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The first thing I remember, was going out and climbing on a man's back while he was husking corn. He got up and took me to a little log cabin, bending down to go through a door, and telling a couple of women to see his "Tom Boy". I said that I wasn't a Tom Boy, that I was a "Tom Girl". They laughed at me. There was a cradle in the middle of the floor with a baby in it. When I was older and told Ma about it, she told me that it was Pa that I had climbed on, and that Aunt Till was there with them. She said Aunt Till came back to Iowa with them when Will was seven weeks old, I was two years and four or five months.
The next I remember was when we lived in a little log cabin about a mile from Grandma, with a one-sash window. Will and I were watching some Indian ponies out on the road. They had their front feet tied together and could hardly get around. They were eating grass by the side of the road. An Indian came down the road on horseback with a long whip in his hand and he drove the ponies off. They went off like rabbits, jumping along down the road toward the Jama Indian Reservation.
The next thing I remember was after we had moved down to Mart Sterling's where Pa did some carpentry work. I think Pa helped build a barn for Mart and a house for another man. They butchered some hogs and gave me a tail to roast. There was another little girl and we both had roasted pig tails. We wore long sleeved aprons that buttoned down the back. We turned them around and buttoned them down the front to be like women.
The next I remember was after we had moved up to the Wilson house. Lola was born there. Pa had some corn that summer and worked in the timber one winter. I remember Ma used to make a little chicken pie and put it in his dinner pail. She baked it in the morning and put it in hot, he had to walk three or four miles to work. When he got there he wrapped the pail in his overcoat and it was still hot for his dinner. Grandma Hall lived on the other side of the road, down the road on the west side of the Wilson house. Will and I used to go down through the orchard and crawl through the rail fence to see her. She would give us bread and butter spread thick with brown sugar and send us back home.
Ma had some hens with little chickens in coops when Lola was born. Will used to take a stick and chase the little chicks out and make the hens make a big fuss. We had two girls working for us. Will kept them busy trying to keep him out of mischief. He would run down to Grandma's crying, "Oh Grandma, Rainey is after me". I think her name was Loraine Goodenough.
Pa had made a powered device to do the churning, by tying the dog up on the top of a roll of slats. When it turned on, the dog had to keep going until the butter was churned. We had to keep our dog tied up to keep him home as he would run off when he thought it was time to do the churning. Uncle Jim had caught a hive of bees in our orchard and left the hive there. One day the dog's rope slipped and he ran around the hive and upset it. The bees settled all over the dog. Uncle Jim came up and he and Ma had quite a time getting things settled. They got so much honey. Uncle Jim ate some of the warm honey and rolled on the floor with colic. Ma got stung while cutting the rope from the dog's neck.
In the spring after we moved to Wilson's, Pa brought home a cow and calf. It was snowing, I can see him yet, leading the cow and driving the calf through the snow.
The prairie chickens used to come in the yard to feed with the chickens. Pa made a trap and set it out by a shock of corn and caught a lot of the prairie chickens. One morning there was a hawk in the trap. We gave it to Will Wilson. They tied it up on that corner of the chicken house to keep the hawks from getting the hens.
After we moved to Mitchellville, we lived in a little house before they got the upstairs of the store ready to live in. Ma was cleaning the upstairs and left us to watch Lola while she went downstairs to get some hot water, but we were too busy to watch Lola, seeing if the cat would land on its feet when we dropped it out of the window. She crawled over to the open stairwell and fell straight down. She was hurt pretty bad and didn't get over it until she had the measles a year or two after that.
While we lived there we saw a hummingbird's nest in a balsam plant. I never saw such big balsam plants. They were as tall as I was - I was five years old. Afterwards, we moved upstairs over the store, even before the partitions were in.
Uncle Sam Hall, Ma's brother, had been staying with us but on the 4th of July he went up to Des Moines to see Uncle Will. They thought he went home but instead he went west and the folks didn't hear from him until Grandpa Hall got a letter from him wanting them to get him out of the Navy. He had joined the Navy so he could go to the Sandwich Islands (now called the Hawaiian Islands). Queen Lil was over in the U.S. on a visit and was going home. Uncle Sam thought it would be a good chance to see the Sandwich Islands, but they didn't even let the sailors go ashore. Grandpa got his release.
One night the folks heard someone come upstairs through the store. Pa wanted to know "who was there". He said it is "me". Pa told him to get into bed with the kids. Ma wanted to know who he was telling to get into bed with the kids. He said it was that bum of ours.
When I woke up in the morning there was a DIRTY red handkerchief on the floor. I picked it up by the corner and asked, kind of disgusted, "Whose is this?" When they told us that it was Uncle Sam's, it didn't take Will and I long to get downstairs to see him. He always was a pal of ours.
Mother told us that her Grandpa Hall was away from home much of the time, and to keep her children contented and out of mischief, Grandma gathered them around her and read to them. The family thus formed the good habit of reading.
Perhaps it was the tales of adventure or reading of the wonders of the world that gave her Uncle Sam Hall the urge to travel. He was never long in one place. He went around the world twice on a sailing ship. Once it wasn't of his choice. In 1875 he was shanghaied in San Francisco! When he came to, he was out on the high seas headed for China. That time it was two years before he set foot on American soil again. There was no Panama Canal at that time, and all ships had to sail around the tip of South America to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
Uncle Sam would come home and then leave again, never telling his family where he was going, and they never knew when to expect him back. One day Uncle Sam showed up at his mother's door with a tiny baby about a week old in his arms. He told his mother that he had been living in Chicago for some time working around the docks on the Lake front, and the mother of this baby just "up and left him". To put his baby in a Foundling Home was unthinkable, so he got on the train and brought her to his mother. She not only gave the baby a home and cared for her, she also gave her, her own name, Minerva Hall.
