JIM WALKER. Born 1918.
Transcript of OH 1147V A-C, recorded at Walker Ranch on June 26, 2003, for Boulder County Parks and Open Space and the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Dock Teegarden. Also present were Rich Koopmann, Tom McMichen, Don Burd, and Carol Beam. This interview also is available on video, filmed by Liz McCutcheon. The transcript was prepared by Anne Dyni.
[A].
000 DOCK: You want me to ask Jim questions?
TOM: That’s what we want to do. We want you fellas to talk. You can ask him questions. During your conversation, if we’ve got a specific question, we’ll raise our hands and sort of throw it in there. Otherwise, we want to let you fellas visit and talk about some of the stuff you’ve already been talking about. The wagon road up here, and the Loomis Road and whatever else.
DOCK: I’ve got a list of 33 questions. You gonna need some tonsil lubricant before we get started? (laughter)
TOM: I’m gonna get you fellas a cup of water real quick. I’ll be right back.
DOCK: I didn’t mean old Tanglefoot. (laughter) Well, we may as well get started. I have a feeling that Open Space is considerably interested in that sawmill, and that’s what we’re talking about right here, only they didn’t hear it. But, would you go over that again and locate….that’s a big steam sawmill …and about when was that?
JIM: Oh, probably along in 1925, along in there. I was born in 19… and I was probably 7 or 8 years old.
DOCK: You certainly remember it. The family bought it and operated the sawmill themselves?
JIM: Well, Frank Woods was a partner on it.
DOCK: Frank Woods? OK, for whom Woods Gulch is named. That steam engine is in storage right here in the barn, and you’re surprised if it’s the same engine.
JIM: Right.
DOCK: We’ll get a chance to show him that engine and maybe he’ll know if that was the same old engine.
TOM: When we get out of here, we’ll walk in and look wherever you fellas want to look. DOCK: And after that period, how long did that sawmill run?
JIM: Oh I would say probably up until ‘28, ‘30.
DOCK: So something over ten years?
JIM: Oh yeah, yeah.
DOCK: And the market was Boulder?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: What trees were you cutting?
JIM: Anything that was of any size. We cut spruce and pine.
DOCK: And the firs on the back hillside here?
JIM: Well, what I call spruce is what you call firs.
DOCK: I suspected that. (laughter) Some of them up there now are 12” to 14” in diameter. So they must have grown in 100 years or you’d have cut them too.
JIM: Probably. We wouldn‘t cut anything under 18 to 24 inches.
DOCK: That’s something to make a note of. 18 to 24 inches.
JIM: I think you were telling’ me about all these small stumps around? Well., that was when the beetles went through here and killed all the trees. And then they let the public come in and cut the dead trees and get them out for firewood. And that’s where your small stumps come from.
DOCK: Then any of the 10 and 12-inch stumps that we’re stumbling around up here, even though they seem to be quite old, those were not saw logs.
JIM: Probably not. Probably some beetle kill that they took down.
RICH: Did you move the lumber mill around or did it stay in one place?
JIM: No, it was stationary.
RICH: It was stationary.
DOCK: How about some of the portable mills that operated up here into the ‘50s. Were they taking some of those smaller stumps?
JIM: Not very many. You take a log that’s any smaller than 12 to 14 inches, you couldn’t get anything out of it. It didn’t pay. By the time you slabbed it, why you got a 2” x 4” . (laughter)
DOCK: Well, that’s been a puzzle to me. I keep stumbling over those stumps and I remember when the portables were operating up here. And a lot of that didn’t make sense. Now I guess it does. What size saw was on that? It was a circle saw, of course.
JIM: Yeah, I can’t remember, but I think it was about a 42 inch.
DOCK: Forty-two inch? That would take a big log. Hmm. You don’t know any of them that might be around on the ranch here?
JIM: No.
DOCK: And you retired the sawmill and from then on it was all contract with these portable jobs.
JIM: Yeah
DOCK: What’s the name of that draw that goes down to Boulder Crick that we‘re looking across right here?
JIM: Right here? That’s Martin Gulch.
DOCK: Martin Gulch. And the far side over there, some of those portable sawmills even went along that hillside up there, didn’t they.
JIM: Yeah
DOCK: It’s surprising where they took some of those darn things. They were run with truck engines and put on skids and they just moved them around.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: OK. Open Space calls this draw right down below here Columbine Gulch. It runs down off the top of the hill here and down in to..
JIM: The Columbine Gulch that we used to run is one that comes down that side over there. It went into the Loomis Gulch. Then Loomis Gulch went down to the Woods Gulch where the mill was.
DOCK: OK, and then Martin Gulch continues on down to the crick. JIM: Yeah. It goes clear into the South Boulder. DOCK: Now, from that ruin down here on the flat and Woods Gulch, there are the remains of probably two buildings down there? One of which is very old and it’s been patched up several times and they’ve all fallen in now. What’s the history of those?
JIM: I think they were built by the people that was loggin’.
DOCK: I see.
JIM: While they were loggin’.
DOCK: There‘s two stages there. One of them’s old enough to have square nails and it was log and has notched corners. And then there was another one later that has wire nails, round ones, and …
JIM: Aren’t you thinking’ of the Martin house?
DOCK: Uh, I always thought so.
JIM: That Martin house is the one with the square nails in it.
DOCK: OK.
JIM: And the deal on the other side that had the round nails? We built that for …..see we tore the Martin house inside out and used it for a hay barn.
DOCK: That makes sense.
JIM: And then this one we built for a shed for the cabin.
DOCK: And just above it up the draw is one of your typical barns.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: OK, we’ll get to those in a few minutes after we get the sawmills out of the way here. Up that draw that they call Columbine, and I don’t know what you call it…probably Martin? Where it comes down just over the ridge here, down to the old Martin house?
JIM: I guess we never even had a name on that one.
DOCK: All right. It isn’t very big but there‘s a good stream comes down it. And there was a road that went up on the west or right-hand side of it goin‘ up. And that must have been a timber hauling road, too.
JIM: I would imagine yeah. I can’t place that.
RICH: Dock, is the boiler down in that draw? That boiler that’s bricked in?
DOCK: I don’t know of it. There’s a wagon rack in there that I was comin’ to.
RICH: There was an old boiler sitting down in one of those gulches that had brick around it. Is that one of yours, Jim?
JIM: No. I’m thinking the one you’re talkin’ about is down below the Martin house isn’t it?
RICH: Yeah, I think it could be.
JIM: Yeah, the mill that was down in there. The one we had, we just gathered up rock and got clay from where that road goes around out of Woods Gulch. That clay was sticky as the dickens. We’d dig clay out of there and then the fire just baked it and worked just like brick.
DOCK: Anyway, up that draw there’s the remains of what was a mighty stout corral . It isn’t very big and it extends from the crick up toward the road probably about 75 feet. It’s almost down now. There‘s a gate there and it has hand-forged ring hinges.
JIM: Oh yeah. (chuckle) That would be my dad’s work.
DOCK: And there’s the same kind of hinges on the gate up at the top of Meyers Gulch, over that old wagon road that goes down to the flume. Identical. Made by the same man.
JIM: Yeah, right. He made all the hinges for all these gates. In the wintertime, we’d make up all the hinges for the gates and all the double-tree assemblies. Everything we needed for next year. We worked in the blacksmith shop over there.
DOCK: He was an artist.
JIM: Yep.
DOCK: The interesting thing about it is I’ve never seen any of those hinges before that were made with a sharp spike on the end so you just plain drove ‘em into the gate post. Don, have you ever seen any of those?
DON: Um hm.
DOCK: OK, you’ve got me beat. These are the first I ever saw, found up here on this ranch.
DON: Well they’re, like you said, they’re unique. Every blacksmith had his own touch, I think. DOCK: I’m sure that’s right. Anyway, do you know anything about that corral? That was a stout one. I thought it might have been for bulls or stallions but it doesn’t figure down in there. It might have been for draft horses for logging. But you don’t place it?
JIM: I can’t place it. (chuckle) I’ve been out of this country too long. ( Laughs)
DOCK: Well, I thought that Open Space might recover those hinges with a post for a museum, because they are museum pieces. Then if you go up that road in the draw for about 300 yards, there’s the wreckage of a wagon. There’s just a hub and a part of a wheel stickin’ up . There’s …what do you call that front axle that the wheel’s attached to in wagon terminology? Anyway, that’s all that’s left of a wagon turned over . But you don’t know that wagon either?
JIM: No.
013 DOCK: Did you use the trucks on the ranch?
JIM: You mean for timber?
DOCK: Anything.
JIM: Well, yeah, the truck here at the ranch here we could haul cattle out with.
DOCK: I see.
JIM: But that was all we‘d use it for.
DOCK: And what was it?
