RECOLLECTIONS OF MY DAD - LUTHER GALE
By DeMar Gale
November 28, 1996
I am going to start off with a little story that Dad told me. It happened before Dad was married. He was a freighter with a four horse team; he was freighting from Monticello to Blanding, Utah. As he was going along he saw an indian blanket draped over a sage brush. He could hear moaning and crying from under the blanket. He went over, moved the blanket, and saw underneath a young indian squaw who was trying to have a baby. All of her tribe had left her, including her husband, or what ever he was. Dad picked her up and put her in his wagon. They had gone a few miles when they caught up with the tribe. When Dad tried to give her back, the indians got a bit put out with Dad for taking her, and her husband was really angry. Dad took his bull whip and made a pop over the indian buck's head. The indian fell down and Dad told them that he was taking the squaw to a doctor in Monticello. So he took her in to the doctor and the doctor said she wouldn't have lived if Dad had left her there. She had a baby boy and a few days later Dad took her back to the tribe and I guess they kept her.
One of my first recollections of Dad is when we moved to Monticello. I think I was about two and one half year old, Dad was the miller at the grist mill south and east of town. Each morning Dad would get up about six, go and start the furnace that made the steam, he would come back and Mother would have breakfast ready. We would eat and Dad and I would go to the grist mill, which was about one hundred yards from the house. The steam would be up to pressure. Dad would lift me up to blow the whistle. He would hold me up to where I could reach the whistle. I would pull the rope and there would be a blast and then work would start. Most always I would run back to the house because Mother had a few rules that Dad didn't dare break.
We moved from the one room house down on the creek to a house up on the hill, about two hundred yards, into a two room house. Dad still ran the grist mill. I remember Dad would say "do you want to go and see how flour is made." I sure did, I enjoyed watching.
When the indians would bring pine nuts to trade for flour, I sat down by them on the loading dock and watched them eat pine nuts. They would put some in their right cheeks and the shells would come out on the left side. They would talk to Dad in Navajo. Dad could talk right along with them.
We had a pack rat move in under our house. There was a hole out near the middle of the room. It was our living room and bed room at night. At night you could hear the pack rat run around and chew on things. One night Dad said "I am going to catch that rat." So he got a pan, thinking about it now it must have been about ten inches in diameter. He put some crusts of bread around the hole, put the pan over the edge of the hole to one side. We set back a little from the hole. Dad had a string tied to the handle. When he could hear the rat chewing he pulled the pan out into the room and had the rat trapped. He put on a pair of leather gloves, slid his hand under and caught the rat. I don't know how he killed it, Mother wouldn't let him kill it in the house. He said he fed it to the dog. He nailed a piece of tin over the hole and I think that took care of the rat problem.
I remember it was about the first of February that my uncle Albert Gale and one of the other boys, I can't remember which one it was, came in a bob sleigh down to our house and they had Grandmother Martha Black Gale in a coffin in the back of the sleigh. They hauled her down to Blanding, Utah, which is where I think she was born. The snow was about to my knees, I was about two and one half or three and it was cold as cold, the way I remember it.
While we were there in that house both Dad and Mother had the flu and were both sick in bed. I can remember that I would get the drinks of water and pieces of bread and a few things and I would empty their chamber pots, which they used for a toilet in those days.
Then we moved from that house into town to Monticello. I could remember the house in Monticello very well. It had a hydrant in back of the house with six pointed spokes and the hydrant was a bit big for me, but I could get the water out of it. We had running water in our back yard, and we were really "up town." It served all of the houses in that area, they could get buckets of water.
Eldon was born in that house and I remember Dad coming out of the house, coming to where we were playing in the back yard yelling to us that we had a little brother. A little later he explained to us how little he was, he weighed thirteen and one half pounds.
I can remember John R. Young coming and visiting us at that time to our house. When John R. Young was a little boy, about six years, he was riding in a covered wagon back behind his mother and a little baby. One of the boys in the wagon ahead of them was messing with a gun, the gun went off and the mother was nursing the baby. The bullet went through the baby's head, through the mother and hit John R. Young just above the elbow, and he lost his arm. I remember him coming down and talking to us, he married one of Dad's sisters, I think it was Tamer.
Dad homesteadded a piece of ground north and east of Monticello. Mother and I and Donald went out and lived in the tent on this ground. Dad built a small log house. I used to really enjoy going after water with him. There was a lake down not too far from where we built our house. Dad would take a couple of fifty gallon barrels and put them in the back of the wagon, drive down to the lake and back the wagon into where he could dip the barrels down into the water. He would fill the two fifty gallon barrels and take them back up to the tent, and that is where we got our water. It was real fun playing out in the pines and cedars and watching Dad work. Occasionally Dad would let me shoot the twenty-two rifle, which I enjoyed.
