Huerfano County, Colorado
Oral Interviews
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Neal Baysinger

Note: We do not have a fact sheet for this interview.

RN: When did your family first come to Huerfano County?

NB: It would have been 1896, because I was born in '93.

RN: And where did they come here from?

NB: Two Buttes.

RN: And where is that?

NB: About two miles South of Lamar. They came up here on the Cuchara. It's called the Cuchara now, where that big white house used to be, close to the road. They stayed there till the First World War.

RN: Did they farm there?

NB: My uncles did. My father died down to Ganado, below Lamar. I wasn't old enough to remember anything about that. Something like two years old.

RN: So you came here.

NB: I came with my uncles.

RN: So did they homestead their land?

NB: No, they bought this land up here and a lot of places around. One uncle went back down to Two Buttes and Springfield, and he lived there till he died. And he farmed, and he got into politics, and he was elected 24 years County Clerk of Baca County. Then he got sick and died, and I think he was about 80 years old.

RN: Did you take over the farming on the place up on Cuchara?

NB: No, my uncles run that. That was home. That was like coming back.

RN: That was where you grew up. And what was it like growing up there? What was life like in those days?

NB: Well, we didn't have no automobiles and we didn't have a very good road. People had to travel with their team and wagon.

RN: How far were you from Walsenburg, or from La Veta?

NB: It's about 11 miles and a half up there to where we were.

RN: So would you get snowed in quite a bit in the wintertime?

NB: Well, people just didn't get out much in the wintertime. We used to come to town in the wintertime, my mother, and my grandfather was alive then, and we stayed down here in the wintertime. I had an older brother. We went to school down here and summer school was up there.

RN: Would you stay down here in the wintertime?

NB: Yeah, most all the time, once in a while we'd go home on weekends.

RN: Who would you stay with in La Veta?

NB: My uncle. And my grandfather. My grandmother had died after we came here.

RN: What kind of farming did they do up there? What did they raise?

NB: They raised potatoes and they raised oats and stuff like that. There was a ready market for it. Lots of coal mines. They bought oats to feed mules. And there's lots of hay. It was baled and sold to the mules at these mines.

RN: These were the mules that did the work in the mines?

NB: Yes, they'd use them in place of the motors they've got now. It was mules them days. The mules moved the cars all around. They had a hoist and when they got them at the right place they'd pull a tower outside and pull the whole works out. And was a trip, whatever they could pull. I used to work up at this mine at Oakview, worked outside and I worked on the Ojo Mine. I fired the boilers there. Steam power. They didn't have gasoline and diesel power in them days.

RN: When did you start working in the mines?

NB: I never worked inside the mines. I worked outside.

RN: So you were above the ground?

NB: Oh, off and on. In the twenties. After the First World War was over.

RN: So you weren't working there during the strike?

NB: Oh, no. I was just at home up here during the strike. That was '13 and '14.

RN: Do you remember those times?

NB: Oh, I remember those times.

RN: Sounds like people had a hard time there didn't they?

NB: It was a little bit rough.

RN: Was there much conflict at either Oakview or Ojo? Was there much that happened there?

NB: Yes, they had a fellow out there working at the mines when the strike was on. There was no dentist up there. He came to town to the dentist. And the strikers in town wouldn't let him go home. Wouldn't let him go back to the mine. So the mine sent some men down to bring him home, take him back up. And that's when they had the massacre out here on the hill. They killed four of them in the car. Right on top of this hill, out of town about a mile and a half. Then the strike just ran from bad to worse till they had that mess over at Ludlow. It was all uncalled for, but they had it. And that's all I know about the mines. Course a lot of these places, you know, some of them didn't have much of anything to sell. And most all of them that lived up in the hills around here, why they cut mine props. There was a ready sale for timber that they used in the mine to prop it up. You could take a load of props to town where they were and if you didn't get cash why you could go to the company store and buy something to eat and you was fixed till the next trip. That's the way it was all the way around the country. Way up here on top of the mountain up near La Veta Pass there was lot of families lived up in there then. They had a milk cow and they had schools and there was a lot of fire killed timber, dry trees, and they cut them into props and hauled them down to Weston and they had a ready sale there. CF&I was in there, had the mines down there and they'd buy up timbers, and people could load them up a load. The sawmills got some cash. They was most all family men and the kids had to have shoes and clothes. Them old houses there up on top of the mountain there. They stayed around there in the timbers, cut around over then, and you can find them in all the different draws. That's all they had to sell was timber.

