UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Utah Valley University Library George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Mae Timbimboo Parry by Michele Welch May 2, 2006
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Mae Timbimboo Parry
Interviewer: Michele Welch
Place of Interview: Home of Ann P. Gross (Mae’s daughter) 1193 Valhalla Drive Clearfield, UT 84015
Date of Interview: 02 May 2006
Recordist: Michele Welch
Recording Equipment: RadioShack Upright Cassette Recorder
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Amber Stohlton
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: MP = Mae Timbimboo Parry (interviewee) AG = Ann P. Gross MW = Michele Welch (interviewer)
Brief Description of Contents: Mae Parry gives a life sketch of herself, including her growing up years in Washakie, Utah, and in a boarding school in California. She describes her family life, adventures in their little Indian school, and being the first Indian to graduate from Bear River High School. She relates many remembrances of her grandfather, Yeager Timbimboo, who insisted the grandchildren memorize their oral history. He appoints her as the story keeper of the Shoshone massacre at Bear River, known for years as “The Battle of Bear River.” Mae relates how she worked to change the title from “battle” to “massacre” and why it was so important to her. She talks fondly of her husband Grant, beadworking, and being named Utah’s Honorary Mother of the Year.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.
Audio Transcription
[00:00] Beginning of interview
MW: It’s May 2, 2006; I’m here with Mae Parry at her daughter’s home, Ann. And Ann is also here and we might refer to her, but let’s just do a test here and make sure this will work. All right, I’ve got the tape recorder turned on now, and so I appreciate you letting me come.
MP: You’d better talk louder or I can’t hear.
MW: Okay, I will talk very loud. And you ask me if you need me to repeat anything for you. I appreciate you letting me come and talk to you. I’ve been reading about your life. You’ve done some remarkable things, and I want you to tell me first of all about your childhood; where you grew up, when you were born. Can you tell me?
MP: My name is Mae Timbimboo Parry. I was born May, 15, 1919, in Washakie, Utah. Washakie—a lot of people think it’s a reservation, but it’s not. The farm we lived on the land belonged to the LDS Church, and so it was, almost everybody belonged to the Mormon—head Mormon faith.1 And the missionaries came among the Indians to teach them how to make a living rather than roaming all over the country; they had to settle down.2 They taught them how to build homes from logs. They had two—they owned two lumber, and then they would go up there and get their lumber and bring it down and build their log homes, and then there were about seven homes that were—that belonged to some of the white farmers, and then the LDS Church bought them out and let the Indians move into these homes. But a lot of them were given these homes to live in, but they preferred to live in their tepees. They set their tepees outside of their log cabins and framed homes, and they worked in their lumber. They were located in Idaho, and they learned to become—they went into the lumber business, and they made quite a lot of money. They hired white farmers to help them run their lumber, and pretty soon they were getting so successful that some of their white neighbors were getting very jealous over their advancement and their money-making, so the two mills, one burned down. They said it was an accident, and when they started to—the Indians had seen lumber disappearing, and they would take their lumber to Malad, Idaho, and ship it all over the country. They made quite a lot of money. And with that money they bought farm machinery to run the rest of the farm.
[00:50]
1. The full and formal name of the LDS Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. The Mormon Church is an unofficial, but common name for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its adherents are often called Mormons.
2. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 2
MW: Did your father work in the lumber business then?
MP: He was a young—he was young at the time when they had these mills. The second lumber place burned down, and the Indians says, It couldn’t be an accident this time; somebody set it on fire to hide discrepancies that will be found. And this little town of Washakie is a dry farm, and they had to have a canal to water what crops they had. So they went up to some area in Idaho, and they start digging this—the canal to bring it down to Washakie to water what little land they had. And they worked hard, and they all said that the LDS Church promised them half of the—own half of that canal. Later on, they found out that that was not true. They were not given the fair share for working so hard, and once it started to show a lot of improvement—when before they went into farming, they became with their lumber—they built us homes and they—I can’t remember.
MW: So your family—you grew up in Washakie?
MP: Yeah, yes.
MW: And what were your parents’ names?
MP: Washakie is located about three miles south of Portage [UT], and the state line is probably something like seven miles; I’m not sure.
MW: So the very north part of the state? What were your parent’s names? What was your mom and dad’s name? Your parents, what were their names?
MP: Oh, my father’s name was Moroni Timbimboo, and my mother’s name is Amy Hootchew Timbimboo. I have a picture of them here somewhere.
MW: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
MP: I had—my parents had nine children and—what five girls and three boys.
MW: What was it like for you growing up?
MP: Pardon?
MW: What was it like for you growing up?
MP: I had a lot of fun growing up. In fact, my two older sisters were much too older than I am and they really didn’t—I guess I was just too young for them to spend their time with so, my brother that’s next to me became my best friend. And we did everything together; we hammered; we went hunting birds; we built a tree house, and one of my sisters, JoAnne, says to mother, “When is Mae ever going to come down to earth and act like a lady? She’s just a tomboy and all she does is live up in a tree.” And Mother says, “As long as
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 3 she’s up in the tree, I know where she is.” (laughter)
MW: What was your brother’s name that was close to you? Your good brother who was your friend that’s—what was his name?
MP: My brother’s name was Frank.
MW: Frank, the one that close, okay?
[1:04]
MP: Frank, Frank. And we had a school at Washakie. When the missionaries came, they decided they were going to have a school, and they had a great big white building that was used for school, a church, gatherings, dances, basketball games, anything. Finally one day a doctor, Doctor Maybe from Malad, Idaho, would come and once a week and visit the Indians, and sometimes some really funny things happened. One family, the children all came down with tonsillitis or something and their throats were so sore, and they went to Dr. Maybe, and he gave them something and told them to come back next week. The grandpa took the children back the next week and no tonsils. (laughs) The grandpa had—they had a big, long stick, and they wrapped a cloth, and I guess he poked their tonsils out. (laughs) But and some really funny things like that happened.