JIM: Uh, Dodge. Must have been about a ‘50 or so.
DOCK: OK, we’ve already covered, for the benefit of people that weren’t with us, you drove a 1926 Dodge high-wheeler to school everyday down in Boulder from here.
JIM: Well, when I could get through. I packed 3 sets of chains and I tore up two of ‘em. And I’d leave it and walk home. And when I got home, we’d repair two sets of chains so I’d have three again. The road was never plowed and of course if you got high-centered you got out with a shovel and shoveled out from under it till you hit the ground again.
DOCK: We’re talking about the 1930s.
JIM: Well, before that.
DOCK: They rebuilt that road in the late ‘20s and with the CCC again in the early 30s, didn’t they?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Yeah, I knew Jim in high school and when you saw that big old high-wheel Dodge come chuggin’ in, you knew that the roads were passable to Walker’s ranch. You said that that wagon road that runs from the top of Meyers Gulch down to the aqueduct was also a road that went down to the Magnolia Road and I haven’t found any trace of that. The trees have got it pretty well covered up, so I always assumed it was for construction of the aqueduct.
JIM: No, it was the road down to there we used to…One time the precinct was Magnolia and we’d have to go over there to vote and take saddle horses and ride down that road over that aqueduct. And we still had a road down through there.
DOCK: Did the stage coaches or freight wagons use that road as a cutoff too?
JIM: I don’t think so. I never heard that.
DOCK: It was too late for that.
JIM: No, it was too steep for a lot of stuff.
DOCK: I have trouble just walkin’ it. To think of wagons goin’ down there. It’s just marvelous what horses and wagons could do. That was real horsepower. I‘m very much interested in your help to trace out the stage and wagon roads up here. There’s a lot of old possibilities but uh…
JIM: You mean the one out of Bear Canyon?
DOCK: Well, Gregory was first and then …
JIM: No, Bear Canyon was the oldest.
DOCK: Bear Canyon was first?
JIM: Yup. Bear Canyon was the first one that went through here so they could get to Magnolia…, or not Magnolia… DOCK: Central City. Gregory diggin’s. Right. Now that’s a piece of history straightened out.
JIM: When they built the Gregory Road, that’s when they built the ridge road out through here, clear out to where the Wings were at.
DOCK: What?
JIM: That ridge road went clear out to where Wings lived. When they built Gregory Canyon, then they could finish that on up this way. Before that, it come up through this way from Bear Canyon.
DOCK: This trip’s been worthwhile. (laughter) OK. The only reason for that early traffic was for people to get to the Gregory diggin’s.
JIM: Um hm. Freighters mostly.
DOCK: Right, but they did have stagecoaches too?
JIM: Oh, I guess. I never heard my dad mention any stagecoaches, but it was a pretty rough road and pretty rugged and they never could depend on it because…
DOCK: It kept washin‘ out.
JIM: No, that slide at the lower end. Just as you start up the canyon, there’s a rock slide in there and that thing kept slidin’ all the time. I know my granddad had a wagon and a team comin’ from Boulder up through there and he had a dog with him and a squirrel ran across that slide and the dog took after it. It took him better than half a day throwin’ rock out of there so he could get through with the wagon.
DOCK: That must be the talus slope that comes down from the south. That sound about right? About the right location?
JIM: Um hm.
DOCK: OK.
JIM: That was one reason they finally abandoned that road because you never knew whether you could get over it or not.
DOCK: OK. It was a toll road and so was Bear Canyon.
JIM: I imagine at that time, probably. Yeah.
DOCK: I don’t know where the toll road was on Gregory. It must have been at the mouth. There was a cattle ranch there, the Muggins Ranch. But I think we recently found a toll road for Bear Canyon.
JIM: Oh, did you?
DOCK: It’s a location that hasn’t been documented . There’s some old brick, some cast iron from an old stove, and it’s below where I would have expected it to be, but I think that we finally found it and Harmon was one of the builders of that road…Harmon Draw named for him up here. JIM: Um hm.
DOCK: Never thought about goin’ into the history business, have you?
JIM: No (chuckle)
020 DOCK: You’re straightenin’ out some. Let’s see. The wagon road and stage that came up Gregory, when it did come up, and I’ve seen a picture of a Concord coach on that road. I don’t know how they did it.
JIM: Well, you see when you come up Gregory and we always called the “fill” when you hit those smooth rocks over there, …
DOCK: That goes up Long Canyon and then down to Kosslers?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: And then where did it go?
JIM: Then it went on out the ridge, the ridge road, and to the Meyers field and on out to Wings.
DOCK: And that goes right through Forsythe Canyon, up Forsythe Crick? That’s where Wings’ place was.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Did that cross Meyers Gulch where the barn sits, and went right straight west through there?
JIM: (Shakes head “no“)
DOCK: No?
JIM: No, that road stayed—well, I guess it might have been—it stayed right at the foot of Meyers field. That‘s the one that opens up towards where you were talkin’ about, the road down to Magnolia. It was right at the foot of that and you come up above …can’t think of that guy’s name now. Anyway, it come up right through to where Wings lived— Retallack—right above the Retallack place.
DOCK: There’s a Retallack Gulch over there too. Right. OK. Then the road that is still little more than a two-track, that crosses just below the barn down there in the lower Meyers Gulch, and there used to be a portable sawmill right across from it. That road that goes through there, I thought went right over to the gulch too. Did it?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: OK, then there were two ways to get to the same place.
JIM: Yep.
DOCK: I wish I’d run into you a little while ago. It would have saved a lot of shoe leather. (laughs) This little cabin right here was also on a road that come from up in there and went down through here along… what the dickens is the name of this ridge?
RICH: Langridge Dike?
DOCK: No.
RICH: Further over?
DOCK: Yeah, it mentioned that name a minute or two ago. The people that homesteaded up in here and then down along the South Boulder and this ridge along behind here...
(Discussion to recall name)
DOCK: But anyway, this little cabin is probably a lot older than it’s been given credit for. Would you say as far back as the ‘60s?
DON: I read an account somewhere by Kosslers that this might have been here in 1859.
DOCK: I’m satisfied that it was back toward the end of the ‘60s someplace. The oldest building in the country here. Now if we could find out who built it and why.
DON: Well, the name I heard was a fella by the name of Lou Jain and that was written by one of the Kosslers for a newspaper article in the 1950s.
DOCK: The Jain family was a family of stage coachers.
DON: Well, they mentioned that, I don’t know which Kossler it was, but they wrote it in the 1950s for the Boulder Camera and they mentioned they think this cabin was here in 1859.
JIM: Galen’s first wife, she wrote for the Camera.
DOCK: I think it’s fallin’ into place. I don’t know whether it can be documented or not. But it’s interesting that you come up with the Jain family because they were a family of coachmen. There’s a draw out near Six-Mile Fold, just east, that’s called Jain Draw, and this is letting “the cat out of the bag” and I guess I probably shouldn’t…. Heck. It’s on City Open Space and on an archaeological survey we found a site of probably 1860s, a place that had burnt to the ground. But the artifacts put it back about that far and it almost certainly was a stage station, more than just a stop. I still haven’t said where it was. But it all ties in, and the Jains were known to have been coachmen in the Left Hand Canyon area. So this has all fallen into place and I’m sure glad I heard the Jain name attached to this. So, it very well could have been a stage stop. But it wouldn’t go back as far as ‘59 probably because the first stages would have been just post-1860, but not by much. ‘64 maybe. It’s something we’ll have to work on. I wonder who could do that. (laughter)
CAROL: You’ve got my number. (laughter continues)
DON: I saw that newspaper clipping either when I was talking with Stella (ed: Rogers) one time or one of your sisters, and I don’t know which one, that showed me their scrapbooks and that newspaper clipping was in there.
DOCK: I need that.
JIM: Probably one of my sisters. Leta Daniel.
DON: Right. Then you had one over on Glenwood or Grape Avenue, or something over in there?
JIM: Yeah. I had one in Boulder.
DON: Yeah, I remember visiting her one time and looking in her scrapbook and all her pictures and that article was in …it was either her or Stella that showed me that. I don’t remember which.
DOCK: Who was that?
DON: One of Jim’s sisters or Stella Rogers.
JIM: Ruth, next to the oldest, lived in Boulder on Grape.
DON: Yeah, that was her.
JIM: Then Leta, my oldest sister always lived up here. They got a cabin just in below where Stella’s at. Then when we left the ranch why they stayed here and worked for Taylor for a year or two.
DOCK: I don’t like to appear as a scavenger, but I do it. (laughter) Do you suppose there’s any chance that your family might have some old photographs or clippings that we could use in this? JIM: I’ve looked and looked and I don’t know where they went. I can remember pictures of the mill down there, and I could not find them. I called my sister in Denver to see if she has them. Called my sister up in Alaska to see if she’s got ‘em. None of them have got them. A whole bunch of pictures.
