5th Installment

In the spring wagon bed near where ‘Socker’ lay dead were two fifty-pound boxes of dynamite.  We were glad the piece of stump had hit ‘Socker’ instead of the dynamite boxes.
We never ate any of the chickens our mother killed and cooked, they all were named, but we said we would eat ‘Socker’ if she would cook him.   She did, but he was tough and stringy, he wasn’t fit to eat.
By the middle of June the logging roads were covered with timothy, clover and oats and grasses knee-high in places.   The rabbits loved the roads.   As twilight advanced, on a mile or so walk, we would count as many as forty rabbits, more snowshoes than cottontails.  Then along came tularemia, the rabbit disease.  Most of the rabbits died, we counted as many dead along the sleigh roads as we previously had alive.   No one ate rabbits for meat, no matter how poor.
We had a field of red clover the bumblebees loved.   It was dangerous to walk even the road through the field, bare legged and bare footed.  We were often stung.  But the most savage bees were the yellow tailed hornets.  Whenever we found a nest, we attacked it with long poles, branches or whatever else we could find.  We prodded the nest, tearing it apart, and the hornets swarmed at us, stinging us on any bare place they landed on.  One hit me between the eyes and knocked me down.  My eyes swelled nearly shut and I had black eyes for two weeks.
Once while picking raspberries on Big Hill I stood on a doty log over a red bumblebee’s nest and twenty-seven bees climbed up my sailor pant legs and stung me.  I ran out in the public road, Highway 8 at that time, and pulled my pants off.  A car drove by and shamed their fingers at me.
We had left our boat at a bachelor’s landing and he offered to do something about the stings, but we paddled home to my mother who pulled out twenty-seven stingers.   I was so sick I vomited and ran a fever.
We had biting insects, plenty of mosquitoes, sand flies, no-see-ums, horse flies, deer flies and a white faced cattle fly as big as a house fly, and hard to swat, that bit hard.  My mother made a smudge pot and carried it through the rooms to drive the mosquitoes out at night.  She worked the garden with smudge pot going until darkness drove her in.  In those days we had not ticks, they came later.
We had no medication for insect bites, yet I remember of no one having an infection from them.
I loved the spring.  The first flowers that bloomed were the Trailing Arbutus.  It grew in beds low to the ground, the smell was heavenly.  There were varieties of spring flowers I’ve forgotten the names of, but Trilliums and Johnny Jump-ups I remember.   In the swamps a pitcher plant that caught insects, lady slippers were rare, but we found them.
In later years a dam was built by the WPA on Wolf River, the trees, brush and shrubs chopped down in the swamps, and the water in the lake raised, killing the wild rice, the cranberry bogs (that were so much fun to jump up and down on, they quivered.)  Anything that grew in the swamps died, even the water lilies in the lake, both white and yellow.  Some way the muskrats survived.
In Kentucky my father belonged to a fox hunting group, they never rode horses to the chase as Englishmen did, they never killed the fox the hounds chased.  Often the dogs treed or holed the fox, but they never caught it.  I don’t know how many men belonged to this group or how many hounds each had, my father always had two.  He bought them from a kennel in Lexington, and he paid fifty dollars for them, then he trained them to suit his desires.  He had a horn made out of a cow’s or a steer’s horn, he carried it on a leather or buckskin thong around his neck.  He trained the dogs to come when he blew the horn.  He blew it every time before he started on the nights hunt, and the dogs went crazy.  The men sat around a bonfire, telling tall tales, drinking moonshine, chewing tobacco and eating — my father’s favorite snack was cheese and crackers.  I think this was a winter time sport for these men, listening to the baying of the hounds, to distinguish each individual dog, to speculate on what they were doing in the chase.  The men came home in the early morning, both man and dog slept all day, recovering from the hunt.
The horn came to Wisconsin with us.  I practiced trying to blow it until I was weary.  It took a lot of doing, but I finally got enough sound out of it to make Old Bruce perk up his ears.  It didn’t seem to be much effort for my father to blow blast after blast

