Sag-Ashus – More of Uncle Tom’s History
Sag-Ashus’ great-uncle B. Tom Holmsley traveled with his family from Comanche County, Texas to the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico in the early 20th century, and he later lived on Crow Flat and in Hudspeth County. He recorded his memories in a book, Holmsley Trail.
This week we share another bit of history from our Great-Uncle Tom Holmsley’s memoir, with incidents dating from about 1918 through the Great Depression. The following is all his words.
“In 1918, the Mexican Revolutionary War was going on. The Mexican federal troops had forced Pancho Villa across the Rio Grande River near my sister’s place. (Ole Sag’s note: he is referring to our grandmother, Mary Neely, and the place is where yours truly later spent his childhood and early adult years and which, by the way, is still held in a trust in the Neely family name.) Pancho had established a camp ther,e and the local ranchers did not like that one bit. So they notified Gen. Pershing at Fort Bliss, and he came part of the way down the river, but turned back. In the meantime, Pancho got word that he was coming and crossed back into Mexico and then started up the river with his soldiers to capture Ciudad Juárez. When he got near the town, the federal troops met him, and the battle began. We could easily hear the gunfire – they sounded like popcorn – and every once in a while a canon would go BOOM! After a while, the Villistas got into the town.
At this time, Gen. Pershing had brought some black troops down to the river just in case either Pancho or the Mexican federal troops tried to cross over to the Texas side. When the federal troops realized they were losing, they began to fire their guns across the river in hopes that Gen. Pershing would come to help. They knew that he would not stand for that, and he did not. He crossed over the river and ran Pancho out of town as they had hoped he would. I had a friend who chauffeured Pancho Villa out of town in his Model T Ford. He told me that those black troops followed them 15 miles south of town.
At about this time, my neighbor, Douglas Downs, had some dairy cows, and one night they disappeared. He and his brother-in-law trailed them and found that they had crossed into Mexico. They crossed over and went after them and found them in a corral by a house, but they couldn’t find anyone around the place. So they started to let the cows out so they could take them home, when three or four men, who were hiding on top of the house, rose up and began shooting. So they got on their horses and broke to a run. The brother-in-law was killed, but Douglas got away. It was getting dark by this time, and he found an old deserted house where he could hide, and he spent the night there and got home the next day.
I moved to Holmsley Trail, near Ysleta, in the fall of 1920. I bought a milk cow that turned out to give more milk than we could use, so I began to sell milk to the neighbors. My sister Mary had a Jersey cow named Alice, and since they could not keep her where they were living, I took her to keep for a while. (Another Sag’s note: At that time, Grandpa Neely had moved his wife and two sons, our father and uncle, from the Helms Ranch at Cerro Alto near where Hueco Village is now located into El Paso and rented a house on Grant Avenue. They took Alice with them, but found that there was a city ordinance against having livestock inside the city limits, and that was when Alice began her sojourn with Uncle Tom.) I had more milk to sell, and I found it to be profitable. I kept adding cows, one by one, until I had to build more corrals and a barn. I was working for the railroad at this time, and when the company sold out and the offices moved to San Francisco I had to make a choice. I could go with them or I could stay, so I decided to stay in El Paso and go into the dairy business.
I got a chance to get more cows, but that meant more barns and corrals. There was a man in the community by the name of J.J. Smith, who offered to back me up and sell me more land that he had near my place, so that made it possible for me to get more cows and raise most of the feed that was necessary. I wound up milking 85 cows in a dairy barn that would hold 38 cows at one time.
My wife and I were married in 1926, and we went to the Cornudas Mountain for our honeymoon. We stayed there two days and nights and then came home and settled down for life. We got through the Depression and raised four children. The Depression hit in 1929, and I had a hard time getting by financially. We raised a lot of vegetables and had plenty of meat, eggs and milk, but no money. Our farm products would not sell for enough money to pay expenses. I sold milk for 10 cents a quart and onions for 1 cent a pound, so I started giving my hired help vegetables and milk and they would do extra things for me. I had one neighbor who was an accountant, until his health failed and he could not work. I gave him vegetables, and he helped me by weighing cotton while we were picking, and when that was over he came to my house and set up a perfect set of books for my farm. I had never had a set of books, and this was a great help to me. To help make ends meet my wife and his wife raised squabs to sell to restaurants and they plucked angora rabbits for the fur.
In the early 1930s I decided to buy a tractor. Up to that time I had farmed with 14 work horses and mules. When I told the banker what I wanted, he asked me if I had plenty of horses and equipment to farm with. I told him that I did, but the farmers that had tractors seemed to do a better and much quicker job than I did. We talked on for a while and he finally said, ‘You are fixed up to farm, and if you want to keep on farming you had better stay with your horses and mules.’ As I was leaving the bank, I met a friend who had met with no better luck than I had, and we couldn’t help but wonder why the banker was using typewriters instead of pen and ink.”
Here’s a bit of wisdom from Mark Twain::“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
SAG