MW: How long did you go to school at that school there in Washakie?
MP: Up until eighth grade. After that we went to high school. But—
MW: Which high school did you go to?
MP: Bear River High School.
MW: Bear River.
MP: And I—
MW: Is that right? Good for you!
MP: —was the first Indian person to graduate from Bear River High School. And not very long ago, I received a letter from their student body president, Harold Kapner. And he said, “I just happened to pick up a newspaper,” and he says, “And there [was a] write up about you,” he says. And he said he was also mission president, and he went to several foreign countries in aid culture to teach the natives of those countries how to farm. And he says, “I think we did our school proud.”
MW: Good for you.
MP: So and—but the schools were paid by the county and partly by the Indian Agency at Fort
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 4 Hall. And for every child that attended school, the teacher received so much money; so we had a teacher; I guess he’s no longer with us, so I’ll just say Mr. Harris. His daughter brought me an article about a month ago, and it sure sounded like the man I knew. He was real tough, and when we’d come to school, he’d make us line up outside of the building, and when we got up to the top of the steps, he’d say, “Let me see your hands.” We had to hold our hands like this and this way, “Is your fingernails clean; your hands not grimy?” And if your hands looked dirty, he’d send you to the back of the room to wash. And he did a lot of things that were real comical. He’d, I think he—we taught him more than he taught us. He would every day—he’d have a chair by his desk, and he’d make a student stand on that chair and tell him stories, Indian stories. And some of the things we—the students talked about were some were bad and some were good. And one day he had me stand on that chair, and then he said he wanted to know, uh, female—what they call a moon house. And he said, “I want you to get up there and tell me what it’s for and what’s in there.” And I was standing up there on the chair, but I would not talk and he said, “I told you—I asked you to tell us about it.” And I says—I still would not talk. He went over there and yanked me off of the chair. And he says to me, “I’m going to tell you something.” He says, “You will never amount to anything.” He says, “You’re going to be just as filthy and dirty as the rest of the Indians. You’ll be sitting; you’ll find yourself sitting in the dirt.” And right then and there I decided well I’m going to prove this man wrong. And he did several things like that.
And while he’d sit down there and take the things in shorthand, and all the rest of the students were supposed to be studying while he was listening to the storyteller. And sometimes when he wasn’t looking, students would make spitballs and shoot them across the room, all of it. And one time, there were about five boys and one girl who were caught throwing spitballs around, and he had a paddle about a big as this paper with holes drilled in it, and there was a storage room, and he’d take them in there, and he’d lay them across his lap and paddle them. And so, one time, I was getting pretty upset cause my brother was one of them getting paddled. Some of them were crying, and so, what my brother did was, when he was laid on the teacher’s lap, he went and bit his leg.
And that article that his daughter brought to me not long ago tells about Mr. Harris teaching in Tooele or Bingham Canyon or somewhere, and she said one Indian student— they were not allowed to chew gum, and he said, “My father marked a round ring on the black board, and made the students stand there with his nose in that round drawing and—
MW: If they were caught chewing gum? If they were chewing gum they had to do that?
MP: We weren’t allowed to chew gum and then another time he—one boy was caught chewing gum. It must have been bubble gum because he made him blow it up, and then he stretched it clear across his face like this, and there sat that boy. His name was Eddie Wagon, and there we were feeling pretty bad for him because he had gum all over his face and the longer it stayed there, the darker the gum became. And then he—I wouldn’t tell this, but his daughter told us the same thing.
MW: Yeah.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 5
MP: I told my husband and the kids [that] this one teacher used to paste you down with gum, and then here this daughter said he did the same thing over to Bingham Canyon to a student.
MW: Hmmm.
MP: And he, in order to get his pay from the government, he made sure that every child attended school, and his home was in—he lived in Washakie, but he was raised in Portage, which was about three miles away.
MW: How long was he your teacher for? How many years was he your teacher?
MP: I don’t know, for years. I think it was over ten years.
MW: Wow.
MP: But sometimes the snow would be so high and it would freeze over, and you could walk on top of the snow, and it got so much snow it would cover the fence. It was just one big plain. And there came Mr. Harris. He’d walk from Portage to Washakie, so he wouldn’t lose a day’s pay. And we thought we were going to have a vacation from school, but we had no luck. (laughter) And—
[23:4]
AP: Mom, tell them when you went to boarding school in California.
MP: Yes, well. We, the students at Washakie were given the opportunity to go away to boarding school, and there were several BIA schools in California, Oregon, Idaho, Oklahoma, in Nevada.3 And we were allowed to choose where we wanted to go, so my— our oldest sister, JoAnne, decided she wanted to go to school in Salem, Oregon, state college (unintelligible) and while she was going to go to school, the bishop—our bishop George M. Ward of the ward heard, “JoAnne is going away to school?”4 He came over to our house and told the family, “You’re making a mistake by sending your daughter away. She’s going to see the evil of the world and she’ll fall into it and she won’t be safe out in the—away from the Church.” And Joanne survived; nothing happened to her. She was—she learned more, and when it—and then the next year, she decided to go to Riverside, California, to another school. These schools are just like college campuses,
3. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is a federal agency within the United States’ Department of the Interior.
4. A bishop is the ecclesiastical leader of a Latter-day Saint congregation or ward. A ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 6 and so our mother and dad packed us into our little old car, and we headed for California. When we got to the school, the name of it was Sherman Institute, and it was such a beautiful place; there was lawn and flowers and shrubbery. And they had magnolia trees, and they give a smell that you just can’t equal anywhere, and when the orange blossoms and the magnolia blossoms get together, it just smells so good. And so we were going to take the two older sisters and leave them there for the school year, and I says to my father, “Can I stay here too?” I was a little just over eight years old. I says, “I wanna stay here; I said, “This must be what heaven looks like,” (laughs) after living in Washakie cause we had to make your own entertainment there. So I started in third grade I think. Anyway, I was just a little advanced and—
MW: So they let you stay there at eight years old? Yes.