We moved back into Monticello, Dad had a big ranch, it was quite big as I remember. Granddad Merrill, Porter Merrill, Bill Merrill and Lucille Merrill, they are all brothers and sisters, came down and helped Dad on the farm. I can remember that when we harvested the wheat, Dad would let me ride with one of the people who was harvesting it. Dad would run the header, that just cuts the grain off just below the head, and it would blow it into this basket rack and they would let me stand in the corner and it would cover me up with wheat, up to my neck. Some of the boys would pull me out and set me on top of it. Then we would take it in to thrash it. The trashing machine was run by horse power. It had a beam coming off from the center that the horses were hitched to and they would just walk in a circle. The shaft would turn and that would turn the thrashing machine. They would put the heads of the grains in there and thrash them. They could thrash over a thousand sacks of grain a day.
Every day Mother or Dad would take the ashes out from the cook stove and they would dump them down the outhouse toilet and that would cover up the stuff. One day I decided I would help them so I took the ashes out of the stove and dumped them down the hole. A few minutes later the outhouse was on fire and it burned to the ground. Mother was out there with a broom trying to beat off the fire in the grass. A man was out there and said, "don't beat the boy with the broom, he didn't mean to do it." So, for the next few weeks we had to use the barn, we didn't have an outhouse.
I remember Zane Gray coming to our place. Dad showed me Zane Gray and told me what they were going to do. Zane had hired Dad, Porter and Bill Merrill to take him on a pack trip down to Natural Bridges. He was writing the story of "Riders of the Purple Sage." I can remember Zane Gray, he was a big man, not tall particularly, but they had to get the biggest saddle they could find on the place and they put it on a work house. The saddle horses were too small to carry him. He had to stand on a box so he could reach the stirrups so he could get on the saddle. To me, he just filled the saddle to overfilled. They were gone about ten days, they came back and Zane Gray sent Dad a book of "Riders of the Purple Sage." I would give anything to have that book.
Back in those days we didn't have television or radio, so we did an awful lot of reading. Dad and Mother would take turns reading to us. We read all of Zane Gray's books, all of Clarence E. Muleford's books, all of Gene Stratton Porter's books and I don't know how many others, but those are etched in my mind. It gave me a desire to read, and I have always enjoyed reading.
There were a couple of indians who came to our house in Monticello. They wanted to make a silver ring for Mother, so Dad took them into the living room where we had a fire place and they shut the doors and wouldn't let anybody in there. I could hear them pounding and the house was pretty well filled with smoke and when they got through they had a silver ring made from a twenty five cent piece of silver. I thought it was beautiful. I don't know what ever happened to it.
Dad took me out pine nut hunting on my fifth birthday. Dad took Bill and Porter and Lucille and they caught me a burro to ride. I went out and gathered pine nuts for what seemed like a whole day, we went about two miles, so when we came home Mother made ice cream. She put the ingredients in a ten pound lard bucket, put the lard bucket in a five gallon can of ice and took the bale and turned it back and forth, took the lid off and scraped the ice cream off the edges of the bucket, and she made a cake with five candles on it. That was my birthday.
On the way home the road forked, one fork went in to our place and the other went around and back into our place. There was an old indian named Bishop's Boy camped down on the creek. I was scarred to go past him on the burro, so Porter jumped out of the wagon, pulled the burro out by the tail and hauled the burro down past Bishop's Boy and up home. Bishop's Boy was just coming in to turn himself into the Sheriff. He had been one that had been wild and they were looking for him. Most of the indians that I knew were skinny little indians. Bishop's Boy was a great big indian.
About this time Dad traded our team and wagon for a Model T Ford. Dad had never driven a car before in his life, so the people who he traded with drove him around the block in Monticello a few times so Dad could get the hang of driving the Model T. We loaded everything that we had that we hadn't traded off and we headed for Bluebell. We got up just above Moab and had a rain storm and it flooded some of the washes that we had to go through. There were five or six cars there waiting to get across the wash. A couple of cowboys come along and hooked on to the cars with their lariats and pulled them across the flood, charging them a dollar a piece to pull them off. My dad was smarter than any of them so he just drove across. I can remember how proud I felt at that time of my Dad.
We camped down on Green River that night and the next morning I couldn't see. The mosquitoes had bit me such that I couldn't see, my eyes were swollen shut. We moved to Bluebell for a short time.