DON: Ruth shared a whole bunch of ‘em with me. We’ve got spread sheets of them. I don’t know if we can make photos off of them or not.
TOM: They’re on a computer?
DON: Yeah.
TOM: OK.
030 DOCK: How about Charles Hockaday?
JIM: Oh yeah, He was across the crick.
DOCK: Crescent Meadows. And your grandfather bought that property from him?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Do you know anything about his history?
JIM: No, I don’t.
DOCK: He was a teamster. He built a road licensed from the Territorial legislature in 1874, now known as the Reynolds Ranch. He may have built that house. He did build a road up the draw below it and through what’s now a lodgepole forest over to North Beaver Crick, down to South Boulder Crick, up the South Beaver Crick and on to the Gregory diggings. 1874. In 1875, we was elected Territorial sheriff. And Colorado became a state the next year so he was the last Territorial sheriff and the first state sheriff in Boulder County because his two-year term overlapped that period. He is planted in the marble orchard (ed: cemetery) up here on Kossler Place…that little private orchard. He and his wife are in it and I think one other member of the family.
JIM: I know my grandmother had buried up there and then….
DOCK: Oh, your grandmother’s buried up there?
JIM: Well, they couldn’t get in to get to the cemetery and then the next spring they dug her up and took her to Green Mountain (cemetery).
DOCK: That’s interesting. Well, there are several people in there including several recent people.
JIM: I didn’t know that, but I knew there were several in there before.
DOCK: Joe Malcolm, a retired Marine colonel from WWII, I think is the one that built that gray castle back there and he’s buried in there and several members of his family already.
JIM: Oh, is it? They still kept it for a cemetery then.
DOCK: Apparently so. It’s perfectly legal. I checked with the coroner years ago, Norm Howe, and you can still do it.
JIM: Oh, yeah. I know Scates did it. Dick and Edith is buried there.
DOCK: I was up to visit with Edith just before she died. She was 94. So Dick went in ‘85, I think, and they’re both in there. But then that’s a heritage ranch, so they’re safe there for a while.
JIM: I don’t know. Dick told me one time they had that surveyed and plotted out.
DOCK: The cemetery?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Yeah, like I say it’s safe now because it’s on a heritage ranch because the same family’s been on it for over 100 years. I kind of miss those people.
RICH: The Colorado Cattlemen’s Association has the primary interest in the Scates Ranch now because Edith turned it over to them before she died.
JIM: I didn’t know that. Does anybody live up there anymore?
RICH: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think Marie still takes care of the place…Marie Mosden?
JIM: Well, she used to run her cows up there.
TOM: Talking about the Scates property?
DOCK: Yeah
TOM: Dock, you and I were up Magnolia last fall and we went by there and I thought we saw some activity that suggested that maybe somebody was living there. But I may not be recalling that correct. Do you remember that?
DOCK: Oh yes, I’m sure there is. I just don’t know who anymore. George Giggey was taking care of her up to the last, and the place, too. George is quite a guy. (to Jim) The Kossler family, when did they come in?
035 JIM: Well, they were miners at Black Hawk and Central City. If he was in the mines over there more than two years… he had miner’s puff, or miner’s consumption. They started with that and so they went up here and bought the ranch and thought maybe gettin’ out of the mines might help him.
DOCK: Too late. It never did.
JIM: Hm mm.
DOCK: My grandfather went that way too. They all did, the old timers. So that would have been considerably after the period we’re talking about.
JIM: Well, let’s see. My mom got married in 1902. You take 22 years off of that. That would put her about when she was born. And she was, I think, 10 when they come over here on the place.
RICH: That makes it 1890.
JIM: Somewhere in there.
DOCK: That fits. 1890s. So they were old timers up here, too. Well, your grandfather married a Kossler?
JIM: No. My dad did.
037 DOCK: Your dad did. Like I said, if my rememberer… (chuckle) Well, this is somethin’ that might be of interest to people. We’ve talked about it, about the wildlife up here. Remember jack rabbits? Were there any jack rabbits up here?
JIM: A few, but not very many.
DOCK: But some.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: I think that’s interesting because now that it’s forested, no way. But back then, yeah, and west of here, too. Marmots?
JIM: Very few.
DOCK: Same thing. Grassland animals. RICH: Prairie dogs?
JIM: No. (laughter)
DOCK: Ringtail cats?
JIM: I can’t think of any.
DOCK: I’ve known of two colonies back in the old days between here and the Halfway House down Flagstaff Road. I’m surprised there weren’t any here, but they hang on canyons, mostly.
JIM: There wouldn’t be any I can think of up in here.
DOCK: And they had bobcats.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Badgers?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Bears?
JIM: Very few. There was a few around, but nowhere near what they are now.
DOCK: No, but there always were some. Did you know of any cattle killers among them? Any problem with bears bein’ cattle killers?
JIM: (shakes head “no”)
DOCK: Know of any grizzlies anywhere in the country?
JIM: No.
DOCK: And wolves?
JIM: Just one that I know of. (laughs)
DOCK: Did you ever see that bugger?
JIM: That wolf? Yeah I took a shot at him once. Or I was goin’ to, I should say. My dad bought me a brand new rifle. He said he’d pay me ten bucks if I could get the wolf. And like a dummy, I hadn’t cleaned the rifle up, and took it out that morning. And either HE had or something else had killed a deer right at the lower end of the opening over the top of the hill and down there. And he was eatin’ off of that. So I thought “Boy, I’ve got ten bucks.” So I lifted the rifle and clicked and the bolt had (unintelligible) in it and cold weather had froze it up and it wouldn’t fire. (laughter)
DOCK: Boy that used to be pretty common. Those firing pins stick. (chuckle)
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: We talked about this back in high school days. I saw the bugger once, heard him a couple of times. And you saw him several times?
JIM: Yeah. Two or three times up here.
DOCK: And probably heard him quite a little.
JIM: Yeah, a little bit.
DOCK: I talked to the game warden down at Central City about that bugger. They knew about him over there, and the general consensus was that he was a loner, the last of his bunch, and he was just making a circle, a big one. Probably come up Bear Canyon, through here, over and down into South Boulder Crick and over toward Rollinsville, Apex, Central City area, then around. And probably made that round over a period of time. How long do you think he might have been comin’ through here?
JIM: That one year was the only time I’ve ever saw him and I saw him actually three times that year.
DOCK: Just one year?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: They figured he was probably the last of his kind. He was lookin’ for company or a mate and finally gave up and went elsewhere because he just disappeared without a trace. But that’s interesting. Most people (say) ”Wolves, here?” But there is a Wolf Hill out north of town. Must have been named for somethin’ bigger than a rabbit. Let’s see, uh…
041 RICH: You missed the mountain lions.
JIM: I’ve never seen one up here. There was a few. I’ve tracked ‘em. I never saw ‘em.
DOCK: They had manners then. (laughter)
JIM: Yeah, you bet they did. Because at that time (unintelligible) had a bounty on 200 bucks. If you got one, you got 200 bucks for it.
DOCK: The (unintelligible) had a bounty off and on, too. But it was like $1.50, but it was one of the reason they were scarce. And the bears, too. They stayed out of sight.
JIM: Yeah, they’d better.
042 DOCK: Yeah. That’s right. They had manners then. The road to Crescent Meadows and that part of the ranch you ran cattle back and forth across there, and …. Now I can’t remember his name again now, and we used THAT just a few minutes ago, too. Tall red-headed member of the family, had a pock-marked face, uh…lived over there.
TOM: Wasn’t Giggey, was it?
JIM: No. We should have got at this twenty years ago. (laughter)
DOCK: I was here. (more laughter) Anyway, how did they get across the crick?
JIM: I don’t know whether it’s still there or not. But they did build a foot bridge across the crick. We had a regular bridge there and the more stouter deteriorated after we left. But we had a bridge through there. We took cars and horses and wagons and everything through it.
DOCK: I see. I’ve always wondered about that and I’m not familiar with the bridge. This fellow is Mrs. Rogers’ father.
JIM: Carl Daniel.
DOCK: Carl Daniel. Well, that’s what I said. (laughter) He lived over there and took care of that part of the ranch. So back and forth across was no problem.
JIM: Oh, no.
DOCK: How about a schoolhouse up in here?
JIM: Well, of course we burnt one of ‘em down up here. (chuckle) And then this one up here above where Stella lives now, and then in the Woods Gulch about where that house sets in the Woods Gulch? Originally, part of that house was a schoolhouse.
DOCK: OK.
JIM: ‘Cause my two kids went to school down there and Bowles‘s kids went down there. Bowles was the one who had the sawmills around here.
