.  Hasty marriages were common during war time. A husband sometimes returned a stranger after the trauma of battle but divorce was still stigmatized, especially for women.  Divorcee was synonymous with “loose woman.” 

    Divorce was fault-based and difficult to prove and obtain. Some churches did not recognize divorce; it was easier in a time before computer databases, social media, facial recognition and tracking devices to simply disappear a few states or a coastline far away.

    Three years later, Harry died in Los Angeles, California, less than ten miles from his second wife, Beatrice Bovee Johnsan, now a Hollywood socialite whose soirees made the newspaper thanks to the wealth of her new husband.  

    An application was submitted by an anonymous person to the Veterans Administration requesting a headstone for Harry at Los Angeles National Cemetery; he had died two months after the end of World War II, twenty-five short years after his military service ended following World War I. 

    Emma and Harry’s daughter, Anne Minturn, had been given a research assistantship at Harvard and Emma decided to apply for a job in nearby Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind. She called Perkins to set up an appointment for an interview, but since Emma’s teaching credentials had lapsed, the only job available was an office secretarial position for the bursar. 

    The bursar was extremely helpful and asked Emma what type of job she was really looking for. He suggested she go to The Statler Hotel in Boston the following week to attend a meeting of administrators from various schools for the blind; he arranged for Emma to meet some of the superintendents. She met with Dr. Francis M. Andrews from the Maryland School for the Blind. 

    Emma told Dr. Andrews that she had presented a speech twenty-seven years ago at a conference on his campus. She remembered how beautiful the grounds were - lawns filled with magnificent elms and oaks, an orchard, woods filled with birds, wild flowers, and a brook running through the forest. At 19 years old, she had sat by the brook to practice her progressive presentation that she later gave to hundreds of educators dedicated to working with the blind.

    The  vacancy at the Maryland School for the Blind was for a dietitian. She was not a dietician, but she no longer had a teaching license and the Superintendent convinced her she could do the job until something became available that she preferred. She asked about budgeting and he replied that as long as she fed the children, the teachers and staff well, there would be no problem.   She accepted and stayed at the school until she retired in 1972.

    But, Emma would not rest on her laurels. She began lobbying her Superintendent to create a new position called  “Home Visitor.”  The Home Visitor would travel the State of Maryland to advise and counsel mothers of babies born prematurely who developed blindness. Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) beat out venereal disease after the advent of penicillin as the leading cause of childhood blindness.  

    The Home Visitor would teach the mothers how to teach their children until they were old enough to attend school. The Home Visitor would provide resources and referrals for the families of children with vision problems and would go from town to town to seek out new babies who qualified for the services.  

    After the position of Home Visitor was established, Emma nominated herself for the job.  The Superintendent hired her and she spent the next twenty years as the Maryland School for the Blind Home Visitor. She traipsed the state from north to south, east to west in her automobile, no longer needing to take a train nor a horse.  She hand typed a memoir after she retired; her last chapter oddly mimicking her first chapter.

      Maryland School for the Blind

  In 1974, Emma went to live with her daughter, Dr. Anne Leigh Minturn, professor of social psychology at University of Colorado at Boulder.  Dr. Minturn’s publications included women’s and children’s issues, cross-cultural perspectives and extensive research she gathered in India.  “Mothers of Six Cultures,” “Sita’s Daughters,” and “Rajputs of Khalapur” were a few of her publications.

    Emma’s obituary in 1985 was titled, “Emma Minturn, She Taught the Blind.” Her story of teaching in Alamogordo, New Mexico was premier, along with the “fact” that she had been a widow for many years.  Her adventures of riding trains, travelling horseback, riding in wagons, and in rented automobiles through the desert to make sure she found every blind student in the state defined her life. 