I remember that Dad told Donald and I that we could go to the show. The show in Bluebell was put on once a month in the church house. A person from Roosevelt came up in a Model T Ford. He jacked up one wheel off the ground, put a pulley under the wheel to run a generator to make power for the projector. Dad told Donald and I we could go if we would go down to Rodney Remington's place and make sure the gates were all shut and the cows and horses were all right. I was willing but Donald didn't want to go down there, nobody lived there, it was dark and scary, but I had a bet with Donald because I had been down there and saw Dad lock all the gates. I took off like I was going down there, and Dad said "you don't need to do it, I have already done it" (I already knew that). At the show, we would lay down on the floor about fifteen feet from the screen, look up at the screen to see the silent movies. I couldn't read any of the writing but I could see the action. Most of the shows were Hoot Gibson, who always wore a black hat because he was a bad guy, or Tom Mix, who wore a white hat because he was good guy. A lot of the times I would just shut my eyes because I couldn't stand the anxiety of somebody going to kill somebody. Sometimes Dad and Mother would come to watch the movies and then take us home.
I remember a Father and Son's outing with Dad. We went with Levi Hancock, he took a bunch of us in his ton and one half truck, we all rode in the back of it. We went up to Moon Lake and I remember stopping because we had do road work, we had to move the rocks out of the road so we could get past. This is one of my first encampments which I really enjoyed.
Dad went to work up to Price, Utah in the coal mines. We didn't see that much of Dad because it was quite a ways up there. He would come home about every two weeks or a month, it seems like he was gone a lot. My grandparents had moved to Vernal, so we decided to move into Vernal. I went to second and third grades in Naples, which is a little way out from Vernal. My teacher's name was Hannah Richardson. Dad quit working at the coal mines and moved out to Rainbow to the gilsonite mines. Dad drove back and forth about every two weeks. That spring he moved us out to Rainbow.
On another outing, we went with Jim Fisher and his family, Dad and Mother and four of us kids, Grandmother and three or four of her kids, to Trappers Lake, which was in Colorado. We got about two or three miles out of Meeker, Colorado and Jim Fisher's car started to make a noise so we dropped the oil pan and one of the bearings was burned out on the pistons, so they fixed it. They took a bacon rind off a slab of bacon and cut it to fit like a bearing. It wasn't very far into Meeker, maybe a few miles, and we drove slowly and this took us into Meeker, Colorado. We took it into a garage and had a new bearing put in. Dad, Jim Fisher, Arthur Merrill and I went up to Timber Line, I can't remember the name of the lake, but we went fishing. Dad just cut willows for Arthur and I to fish with, I remember we used Royal Coachmen, the fly we used, and Gray hackle, and the fish were biting like crazy. I don't know how many Arthur and I caught, but Dad and Jim had about 25 or 30 pounds a piece, about all they could carry. When we got back down to Fruita, Colorado, coming home, we came to a farm and a man there had sweet corn. Everybody ate sweet corn until we were well filled, and it gave us diarrhea, so we went over the canal bank and that is where we took care of the planting of our corn.
Dad was musically inclined. He could not read music but if he heard a piece of music, he could play the melody on the harmonica, violin, mandolin, banjo, and a little on the piano. He also played the drums. He could also play the Victrola. He and mother played for dances, he generally played the harmonica and the drums and Mother chorded on the piano. He had a harness that would hold his harmonica so he could also play the drums. His favorite songs were "When the Red Red Robin Goes a Bob Bob Bobbin," "Turkey in the Straw," and several Southern songs, like "My Old Virginia Home." Dad also liked to dance, he would tap dance and he liked to square dance. He could call square dances, but he usually played the harmonica.
We didn't have a church when we lived out at the mines, but every Sunday we would have church services at our place. We didn't have the sacrament, but we had prayers, hymns and stories.
Every morning when we got up we had the family prayer. We had a blessing on the food at noon and at night we had a prayer, kneeling down by the bed. In those days we didn't separate much for beds, we generally slept in one room. In fact, our house was a two room house, the kitchen and living room was one room and the other served as the bedroom.
Dad had a talent for languages and he could learn them easily. He talked right along with the Navajos and I believe he could talk Ute also. I was born in Ute country, but we associated more with the Navajos. Monticello was Navajo country. He could also speak Spanish, he could talk with the Mexicans as well as the Mexicans could. When the kids came home from their missions Dad could talk with them in Spanish. He also spoke a little German, I don't know whether they were cuss words or he made them up as he went. I don't know who he learned German from, although we had quite a few Germans who came to settle in our country. He also could speak a little Norwegian and Swedish, as the Lybberts came from those countries. I don't know why it came easy for Dad to learn languages.
Dad served his full-time mission in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was the headquarters. I don't know how far he got from there as most of his travels was on foot or train. He served a two year mission before he got married. His folks were living on the San Juan River when Dad got home from his mission. There wasn't any one there to meet him or to take him across the river, so he took of his clothes and held them above his head and crossed the river. Then he and Mother went on a mission together later in their lives.