DOCK: Who was the schoolma’am? JIM: Miss Greeson. She lived in Boulder. She was related to Stella’s husband.
DOCK: OK. And then there was another one that came up from Eldorado Springs and stayed with the Kosslers at their school. Her name was Dorothy Chesebro.
JIM: Oh, yeah.
DOCK: And she walked up here.
JIM: And then my first teacher was Ruth Dunn.
DOCK: Ruth Hellart, later.
JIM: Yeah, and she used to come right up the canyon up here and she stayed up here at the ranch and then walked back weekends.
DOCK: Does anybody detect the difference between the modern school ma’am and some those ladies? (Laughter)
JIM: When my mom went to school, she walked to classes down to the Academy down there in Boulder.
DOCK: St. Mary’s…..St. Gertrude’s Academy?
JIM: Yep. And she walked there everyday to school.
TOM: Jim, you said your children went to school down here at the schoolhouse in the Woods Gulch. When was that? When were they in school? Would that have been in the forties, or…
JIM: No. Well, it could have been, yeah.
047 DOCK: So you made good time after high school. (laughter) We’ve been talking about the forest up here. It’s apparent that when your grandfather established this ranch, this was practically all open country and it was grasslands.
JIM: Pretty much. Well, some of these homesteads up there had fences on ‘em. But a lot of it was open. And for a long time we had a permit back here that run clear to Pinecliff. You could turn right out of the place onto the permit.
DOCK: The point being that cows don’t eat trees. This was open grasslands that supported a herd of how many cows? JIM: We had about 350 to 400 and when we sold it we was lucky to run 250 and rent Tolland’s up at Tolland. We rented about 6000 acres up there to run ‘em on. DOCK: Scates run their herd up there in the Mammoth Basin, too.
JIM: Yeah, so did Betassos.
RICH: You ran them all together, didn’t you?
JIM: Yeah. Um hm.
TOM: Were you using the same brand that your grand-daddy had?
JIM: Yeah. Well, originally our brand was just a cross.
DOCK: A cross?
JIM: Um hm. And then everybody started with a cross and a bell, and a cross and this or something else so you couldn’t tell what they were doin’. If they wanted your cow, all they had to do was put a bell under the cross and it was theirs. So then we went to this triangular-two-slash. And that’s what we had at the last.
DON: That’s in the scale house.
TOM: That’s right. That’s right. You talk about folks modifyin’ brands a little bit? I heard if a feller got caught with a runnin’ iron in them days, he was in pretty deep trouble.,
JIM: Yeah, but there was a lot of ‘em carried em.
TOM: Yeah, I’ll bet they did.
DOCK: Put that brand there for me will you, Jim? (Jim draws the brand on a piece of paper). You were runnin‘ your herds up in the forest after you‘d gone to Herefords then.
JIM: Yeah.
RICH: Do you know when you switched from Galloways to Herefords?
JIM: Oh, let’s see. About ‘39 or ‘40.
DOCK: Jim, would that work any better if you got on the other side of that pencil? (Laughter)
JIM: No (chuckles)
DOCK: You tried it, huh? We’ll get back to business here no matter what. Back to the forest. Then you kept working to keep the forest from intruding on the grassland as best you could, as long as you could?
JIM: Yeah. There was a lot of times when it was real cold and froze why Pop would give me a single-bitted axe and these double trees that was comin’ up, you’d just give ‘em a whack with that and it would bust ‘em off. And he’d send me out any time I had any spare time. That‘s what I‘d do to try to keep some of these meadows open and try to keep the trees down.
DOCK: As you look back, going west up through the Magnolia country, wasn’t that all open, too?
JIM: Pretty much.
DOCK: Giggey’s place up there and the Reynolds, and all the rest of it? Forest fires have anything to do with that?
JIM: Not that I know of.
DOCK: Didn’t have many then, huh? (laughs)
JIM: No.
DOCK: Okay. You know about the Halfway House or the stage stop on the Wing Place right straight west of here through Forsythe Canyon?
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: And do you have a handle on the time that the toll road came through Bear Canyon?
JIM: No I don’t. I don’t know when my grandpa homesteaded and the road he had to take comin’ up here then, but I couldn’t tell you when he homesteaded it.
DOCK: Probably the late ‘60s to early ‘70s.
JIM: Might have been. You know, I’ve got a kind of a picture down there that he got for raisin’ the best wheat in Boulder County and that was raised right about where the schoolhouse is now in Boulder….where the high school is. And it’s got a date on it and I think at that time he was startin’ to homestead up here, but I’m not sure.
DOCK: That’s interesting. We’ve got a little documentation on that canyon road, and I have to refer back to that. That Langridge Dike back here, that was about 1900 he was working’ that?
JIM: Yeah. DOCK: Did they junk that mill out and sell the machinery out of it?
JIM: Some of it, but you see that was a cyanide mill and about all the machinery they had in there was crushers to try to break that rock down. But they never broke it down fine enough to get the gold out. (brief sound check for buzzing noise)
054 DOCK: Well, let’s see here. These meadows, some of them at least, were hay meadows and you cut hay on them. Did the family plow and plant hay, or was that natural?
JIM: No, plowed and planted. Raised in alfalfa. These fields all around here. Take down at the Loman’s place down here, all those fields down through there was alfalfa.
DOCK: Up at the Reynolds place, I found a few wisps of timothy.
JIM: Yeah, but it was more wild hay up that way.
DOCK: There was a wild timothy here?
JIM: The timothy that WAS here was a form of timothy, but it’s smaller.
DOCK: OK. I’ve learned something there. A pleasure to be doing this with you. Then the hay meadows here had been plowed and planted and it was alfalfa. I’ll be darned. OK. Now we’re getting’ to…
RICH: Dock, I have a question about that also. Some of the old Sturtevant photos show these meadows that looked like there were potatoes in ‘em.
JIM: Oh, yeah. That’s the way most of the people up here got their start, was raisin’ potatoes. My granddad raised potatoes and he used to haul ‘em to Boulder in the wintertime on a sled. And he said that anytime he got less than a dollar a hundred for potatoes, why he wouldn’t haul ‘em anymore.
TOM: Last weekend, we got a fella that comes up here and does draft horse plowin’ and whatnot. And he got a spring-tooth harrow out here in this south field last weekend and turned it up just a little bit. And we had a bunch of them little girls runnin’ around putting cut-up spuds out in that field. Do you remember seein’ potatoes growin’ in this south field over here when you was little?
JIM: Used to be you could plant any place up here and raise potatoes. And now I’d say for the last probably 40 or 50 years, you couldn’t get a potato to grow up here if you had to. Everybody used to… the way they got their start, raisin’ potatoes. Take Winneger out there, he used to raise potatoes and take ‘em to Blackhawk and Central. Up there, they had scurvy then and potatoes would stop it and so he’d take potatoes over there. He’d get a dollar for one or two potatoes. Just people would come along and buy ‘em.
DOCK: That’s the magic word. “Winneger.” That’s the one I was fishin’ for. (laughs) Winnegar. I knew it would come up. (joking about the name) How many horses did you keep up here?
JIM: Oh, we’d usually have about four saddle horses and possibly three teams—six work horses.
DOCK: And what horses did you have for teams? Heavy or light?
JIM: Heavy. Draft horses.
TOM: Percherons, or …..?
JIM: No, all mixed. Just horses. No special breed.
DOCK: Morgans on steroids, huh? At any given time, how many hired hands did you have up here?
JIM: Well, of course when we was runnin’ the mill we had about 4 or 5. But ordinarily on the ranch we’ d have two. Sometimes three in the hayin’ season.
DOCK: Were they family men or “go throughs”?
JIM: Well they were people we would hire. Of course Carl always helped. He was on the other side over here. And then this John Yaekle.(sp?) He just worked between us and the Kosslers and just around in this country. You could always get him.
(Discussion about the name Yaekle)
060 (End of Tape A.)
[B].
000 JIM: And right up above the house that burnt down in that draw, I‘ve had to go in there with a dump rake and back in and pulled hay out because it wouldn’t dry in there …it was so wet. Now there’s nothing’.
DOCK: Now you’ve given me the opening I’ve been hopin’ for. How are the winters up here?
JIM: Nice, about four feet. DOCK: Four-foot snows.
JIM: Well, we always figured on about a 3-foot snow in the fall and then a fairly nice winter. Then in the spring you’d always get another 3 or 4 foot of snow. When Stella was born we couldn‘t get out of here with a car and I took a spring wagon and a team of horses and took her to Boulder ‘cause we didn’t want her up here. And when I went over the top of the hill up there by Kosslers, you know how a spring wagon tongue is. It was draggin’ in the snow.
DOCK: And that was after the Flagstaff Road had been graded? Darn good thing, huh?
