"There’s a damn wire there. I’ll have to dig it up sometime, get a pick, dig it up. Might puncture a tire.

This is a good truck. I just drive it on the property now. Use to take it into town until a few years ago. Now I don’t want to. It’s all different there now, and I don’t know anybody there anyhow.

"There it is. The Tarleton ditch comes out of the creek. In 40’s we built the structure. (Stops the truck, gets a shovel from the back, and walks to the ditch) Now, the one field has had enough water… I’m just gonna’ divert the flow. See, I take this board and put it in there. It’s not a tight fit, so I just grab something, like this clump of weeds, and snug it in…there, that’s good. The water pressure will hold it in place.

"In ‘33, my father was on the school board and JB Martinez, the county treasurer, told him about a lot north of Taos that had back taxes due for sixteen years. Father had a small inheritance from his brother from Australia, who had left it to his son, conditional on the son having a boy, but didn’t. The people were given the option to pay taxes, and refused or couldn’t. Dad got the 500 acres for about $12,000. It included about twelve acres of cultivated land, and the remainder priced at $1.50/acre for just sage. The former owners had the option to buy it back for three years if they paid interest. Later the people tried to buy back forty acres, but couldn’t split it like that.

In Elizabethtown, I was about 15 or 16, lied about my age and got a job driving a skid around to supply the miners. There were two horses that dragged a plain wooden sled with dynamite and other supplies. I kept the blasting caps in my pocket so it wouldn’t all explode.

Thousands of men had come out after the Civil War. It was a big gold strike. In the 80’s they built the Santa Fe railroad, and in ‘84 it came over Raton Pass. The DN Rio Grande came in here too. Before that they had to bring everything in from St. Louis by Wagon. Not sure if they came over Raton Pass or from the South.

During the 1920’s the Carson area, Cerro, Ute Mt., Questa, you could get 600 acres in homestead. The people that settled there did okay, but in 50’s it dried up-like the dust bowl. The government bought it back & planted grass.

Crested Wheat grass came in the 20’s-came from Siberia, people tried to keep it out. In 30’s the Soil Conservation Service from Cruces asked if wanted to try it. Tom said okay. They tried it out back, figuring if it would grow there... Now it’s all over the West.

In the 20’s, 30’s the road to Colorado ran right through our property. In the late 30’s built the new road north.

Tenorio tract east of Indian League corner. (South and east of Tarleton’s land, across road). The government bought out the Mexicans, paid for improvements. Later the Indians brought suit; the Mexicans had squatted, built corrals, churches, for 20-30 yrs. The Government split it up and gave it to the heads of Indian families. The Indians bought Watson (Antonio Martinez grant) for $1.50 acre, all the way to top of the hill.

This was all on Indian land. Half of Taos plaza is on Indian land-the Indian League that the Mexicans gave them. When I bought that place just off The Plaza on Pueblo Road, the title said that it belonged to the Indians, as granted to them by the King of Spain. Ya’ could never own that land until ya’ paid the Indians. So that’s what they did. In 1930 had an assessment survey, and the US government paid the Indians and I got clear title to the land. The NW corner of the Indian League is out there by the Chili Connection. They stayed in there, too. If the Mexicans caught the Indians off that land they were in trouble. They had battles all the way to Santa Fe, skirmishes. The Indians patrolled their land on horseback but weren’t hostile. Now if they caught you on there they’d arrest ya’. People went on there; the Brooks family had an ice pond that they took the ice out of. They hired Indian labor. Also people went up there to pick Indian plums and see the pueblo. The Indians had first right of the water out of pueblo creek. They used what they needed and everyone below them got what was left. They’re adjudicating it again - but the Indians will prevail, they have to, the structures are all on their land, they have first rights. It’s not like up in Colorado or something where it’s all Americanos and Mexicans vying for the rights. They used that water to grow corn- it was their livelihood.

When I came from E-Town, around 1913, there was not high school in Taos. You had to go board in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. There was about seventy five kids in the Taos school, taught by Professor Compton-only a couple of eighth graders. In sixth grade I went to the Canon, where a Mrs. McGowan was a great teacher, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. She lent me books, and when I took eighth grade for the second time she changed it so I could learn new things. I would have gone to college to be a Civil Engineer if I could have. There were barely any Anglos in the Taos school, just me and my sisters and cousins. Tom T. learned Spanish. His cousins spoke Spanish before learning English; they were raised by an old couple up the valley. Uncle Lee Witt was an Alcalde & Justice of Peace.