RN: Were there more families living in the hills, in those days?

NB: Oh, yes, there was more families up in the mountains. You wonder why they went up in a place like that, up in the mountains to settle. But down here on the prairie ground you couldn't raise much, it was prairie pasture. It was pasture, you know. Lots of them came down to work the mines. There was lots of mines, and men was turning over all the time, quitting this one and going somewhere else to that one, and they hired new ones. The early ones that were in here, they didn't come to town very often. One neighbor would maybe come for the mail and get what the other neighbors wanted. Maybe next time a neighbor up above or below. When they was below you, you didn't know much about that but when they was above you they all stopped to see. Neighbors was neighbors them days.

RN: They cooperated a lot in those days, sounds like.

NB: They were really neighbors. Well, you know in the early days here we had a mail route from here to Stonewall.

RN: Is that right? All the way over the mountain. So would they deliver mail over there all through the winter?

NB: I don't know how often it went, whether it was three times a week, I don't believe it was every day. Because there wasn't no snow equipment to buck snow out of the road and it was mighty rocky in places and you couldn't hardly get over. But that's the way things was in the early days, before the turn of the century.

RN: How about medicine? Did people come into La Veta to a doctor or would they pretty much doctor themselves?

NB: We had five doctors here in this town. We had two undertakers. I always tell them it took two undertakers to take care of the mistakes the doctors had made. That is a little laughable. But doctors didn't know in them days like they know now. If they had of our graveyard wouldn't be full of young folks from one year old to five or six. Lots of 'em died of scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, whatever kind of disease came along, why.

RN: They didn't have the vaccines they have now.

NB: Now, why you have a hard job now getting a doctor to come out, because he usually gets 8 or 10 for an office call and he'll put in several office calls while he's waiting on one out in the country.

RN: Did people use a lot of home remedies?

NB: Oh, yes, there were patent medicines and I don't know but what some of those patent medicines are as good as what a doctor will give you now. They changed the name of them but some of them old folks knew pretty well how to doctor you.

RN: Did people seem like they stayed healthier in those days?

NB: Don't seem as like we had as many sick people. We got somebody on the list all the time at the hospital now. They live different.

RN: In what ways?

NB: Well, especially in the foods. They couldn't run down and buy foods every day. They had to stock up on something that would keep and something that would last a little while. Lots of people would buy 500 lbs. of flour at once. Now it would scare you to death. 500 lbs of flour. You take a family, bread was the staff of life. All these old ladies, they knew how to bake bread, and good bread, and they all had a milk cow, too, and they had their butter and they had a beef to butcher once in a while. People used to raise some hogs and have pork meat. That's the way they had to do it.

RN: Would people grow big gardens for themselves?

NB: Oh, yes, everybody would raise a big garden if they could. Then they raised lots of potatoes around the country up into the mountains.

RN: Would people in the mountains make part of their living with potatoes? That was a cash crop then, wasn't it?

NB: Oh, yes, they would get credit at the store until they would harvest their potatoes. Then they'd buck them down and sell them. Now days you'd think that was an awful job. There were several sawmills around the country in them days. They sold quite a lot of lumber. They cut their own logs and hauled them to the mill. People would give them an order of what they wanted to build a house with, and they would get the logs out and cut the lumber. And lumber wasn't very high. Course a dollar wasn't very much money, but it went further than a dollar now. They had to do it that way. No other way to do it. Oh, a lot of 'em in the fall of the year they sold their hay crop. They'd bale it. They had an old horse baler. They'd haul it down here to town and put it on rail cars, and all these mines had a railroad into them because they shipped coal out. They'd take a carload of hay in there, and they could unload it themselves. You had to load it for them. They sold lots of hay that way. All the mines had to work the same way. We had here in this town, we had a lake right up here on the hill on the way out of town west of here. They used to harvest ice off of that lake. Sometimes twice a year. They'd cut the ice with a team and plow that was made for it. Every mine around the country had a meat market and a saloon and they had to put them up an ice house, and they'd fill it with ice. And the sawmills, they'd go there to set the sawdust to pack the ice in to keep the air away from it and that lasted pretty good. Course there wasn't as much fresh meat to eat then as there is now.

RN: How would people preserve their foods in those days? When they killed a cow, how would they preserve the meat?

