Father’s story is an eventful one
About the time the Weston County History Book was compiled, I asked Babe (Ethel) to write down some of her early family history. At that time, she was living in Walla Walla, Wash. It was early 1990s. The following stories are what she wrote from her memories.
MY FATHER (William Thomas Williams)
Dad (Bill) was born April 25, 1870, in Princeton, Mo. He died Nov. 09, 1959, in Newcastle, Wyo. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Newcastle.
My Dad was an outdoor-type of person. He wasn’t happy unless he could be on the go, gypsy like. He loved to hunt and was a trapper. We lived out of Osage, when we first came to Weston County, on the oil lease, in a tarpaper shack. There were two of them, one was a cook shack, the other one a bunk house. They were thrown up quick for oil field workers.
Dad trapped coyotes, even had one for a pet. He caught it when it was about 4 months old. He was also a horse trader. He came home one day with 12 or more hound dogs. He had traded a horse for the dogs. He used them to chase down coyotes.
They were greyhounds and could run like a whirlwind. Dad would find a den of coyotes, then take a smoke bomb, and the dogs, and go smoke the coyotes out and the chase began. Dad would skin the coyotes and stretch the hides and sell to a pelt man from Sheridan, Wyo.
The dogs came home one day with porcupine quills all stuck in their face and heads. We had to kill some of them. My older brother Jap (Jasper) came up from Newcastle and helped Dad pull out some of the quills. They had a Model T Ford and put the dogs’ heads through the spokes and pulled the quills out, soaked first in kerosene.
When we moved back to Newcastle, Dad started work on the railroad for awhile. Then he helped haul in limestone blocks that the Chevrolet garage was made of. He herded sheep for Bocks and Ralph Doyle for a number of years. He helped dig up the old water line that carried water into town from Cambria.
Dad was a great friend of Mace Payton. Mace was a moonshiner. Whenever the revenuers (law men) would come to raid certain places in town, the moonshiners would run like rats to hide their moonshine. I remember Mace lived across the road from us. He had a Model T Ford pickup. It had rained that day and someone yelled “revenuers!” so we watched to see what Mace would do. Well, here he came out of his house, with a wooden barrel full of moonshine. He threw it in the back of the pickup and took off. We watched which way he went. He wasn’t gone too long.
So, on Sunday my mother, Dad, David (a brother) and I all went out to see about where he could have hid it. We took a lunch and water as we were going to be gone all day. We walked, out toward Osage. There was a small draw and it had a culvert across the road to let water run off. Up from it was several small cedar trees. Dad said, “I bet Mace put his moonshine in that culvert. It wasn’t there. We searched all around but didn’t find it. So, we went on up the draw, across the railroad tracks, on the hill where the trees were quite thick. No luck.
My dad was always following wild honey bees. He would find where they had their tree with honey. Dad could really track them down. In the fall he would take his smoke things, a crosscut saw, ax and tubs and wash boiler and we would go cut the tree down. We always got a lot of honey. Mother would clean it, cook it down and strain it, keep the bees wax for a lot of uses. Dad would sell the honey and give some away.
Now, back to the hunt for the moonshine. We would go out ever so often to search for stills or for the wooden barrels. I think it would be about five gallons. One day Mother and us kids went out and found the barrel put way up high in one of the cedar trees. We never thought of looking for it there, we just looked on the ground.
David and I took our little red wagon and Mother put up a lunch and away we go. We put wood that we picked up on the top of a barrel or keg and instead of coming along the road, we went up to the railroad right-of-way. We promised not to tell. So, we knew a woman who was a moonshiner and us kids would pick up empty whiskey bottles and wash them up and she would buy them from us for a penny apiece. That woman was Jenny Ellis, or Crazy Horse, as she was called. Anyway, we had a lot of bottles so Mother filled them up. When Dad came home from herding sheep, he would go get drunk and he needed some to drink when he sobered up.
So, Mother would sell it to him. He didn’t know where she got it. After it was all gone, she told him where she got it. Boy, was he mad! So was Mace Payton. But Mother was good to him, she gave him back his barrel. (The Payton family lived in a little house just behind the Dare family which both set where the Gertrude Burns School was built years later –Irene)
The story continues next week.