Sag-Ashus – Am I A Pioneer?
Those who have been with us for some time may recall that we ran several stories written by our great uncle Tom Holmsley. They were taken from his book of memoirs titled Holmsley Trail, and this week we will be sharing the story written by his older sister, Lucy Lucinda Holmsley Rush, which covers some of the same travels and events, but from her personal perspective. What follows is a verbatim copy of her story just as she wrote it. To understand her story best it would be well to keep in mind that it was written in July 1939.
“Some think that pioneers are things of the past, but when I tell you of my early life in West Texas and New Mexico and of the primitive manner in which people lived in those communities we called home, I think you will agree that I am a pioneer. What is a pioneer? Webster tells us that a pioneer is one who goes before to prepare the way for another. It is true that I shot no buffalo, fought no red men and had no contact with desperadoes, but it is my sincere conviction, that in my generation, I am a pioneer. Fifty, or even 25 years, has been a long time in point of improvements that have taken place in my way of living and in that of most of my old neighbors.
In comparing books on pioneer life with what I really experienced, the only great difference is in the lack of Indian raids, buffalo hunts and bad men. We did not have them. However, 50 years ago most of West Texas was wild and uninhabited. William Holden, author of Alkali Trails, speaks of my birthplace in this wise: ‘Fortunate indeed was the town of Ballinger in its timely origin. The Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, extending a branch line from Coleman Junction, reached the Colorado in Runnels County in February 1886. A town site was laid out by the railroad company on the land previously purchased. A lot sale was held, and the town started off with a boom. By the middle of March more than 1,000 people were living on the land which a month before had been a cattle pasture.’
My father with his family was a part of this thousand. He built a little home and a drugstore and began practicing medicine. The drought of 86 came on the same year, and people left by the hundreds. Some, with more humor than money, made inscriptions on their wagon seats such as this: ‘Last fall we came from Rackin Sack. Got sorry and now go racking back.’ Father stayed. My birth came two and a half years later, May 29, 1889, on the day of the funeral of a little sister just older than I.
Three months later, as soon as mother was strong enough to move, we bought a farm at Maverick, Runnels County, where my father put up a cotton gin. This invention, very modern in the West, was shipped in to serve the farmers who had begun to produce cotton along the Colorado River.
During the next six years my most vivid recollections are of hauling water from the Colorado River in the wagon, of an old teakettle full of crawfish and of being pinched on the toe by one of them, of seeing the men tramp the cotton down in the gin press, of making cotton mattresses from fluffy white cotton as it came from the gin stands, and that which stands out in my memory above all the others is of the time when my father lost his arm in the gin. He had a call while trying to clean the gin saws. A saw caught his hand and dragged his arm in up to the elbow. He jerked with all his might and freed himself, but lost his arm and threw his shoulder out of joint. No other doctor could be had except a drunken wretch who knew very little. He sawed the arm off above the elbow, but did not set the shoulder. My youngest brother (Sag’s note: our great uncle Tom Holmsley) was born that same night, and, because of the inefficiency of the drunken doctor, my father had to go to mother’s bedside to help her through her ordeal.
In a few months my father sold the gin and went to Palestine, where he brought a good drugstore and then lost it to the bookkeeper. He then moved to Comanche County, but, according to traditions gathered from the books I have read, we did very little pioneering at either of those places. The schoolhouse in Newburg, Comanche County, where I first went to school, was one large room with a huge woodstove in the center and with long pine board benches for seats. The games we played at recess and the noon hour were the same as those mentioned in the book Pioneer Days in the Southwest from 1852-1879, such as mumbley peg, running base, club-fist, hull gull, thimble, frog-in-the-middle and drop the handkerchief.
Ours was the only bathtub in the community, and my little friends used to come to spend the night for the privilege of taking a bath in it. Much to our amusement, one little girl always brought along an old dress to wear while she was in the tub.
Several uneventful years passed in which my father worked hard as a country doctor. Then, in 1902, with his health failing, he decided to go West to recuperate and find a new location. Early in 1903 he, with three of the older children, set out in a covered wagon. Father’s health improved every day thanks, we think, to daily rest and plenty of sleep at night. By the time they reached Weed, New Mexico, in the Sacramento Mountains, he felt almost well again.”
Let’s interrupt Aunt Lucy’s story with their arrival at Weed, to be continued next week.
Here’s a thought provoker from Pres. Dwight Eisenhower: “An intellectual is a person who uses more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”
SAG