NB: Oh, they had to wait til it was cold enough weather. Or can it. In my time we lived over here and we'd put vegetables and things in the glass jars in the summer time and empty them, butcher and put meat back in for next summer. Yeah, that's the way. And that hasn't been too long ago. See with no refrigeration. Oh, it started sometime in the forties before they done very much about it. There was a few refrigerating plants around, but they used to have to harvest ice and fill the meat houses full of ice. That sounds awfully rocky, but that's the only way people could get by those days. They could neighbor, everybody had time to make neighbors. They don't have time to neighbor any more.

RN: That's true. Do you remember Indians when you were young? Were there any Indians left or had they already gone?

NB: No, the Indians had all moved out, when we came here, not too long before we came, though.

RN: Do you remember any stories that were told about the Indians?

NB: No, I couldn't give you any Indian stories. Those old timers used to have some bear stories, but I couldn't tell you about them because I never saw them kind of bears.

RN: What was the wild life like? Was there more wild life then or less?

NB: No, I don't believe there was as much game in the hills as there is now.

RN: I know you see a lot of deer these days.

NB: Now, nothing to see deer, if you go out at all. You see deer here in town sometimes. And bear right down... And they used to when I was a kid they never was like that.

RN: I know there were a lot of bear last year. We bought Mrs. Young's Honey Farm so we had bees on Roricks land down here, down Valley road and we had to move them out because the bears came, and they came back and back.

NB: That's her home place down there. She came there when she was 5 years old.

RN: It's so beautiful. We fell in love with that. We were sad when we had to move our bees out because we just liked going there. That was really nice.

NB: Yeah, there's been a lot of changes. People I grew up with, they don't see any changes particularly. They heard people talk about these things, but they grew into them. What if you was back in the same place, what would they do? What would the young folks do now?

RN: They would have a hard time. I think electric lights are one of the main things.

NB: Oh, yeah. I can remember when this town didn't have lights. Didn't have water. Only a well, at every house in town.

RN: Did people have an inside pump or an outside pump?

NB: Oh, some of them did. There's a house over here that had a pump and put up a tower with a water tank on top of the tower. Oh, three, four hundred gallons, and the windmill pumped the water up from that, and they'd take that and irrigate the garden. But the others irrigated out of the creek. Because we had lots more snow and lots more rains in the summer time. The creek ran quite a lot of water. People would take it out in ditches. And irrigate their crops.

RN: Does it seem like the weather has changed?

NB: Yes, don't get as cold as it used to. Like I was telling about that ice. I've seen them harvest twice, harvest a crop of ice. Anybody don't know about it that sounds they'd cut the ice off of the lake and still freeze back so much they'd freeze ice again and ship it. All the stores and the saloons all had to buy their ice in the winter time and put it up for next summer. And a lot of these people that was working in the timber and stuff they had to do the same way. They had to do their work and get their groceries and things in the fall of the year and have it on hand because you didn't run down to the store every time you wanted a loaf of bread.

RN: Did people have root cellars?

NB: Oh, yes, everybody had cellars and they stored the potatoes in them. Quite a little work, all hand work them days. I believe people got along better than they do now.

RN: You sound like neighbors got along real well together. Did they have disagreements or arguments much?

NB: Once in a while you'd find a couple that couldn't get along but very seldom. Everybody was neighbors. You knew where they lived and who they were. As I say, my uncles and my granddad bought that place up there in 1896. My granddad on my mother's side bought this half a block about the turn of the century. And this home was my mother's home at one time. I thought she was an old lady when she died, but she was only 73. So many children died. They had children's diseases, all them things you know, mumps and measles and scarlet fever and Scarletina and diphtheria and whooping cough. Name it. They had it. That's about all I can tell you about.

RN: What do you think the differences are in the way kids grow up today and the way they grew up then? What was it like being a kid in those days?

NB: There's a lot of difference there. Kids minded them days. Now they wait till they see whether they got to mind or not. They was stricter, they learned what “no” is, “you can't do these things".

RN: Did kids have a lot more responsibilities to do chores around the place than they seem to have now?

NB: People didn't get out very much. Somebody had to stay home all the time. Now they are all looking for a vacation nowadays to go somewhere. In those days no such thing was a vacation, not paid or anything like that.

RN: Did kids do a lot of work around the place, chop wood or...

NB: Oh, yeah, they all had things to do, that they could do.