JIM: Yeah. ‘Cause the cars couldn’t get up, I took her in a spring wagon down to where the road goes up to the flagpole, and then they finally got a car up that far and picked her up and took her on into Boulder.
DOCK: Wind ever blow up here?
JIM: Well, occasionally. Quite a bit. (laughter) I can remember going to that schoolhouse up there, where I’d back from here until I got into the timber. I couldn’t face it goin’ this way, right straight up.
DOCK: All this talk about droughts in recent years, we’ve seen a few of them, haven’t we?
JIM: Yeah. One thing they talk about the drought. This was really started a little bit before we sold the place, before this country started dryin’ up and you couldn’t raise hay where we used to have it a foot and a half tall. It’s takin’ a long time for it to come out of it. I hope it does but…
DOCK: I think the country has been dryin’ up gradually ever since the breakup of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. But in our time we’ve certainly seen a difference, a real difference. A lot of springs though the foothills have dried up forever, I’m sure. The winters aren’t like they used to be. They’re not as cold, not as much moisture.
JIM: No, you know… I was just wondering if all the people that live up here, if we catch a winter like we used to, they’d be in tough shape.
DOCK: Well, some of ‘em could stand a little modification of their shape. (chuckles)
JIM: We’d take two wagons to town in the fall, and we’d pick up all our groceries for the winter. And if we couldn’t get out of here, why maybe some yeast or salt and pepper, maybe a little sugar was all we ever needed. We had our own potatoes, and butchered our beef and had pigs that we butchered. We had everything, really. Bought all kinds of vegetables by the case.
DOCK: Do a little hunting on the side? A little venison, elk?
JIM: Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. (laughter)\
RICH: Jim, what are all those hooks then up in the barn? (laughter continues)
TOM: They look an awful lot like meat hooks, I tell ya.
DOCK: The statute of limitations is over. But there has been some changes. There’s just no question about that.
005 CAROL: Jim, how long did it take you to go to town on a wagon?
JIM: Oh, probably four hours.
TOM: To get there? That’s just to get there?
JIM: Yeah, and another four hours or a little longer comin’ back with a load.
TOM: Sure, comin’ back uphill. Did you ever spend the night in town?
JIM: (Shakes head “no“.)
TOM: No, you’d come back?
JIM: Yeah.
TOM: It would make for a long day, wouldn‘t it.
DOCK: It’s be shorter in the wintertime (chuckle). Kneales had another sawmill down in the canyon, too, didn’t they. A big steam mill.
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Were you ever in it?
JIM: No.
DOCK: There’s a story that Frank Barber from Eldorado Springs contracted to deliver the steam boilers to that and came up through here, one of the canyons, and across probably behind this ridge and then winched them with ropes on some of those extra large yellow pines clear down to the bottom of the canyon. Did you ever hear anything about that? They got to get those boilers in there somehow, alright. They said for many years after that there were rings around those trees where the ropes had scarred the bark to let those boilers down.
JIM: Well nope, I don’t. The only ones I know is my dad was talkin’ about (or my granddad told him) that when they started takin’ boilers and stuff into Black Hawk and Central, they’d come up over Flagstaff. And he said he remembered seein’ trees where they had oxen that they couldn’t pull ‘em up through there so they’d put a rope around a tree and then get the oxen to pull backwards to pull that wagon up there.
DOCK: There’s a bit of history. I’ve never run into it.
JIM: They’d pull ’em up on top of Flagstaff and then that would be the steepest part, getting’ up there.
DOCK: Where would they go through to get on the Piedmont to get over to Central? Probably up here on Magnolia Flats.
JIM: Probably.
DOCK: I ain’t gonna live long enough to get straightened out on these old transportation routes. It would be hard to find any traces of that one.
JIM: My dad showed me where they used to take ‘em up at, you know. That timber’s all gone now, and I could see where the ropes went around ‘em and the oxen couldn’t pull the wagons up, but they could rope around and then the oxen would pull down.
008 DOCK: How old do you think the oldest trees were up here that were logged or that you‘d known about? Ever check that out? Sit down and count the rings?
JIM: Never bothered to count the rings. I know I’ve seen logs up here that were probably 3-foot through.
DOCK: Three feet in diameter?
JIM: Um hm. Not around but 3-foot straight through.
DOCK: (to staff) That’s a piece of information I’ll bet you never had.
DON: There are some boards in the blacksmith shop that are 24”- 26” inches.
JIM: Oh yeah, we cut those all the time.
DOCK: And those were ponderosas? Yellow pine?
JIM: Yellow pine, yeah.
DOCK. Do you know what might have happened to any of the old saddles and harness on the ranch?
JIM: Yeah. We left ‘em here except a brand new set. I took the brand new set and I didn’t have any place to store all that stuff. And I took collars and harnesses and that stuff up to Betasso where his ranch was and stored ‘em in his barn. And when they had the sale up there, they sold all my stuff.
TOM: Oh, man. I’m sorry if I look a little sad. That’s a little disappointing. That’s a little hard to hear. That’s too bad.
JIM: What I should have done when I stored ’em up there was just to tell Ernie and write me a deal that the stuff they sold was mine, but I didn’t do it. And then he passed away and then they had that sale up there. I’ve heard people say, “Boy, we got some good horse collars up there.”
TOM: Reasonable.
RICH: We found a stove in one of the barns up at Ernie Betasso’s .
JIM: Oh, that stove, yeah.
DOCK: Was that from here, too?
JIM: No, I think Betasso’s had that.
DOCK: They’ve got a history up there too. In my wanderings around here, I’ve never seen a wood fence. One of the old rail and riders or the trestle fence and all those. Apparently the ranchers up in here never bothered to build wood fences.
JIM: No. We had a lot of what you might call fences made out of wood. But we just cut trees down in these rocky hills and lay ‘em down to make a fence. But really to fence anything in tight, why they always used barbed wire.
DOCK: You’re telling me that you’d take a tree and have it horizontal on the hill so that animals couldn’t climb over it?
JIM: Yeah. We’d gather up a lot of this pitch up in this country and put ‘em this way with a cross in them for fences.
DOCK: You know, I just learned something. I’ve seen those horizontal logs and couldn’t figure out what in Hades they were for. They work, I guess.
JIM: Yeah, There’s quite a few of ‘em up in here.
DOCK: Now, down in the valley on the mesas and out north along the ridges, there’s a lot of stone wall fences. You didn’t use those up in here either? JIM: No, they didn’t use those up here but they did a lot on the foothills down there DOCK: Miles of them. Think the Indians ever made any fences? (laughter)
JIM: (laughs) I don’t think so.
DOCK: There are people who do. (more laughter) In the lack of those fences, then all the fences we’ve seen up in here have been barbed wire.
JIM: Yeah, the biggest percentage of ‘em.
DOCK: And that was expensive. But your family fared a little better than a lot of people there anyway, but there is a little barbed wire. Did they use slick wire up there at all?
JIM: No.
DOCK: I’ve never seen of it up in this country. There’s some out at Rabbit Mountain, and there’s some on Mt. Sanitas. There’s some here and there, but apparently it never got up here.
RICH: Jim, was your family one of the first ones to put barbed wire up here? ‘Cause you said it was all open country.
JIM: Probably the one that’s put up the biggest part of it, yeah. As I say, there was a few of these little homesteaders that fenced around., but really the biggest part was put up by my granddad and dad.
DOCK: Did you ever build any fence?
JIM: Afraid I have. (chuckle).
DOCK: You know, one of the worst chores on a ranch or a farm, I’m sure, must be diggin’ post holes.
JIM: Yeah. (chuckle) In this country.
DOCK: I remember a fella one time that was out incensed beyond belief to think that someone had stolen a whole pickup load of fence post holes that he had stored. (Laughter)
TOM: Be awful hard to come by for someone to be stealin’ them, I tell you what.
DOCK: Well, it’s amazing what people will do.
RICH: …and believe. (laughter)
015 DOCK: The old railroad grade from the 1882 Utah and Pacific Road down on the mesas came up South Boulder Creek.
JIM: Right.
DOCK: How far up did it go?
JIM: In places, clear up to Yankee Doodle Lake.
DOCK: And there’s places down here on the creek that I’ll defy you to show me where it went, I think.
JIM: Probably a lot of it was forced out. I don’t know. But right down here on the crick where you take the road down and hit the crick, that’s the old railroad grade. Then it used to be before they had a road down to Eldorado Canyon, where the water board put the good road. But there used to be an old one down . It used to be that there wasn’t a road down there, and you went down in below Kneale’s place and then caught that old railroad grade and went clear up above Eldorado Springs. And where that wire used to be across the canyon that old Baldwin would walk, well it went right in back of that. And that was the old railroad bed.
DOCK: There‘s quite a cut there yet.
JIM: But there wasn’t any roads for a while right down the crick.