    Emma’s daughter,  Anne,  named after Anne Sullivan, teacher of Helen Kellar, died in an Egypt Air plane crash off Nantucket in 1999. She was seventy years old.  In her will, she bequeathed a collection of New Mexican artifacts, (gifts from parents of blind children to Emma), to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.  The Pueblo storyteller clay dolls, figurines, bowls, Navajo and Apache baskets, and other artifacts were each small enough to fit into Anne’s mother’s leather shoulder bag she'd carried onto trains, horse’s backs, and in rented cars.  Even the santo of Joseph, caretaker of children, now displayed in the Harvard museum, once fit perfectly into Emma’s well-traveled satchel.

 

Story Teller

Margaret and the Cowboy, A Ghost Story

Late in the year of 1960, my husband and I purchased and moved into one of the oldest farmhouses near Alamogordo, New Mexico.  It was nearly a hundred years old and at the western edge of town on a now unused road that had traveled past our farm on through to the White Sands, over the San Andres Mountains, on to Las Cruces and eventually to California.  Pat Garret, Billy the Kid, Colonel Fountain, and an array of Apaches, Spaniards, Mexicans, heroes and villains had traversed the road behind our simple wooden, white, pitched-roof farmhouse. It was a quiet place, enclosed in elm trees, fat cotton woods, willows, several barns and a rickety arrangement of pens for sheep, chickens and turkeys. A small house, used for itinerant farm hands, stood catty-corner to our house.  It was then occupied by our hand, Gregorio, his wife and their small child. Forty acres of furrowed fields lay south of the houses and were edged on the west by a stingy apple orchard, too old to produce much but a drupelet, but the front yard abounded with fig bushes and apricot, pomegranate and mulberry trees.


My husband was a political sort, away at meetings many evenings, and one February evening this was the case. Our youngest daughter had been born on Christmas day two months previously and she was fussy this evening. I was trying to rock her back to sleep in front of the fireplace which was wildly crackling with a hot mesquite wood fire.  The older children were in their bedroom but kept getting up and pestering with requests for water or bathroom or "I can't sleep."  A storm had begun brewing, beginning with the windows brightening with lightening, followed by close bursts of rambunctious thunder.  Rain began pouring down in sheets blown in by a forceful wind. I relented to the children to bring in their blanket and lie next to us on the rug in front of the fire.

As I rocked the baby and hummed a calming lullaby, I noticed the hatch door into the attic was rising up and hovering a few inches above the little frame that held it in place.  It would slowly close and then a few minutes later it would hover open again.  I kept rocking the baby and watched the hatch open and close.  The storm had begun to abate by this time and I began to fear that someone was in the attic and was watching us. I held tight to the baby and continued rocking until the door blew open. I jumped up, and my husband bounded in through the door .  I spilled out my story about the hatch while my husband pulled off his winter coat and stood by the fire to warm himself.  "It's probably just the draft pushing the hatch up," he said dismissively, but I persisted and he finally said he would get the ladder and see what was up there.  "Maybe a critter," he said. "I don't know how anything could get in there, but we'll have a look"

My husband brought a ladder in from the barn, triangled it the middle of our living room, and climbed to the ceiling with his flashlight.  To our surprise, the hatch was constructed from heavy lumber and my husband struggled to lift it and set in onto the rafters. It seemed too heavy to be lifted up by a mere draft of air.

"There's nothing up here," he yelled back down.  "A thick layer of dust. It hasn't been disturbed, there's no tracks."  He swung his flashlight from edge to edge of the attic. Secreted in the corner was a small wooden box, camouflaged with dust, untouched.  "It sure doesn't look like there's been any movement up here.  Maybe you were sleeping and dreamed the hatch was lifting up."

The next morning we viewed the results of the storm.  Flood water, deluging down the Sacramento Mountains and overflowing the arroyos had swept across our front lawn and caved in an old hand dug well in our lawn that we were unaware of.  We were shocked to find the well; it had been covered with heavy timber and sod  and the weight of the flood water must have been too much for the decayed and rotted planks causing them to collapse.  The hole was about sixty feet deep and we feared that the children could fall into this pit and even though water didn't rise into the well anymore, it would be a deadly fall and needed to be filled.  My husband and Gregorio pushed dirt and rocks with the tractor to  fill the well and replanted grass on top of the site.