RN: They probably would help with the milking.

NB: Oh, yeah, feeding cattle in the wintertime. If you had any stock to amount to anything you had to hitch up to a wagon and haul the hay out to 'em. Now you jump in a pickup and go throw a few bales of hay and take off and dump it out to them. Them days you couldn't have drove a pickup. Too much snow on the ground when you wanted to go.

RN: How about the schools, did you go to a country school? So they just would have the school room?

NB: The country schools, yeah. But when you came to town, had a brick schoolhouse over there just the other side of this one. Had four rooms and as I say it didn't take much. Had four teachers and a principal, and they ran the school. Side 2 of tape.

NB: I've seen a lot of changes made.

RN: I bet you have. What are some of the ways that neighbors used to help each other out?

NB: They'd trade work. Just trade work.

RN: So if you needed help somebody would come help you and you would give him a hand too.

NB: We used to have to do that way in the '30's and '40's. We was living up at a ranch up above Aguilar and maybe he'd be getting hay ready today to load tomorrow and cutting some down, and getting it ready and we'd put up his and come on back to my place and stack the hay that I'd cut while...

RN: That's right. You don't see a neighbors cooperating quite the same way these days, do you?

NB: No, you don't see 'em. And you don't see no young folks round here in this country. You see, we had the railroad through here, had two section gangs. We still got 'em but we only got one section gang, and he's only got one or two men or three. Then they had seven or eight. And that give several of 'em jobs. Then this was a division point, and all the engines pulling trains up from Pueblo up to here, one engine'd bring in a train here when they had to have two helpers to get over the hill, three engines to get it over the hill, from Walsenburg up.

RN: Have you ever worked on the railroad?

NB: The railroad had a passenger train that hauled two pullmans on the rear every night, goes down at night, comes back tomorrow night. They stopped here and changed the engines. It was steam power, Oh, in a lot of ways we had it a lot better when we had the passenger trains on than we do now.

RN: We talk about that all the time. We wish there were trains.

NB: You wanted to write somebody over here in Alamosa about 50 some miles, you could mail the letter tonight and he'd have it in the morning. Now you write him a card or a letter they take it to Colorado Springs and stamp it and hold it over till the train comes back, three days. And you used to get it in one night.

RN: Would people ride the trains quite a bit in those days? Would people take the trains over to Alamosa?

NB: Oh, wherever anybody wanted to go. They had wagons but they didn't travel that way with a wagon or a spring wagon unless they was moving something. Get on the train, go tend to your business and come back.

RN: Wish they'd bring 'em back.

NB: You betcha.

RN: You wait for a lot of trains in Walsenburg, but not passenger.

NB: They had two trains a day a going and coming through Walsenburg. They had one passenger train, went to Trinidad and back to Pueblo every day, the C&S, it had four, a night train. My father went to work here on the narrow gauge in the 1800's.

NB: Yeah, he was conductor on the train that came over this Old La Veta Pass and worked over at Silverton when the boom was on there, up at Creede in the mining days.

RN: How long did he work for the railroad?

NB: Forty some years. Until he retired. His folks came from North Carolina in the 1800's.

RN: Is that right.

NB: You got to talk a little louder than that, Dear. They came here from North Carolina. My mother originally came here from Pennsylvania. Her father was killed in the Civil War. And her mother came to this county with my father and mother in the 1800's. Pretty near all the people around Gardner and Rye and around here and Walsenburg came out, alot of them right after the Civil War. This was all new out here, but there's a lot of 'em that came. Pretty near all the old timers that I knew around here came from Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky.

RN: How did they get here?

NB:By train. The riders paid them about 2 cents a mile. You can't do that anymore, but it took a long time to get 2 cents a mile to ride it on. It didn't make much difference. They just had enough to get here on, and they'd get a job pretty quick. It didn't pay much, but you had a job and you was content them days. Anybody had a job and could make a living and take care of his family, boy, he was sitting on top of the world.

RN: So did your family come and homestead here?

NB: None of mine did. They came here, and I've heard my mother tell about washing for the cowboys. When my father was working. He did ranch work when it was all hand. And when they got here what like provisions they had it in a trunk. And that was it. This old house down here at the museum.

NB: You know the blacksmith shop down at the museum?

RN: Oh, yes.

NB: And my oldest brother was born in that down on the Rorick Place. Dirt floor in it. Now days it wouldn't be sanitary, would it?