MP: Yes, it started from first grade clean up to high school, and then if you wanted to go to college and stay there, you were allowed to do that. So my father went over to the superintendent of the school and asked, “Could I leave another daughter?” And he said, “Yes, you can leave her. There’s room enough for one more.” And I was left there and I was—the first day was really lonely. I was standing in the hallway, the floors of the buildings were just like this, shiny and polished all the time, and I was standing there all alone, no friends, and then a girl came up to me with a candy bar, and she was from Fort Hall; she was Shoshone too.5 She said, “I heard a Shoshone girl is here, and I am looking for her. Are you the one?” I said, “Yes.” She gave me the candy bar and introduced me to several other girls and pretty soon I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Some of the things I did are—I don’t know—while I was doing them, I thought it was great. Like they were filming the show Ramona several years ago and the actress was Dolores del Rio.6 And they wanted to film some of it on the campus and have the children in the background, so we—oh there was about—we had about seven little girls that ran together. They said, Why don’t we turn the water on—the sprinklers on? And I took one sprinkler, and the other girls took the sprinkler, and we took the heads off and turned the water on, and it was just a fountain Yellowstone Park. (laughs) Water squirting everywhere, and they told us, Don’t water the pepper trees, because they were going to drip and ruin the film. There we were, and the matron was a real tough old lady, and she wanted to know who turned the sprinklers on. And we wouldn’t say, but somebody told on us and said “Those girls, they’re the mischief makers,” And they said—they told us how many thousands of dollars we ruined by turning the sprinklers on the movie crew and so many new things happened all of the time.
There was one lady—well, I found out she was from Arizona, and she came and she said, you know—we had a great big cattle truck that came and those little children would herd sheep for the family. And she said, “I was herding sheep, and this great big truck came
5. Fort Hall is an Indian reservation located in southeastern Idaho.
6. Delores del Rio was a well-known Mexican actress in Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. She starred in the 1928 version of Ramona.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 7 and loaded me on there with the rest of the kids.” And she said, “We were crying because they didn’t even notify our parents; they just picked us up and took us to a boarding school.” And she said, “At night, we were crying.” She said the matron came in and said, “What are you crying for? Are you lonesome for your sheep?” And she was really tough.
And a lot of times they would bring oranges from the groves; oranges that were too small or too large were given to us. They came and dumped it on the lawn, and we could have all the oranges we want. And—
MW: How many years did you stay at the boarding school?
MP: I stayed three years, and I enjoyed every minute of it. And when I first started, I decided well I’m going to be on the honor roll. Because the ones that were on the honor roll had privileges that the lazy students didn’t have. We were driven by a driver, well—like a— there was a famous racetrack was close by, and this driver would drive us there, and he would drive us different places and drive us through Mt. Rubio. That’s the great, great big hill where we spent—the whole student body was loaded in street cars—and thank you—we would spend Easter there, and we had a lot of privileges if your grades were good. So I made my mind up; I was going to see the country besides learning. I studied hard and I made the honor roll.
MW: Good for you. Did you go home to see your parents or your family?
MP: In the summer.
MW: In the summer.
MP: If you wanted to. They didn’t tell you you had to go. You would make up your mind. I decided to stay there the first year. I didn’t want to come home. And that was the year my grandmother Yampitz died. And I remember my grandma sitting on a—there was a box, a wooden box, and grandma was sitting there on this—lonely little figure sitting there on the box, and we waved to her, and she said, “When you come back, you probably won’t forget—you probably forget how to talk Indian, and I’ll say, ‘What do you say?’” And that’s all she could say was that. So while she was gone, my little friends—they were two sisters, and they decided, Let’s, since you didn’t see your grandma, let’s have a séance, and we’ll bring her back so she can visit you.
MW: (laughs)
MP: And window wells was around the building. And we crawled into one of these holes— wells, and one of the girls that’s supposed to know all kinds of magic things had a Ouija board. She said, “Put your hand on there and when you ask it a question, it will shake so many times.” There we were sitting in—we went, put candles on the top, and we were sitting in the dark with our hands on this Ouija board and and nothing happened. And she said, “There’s somebody in here that’s not a believer, and I wasn’t a believer, but I wouldn’t admit it. And so we had—she said, “This isn’t a good Ouija board.” So we took
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 8 the Ouija board out and we beat the heck out of it. (laughter) We beat it up; it was no good. It didn’t tell the truth. And—
MW: When you finished at the boarding school three years later, did you come back and go back to the same school in Washakie?
MP: Washakie.
MW: Washakie. I don’t say that right.
MP: I wanted to.
MW: That was probably difficult to come back to the school.
MP: It was. But what I wanted to say was the girls that came from Oregon and Washington, they were quite wealthy because they had lumber mills and all of fishing and lumber, and when a new girl came, we’d all stand around and see what she’d brought. And something that the other girls didn’t have, they had soap that smelled so good and their clothing that they brought with them were—they looked expensive to us. At that time, we were—we had to dress all alike. We wore dark navy pleated skirts and white blouses and black stockings and black shoes. Everybody was the same. And when these girls came from Oregon and Washington, we just wanted to hang around them because the soap that smelled so good. (laughter)
And after I stayed there through—I came home and I went back again and the last time I came back, I was in the fifth grade. Pretty soon I made it to the sixth grade, and Mr. Harris was still the teacher, and he—a cousin of mine named Ivy Wongan—we were the only two eighth graders, and he said, “You’re not prepared to go to high school.” He says, “The kids are going to laugh at you; they’re going to make fun of you because you’re not prepared to go to high school.” I told him, “Mr. Harris, you’ve been calling us eighth graders all year, and no matter what you say, we’re going to go to high school.” And he said, “I told you; you’re going to be left behind.” We went to high school, and we were never behind. We—in fact, some of our grades are much better than a lot of white students. And my father always made sure that his children were dressed well. If we didn’t have the best, we had the cleanest. And he made sure that we—it was very important to our parents that we get some type of education, and we had two great big books: The Book of Knowledge and we almost wore that book out. We’d look at the pictures, and we enjoyed seeing what the world looks like outside Washakie. And we—
MW: What was it like at Bear River High School for you? Were there a lot of other Shoshone students?
