Loe raamatut: «The Pinos Altos Story», lehekülg 6
The Family
There was a time when asking a person in the West where he was from was a shooting matter. Visitors today have no hesitancy about asking that or about how long one has lived here or what brought one here in the first place. Is it more eccentric to spend one’s life here than in a small hamlet in Vermont or elsewhere? Lack of initiative or drive may be partly responsible and surely sentiment is. Some of us just love the home place.
My father, W. E. Watson, came west for his health at the age of nineteen. Friends in Wisconsin had recommended Silver City and had given him letters to Mr. Pat Rose and Mrs. Lettie B. Morrill. Among the first people he met was Mr. A. J. Spaulding, and for several years they were closely associated. They made Claremont, near the later town of Mogollon, their headquarters for many prospecting expeditions. This was during the days of Indian raids but they never encountered an unfriendly Indian. Once when Mr. Spaulding had gone into Silver City for supplies and was expected back that evening, Dad hiked over the mountains to Whitewater and caught a mess of trout. He had returned to the cabin when a rider came up calling out that the Indians were on the warpath and were in the mountains and that all the people were to go to Meaders on the Frisco River for safety’s sake. Dad said he was expecting Spaulding so would not leave. He took his binoculars and scanned the hillsides. A movement far up on the canyon wall caught his eye. He watched the brush intently and presently made out the figure of a man, the queerest he had ever seen, more startling than an Indian even. Surmounting the pack on the man’s back was a large rectangular contrivance, attached to his belt were many packets, in one hand he carried a gun and in the other a butterfly net. Dad went to meet him. This was the beginning of an interesting friendship with H. H. Rusby, a botanist who was looking for medicinal herbs for Parke Davis Co. of Detroit and also collecting specimens of flora and fauna. Mr. Rusby had seen no Indian sign, nor had Mr. Spaulding, who returned later that evening. They were not molested but the next day they learned that Capt. Cooley had been killed not many miles from their cabin.
My father’s parents were English. His father was born at Littleport, Cambridgeshire. He worked with his father, who was a bridge builder, from age 14 until he came to America in 1848. He lived in Chicago for one year, then joined in the Gold Rush the following year and traveled overland to California and tried his luck at Placerville. After two years of varying success he returned to New York and crossed the ocean to his old home. In 1853 he was married to Miss Sarah Wilson of Spaulding, in the Ely Cathedral. They came to Chicago, later moving to Janesville, Wisconsin, where as contractor and builder, especially of bridges for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, he was quite prominent.
On Mother’s side of the family one of the earliest ancestors in this country was Pieter, son of Claes, who came from Holland to New Amsterdam in 1636. Very few of the Dutch emigrants had surnames—they were merely “sons of”. Pieter was later identified in the records as Peiter Claesen, who in 1655, superintended the bowery and cattle of Peter Stuyvestant. The entry in colonial records dated July 10, 1655, reads: “Pieter Clausen agreed to fodder and winter, according to custom, all the cattle which Petrus Steuyvestant has at present in his bowery at Amersfoot (Flatlands), also to sow all the land that is suitable for sowing, provided that he deduct from the rent the grain sown thereon. For said service the sum of 325 gr(?) be paid; to leave the manure of his own and the general’s in the bowery.” He was magistrate of Flatlands from 1655 to 1664. When Peter Stuyvestant surrendered New Netherland to the British, Pieter Claesen was required to take another name or to adopt a surname and he chose “Wykhof” which meant “Household Courtier” or “Clerk of the Court,” but the family soon changed to the English spelling of Wyckoff.
Little is known of the Robbins line except that great grandfather Wyckoff Robbins was born in Ohio, married and moved to Missouri. One son, my grandfather, Edwin Augustus, married Betsy Hartwell in Bowen, Illinois, in 1869. The Hartwells had come from England to Massachusetts in 1636. Later one of the family had married a French Huguenot named Dee in New Jersey, whose family had settled first in North Carolina. Betsy’s mother was that Dee. Her father, John N. Hartwell, married three times and had fourteen children, an economic necessity in those days. One of them lost his life in the War Between the States. John N. was a close friend of young Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, and always supported and admired him. One of Grandmother’s stories recalled the day she was sent into the field where her father was plowing to tell him of Lincoln’s death. They returned to the house and her father prepared for his journey to Springfield where he went to “pay his list respects to a great man and his good friend.” Grandfather Robbins had spent nearly two years in Andersonville Prison during the war. Ill and discouraged, he did not want to settle down with his family. Then he met Betsy, fell in love, married her, worked as a carpenter and made a home in Quincy, Illinois. He was restless so they decided to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862 and find land for themselves in the West as other discharged soldiers were doing. They went to Missouri, Colorado, and finally to New Mexico. Farming did not appeal to Grandfather but the lure and adventure of mining did. However, he found that his trade of carpentry furnished a better living than the mining game. After several years in Silver City he came to Pinos Altos as chief carpenter at the Deep Down where a St. Louis syndicate was building a mill. It was here that Mother rejoined her family and met Will E. Watson whom she married in 1889.
