I have an autobiography of Ida Louise Stanley in digital format. There is a lot of great stuff in this document that was edited and put together by Edna and Robert Wall, two of her grandchildren.
This document talks about Ida Louise Stanley, Charles Anderson Stanley (father), Sophia Jane Journeaux(mother), Jane Hooey(grandmother), Philippe Journeaux (uncle), Andrew C. Steinagel (husband and step-brother), Susanah E. Harrison (step-mother, mother-in-law), Lulu Jane Steinagel (her daughter) and her other children: Eugene, Edna, Susie, Charles, Harry, Bessie and Herman.
I decided to go ahead and post the whole file. It's super long (33 pages in word) so here goes.
Autobiography of Ida Louise Stanley Steinagel
5 Jan. 1866 to 25 Apr. 1963
This autobiography was dictated when Grandma and Aunt Susie stayed with Bonnie and I at the time of the birth of our first son, Terry. She stayed with us for about two weeks, and every night after work, I would get her talking, and type her remarks in my hunt and peck method. After she left our home, she went to stay with Edna and Ed Cassady. Edna continued from where I left off, and completed this work. Edna then compiled all the rough notes, and put them into a semi-finished form. I have brought it to it’s present state. Although it isn’t perfect, I felt an urgency to distribute this work among the remaining posterity as a tribute to this remarkable woman. This was started in 1955, and Gram would have been about 89 years old. Her body was a little feeble, but her mind was as sharp as a tack. She could remember the names, dates, and many details from the time of her youth. All of the facts that I have been able to verify have been righton, although there are many that I have yet to prove. As you will find when you read this, Gram had a very rough life, but she never said a bad thing about anybody. Her last surviving son has passed away, and there is no longer any chance of adding to this work by soliciting their aid. I hope that if any of the surviving grandchildren feel like adding personal experiences from their own memories, this can be incorporated at a later date.
While Gram was staying with us, we put her and Aunt Susie into the car and went searching for the “Long House” where Gram stayed after the fire burned their house in the Newcastle area. We were able to find the building, and the grandson of the people who had lived there at the time was visiting. He remembered much about what had happened, and he took us to the family cemetery, and the unmarked grave where Gram’s mother was buried. Since then, Bonnie and I have tried several times to find the building again, but have had no luck.
During the month of September 1994, Bonnie and I visited some of the places mentioned in Nevada. Palisades is a ghost town with little signs of the community that was once there. Bullionville is just a sign posted along side the road, and a small cemetery. Pananca, the small Mormon community, is still there and hopefully maintaining. The little community of Pioche is still the county seat of Lincoln, County Nevada, and has many remanents of the early mining days. All the details about this area such as distances, the small locomotive, the stamp mills, and other details were just as Gram had remembered. I hope to be able to visit some of the areas in Northern California in the future, and walk some more of the paths she trod.
This is dedicated to a very remarkable woman, who I am proud to claim as one of my progenitors. I only hope that I can live worthy of her legacy.
Robert L. Wall
Grandson
I, Ida Louise Stanley (Ms. Andrew Christian Steinagel) was born in San Francisco. California on January 5, 1866 near Woodward’s Gardens. I was the next to the oldest of five children. The first child was Eva Jane who died and was buried in Rome, New York or August 9, 1864 at the age of eight months. She was born December 8, 1863 in Ottowa, Canada. My father was named Charles Anderson Standley, and my mother’s name was Sophia Jane Journeaux.
I was christened Ida Louisa but used Ida Louise after going to school. Next came Maud Jane, born February 1, 1868 in Alameda County, California: George Charles born January 29, 1870 in Gilroy, Santa Clara County, California; Arthur Washington born May 18,1872 in Eureka, Eureka County, California.
I have no memories of San Francisco except for a few things that my father told me.
One day when I was an infant my mother could not waken me after my nap. When the doctor examined me, he said that I was stupefied with alcohol. My father, who never drank, said this could not be, but the smell of it was in the room. My bed was near the chimney; in the chimney they found a crack from which strong fumes were coming. We were renting the apartment, so my father went to the landlord and complained. The landlord, a wealthy San Francisco attorney, said that he would have it repaired, but he was obviously frightened. On closer scrutiny it was discovered that he had a still in the basement. He offered my father a sum of money if he would not report it to the authorities. My father irately refused the bribe and threatened arrest, but they finally compromised by having the landlord fix the chimney. We moved soon afterwards.
Somewhat later, before Maud was born, we moved to Alameda County. This was necessitated because my father had inflammatory rheumatism in the knees. This was caused by his work. While in San Francisco he was employed as an engineer running the locomotive to pull the train from the sand dunes to fill in the area where the Civic Center of San Francisco is now located. His illness was caused by his having to sit so steadily and the jarring of the engine as well as the dampness of the San Francisco climate.
Since my father’s illness did not improve by our move to Alameda County, he was advised by his doctor to move to a warmer climate. As a result, we moved to Gilroy, Santa Clara Co. There my father went to work as an engineer for a Mr. Hanna, who owned a planing mill. At the time I was just a little over two years old, and Maud was a tiny baby.
After my father had worked in Gilroy for some time, he decided to procure some land north of Gilroy in what was then called Canada Los Osios. (This means “Lost Canyon”.) He decided to become a farmer. He raised some hogs and let them run loose and eat acorns. I had a little pig that I used to scratch when the pigs were called up to eat. She would lie down on me.
There were many tarantulas there at the time. One day mother picked up Maud, who was eight months old, and a tarantula fell out of her diaper. Mother was greatly frightened, but no harm was done. My father warned me that if I saw one to call him to kill it, because it might jump. One day he heard me screaming in wild terror. He rushed to see what was the matter. I was standing quite a distance from a tarantula, my eyes glued upon it. My father said that it was the largest tarantula that he had ever seen. He captured it and put it in a bottle. Needless to say, I was unhurt.
My mother was a city girl unused to the country. One day she discovered a wasp nest hole in the ground and saw a wasp coming out of it. She heated a kettle of hot water to scald the wasps out and poured it down the hole and stood watching what would happen. Suddenly the wasps started to swarm out of the hole towards her. She ran away from the house to protect Maud and me who were in the house asleep. My father, working nearby, saw the wasps after her and started over to help her fight them, but he had to run with her. She had long hair below the waist which fell down as she ran. Wasps got into her long hair and into my father’s very curly hair as they ran. Without thinking, they ran past the cow who was staked nearby. The wasps attacked her too. She broke loose and ran. All three eventually outran the wasps. They finally found the cow where she was quietly eating. Needless to say, mother never again used that method of ridding herself of wasps.
There are three kinds of wildlife there. Once my father killed a deer and hung it in the front of the house which was a little cabin with a lean-to kitchen with a fireplace in it. The deer hanging in a tree in the front of the house attracted the coyotes who began to “raise billy ned”. My father grabbed a gun and went out the door after them. My mother, thinking that coyotes were like wolves, was afraid that the coyotes would attack my father. She grabbed a firebrand and lit it at the fire. All at once everything flamed up. And when my father turned around there was my mother standing in the doorway in her night clothes. He was frightened, because he did not know if she or the house was on fire. The fire, added to my father’s shooting, scared the coyotes away.
On another occasion my father saw a deer running for its life. He was going to shoot the deer when he thought he would find out what was chasing it. Hot of the deer’s tail was a California mountain lion. All at once the deer gave a tremendous jump and the lion sprang over a cliff and was killed.
I do not know how long we lived up there. My mother said that she was really frightened when we first moved up there. One of the nearest neighbors was a Mexican family, of which my mother was rather nervous. One of the men came one day to borrow some flour. My mother could not speak Spanish, and the Mexican could not understand English. Finally, when they were both at wits end, my mother thought that what he was saying sounded like “bread” in French, and his face lit up. After that they got to be very good friends.
One day my father took the horse and wagon to Gilroy for supplies. This was an overnight trip. He came back the next day with very few supplies. When my surprised mother asked him what was the matter, he informed her that we were going to move back to Gilroy. He had met his former employer, Mr. Hanna. Mr. Hanna’s engineer had quit, and my father had agreed to return to work for him. My mother wept at leaving the farm, but we moved back to Gilroy.
My father worked for the mill for several years, and during that time they build a new house, and my brother, George was born. One day, Father took the three of us out to the field to pick flowers. I happened to look back just in time to see the doctor come to the house. When we returned from the walk, we had a little brother.
While we lived in Gilroy, I had Scarlet fever and almost died. My father put a swing in the back yard. One day I put Maud, who was 2 years old, in the swing. She had a small slick in her hand. I decided to give her an extra push. The swing went crooked so that it banged the stick into the corner of Maud’s eye. It must have been Sunday, because Father was home. He took the stick out of her eye. Although it looked bad for a while it got alright.
I do not know if Mr. Hanna retired or sold the mill, but my father went to work for the Central Pacific railroad in Winnemucca Nevada. (The railroad is now the Southern Pacific Railroad.) My father was foreman of the roundhouse. I was about 5 years old at the time. I used to love to go to visit my father at the roundhouse.
After a short time, we moved to Carlin, Nevada. Several British Mining firms were opening mines there, and they must have requested my father from the railroad shops to help set up the mine machinery.
As near as I remember, when I was about 6 ½ years old, we moved to Eureka, Nevada, because there were silver mines there. My father worked as chief engineer for the Richmond Consolidated Company and the Ruby Consolidated Smelting Company. He was employed to install machinery for the smelters. These companies were owned by a wealthy English company. After he had installed the machinery, he worked as a day engineer for both companies.
While he was working at the Richmond Co., the larger of the two mines, Mr. Pilkington, a junior engineer was killed by fumes at a time when his family was enroute from England to join him. My father had to break the sad news to his family.
A young engineer, Fred Luke, was superintendent of the “Ruby” when my father worked there. He was the nephew of one of the owners. One noontime my father had stopped the machinery to oil it. Mr. Luke stopped a minute to watch him. He said, “Mr. Stanley, why do you stop the machinery to oil it?” Mr. Luke said that he did not want the machinery stopped for oiling while he was there. Father said, “I will not oil the machinery while it is in motion for my own safety and that of others.” Mr. Luke said, “You may do as you wish in other mills, but you keep them going here.” Father put down his tools and said, “All right, Mr. Luke, I will quit right now,” again warning him to be careful, because no experienced engineer would try it. Father came home after quitting and said that he was sick at the thought that the young fellow was going to try to oil it while the machinery was in motion. About 2:00am father was called out of bed by a knocking at the door. He was informed that Mr. Luke had been oiling the machinery while the machine was running. He had been caught in it and killed. Father returned to work there for a while longer.
I first went to school in Eureka. This was a two-room schoolhouse with all small children. There was the principal, Mr. Keyes, and one teacher, Mrs. Brown. We all enjoyed school.
We lived in Eureka about one year, I think, since I remember it snowing just once. When we first arrived, there were very few houses, so we lived in a log cabin with what I believe they called a “puncheon floor.” This consisted of logs’ chunks sunk in the dirt as close together as they could fit. It was a large cabin. Our family had one room with a fire-place and a stove. One end of the remainder of the room had a little flooring. This we used as a bedroom. This section was divided from the remainder of the house by a blanket hung across it. This building was divided somewhat like a duplex with the other portion somewhat smaller, both having separate doors to the outside. The chimney was used for both places. The other part was occupied by our landlord, who was some sort of official connected with the St. Louis World’s Fair. He was helping to plan it then even though it was not held until a number of years later.
Soon after we arrived in Eureka, probably in the spring, there was a smallpox epidemic. It was thought that the smallpox was caught from a letter received from New York from a family that had smallpox at the time.
At the time my little brother, George, had an upset stomach. He was used to cow’s milk, and since there were no cows in Eureka at that time, we were forced to feed him Borden’s Eagle Brand Milk. Because they feared that George had smallpox, the city physician and an assistant came one day to take him to the “pest house”. The pest house was situated about two miles away and up the hill from town. Only adults with small pox, and male nurses, who had survived smallpox, were there. No children were there. My father refused absolutely to let them take George. He explained that he had vaccinated George himself by taking a scab from a healthy baby who had had smallpox. My brother had shown no sign of smallpox, but the vaccination had taken. George was no longer sick, but the men were determined to take him. “Over my dead body,” my father said. The men left, threatening to come back, but they never did.
My father had vaccinated all of us in the same manner. None of us ever had smallpox.
Finally one of the workmen bought a cow, and agreed to let my father have a small tin-cup full of milk each day.
My mother was in bed after Arthur’s birth, and she could not get a nurse anywhere, because they were afraid that we had smallpox, but a neighbor woman came in and cared for the baby until mother was able to take care of him herself.
We moved from the log cabin to a house of three or four rooms. This was a new building of rough lumber with the rafters visible. It resembled a big barn. While we lived there, we had a pet squirrel that used to steal Mother’s cooking.
Later my father had a house built just a short distance from the largest smelter there. This was built right against the hill. We had a cellar as everyone else did. We walked from the house right into the root cellar. One day a man was driving some oxen across the hill when one of them made a break and came through the roof of the cellar.