MP: No, there were just the two of us to begin with. And—
MW: Did you have a good experience there at high school?
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 9 MP: Had what?
MW: Did you have a good experience at high school?
MP: Yes, very good.
MW: Good.
[4:92]
MP: Very, very. I enjoyed high school. In fact, they were putting on an operetta, and I can’t recall the name, but we were in that operetta. And also I had a very special teacher, Miss Johnson, [an] English teacher. She encouraged me all along to write the story, write something and says someday it’ll pay off. And so I enjoyed a lot of things that a lot of the students didn’t have the privilege like I did. The teacher just went out of her way to help me. She would encourage me to get up before the class and tell some stories or something like that. And there was another teacher, Miss Woodside; she was a history—and she was very encouraging. Elections were coming up, and there was a Landon running for the presidency, and I can’t recall the other one. She said, “We’re going to have a trial run and some of you are going to be asked to get up there in front of the student body assembly and talk about why you should vote for this certain person.” She said to me, “So, Mae, will you be one of the speakers?” And so I said, “I’ll try.” I got up there, and I did my speech, and I had a very good friend who later turned out to be my husband. He helped me all through high school. If there was something I didn’t know, he was right there to help me. And his sister was going to be valedictorian of the high school. I think one of his brothers graduated three years out of high; he finished in three years.
And then at seminary graduation—by this time, I had the experience of speaking in front of a crowd, and seminary graduation was coming up, and the principal of the seminary asked me if I would be one of the student speakers at graduation, and I told him yes, I’ll give it a try. And there—my husband was Grant Parry—jumped right in and helped write the speech I was going to give at seminary graduation.
And I remember my father taking me to Tremonton [UT] to—I had—they bought me a blue dress, and my father decided I had to have shoes that matched that dress. So we went to town; he checked me out of high school, and we went to town, and he bought me a pair of blue shoes to match that.
But before that, he made sure—he would call the children together and shoe polish, and Sunday, I mean Saturday nights, we had to have our shoes all shiny to go to church the next morning. And—but he was very interested in getting his children’s education.
My father was the first Indian student; he went to school at Malad, Idaho. His parents also wanted him to have some type of education, so they went up to Malad, and some of their friends—and asked if their son could—would they help find some place for him to live. And there happened to be a shop there that was empty. So they settled my father in
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 10 this one-room building, and he had a horse, and somebody took his horse and kept the horse, and my dad finished the eighth grade, and that was as high as uh anyone went white or Indian. If you were in eighth grade, you were educated. And uh—
MW: What did your father do for a living?
MP: Well—
MW: Talking about your father, tell me what he did to make a living for the family when you were growing up.
MP: We had a dry farm, and my dad grew all kinds of like oats and wheat and barley, alfalfa, and also he planted beets, sugar beets, and we had to go out there and work real hard cause we—the two brothers passed away when they were young and then my brother, Frank—so we had to work hard to help keep the family together. And sometimes my dad would hire some white boys to come with the—load the beets and haul it to Garland [UT] to the sugar factory. And when haying time came, he would hire some white farmers to come help him put up his hay. And at that time, they would hitch a horse, and this horse had to have somebody to drive, and they’d tell you when to drop the fork. There was a great big fork, and they’d grab that hay and dump it, and a lot of times I’d took my turn and rode that horse all day long, and we had all kinds of vegetables. I grew up on vegetables and fruit. And uh, we had a cellar and in this cellar, we had all kinds of good things to eat cause my mother and dad believed in storing things and not have us go hungry. It was a cellar they dug in the ground and covered. So a lot of times some of the Indian children would be hungry. I was talking to one lady not too long ago and she said, you know, “I grew up on squirrels, those little ground squirrels.” And she said, “We had nothing to eat but squirrels three times a day.” And she said—but I told her, “I don’t think I ever ate a squirrel.” And in fact I wouldn’t even eat deer meat, even today, not no deer meat, and there was one man, he’d see me and he’d say, “Oh dear, oh dear” because I hated the deer. (laughter)
[0:38]
MW: Tell me about when you you met your husband in high school and tell me when you got married about that time.
MP: The Parrys moved into Washakie in 1928, I think. And I was away at school in California when the Parrys moved in. And one day when it snowed quite a lot—and Grant, that’s my husband and his sister, Margaret, used to ride a horse or a sleigh to go to school. One day they didn’t go to school cause there was so much snow, and they came to our little school, and they brought some books, and they sat in the back of the room and looked at magazines or read something. And I wrote in one of my journals, “Grant sure looked disgusted,” I said. And that’s when I first saw him was at school. But we were the best friends—anything I wanted, even today; he’d go out of his way to get what I want. But I never demanded anything of him.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 11 And as I grew older, after I finished high school, I went to LDS Business College in Salt Lake [City, UT]. But just before that, the BIA made it available for us to go to one of the colleges. They gave us a scholarship, and the scholarship they gave me was to University of Utah, and I accepted, and they were going to pay—the government was going to pay my way through. And then because my father was, by this time, became a bishop of the—he was the first Indian bishop in the LDS church. And this Church says, “Don’t send her to University of Utah. Send her to either LDS Business College or to Brigham Young University.” And I didn’t go to BYU or University of Utah, I chose to go to the LDS Business College, and I had learned to type while I was in high school, and so I took some business classes, and after the school year was up, I went back home.