DOCK: I know of the Winneger Ranch down on South Boulder Crick, but was there a Winneger Ranch right up in here? They’ve got the Winneger Ridge named after him up in here.
JIM: I think that was because he was the only one up there that they named the ridge down from there.
DOCK: You think he was a pioneer settler up here?
JIM: Oh yeah.
DOCK: That’s worth knowin’. Do you know anything about the family?
JIM: No.
DOCK: I can’t even remember the name half the time.
RICH: It’s the end of the alphabet. (laughter)
JIM: He‘s the one that used to take potatoes to Black Hawk and Central and sell ‘em right off his wagon.
DOCK: Was that one on the ranch down on the South Boulder where George Giggey’s hangin’ out. That road from Magnolia down there is known as a cutoff road, and that was a stage road cutoff. Were those buildings down there associated with the stage line at all, do you know?
JIM: Right where you hit the crick? Right past it, that was the Winneger house, that’s where he lived. But whether he had any connection with the stage or not, I couldn’t say.
DOCK: I’m disappointed in you. I’ve been years trying to prove that. (laughter) I know that Indians were up in here and the family had a collection of artifacts that they’d picked up. But do you know of any Indian campsites or locations in the area here? With all that open land, there undoubtedly were some.
019 JIM: Well, you take…if you go right at the gate, top of the hill and down through that opening down through there towards the Langridge Mill, well there was a camp right in there. Because when I was a kid, you’d find little chips and that kind of stuff where they’d been makin’ arrows and stuff. And we found several arrows down there and a skinning knife. So that used to be a camp in there.
DOCK: Sure sounds like it. The skinning knife was a White Man’s knife?
JIM: Pardon?
DOCK: Was the skinning knife a White Man’s knife?
JIM: No, no. It was Indian. A stone knife.
DOCK: A big triangular-shaped outfit like that? Did it have a shaft on it for hafting?
JIM: Um hm.
DOCK: I’d have thought you’d have brought me that. (laughter)
JIM: (chuckle). I don’t have it anymore.
DOCK: Do you know where it is?
JIM: No, I don’t.
DOCK: It’s a shame that a lot of that stuff got away. There’ve been several of those found in the country here and that one type seems rather unique for the country here. You think it was Arapaho?
JIM: I don’t have any idea.
DOCK: More than likely. I just wondered.
RICH: At one time, Leta had a lot of that material because we looked at it at one time. She had it in shoe boxes. That was from that camp. There was also one at the bottom of the road, where the road went down to the crick. There was a camp down there also. We found a few things when we were first surveying the ranch twenty-some years ago. Right where the road hits the bottom by the crick.
021 DOCK: Sure seems like a logical. Well Jim, I’ve got to apologize. I’ve run out of gas and that doesn’t happen very often. I’m gonna leave you at the mercy of these people to learn a thing or two. But that’s the list of questions that I had and I sure do thank you for your answers. And some of them have been mighty informative and to me very valuable. Couldn’t have got it anywhere else.
JIM: (chuckle) Oh, you could have maybe.
DOCK: Who? (laughter) They gotta be alive.
JIM: Not too many of them.
TOM: I know comin’ up here we talked about the fact that you fellas were a year apart in school, but of your classmates that you recall, who’s left? Who’s still around?
JIM: Well, Ollie Shepard’s still around.
023 DOCK: And his wife. She’s from an old pioneer family too, the Hoovers. Maybe I can help a little there. The high school that we went to was the State Preparatory School built in ‘87, a great big sprawling building, two stories.
JIM: Well it had a basement. That’s where we blew up the forge. They used to have the metal-work in the basement. And I was takin’ the blacksmith training.
TOM: You kind of already had a leg up on that, didn’t you?
JIM: Yeah. I got the coal a little bit too wet and put it over there and get it real hot, you know, and all at once the thing blew up.
DOCK: Almost graduated us early, didn’t you! (laughter) The fact of the matter is, the graduating class of 1937—and I was in that class. You were in the one the year before— and that did it. They just tore the darn thing down and built the present Boulder High School. And as a result of that graduating class being the last one at Old Prep, a group got together back in 1985 anticipating a 50th anniversary of that graduation and then put in time from then until ‘87 to formulate a group to host a reunion and get the history. And all those myriad of details that it takes to do these things . There were women mixed up in it and they were great for details. But it’s great for history too. As a result, we did have a reunion and it was so much fun that from then up until three years ago, they had an annual reunion for that class. And it got to where there was so few of us that they invited everybody who had EVER graduated from old Boulder Prep and had the reunion every year anyway. Now there’s so few of us left that I think this year they decided to just drop it. As to how many are left, a handful. Quite a few widows.
TOM: Do you recall anybody other than the couple that Mr. Walker mentioned a minute ago? Do you know of anybody else that you can think of?
DOCK: Oh year, the names wouldn’t mean anything to you but I’d be glad to recite it.
TOM: No, that’s OK. I’m just curious more than anything else.
(There is some joking about curiosity)
DOCK: I would suppose that there’d be twenty of us left.
TOM: How many in your respective classes?
DOCK: (to Jim) You’ve got a memory. You tell ‘em. You don’t remember the graduating class numbers? I don’t either.
(Dock reminisces about loss of memory)
028 DOCK: What would you like to have people remember about your family and this ranch?
JIM: Kind of a hard question to answer.
RICH: Well, I can guarantee you this, Jim. We’ll always keep the name “Walker” on this ranch.
JIM: Well, I guess my granddad… I think I was about 3 or 4 when he passed away. I really didn’t know him. And then I guess the thing I liked about the place was you were pretty free and did what you wanted to. Nobody told you (that) you couldn’t go cut a tree down or you couldn’t set it on fire…you couldn’t do this or that. And it was kind of a free life.
DOCK: With that being the case, would you resent somebody complaining about ranchers, cattle, trees? I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
JIM: (chuckle) But, you know the thing that I keep hearing about these forest fires. They got rid of the biggest protection they ever had, and that was to put cattle out and graze that grass off. We never had a fire up in here for years as long as we run cattle up here. You take that Winneger Ridge up through there, the last time I was out there, there was nothin’ but a mass of dead grass, and if that ever got started, why look out.
DOCK: Well, and the overgrown underbrush and trees and stuff and Ponderosas…
JIM: Grass will travel and burn so much faster than about anything you…. When the old steam engines used to go through by Crescent over there, they would set fires. And boy if you didn’t get at ‘em where there was much grass why they ’d spread about as fast as you could run.
DOCK: What was your best fire fighting tool on a grass fire? We used a wet gunny sack. We put out more fires with that than …
JIM: Yeah.
DOCK: Now they don’t even have those.
JIM: No, you don’t get gunny sacks anymore.
032 RICH: How often did you get together with the Betassos? Just when you ran the cattle in the summertime?
JIM: No, Ernie and May and Marge and I in the wintertime used to go to dances all the time. And then of course in the summer we was up at Tolland. No, we was runnin’ quite a bit with the Betassos.
RICH: Did you go to the dance hall on Sugarloaf? Or down in Boulder?
JIM: Not too much at Sugarloaf. We used to go to Jimtown and the grange out the other side of Boulder and at the Stage Stop at Rollinsville.
TOM: That grange you were talkin’ about, was that the Pleasant View Grange?
JIM: No, its about where the fire station is out there now. Where you start towards the lake or Boulder Reservoir. It used to be right on the corner there. There used to be a grange there and isn’t there a fire station there now?
RICH: Boulder Rural has their fire station there now.
(Discussion of granges and how long it took to get anywhere)
033 DON: You told me a story one time, you snuck home and you managed to get upstairs, and just as you got in bed, your dad woke you up.
JIM: He said, “Did you bring the horses in?” I said, “No.” Well, he said, “You better go get ‘em then.” (chuckle) So we could work the next day. And boy, that next day was the longest day in the world. (laughter)
TOM: I think in one form or another, we’ve all had a similar experience, I would expect.
RICH: Not Dock. (laughter)
DOCK: I remember when I was studying those stone walls we spoke about a while ago, there’s one at the Dunn place just below Eldorado Springs that must be a mile and a half long. And you know that’s a lot of rocks. I was studying those, tryin’ to figure out who did it and why. And one of the old timers over there said, “Well, kids bein’ kids, some of the older folks found out that if they get those young fellas haulin’ rocks and building’ walls, they didn’t go NEAR as far on a Saturday night for the damn dance. (laughter.)
DOCK: Or stay as long, I guess.
035 RICH: I gotta ask you, Jim. How did you meet girls?
JIM: How’d I meet girls?
RICH: Yeah. At school or…
JIM: Well, a few at school but mainly just at these dances.
RICH: The dances? Is that where you met your wife?
JIM: Well, see, my wife was a Daniels and Carl Daniels was a brother to my wife. That’s the way I met her.