My father bought a new kind of roofing from a man just to be up-to-date. During the rains that came we needed pans all over the house to catch the water. My father told the man off and the man offered to replace the roof with the same material as before, but my dad refused and had it replaced with a more durable kind of roofing.
We paid $8.00 per box for apples there.
The land in front was leveled off to make a yard. While we lived there my father bought a small-sized donkey for me. I named her Jenny. She was gentle, and all the children in the neighborhood would ride her. When she was tired, she would lie down and not get up until I would unbridle her and lead her back to the barn.
On the left of the house was a ravine and a hill. Opposite there was a wide trail down which the packhorses were returned from their winter’s rest. One day Arthur, who was not yet old enough to walk, was sitting on the flat place in front of the house, and the donkey, who loved him, was standing by him with her head down, seemingly asleep. Suddenly we heard the bells of the leading horse of a pack train coming down the trail. There were quite a number of horses being led by the man in front on horseback, and a man quite a distance back was driving them. Suddenly, two or three of the pack horses, without warning, broke away and started across the ravine toward our house. Their line of direction led right over where my brother was sitting. We, including mother, were just a short distance away but not close enough to rescue Arthur. We were terrified, thinking that Arthur would be killed. Jenny awakened and suddenly jumped right over my brother with her front feet and stood over him with her mouth open and her ears turned back, defying them to come. The horses turned sharply, almost grazing Jenny, and then went on down the hill without harming the baby. Jenny held that position until the whole herd had passed; then she stepped back, one foot at a time, put her head down to him, and he laughed and put his hands up and patted her nose.
Eureka, Nevada, was situated in a narrow valley with a street running along each side and low sage brush and deep dust in-between. One day jenny was playing with us. A couple all dressed up, came walking down the road. Jenny, who had been asleep, suddenly awakened, ran across the road toward the coupe. They started to run away from her, but she just stopped in from of them and brayed, and walked slowly back to us. This is the way she always treated people who were dressed up with big hats and parasols.
On Sunday mornings when we would sleep late, she would stand by the side of my parents’ bedroom and bang with her tail stub until Father would get up. She was so small that my father could straddle her and still have both feet on the ground.
One day I saw a baby mouse drowning in a rain barrel, so I rescued it and made a little house for it and tied a string on it. It stuck it’s head out once when an old setting hen was near. She swallowed the mouse. The string was still sticking out of her mouth, and mother caught us trying to pull the mouse out of her stomach and almost choking her to death in the process.
I also had a pet chicken that followed me around until it swallowed a wasp which stung it and killed it.
Looking back, there are so many memories of Eureka, it seems that we must have been there longer than a year, but in checking age, it could have been only that long.
I remember several holidays. On the Fourth of July we had a big parade, and the celebration lasted all day. A little before this time two young men started a dairy in the hills. On this holiday they donated milk for ice cream for everyone. It was a wonderful treat.
At Christmas time we had a Christmas tree in our living room for the entire neighborhood. My father bored a hole in the floor and inserted a piece of pipe and rigged up a rotating tree. It could be turned with a child pulling a limb. All gifts were put on the tree. Maud and I each received a beautiful doll. One cost about $20 and the other $15. Among the gifts one woman received a “musical album” from her husband. It was would by a key. Father put it in the center of the tree, and while it played, they turned the tree around.
The dairymen furnished the eggnog, but Father would not let them put liquor in the bowl. He told them to bring it for their own eggnog if they wished, but not for the center bowl.
Mr. & Mrs. Horn, and elderly couple who lived near us, came to our Christmas party. Among the gifts were some “fun” gifts. Mrs. Horn gave her husband what looked like a very large English walnut. When he opened it, it was made like a small cradle and had a tiny dressed doll in it. I had never seen one like it before.
That night, after the refreshments had been served and the children were supposed to be in bed, the adults decided to try our “sliding place”, which went down past the cellar. The snow was not too deep except in the mountains, but we had made it slick as glass and had piled soft snow on each side. Some of the adults took spills. My father took one man’s wife and he a stout man took my mother who was small. They tumbled into the snow. There were about six of us children. We all were good sledders. We sneaked out of the house and watched the fun and then sneaked back before they saw us.
Charlie, a young man of about 19 years, carried the mail. He used skis in the winter time to deliver to out-of-the-way places. When we would see him coming, he would whistle and then ski down the hill several times for us. He was an expert skier.
One of the dairymen used to stop in at our house rather frequently. He was unmarried and came from a large family in the East. On Valentine’s Day he mailed Maud and me our first valentines. We were proud of them!
For summer fun we enjoyed playing in the sand that was deposited by a little creak that ran on the “flat” near our house on the hill. It was fairly heavy in winter, but virtually dry in the summer.
At the end of the valley there was a large level place and the Indians used to hold a Fandango there twice a year. These would last for one week. People from miles around came to them. They had many kinds of colorful dances. Everyone danced, including small children.
The Indians who frequented the town used to pass along the road in front of our house. Our little puppy barked at the Indians, and they tired to be friendly to him. A couple of days after that, he disappeared. A few weeks later some Indians were in town, and we recognized our little dog on a leash held by a small Indian boy. We called him and he started to come to us, but the boy pulled him back. My father said to let him keep the dog and not to have trouble with them.
Through the summer time there used to be whirlwinds which were apt to happen at any time. The wind would gather dust and whirl down the valley. Whirlwind usually followed the roads and went up or down the valley.
The high slant-sided ore wagons would come down the roads loaded with ore dust. Everything was covered with this dust. These wagons were drawn by teams of 6 or 8 horses. All of the transportation was provided by horses, mules, or oxen. There was no railroad in Eureka.
Dust was ankle deep in the roads, which ran on each side of the valley. The ore was hauled in from the opposite side of the valley from where we lived. The smelters were right in town.
Father always told us that if we were ever outside when a whirlwind came to lie flat on our stomachs and grab some sagebrush to hold us on the ground. There were notrees in Eureka except in the hills.
One time we took lunch to Dad at the Richmond Consolidated smelter. We were all dressed up in clean, light-colored dresses. We ate with Father, and were on our way home. Ahead we could see a whirlwind coming. I cannot say how large it was, but it was as wide as a large road and as high as a house. It carried large stiks and whatever it could pick up. We were not in the path of the center of the whirlwind, but we plopped down in the dust and grabbed hold of a sagebrush plant. It lifted our dresses and almost lifted us up even though we were on the fringe of the wind.
My father and a friend decided to build a summer house to consist of a wood frame with windows and doors and a heavy canvas cover. The two families went down one Sunday to see it after it was completed. It was quite a large structure. A few days later a whirlwind came along and just picked the canvas house up in the air and crashed it down.
One weekend my father was going up to where he had a piece of timberland. There was a cabin on it, and an old man named Charlie lived there as caretaker. Father had decided to go up and see how Charlie was getting along and to take a few supplies to him. He hired a horse, because there was only a trail and no regular wagon route. He was on a part of the trail where the mountain juts out like a shelving rock right over anyone passing underneath. Suddenly he heard a “ping”, and something hit the road in front of him. It happened again a little closer. Suddenly a shot went through the crown and the brim of his hat. He decided he was being shot at. He saw two Indian heads sticking up over the rock. He turned the horse and went under the “beetling cliff” for protection. The Indians continued to shoot at anything they desired. They were drunk. They also shot at another man but missed him also.
There was a law against selling liquor to the Indians. When this was reported, the men were located who sold the liquor to them, and they were fined. The Indians were usually turned over to the Chief who chastised them in his own way.
These were probably Piute Indians. They were generally friendly, but the Sious War was going on, and since the Indians greatly outnumbered the white people, the white people did not want to start anything.
On the way home from school, which was on a hill, we could look right down into a blacksmith shop. One afternoon, when coming home from school, we heard a terrible racket and we recognized it as an ox bellowing from the direction of the blacksmith shop, and for the first time we witnessed the shoeing of an ox. This differed from the shoeing of a horse. They had a piece of canvas across the midsection and eh was suspended to the ceiling with was not too high. The two men were standing on the ground, shoeing him from underneath. The ox was very frightened. An ox had a split hoof so requires a differently shaped shoe.
At the foot of the hill, just down from our house. There was a place where the oxen used to drink. On one occasion, after the spring thaw, an ox strayed out from somewhere in the middle of the night and managed to get stuck in the mudhole. In trying to extricate his front two feet, he had managed to get his back two feet submerged as well. The more he struggled, the further down he went. He had made no noise, but we children discovered him in the morning. He remained there all day and all night. We children pulled green grass and fed it to him. It was a freezing cold night, and the ox’s legs and feet froze up to the knees in the water and the mud. The next day the men, who had not previously succeeded in lifting him out, took a team of oxen and pulled him out bodily. When they got him out, he could not stand; he was helpless. They finally decided that he would have to be shot. They did it after we had gone to school.
Mr. & Mrs. Horm were the only ones in the valley who owned chickens, and it was from them that we purchased eggs. She took care of the chickens, and he worked in the smelter. As a child, I used to enjoy visiting them, because she often took me into the little chicken house where even the snow on the ground seemed warm. Mrs. Horn had a small heating stove that burned wood or coal; it was covered with wire so that the little chickens could not get burned, but it kept the entire place warm.
Mrs. Donahue, our nearest neighbor, had a small baby whom I adored. She had named her Ida after me. The baby died when she was only a few weeks old. She was buried in a private spot, and my father officiated since the minister was not always there. I was terribly upset about it since I adored her so.
There was a young boy about 10 years old who had been truant from school. He had no parents but had a guardian. One noon hour just after we had finished our meal, the boy and the guardian appeared. He told the teachers to have all the children go to the woodshed. When we arrived, he pulled out a rope’s end and beat the boy unmercifully with it.
One day my father came home from work and said, “Well, Jane, I guess we will be leaving soon, because the Richmond Consolidated mine is flooded.” An underground river had broken through into the Richmond mine. The shift had just left, and before the next shift came to work, the mine was flooded. The Ruby was not big enough to support itself, and so it closed too.
We next moved to Bullionville, Nevada which was about a mile from a Mormon community called Panacha. This was my very first contact with the Mormon church.
This move probably occurred early in the spring after I was 7 years old. My father believed Eureka would soon be a dying town, so he went to Bullionville where there was mining being done with stamp mills instead of smelters. In Bullionville, there were 30 stamp mills, 15 stamp, 10 stamp, 5 stamp. 30, 15 & 10 stamp worked steadily and there was a steady roar, but on the 5 stamp there was a regular chug! Chug! There was also a machine shop connected with the 30 stamp mill, which was the largest. There was also a locomotive and 21 miles of track that ran to Pioche.
Although it was only 12 miles to Pioche by team, it was 21 miles by railroad.
Father was hired as master mechanic of the shop. He was also the engineer of the locomotive which hauled a train of dump cars hauling the silver bricks or bullion as they were called. There was also a turntable for engine locomotives.
My mother and the four of us children (me, Maud, George, and Arthur) followed Father to Bullionville. We traveled by “fast freight”. The slow freight would have been by oxen. We hired wagons that had a team of 6 or 8 mules driven by 2 professional drivers. The mule teams were changed every time we came to a station. We had two wagons, one for furniture, the other for us. We slept in the wagon but got our meals at stage stations.
The man who had the wagon in front of us was a groceryman who was taking groceries for his store in Pioche. He was very nice to us and helped my mother.
As children, we enjoyed the trip to Bullionville, because we had a chance at every stop to get out and run around and pick the wild flowers still blooming in the fields. At one station where we stopped unusually early, and & I went exploring and found a stream with water that was quite deep but narrow. We decided to jump over it, which we were doing, when she came over to get us. She asked a man nearby how far it was to White River as she would like to take a walk to it. He looked at her, then at Maud and me and said, “There it is.” He pointed to the stream we were jumping over. The station was White River Station. That was funny, but the next event was not.
The last station we stopped at was less than a day’s journey from Pioche, and we were to stay all night there. This was to give the men and mules a good rest. It was only a cluster of empty houses except for the Station buildings. There was one house still ocuupied, but that family was moving out the next day.
We arrived in the evening and were eating supper in the station Rest, when the male cook set a cup of hot tea at my mother’s place. Before anyone could stop him, Arthur, who was sitting on my mother’s lap, reached out and caught the edge of the cup and tipped it over and down his arm. He had a brown woolen dress on, and my mother, knowing that it would hold the heat, pulled it off of his arm as quickly as she could, but it had already burned so badly that part of the skim came with the cloth. Someone suggested that a plaster of olive oil and flour would relieve the pain, and someone found a bottle of oil but no flour. The people who were packed to move, opened a sack of theirs and gave us some of the flour. It game some relief, but Arthur continued to cry with pain.
The poor cook blamed himself for the accident, and he felt terrible about it. It was really a harrowing time for us. Everyone was kind and wanted to help, but could do no more than they were doing.
Finally, Maud, George, and I got to bed in the wagon. They were tired and soon fell asleep, but I could not sleep, as I could hear my mother walking back and forth outside the wagon. I do not know if I slept or not, but about midnight my mother came into the wagon, but I doubt that she or I slept at all.
