The Ancestors, Part 14 & 15

Thirty-five for Thanksgiving Dinner

The house consisted of two good-sized rooms with a double partition between them that made closet and cupboard space.  It made a lot of closet room, which I surely appreciated.  The walls had been lath and plaster but the jerking of the move had cracked the plaster unit it all had to be removed.  Clyde found plastering much more difficult than carpenter work.

We were still able to live in the sod kitchen and living room.  We also used the frame room that Clyde had built for a bedroom, so for another month Clyde had time to put up all of the hay that he could cut in our valley and the pockets between the hills.  That was his main problem: to have enough winter feed.  The owner of the steers that we were taking care of took them to a feed lot, so we didn't have them to worry about.  The weather stayed nice so that Clyde was able to get another little barn put up and a long shed built to protect the cattle in the coldest weather.

All of this time there were dances that were really part of our living.  Clyde had found a good drummer and he found a fine piano player.  She was the mother of six children and glad to be doing something with her music.  "Possum" Ross, the drummer, had a section about five miles from us, and Grace Corl and her husband Floyd live about nine miles away.  I don't remember what Possum's real given name was for even his wife called him Possum.  They were both nice families and we became good friends.

Another big job came up that fall.  There were more children now and the state had set aside land for a school house in our area, but the Kinkaiders, as were were called, had to haul the building materials and build the school house ourselves.  Clyde hauled load of lumber and bought winter supplies while at the railroad.  He bought flour enough to last all winter, canned goods that we would need, kerosene for our lamps and lanterns, two big five gallon cans of it.  We also bought some coal that fall.  I guess it was because Clyde didn't have the time to pick up chips.  They didn't get the school house started until the first of November, but the weather stayed good and by Thanksgiving they had it enclosed and made plans for a neighborhood Thanksgiving dinner in it.

By this time Clyde has plastered the Haine house.  I think it was the hardest job that he tackled out there, for he didn't really know how.  I mixed the plaster and kept the children out of the way, and he finally got onto the knack of it, and we moved into the two rooms for the winter.

When Thanksgiving day came it turned out to be a cold windy day and the men working on the building that morning decided that it would be too cold for children, so Clyde asked them to come down to our house to eat.  Of course I had no way of knowing the change of plans and was getting the children wrapped up for the trip when the gal that Clyde said he'd send after me came in and said they were all coming down to our house.  I had chickens, salad and pie ready and of course every one else had food.  We put all of the leaves in the dining table and I got out a long linen table cloth and really had a wonderful dinner.  We fed the men first so they could go back to work, so we had to eat in shifts, but it was a nice way to get acquainted.  I have always looked back with pleasure to the time that we had thirty five guests for dinner, that we hadn't planned for.

That fall, we also had some uninvited company.  Dwight Ingalls and his wife drove their new Ford up from eastern Colorado.  He said he didn't let us know because he didn't know whether his car would make it or not.  Cars were just beginning to be used then, and there were no roads built for them yet.  It was just at the time when ducks were migrating south.  I had never seen them come into the lakes out there, and Clyde took us all up to see them come in and land on the lake at sundown.  They made a cloud.  I had never seen anything like it.  He and Dwight went back the next day, too Don to retrieve what they shot and brought back all that we could eat.  I picked the down off and saved it for pillows.

As soon as the school house was finished, a teacher was needed of course.  There were only about a dozen youngsters and wages were very low, so it was not easy to find a teacher, but one of our neighbors had a certificate that was still good.  She also had a little two year old daughter, but she took the job and her husband tried to take care of the baby.  When he just couldn't have her with him, he brought her down to me.  It was too far for Ruth to walk to school alone, and in the cold weather, so I kept on teaching her.

We had a much better organized Christmas that year, were home alone on Christmas day, but went to the Corls' for New Years day.  They had two daughters, 14 and 15 years old, a pair of twins Ruth's age, a boy Richard's age and a baby Mildred's age.  They had come out from Grand Island for Floyd's health with only the two older girls and taken a homestead north of the land in the drawing.  The were educated, gentle people, and we enjoyed them very much.  Evidently they had income coming to them fro back home, for Floyd was not a rancher.

After Christmas that year, some of the Kinkaiders go together and decided to try building a telephone line using the barbed wire fences.  Clyde had helped build the rural line that led to their home back in Kansas, so he knew how to put the insulators on the wires and they used poles to carry the wire over the gates.  They built it to the new county seat and it really worked unless some nosey cow went through a fence -- then someone had to ride until he found the break and mended it.  It was wonderful when it worked.