Autobiography of Alvin James McCuistion

I came to this country in 1877 from Tooele, Utah. Tecoma was a small town then. I brought the family to Montello in 1908. About all there was here then was a postoffice about a mile above called Bauvard. There was a colony of Chinamen living here south of where the present railroad tank is. They were no problem to the community at all. There was China Jim and Maggie and Tom--good Chinamen. Jim stayed here and ranched for a number of years, about where Ray Browning lived. Tom ran a laundry here in Montello and Jim and Maggie went to Tecoma. Jim would buy and sell beef cattle. He went to China and brought back with him a girl and a boy. The boy died and the girl married an Italian and is now living in Chicago.

Tecoma had two hotels--really just made up of saloons and a store besides. Copper Mine run pretty big there. They ran big teams from above Claysons and hauled ore for a number of years. Finally the company built an aerial tramway which made Tecoma boom. Delno never did the amount of business that they did at Copper Mountain. A man operated there at Delno by the name of Hank Dake. He had a brother, Frank, who ran a saloon in Montello. Hank would go into one mine and get what available ore he could get easily and ship several carloads, picking off the easy ore. He got as much as $5,000 in this way. Several times he claimed, though, he didn't own any-mine at-all. This was a common practice.

Sparks and Tinnen first came in here. Tinnen was from Texas, I understood, and they were partners and they bought out the old Baily-Harrell interests in what we called Thousand Springs Territory where the U. C. operates now. Subsequently, Tinnen quit and Sparks united with Harrell again and then Sparks became governor. He sold out his interest to Harrell and Harrell died. The Vinyard Land Company had loaned him over $8,000. Then the U. C. bought out the Vinyard Company. Sparks had the name of ruthlessly crushing all opponents.

Before we ever moved out here, W. C. Gollaher and I had a nice big herd of horses. I bought a stallion in Tooele that cost me $2,150. We took him out on the Badger Creek Range of mountains, called now by the U. C. Company, Gollaher Mountain, who now own it. We ran those horses for several years and then the depression of '93 and '94 came and horses got so you couldn't sell them for five cents a head. Then my partner sold me out to the Sparks-Harrell people in 1894 for $2,000. Gollaher was my stepfather's youngest son and when his father died, he and his sister lived with my mother. We bought two or three water claims here and a squatter right three-fourths mile from our ranch as of now. I came out from Tooele in 1895 and we worked, four of us, from the mouth of Debbs Creek to connect with the water in McDonald Creek and take it down to the place we had the squatters right on. I tried to got Gollaher to find out if it was railroad land, but he was easy going and the first thing we knew, John Sparks had bought it from the railroad company. He was Governor of the state, too.

First thing I knew, here came an agreement; my partner (Gollaher) sent that to me into Tooele, made by him and me, supposedly, and it was on account of that section of land that they (Sparks-Harrell) wanted me to sign an agreement. They would give him (Gollaher) half of the land and they would give me half of the water and improvements, but I told him (Gollaher) not to sign it because they would get it all away from you. I told him to go and file on 80 acres north of there so then they (Sparks- Harrell) made another offer, cutting out the forfeiture clause but didn't send it in to me and I didn't know he (Gollaher) had signed it til I got here. In 1907 he (Gollaher) got a carbuncle on his knee. Blood poison set in and he was sent to Salt Lake. He came down and telephoned me in Tooele. I went into Salt Lake and brought him to Tooele where he recovered and he told me I had better come out because he had used my money for thirteen years. I had 300 horses and two or three hundred cattle. I had a big family and no farm much in Tooele, so I figured I would stand a better chance in Nevada than in Utah because it took at least $150 an acre to buy land with any water to it in Utah. I came in 1908. We lived four years on the ranch below us owned by Sparks-Harrell.

In 1908 the Vinyard Company, an Ogden firm that had organized this company composed of Eccles, Brownings, Adam Patterson and so forth, but anyhow, they had loaned money to the Sparks-Harrell people and Adam Patterson visited me in 1908 at the ranch down there and told me they had purchased the Sparks-Harrell property--all that property now controlled by the U. C. He said they understood I was interested in but 60 acres, so I showed him the agreement signed by Sparks. "Well," he said, "this says you are due for 320 acres," but I never could get any settlement out of them and they wouldn't give me the deed to the land for which I was to give them half interest in the water. Finally they brought suit against us because we had homesteaded this place and I took the water across their land, took the wire and posts, etc., because we had put all the improvements on it in the first place; we did everything that was done and had 40 acres of alfalfa growing so I took it off and they brought suit in September 1913, and I beat them in the court at Elko. So we started in here and built this place up. Sparks never actually farmed out here but he just supervised it from afar.