John Dunne had a toll at Hondo to get to Servilleta, even if you walked. In 1900 the county bought it.

Manby, the guy that tried to develop the hot springs on the Rio Grande into a resort, had grandiose ideas and financing from England. When that dried up in 1914 at the start of the war for England, he lost everything except the house over by Doc Marten’s.

In 1906 there was no autos in Taos Valley. Around 1910 they started to come up from Santa Fe and Albuquerque on the old Rio Grande road, one vehicle wide...

In 1906, about ten people lived on the plaza, and maybe one hundred lived within the village. There was no restaurant, just a hotel that served meals. The rest lived out on the Loma, El Prado, the Canon. They were the farmers. The ones that lived in Taos were the storekeepers, the Saloonkeepers. Everything was around the Plaza, with horses tied up. All the roads were either mud or dirt.

In the 30’s teachers in Taos county were paid 50% in cash, 50% in IOU’s. Hines, the blacksmith took these at a discount. Hines was a ferrier in England, here most cowboys shoed their own horses, so he became a blacksmith instead. He reluctantly took a lot of land because he held the mortgages on people’s credit.

When I was fixing cars, during the war, you either had to fix your car or go afoot. There were no new cars to buy. I’d sometimes buy cars, fix ‘em & sell ‘em,-make a couple of hundred. There were no new cars to buy. We owned the houses and the shop, dad kept the books. We had an acre and a half, with fruit trees. Every year for thirty or forty years I’d send down to Texas and get bags of a thousand onions, and plant ‘em. Then in October, I’d harvest ‘em, bend the stems down, put ‘em on the concrete floor of my shop, and have onions all winter. And boy my wife used ‘em. We had boiled onions, fried onions, onions in soup. Those German people like onions.

We had cows right there, too, right off the plaza. When we first got the ranch, that’s the first thing Thomas had to do before leaving and upon arriving home-milk the cows. All his friends commented on his strong wrists, when he told them why, they wanted their dads to buy them cows.

I wrote a letter from the Grand Canyon in 1925, and said "When you get a lot across from my house, I’ll buy it." The lot has 150 feet of frontage on the street. I bought it for $250. Built the shop for $900. Had a dirt floor for the first year. Then put a concrete floor in, cost me another $900. Had a big coal burning stove in there. Used to go to Madrid and get a load of that anthracite. Frank Brooks, Jack Brooks son, had the freight line from Santa Fe and and would haul groceries and light goods he bought from Jack Kelly and Ilfeld and them. I stored his International truck in my shop.

I had a house I bought in 1926, so that my mother could have the acre lot next to it to build a house. It’s where the Taos Inn is now, right next to Doc Marten’s. Mrs. Marten wanted to build a hotel, so my mother sold her the land and built a house out on Taos Pueblo Road. They came back from the Grand Canyon in 1929, I came back in 1930. My wife was ready to come back. She had never been to Taos, but she wanted to start a family.

Dad could still keep the books, build fires, and sweep the floor. He was active until his 80’s. By that time we were out at the ranch. He never got to live there. My Mom did, though. It cost us $10,000 to build it and we never could have done it without the loan from the Farm and Home Administration. They tried to cut the amount on us, but my wife insisted. That was her house and she knew how she wanted it built.

Took me two years to build. Worked out there all day with a Mexican man. He did all the adobe and I did the carpentry. Then I got a man who lived in Sunshine [That’s the name they gave the place on the other side of Questa, up the hill there, when the Denver Post advertised, they gave it the name to make it sound good. That’s about all they had out there, was sunshine.] He was an itinerant carpenter from Albuquerque, and he built the cabinets out of plywood. Camped out in the house. The walls are made from 20,000 4x8x16 adobes. Has 16 inch walls. I bought all vigas for $100 from Continental tile. It never had a leak until ‘95, when it snowed fifteen inches and I didn’t get up there fast enough and clean the roof. After that I did climb up there.

Patini built in 1911 a new church, tore the old one down, which had been like the Ranchos church. Philips bought the old one, used vigas, brick. They’d set up their big wagons, pretty soon they had shops and the Indians wanted them to come. This was all Mexican until the 40’s & 50’s so they had to deal with them.

In 20’s, if you didn’t work in the saloon, store, or teach school, there was nothing to do.

There were a series of fires, and it wasn’t until 30’s that they got hydrants. In about 1915 they formed a fire department, but was just a bunch of guys with buckets. The Plaza last burned in the late 20’s. The underwriters cancelled all insurance, and would not grant policies until they got a proper fire control system.

