Interview with Roy Wilhelm, December 24, 1992

'''Roy''': So, I'm  a kind of a detective, maybe it isn't a good thing to be a detective when you're playin' around with your ancestors but here grandpa had orders to go down there and he had orders to take a family on the road with him and you just can't thumb your way.  You gotta have something to eat and they were already established there in Concho, so it was one of two things they had a little money and he took the money and left two boys there, teenage boys, to make a living for their mother and the family.  And here the detective part comes in.  He come to the country in 1881 ''(Ed. Note: Bateman actually arrived in Chonchi in 1878)''.  That's when they first took up that place in Concho and  it was in '84, probably the last part of '84, that he got [[Erastus Snow Letter|this letter]], it's dated there, to leave.  That's not many years.  He got paid off a hundred to one when he left the Order up there and he was broke when he left to go down over the mountains, would indicate to me he was a damn poor poker player.  But anyhow, be that as it may, you can include that in your writings if you want to but it is, a little gambling, is a long time trait in both families that cropped up from now and then, we got it from the Harris family on the other side too.  All because Uncle David Aldridge got lucky in San Bernardino one time.  He married a Harris, incidentally, Uncle Bill's sister.  He got lucky and won, oh almost a hundred-thousand dollars in a poker game.  Two big bags of gold.  It was all he could do to load 'em on a horse and  course he didn't figure that he'd ever get where he was going with those.  The poker game broke up just after daylight see, between daylight and sunup and those other guys didn't figure he'd get to goin' where he was goin'.  But he had two what they called horse pistols, big long barreled pistols and he had them already on his saddle loaded full blast.  And they didn't know about that and when he went aboard he got out in the middle of the street and he hit a run with the horse, see and he would have really fogged anything up that moved on the side but he made it, made it to where he had backin'.  And anyhow, on account of that game why he was always considered a very smart man by the Harris family and quite a few of 'em done a little poker playin' on account of it.