Grass, lots of it everywhere here before the sheep got bad in here. The stockgrowers all thought if they could put their cattle south of the railroad property they could winter out beautifully, but the sheep ruined it. I don't wonder that Cain killed Able! Nearly all kinds of grass, bunch grass especially grew here. I have seen that white sage at least a foot high in the winter and you could mow it with a machine and put it up as hay. Stock will live and do well on shadscale. We also have black curly sage here which is very good feed, but if they feed on that alone it seems to poison them, so it should be mixed with other feeds.

We found a place where some members of the Donner Party died in the desert. Tooele County is a big place and for a long time it was the winter grating ground for the sheepmen and in those days each county assessor would go out and assess all these sheep. I was county attorney one year when Box Elder County demanded a share of this tax collection and I asked them to make a definite statement as to how long those sheep had grazed in their county. We have had application from two other counties besides Box Elder County and their attorney wrote and said if we didn't send that money they would file suit, so I told him to go ahead and try it. So they agreed finally to get the statement that we wanted and we adjusted. that difficulty and then I suggested that these two counties send their surveyors with their equipment clear from their county seats to the Nevada state line and establish county and state lines so each assessor could tell when they were out of the state and these surveyors found one of these old Donner Party camps where some wagons had gone to pieces, skeletons, etc., a little east from Silver Island out in the desert.

They went through the Silver Zone Pass southwest of here. When they ran out of water, they couldn't find any on Silver Island, so one branch came clear to Pilot Mountain. They loaded up their wagons and took back to the camp on the desert and then brought all that were left alive back to Pilot Mountain. They stopped there to recuperate their stock and then went around the south end of this mountain and on through Wells and followed down the Humboldt River. There's a spring on the east side of Pilot where they stopped. There are several springs there. The highway goes through Silver Zone Pass now.

When we ran our horses up north here, we frequently cross a road running east and west and the later settlers in that section said that was the old emigrant Oregon Trail.

My mother, Betsy Cranson, was born in New York; her parents died. She had three sisters and two brothers and by the time her parents died, her oldest sister had married a man in the east, but he came west to about where Chicago is now, on Lake Michigan, and she kept writing to her sisters and finally got some of them to move out and finally my mother went out. She met a man in Michigan by the name of Howe. They were both young and they fell in love and were married. He was a carpenter. There were no postal facilities, no railroad, etc. In that wild country, people who went east brought mail and distributed it. Everything was the hard way of travel so he got a job way up in the northern part of Michigan to build a house. He packed his tools and went up to this place with a team. He thought it would be six weeks at least till he could get back, so he went and that was the last she ever heard of him; whether he died or what happened to him, she never knew for sure. Subsequently a baby came along--Gertrude Isabel Howe.

My mother's younger sister married a man by the name of Isaac Hawley. He had come out from the eastern states to that section of the country and they got the gold fever and they all pooled their resources and made up a company. They induced my mother to come with them and they came across the plains and landed in Salt Lake about 1851. When they got to Salt Lake, the people told them they had better not try to go on that year because they were too late to make it before snow and the news of the Donner Party had just reached them, so they decided to stay and winter there. They camped down at the end of the Oquirrh Mountains where it juts into the lake where Garfield is now. They were in camp all winter. The people from Tooele and Grantsville stopped off with them on their way to and from Salt Lake. The next spring, they went on to California and when they got there the men folk organized a mining company and then decided that they had to have some mining equipment so they sent Hawley by the Isthmus of Panama to New York. He contracted yellow fever and died before he got to New York so that left my aunt a widow with three or four children.

My mother was a good cook. She cooked in Placerville and Red Bluff. She got acquainted with my father, Oliver Porter McCuistion, who was from Tennessee and married him. One son was born to them, Franklin. He died when he was about 2 years old. After McCuistion went into the gold fields, she never heard from him again. My mother got the Mormon bug and she wanted to get back to Utah. She met a man, Baker, a Mormon at Carson, Nevada. In 1856 he went to Ragtown (now Sacramento) to get some irons because they were building a mill to grind grain and saw wood. He found out that she wanted to go to Utah so he made a bargain with her. He said, "My wife expects to be confined about the beginning of the winter, and if you want to come and take care of her, she will take care of you when you have your baby," (that was me.) So she went and stayed all winter and I was born on December 14, 1856. Then in about 9 or 10 months she went to Tooele, Utah. In 1857 she met Gollaher whose wife had died previously and as he was a widower and she a widow and dependent for help with her little daughter and myself, she married him. I don't know when they were married, but anyhow after they were married they were ordered to go to Lehi and all the people in Tooele County were to concentrate in that valley around Provo and if Johnson's Army broke through their lines in Echo Canyon, they were to destroy their homes and flee to the south and go to California on the southern route. Finally they came back to Tooele.