While we were still living in Bluebell, Uncle Dan Olsen came to visit us. His wife had died many years before. He was a school teacher. He was smart as a whip when it came to knowing what was in the book, but he didn't seem to know a lot of practical things. He came to see us and had a brand new Chev car and while on his way, his hat blew off. So he came over to the house and decided to take some of us kids to go back and try to find his hat. I went with him. Later, Dad came along in the Model T Ford and it didn't have any headlights, so Porter was on one fender and Bill on the other with kerosene lanterns. Before this I had never tasted peaches from a can nor had I tasted store bought cookies with creme filling. We were eating these things that Uncle Dan had brought to pass the time. Then, going home we didn't have to have the kids on the fenders with the lanterns because Uncle Dan went in front. We never did find Uncle Dan's hat.
My Dad was six feet tall. He weighed about 185 to 190 pounds. He had light colored hair, but I can't remember him ever having much. He combed what he had over to the side. He never wore a beard or mustache. He always did the hair cutting of us kids and he did most of the hair cutting of the men out at the mine. At the gilsonite mines we had a bath house. When you work in the gilsonite you get really black. Dad would take the barber shears and clippers up to the bath house, but he never did charge a penny to cut hair.
Dad never did meet anybody but what he was quite friendly; he asked them where they were born, who they were related to and asked a lot of personal questions. This made Mother unhappy that Dad would pry into other people's business, but I think they liked it and he did to.
When I was about five or six, Dad went on a trip down into the South end of Utah. Levi Hancock went with him. While he was gone Mother had Dude Hancock, Levi's nephew and a man who Mother dated before she was married, come over and cut off her hair. Mother's hair was long enough that she could almost sit on it. When Dad came home he wasn't happy about her loss of the hair. One reason, Dude Hancock cut the hair and Dad was the hair cutter, and the second reason is that Dad was a little jealous of Dude. Mother took the hair and made a wig out of it, she sewed it on her sewing machine and later Dad wore the wig when he played a witch for Halloween. Dad liked to play tricks at Halloween. He also liked to go trick or treating with the kids, which also made Mother upset. There would be ten or twelve kids who would follow Dad around, he never came home with anything, he gave it all to the kids.
We had a dog, we called Queen. She was an Irish Setter dog, an expensive dog. We got her from a man who raised them and sold them through magazine ads all over the country. The man came and told me that my boys, Doug, Leon and Ken, could have their pick of the pups. We had Queen for fourteen years. She wouldn't come in the house, she would just put her front feet on the thresh hold. She loved to hunt, whenever I came out of the house with the gun, there she was ready to go. She finally got so crippled up she could hardly get on her feet, so one day I told Dad I wished someone would put her out of her misery, I couldn't do it. So Dad said he would do it. They lived in Moses Lake at the time. Dad took her up in the field, he had his 25-35 rifle with him. I think Queen knew what was going on, Dad said she put her front feet over her nose and Dad shot her in the head. He asked that I never ask him to do something like that again. Queen is buried up there on Dad's place.
Dad loved to go hunting, that is one of the things that I remember most about him. He liked to go deer hunting, he went after mule deer that lived around Bluebell. There weren't many for a while, but then they came back around the gilsonite mines. I remember the first deer that he shot at the gilsonite mines, it was on the run and he shot a two point buck right below the eyes. When Dad was a young man they used to get deer by the wagon load and make jerky and other things. He dressed his own deer and cut them up. Before refrigeration, the deer was cooked and bottled unless it was cold enough they would be hung on the north side of the house.
Dad also liked to go fishing. He mostly fished for native trout at Rock Creek and Moon Lake. If you got one eight or ten inches long, that was a big fish. He also liked to get Rainbow trout, which got bigger. He also used to catch a lot of cat fish and hump back fish down on the Green River. Now hump back fish are about extinct, there used to be a lot of them. They have a hump on the top and they are a bony fish, quite dark in color, more like a carp. We ate them, we cooked them like salmon in the can, we put them in bottles and canned them so then you could eat the bones.
The last hunting trip that we took Dad on was unusual. Donald and I rented a trailer and took him up on the Bookcliff mountains, south of the Rainbow mines near Vernal. He could only walk about 100 yards before the trip. By the time we got ready to go home he was walking a mile or two, he got so enthused about it. When he got home he started walking every day, about a mile or so to get in shape for next year. He told everybody he met that he wanted to go hunting next fall and he invited about 20-25 people to go hunting with him. About eight days before hunting season started the next year, he up and died, but we still went on the hunt. It snowed about 18 inches the night we got up there, one family who went had a baby who was only 2 weeks old. I shot a deer and we were going to get it, but Marvin was lost, the fog was set in and we couldn't find him. Someone suggested we kneel and say a prayer. Bernard Winkler, who was the oldest, prayed and when he finished, the fog lifted and we could see Marvin. After he came the fog came back and we went to Bernard's place. We never did go back and get the deer, a big buck, the snow was too deep and we couldn't find him.