I and a bunch of young businessmen went to everybody in village tax roll, and got them to contribute a percentage based on tax value, and got a matching state grant. They put in a waterworks and bought a fire truck in the mid 30’s. Hines, the blacksmith donated a lot.

Taos used to have gambling. Slots in Saloons. In the 30’s a Baptist governor, Burroughs, stopped that. During the war they had no liquor.

Regarding the Taos Artists; I worked on their cars. I have paintings by Blumenshein & his daughter, Helen. Also Bystrom, and Phil & Gene Kloss, to whom I sold some land. We have a painting by Kloss. My wife played bridge with Blumenshein, and she was very good. He was not, so he gave her this picture of the painted desert in Arizona for putting up with him. Lockwood painting. Carlos Hall (part of Shoering family) painting; Indian in a blanket on a horse.

Kloss painting depicts the old Folig store, jail down here, saloon on the hill, and old stone store which was there ‘til the thirties. All the buildings were torn down in the thirties.

My grandfather was Episcopalian, from near Dublin, my mother was from Belfast. My grandfather worked for the Crown at the Income Tax and Stamp Department in Dundalk. In 1865, he moved to Carlow, then to Rathmines in Dublin. There is still a window in the Episcopal Parish in Rathmines dedicated to him by the four boys. He sent my father to the University in Dublin. But he didn’t make it studying, so he sent him to the English merchant marine. That was in the age of sailing ships. He traveled all over the world. He tried farming in Ames Iowa, but He got a chance to be in the Wild West Show which was going to England, working on the gas lamps they used to light the show. He worked for Buffalo Bill one season in England and one season in New York. Then he worked transporting cattle to England for slaughter. Finally, he was working in Lamar, Iowa, for the marble works, and the owners heard about Elizabethtown, the mines n’ things, and, oh boy-they wanted to come! And they did. in 1894 the owner sold out and came to E-town & started a mine in Willow Gulch, and my dad worked for them. Samis was their name. One of their sons, Fred, had a Conoco agency in Cimarron. He married Mason Chase’s daughter. The Chase’s were related to the Springers.

My grandmother & grandfather were divorced as long as I can remember. They were friends, but my grandmother was a businesswomen and he wasn’t. He would get involved in a sawmill with a partner, and he would do all the work, they would get all the money. After three or four times she divorced him. That was in a time when not too many people got divorced.

My grandmother sold milk, butter, and eggs in Elizabethtown. They had a ranch in the Moreno Valley, which they had homesteaded. She had bought the land from the Maxwell Land Grant for about fifty cents an acre. She sold fresh butter for a dollar a pound in Elizabethtown. Her ranch was the Six Mile Ranch, on the Six Mile creek. That was the distance she had to haul her eggs to Elizabethtown. She was a Snyder, and the first one born there on the Six Mile. She lived out her years at a house on the road out the Canon, on six acres with horses, cows, and chickens.

Uncle Lee Witt, my mother’s older brother, started working for the Colorado Fuel & Iron company in Pueblo, and crushed and lost his left arm while dumping fuel cars. CF & I paid his hospital, and he moved back here and helped his dad working at the lodge. Lee, Julia, Walter, Sammy & Clara Witt were her siblings. My grandmother & grandfather were divorced early, as long as I can remember. They were friends, but my grandmother was a businesswomen and he wasn’t. He would get involved in a sawmill with a partner, and he would do all the work, they would get all the money. After three or four times she divorced him. That was in a time when not too many people got divorced.

Near the crossroads to Cimarron was a black woman who lived on six mile creek-she wasn’t allowed to live in E-Town. Every day her husband walked a few miles to work at yellow gulch. She smoked Bull-Durham, my grandma smoked a pipe. I remember being five or six and just sitting there watching them. She had nice furniture. That table in my hall with the marble top came from her. My grandmother sold it to her for butter or eggs or something. When her husband died she sold off the furniture and my grandmother bought some.

Other Irish families: Jack Scully-raised horses, when he died sold them off, my uncle helped round them up. Patrick Dugan - lived along six mile creek. Jack Gallagher - Cimarron a brother of his in E-town, cousins around too. Other Irish families; Jack Scully, on the Comanche right below E-town. He had alot of horses. Herman Mutz, a German, was big in E-town.

For a while my dad worked in a town named-I can’t think of it-south of Springerville in Arizona. There was a lumberman from Louisiana, had started a big mill, and was bringing in Negros to work there. This was in the big Yellow Pine forests of Arizona. My dad went down there and sure enough he got a job. When that work was complete, they heard Oh boy! They’re startin’ up at the Grand Canyon. They’re gonna’ build roads, houses, shops to bring tourists.