After that night, there were changes at the old farm house.  Some mornings we would find the breakfast table set with an odd assortment of dishes, a plate, a spoon, a cup and maybe a spatula;  strange settings of dish wares appeared on our table intermittently. Tea towels would be folded or unfolded. Kitchen chairs would be moved, lights turned on or off and we'd hear soft noises at strange times - clicks, scrapes, taps, - nothing uproarious. Sometimes guests would ask about who just went into a room and when we investigated, we would find the room empty.

Several months after the storm we went  into the attic to remodel to turn the attic into bedrooms - since the house had only two bedrooms and we had three children. The dust wafted as we stepped from rafter to rafter.  Sitting on the joists in the corner was a small cedar chest, coated with decades of dust.  I lifted the top of the chest and inside was a collection of embroidered linens with perfectly aligned and administered back stitches, split stitches, french knots - all done in blue two strand thread, a four patch crazy quilt, two dishes bordered with pink roses, a spatula, several wooden spoons, two teacups and saucers, and an assemblage of  mismatched spoons, forks, knives.  A simple white sleeping gown lay in the chest; its bodice was embellished with white cloud filling stitches which ended below the breasts and bedizened the bottom of the gown into grecian folds. In the bottom of the trunk was a floral printed flour sack tied at the top with a string and enclosing a pair of tiny pair of lamb's wool booties and a pair of knitting needles with a tiny white cap still in progress interlaced on the wooden sticks.  "It's someone's Hope Chest," I told my husband, uncomfortable with this new knowledge.

We decided to research the history of the old farm house.  Through census records we learned that the original farm was homesteaded by a couple who had a daughter named Margaret who was 18.  We found a newspaper article saying that one summer Margaret had gone missing.  The newspaper reported that the family had hired a drifter, a young cowboy who worked for the family for about a year and one day the daughter and the hired hand disappeared.  Thinking they had eloped, the family waited for their return, but they never came back.  Stories filtered back of seeing the hired hand in neighboring Hillsboro, El Paso, or Las Vegas, but no sightings of Margaret were ever reported.

We considered the sequence of events on our farm: the storm, the flood, the uncovered well and the appearance of the ghost in our house. We have decided it is Margaret.  We theorize that Margaret became pregnant and told the cowboy - who did not take to the news kindly.  We believe he killed her and dumped her in the dried up well and when the well cover collapsed, she escaped and moved back into the farmhouse.
We have lived in this house with Margaret for 60 years. Her Hope Chest sits in the bedroom filled with her unused treasures.  She still upsets our routine at times and I'm sure we upset hers, but we are all by now family.

by Barbara McDonald

Goat Herding in Otero County

by Clif McDonald

Sam Gilliland knocked on our door just at daylight.  My brothers and I had been waiting in euphoric anticipation for this moment for several days.  I was twelve years old and didn't know Sam, but I had seen him roping at rodeos.  He was six-foot plus, red-headed, strong, and tall and straight in the saddle.

One reason the Gillilands were heroes to me and my brothers was the gun battle at Wildy Well.  Sam's brother, Jim Gilliland and Oliver Lee had been attacked by Pat Garrett and his posse while they were asleep.  We believed the sheriff had taken an unfair advantage.  Of course this happened before we were born, but we had heard the story, and our loyalties lay with Gilliland and Lee, who fought back and defeated Garrett and his posse, killing one of Pat's men.

Dad had told us a few days before that Sam was coming to possibly buy a herd of goats from us.  Not only were we happy about meeting Sam, but we were also hoping to get some money from the sale of the goats to buy some new school clothes.