One of the drivers came and told her that because of Arthur’s condition they would start for Pioche at 2:00 am in stead of later, which they did. They made as fast time as they could.
We arrived in Pioche about noon, and met my father there. He did not know of Arthur’s burn, but did know of our time of arrival. He immediately got a doctor for Arthur. We were there for about one week, as Arthur almost from the burn. He was in a semi-conscious state for much of this time. At the end of the week ha had a convulsion, and we thought that he was dying, but this proved to be a turning point in his illness. At the end of the week, the doctor said that he was well enough to be moved, so we took the train to Bullionville.
I think that we rode in the engine with my father while he drove the train. This was easier riding for Arthur than the train would have been.
Our house was ready and waiting for us when we arrived in Bullionville. My father had bought it and had installed the furnishings in it. It was a three-roomed house. There was a large room for two beds. My parents slept in the living room, and we had a large kitchen. This was a large house for that time. It was freshly papered.
Bullionville was quite level on one side, and quite hilly on the other. In the hills there was timber but on the level there was sand and sagebrush. I remember one small tree just outside our house.
There was a small settlement of people who worked in the mills, particularly the 30 stamp mill. This was about a half mile from Bullionville, and had a schoolhouse on one knoll right by our house. Just opposite the schoolhouse was another knoll where the machine shop was. The turntable was by the machine shop on the knoll. The road where everything was hauled was built up on an embankment just as the railroads are built. This was to keep the snow and water off the road, but it meant that water ran down into our yard. Our homes and all our buildings were down on the flat.
In Bullionville, my father had charge of the machine shop for the stamping mills. He also ran a little engine which ran the 21 miles to Pioche. Two or three times a week, he would take a load of bullion to Pioche. They had their own machine shop and turntable for the little train.
We used to get almost all of our fresh produce from Panaca, which was peopled by Mormons. Sometimes we used to walk to Panaca.
On the flat a little ways from our house was a very small lumber yard that as a playground for us. Life was not particularly eventful here.
Either because of the scarcity of building materials or the snowy winters, some of the homes were built somewhat under the hill. One would step down about three steps to enter them, and only the front portion was out of the hill.
Our Sunday School teacher was a young man heavily bearded with whiskers on his cheeks and chin. We liked him very well. He lived really underground, with only a front window and a door visible at the front. Once a month a minister came from Pioche and meetings were held in the school house.
Our school teacher was a young man who appeared out of the brush in the morning and disappeared into it at night. He was a bachelor living with some friend who had a cabin in the brush.
All of the help that any of the women had came from Indian squaws. They squaws did house work. Some of the old Indian men helped by cutting wood and other manual labor. An unusual thing about these elderly Indians was that one of them would occasionally have a short beard. The women were paid 50 cents a day for 5-7 hours of work, and they were given their noon meal. Her relatives would also show up for the meal. My mother would put the food out in a big pan life a large milk pan, and they would all eat out of the same pan.
The first time that she gave them butter on their bread, my sister and I were watching them. They rubbed the butter off with their hands and onto their hair or directly onto their hair.
They were very fond of molasses. A friend made some sorgum molasses and brought us a large jugful as a present, but none of us liked it. My mother had the bright idea to see if the Indians would like it; she gave them a panful with their bread, and they eventually ate the entire jugful.
One day my mother thought that she would give the squaw that helped us a sunbonnet. This was all ironed and ready to wear. The squaw had just finished preparing the floor for mopping. My mother came in to find her using the sunbonnet as a mop. My mother told her it was for her head, so she washed the dirt out and wore it home, flopping and wet.
The squaw used to bring her two children with her when she worked. One was a child of four and the other was a baby she carried papoose style. She would hang the baby on a tree while she worked. We had a playhouse under the tree, and the baby enjoyed watching us. He seldom laughed or cried. When the sun got too hot for the baby, she would come and change it and hang it one a big nail against the house in the shade. At noon she would release it and nurse it, and let it kick and stretch its legs. At other times when she nursed it, she would not always unlace its bundle.
We children, who noticed everything, noticed that a boy and a girl who were courting were always painted the same. She would paint herself, and the next day he would be the same as she had been the day before. She changed her paint everyday. An old squaw, whom we questioned about this, said that when she finally left her paint the same as his, it would indicate her acceptance of him. (The Piute Indians used paint in peace as well as war time.)
The young braves would come into town with very beautiful bouquets of wild flowers that they had picked. They always took them into the saloons and hotels in the town where they received 25 cents for a bunch. These bouquets were made in a peculiar fashion. They would start with one rare, long-stemmed flower in the center, and arrange the others around and out with smaller stemmed flowers on the outside. We tried hard to duplicate these but would never find the rare center flower.
One day I found a buckskin purse, beautifully beaded of many colored beads. This was about 3 inches long by 2 inches wide and ½ in thick. It had a flap opening and in it were several kinds of powder made from pulverized rock. Someone told me that this was an Indian girl’s cosmetic purse.
When the Indians passed our house, they would stand at the door and the windows, with their faces cupped in their hands, peering in at us. They would do this for about 5 or 10 minutes. This was apparently just curiousity, because they never begged. We would not pay any attention to them. If we were eating, we would just go on doing so. They always passed by in the daytime except for one time.
One evening we were eating supper after dark. E had not drawn the curtains, and suddenly our window was darkened by peeing faces. They stayed their usual 10 minutes and went on through town. This was such unusual behavior that the entire town became alert to possible Indian trouble, and posted guards about town. When they investigated, they found that it was an Indian family who were belatedly returning to their village.
Indian women usually dressed just as white women did. White women sewed for the Indian women. The Indian men usually wore buckskin pants trousers and wore blankets across their shoulders.
One day my mother and I were in the kitchen when a young Indian brave, dressed in a white shirt and trousers like a white man, walked through the open kitchen door, pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, and ordered food. This was unusual, but my mother thought that if she humored him, he would go away. My mother had a large bread knife which she used to cut him some bread, and she also gave him a large helping of food. After he finished this, he asked for more food. When this was refused him, he asked for money. My mother said that she had none, but he persisted, saying, “White woman got money”, in a belligerent tone, and started toward my mother. My mother first thought of grabbing the red pepper can, and then the knife caught her glance. It was known as a broad-bladed cheese knife, about 15 inches long with a wide blade. She grabbed this and started for him, with it raised above her head, saying, “Get out or I’ll kill you,” in as grave a voice as she could muster. He took one look and ran out the door like a shot from a gun and was last seen hurrying up the hill. He never reappeared. When it was all over, she sat down and laughed hysterically. My mother’s bravery was especially notable since she was very small; she could stand under my father’s arm, and he was only 5’10” tall.
The 30 stamp mill had a bathroom with two doors leading into it, one from inside the mill and one from the outside. It was very clean with a window on each side with curtains on it. It had a built-in wooden bathtub, zinc-lined and hot and cold water on tap. One Saturday afternoon, the door to the mill was locked and the outside door was left open for the use of the families of the men who worked in the mill.
In the summertime, Mrs. Lawson, our nearest neighbor, and my mother would take us children and we all had a bath in the tub. The remainder of the time the tub was for the use of the men who worked there.
In the winter when the snow was deep, my father cleared a path with a shovel up the hill to the school house. All the children who went to the school used this path to get there.
In the winter we were in Bullionville there was a very heavy rain. It did not last long, but it flooded our yard. My mother went out into the yard for something and stepped on a nail. She was quite ill, but a man told us to take the rankest, saltiest bacon we could find and bind it to her foot. This cured her within a few days.
After some of the neighbors moved away, there were just the Lawsons and us living as close neighbors. They had three girls and a baby who later died. There were no large trees for a swing, so Mr. Lawson obtained the wood and my father the iron, and we had a lovely swing. We children watched a romance develop as a result of this swing. There was a young girl who used to visit from town. There was also a young Portuguese boy who worked in the mine, who used to come and swing us at noon. He used to swing her, and they would talk. They later married.
Mrs. Lawson made the wedding dress for the girl. It was dove-colored with a dove figure woven into it. She was about 15 years old and an orphan, and he was in his 20’s. They were very nice to us seven children who well-chaperones them, but they did not seem to mind.
The Lawson’s moved into town at Bullionville when the mills shut down. She worked as a dressmaker. We were about ½ mile from town.
We used to go down to the 30 stamp mill to meet my father. About two or three times a week he would go to Pioche with a load of bullion. We would try to time his return, and we would walk up the railroad to the stamp mill and meet him and ride home on the engine with him back to the engine house from the stamp mill.
There was a gully where a little engine had run down into the sand, and we used to play in it. I was the engineer, because I knew more about driving than the others.
When the 30 stamp mill closed, my father was laid off. Almost everyone left the area around the mill. We were the last ones there. The mill started working on the tailings. This was the pile of earth remaining after the silver was extracted. They went over this to find any silver that had been missed the first time, and would make it worthwhile to work the tailings. There was no slag in this, because the smelting process had not been used. The dust from the tailings made a number of people ill, especially children. We were among those who were ill. This consisted of a form of dysentery. The doctor advised us to move to Panaca.
My father was making plans to go to California alone. He went to Pioche and bought out a milliner who was selling out her variety store. He bought out everything at a “cheap price”. There were hats, needles, pins, thread, combs, and three wigs of false curls. There were also small prize boxes that had a thimble, needles, and thread, and a cheap prize in them. These had sold for 50 cents. My mother was a milliner, so she remodeled the fats, and Dad and I went to Panaca where he sold them. She also sold the wigs and made some hats for us.
My father bought an Indian pony and some saddle bags. He loaded these with the prize boxes and supplies for him trip to California. He used the boxes for trade for his needs instead of money. There were many small Mormon settlements, and the boxes were of more use to them than money would have been.
He set out one morning headed for Bishop’s creek to a friend’s home. From there he went on to Colusa, California. He skirted Death Valley and on his journey he met two men wandering in the desert. He gave them all the water he could spare and told them he would send help as soon as he got to the next oasis. The, instead, tried to take his horse and leave him there. The horse was well-trained and eluded the men. As soon as he got to the oasis, he sent some help back for the men.
After he had left, my mother sold our house for $40 and moved to Panaca. She had no trouble selling most of our other belongings because those things were in short supply there in Bullionville. She sold two feather beds for $40, which was the same price as the house.
The man who bought the house was a superintendent of a small mine not far from where we lived. He said, “Mrs. Stanley, you cheated me, because if I have waited a few days, you would have left your place vacant and I would have had it free.”
My mother had a little concertina for which she had paid $5.00 and she took that plus a few mementos and our clothes and other essential belongings, only that which we could carry on a stage. We boarded with a lady in Panaca, which was 1 mile away from Bullionville. We recovered from our illness in the clear mountain air. She and her husband were childless. We enjoyed living there because she had melons and vegetables. There were lots of children in the area to play with as well.
My father was sending money regularly, but my mother supplemented her income by washing the mine superintendent’s white shirts. He paid well for this service. My mother was trying to save as much as she could for our trip to California.
Since Panaca was so small, the people there did all of their own trading, etc., in Bullionville. I went every week to the post-office there to get letters and take the washing to the mine superintendent and to bring the soiled clothing back. He always had a fruit for us—large grapes from California or apples or something to take home. I was always my mother’s errand “boy”. Whenever we would move to a new town, my father would take me to town and show me where all the shops were.
There was one family whose only child, a boy, had died of consumption, and they had adopted a little Indian boy; his name was Beavini. Heused to call me Butterfly. He would not sleep in the house in the summer time, but slept on top of the woodshed under a tree. He used to go for two or three days at a time to visit his tribe and then return. Some of the people called him “Whacker” which he disliked.
There was a large irrigation ditch which ran from Panacha to Bullionville and then veered off. This was full of blood-suckers, a flesh colored worm that lives in water. People used to use them to eliminate the discoloration from black and blue spots. One day when Maud, George and I were taking a walk, George insisted on sticking his foot in the water up to his knee. When he pulled it out, there were three or four of the worms on his leg. They would only fall off when they were full of blood or if salt were put on them. We took him somewhere and someone got them off of George.
We stayed in Panaca until late summer when my father sent for us to come to California. A neighbor took us to Pioche and we took a stage from Pioche to Palisade at the end of the railroad. On our way we stopped at way stations and ate.
At one of the way stations between Eureka and Bullionville we picked up three boys, aged 8, 12, and 14 years. They had a small harp, a violin, and a guitar. They played beautifully. They were orphans and paid their way with their music. Part of the way they sat up on top of the stage and played for us. They planned to go to Palisade, as were we, but when we arrived at Eureka at night, the boys disappeared.
At Eureka we had to buy tickets for another stage. My mother tried to get tickets for the back seats. These were the best seats but two men had already bought them; so mother bought front seats. While we were waiting, two nuns came in and were angry not to get either front or back seats. The two men offered to exchange seats with my mother, which they eventually did. We boarded the stage at 6:00 p.m., George on my lap, maude between us, and Arthur on Mother’s lap. The two nuns, both of whom were obese, occupied the central swing seat, which swung back and forth with the motion of the stage. All night they bumped against us. We finally arrived at Lodi, Nevada at 4:00 a.m. which was the end of the railroad line.
