Interview with Roy Wilhelm, December 24, 1992

Well, on the way to Arizona, another family  . . . was on a wagon train, comin' through and the Wilhelms signed on that same wagon train to come to Arizona. It was the Maxwell family. There was an Andrew Maxwell; he was nine years old, like [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] . . .  they were best friends on that trip . . . travelled together, and when they was off helpin' drive cattle along the side, they teamed up and did it together and they was chums all the way.  It took six weeks to make the trip, and when they came to the place where the road forked, and the Wilhelms was to take the Concho road, and the Maxwells was called to go to Round Valley, they stopped and cooked dinner and had a little friendly ceremony. [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa]] and Andrew Maxwell vowed that they would never lose track of each other; they'd stay in touch. So he lived up there and was raised there, [[Zemira George Wilhelm|Pa's]] folks went up to [[Vernon, Arizona|Vernon]], and it was sixty-two years, or something like that, before they met again. Andrew Maxwell got to be cattle inspector and he had some deal in connection with his job to go to Show Low so he took the trouble of comin' by the ranch. That's the funniest thing you ever seen, two old guys puzzlin' . . .  over each other!  They was still friends. Took a long time to get back together.

'''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.   

'''Roy''': Yea Well I didn't know very much about him after he got down there until I got ahold of a book that his boy wrote, no his grandson wrote, and the old man went plumb off the deep end down there drinkin' and  he got so he'd come home and kind of rough his wife up and Marion didn't like that, he was the same age as Pa, only a half-brother, see.  According to that book that Ben wrote, Benjamin Franklin, his son wrote, the old man come home and started to roughing his mother up and the kid come in and seen him and just reached out the door where they had a single tree leanin' up there, about that long and they were about that big around, made out of hickory.  It was a perfect club and he laid 'er up there across the old man there, I guess he tried to kill him, but he knocked the old man just colder than a wedge and then he knew he was through around there, there was no use both of them trying to live under the same roof, so he shoved off and went down into Old Mexico and  went to work at a mining, for a mining engineer down there.  The mining engineer kind of took over an  tutored him along and made a whole new story of its own.  Well, Grandpa went on over to Silver City following the mines.   

'''John''':  A few years, anyway?  

'''Roy''':  Yeah, he might have gone to sea. There have been several instances where a coffin has been washed out, see, out of a graveyard and dumped into the sea and it makes a sea voyage.  It's a perfect thing...  ''(Ed. Note: The flood that washed out the Silver City grave yard actually occurred before Bateman died, and he is safely interred in the Memory Lane Cemetery)''

'''Roy''': 5 kids.  ''(Ed. Note: 6 also Clarissa Isabell?)'' Well, they had a hell of a time, first the Mexicans, they tried to starve them out, then they got to feelin' sorry for them and gave them a little work, see, but they just damn near starved to death but they had the best damn place in the whole country there.  Some things you can't raise and when your clothes wears out, it's hard to produce them on a farm.  They  had the Greer boys, about the only friends they had but they didn't, they might as well, probably been better off without 'um sometimes and Pa was a tellin' about when Cleveland's time, it was a great depression before the turn of the century, when Grover Cleveland was in and he was elected on a certain thing that he guaranteed to do and everybody told him, says, it'll throw the country into a panic but he didn't think so but he kept his word and for 4 years they had  "Cleveland's time" and there was just no money, it just went out of circulation and that was it.  There was for 2 years there wasn't even a cattle buyer at any price for the steers that was raised in this country and the sheep men could sell a little wool on account of the government used it for uniforms for the soldiers, but the meat they couldn't sell.  Well, they had to shear those sheep and it was a nasty job and somehow they got started off they had to pay for that and they only guys that had any money was the sheepmen and they had to pay for the shearing and everybody wanted to shear sheep for them, even the Greer boys. Pa and Haight, they got a job shearing sheep and so did the Greer boys.  Pa says they was a shearin' away there and the Greer boys was down there really getting with it and oh they hated it.  They were the ones that would hold their nose  when they rode up to the camp to visit with Pa and Haight 'cause they were sheep men, see, hold their nose all the time they visited, they couldn't stand the smell here they are down in the bottom  a shearin' sheep so these two old big fat Mexicans got up there and oh, you never seen a dandy till you've seen those old Mexican sheep men, dressed up you know, they always wore suits, tailor made suits, see and they was on a, put on a new one and here they'd go a chain here with an elks tooth hangin' on it, it fastened on one side and there was a watch pocket over here and they could look at the time, lot of crap like that.  Well they got positioned up there and they each lit a cigar and they pretended that they didn't know the Greer boys was there and one of 'em says "they tell me the Greer boys do not like sheep, I wonder why they don't like sheep?"  the other one said, "That is a false statement my friend, the Greer boys like sheep, look at them.  They are hugging them!  They love them!"  Pa said if those Greers 'd of had a pistol they'd a killed those two Mexicans, he knew damn well.  There was nothing they could do about it, they had to have that money and they put up with that kind of insults. Better not play that tape to the Greers, it won't be too popular.  That ain't part of their script at all. Well, finally there was one old man over there, an old Mexican man, come to Pa and Haight and says, "Why don't you boys go into the sheep business, that's where the money is, if you have stock, why you're all right.  Unless you can cash in on your share of this grass, you just as well give it up.  Well, they couldn't go into the sheep business, they couldn't even pay taxes,  He says,  "I'll tell you what, now these old sheep are doomed to die, maybe she's pregnant, and in the spring she would have just as good a lamb as any other sheep but she won't live.  She won't have teeth; she can't keep up, she'll die.  So every sheep man knows 'em they can go through and they can tell you just which ones won't.  He says,  "I'll let you have all that are in my herd for a dollar apiece, and pay for it when you can, I won't get nothing otherwise.  When you can!  Someday; years!  And I'll spread the word to the others and some of 'em 'll take it up."  And some of um did.  And said,  "You boys have raised all this feed."  They were working son of a guns, but they'd raised this feed cause they had nothing else to do and then nothing to feed it to, see, and that's what they did.  They bought those sheep on time, dollar a head.  They went in the sheep business that way.  After a few years, Pa said it never dawned on him until suddenly, he was a riding along and he had a new saddle and a new fat horse and following two herds of sheep to the mountains, check book in his pocket, he still thought he was poor.   