MW: And is that when you and Grant got married then?7
MP: Uh, yeah, yes.
MW: After that year at LDS Business College?
MP: He was I have to say—he’s a very smart person; all those Parry children were extra bright. And he didn’t know what he was getting into. A lot of times you say the man—the woman behind the man makes a success. I think it just did it the other way about. He helped me so much that whatever I tried to do, I accomplished, and so I applied to go to—can’t think? What? Pay your taxes? What? I?
AP: Oh, IRS. IRS?
MP: Yes, I applied for a job there, and it just happened that I didn’t know—another Mr. Harris, not the one that put gum on you, but this one was Ed Harris, and he was an instructor at the IRS, and he told us to get our machines ready, and a lot of them were already set for so many minutes, and I got it; I sat down and he said, “Go.” We all started typing, and I guess I didn’t listen to him too well. I had double space on my machine and everybody else had single space. I was typing along, and I quit and I turned my paper over and everybody stopped. They said, Who could type so fast that they finished one page and started on the next one? They didn’t know I’d double spaced. (laughs)And Mr. Harris said to—after the class was over he said, he says, “I had you in high school, and I know you can do it, so we’ll just let it go; we’ll just let you pass even if it’s double spaced.” And uh—
[1:03]
MW: So you worked for the IRS for a while?
MP: I worked for IRS, and then I worked at the Ogden Arsenal and Hill Air Force Base. And I also worked about three months at the—one of my friends I met at the IRS said, “Hey, there’s an opening for a housekeeper at St. Benedict’s Hospital, why don’t you go apply
7. Mae married Grant in 1938.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 12 for that?” And my husband had gone fishing with some of his friends up to Yellowstone or somewhere. While he was gone, I went and got a job and the—are they nuns?
AP: Um-hm.
MP: She said to me, “I don’t think you’re going to stay with us very long; this is not your type of work, and I bet you will quit before long.” So an airplane crashed from Hill Field, and it wasn’t an Air Force plane; it was another type of plane that crashed, and the man—the pilot was in the hospital, and I went in there to clean his room, and he says to me, “You don’t belong here.” He says, “I just have a feeling you belong somewhere else.” He says, “You go and quit that job; quit this job and go and apply for something better.” So, I hated to go to the nun and tell her she knew that I wasn’t going to stay for very long, and and then I went to—from [the] IRS, I went to Hill Air Force Base—transferred to Hill, and I had the best time ever at Hill Field. My husband says, “Every day you go to work it’s just another holiday.” And I told him, “Yes.” And I was—there were over two hundred mechanics, and I was the only female in the group. And my boss told the mechanics, “We’re going to have an LDS bishop’s daughter working for us, watch your language and don’t give her a bad time. And she’s not used to some of the words that you are using and treat her like a lady.”
So I started working there and I had to go pick up the mail, and they had a cracks in the floor, on the cement floor, and they had just covered it with something like tar, and one day I was walking through there, and I had high-heeled shoes on, and I stepped in this tar and my shoe came off, and I went further took about three steps and everybody was laughing in the aircraft. They were laughing saying, Hey, Minnie, ha ha, your shoe’s back there. (laughs) And uh, “Hey, Pocahontas, you lost your moccasin.” And they just teased the heck out of me every time I went to pick up the mail. And one day I was going to pick up the mail and somebody in one of the airplanes said, “I like red!” I said, “I like red too!” It just happened to be around this time of the month; it was in May. He said, “Where’d you get that red coat?” I said my parents gave this to me for my birthday. He says, “Well, I like red.” He said, “When is your birthday?” I said, on the fifteenth of May. And on the fifteenth day, a florist stopped out in front of the house, and he—a man brought a box. I said, “If it’s to me, I won’t accept it.” I told the kids, “Tell him he came to the wrong place; there’s no Mae Parry here.” They said, We’re going to take it. So my oldest son, Bruce, got the box and inside of this florist box was a green orchid, green with a little yellow running through it, the most beautiful flower I had ever, ever received, and next day I came and told my boss, “Hey you know what happened? I received a green orchid, a rare orchid from somebody, and I don’t know who it is.” He says, “Go get the roll, and let’s sit right here, and let’s go over them one by one. Could it be this one, could it be that one?” And we’d say, No, it’s not him. He said, “I know who sent it to you— your husband.” I said, no, my husband wouldn’t do that. I am lucky if I get a dandelion.” (laughter)
So one day, I heard somebody say, “Did you receive my posy?” And I said, “Who are you?” and he said who he was. He said, “I’m the one that sent you that posy. And I went back and told my boss I found out who sent that flower and he says, “Well, stay away
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 13 from him.” He said, “He’s been a sheepherder all these years and because you’re being kind to him and helping him do things, he’s taking advantage of your kindness; keep away from that man.” So I did; I would say hello to him but that was as far as it went. And another airplane crashed just east of the Ogden, and just before that they’d call an alert, and it was my position to call their homes, their wives, and tell them that their husbands been sent on an alert—emergency alert, and we watched the plane take off, and there was a cooler out, a great big cooler out—while we were watching, some smart aleck mechanic had put a chain, a link chain about this long—he had put it in there, and it was ice cold, and while I was up there looking at the airplane, he dropped the chain down my back, and he—snakes had been up there. Oh and I just about died! And it slipped down and fell on the floor, and it was a chain. (laughs)
MW: That’s terrible.
MP: Oh, I was scared to death.
MW: What—so at Hill Force, Hill Air Force Base, you were—were you a secretary or what? That’s the kind of work you did?
