Interview with Roy Wilhelm, December 24, 1992

==Homesteading at Vernon==

'''John''':  Well, is that about when your Dad and Uncle Haight decided to go homestead at Vernon?   

'''Roy''': Yeah, when this breakup come.  It was all over there for them.  Their friends, the people they were raised with, they were all movin' out.  They were on the range see, and they had learned to, incidentally, grandpa still had a remnant of his cows and when he got out of this here "captain of the guards," he'd lost his squatters right up at Valle Bonito, the old Goodman set, so he made a deal with the Mexicans at Mineral.  Rented a house and moved his cattle up there, that was his headquarters.  Well, while they were there and Haight and Grandpa was still riding herd on this big bunch of cattle, the Mexicans had raised down in the Scott place, that meadow down there, they'd raised a barley patch, a big barley field and they didn't have the way of gatherin' it that we have nowadays and time they got through mowin' and gatherin' up there was about, well, just too much of this crop still down there but it was just goin' to waste so anybody was welcome to go pick it up by hand  and my Dad found out that it was worth five dollars a hundred pounds and that he could thresh it by hand, gather it up by hand and thresh the stuff by hand and eventually git him five dollars, so he did that.  Well that's quite a chore for a little kid to do that, see.  He wanted the money, he'd seen a pair of boots down to St. Johns or Concho in a store and that's what he was aimin' at.  Those boots were five dollars, red boots, red leather boots.  So when he got it done he says to his Dad when he went for supplies, he says, "I saved this up, a hundred pounds here and I want those boots.  Will you sell this barley for me and bring back the boots?"  And Grandpa told him yes, throwed the sack in and never said anymore about it.  Pa never heard of the boots anymore and there was a gap between him and his Dad like there was between me and Pa, see, so they didn't talk things over, see, and Pa held that against his Dad till the day he died.   

'''Roy''':  No, she put up a homestead, see.  Time they got up there, John Wilhelm was old enough that he was married and had a little bunch of cattle and he homesteaded.  ''(Ed. note:  In Gloria Andrus' book she states that John and his wife Luella homesteaded in Vernon in 1907)''  Ya had Haight's homestead and Pa's homestead, side by side.  And John's was on the west of Haight's where the west side of Vernon is on Haight's homestead, just a quarter of a mile strip there was Haight's and John's bordered onto that thing there toward the knoll and Grandma's was over in the flat there west of John's and that's the way it was. ''(Ed. note:  Why, if B.H. could not homestead twice, could his wife?)''   

'''Roy''':  Now you take Ben F. Williams.  He was the mayor, his dad was before him.  And he was the mayor of Douglas and I corresponded  with him, I made him a present of the History and he, what was I going to tell you about him, anyway he's a nice guy.  Oh, he's in, oh what I was going to tell you about him, he's in genealogy, he's not a religious guy but he's got this thing about genealogy and he sent me a whole bundle, we'll get it and dig into it  . . .