There was a small, new unpainted hotel there where we obtained rooms to rest, at last. At 8:00 a.m. or so, we had breakfast. We found that at 10:00 there was a little freight car with a bench on one side and open doors on the other that we could ride to Palisade. We children thought this was wonderful.
We stayed in Palisade for a couple of days while mother went shopping for clothes we needed for travel. We stayed in a hotel and went next door to a small restaurant to eat. When we went there for our first noon meal, who should be waiting outside but the three orphan boys, playing for their meal. They got it, too, because the owner invited them in.
We caught the train from Palisade to Sacramento, California. Sometime in the night, while coming through the mountains, the conductor told mother to keep everything closed. First, we came through a burning area; when it became night, we could see the flames. We went right through the fire with flames on each side.
Father met us on the train in Roseville. He then rode with us to Sacramento.
We stayed there about a week and then went to Knight’s Landing by train. We then boarded a steamboat by elevator from the train. We traveled overnight, arriving at Colusa at about daybreak. Father had bought out an insurance agency in Colusa. We all went to a boarding house where my father had been boarding and stayed several days before we moved into our house.
The year we arrived the river flooded. The town was on higher ground, and was not flooded, but the lower parts were under water. The fire bell was constantly ringing to call the men to work on the levee.
My father started to buy a piece of ground. It was excellent soil, but the mosquitos were awful. Most of the people had a touch of the fever. There was a small house on the property, and we intended to live there. I do not know if the fellow who owned the other piece adjoining got the chills or what, but he sold the rest of the land to father, and we moved into the bigger house on the new piece of property.
The next year we all took the chills, and the doctor told my father to get my mother out of that place. My father just picked up and rented a couple of horses and a wagon. We had a cow, six chickens, and away we went.
We took a trip through Marysville, just camping on the way. I think that it took us five days to get to Newcastle, arriving in the afternoon.
My father took up and abandoned claim. Other residents were planting fruit orchards. My father put in a family orchard of fruit trees, currents, and raspberries.
Soon after we arrived at Newcastle, two men came to the house. They were on foot, but they were not tramps. One was named Mr. Cole, the other Henry Miller. Mr. Cole owned a farm in Kansas; he was about 60 years old and a widower, but he had children. His daughter was about 14 years old, and she used to write to him. He had just decided to take a trip to California.
Along the way he became acquainted with Henry Miller, and they decided to take a walking tour together. Neither of them smoked or drank. They arrived early in the fall, and were looking for a place to stay for the winter. My father liked their appearance. He was cutting stove wood from his property and selling it; he offered them that employment in exchange for staying with us, and a certain amount of pay as the wood was sold. They accepted and stayed with us until shortly after my mother’s death.
The “Auburn Ravice” ran across a part of our place. Some of the water that the miners used in placer mining also ran down through the ravine. My father often panned from 50 cents to $2 or $3 in a day. He taught us how to pan for gold also, and I as a young girl even panned up to 25 to 50 cents in gold at a time.
Mr. Cole was anxious to see gold since he had never seen any gold mining. My father showed him how to pan, and he not only panned “color” (which are flakes of gold), but he also panned out a tiny gold nugget about the size of a small pea and in the shape of half a pear. He was so pleased! He offered it to my father, but my father refused, so he wrapped it in tissue paper to take home to his children. He was so proud of it that he showed it to everyone who came to the house.
Henry Miller was about 25 or 26 years of age. He was very husky in build, nice-looking, and with a pleasant personality. We liked both of these men.
Mr. Cole was very spry for his age. He used to do a succession of backward somersaults without letting go of his feet; then he would do the same thing in forward somersaults back to his starting place.
My father was planning to spade a garden, so he purchased a shovel. Mr. Cole jokingly said, “I may use this shovel before you do.”
At Christmas time my father made a ginger bread cake as a surprise. My mother made a coconut cake, which she kept secret. On Christmas morning he brought out his cake, and my mother surprised us with hers. That was our Christmas. They had explained to us that there was no money for gifts, so we had not hung up our stockings, but my father did make stilts for all of us.
As the year 1877 started, my mother was in poor health. We had a number of helpful neighbors. On New Years Day, the Threkills came to see her, bringing a chocolate cake and a box of strawberries. The box size was about twice the size of those we use now. They were there first crop, and they had really hunted to find them.
Mrs. Julian, another neighbor, used to come over and do stitching for my mother. The two dresses she had made were the only thing my sister and I had to wear when our house later burned.
Joe and Frank Gildersleeve were our schoolmates. Joe was 13 years old and six feet tall. Frank, aged 15 years, was even taller. Joe liked to go hunting, and every time theat he went hunting, he brought all or part of his “bag” of quail. This happened at least once a week. It was through my mother’s direction in cleaning the quail that I learned to also clean chickens.
Their mother, Mrs. Gildersleeve, had a baby boy, but she would come up and offer to clean, as well. My mother wanted to show her appreciation. I had a dress of beautiful pale blue Merino, a fine type of dress material made from Merino sheep. My mother used the remnant from my dress and some swansdown to make a bonnet for the baby.
My mother washed the swansdown which is the skin of the swan with the down on it, and the skin tanned. My mother washed it as one would fine wool and held it over the stove and shook it until it was fluffy. She made a cute little hat trimmed with the down and with ear flaps of the down. My mother, who had been a milliner, was a beautiful seamstress. Mrs. Gildersleeve almost wept when she saw the beautiful hat, saying that she had never seen anything so beautiful.
The neighbors were really wonderful to us, considering that we were really newcomers.
As mother grew sicker, the doctor performed two operations to remove a growth in her uterus. This was done right at home with very little anaesthetic. On these two occasions, I took the children up into the hills away from the house, but I could still hear my mother’s screams. She was not a hysterical woman, either.
Later, the doctor, who was the best we could find in that area, called two other doctors in for a consultation. They walked out of the room to the side of the house to talk. I overheard enough of their conversation to realize that my mother would live but a short time longer.
I said nothing, but made straight to an out-cropping of rocks that was overgrown by a live-oak cropping. This was a sort of private room that I used when I wanted to be alone. I just broke down and cried. My father said that in after years he had followed me; when he heard me crying and praying, he did not make his presence known, but went away. He said that he just felt that if there were a just God, he could not help but hear that prayer. Later, my sister, Maud, found me, and when I told her, she joined me in crying.
My mother died on February 23, 1877, one month after my eleventh birthday, and about five months after we had moved to Newcastle.
My father had been up with my mother day and night. The night before she died, our neighbor, Maggie Greeley was at the house, and she said, “Wouldn’t you like to have me take the children home with me?” She took all of the children except me.
My father awaked me toward morning and told me that she was dying. When I went into the room, my mother was sitting up, propped against my father, who was kneeling by the bed. He was holding her so that she could breathe. She was conscious to the end. Her brother, Phil, had been notified of her illness, and he was there also. Phil asked her something about herself in French and she shook her head and then she was gone.
My Uncle, Philip Journeaux, was an interesting man. He was born in 1850 and died in 1941. He was living in San Francisco at the time of my mother’s death. He was a brilliant man who learned many languages. He also played many musical instruments. When he was 12 years old, he played in the city band which was made up mostly of adults. He left home at age of 16 years and went to New York, where he almost starved. He also served as a merchant seaman, having sailed around the world at least seven time.
In the morning, after my mother death, Maggie Greeley was putting a black ribbon in Maud’s hair. She said, “What’s the matter? Is my mother dead?”
The neighbors came in and dressed my mother and laid her out in a white embroidered nightgown, which they furnished. They also put a sprig of small white flowers in her folded hands. She was buried in a private cemetery that belonged to the Threlkel family; Mr. Cole and Henry Miller dug her grave with the shovel my father had bought for the garden.
Uncle Phil was at the funeral, but my father was not. He had a complete physical and emotional break-down at the time of my mother’s death. After the funeral when we came home, I was almost afraid to go into the house, because I thought my father might be dead too. He was still in bed and the doctor was still there but he had quieted him with a sedative. I, of course, had thought him to be much sicker than he was.
The next day I was sweeping the kitchen, and I thought of something I wanted to ask my mother, and I was clear across the threshold of her room before I suddenly realized she was gone. It was a desolate feeling.
Mr. Cole and Mr. Miller stayed on for a while, as did Uncle Phil. When the time came for them to leave, my father started to pay Mr. Cole. He said that he did not need any money, and he pulled a roll of “green backs” out of his pocket. This was the name for Eastern money, as it was called. I do not know if Henry Miller was paid or not, but at any rate, neither took much other than their board or room.
I did not know of the following incident, but my father told it to my daughter Edna, a number of years later. Mr. Cole told my father that he had had a dream about coming to California shortly before he had left his home in Kansas. In the dream he had seen our house, and he had been looking for it when he met my father. When he saw our house he recognized it as the house of his dream. He had met Henry miller along the way, and they had come together. As he was departing, he said that he now understood why he had had that dream. They left, taking my father’s heartfelt thanks. They left many cords of wood ready to be sold for money. Mr. Cole had been a comforting influence on my father.
Until haying time, my father occupied himself by clearing the brush and planting the garden. Sometimes we would go up the creek and wash gold. Two of our neighbors told my father that at a place just on the edge of our land a pocket of free gold had been found in the creek, which had been panned out. This was just north of the Auburn Ravine and was worth $3000. Though they prospected all around the area, they could find nothing more, net even “color”.
When father would have to work, Arthur would go to school with us. He was 5 on May 18th after my mother died. Father told the teacher he would not have to be taught anything. He sometimes napped at his desk. It was two miles walk to school, but we took a shortcut.
School usually ended in May except for one time, when it ended in April because it ran out of funds. This was a one-room school house with a front and back door, and a stove for heat. We had an exchange library in one corner of the school room, where books that one had used could be exchanged for other books, some of them new. These required an additional fee. There was also an organ in the center of the room. We used to march into the room and out of it to organ music. We had McGuffey readers up to five. On Friday we would have special music taught by a teacher who came once a month. On another Friday, we had spelling Bees for the older children. There were about 30 children and one teacher. The first teacher was a Miss Kelly and later, Miss Mattie Cole. The key to the school house was kept under the steps. And one of the boys would start the fire in the morning. The older girls swept the floor, and the boys brought the water from the spring. It was set in a bucket on the bench, and we all drank from one dipper.
Sometimes during haying season, my father would be away for a week or more at a time, sometimes as much as ten miles from home. During that time we children took care of the house and ourselves without any help, since everyone was busy with her own home and family. Father could have earned more money, as much as $5 per day, if he had gone to Sacramento Valley to work, but he could not leave us alone that long, and he could not afford to pay anyone the $30 that it would have cost per month to care for us.
Dad also cut wood during the summer, and piled it in various parts of the yard. During this time one of the worst forest fires in years occurred in the nearby mountains. Father was out fighting the fires, but had left us at the house. We were very nervous, as we could hear the fire crackling. There was no water with which to fight the fire, so the men used backfire and beat the fire out with green saplings. On three sides of our house we were protected by the road and plowed ground. On the fourth side we were completely unprotected, because there was short, dry grass growing right up to the house. We children went to the spring house and got as much water as we could to wet this side of the house. We decided that this might not help, so we decided to cut the grass away from the house as much as possible. I grabbed a spade, one of the children grabbed the shovel, and another the hoe, and Arthur grabbed his little shovel. There was an old pine, which if it were to catch fire, would set everything on fire, so we struck our path on the safe side of it. It was round, because the land was full of gravel and very hard, but we started to dig as fast as we could. The fire broke through and was following right along our path. We looked up and saw my father running toward us. He grabbed my spade and rushed along, cutting the path we had started. We had got about two-thirds of the way to the fence, and he dug the path to there. Our house was saved; we lost only some of the wood. We were 11, 9, 7, and 5 years old at that time.
There were many fires that season. One young farmer had just completed a new home. It was burned, but he managed to save his cow and chickens. He also saved his pigs by turning them loose. He rounded them up after the fire.
My father built a corral on the flat. The house as on a hill, the flat below. Very often, people coming along with their sheep would leave them overnight, and give my father a sheep for payment. One man had a large flock of sheep that he asked my father to care for for a few days. He said that he was in debt and having trouble. Eddie King, the King’s adopted son, and several neighbor boys watched them and watered them. He asked them to herd them during the day and corral them at night. Several got away. They rounded up those that they could, but the man had to leave for Auburn without finding the remainder. He gave my father a couple of sheep, saying that the strays might return if he had those. This did happen until my father had 20 sheep. We had no way of butchering them, but my father and three of us took the twenty sheep and sold them to a neighbor for $1 a head.
Coming home, we took a shortcut. There was a fairly wide irrigation ditch, so my father decided to throw us across. He did so with George and then me, but I slipped in the mud and went clear under water. George was also wet around the leg. Maud was carried over, because she was afraid. I hid behind a bush until my clothes were a little dry before going on.