They went up there, and sure enough, my dad got a job in a warehouse working for the Forest Service, Nance got a job as a carpenter. Both men were past sixty years old, and they supposed to retire at sixty-five. They asked "Do you got any birth certificates?"

"Well, no; We’re sixty." They got to work an extra two or three years. My mom and dad and I lived in tents two years before we got a small cabin. Shortly after he got a job, my dad said, "Come on up". In 1919 was at Ft. Bliss, army mounted engineers. ‘21 left army Ks City, went to Sweeney, auto mechanic school.

In the twenties I went to Camp Travis & Ft. Sam Houston, then to Chesapeake bay to engineer & demolition school. Spent most of my army time at Creshane, on the Rio Grande, between NM & Texas. We had a bridge & camp there. One day they decided to move us to Ft. Sam Houston. So we saddled up, and it took us thirty eight days to get there. It was down there, where, what’s his name, Judge Roy Bean had his...the law west of the Pecos-we had to build a bridge across the goddamned thing just to get across.

From about ‘25-’30 was at Grand Canyon. Fixed White school buses. Babbit general store. Fred Harvey owned all the concessions including mules. They still own it, I think.

Well I had my mechanics certificate and training in the army mounted engineers. There was nothing happening in Taos, so And I went to the Grand Canyon and got work at the repairing the white school buses for the Forest Service. I boarded with my parents, they had these two tents.

Then I got to know a porter at the El Tovar, Fred Harvey hotel at the South Rim. He was a good porter too, and Italian guy by the name of Sam Brocko, from Trinidad, Colorado. He ended up marrying a girl from the Bright Angel Lodge. He made a deal with Matrissa, El Tovar’s manager, that I could haul bags for a couple of hours every evening to haul the bags from the train up to the hotel. Gosh, those people had lots of baggage; truckloads of it! Trunks and everything else. I got a supper out of it, and maybe some tips of fifty cents up to three dollars. We could eat whatever we wanted. These dinners cost $3.75 and included everything from soup to nuts, as my wife used to say. My God what a meal. While there I noticed a young lady, a girl from Vienna about seventeen years old. I walked in there, and when I saw her, I wanted to meet her right away. (tearful) Millie came from Vienna in 1922.

She had contracted Tuberculosis and lived in a sanitarium. Someone had recommended the American West so when she was old enough she moved to San Diego. She got a job with the railroad and ended up working the down on the line at a lunch counter at a rail stop in Gallup, New Mexico. Well, she was good, and she got into training to be a Harvey Girl. When She graduated, she went up to the Grand Canyon. That was 1926. In 1927 we were married. We used to have wonderful times there, ya’ know, going to parties, dances, shows. You could buy tickets by the month. We would go on picnics along the rim, always had a car.

One of my jobs, in the evening, was to take down the big flag they had up in front. How many stars did the flag have in 1926? The guys before me used to take down the flag and just fold it. When I took it down, I folded it in a triangle, like I learned in the army. And when I finished all you could see was stars. I took care of it right. I was twenty-four years old. When I would take down the flag, I’d see, over the entrance of the hotel, on that north side, towards the canyon, there’s an inscription;

Every evening when I took the flag down I would see that over the portal. I just wondered how many people had seen that. The hotel is still there, and so is that inscription. You go down there today and there it is.

The Santa Fe railroad had a good retirement, but the Harvey hotel gave you, like, a supper when you retired. So I said, forget this, and I went back to Taos, where I owned a house I had bought for my mother in 1926.

My mother was a Snyder. I think she was of English or Danish descent-from Illinois. She was the first born on the Six Mile Ranch from that family. Her father came with oxen, moved a sawmill from Tennessee to Moreno Valley. She’d catch a mess of fish down on the six mile and we’d cook ‘em, I still remember. She lived here in Taos later, built a house on the road out the Canon. She had a milk cow, she even had a car, a 1916 Studebaker, had someone drive her. It was unusual to have a car, then. You couldn’t go anywhere, there were creeks and logs and things.

Mike has some good panoramas of Elizabethtown. We stood over there on what they call Boot Hill. That’s all that’s left there that’s permanent; the cemetery. Oh, there’s lots of tales about Elizabethtown. When it was first incorporated, in 1870, it was a city!

Lucky? I think I was very lucky in life…I wanted my dad to buy the land, but I didn’t influence him; was his money. He used to say "By jiminy kraut, I’d like to have a piece of land." "You know, the air is better out there," he used to say.