There was a fire in the kitchen stove and the coffee pot was percolating.  Dad got up, opened the door and said, "Come on in, Sam."  Sam said, "I brought my wife." and Dad said, "Bring her in.  Breakfast is about ready."  They came in, introductions were made all around, and everyone sat down at the big kitchen table, waiting for Mother to finish cooking breakfast.  Sam and his wife had been married just over two weeks - and she was a beautiful lady!

Soon, breakfast was over and we went out to the corral.  Sam walked around through the herd, looking the goats over.  He would occasionally catch one and check its teeth for age.  Dad wanted two dollars per head and Sam wanted them for a dollar seventy-five.  Finally, Sam said, "We are going to have to drive them cross country on foot 'cause so much of this country is fenced up now."

We knew what he meant.  the goats could go through fences but saddle horses could not.  Sam took off his hat, scratched his head and said, "Tell you what I'll do.  I'll give you two dollars a head for all the goats we get to my ranch.  If we lose any of them along the way, I can't pay you for them."  Dad said, "Fair enough.  I'll send this boy here with you.  He's a good herder; he'll get 'em all there.  His name is Clif."  I was elated to be the one chosen out of eight boys!

We filled our canteens, got our slickers and a pocket full of jerky and headed out to Sam's ranch which was south of Carrizozo.  Sam's wife met us in the truck with food and bedrolls where we made camp that night.  Next morning we had finished breakfast when it started coming daylight.  Sam and me and his dog had all become good friends by then.  His dog was a well trained, good herder.  When we got the herd strung out and grazing, we would sit down to rest and drink out of our canteens.  Then Sam would pour some water in his hat and hold it for his dog to drink out of.

We left Tulie Creek the next morning, headed north through the saddle just west of Cat Mountain.  We were to meet Sam's wife that night in Coyote Canyon near the Indian reservation.  About noon it started raining and we put on our slickers.  It was almost dark when we reached our next campsite.  We found a good tank of water but the corral had deteriorated to the point that it wouldn't hold our goats, so we had to take turns watching them so they wouldn't run off and get lost.

Sam's wife didn't show up with our food and bedrolls so we figured the  roads had been washed out because a lot of the road was in the arroyo bed.  You don't know how hungry a twelve-year-old boy can get.  I had run out of jerky about noon the day before.  Sam asked me if I thought I could eat some goat meat if we butchered one, and I said, "If we could find some dry wood to cook it with, I can."
About that time the moon started coming up and got very bright.  Sam said, "You know with this cool night air and moonlight, we can maybe see good enough to move this herd.  We sure could make lots of miles before it get hot tomorrow and it's only about twenty-five miles to Three Rivers.  We can get something to eat there."  So we moved them out.  We could see well enough on the ridges, but when we had to cross a canyon, some of the goats would stop under the trees and I couldn't see them.  So, I would take the dog and bark them out in the open.  This worked well, but I also woke several rattle snakes which was kinda scary in the dark; and, I was afraid maybe I wasn't getting all the goats out of the brush.

Next morning when it came good daylight, I looked over the herd but I couldn't tell if I had lost any goats.  We were on the lower slopes of Sierra Blanca Mountain.  Looking to the west across the Tularosa Basin, we could not see Three Rivers, a ranch house, nor any sign of life.  We were so hungry and tired, and the goats were so tired that they couldn't make much mileage.  I suggested we rest, but Sam said, "If we stop, we're going to stiffen up and it will be worse. Besides, our canteens are dry."

About that time we spotted a windmill and we could see the blades turning in the morning sun.  We figured there might be a ranch house there, too, and we could get food and water.  However, it appeared to be several miles away.  This kind of gave us a second wind, and Sam asked, "Can you make it, Kid?"  I said sure!  If these goats don't sull on us, and, if it don't get too hot, we can be there in about four or five hours."
About an hour later I could see a long dust plume going north down in the basin beyond the windmill and we knew it was a car on Highway 54 between Tularosa and Three Rivers; Highway 54 was not paved then.  Soon after that, we saw a train.  This gave me assurance we could eventually come back into civilization.  I had never been in this part of the country, but I knew there were people and food down there somewhere.