We had just started again when we suddenly realized that there was a fire started and coming straight toward us. We children were afraid that our home was burned, but my father said that the fire had just started, so we were able to get around it. He was curious as to the cause of the fire. It had started in a “V” shape from one point. Someone had thrown a liquor bottle which had broken against a rock. This was a bottle with a great indentation which formed a perfect burning glass which had started the fire.
Mr. Homer, the nearest rancher to the fire, had a father-in-law who smoked a pipe. The fire caused quite a lot fo damage, and someone started a rumor that he must have started the fire with his pipe, by carelessly emptying it along the road. My father happened to be in Newcastle where the rumor was spreading. My father told them of his findings, and they were amazed with curiosity. My father told them that there had been no one on the road that day who could have emptied a pipe.
Albert, who had been left with the Gildersleeves, was happy to see us return, as he thought we were lost.
I did the sewing. I took an old dress that had fitted me well and took it a part and cut a dress from it. It also sewed clothes for the others. We had a very fine Florence silver-mounted sewing machine for which my father had paid $100 when he was an insurance man in Colusa. I did quite a lot of sewing during the summer.
As I previously mentioned, while father was haying, we stayed along and kept house, and he came home on Saturdays. He used to get up at 2:00am and walk 10 miles to join the others to go to work. On one occasion he left Maud with a friend’s wife who had had a baby. That left me alone with the two boys. I was surely lonely.
The summer wore on in this fashion. We went back to school; then it was nearing Christmas time. We had made no preparations for Christmas, as people in the country did little. Besides, we considered we were grownup.
The weather was cold, and the ground was frozen. It was evening, and we had picked up some white beans, and father was cooking the beans and pork for the next day. Our stove had a door on the front for loading it with wood. Father had warned us that if we were to be away we should put a pan under the door of the stove in case any coals were to fall off the door if it were to fall open. Every night that was my last act before going to bed. I never remember that the door ever fell open.
I had gone to bed after sitting up later than the others, as I was sewing a nightgown for Arthur. I had not finished the buttons on it, but had put it on him anyway. I left father cooking the beans. I must have been asleep when something roused me. I opened my eyes and saw my father jump up and try to grab his coat. I thought he was just going to bed, but he shut the door on the room which was all ablaze. He ran over to me and said, “Get up. The house is on fire! Grab some bed clothes! It’s cold out there.” I jumped out of bed and roused the children. He grabbed Arthur and all of the bedding he could carry, and we started out. We went down to the plowed ground, because we thought the grass on the hill leading down from the house might burn. He wrapped Arthur and George in the blankets. They were crying.
My father ran back and soon appeared with a little trunk. I had in it Mauds and my Sunday dresses and four special pairs of socks he had bought for us from San Francisco. He as well as all of us was barefooted. He ran back again on the frozen ground. He grabbed the sewing machine cover and emptied the mementoes from a little drawer. He was working in the dark. The fire had not come through the walls, as they were double, but the fire had gone under the floor. Maud and I thought he was going to be caught in the fire. We were screaming, “Papa! Papa!” Then I started to run after him with Maud right behindme. He thought I had just awakened and was going to run into the fire, but as it happened, we ran just in time, because his foot had a large blister on it where the fire had come up under the floor. He jumped down from the house and said, “Come on! Don’t run into the fire!” and he came with us.
All we saved were what we had on, what was in the trunk and sewing machine case, and some loose bedding. The house was insured.
Our cat, Tommy, used to sleep under the floor where it was warm. He was bewildered by the fire. When the fire died down, we carried the bedding back where it was warm. Father and I put the three children between us. Neither he nor I slept, but the others did. The fire happened about 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. Father had forgotten to put the pan under the stove. Most of our belongings were in the small store room adjoining the kitchen, because we all slept in the bedroom which was crowded. That morning was the first time in my life that I ever remember witnessing the daybreak.
My father took the sheets and pillow cases and ripped them to make rags to wrap around our feet on which we had already put the socks. Maude and I put on our good red dresses over our nightgowns. Father tore a blanket to put over the boys nightgowns and he wrapped one around himself.
We walked a mile over the hard frozen ground to George W. Threlkel’s house. When we passed the Indian Reservation on our way, all of the Indians came to stare at us. Mr. Threlkel was about 80 years old and a Mormon. We thought little of it at the time, but there was a picture of Brigham Young hanging on the wall. Mr. Threlkel threw open the door and greeted us in a very hearty manner, saying, “Come in, man, out of the cold.” They ransacked the attic to find clothes for us to wear.
As soon as my father could, he contacted the insurance company and he had everyone he could to sew for us. He had made for us black “water-proof” coats lined with red flannel. These had detachable capes and hoods that hung down over the cape when not on our heads. Several of Mrs. Threlkel’s daughters, as well as nearly everyone in the neighborhood sewed for us.
The Threlkel’s owned the “Long-Valley House” which was on their ranch. They had built this as a hotel; it was actually the second building, since the first had burned. The children always said that they were half-raised in a barn, waiting for it to be rebuilt.
As soon as Father received the money from the insurance he bought clothes for the boys. He then took us all to the Protestant half-orphan home in Sacramento. He planned to leave all of us, but they did not take girls over the age of ten years unless they boarded them out. He finally arranged for us girls to board and room at Threlkel’s and left the two boys at the home. It was really quite a nice place with a school and doctor, etc. We were heartbroken over this separation, but father left them there for two years while he built a house.
My father went to work for Towle Brothers, a lumber company at Alta, Placer County. This is just above Dutch Flat. Father was running the locomotive which carried the logs to the sawmill from the woods. He worked there for about three years. During the winters, he stayed in Auburn. Alta was the nearest town to the mill, but it was not much of a town, so most of the people lived in Dutch Flat.
There was a lady living at the mill whose husband was hurt; they had three young children. She told my father that she wished that she had someone to help her with the children. He sent for me, and I went up to the mill where I stayed for about a month. Wee spent part of the summer in Blue Canyon.
My Father met an old engineer who operated a fire locomotive that ran from Blue Canyon to Emigrant Gap. There, it was met by another engine from Cisco. Sometimes we would ride along with them. I was staying with a woman who had delivered milk to us as a young girl in Carlin, Nevada.
I was while I was at Blue Canyon that I talked over the first hundred miles of telephone to be constructed in California. It was the private phone of the Central Pacific and was in the railroad office. It ran from Blue Canyon to Cisco. One talked into it and tehn held it to his ear to listen. I stayed at Blue Canyon until it was time for school to start, then I returned to Newcastle where I stayed with the Threlkels. I was still 12 years old.
George Threlkel came to live with his mother and father. He was a widower; his wife and mother-in-law having been killed by a run-away horse. His 6 year old daughter, Katie, stayed with his parents, and the baby, George was taken care of by a friend of his wife. Her name was Mattie Nixon. She and George later married.
The older Threlkels decided to go to Byron Springs for the summer, so George managed their ranch with the help of his brother, Jim. I was 13 years old that summer. I stayed there and worked for George and mattie. Mattie’s mother was lonesome after mattie and her other daughter had left her home, so she asked to have Maud stay with her for the summer. They lived about 10 miles away.
The fall that I was at Blue Canyon my father started to build a new house. He had the lumber shipped in and spent his spare time in building the house. He finished it before I as 14 years old; it took about two years.
That winter before the house was finished my father’s mother came out from West Chazy, New York. Her name was Jane Heney (Hooey) Stanley Cardwell. When my father was only two weeks old, his father was killed by Indians in New York. His mother had remarried and her second husband was dead. She stayed in Auburn at the hotel. We walked the four miles from Newcastle to visit her. We stayed with her for two days and nights. She later stayed with our nearest neighbor, a doctor, until the house was finished.
When the house was completed, our family was reunited. The boys returned from Sacramento, Maud from Nixons and I from Threlkels. My grandmother kept house for us.
Maud and I helped my father plant raspberries in our yard. In the fall of 1879 we moved into the new house. Soon after, my father returned to Alta to work for the Towle Brothers, leaving grandmother and us alone to keep the house.
In February he wrote to me that he had to go to Sacramento on business and that he would try to stop in to see us on his way, so we were expecting him. When the time came for his arrival, we became worried because he failed to appear. Our neighbor, the doctor, sent a little boy who had been in the Protestant home with my brothers, to get me. His wife said that she wanted to tell me something about my father. I feared that he was hurt. When I asked the little boy, he said that all he knew was that the doctor’s wife was crying. When I arrived, she told me that my father had remarried. It hurt me, beucase my father had not confided in me. I was actually so relieved to know that he was not hurt of dead, however, that I put my head on the table and cried.
It was my duty to go home and break the news to his mother. I wondered how I could tell her. I did not know her too well, since I had lived with her only that summer. She looked shocked when I told her, but she concealed it well.
My father married the widow of Andrew Christian Steinagel, and they were married in the spring of 1880. She was a nurse, and she owned a home in Dutch Flat. My father had met her at some social affair.
In a couple of days my father returned with his wife, and in a week her youngest son, Chris, aged 15 years, came down to Newcastle too. The house was a story and a half high, so there was plenty of sleeping room.
When I learned of my father’s marriage and that she had a son, I took my brothers and sisters aside and told them that they must behave and treat the “little boy” kindly, because he did not have a father. Actually, Christ was older than I. The children were used to following me, so we did not have too much trouble.
My father continued to work at Alta, so he was away all week, but returned home on Friday and would go back to work on Monday morning. He would arise at 2:00 a.m. and walk the 3 miles to the Alta switch that drove up the incline. He would arrive at work at 6:00 a.m.
Everything seemed to be going along smoothly until one day I walked into a room to hear my father and his mother quarrelling. Apparently, it was started by something he had said, because my step-mother was trying to smooth it over. My father and grandmother were both of a like nature, very stubborn and would not give in. My grandmother had always seemed contained, but apparently she resented the way he had remarried without telling us. Anyway, she suddenly put her hands to her breast, saying, “You might as well kill me, Charles’, and whirled and went into the bedroom. My father had shown a hardness I had never seen. Grandmother had always been kind to us.
Soon after, my step-mother went back up to Dutch Flat to care for a woman who was
expecting a baby. She had bargained for this before their marriage.
Grandmother Cardwell stayed and took care of us and Chris. My father had built a little cabin on the property. He hired a Chinese man to take care of the yard. My father had planted trees and plants, etc, because he planned to live there. The Chinese man did not know what to call my grandmother, so he called her “Glandamuda”, which she resented, but she gradually became resigned to it.
We got along nicely while my father and step-mother were gone, but grandmother Cardwell had decided to leave. Her sister was urging her to return home to West Chazy, Clinton Co., New York (near a lake). My grandmother moved to the doctor’s home, and we all went to Dutch Flat since my father expected to be working there quite a while. Alta is 3 miles from Dutch Flat. The Chinese man was going to take care of the house.
Grandmother’s sister was named Elizabeth (Hooey) Anderson. She wrote frequently to grandmother, saying that she was very ill, and that if grandmother did not hurry her return, she would be dead, so she decided to return.
Grandmother stayed until the raspberries had been picked. She canned them and shipped them up to us at Dutch flat. The house in Dutch Flat was very near the railroad track. One day some of the children came running in and said, “Grandma just went by on the train. She looked out and waved.
Not too long after her return, her sister died, and she went to lived with her brother, William Heney in Redford, New York. She lived there until she died at age 83 years. My grandmother and father never exchanged letters after she left, but I wrote to her after I was married.
In Dutch Flat we lived in the home owned by my step-mother. We lived there through the winter, living typical child lives and going to school. This was the second graded school I had ever attended, the first one being in Colusa. For fun we used to have singing parties, and we made up plays.
My father worked at Alta until late part of 1880. I have never known the exact reason he left Towle Brothers except that he wanted to go into business by himself. Why he picked Red Bluff I do not know, but he did, and my step-mother went with him.
My step-brother, Chris, went up into the Sierra Nevadas with a young man who owned some sheep, and wanted him to work with him. He took them up to the mountains in the late spring, so he was away when our family included my step-mother’s grandson, Neddie Steinagel, the son of her oldest boy. His parents were separated, and his father had custody. He was 4 or 5 years of age.
My step-mother’s oldest daughter, Mary Holmes, lived about a half-mile towards Gold Run, just away from us.
Mrs. Kinney, our nearest neighbor, lived just a ways from us, about the width of two streets. Her son, a very fine piano player, was in school with us.
My parents had been in Red Bluff only a short time when my youngest brother, not yet 9 years old, was taken suddenly ill. We telegraphed my father to come home. He arrived the next day. Arthur was at Mrs. Kinney’s home when he became ill. He loved to visit with her and with Aunt Mary. He also loved my step-mother very much. Arthur had had a cough ever since he had had whooping cough when he was in the home in Sacramento. This was just prior to our move to our new home in Newcastle. He had complained of feeling tired. Our neighbor was “homeopathic”, and she gave Arthur a big dose of patent medicine that she had. He was in her home all day, and when he became ill, she put him to bed, where he stayed all night. He was so ill that we thought he was dying.