==Homesteading at Vernon==

'''Roy''':  Well, that comes along with what is known as the "Concho curse."  The people in Concho, the Mormons that, they put the names in a hat, see, they put the description of land, see, so many acres when they got all their people that wanted to settle there.  They had these plots surveyed and numbered they put 'em in and a man comes up and pays his money and draws out of there it's up to him what he got and over to Concho there was part of that land that was sandy loam where the sand had washed down over this clay and mixed in with it until it wasn't clay soil anymore but it was had enough clay in it that to  hold the moisture and nutrients and it was good.  Good land and bad land.  The bad land, when it rained you couldn't even walk across it cause you got about that much mud on each foot, that old sticky mud.  Well, those guys had a hell of a time getting their seed back, but the guys with the good land, man, Concho was all right.  It was the garden spot of Arizona, they called it.  Well these people that had the bad land, they concocted a scheme.  Why not take the water that they impounded there in the Concho Reservoir and ditch it down the stream course? Down to the Hunt valley, where it was all good land, down where Doc Ellsworth was and then they could all have good land.  But these other guys cited 'em to the fact that the evaporation on that much ditch, the evaporation and sinkage would lower the stream 'til none of them would have anything when it got down there.  Well they hung on that point.  They even got to where they were takin' their guns to church with them.  All belonged to the same church, see.  Then they got to where they wouldn't go to church at all and it was just a bad situation.  So they sent one of the apostles to straighten it out, so he would talk to one faction and the other faction and the other faction trying to get 'em something, a little common ground.  And they couldn't, the longer he was there the worse it got.  Finally he decided that it was a lost cause and there was just nothing could be done about it, cause these people wasn't gonna budge.  Anything was said about it, crystalized it more than ever.  So he advertised that he had the solution to the whole thing and to come and have one big meeting.  And he beat the bushes until they all got out to see what he had to say.  And he told 'em that the situation was beyond human power to resolve it and that he had the authority to release them from their call as colonizers.  And he says,  "I release you from your call.  You're free to go where you want to.  Concho is no more as far as the church is concerned.  I release you with this prophecy:  That Concho will wither and die like a melon on a dead vine."  Which it has.   

'''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''':  Yeah, that's right.  

'''John''':  Well now, we've talked about John, he married somebody and I read about him and his troubles in a Rothlisberger book, he must have married a Rothlisberger.  (Ed. note: He married Luella Hall June 25, 1906.  After John's death on June 9, 1911, she married a Rothlisberger.)

'''John''':  But what about the two sisters, Zora and Fan, what do you know about their . . . ?   

'''Roy''':  Zora went down to, now wait, there was a girl that married a Rogers fellow and he went up with this homestead drive and he homesteaded "John Dutch's" place, John Rothlisberger's place and then he moved off and turned his equity over to John and John homesteaded.  It happened all the time.  You'd buy a homesteader out; buy his squattin' rights, get him out and you'd file on it, see.  Now what was her name, oh that's Zora.   

'''John''':  Zora was the one that married the Rogers?   

'''Roy''': Yeah,  I guess through, see they were one family and he was corresponding with this other family, Marion's family, down there, that was the attraction.  Went down there to work in the mines or something, he went down there and that's why we've got that Rogers bunch down there now.  We have relatives down there, the Rogers.  However, can't think of his name, the main one of them, he died and he had kids.  

'''John''':  By the main one you're not talking about the one that married your Aunt Zora?  You're talking about somebody later than him?   

'''John''':  When B.H. headed out.   

'''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  . . .

 

'''Roy''':  Well that's the guy; she buried him there, plus three kids and just had the two boys left.  ''(Ed. Note:  According to genealogy records, James Return, Susan Clarissa, Bateman Haight and Ellen Albinia were alive when they left Missouri; also, [[Autobiography of Clarissa Wilhelm|Clarissa' Autobiography]] confirms only two children died in Missouri)''  And then this Holliday, this wagon master, was lookin' for a good cook.  And she was a good cook and so she signed on to cook for him and his out riders for passage for her and the two boys.