Unearthing a life.....

"When Dad got out of Othello High School in 1929, there weren't many opportunities for employment and no land left to homestead, so he became a trapper. The government was offering a bounty ($3.50 I think) for coyotes ... and a good coyote hide taken at the right season was worth $3-$4 dollars on the fur market. So Dad had several trap lines running out of Othello. He also caught occasional bobcats and badgers. He made a good enough living at it that he owned a car and a house by the time he married my mother in 1933. I can remember (probably from the years 1938-1940) riding the backroads with my folks, collecting the 'kills' and resetting traps. When Dad began getting work on the Railroad, Mom ran the trap lines during the day (with three little kids in the car) and Dad did the skinning and hide curing in the evenings. We had a shed where he did this work and where the hides were stored to cure. I remember squating on my haunches and watching him do the skinning ... by the light of a kerosene lantern ... and his Case knife had red handles ... and there was the odor of kerosene from the lamp and the smell of sulfer which he rubbed on the wet side of the hides.He quit trapping when we moved to Smyrna in 1941 where he became a Section Foreman on the Milwaukee Railroad. Mom trapped the winter of '41-'42 and made $104 and bought Dad a Hamilton pocket watch (The Railroad required Foremen to have reliable watches -- within a few seconds per month)."

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I wrote the piece above last Spring to accompany a photo (one of these posted here) that I had posted to my yaFro photography site.
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In these pictures, Mom is thirteen or fourteen and Dad is around twenty. Her family moved to Othello in 1929 and she 'set her cap' immediately for this 'older fellow' who lived next to his parents out east of town. I have her old high school Autograph Book with numerous entries (by classmates) referring to her conquest of 'Gil' .... and this only a few months after she had moved to Othello.
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I have clear images of bouncing along the winding dirt roads out in the scablands with Mom and my younger brother and sister. When she found a live coyote in a trap, she'd shoot it and tie it to a front fender ... if the coyote had already died and was getting a trifle 'ripe', she'd lash it to the rear bumper. Once we came up on a badger that had torn up all the ground he could reach. She sat on the roof of the car to shoot the badger -- with Dad's lever action single-shot .22 rifle. I don't know if she was afraid of it, or if she was getting a high angle to make a shot to the head that would not damage the fur.
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Some of the traps were fastened to stakes driven into the ground, but often there wasn't much ground sitting atop the basalt bedrock, so traps set there would be attached to large rock anchors with baling wire. I recall one such anchor that was apparently way too small .... the folks had walked out maybe a hundred feet into the brush to check a set, when all of a sudden they broke into a run, running in circles, leaping sagebrush, passing each other going opposite directions -- and a little cloud of dust streaking along with and amongst them. One of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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A few years before Mom and Dad's romance, a rabid coyote got Grandma trapped in their barn for several hours. It laid down in the barnyard just outside the door and kept her penned in. When she knew Uncle Don would be coming home from school, she climbed up in the hayloft and hollered at him in the distance. Told him what was going on and gave him orders to go down to the railroad roundhouse and get Grandpa. Half hour later Grandpa came storming home in his old pick-up truck and dispatched the coyote with my Dad's .22 rifle.
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Old Man Coyote was/is never too far away.