When we called the doctor, he diagnosed it as congestion of the chest. Arthur lay in a coma, unconscious all night. Maud and I stayed with him. Maud fell asleep, but I stayed awake, forcing his clenched teeth open to give him the medicine the doctor had prescribed. Mrs. Kinney had made doughnuts for us to eat while we sat with Arthur, and she went to bed. I did not eat any of the doughnuts, I was too upset.
Arthur was a little better when my father arrived in the morning. As soon as he arrived, he took Arthur home. He seemed better through the day. One night he slept on the couch, and I sat up part of the night with him, because my father had had no rest. The next night he slept with my father, and he was talking to him. He fell asleep during the night, and my father carried him out to the couch where it was warm.
As we sat down to breakfast, we could see into the room where he was. I do not know if Arthur made any kind of noise or just what happened, but my father jumped up from the table and went in. In a very short time he was back, and he said, “Children, come in quickly if you want to see your brother alive.” We all went in, and within a few minutes, he died.
My step-mother had come home a few days before Arthur died.
I helped my father to wash and dress Arthur. I did not cry at all. He would have been 9 on the 18th of May, and he died shortly before this. They put cherry blossoms in his hands. They did not decorate with flowers in those days as they do now.
My step-mother did not come to Arthur’s funeral. She had a heart condition, and it almost killed her, because she loved Arthur. I had been sort of a mother to Arthur after my mother died, and I was happy when he had turned to my step-mother and to Aunt Mary for affection; a little of the responsibility had been taken from me. Mary Holmes gave her little boy, Fred’s white shirt to Arthur for the funeral. A lady who had inflammatory rheumatism, with whom I had stayed, loaned me a black veil, hat and gloves etc., and the neighbors made black dresses for us. All of the neighbors were very kind. Arthur was buried in the Dutch Flat Cemetery near the statue of Abraham Lincoln that was there at that time. At the head grew a cedar or fir tree.
My father stayed and helped us pack, because they had decided to move to Red Bluff to live. My step-mother’s house had many valuable books and was several acres in size. There was a ‘living’ spring for wonderful water. This ran summer and winter. Pump logs had been laid so that it ran into the house. The house was on a low hill among the many other hills, and there was a nice orchard.
When Chris was about 12 years old, his father went to the Black Hills looking for gold, as did many others. This was in 1877. He never returned. He had owned the property, but had failed to prove up on it before he left. She decided to sell the property, and one of the neighbors, Mr. Hudson was interested. She hesitated to sell it to him. He checked on the property, and finding it was not clear, told her he would buy it rather than going through the law to clear it, at which time anyone could claim it from her. They sold it to him at a ridiculously low price, and they sold all of the heavy furniture, only packing the light things to take to Red Bluff.
Mr. Hudson had a great deal of land. When the Chinese of Chinatown decided to move out, he leased some of it to them for 99 years. The Chinese Six Companies handled the move, etc. Anyway, they moved Chinatown onto that property, and they had a wonderful income from it.
Mrs. Kinney was a kind of a “busy-body”. She reminded me of an old-maid school teacher, tall, slim, and prim, very precise in speech. Actually, she was married and had children. Since Chris had returned home sometime before Arthur’s death and our parents were away, it meant we children were all alone in the house. Mrs. Kinney said that this did not look good. She had a spare room and offered it to us girls. We stayed there a few nights, but she repeatedly said things that made us feel that we were a burden, so we told her we would return home to sleep. She dashed over to Aunt Mary’s house to tell her before I could tell her what had happened. Mary did not give her much satisfaction, but she came right up to the house. Aunt Mary said that she did not blame us, and that she would not go back to Mrs. Kinney’s either. We were still friendly with Mrs. Kinney, or so I thought, but I wondered when she treated Arthur with her homeopathic medicine and he became ill.
She was in the habit of dropping in on us at odd hours; for example, she arrived one time as we were sitting down to eat a meal of roast mutton, vegetables, and a cake I had made. She told Mary that we were very extravagant with our father’s money. I was insulted, as I had kept house for years and had always been depended upon to manage the money for the household.
She came over to help us pack to go to Red Bluff. My father was a good packer, and she insisted on helping him. She packed the dishes, many of which were broken when we arrived. She came every day, and while she packed, she kept making little remarks about my step-mother, whom she pretended was a good friend.
We were virtually packed when Mrs. Kinney got my father aside and warned him to watch me, implying that I was pregnant and that Chris was the father. Actually, we were so young and busy with other things that we had never thought of such things. We were just brother and sister at that time. When Aunt Mary heard it, she was terribly angry, but my father did not tell me until we had moved to Red Bluff. My step-mother came in and asked if I had any stained cloths from my previous menstrual period, and I finally produced one. She took it, her eyes snapping, and showed it to my father. He said that the day before, when we had taken a walk together, he had decided to tell me what Mrs. Kinney had said, but he had not been able to bring himself to do it. I had realized that something was bothering him, but never even suspected what it was. It surely hurt me that he would believe Mrs. Kinney.
Before we moved to Red Bluff, Alice Steinagel, Ed’s divorced wife came to visit. At the time of the divorce she kept the girl, Stella Claire, and Neddie, the boy, had gone with his father. She had given the little girl away. She was a beautiful woman; she stayed only a few days. Ed was away at the time, and she was afraid that he would return and find out that she had given the little girl away.
I was sitting at the table one day with Neddie standing beside me. His mother came up and spoke to him and asked him if he would like to go home with her. He leaned against me and said, “No. You gave my little sister away.” He buried his head in my shoulder. In spite of this she liked me. Neddie was a very truthful little boy. He just did not know how to tell a lie.
When Neddie was in his teens, he was working for a Senator in Sacramento. The Senator was a lawyer. Ned put an ad in the paper, and the couple who had the little girl saw it. The girl came upon them discussing it, and they told her the truth about her background. She contacted Neddie, and they were reunited while both were in their teens. She later married and went to Hawaii where her husband died, but I think that she remarried. Ned was an attorney in Stockton he lives in Escalon.
I first worked for a Mrs. Hibbard, the jeweler’s wife, until her baby was about a month old. She had had her mother staying with her, but her mother had to leave, so she hired me to be with her. Maud worked across the street.
On another occasion there was a girl, Mrs. Beecher, who had been ill with bilious remittent fever, and the family was worn out from sitting up with her, so I went to stay all night with her. The next day the doctor diagnosed it as typhoid fever; they asked if I would help them, so I stayed three weeks, doing their washing, lifting her while they changed her bed or she sat up or whatever she needed. My step-mother said that I would not have been allowed to go there had she known the girl had typhoid; I however never caught it.
I later worked for Mrs. Peters, who was a confinement case, and many other confinement cases. I also worked for Mrs. Bear, a woman who was paralyzed from the waist down. The county had been sending her help in her care. I was hired by them to work for the Bear family. They felt that I was quite young but hired me anyway. Mrs. Bear was a young woman with four small children. She was paralyzed after her fourth child was born, and she could not be cured. When she was first paralyzed, she had been able to do al her own work while in a wheel chair. As she became worse, she was bedridden. The children caught the measles, and I was really over-worked trying to do all of the work and care for them. Finally the county sent a regular nurse to care for them.
I lost contact with them at first when they moved, but I later went to visit her. She told me that she had lost her sight, hearing and speech, but all had been restored and she was very grateful for this.
I later went to work for Mrs. Hallam when I was about 17 years old. She lived across the street from us.
My father left his job at Merry’s Machine Shop and was doing odd jobs. There was no junk store except that owned by an old man in the country. We had a large yard, so my father got a horse and wagon and started to collect junk. He made contacts to sell what he collected. Chris was helping him. Most of the bottles he collected he sold to a San Francisco firm. They washed the patent medicine bottles and sold them to the drug stores. Aunt Em and her son, Frankie, were living with them. She took over the job of washing the bottles and sorting them. Father was very successful in this business.
My father had a chance to take over a grocery store. My step-mother managed the fruit stand; Chris managed the junkyard. The grocery store was called “The Junction Grocery Store”. It was like a suburb of Chico. There were living quarters in the rear for them.
While in the junk business my father became acquainted with Mr. O.D. Richmond. He was a man who had some money and was seemingly a successful business man. He was living in Marysville and had his warehouses there. He was a dealer in all types of oils-fuel oils, coal oil, etc. When I first met him, my father asked me what I thought of him. He was fine-looking and had a good “business front”. He went out of his way to be good to me. I said, “I guess he is all right.” I finally had to admit to my father that I did not like him, but I did not know why. I just had a feeling that he was not what he seemed to be. My father said, “Well, I have just gone into business with him.” I said, “Well, that is that, then.”
Chris spoke fluent Chinese, so they dealt in oils and rice with the Chinese; this Chris managed besides the junk shop. Mr. Richmond tried to get the whole family to work for him. He persuaded Chris to go down as manager of his warehouse in Marysville. Chris was then 18 years old. Chris did not like Mr. Richmond very well and Mr. Richmond tried to get me to persuade him to work for him. I refused to use any influence on him. Chris, although reluctant, went anyway.
My step-mother (I always caller her “grandma”) made over $400 on her fruits and vegetables in the summer they went into the store. My father decided that since he was going into the oil business as a partner with Mr. Richmond, he would sell the store when he had the chance and devote all of his time to the oil business. Mr. Richmond was to furnish the oils; my father was to sell them. They had a shed where horses were kept which they used one part of for storing oil. After father sold the grocery store, he continued with the junk and oil business. Mr. Richmond told him to send his loads of scrap iron to him and he would fill the cars before sending them on. It was cheaper to ship that way.
Chris had been in Chico only a short time, working for Mr. Richmond, when he returned home saying that Mr. Richmond was a crook. He used to take the fine grade oil remove some of it, replace it with cheaper oil and sell it at higher grade prices. (The more refined the oil, the less flammable.) When Mr. Richmond asked Chris to do it, he refused, quit and came home. My father did not quite know what to do when he found out about Mr. Richmond’s dishonesty but he sent a partial carload of scrap iron to Mr. Richmond. Mr. Richmond was to fill this and send it on. Instead, he took out the best grade of scrap iron and put in cheap materials. When y father received record of the shipment, it was short of the amount it should have been. We later learned that Mr. Richmond had been ten years in coming from Denver. He would set up businesses, barely staying within the law but selling out when his dishonesty would become known.
The barn with their horses and coal-oil caught fire; a corner of the fence and one side of the barn was burned. They got the horses out but Chris was kicked by a frightened horse (not seriously) while doing so. The insurance was in Mr. Richmond’s name so he collected it. My father did not receive any of it. After the insurance episode, my father broke off relations with Mr. Richmond. Mr. Richmond and his wife were separated; she lived in San Francisco. It was rumored that she had left him because of his crookedness.
About this time I went to work for Mrs. Hallam. Their family consisted of a son, Harry about 24 years old, who was a butcher; a married daughter (Mrs. White) and her two children, aged 8 and 6 years old. Mrs. White, her husband and a friend were in Redding for the summer but they returned for school in the winter. In addition to their house, they had another cottage that they rented. There was some land adjoining it so they decided to build a rooming house alongside the cottage. They joined the two with a porch and had a reception room and office in the front. They ate in the cottage and slept in the rooming house.
When they were constructing the rooming house, they measured the carpeting, which was in strips, and Mrs. Hallam and I sewed them together. She also made all of the pillow slips and sheets; I had the job of turning the hems. I surely got tired of carpeting and pillow slips.
My regular job was to do the cooking, take care of the dining room and do some of the housework. When they moved to the boarding house, she asked me to go and cook for them there.
While I was there, I developed a “felon” on my right index finger—infection in the bone. Someone told me to make a solution of oak ashes and water, to boil it, and when it cooled enough to put my finger in it and keep it as warm as I could. I almost baked my finger but the felon persisted. I finally had to quit work because of the felon. There was a woman doctor living across the street from the Hallams. Her widowed son, who was also a doctor and his daughter, Nina Cook lived with them. He later remarried and had four more children. The woman doctor treated my felon until it was recovered. As soon as I was able to work again, the doctor’s son-in-law asked me to work for him in his home. His wife had just given birth to their fifth child. The nurse who was helping them had hurt her wrist, so I replaced her. I stayed there a month. This was the last place that I worked before I was married.
While my parents were in Chico, Alice Steinagel, Neddie’s mother came back for a visit. She stayed in Chico all summer. She took the name of Stanley and called me her sister. She was a very beautiful woman. Mr. Richmond hired her as his secretary in Marysville, but she did not stay there very long. When she left to return to San Francisco, she tried her best to get me to go with her. She took her son back with her. I went to the station to see her off, and she tried again to get me to go. She said that she would telegraph my folks and let them know that I had gone, but I refused. Sometime later, after we had left Chico, she married a wealthy lawyer in Chico. This ended in divorce.
The junk business was not prospering too well. My father and step-mother had gone to Fall River Valley the previous summer. They talked of moving up there, so they sold the junk business and moved in June, 1844.