Samuel Hall was a vagabond all his life. He never married. His last years were spent near Salem, Oregon, living alone in a small house on his nephew, Will Hogg's farm, helping with the fruit harvest and other chores. He died in 1936 at the age of 86.
We used to like to see the Indians when they came in town. In the summer the little boys used to come with the older men. The dust used to get pretty deep. The men around town used to put a penny in a split stick and stick it up in the dust and have the papoose shoot it out with their bow and arrows and see them dig it out of the dust and get it for themselves. The Indians were great beggars and never liked to have the storekeepers weigh out the groceries if they just put the things in a sack, even if they didn't get as much, they were better satisfied, they thought they were getting cheated when they weighed it.
THINGS MOTHER TOLD US
My mother, "Mamie" VanDyke wrote the preceding stories in her 82nd year. I wish she had written more for she could have told so many more stories of the Indians. I remember her telling us some stories:
Grandpa's store was a general merchandise store and he sold German calico, a heavy cotton material that came only in "Navy Blue" and "Turkey Red". Those Indian squaws bought it by the yards and made full skirts, often wearing several at a time. They were great scavengers, always snooping back of the store to see if anything had been tossed out. One day near spring, Grandpa had sorted his potatoes and apples, putting the discarded culls in a barrel along with cleanings from hens he had dressed to sell. Along came two squaws. They gathered up the top skirts they were wearing and proceeded to use them for sacks to empty that barrel of everything in it - rotten potatoes and apples, chicken offal, feathers and all! Then went happily down the road followed by dozen or so dogs, that were hungrily sniffing the juice that was dripping through those skirts.
One day Mother came into the store to ask Grandpa for a yard of hair ribbon to take as a gift to her best friend, Millie Seams, for her birthday. An old squaw who was a regular customer was in the store, was a very jolly old girl who was always teasing Grandpa to give her something for nothing. When she saw Mother, she asked him if she could have his "papoose". Grandpa said she could. What? Let an Indian have her? Never! Mother flew out the back door, through the yard, crawled through a hole in the fence, and ran as fast as she could up the road to Millie's house, the squaw following right behind her. "The Indian is after me!", she told Mrs. Seams as she ran through the parlor and hid in the bedroom under bed. The old lady came to the door and laughed as she told Mrs. Seams she wanted her papoose. There were several little girls there for Millie's party so Mrs. Seams asked her which one was hers. After looking around and not seeing Mother she shook her head. "No, not her Papoose", she said, and left chuckling to herself, apparently enjoying the joke. Mother was eight years old. Another thing she remembered was that summer she was taught to sew. Grandpa gave Grandma a whole bolt of unbleached muslin to make bed sheets, pillowcases, underwear and whatever we needed. Thirty-six inches was the standard width for most yard goods at that time. Some silks, velvets and laces came in narrower widths but there was nothing wider, so sheets were made of two widths sewed together.
There were few sewing machines in 1875, at least Grandma didn't have one. Ready-made clothing was not available either, everything was sewed by hand. After cutting the two lengths for a sheet, Grandma pinned the edges together, a pin every six inches, and taught Mother to overcast those edges together. It was summer and so beautiful outside. How could little girl who was used to playing outside with other children most of the day, stay inside and sew? It was hot in those rooms over the store, so Grandma let Mother sit outside on the stairs which led down to the street. She told her that every time she sewed from one pin to the next she could slide down one step, and when she reached the bottom step she could quit for the day. What a task for a little eight year old girl but Mother must have learned her lesson well for she was a beautiful seamstress and later after the family came to Nebraska, Grandpa bought a sewing machine and Mother made most of the clothing for their growing family.
The wrapping paper Grandpa used didn't have printing on it, but he had a rubber stamp, which advertised his wares and Mother remembered sitting on the counter stamping the wrapping paper. In the year of 1875 Mother was given a subscription to a children's magazine and with it she received a picture of a little girl with long curls holding a sheaf of wheat and flowers over her shoulder. Grandpa framed it for her and a fold of his heaviest wrapping paper with his stamp on it was placed behind the picture in that frame where it has stayed through the years, until we found it. (Incidentally, a picture just like this one hangs in one of the sod houses in Pioneer Village in Minden, Nebraska.)
Two children were born while Grandpa and Grandma lived over the store at Michelville. James Burton (Uncle Burt) in 1873, and Sarah Inez (Aunt Sade) in 1875. I don't know when Grandpa sold his store, but they were living in Rippey, Iowa, when Lizzie Amanda was born in 1877. Grandpa was working at the carpenter trade at that time. I don't recall anything that Mother told of her life in Rippey, except that she was so proud of her pretty little sister, Lizzie, who had brown eyes and curly auburn hair.
There was no Post Office in that small town. They had to go to the Depot for the mail, so each day about train time, Mother put Lizzie in her carriage to go see if they would get a letter from Grandpa, who had gone out west to find work. Little Lizzie was afraid of that noisy, huffing and puffing old engine, so Mother would take her behind the Depot until the horrid old monster left town. Then she could get the mail.