MP: Yes, I was a secretary. And there was a man; he belonged to a different—he still belonged to the air force, but he had a different title. And he’d come over and bring his paperwork and set it on my desk and he’d say, “Type this up you cotton-pickin’ squaw!” And they wouldn’t say things like that in our—today. And I’d tell him, well when I get around to it I’ll do yours. He said, “I said for you to type these up!” And so I says to him, “I’ll type it sometime.” And then he said, “Right now!” I said, “Why you demand so much of me you bald-headed white man!” And he grabbed his paperwork, and went out and we didn’t see him for quite a while, and my boss and another—well, there were about three, four bosses, and they said, We’ve been wanting to tell that man off for months, but we know that you could take care of yourself, and you did it today.
MW: (laughs)
MP: So and one day I met him in the hallway and he said, “Are you still mad at me?” I said, “I’ve never been mad at anyone.” He said, “You hurt my feelings.” I said, “What did I do to you?” He said, “You hurt my feelings so bad I didn’t come over for a long while.” He said, “Oh, I know what you mean.” I said, “You mean when I called you a bald-headed white man?” (laughs) He said, “That’s it!” And after that we weren’t very good friends. (laughs) And—
[2:26]
MW: Mae, you are a good storyteller, aren’t you? And you have been honored for your beadwork that you’ve done. Tell me about the beadwork that you have done. Do you want to take a break?
MP: Yeah.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 14
MW: A break?
MP: Yeah, I do. (Tape stops)
MW: Let’s turn it back on. This is you and Frank when you testified before.
AP: It says on the back; I’m not sure what that is.
MW: On the back? Oh good.
MP: Oh, back there. And that’s a cow pile.
AP: Oh yeah, the cow pile one.
MW: So you were a great-grandchild of Chief Sagwitch?8 I didn’t know that. That’s wonderful. And you have—when did you learn how to do the beadworking? The beadwork? Were you a little girl?
MP: Oh, our parents, our mother started us with sewing clothes, and later on we’d start swinging, streaming beads. But —is that where the uh—
MW: I’m trying to see here if there is anything on the beadworking?
MP: See, here’s my grandma and grandpa. She’s the one that passed over.
MW: Let’s talk about the Bear River Massacre. You were the one who got the name changed, isn’t that correct?
MP: Did I what?
MW: Didn’t you—aren’t you the one who worked hard and wrote letters and got the name changed to Bear River Massacre, is that correct? Tell me about that.
MP: I guess so. There’s some pictures in there.
AP: I know.
[2:54]
MP: I’ve done so much. Our grandfather was a real good storyteller. And he would say to us, “Indians do not talk about tell stories during the summer months. We only tell stories when it’s winter.” And so Grandpa would gather his grandchildren and tell us stories and
8. Chief Sagwitch was the leader of a band of Northwestern Shoshone who were killed in the Bear River Massacre in 1863.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 15 I don’t think a day passed that Diamond and Grandpa weren’t standing by each other. He would tell us stories, and Grandpa would sing, but he was forever telling us stories and then, a lot of times our father would be called to speak in some gathering or some celebration, and he always invited me along because he said, “You come with me; you tell this story.” These two, my grandpa and that’s his cousin, Yeager Timbimboo, and his name is Ray Diamond Womehup. And he was a mailman. He’d carry the mail from the train depot to the bishop’s house; that’s where they picked up their mail. But they told— not a day went by when they didn’t remember something about the massacre. And so I— it was just drilled into me to tell this story about the massacre. When a group of us Shoshones were gathered together at Franklin; that was their winter. January is what they call—oh, they do a dance and have a great big celebration so that warm weather will hurry along, and it was during this time they were having—they had Indians, Shoshones come from Fort Hall area and Shoshones from Wyoming. There was about over a thousand Indians gathered at Franklin, and they had finished their games a few days before the massacre.9 And the families were just living at peace with each other. They didn’t have to have locks and padlocks and things on their drawers because they did not steal from each other. They trusted each other to anything they had. They were living at peace, and all of the sudden one of the men heard that Conner was coming with his California volunteers, and they says, We haven’t done anything wrong.10 So my great- grandpa was Sagwitch. Is a picture here?
AP: It’s here somewhere.
MP: He told his people, “Don’t shoot!” And so they were not prepared at all to fight. In fact, all they had was just a few rifles. So when my great-grandpa got up real early in the morning and was looking out towards the hills, the hills looked strange to him. It was covered with steam—steam rising from something and he said, “It looks like we’re being descended upon by the soldiers. Be ready, but don’t shoot first.” So, great-grandpa and I think three other men went to meet them and while they were going, somebody shot an Indian. And great-grandpa said, “They didn’t come to listen to our side of the story.” Colonel Conner wanted to make a name for himself because the Civil War was going on, and he was turned down for that position, and he was not getting a promotion unless he did something great or something that people would remember him by. And the soldiers started shooting the sleeping Indians; it was early in the morning. And if they had—if they were ready to fight, they would not have had their children and mothers and grandmas at camp, so some of the most horrible things happened there. This Ray Diamond, this littler man, remembers he jumped into the Bear River, and it was starting to flow with ice; he jumped into this, swim across, and he sat under a tree—all—this was in January, and then he tells of different things that he witnessed. He said the beaver dams that were built in the river were starting to move. He said those little beavers had
9. Mae refers to the Shoshone Warm Dance, which had taken place a few weeks earlier. Had Connor arrived then, the Bear River Massacre’s death toll could have been much higher.