RN: So that was where your family originally came, to the Rorick Place, there.

NB: Well, they bought that after they had my oldest brother in Alamosa, they bought that and I came there when I was five years and I lived there all my life.

RN: So where were you born?

NB: Alamosa. I came when I was 5 years old in a horse and buggy with my folks over the Pass.

NB: I came here in a covered wagon. Had a railroad in here but folks all moved up here, they had four or five wagons, teams, friends they had back there around Springfield, Two Buttes, they helped and hauled stuff. I had an uncle here, Charlie Powell. He was a kid twelve years old when they moved from Pittsburg, Kansas, out here, him and another boy his age drove a herd of cattle right up Main Street in Wichita.

RN: Is that right? You don't see many twelve year olds doing that these days, do you?

NB: Don't see 'em doing anything.

NB: You just grazed them. You just didn't go very far in one day, had to let the cattle graze. They just had to eat what they could get on the road and find their water, that was the next thing. But they was pretty well. There's lots of windmills and water holes but they's long ways apart, too.

RN: So both of your families were ranchers at one time or another.

NB: Yes, well, my dad was a railroader but my mother and the rest of us stayed home and ranched.

RN: So you stayed home and really ran the place while he... My mother did that, with some help from the boys.

NB: I had five uncles. And my mother, no sisters, and when my father died, mother had no place to go but back home. And they raised me. I stayed up there on the ranch with them. I was lucky. Some people wasn't that lucky. The one that I told you was the county clerk in Baca County for 24 years, he went to Chicago and went to a school there and he taught school all around this country here, just a young man, before he was married, all these out-side places around. First school she ever went to he taught down there, the Ritter School. He taught up here at the Prator School. He got married and taught in the school here in town for I don't know how many years. 5 or 6 years, and his wife, it was too high for her so they went back down to Two Buttes and then he went over to Spring Field and dabbled in politics and got elected and stayed there till he died. RM: And what was his name?

NB: Walter Powell, Powell is the one behind. I had 5 uncles. Yeah, I used to know all the people that were around here, now it's been sold and resold and I don't know.

RN: There are a lot of new people in La Veta, aren't there?

NB:. Lot of strangers to me. Up there where Cuchara is, I knew that when there was just a house there nobody ever thought of making anything. A man bought it. There was a fellow named Maes came from Plain Oaks Texas up here, and he bought the place and made a few cabins around just for summertime. Now they are building real homes up there. In the wintertime, I think they said there's more than 50 people living up there in the winter. La Veta here, it's not any bigger. It's bigger, yes, but the school will tell you the story on that. They don't have any more children going to school, or as many, as they had them days. Every house in town had a family, anywhere from three to five children. Now they got a widow woman in there, and they got several of them in town. That's where we had more people. They built several new homes and one thing and another but the population, oh, I think it's somewhere around 700 now. They had 5 doctors and 2 undertakers, had three saloons.

RN: There was a bank here at one time, wasn't there?

NB: How well I know. I wasn't rich by a long ways, but it just left me with 35 cents. Well, those kind of things happen and still happen. But, I wouldn't know, all these young folks, if times would get hard, they're hard now, if it wasn't for the welfare, it'd be awful. Them days they didn't have welfare. The young folks had a few beans to eat and one thing and another and no automobiles to keep running, so they done pretty good. They didn't realize. But now it wouldn't be what people are used to and they'd have to go back to everybody working at some kind of little job, why, it'd be pretty tough on 'em.

RN: Does it seem like there were more jobs in this area? Was it easier to find work?

NB: Most of the work is carpenters, you know, putting everybody to work building somebody a home down in Texas or somewhere else. They've got money enough to buy a lot and build a home on it. Travel back and forth. We got a lot of people going back and forth. When I was a kid living up on that place, why lots of days you wouldn't see anybody go by. Course there's three or four families lived above us, and they didn't come to town everyday. Now, maybe two times a day. Run back home in half an hour. Well, I wouldn't like to see it go back to where it was that much but I think a little bit of that would help the country. This thing everything being brought to you on a platter. Somebody's got to work, somebody's got to turn out some work.

RN: What about entertainment, what would people do for entertainment?