Chapter 6
out of it and Old Bruce in his dotage would go wild.  I wonder whatever happened to that horn? [According to Wallace Yocum, Anne’s brother, the dogs chewed up the horn and destroyed it.]
We had cold spells in our winters.  It got down to forty below and in a couple of days the house got cold.  Mammy got up in the middle of the night to add wood to the heater in our bedroom, even then we broke ice in the water pails in the morning.  We got up and dressed by lamp and lantern light.  I don’t remember missing any school.
In our teen years, the beginning of winter found us out in the swamps tramping sleigh roads to the Siding [NW 2nd Siding in Monico and Spur 236 on Soo Line] where we hauled ties, pulp and a few logs.
We had a camp by Shady Springs; two rooms, one a bunk room, the other kitchen and dining, the cook slept in this.  By this time we had a team of draft horses, Cub and Dexter, but Old Bill did most of the work, skidding pulp, ties and logs to a windjammer that stacked them.  On one of these tramping road days, Old Bill fell in a spring hole and we couldn’t get him out.  I don’t know how long we struggled but Pappy gave up, deciding to go back to camp and get the pistol to shoot him.  We started to leave and he made a mighty effort and got himself out.  Black mud dripped from his body onto the white snow for a long ways as we headed back to camp.  We didn’t have any hired hands at this time.
My feet were always cold.  I decided to put on all the stockings I had to tramp roads one cold day and I froze my feet.  They were too tight, in leather boots there was little circulation.  They hurt so bad I couldn’t stand the weight of a blanket on them.  I lost my toe nails, my big and little toes nails grew in heavy like horns.  The boys had leather top-rubber bottom boots, now I wonder why the girls didn’t?
We never found the bottom of the mud in the lake.  We used long poles and roiled it up until the stink of ages filled the air.  Shot guns lost by duck hunters that turned duck boats over in the excitement of the hunt never recovered their guns, no matter how they drug the bottom.  The duck boats we had were made out of boards as free of knots as possible, Old Struggle, the first boat, was made of pine, caulked with tar, both ends were the same, closed over.  They could be paddled from either end.  They held two men or five lightweight youngsters.  The riders sat on the ends.  The second boat was made of cedar.  We called it Sandpiper, it was easier to handle than Old Struggle.  In a way they resembled kayaks, except they were wider and made of wood.  The designer was unknown to us.  Someone left a row boat with us, we called it Flower Pot.  All of us could ride in it, with two of us rowing.
Wild rice grew over most of the surface of the lake, the river kept its channel, there was a big opening in the middle, and two small openings where the rice didn’t grow.
Frank was born on September sixteenth amid a barrage of shotgun shots, duck season had opened at sunrise that morning.
The world was covered with a tracking, white frost.  When the sun came out, Mammy’s garden was as black as a man’s hat, one of Mammy’s quotes.  Any vegetable above ground was finished.  We still had to dig the potatoes, the rutabagas, carrots, beets, and cut the cabbage to put in the dirt cellar that had been dug under the house.  It was our winter’s supply.
There was an entrance to the cellar from outside that had two doors, one inside the cellar way and one on top.  When the cellar was closed for the winter, between the two doors was stuffed with straw and dirt to keep the freeze from creeping in.  There was a trap door in my parents bedroom for winter use.  This room also served as a living room.  My mother hung a kerosene lantern near the stuffed inside door entrance on forty below nights to keep the potatoes and winter vegetables from freezing.
Four and half years after Frank’s birth, on a stormy day with the snow drifting so the doctor had to walk in, the girl twins were born.  It was a long and difficult birth.  As usual, in all the births we were sent to a neighbor’s but we came home before this one occurred.   One of the twin’s umbilical cords was wrapped around the others neck.  Without the doctor, my mother and the twins would have been lost.  The neighboring women didn’t know what to do.  We had a hard time naming them, I claimed Joy and Nina claimed Jo.   When summer came we carried them in pack sacks.  We bathed the twins, changed their belly bands and diapers, fed them stinking cod liver oil and sometimes orange juice.  When they were a year old, we took them to the school picnic.

Chapter 7

Once we fed them bean soup when my mother was in town all day.  It took all day with Old Bill and a spring wagon.
They had a cradle.  One day Mammy caught one of the hound dogs rocking it.  They had been crying and shut up, she went to see why.  They had an iron bed crib that she painted blue.  It was second hand, as was the cradle, where she got them I can’t remember.
Twenty-one months after their births, Jo got pneumonia and died suddenly.  The man that made the duck boats made her coffin.  None of the kids in our family went to the funeral.  The people from Marinette had sent a Christmas box filled with things for the twins.  Mammy wept oceans, the most miserable Christmas I can remember.
From that time on, it seems things changed for the rest of the family.  Nina and I went to work the first of May, the spring of 1929 for someone other than our father, for ten dollars a week each.  We were supposed to send every penny home, but we rebelled and ordered swim suits and caps from Sears so we could go in the lake with the other workers at Camp Franklin.  I was twenty, Nina was seventeen.
Wallace says it was the mud that held the doctor up getting to Mammy for the twins birth.  Nina says the doctor was out electioneering for the April elections and I say it was a late snowstorm.   We could all be right.  It can snow during the breakup, unpaved traveled roads are muddy and elections are held.

Stray Thoughts

Arrived in Wisconsin 5-1-1918.  Lived at the Ben Foster place.  Moved to Jameson’s camp late fall 1918-19, spent winter there.  Moved to Cliff Day place spring of 1919.  Lived there over winter of 1919-20  Jack was born 3-13-20 at the Cliff Day place.  Moved to the white school house after Jack was born.  Moved to Doyles camp fall of 1920.  We must have spent the winter of 1920-21 in Waite’s black school house.  I can’t remember anything about that winter, our third winter in Wisconsin.

They worked on the land all summer of 1921.  A garden, a potato patch, building a three room log house.  I can’t remember seeing the house under construction, I was a baby sitter.  Jack was probably eight months old when we moved into the log house in November of 1921.  I don’t know who helped build the house but the logs were too big for Pappy not to have had help.  They were chinked with mortar six inches wide.
Wallace says they had a house raising, all the neighbors came and helped build the house in a short time.
On November 28, 1916 Wolf River Lumber Company gave a warranty deed to Alton and Haas.  Then Alten gave a land contract to Verlin Snowden on April 20, 1920.  On October 9, 1920 Verlin Snowden gave one half interest to Andrew Yocum on a land contract.
On March 28, 1927 legal action was started between the two of them.  (Information supplied by Edna from courthouse records in Crandon, WI.)
I wonder what the original price was? (Wallace thinks $600.00)
What did they ‘fall out’ over??

First Teachers at Wolf River School
Hattie Penrose
Marie Testolen
Elizabeth Schimek