Prior to that, however, in March 1884, Chris Steinagel, my step-brother, and I were married. We had been engaged for about a year. In the late summer before we married he worked on the Sacramento River levee. This was built to keep lowlands from being flooded. It was 6 miles from Chico, which was on higher ground, so there was no danger of its flooding. While Chris worked there, he contracted Malaria, and he was not rid of it until the cool winter or late fall.
Chris always said that he loved me the first time that he saw me, but I did not feel that way about him. He was just one of the steadiest, nicest boys I knew, and more like a brother. It was just a case of propinquity, and Chris was very kind, polite, and good. Our association just ripened into love.
We planned to wait until Chris was 21 years old to get married, but when the folks planned to go to Fall River Valley (north of Mt. Shasta), they wanted us to go with them and take up land, so we were married ahead of time. My father had to sign the license as his guardian, in Oroville, Butte County, as he was not yet 21. I, being 18 years of age, was old enough.
Chris Steinagel was born December 4th 1864. He was one year, one month, and one day older than I. We had a quiet home wedding with just my father, step-mother, Aunt Em and Frank present. We were married by a Presbyterian minister. I weighted 119 lbs with a coat on when I was married.
During the time that my father had the junk yard, there would be men who would buy old clothes in exchange for good ones, taking the difference in money in order to buy alcohol. As a result, he had quite an accumulation of good suits. He suggested taking them along to Fall River, suggesting that, if nothing else, the family could wear them.
Maud and George had been working on a ranch during the summer, and they stayed on to work there during the winter. Maud always preferred country to city life.
Aunt Em, Chris’s sister, and her little boy, Frankie, went to Fall River with us. Since Aunt Em was divorced, she thought that she would be eligible to take up land too.
We stayed in Fall River for ten months. We did not take up any land, because there was no water on it. Instead, we worked in the mountains at a saw mill. Chris worked in the mill, and I cooked. When the season closed, we came back into the valley, and Chris worked on the county roads for a while. After he finished the road work, we went to work for Billy Stevenson on his farm. We stayed there all winter. We traded flour to the Indians for fish and dried plums. We had all of the meat that we wanted, and the vegetables were cached away for the winter. Chris carried a twenty dollar gold piece in his pocket all winter and never had to break it.
Father sold all of the suits he had saved from the junk yard to the Indians. We sold everything that we had for cash before we left Fall River. The people dug up paper money that they had had for years to pay for the things that they bought, and we received a good price for everything.
When we left Fall River in March, 185, it was so early in the season that everyone advised us not to start, because they feared we would be caught in the snow. We had no trouble, however, but in April there was so much rain that we thought it would never stop. We all came back and rented a house together. Maud and George were still working on the farm where they had been when we had left. When Mary, Em’s sister, heard that we had returned, she invited Em and Frankie to visit her. Mary’s husband was working in the mines in Washington, and she was lonesome. They went up to Dutch Flat and stayed with here through the summer.
The lot of the home that we rented backed up to Chico Creek. There was a lot of gravel in the creek, and they had to pay very little to the owner to be permitted to haul the gravel out. There was a good market for it, so my father and Chris used the team to haul it. They also did other odd jobs with the team. Later someone told them peanuts would sell well in the mountains. They took the horses and the wagon to Vina, a little ways from Chico, where Governor Stanford had a ranch. They bought raw peanuts there, had them roasted at a bakery in town, took them up to the mountains and sold them as fast as they could by the bucketful and did well financially. They continued to do this for a good part of the summer until another peddler found out about it, and started peddling too. Competition was too stiff, so they stopped it. They continued to do other odd jobs for a while.
After we had been in Chico a short time, a man asked me if I would take care of his sick wife and four children. I was in the early months of my pregnancy, but feeling all right, so I agreed. After she was well, in July, when she went to the cool mountains to stay with her folks, I went along. It was really pleasant and nice. They had many relatives who visited from time to time. I did the washing and everyone helped with the other work. There was one girl who visited, Millie Bruce, age 17 years, with whom I became good friends. She and I tramped the hills when we had any spare time. We returned to Chico in October.
Soon after my return, my father and step-mother took the horses and wagon and went up to visit Mary in Dutch Flat, so Chris and I kept house along. We had saved enough so that we were able to live alright.
George finished his haying, so he soon came home to stay with us. He later found work in a paint shop, continuing to live at home.
Aunt Em returned home for one summer, and took charge of an ice cream parlor. She had living quarters in the back. The owner peddled the ice cream in the neighborhood. Some gossip monger tried to start talk about their relationship. I had an argument with one of my neighbors who had started the gossip, as I knew that there was no basis for her suspicions. In the winter the owner managed the shop himself, so Em returned to Dutch Flat.
My step-mother came home on the train, and my father took a trip to Stockton. Things were slow in Chico after the haying season. Stockton was busy, as river steamers came in at the channel.
My first child was born on December 30, 1885 on a Wednesday, at 20 minutes to 4:00 am in Chico, Butte County, California. We named her Florence Edna Steinagel. My father was not there but came soon after her birth.
When Edna was one month old, Chris developed pneumonia, and he had a very bad cough, and so we decided to go to some place where there was warm air. We stacked all of our belongings in wagons and sent them to Stockton by wagon freight. We traveled by team, camping along the road, stopping when we wished.
It was a very leisurely trip, and Chris recovered greatly. He went to work immediately after our arrival in Stockton. He went to the paper mill where they were doing some brick work, and the bricklayers hired him at $2.00 per day for two weeks. He then went to work for the paper mill where he worked for several years. He worked at several different jobs there. He was finally put in charge of the women picking paper, and he kept that job until the mill moved to Oregon.
The superintendent like him very well and asked him to take the job of time keeper at $3.00 per day and move to Oregon with them. The superintendent only received $5.00 per day in pay. Chris did not want to leave the family then—Mary, Em and all of them had come to Stockton by then to live, so we did not go to Oregon.
We started to buy a lot and a two-room house in Stockton. Later, John Lethwaite, the superintendent of the mill, gave him a Christmas gift of all of the waste lumber, etc. that was piled on a vacant lot near the mill, if he would haul it away. This does not sound like much, but many people wanted it. There was enough lumber to build an enlargement on our house that just doubled what space we had had before. It was only rough lumber, unfinished, but it was surely nice to have more room.
During this time a company began to drill for oil near our place. They struck gas and also warm water came into the well. They stopped drilling without striking oil, apparently for want of money. When they started, a real estate man obtained an option on all of the lots adjoining our place. When the boring was stopped, he put the lots up for sale, so we bought another one. This gave us two pieces of land, 100 feet square, located on a corner of two streets. Right next to us my father had two lots, and my sister-in-law Em, who had remarried to a Charles Hikenbotham, also bought a lot on the opposite corner from ours. They were on one corner facing South Street, and we on another facing Clay street.
While we lived there we had three children born, two girls and a boy. Susie Elma was born on Friday April 21, 1888 at 1:30 pm. Lulu Jane was born on Monday, August 11, 1890 at 12:40 am. Charles Christian was born on Monday, March 10, 1893 at 6 am.
My father started a route, picking up waste paper from the stores. They paid him so much per month to haul it away, and he in turn sold it. There was a good market for the paper.
Chris and my father decided to go into the hog business. Chris would pay half of his earnings $1 per day, and my father would run the hog business. They rented the enclosed are which surrounded the gas well, as there was warm water pouring out of it all of the time. My father obtained the refuse from some of the larger restaurants in town. He bought bran from the mill which he mixed with the restaurant leftovers. This he fed to the hogs.
The folks bought a cow which supplied both families with all of the milk that we needed.
My father built all of the pigpens against the fence, raised several feel off of the ground. He built ramps for them to get to the ground. The pens that he used for the mother pigs and their little pigs were situated near the warm water where there was always green grass. Father explained that there would probably be a flood and he did not want his hogs to be flooded. A short time later there was a flood, and even my father’s house was flooded, but the pigs were safe. The folks stayed with us because our house was on higher ground and was not flooded. I had to lock the chickens in their houses to keep them from flying onto the water.
During the time that we were in Stockton my father was chosen as poundmaster, a job he kept for a year. There were too many hard feelings involved, because he had the job of impounding all stray animals, and some people were careless of their animals and where they were allowed to roam.
In October 1892, before Charles was born, my father’s mother, Jane Heney Stanley Cardwell, died in Redford, New York. Since my father was the only child, he went back that winter, which he spent in New York, to settle his mother’s affairs. She left $1400 in two banks and all of her belongings. She had died suddenly, leaving no will. My father had to wait a year before receiving the money from the bank accounts, because he lived out of state.
After the paper mill moved to Oregon, we moved to Calaveras, as the folks had bought a place there, and there was one they wanted us to have. We had planned to trade out two lots in Stockton for 40 acres located 27 miles from Stockton and 3 moles from Jenny Lind, and one mile from where my father had bought his 40 acres. We moved up there, but when we came to make a final settlement of the $800, the man who owned the 40 acres did not want any town property. Instead, he told us that we could live on the property and just pay interest. He also told us that we could cut all of the wood (oak) that we wanted if we did not want to buy the property, so we rented and moved to Calaveras.
The folks had no house on their property, so they stayed with us for a year. It was a two-story house and had been an over-night stopping place for teamsters in the early days and a wayside inn. We continued to operate this. They had their own blankets and grain for the horses, but they always wanted hay which we raised and sold to them. We also had a large barn for the horses. We also fed the men supper and breakfast, and then they would go on. Business was particularly good in rainy weather.
We moved there December 8, 1893, when Charley was nearly 9 months old and Edna was nearly 8 years old. We stayed there about 4 years.
Soon after we moved to Calaveras, my father received the money from his mother’s estate. He used it to move an extra building he had in town, a large new one, to his farm where he remodeled it for a house. He fenced an orchard area to keep the rabbits out and planted it in fruit trees.
In the winter the men sometimes did gold prospecting. In the summer they cut stove wood which they sold in the valley. They also worked on two farms. Fred Holmes, my husband’s nephew, also stayed with us. He cut wood and went prospecting with them. In fact, he was the only one who found any real gold. Each of us had a cown, chickens and a few turkeys.
At first we rented our home in Stockton for $10 per month. Later, in the spring, my husband sold our equity in the lots and house for a span of mules, and a spring wagon, and a harness.
We bought fruit, melons, etc. I the summer and sold them in the mining towns above ours. We did very well financially with this.
Harry Albert, my second son, was born here on Friday, June 21, 1895, at 7:30pm. This was near Jenny Lind, Calaveras, County, California. There was no adult with me at the time of his birth. My father and Chris had taken some wood to town and also planned to do some shopping. It was only 27 miles away, but it was a two day trip. My step-mother was staying with me, but she and Edna went to her home every night to milk the cow and feed the chickens. She had just left, thinking that I had a while yet before my baby would come, when I realized that it would be born sooner that we had thought. I immediately sent Susie to our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Tetherington, but she was not home. She came running back and said that she would run to Grandma’s a mile away. She was about 7 years old at the time, and it was beginning to get dark. She was timid in the dark, but she took a short-cut and arrived just as they were ready to leave. It was a hot day and a hot night, but my step-mother, who had a heart condition, ran most of the way back to our house. She arrived just a few minutes after Harry had been born. The cord was around one side of his neck and under his arm, and I did sit up to move it from near his nexk in case it might choke him, but there was no danger. He gave one small cry and immediately started to suck his fist. I just lay there then, as long as I knew he was alright, and waited for my step-mother to arrive.
Labor with Harry was the shortest I had ever had. When I realized that his birth was imminent, I had changed the bed and padded it with a rubber blanket or oil cloth in preparation for it. I then locked myself in the room so that the children would not get in.
Lulu and Charley were playing in the kitchen. Charley was trying to get into the sugar bowl, and Lulu came to the door. I told her to give him some and put it away. She came to the door a few minutes later. She had apparently heard Harry’s cry, and she said, “Mama, I think the mother cat has had kittens under the house; I can hear her.” I told her to go out and watch for Grandma, so she did.
When my step-mother arrived, she cleaned up the baby and me. She had been a nurse and mid-wife for many years and had delivered many babies. She had mid-wife papers. She had suspected that Harry would arrive that day, just by the way that I looked, but I had been ironing and felt alright. He came very suddenly and fast, unlike the four that had preceded him.
The men arrived back the next day.
When Harry was bout 1 year old and Lulu was 6 years old, she became ill with “intermittent fever”. Neither her bowels nor her bladder would function, and she seemed to have a temperature that would come and go. She caught the hiccoughs one day, and I thought that she was dying; I sent my husband for the doctor. He raced, crying, across the 4 miles to the doctor. The doctor gave her some medicine to stop the vomiting and used a catheter on her kidneys and said to give her small enemas. Still, her bowels did not work, so I sent one of the children to buy some fig medicine. It helped her along with the enemas. The next day, when the doctor came, her temperature was gone, and she seemed to be getting well. I never did tell him that I had giver her two doses of fig medicine.
Lulu could only speak in whispers for a while, and she had to learn to walk all over again, but she did get well. At the same time Harry had diarrhea, but I think it was his teeth, because nothing developed of his illness.