NB: Oh, they used to have dances. They would play the fiddle, not the violin, the fiddle, and somebody else blow a mouth organ. I don't remember seeing a guitar. Oh, yeah, the young folks had parties and they had them in the home and they'd sing and play games and one thing and another, you know. A lot of people around town had pianos or organs in the house and there was always somebody could play them. They'd sing and just have a good time. Taffy pulls.

NB: Yeah, used to have those taffy pulls. They don't do that anymore. Used to have.....Yep I don't believe our young folks could settle on that mountain. That would be too slow.

RN: That's a shame. People had a good time. It's too bad people don't have those things they could enjoy again.

RN: Did the churches sponsor a lot of activities? Did they have clubs or dances or parties or anything through the churches.

NB: Oh, everybody on Sundays went to Church. We had young people, too.

NB: Yeah, they had the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church. The Adventists didn't have a Church here, but they'd meet at somebody's home. I can remember when they didn't even had a 5 cent picture show in town. They finally got a movie, a solid movie, you know. Kids could go for a nickel, grownups was a dime, to go to the show. In the summer time they always had a Chataqua that came through and they'd put on different kinds of, people'd speak that know what they're talking about.

RN: Did they put on plays?

NB: I don't believe they ever did. No, they had more talent, things like that.

NB: They used to come in here in the summertime and have a big tent down here and they'd be here for a week. Pretty, nearly everybody that was close enough to make it. Then the railroads went on excursions every once in a while. Had a long passenger list. Used to run an excursion train out of Pueblo to La Veta Pass. Go up there and spend the day and eat their dinners and ramble all over the country and they'd call 'em all in and get on the train and go back to Pueblo. Give them about half fare or so. Something like that. They had a wonderful time.

RN: That's a wonderful idea. Did women get together and do a lot of quilting?

NB: Make the quilts and one thing and another. The Presbyterian women down here, for years, well, there was other women of the other Churches, too, that could quilt, why they met over at the Presbyterian Church and you had a quilt you wanted made up they would quilt it for you. They would charge a little but not too much, so much a spool of thread, and, boy, some of those old ladies with their needles, boy, they could run a line just as straight.

RN: Did people knit a lot, socks and sweaters? My mother, in the first war she made many socks. And did women in most of the families make most of their clothes?

NB: Oh, yes. People didn't dress like they do now. We had three dresses generally. One was a school dress. One was a home dress.

NB: They wasn't like kids now. Kids now haven't got any clothes to wear. They's harder up than they was then. I wouldn't go to feed the hogs like I see kids going to school.

RN: Did girls get to wear pants to school in those days? Mrs.

NB: Oh, heavens, no. They had to wear a dress. Oh, my word yes, we had to have uniforms.

NB: Bloomers. No, skirts, and blouses. Mrs.

NB: This old spinning wheel that's down here in the museum belonged to my grandmother. She spun all the time. They talk today about people saving. All my life I sewed. Never knew anything else, I was raised that way.

NB: The good Lord leaves me around till December, I'll be 86 years old. On borrowed time, you know.

RN: You look like you're doing pretty well.

NB: Well, we got a little farm around here. We got three lots. We raise a lawn, we raise a garden. She takes down all of it. We raise roasting ears, beans, lettuce, beets, lettuce, carrots, take care of all of it. And we laid a bunch of flowers out this window here. I was just saying this morning, how much beauty can a person get out of 15 cent package of flower seeds, if you take care of 'em, put 'em in like you ought to and take care of 'em. Look at the beauty there is. Everybody came by and say, “How do you take care of 'em? How do you do it?” Well, I said, “A man that's worked all of his life, put him on a retirement list, what's he gonna do? He worked all of his days, don't know anything else, only work, that's all. Most of us worked together.

RN: So what did you do after you stopped mining?

NB: Oh, we went in the ranch over there.

RN: In Aguilar.

NB: Oh, I went in with a railroad outfit for awhile. I went in. I pumped up here at a pump station where they had to stop for water, and then they consolidated that job with the Fort Garland job, and he was an older man so he pumped both stations, and I was out of work. So I put in an application over at Alamosa in the water service. I worked, wasn't but just a little while, they called me to go to work. Alamosa was the headquarters. Any place between Alamosa and Creed. They had water troubles around those water tanks or in the depots or things, the plumbing, and from there over to Chama and from Alamosa to Santa Fe. Alamosa was over there. Anything there was to do. I worked in the railroads over there. Sometimes it was a little bit tough, sometimes it wasn't but you had to have somebody to call if anything went wrong.

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