By Shu, November 27, 2019 — When I was a little kid, we would go to Pennsylvania and sit on my grandmother’s lap and I would have her knee and all. She would tell stories about the Wild West because her dad went west on a wagon train with his mom and dad. His father died along the way, just like thousands of other pioneers did. They couldn’t stop. They just buried him in Nebraska someplace — well, it wasn’t Nebraska those days … I guess it was a Nebraskan territory. They buried him in an unmarked grave along the river and continued on to Colorado on the wagon train. Now it was just the woman, my grandmother’s grandmother, and her son—he was sixteen years old. In America, the first place that women had equality with men and the right to vote was out in the West. It was like that because they were forced because of circumstances to take over in a man’s world, let’s say. She and her son started a cattle ranch. The cattle ranch is still in the family in Colorado a hundred and… what? A hundred and fifty years later, I guess you would say?
My grandmother told me stories about that—about her dad being sixteen years old going out looking for gold. They didn’t just look for gold in San Francisco in California, but they looked for gold mines in Colorado as well. And so, he was out panning for gold, just like what we see on TV. He would be in the streams and would shake those little screened pans so the little stones would fall out and the bigger gold nuggets would remain in the pan. I guess they never found any or didn’t find much because he remained a rancher all his life. And she was born in Colorado in 1886, which I think makes her the oldest person that I ever knew. I don’t think I ever personally knew anybody who was born before 1886. She was a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse on a prairie. In those days, they didn’t go to college to be schoolteachers. They went to what you and I would call a high school, a normal school. Most kids didn’t go to high school, particularly out West. They got maybe four or five years of basic schooling so they could learn to read and do basic arithmetic, but they didn’t have the money and colleges didn’t exist out there until years later. Anyway, she was a schoolteacher. We used to listen to her tell stories about her classes. In a one-room schoolhouse, it was just like on TV: a little house on a prairie where she would have students of all different ages—all different grades in the same room. She would have to sort of balance all the work that they did and would have to work with all of them.
One of my favorite stories that she told me… we actually have pictures of her dressed in her cowgirl outfit with another schoolteacher. This was in a town called ‘Franktown’— a little bit later it was a four-room schoolhouse, she said. Two stories, four rooms. But they got on a horse and they rode to Denver, Colorado, which I think was twenty or thirty miles away. This was 1910. They went to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. If you know what that is, Buffalo Bill used to travel all around the world, and he would bring horses with him and buffalo and cattle. They would have guns and shoot-ups and Annie Oakley, the famous, young female sharpshooter. My grandmother saw her in a rifle-shooting demonstration.
I love that story and I love all the stories my grandmother told me about living out West and on the prairie. Just from listening to her stories, that’s how I became so interested in history. Even though she wasn’t rich or famous, she was part of history. She was part of the opening of the West—the first time people had gone out there. She was one of thousands—she was one of tens of thousands, but she was my living connection to history.
Her husband, one time, got a job working for the government. It was his job to shoot and kill prairie dogs. You know those cute little prairie dogs? They would put holes in prairies to build their huts and little tunnels. When the cattle would come up from Texas and through Colorado on the way to like Chicago to be butchered and put on a train to be sold for meat, the cattle, or the horses, would put their feet—they would get their foot in this hole and it would break their foot. So now a cow that might be worth like five-hundred dollars at that time is now worthless and has to get shot out in the prairie because it got a broken leg. It was my grandfather’s job for a couple of years to shoot prairie dogs for the government. He died before I was born because otherwise, he would be the oldest person I knew since he was born in 1879. He was in the Spanish-American War and he worked with dynamite and explosives for an outfit called DuPont. He was from Pennsylvania. DuPont transferred him out to Colorado, and that was where he met my grandmother and got married.
Again, these are all family stories and history of people. They came back to the east of Pennsylvania. When I go to Pennsylvania, I go to the same little town where they lived. I went to the same little town where I went on vacation as a little boy. Sometimes, I would stay for a week or so in the summer in Pennsylvania. I still go to their graves and go see the house where they used to live. I have such wonderful memories of life back in Pennsylvania.