My husband’s sister, Mary Holmes, had moved from Dutch Flat to Calaveras. She was a grass widow (divorcee). Her husband had gone to the mountains where he made part of his living gambling. Their son Anson, had gone to Montana to mine. He struck it rich and was well-off for a while. He sent money to his mother and father, but the father lost it in gambling. Anson had a chance to sell his mine, but he did not, and it later petered out. Mr. Holmes and a friend were hit by a railroad train while driving in a buggy. Mary received a settlement for this. Mary’s son Fred lived with them there.
I enjoyed living there even though we had to carry water and lacked many other conveniences. The people were very pleasant. During the winter time they would come over in the evening with a violin or some other instrument and we would have dancing downstairs. Sometimes they brought refreshments. Usually, we had a sandwich and a glass of milk. At Christmas time they had a big Christmas party at the school and everyone went, including adults and children.
Harry was about 2 years old when we moved again. It was in the spring when we were notified that the place had been sold at a bankruptcy sale. We preferred not to stay and rent the place after it was sold. We moved back to Stockton. There we rented Fette’s place. This was next door to my sister-in-law, Mary, who had also moved back. We lived there for over two years. Our youngest daughter, Bessie Viola was born here on Saturday, April 29, 1899 at 7:45 am.
The folks moved to town too, as they had been cheated out of their place through a dishonest agent. Father had borrowed money on the lots in Stockton to finance his trip to New York. One day the agent who had loaned the money wanted payment and he had father sign a paper giving hi permission to sell the lots or borrow money to pay the man. There was a space between the description of the property and the signatures of my father and mother, and the agent’s wife was the witness. After the agent left, he added the description of the property in Calaveras to the original. The agent then borrowed some money on the property himself. The man who loaned the money wanted to property. My father’s attorney told him to have the property recorded in San Andreas in some other name; we had it recorded in my name but the recorded said it had already been recorded.
A number of years later, after my father and my stepmother were both dead, I found that it had been recorded in my name and the man who had gotten the property had been unable to sell it. One day one of my father’s neighbors in Calaveras came to see me and wanted me to sign over my rights to him so that he could get the property for the man who was trying to sell it. I was reluctant at first, but finally relented and gave him permission. Some time later I received twenty dollars from the neighbor for the property. The dishonest agent was a superintendent of a Sunday school in Stockton.
The folks stayed for a while with Mary next door. Then, they came and stayed with us. Later, they rented a place with chickens four miles out of Stockton. They wanted us to move nearer to them so we rented a small five acre fruit ranch for the summer. Bessie was about two years old then. The folks then moved even closer. The people for whom they had been renting had been separated but the decided to reconcile and wanted their place back. The folks were just two blocks away.
The man decided to sell the place where we lived, so we moved back into town. This was called the “Homestead Addition” and was located in the southern city limits. We lived there one winter; then we moved to the eastern addition (Washington St.), where the folks also lived).
In May 1901 my step-mother died. Afterwards, my father moved to the mountains for a while. He got a job, working as an engineer in a sawmill. When he returned he stayed with us for a while. He then moved nearer Stockton where he could have chickens and be near the cemetery where my step-mother was buried.
In the meantime, we moved into a larger house at Del Porte Street. My father died in March 1902, just before Easter, when Herman was six years old. George, my brother, unknowingly, contributed to my father’s death.
George was dearly loved by my father but was he was selfish—a dreamer and very neglectful. He would stay away for months at a time without letting my father know where he was or what he was doing. Once, when Bessie was a baby, he had come and visited for a week. He then told us that he had been married to a girl named May and that he had a daughter, named Esther.
George and May lived with her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Massel. George also neglected his responsibilities as a husband and father. May died when Esther was two years old and Esther was raised by her aunt and uncle, who lived in Oakland. Esther later married. Her married name was Sparks and she lived in Oakland.
For a while George was a successful actor. We had not heard from him for a long time when my father made contact with an actor whom he thought was George. He had seen an actor’s name in the paper as playing the part of a Major Stanley. My father had written to him inquiring if he were his son. The actor answered and my father thought he had heard from his son. It was a short letter but it did not quite sound like George. However, I paid little attention as we were having financial worries. I remember that one of the remarks in the letter irritated me because he made a kind of smutty remark about me and my population. It was not like George.
My father received a number of quite nice newsy letters from “George”. I never saw the last letter but he told me about it. It had bothered him. It had said something to the effect that he was tired about carrying on the correspondence and that my father must be losing his reason. My father brooded about it for some time. One day he took carbolic acid and laudanum mixed and swallowed it. He survived all night before he died. Someone wrote to “George” in San Francisco and told him of my father’s death. He was just a man who thought he was going along with a good joke. He wrote a letter to the undertaker and felt terrible about the whole incident.
We have had only two contacts with George since that time. He came one day and stayed a long time. He said that he was selling washing machines. Ten years later he wrote to my sister, Maud. The folks had seen him in a play in Fresno at one time, but when I went to see him his company had moved on.
My father left me responsible to dispose of his belongings. I sold his chickens and kept his horse and cow. My father left an insurance policy but he had paid in only $15 which was all that could be collected since he had taken his own life. I sold everything that we could not use. We finally were compelled to sell the horse and buckboard. We sold it cheaply but we just could not afford to feed the horse. I applied what we received on the funeral bill. My father died the Friday before Easter Sunday. I knew something was wrong when my husband came home from the store at noon. The people from whom he had rented had found him and had informed my husband. I spent Easter Sunday at my father’s place, clearing out his belongings.
We lived in an Italian neighborhood and the people just covered our entire large porch with flowers from their gardens. We did not have to buy a flower for the funeral. Maud lived in Sacramento and came to Stockton for the funeral. That was the first that I knew that she had had a baby the previous December. She had left Mary in charge of things and came down.
Things were not too good financially. There were ads, telling of opportunities to buy houses on easy terms in Oakland, and chances for the children to work. With the children’s help, I loaded my belongings into a wheelbarrow and took them to Mary’s house. My husband knew a man in Oakland who was a dealer in second-hand things. Chris had been working in this business for a man in Stockton but was drinking then and they quarreled. Chris thought he could do better in Oakland, so he went there.
Chris had started to drink socially just before Charlie was born. He had not yet become an alcoholic but he did become one later. He felt that if he could get away from the drinking environment in Stockton he would be able to conquer it. The man in Oakland hired him immediately. He worked a couple of days and spent the money on alcohol. Being completely broke, he walked the 45 miles to San Jose. He had nothing to eat but ripe apricots which he picked from orchards along the way.
When he wrote me from San Jose we decided to move there, as all of us could find work in the fruit. My husband could always find work but he could never hold a job for very long because of his drinking. We decided to let Edna go to San Jose first to be with her father and keep house for him. She had worked in a fruit cannery in Stockton and could easily find work there. A little later in the summer Lulu also went to San Jose and worked in the cannery.
Just before Lulu left I packed all of my furniture and moved to a smaller house as the owner of the house we were in wanted to sell the place. We were waiting until we could accumulate enough money so that we could all move to San Jose. It was at this time that Susie’s illness became at its worst. When Susie was about nine years old, she was terribly frightened by her pet dog when he had been poisoned and had “fits” from the poison and then died. She had developed an obscure form of epilepsy but she did not at first have convulsive seizures. At first they took the form of a nervous fright. She would suddenly jump up and run across the room with a look of fear or fright. These lasted for a few seconds to two or three minutes. She gradually worsened until she had the worst type of epileptic seizures. She was under a doctor’s care during this entire time. There were days when she was quite well but she could never be left alone. This effected the family a great deal, not only because it was necessary for me to be at home instead of working, but also, whenever we heard of a possible cure, we would spend what money we could save to try it, but without any result. It was like a cloud over the family.
Finally, when she was a young adult, we heard of a remedy at a doctor’s institute in the East. We sent for it and used it. She had been having as many as three seizures in a night but with this medicine she began to improve. She took this for a number of years until it began to make her hands and feet swell. We discontinued giving it to her but she continued to improve. In her later years, the seizures took the form of “quiet spells”, as we called them. She would sit in a chair completely unaware of what was happening around her, although not unconscious, as she could see. These would last for an hour sometimes. As she grew older these “spells” diminished in frequency and in length until she was virtually free of them at the time of her death.
Soon after his arrival in San Jose, Chris met the Mormon missionaries of whom there were then seven in San Jose, with the district headquarters in San Francisco. He had been sitting in Saint James Park one evening when he started to talk to the man sitting next to him. This man was the janitor in on of the buildings near the park. He had been attending the elder’s park meetings and also their hall meetings across the street from the park. My husband also became interested in their meetings and wrote to me about them.
After we moved to San Jose, the missionaries visited us and we investigated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (so called “Mormonism”). This was in the fall of 1902. In April, 1903, all who were old enough were baptized. Harry was baptized the following June when he was eight years old. Bessie and Herman were baptized when they were old enough.
My husband tried very hard to stop his smoking and drinking and hoped that his church membership would help him in this but he was unsuccessful. He always believed Mormonism, however, and he always talked in its favor.
When we joined the church in San Jose, there were only two families who belonged, the Hendersons, another family and Brother Victor, the Branch President. It had been said that we doubled the membership in San Jose at that time.
We improved our lot financially. Chris got work and kept it fairly steadily. Edna and Lulu worked in the cannery since it was possible to do so at the age of twelve years. Edna and Lulu also worked in the fruit packing house.
On Juse 25, 1905 Edna married Alfred Kopp, a convert to the church. Their first child, Ida, was born the night after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906. San Jose also suffered considerable damage from the earthquake but there were few fires and few, if any casualties. A red glow could be seen in the sky for many nights as we looked toward San Francisco.
We lived in a number of houses before we bought a home in the “Interurban Tract”, now called “Burbank”. This was at 129 Brooklyn Ave. We lived there for ten years. We got along well financially because we all worked in the fruit; the older ones worked in the canneries and the younger children and I in the prunes.
Although it was becoming increasingly difficult for us to live with my husband because of his drinking—I never left him. I had promised his mother (my mother-in-law and step-mother) that I would never leave him, as she felt he would just go “to the dogs” without my stabilizing influence.
One night he came home more belligerent than he ever had been before. He frightened the children so much that the older ones had decided to leave home. Finally, when he could not pick a quarrel with any of them, he said, “I’m done with all of you. I’m going to leave.” I said, “Chris, you’re not so drunk but what you know what I am saying. You can leave if you want to but I won’t take you back if you come back in the morning.” He left immediately and did not return that night. The next morning he returned after the children were in school and I was alone. He was very repentant, as he always was when sober. He promised that he would never do it again and begged for another chance. I reminded him that I had given him many chances and said, “Remember, I told you it was a choice between you and the children and that you were leaving me.” Then he said, “If I go a long time without drinking and prove to you that I can stop, will you take me back?” He had never gone a whole year without drinking, so I told him if he would go an entire year and prove to me that he had not had a drink during that time, I would take him back and I knew that the children would too. “All right!” he said. “I’ll do it and prove it to you.” He then left and we did not know where he was.
He had been gone for over a month when he returned with $45 he had saved. He had had a few drinks before coming. I did not take his money because I did not want him to be broke. He gave the money to Susie. A couple of days later he came back for some of the money and he kept coming back until he had taken it all. He then left town.
I was working much of the time because Lulu had quit school because of poor eyesight. She took care of Susie. Chris wrote to us now and then and I always answered him. On one occasion, he came home and threatened to take Herman away from he but it only made me mad. I said, “Don’t you ever attempt it. How would you take care of him? Besides, you do not deserve him!” Even Herman, only four years old, sensed somewhat his father’s condition. He was gone for months at a time when we did not know whre he was. Then he would come back sometimes for a week; the boys only allowed him to stay on condition that he would leave me entirely alone and not try to get me to take him back. They fixed him a room in the back. He never brought any money. Often when he came home he would be sick from drinking.
One time, when he was home, he and the boys worked out a singing and acting routine. They bought him clothes and made and appointment for a tryout with the Orpheum Circuit but he disappeared at the time of the tryout.
One of the last times that he came home, he fixed my garden and worked around the house. On another occasion he came home for one day. I gave him a suit of clothes because he had acquired body lice. He said that he had been sleeping on the creek bank. I warned him against his doing this because he might catch pneumonia. One morning he telephoned Edna and said he was sick and that he was going to the hospital. Fred went out to visit some lodge brothers and he checked on Chris. He found him there with pneumonia. We had then been separated about 10 years. The doctors had told Fred that Chris would never do a day’s work again and that he would be virtually an invalid. Chris was convalescing and he expected to be released within a week. He got out of bed and dressed. When the call was given for breakfast, he stood up to walk and collapsed. He died a few minutes later. They performed an autopsy and discovered an abscess on his heart. One lung was partially filled with liquid. The doctor said that he death was actually caused by the effects of nicotine and alcohol.
This is the end of the dictated life story of Ida Louise Stanley Steinagel, though she went on to live until 25 April 1963. She died in San Jose, California at the age of 97.
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