As the day got hotter, the herd got tireder and slower; I didn't have any trouble with any of them trying to break out of the herd.  I was so tired, I couldn't have done anything about it.  Sam and I were both punching up the drags this time.  After an hour of silence, Sam finally said, "The windmill is just over this next mountain.  Can you make it, Kid?"  I said, "Sure I can!"  But in my own mind, I was not at all sure I could climb that next mountain.  When we did finally make it to the top there was good news - there was a big trough of water, but no ranch house.  When we got to the water, the goats were climbing on top of each other trying to get a drink and we joined in the competition.

As soon as all the goats got water, they bedded down to rest.  It was about three in the afternoon, and I tried to figure out how many meals I had missed in a row, but the days and nights ran together.  I lay down in the shade of a mesquite bush and I immediately went to sleep.  I sprang to my feet an hour later, aware of my responsibility to keep the herd together, but they were all still bedded down.  Sam said, "They ain't going nowhere."  We had become good friends by then, and I felt proud to be pardnering with a man like Sam.

Sam said, "Well, we got several options.  We can cook a goat and spend the night here, or one of us can walk on into Three Rivers and bring food back, or we can just wait awhile.  My wife may find us before long if she ain't stuck somewhere.  What do you think we should do?"  My hunger was overcome by the joy that Sam was including me in the decision making.  I felt like I had gained his confidence.

We didn't have to make the decision because we heard a truck engine coming up the arroyo bed.  He cupped his hands behind his ears intently for a moment and said, "Yeah, that's my truck."  We were waving our hats as Sam's wife came up over the rise.  She pulled up and said, "The roads were washed out yesterday.  I been lookin' for you all day."  After we had eaten everything on the truck, Sam said, "Let's spend the night here.  Let's get the herd up and graze 'em awhile, so they won't be restless tonight."

The next night we spent near Three Rivers.  We herded the goats back into a box arroyo and I unrolled my bed in the mouth of the divide so I would wake up if they started to leave.  Sure enough, I woke with them walking out over me.  I looked to the east and it was beginning to be light, so I knew I could have enough light to gather them in about thirty minutes.  The following night we bedded them down in a big, dry dirt tank and took turns watching.  We could skylight them as they went over the tank dump.  The next evening we reached our destination at Sam's ranch, which was south of Carrizozo, right next to the lava flow.  I sure slept good knowing the goats were all corralled.

When we counted them out in the morning, and we had only lost five head, I was very relieved because I knew it could have been much worse.  After the count, Sam said, "Would you do me a big favor?"  I said, "Sure, anything!"  And he said, "I've got to go to Roswell and hire another herder to help this one I've got.  I'd like you to help my herder till I get back and I'll get you home in a couple of weeks before school starts."   So I said, "OK. I'll write and tell my folks if you'll mail the letter tomorrow in Carrizozo."  (There were no phones or electricity in the ranch country at that time).  So I wrote:
              Dear Mom and Dad,
              We finished the drive.  Be home in two weeks.  I'm working for Sam awhile.  We
              only lost five head.
              Clif

I got a whole new experience herding on the lava rocks.  There was lots of good brush for browsing.  But again, we couldn't ride horseback because it was too rocky.  So when I finally got home, I had completely worn out my shoes.
Sam came back and brought me a new pocket knife for a present.  It was a Barlow with good metal, the first expensive knife I had ever owned.

When we got home and Sam paid my dad for the goats, he shook my hand and said, "Enjoyed working with you, Kid, and I'll see you again."  He still called me Kid when I was fifty years old.  He would come to my barber shop and say, "Hi, Kid, how about let's cook a goat?"  Sam is long since gone, but I think about him often and I miss him.  I'm eighty-five years old now, and I'll probably be seeing him again before too long.  He will probably ride over from the side of the arena and say, "Hi, Kid, how about let's cook a goat."