10. Colonel Patrick Edward Connor led a detachment of California Volunteers in an attack against the Northwestern Shoshone Indians on January 29, 1863.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 16 trouble walking down the river it was so full of Indians. And then this grandpa was running around there, and he was somewhere between ten and twelve years old, and they didn’t have no records. They had no one to copy, and they’d just start guessing. You were this when this happened; you seemed to be this old. So he was running around there looking for somebody he knew he could identify with and he ran into his grandmother and Grandma says, “Why don’t we drop down on the ground and play dead.” So they dropped with just the clothing they had; they laid on top of the snow. Pretty soon, one of the soldiers came along and Grandpa just happened to be looking; he was supposed to have kept his eyes closed, and the soldier got off his horse and came and walked over to Grandpa, aimed at him, and what seemed like forever, he held a gun. Three times he pointed at Grandpa, and then something beyond description happened; the soldier put his gun down and walked off and left Grandpa. And Grandpa says, when he’s telling the story, “Somebody had to tell this story; somebody had to tell the truth about what the Indians know.” And Grandpa says, “I think you have been picked to fill this mission that someday you are going to be recognized for telling the story of the massacre of Bear River.” And I’ve thought as long as I lived, I’ll always call it the massacre instead of the battle.
At that time, everything was The Battle of Bear River. I told them it’s not the Battle of Bear River, it’s a massacre. And later on the historians caught on, and they started to have me come and talk to them. I‘ve spoken before more important people than I can recall. Some came from the University of Utah and all the universities in Idaho and some eastern colleges even got hold of the story, and so if I’ve done anything, I’ve fulfilled that mission. I guess that was my assignment is to—I just always felt like I had to say something—that I said I was going to change that word battle to massacre.
The people up in the Franklin area formed a club; I have a picture of the lady here somewhere. And she—Allie Hansen’s her name. They formed a group, and they were going to make a park, and they—she said, “It’s The Battle of Bear River.” And I joined the group thinking they were going to find a way to change the title and let’s see—so I said to Mrs. Hansen, “I’m no longer coming to the meeting because I says, ‘Have you ever seen any Indian ruin anything.’” I just said, “I don’t feel like I belong here.” So I quit that club and kept my story going about the changing the word from battle to massacre. I wrote to senators, congressmen, university professors. I have more friends that have Ph.Ds. degrees, and they agreed with me after some of them decided, researched it—a lot of work—and they said, You were right.
And Mr. Baird from Washington D.C., the chief historian from the United States government, came down, and I told him my story, and he said, “I’ll go back to Washington D.C. and see what I can do.” He says, “It sounds like to me you may be right. It probably was a massacre.” And we had the National Park Service start looking into what they heard from the other people and not—it took a while for them to change that word. So I left the club because I just could not believe it was a battle. And now they are calling it the biggest massacre this side of the Mississippi. They are just now starting to realize that something happened cause they didn’t even investigate and say, “Now which ones are the guilty Indians?” Because there were a lot of stealing and killing both
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 17 among the Shoshone and other Indians and the white people.
[4:81]
MW: I have two questions about that. How old were you when your grandfather told you that he wanted you to be the story, to tell the true story?
MP: All the time he was telling all of his grandchildren.
MW: Okay.
MP: But I stuck to it. And—
MW: Because he was there as a young boy, is that correct? He was the one who was with his grandmother that said to lay down and hold still, that was your grandfather?
MP: My grandfather was Yeager. Will you repeat that again?
MW: As I understand, it was your grandfather; your grandfather was there at Bear River. He was a young boy about ten or twelve when the massacre happened, is that correct?
MP: Yes.
MW: And my other question is, is changing the name or working to tell that true story, is that the thing you would like to be most remembered for? Or is there some other part of your life that is even more significant than that? What would you like to be remembered for?
MP: I’d like—oh there’s so many things. I remember—sometimes it gets to the point where you just—I could almost break down. One day, I think it was Anne’s husband, Steven, came to the house just when I was in the middle of writing something about the massacre. And I just had to break down. I waited for him to leave; I don’t know what he came after, but that same—so many things happened—what 1986—I think we were up at Franklin. We’d go up there every January and remember the people that were killed, and we came home one evening quite late from there, [the] massacre site, [and the] telephone was ringing, and I answered the telephone and she said, “You have been picked as our honorary mother of the year for the state of Utah.” I said, “Will you repeat that?” She said, “I said it’s the national organization and not any of your family voted for you, but you have been picked for the National Organization of Mothers to represent the state of Utah.”11 And I said to my husband, “There’s somebody on the phone that says I’ve been chosen as honorary mother.” And he said, “Are you sure you heard right? You probably heard them say the orneriest mother of Utah.” (laughter)
MW: That’s nice; that is a nice honor.
11. Mae was awarded Utah Honorary Mother of the Year in 1986.
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 18 MP: But after that, I had a lot of nice comments for quite some time; some of them are [from] Indian people down in Uintah and Washington, down in that area—counties would call me and say, Hello, Mother. He said, “You’re everybody’s mother now, not only your own children’s.”
MW: That’s nice. What! This tape is almost over, and I hope I have another one. But do you have a certain motto or scripture or life saying that you have lived your life by? A certain phrase or teaching that has meant a lot to you for many years?
MP: I’ve had so many nice things happen to me. And I think changing it to word battle to massacre was the probably the—I’ll have to contribute that to my grandparents and this Ray Diamond and Yeager who were the storytellers. And I was going to say to begin with, before one of the Indians said the—some of them, for their storage they had little wheatgrass tepees. And this little wheatgrass tepee was walking along it was so full of Indians, and this little grass hut was just moving along with legs and that’s what our brother, Frank Warner remembers when he dived into there, he found his relative. He was about six years old or something, and he remembers that; he said, “I remember it really well.” And after the massacre, they settled down and then one time they were so hungry because the soldiers had scattered their food all over the ground, and Grandpa says looking at—
(The tape ends here, but Mae recalls the vivid colors that her grandfather sees on the ground looking at the scattered food, berries, blood, and wood, etc., after the massacre)
MW: What you just said about your mom about what she stressed to you as a daughter to you, as children.
AP: Okay, well they always—she always wanted to make sure that we were dressed well because she that knew that if we felt like we looked good then we would do good. You know we would be able to succeed in school or whatever else we did; they just wanted to make sure we always had nice clothes and looked clean and because she knew it would help our self-esteem I think. And she learned that from her parents.