CAROL: Was it love at first sight?
JIM: Oh, no. At first sight, as I remember it, she was about that tall. (shows her being very small) (laughter)
TOM: Sort of had to grow into that one a little bit.
JIM: We both had to grow into it. (laughter)
DOCK: Back when, they were kinda scarce anyway. Gosh, I can remember when they used to import a school ma’am for some of these mining communities. Poor gal come into town and there was forty guys just waitin’ for her. (laughter) Must have been awful. RICH: You know, those farming communities, Dock, it was about the same way. The girls would be right out of college, young girls. And there were all these bachelor farmers waiting around for her.
Discussion of meeting guys
037 DOCK: Jim, would you like to see that steam engine?
JIM: Yeah, I’d like to look at it.
TOM: Well fellas, we sure do appreciate your taking the time today to join us out here and reminisce a little bit. This is mighty special. I want to thank you very much for being here.
(Group gets up and Jim begins talking again about barns)
038 JIM: As I say, all the fields around here, we’d build a barn at, usually a shed for the cattle. We built a barn in most of these fields so that we could store the hay in it and then we built a shed. Most of ‘em had a shed built onto them for protection for the cattle. And then the barns were built with a manger like that across this side and the full length on this side. You’d stack the hay inside and then in wintertime when it was snowin’ bad, you could get up there and throw the hay down in this manger and you wouldn’t have to fight the weather.
DOCK: The wind never got your hay?
JIM: Not in the manger. You feed ‘em out in the open and they’d have to run for it. (laughter)
TOM: Chasin’ down a mouthful.
DOCK: Is this barn down here typical?
JIM: Pretty much. It’s a little bigger than most of ‘em.
DOCK: Suppose we could get over there and you could explain just how that… the idea was you could bring hay down and store it in there without havin’ to trailer it in and then you could just feed it through the windows to the cattle without wasting so much. That’s a different concept all the way ‘round.
JIM: See, we used drags to pull our hay in. They were a about 8-foot wide and 14-foot long. Just slid on the ground.
DOCK: Isn’t that a kind of a sweep they used out in North Park to work hay? JIM: No. This, when you pulled it in there, you got on top of your load with a pitchfork and shoveled it in the barn. Then we’d have someone in the barn puttin‘ it back. You had all the handwork on that.
DOCK: Well, I’ll be honest. I’d kind of like to have an explanation of it myself. And I think Don would.
DON: Yeah. (Group wanders outside. Begins talking about portable saw)
040 JIM: In my mind, the one we had was a little bigger, but maybe not. Maybe it’s a kid’s mind, you know. But I thought it was a little bigger than that. But I couldn’t say.
DON: That’s the one we got out in the back yard, right Rich?
RICH: Yeah.
DOCK: How was it mounted to use? Did you have a timber bed for it?
JIM: Yeah. A timber base to set on, yeah. 12 by 12 or 14 by 14 base on it. Wood base. And squared timbers.
DOCK: I imagine that thing would tend to jump around a little bit if it wasn’t anchored down pretty good.
JIM: Yeah,. You bet it would. But they run awful smooth and awful nice. Quietest engine you can get a hold of.
DOCK: Do you know what the horsepower was?
JIM: No.
DOCK: What was the size saw you said you had on it?
JIM: About 3-foot . No it was more than that.
TOM: I thought you said 42 (inches) a little while ago.
JIM: Yeah, 44-inch, I think, yeah. Because some of those big timbers, why we’d have to slab a little bit first before the saw would take clear through it.
DOCK: I don’t know anything about these things. How was the motive power delivered to a saw? Did the saw go this way or… JIM: One head of steam came from your boiler to your …back here…or probably this one here. And the steam came in there and then you used to have a handle on there and you’d pull the handle this way and the steam would hit that side of the piston and pull it this way. Then you’d push it back and the steam would go the other way and after you got it under motion, you’d set the handle straight up and down and the steam would run that piston back and forth.
DOCK: Then how was the power delivered to the saw? Through belts?
JIM: Yeah, off to the fly wheel.
DOCK: So you’ve got two hubs. One of ‘em had to run the carriage?
JIM: No, one belt run the carriage and everything. Run the saw and the whole bit. The other one, if we wanted to, we’d put a belt on and run a planer to plane a little bit.
DOCK: You finished lumber on this project?
JIM: Oh, we used to plane it, yeah.
DOCK: How about that. So you were deliverin’ finished lumber down …
JIM: Well, planed lumber. It wasn’t finished, I mean not like they call finished now. You just planed one side of it and made it smooth.
DOCK: Just planed one side. Would you cut one inch and then plane it to, uh….?
JIM: Yeah, three-quarters. But usually we cut it just a little over an inch. You’d have a good ¾ when you got through planning.
DOCK: I’d like to have seen that. What run the carriage? How did you get the log to go through the saw and then it would have to be offset and come back?
JIM: Um hm. See, one of these belts run up to your shaft and run the saw. And off of that shaft there was a wood pulley, about that big, that had a cable on it. And when you run the carriage back, this cable would pull the carriage back. And when you went into the saw, you’d pull the other way and take the cable ahead. And that one shaft run the carriage back and forth. It run the saw.
DOCK: It must have been a busy place. (chuckle)
TOM: A fairly dangerous operation too, wasn’t it?
JIM: Well, I guess. But we never thought much about it.
TOM: Any of the fellas ever get hurt when you was millin’?
JIM: No. Outside of maybe getting’ a toe mashed or something.
TOM: Nothing serious eh..
DON: That would be a good interpretive thing to do.
TOM: What’s that? Mash a toe?
DON: Get the saw running.
TOM: Oh yeah. I think it’d be a real good thing to do if we could get OSHA and everybody else to let us do it.
DON: Just don’t tell ‘em.
TOM: Yeah, (unintelligible) 14 years old than most 25 year-olds work today, I do believe.
JIM: I don’t know. You didn’t think anything about it then. You just did it.
TOM: I know. It just had to be done.
RICH: We got this one from a fella in Boulder who said he hauled it out of Martin Gulch. Back when Doc Taylor owned the place, he let him go down there and he took it apart piece by piece, hauled it to Boulder, and then he restored it in his backyard. He said it came off the ranch.
JIM: Came off the ranch?
RICH: He just called us up one day and asked if we wanted it. And it IS heavy. Man, is this thing heavy.
JIM: Yeah, it’s heavy .
RICH: There were about eight of us and we had rollers under it. We had to use a wedge to get it up on a trailer.
TOM: And it’s been sittin’ here since then?
RICH: Yeah. But it’s completely operational. He rebuilt the whole thing. And once a year he would hook it up to a boiler and run it. And we haven’t done that since.
JIM: We had two. The first engine we had down there…steam engine… we run it for several years when the shaft broke and blew the piston out of the back end there. And then (unintelligible) kind of up in there where the university lake is up in there, kind of in that in there, and got another engine out of the mill up there. And that was the last one we had in there.
DOCK: How’d they get this thing up here from, I suppose, Denver?
JIM: I don’t know. I know how we got that one that we brought down in here with four head of horses and skids and hook onto it and slide it up on a wagon and four head of horses brought her down.
DOCK: That took some doin’.
RICH: The boiler that supposedly came with it is sitting on the other side of the pig barn over there.
JIM: That’s not the boiler that was down here.
RICH: Not tied to this one?
JIM: Well, it might be. I don’t know.
RICH: Oh, but not the one you guys used…
JIM: Not the one we had down here.
RICH: OK.
JIM: That boiler up there reminds me of the one that was down below the Martin house that I told you about. That boiler up there, as I remember it, looked very similar, because it had a real short firebox. And the one we had, as I say, I could put an 8-foot slab in it. What happened to that boiler that was down here, I don’t know. I think after the Second World War, when they was so hard for metal? You know, I think that’s when they took that one out of down here and that’s when they set what was left of the Langridge Mill on fire to get the bolts and stuff out of there. But that was after I was gone. (chuckle)
050 TOM: Dock, did you have anything specific you wanted to ask Jim about this particular barn? I know you wanted him to see that steam engine, but I didn’t know if there was anything about this barn.
DOCK: No. I’m just interested in the impression. He seemed quite interested and we just had to look at it and get all the history out of it that we can. It must have had an interesting history. I don’t know a thing about steam engines but they were all over the country here. Incidentally, I was up at the Cardinal (Mine) with Jeff the other day and there’s a big ‘un up there that looks pretty near complete, as near as I can tell, including a boiler and a big one, fire box. I got quite a little history on that mill, by the way.
RICH: Did it operate up until the 50s?