Like most American families we are a hodge podge of nationalities. Members have been farmers and traveling salesmen, doctors and ministers, missionaries and teachers. Dad tried many things but settled for the mercantile business. He was “store-keeper” and Postmaster in Pinos Altos for many years where he worked early and late to accommodate customers, but he was never so busy that he could not take time off for fishing and hunting and enjoying the great out-of-doors.
TODAY
Messrs. Birch, Snively and Hicks would not recognize the valley if they could come back one hundred years later. Gone are the tall pines that gave the place its name; gone for the greater part of the year are the streams where they placered for gold; gone are burros that carried their tools and supplies; gone is the excitement of a rich find and gone, too, are the hundreds of placer miners who followed them seeking “El Dorado”.
Today there are approximately fifty families and a few lone individuals living in the camp, many of whom are descendants of “old timers”. They refuse to admit that they live in a “ghost town.” They think they are very up-to-date because they use and enjoy modern conveniences. Instead of smoke rising into the sky there are TV antennas bristling over the homes. No longer do they buy wood by the burro load and hire Jose Maria Romero, invariably with a gunny sack over his shoulder, to cut it into stove lengths. Now they heat and cook with butane or electricity which comes from Silver City. No longer do they fill lamps and polish chimneys but light their homes with the flick of a switch. No longer do they draw water with an old oaken bucket, now just a museum piece, from a well, but thanks to electric pumps, they have only to turn a tap. If children but knew what they had missed, how thankful they would be, with no wood box to keep filled, no bringing in of chips and water for household needs. No longer do the women bend over a wash tub, scrubbing out grime and grease on a wash board. It is only a fifteen minute drive to a laundromat. Cars, trucks, and “jeeps” have taken the places of horses, mules and burros for transportation needs and pleasures. No more do they send first-of-the-month orders to the company store and have them delivered. Now, finding themselves short of margarine, or bread, or wanting a frozen vegetable, they take the Ford or Chevrolet and drive to a supermarket. Who plays baseball now or spend an evening around the old piano singing old familiar songs when one can watch sports events on TV, or listen to the radio? No longer do the men gather around the pot-bellied stove in the store or sit on the long benches outside, settling the affairs of the world. A favorite commentator or the pictures in Life keep them informed, and with so many smart men in Santa Fe and Washington, why should they worry? No longer do the workmen trudge up and over the hills to the mines and return from their shifts in single file, whistling and singing down the trail to their homes. If they worried about the meager wages of former days, it was not apparent. Now they ride in cars and trucks to their work in Silver City, Hurley and Santa Rita, often “cussing” their employers or the union, depending on their status in the industrial field. Housewives say the only convenience they lack is an electric dishwasher—and “who wouldn’t rather buy than be one?” The most common complaint is insufficient water for lawns, gardens and those dishwashers. If and when there is town water Pinos Altos will be truly a suburban Utopia.
Acknowledgements
To: Dr. Nanette Ashby of New Mexico Western College and her students of Southwestern Literature who have shown interest and pleasure as we gathered on the Continental Divide and talked of the “good old days”, whose questions and comments spurred me to write “The Story of Pinos Altos”;
To: The sons and daughters of the men and women who made those times what they were, and who have shared the tales their parents told:
To: The few “Old-Timers” who are left who remember so much and delight to recall their experiences, and especially,
To: Mrs. Alpha Hickman Stephens who first came to Pinos Altos in 1888. Her father operated a saw mill in Big Cherry for a Mr. Comer. It was Comer who constructed much of the Cherry Creek Road as we know it today. At that time the road, from Little Cherry to town, ran along the bed of the canyon. Hickman Springs was the site of the family home. In 1890 she married Charley Stephens, oldest son of Mr. and Mrs. Trolius Stephens. Her keen mind is a treasure house of recollections—from which she has generously supplied me with facts and figures—and pictures.
I say “Thank You”.Dorothy Watson