MW: Right. How many brothers and sisters are there in your family?
AP: Uh, there’s three girls and three boys. We had a brother pass away when he was sixteen though.
MW: Would that probably be one of the most difficult things that she had to live through?
AP: I’m sure it was; I’m really sure it was. I was only eight years old, and so I don’t remember a lot about it. I wish I could, but I don’t, but I’m sure it was really hard for them.
MW: And all of you have lived here in this area for?
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 19 AP: Yes, we have. My sister had moved away to I think Washington or Wyoming, but she’s back now. She was gone for a while. We’ve all been pretty close.
MW: Can you tell me anything about her beadwork and things that she—has that been a skill that she’s passed on to you?
AP: Oh yes, definitely. As a matter of fact, I think I’m the only one in the family, her immediate family, that took on with the beadwork, and so I, ever since I can remember, we were little stringing beads. And so it just was—it came really naturally to me. And uh, so yeah, I’m the one that kept up with it. And I still do it. I was able to take a oh— maybe it was two or three years ago—I was able to get a grant from the state and learn from a master teacher, and so I had that opportunity to do that, and that was really a neat experience because I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know. But yeah, I’m the one that does the beadwork now.
MW: Now that it’s passed on to you.
AP: Um-hm
MW: And some of them have been honored. I read a few newspaper articles about honors that have been given, and they’ve been in museums all over the country.
AP: That’s right, yes.
MW: Tell me about some of the pieces or anything?
AP: Oh, it’s just, there’s just so much; I can’t even tell you. There was—she was telling me a story about the queen of New Zealand, that she, my brother—Bruce was the director of Indian Affairs for Utah for several years, maybe ten years or so, and I think one time the queen of New Zealand was coming to the United States, and she said that some of our students here were supposed to go meet with her I think maybe in Washington D.C. or something; they were supposed to take a gift with them. Well they came unprepared, didn’t have anything to take. And so my brother called my mom and said, “Have you got anything we can take?” So she and her sister got some beautiful pieces of beadwork and sent them with the students and then my brother, I think it was my brother, got a phone call from the queen of New Zealand and said that she that was coming to Utah, and she wanted to meet my mom because the beadwork was so beautiful. I think she sent—I’m not sure what all she sent, but I know she sent a couple of dolls, and she found out later that those dolls were in a very special museum or someplace in New Zealand where like things from heads of state were given to this queen, and she said that the queen told her that the dolls had so much power; they could just all feel the power coming from the dolls. So that was just one little story. But they’ve had so many things and so much notoriety and many articles written about them and pictures taken all of these years with their beautiful beadwork.
MW: And is it on exhibition now currently in certain museums that you know of?
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 20
AP: I know that they—she—we have had things on display up in Wellsville at the—I’m not sure what it’s called—the American Heritage Museum.
MW: Museum, uh-huh.
AP: It’s been up there a lot, and then I think in the paper last week I saw an article, maybe just last Friday where it said Mae Parry and her beadwork was going to be shown somewhere else and (laughs) I get—so, so many times I pick up the paper, and there she is that I just, I totally forgot to cut it out, but I don’t know where that was—Salt Lake area somewhere. But yeah, she’s loaned things out over the years many times. I think she’s given a lot of things to different museums, different places.
MW: Do you do jewelry also or just the beadwork?
MP: Mention about that queen in New Zealand.
AP: I just told her that, yeah. Jewelry. We don’t do like—we do necklaces; anything to do with beads. We don’t do like the silver, the turquoise things like that. But we’ve learned a lot; I’ve learned to do necklaces and hairpieces and belt buckles, you know, really a lot of decorations, that kinds of things for people to wear like at pow-wows and things like that. So lot of decorations.
MW: Who do you think have been the most influential people in your mom’s life, would you say?
AP: Um, I would just have to say, influential people in her life—oh, she’s met so many people. It seems like to me she’s just influenced everybody else, you know, along the way. Her parents I’m sure were a big influence on her life—just her tribal people that she’s met along the way. She’s—
MP: For a little girl that wouldn’t come down from the tree, I’ve flown so many airplanes that I became a—
AP: A frequent flyer?
MP: Yeah, a frequent flyer. (laughs) My brother and I used to get—tie a dish towel around our necks right here, and, like Superman cape and leap off Grandma’s chicken coop things. We were going to fly when we got—we’d just land and flop on the ground.
MW: Are you are you surprised that you’ve been able to do so much in your life?
MP: No.
MW: No? You planned to do good, big, big things, didn’t you?
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 21 MP: Pardon?
[0:68]
MW: You planned to do big things in your life. You planned to show that Mr. Harris that he was wrong about you?
MP: Well, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve done. I’ve enjoyed meeting people. I’ve met so many nice people that they outnumber the ones that gave me a bad time.
MW: Who has been the most influential person in your life?
MP: I have so many that added to my experience. A lot of them are like doctors and, you know, doctors and lawyers and people in the government I’ve met [that] I’ve enjoyed working with. And I’ve got letters from about five governors, and I enjoyed people. A lot of times, some of our Indian people are so ornery and mean, you just have to overlook it.
MW: Well you’ve done a lot of good service for people and women in the state. You’ve been a good example and a good role model, and we hope to honor you in this Utah Women’s Walk, so thank you for your time. I appreciate being able to visit with you today.
MP: Well, I’ve done quite a lot of things for the University of Utah. I’ve been in several of their films. I did The Deseret Sea or something; several little a parts I’ve had on television with the University of Utah TV channel.
MW: That’s good to know; I will check out those things so I have access to that for this this biography. Thank you again for your time.
MP: You’re welcome.
[ ] End of interview
Utah Women’s Walk: Mae Timbimboo Parry 22