DOCK: No, as best I’ve found, it was fitted up in about 1940 and run until ‘42 and was shut down as being non-essential to the war effort and it had just been set up as a ball mill. But I’m surprised at that. I thought it was probably running tungsten, but apparently it was still a gold/silver operation and non-essential to the war effort. And there it sits, they just had to shut it down, I guess. But it was a stamp operation to begin with. And they converted to a ball mill later on. But that engine up there, there can’t be many of ‘em sittin’ on dumps that are….. It looks about like this one. I think it’s a two-cylinder.
052 RICH: Well, let’s look at some of the other barns.
Group moves to next barn
JIM: We put the tin on the (unintelligible) because the shingles were getting bad. I think you’ve taken it off.
DON: We took all the metal off and replaced the shingles. I’ll tell you that took quite a while to shingle that whole barn.
JIM: It originally was shingled and we put tin over it rather than replace the shingles.
DON: These slab (unintelligible) aren’t working’ real well.
DOCK: Fire gets hot enough to boil that pitch in there and it just impermeates the wood and it just darn near becomes metal.
JIM: I think my dad said that he was about 5 or 6 years old when a fire started up in there above Pinecliff and burnt clear down to this opening over here. And he said that him and mom was up on the roof with buckets of water ‘cause sparks was comin’ from that fire clear over to the house. That was the log house up here. And that’s what made the posts because it burned yellow pine, big ones. This little stuff doesn’t make anything.
DOCK: Some of the people here probably have never heard that if you take one of those old pitch posts on a cold winter day and try to turn it into firewood, you can chip the edge off your axe.
JIM: Yeah. But it makes a good starter. Boy, if you got a good pitch post or a good piece of pitch and take your knife and about three shavin’s on the side, and light it, and it’ll burn just like gasoline, practically. DON: Did you ever burn the bottoms of ‘em to make ‘em hard?
JIM: No.
DON: ‘Cause I’ve heard people have done that. I just …
JIM: I’ve heard of it too, but we never did.
DOCK: There’s an old sayin’ that no man can be considered a poor man if he has a stack of pitch faggots to feed his fire.
JIM: (laughs) Yeah.
RICH: In the Pacific Northwest they call that…
(End of sentence cut off as the video picks up again inside the barn)
JIM: …..put hay through those windows and keep somebody in here trampin’ it down. And then, like where you come in right here you’d build a circle like this then when you wanted to get the hay out of here you throw it down and just take it down there. If you wanted to throw it out the windows, you could, but usually we just fed it down in here.
DOCK: And then the cattle could just feed through the windows and they hay was undercover.
JIM: Yeah. Of course we used to stack it up over the top, too. ‘Cause we used to fill this barn just off of these fields up here.
RICH: I was going to ask you how much you put in here at any one time. Like even with the windows and higher than that.
JIM: We figured close to 100 ton, that is loose hay.
RICH: That’s a lot of pitch forking.
JIM: Yeah. That’s a LOT of pitch forkin, is right.
RICH: Particularly probably when it gets down lower and you have to go clear back to get it.
JIM: Well, we’d feed some up in here and then.
(Jim’s voice fades as he walk away from camera)
057 JIM: Down in here was the same thing. We’d build a…
RICH: OK. Build up a semi-circle around here.
JIM: And you could pitch the hay right down in there.
RICH: Yeah. And these were all your draft horses on this side.
JIM: Yeah, draft horses and one or two saddle horses. And the same way off that door. We’d build a circle around it. When you’re throwin’ hay, we had it stacked as high as we could get it in here. That made it a lot easier to get it down.
RICH: Did you use the old stuff for bedding material in here, or you didn’t use any?
JIM: Well, we always raised enough …..
RICH: Did you have some oats?
JIM: Wheat for chicken feed. We’d raise our wheat for chicken feed. Then when they scratched it out, then we’d bring the straw in here for bedding.
058 DON: Jim, who built this building? I heard it was your grandfather and his brother. Is that true?
JIJM: Well, my granddad was in and fact is, I never met his brother. I know my granddad was in it but I think most of this flooring and some of the stuff in these stalls here came out of the Langridge Mill. And the same was with that flooring in the garage up there. It come out of the Langridge Mill. About 3-inch ….
DON: Yeah, we had to replace some of that and I was wondering why it was 3-inch and not four (inch) or two..
RICH: It was what was available. What did you have before that, or was that the first time there was a floor in?
JIM: That was the first floor. Otherwise you had just dirt. Then they replaced it with that flooring. All this whole deal down through here is replaced with that flooring out of the Langridge Mill.
DOCK: Do you know where IT came from?
JIM: (chuckle) Some of the sawmills around here, I guess.
DOCK: That was around 1900. JIM: Yeah.
TOM: Jim, one our volunteers that does the tours up here told me last fall , he said, “Now I tell you something we need to get in that hay barn down there. We need a slip scoop in there so that he can show folks how a lot of this dirt was took out of here by your granddaddy. So we’ve got a slip scoop laying over here on the floor now. Does that seem reasonable to you, how he might have excavated a lot of this dirt with a team and a slip?
JIM: Well, you could have, yeah. You always used a slip for road work, but I couldn’t say if that‘s…. They probably did take it out some.
TOM: Well, I don’t know if this looks anything like the one that WAS up here.
JIM: Yeah, that’s the same thing.
(Noise drowns out voices. Jim demonstrates how the slip was used. Lack of light makes it very hard to see this part of the video.)
JIM: You have your team there, hitched and you could grab these handles and tip it up for how far you wanted to dig. Then if you hit a rock and why you kind of ended up at that end.
TOM: (chuckle) Yeah, I’ll bet you did. You kind of flipped over the handles there.
JIM: I don’t doubt what they used a slip like that all right. I have. We worked on the county road years ago when it was just single track. It was hard places to get dirt at. Where we had dirt it was easy. We’d load her up and bring her down and scatter it onto the road where there wasn’t any dirt.
TOM: Right. It would separate the men from the boys. I bet it would.
062 End of tape B.
[C].
(Tape three continues inside the barn, where there is little light, so the image is very dark.)
000 JIM: ……..off of the main big sitting room and the two bedroom upstairs was all there was there originally. All the rest has been added.
RICH: So the kitchen was where the fireplace was in at an angle? JIM: Well, no. The kitchen was just off of that. And right where the fireplace is angled off, used to be kind of a sitting room. That was before the fireplace went in there. Then you went upstairs and we had two bedrooms upstairs and two down below. And then the rest of it was added. Oh, I don’t know how old I was, probably about maybe eight, when they built that big kitchen and all that on, because (chuckle) we had a school teacher…well, the room out in back was a school …
RICH: …what ended up being the bathroom later was the schoolhouse?
JIM: Yeah, and this teacher, when we’d get out of school, why she’d always stay out there and she’d build a fire in that stove, you know. And about the time those guys were shingling’ the roof why that smoke would come right acrossed ‘em. And this one, Dick Yates, that worked for me, work for my dad, he said. “Put a shingle and a rock over that chimney. (laughter) So, that’s what I did. (laughs) Boy, the teacher come out of there pretty fast. (laughter)
RICH: On the side that went to the outhouses, it was ….?
JIM: Used to fill that full of wood. Of course, that other one that run this way, (there isn’t any sign of it anymore), we’d keep some wagons in that. Some wood and just storage. One end of it was a chicken house.
002 DOCK: Ever have any weasel trouble?
JIM: No.
DOCK: Skunks?
JIM: Once in a while, but not very many. Wasn’t an awful lot of skunks up here then. We’d see one now and then and a time or two they got in after the chickens, but ….
DOCK: They certainly were a problem down around the mesas and around the early part of town.
DON: Well, when I lived there I remember, we saw a weasel and shortly after we saw the weasel, we didn’t have any more mouse problem in the house.
TOM: I know you didn’t have a whole lot of time, but did you ever do any trappin’?
JIM: Oh, I trapped coyotes and bobcats. And the last coyote I trapped, skinned out, sent it to a furrier in Denver. We used to be able to get maybe $6 - $7 bucks for a hide. I didn’t get enough out of it to pay postage. (chuckle) So that quit my trappin’ right there. But you know, one time I had, I think about three bobcat hides and I took it to the furrier. And like a dummy, I called it bobcats. And they offered me $1.50 apiece for ‘em. Well, I wouldn’t take it so I went to another furrier place and I said “I got some linx cat out here.” And he looked at ‘em and yeah, that’s what he thought they were. I got about $25. (laughter)
TOM: It’s all in what you call it. (chuckle) It’s just the terminology. You gotta get the right terminology. .
RICH: Were there ever any sign of beaver in the creek down below?
JIM: Yeah. You know, my dad trapped beaver because for a while that the law went off of ‘em that you could trap ‘em. Down there on the crick, he used to trap the beavers.
RICH: Were those taken to Denver also then—to sell them?
JIM: Yeah.
005 (END OF INTERVIEW)