Growing Up, Playing and Learning Part 1

 As told by Dad, George Clarence Hyde

This edition is written in the first person as it comes from Dad’s personal history.

The next summer, 1920, I remember, we were putting up hay on a ranch near Brooks. George and Lyzzie (Eliza, his step sister who raised him) made rather good money that year, so they decided to take a trip. Lyzzie took me to Utah for the winter and George went to work in the logging industry in Walla Walla, Washington. We traveled by train and I can remember standing on the platform at the station when those big old steam engines would come puffing in. It would just about scare me stiff. We spent the winter in Utah mostly visiting my mother’s folks. I met the only one of my grandparents I ever knew, my mother’s mother. All I can remember is that she was very old and very poor. We visited two or three of mother’s sisters and two brothers. These are about all of mother’s relatives I ever knew. As for my father’s relatives, I have never seen any of them. Dad left home when he was fifteen and never returned. His relatives are all in Ontario, as far as I know.

We returned to Canada in the spring of 1921. We lived in Brooks for a while then we moved to Monitor, 200 miles north of Brooks. We left in the spring with a team and wagon, one colt, and a tent. The trip took seven or eight days. It seemed like much longer to me as 200 miles of rocks, hills, and mosquitoes is a long way in a wagon on just a trail and sometimes no road at all. Some days we did not see one house in our travels.

It was with great joy and relief that we arrived in Monitor at Uncle Nephi and Aunt Jessie’s homestead. We lived with them for two or three years, sometimes in the same house and sometimes at the sheep camp in the winter living in a covered wagon. This was called a sheep camp.

I was happy to have someone to play with. Ray was one year younger than me, Lindsey was a year or so younger than Ray, and Logan was the baby, just learning to walk. The four of us were all in the yard playing one day when Logan was badly burned. Lindsey was riding a tricycle; Logan was hanging on the back and Lindsey rode through the ash pile. There were a lot of hot ashes that had just been taken out of the cook stove that morning and they were still red hot. When Logan felt the heat of the ashes, he let go of the tricycle, fell in the ashes, and was severely burned. Uncle Nephi had the only car in the neighborhood. It was a Ford with an open top and just a windshield sticking up in front. It was started up and Logan was rushed off to a doctor at the high speed of 20 to 25 miles per hour. There is still a scar on Logan’s leg today.

The first winter in Monitor was a hard one and there was not enough hay to feed all the sheep. There was a terrible loss. That year, one thousand sheep went into the bone pile from hoof and mouth disease and starvation.

We spent four years in the Monitor district raising sheep and farming. I think though, Monitor could have been a paradise as far as success goes, if we had the know-how and the right management. There was free grass as far as you wanted to go, and you could put up hay by getting a haying permit from the government. For 50 cents you could put up all the wild hay you needed just for the cost of labor and equipment. There were dry years, but there were years when it looked like the Garden of Eden. Oh yes, I must not forget to mention raising a garden with very few or no weeds. There just were not many weeds in the country then. I remember riding a horse down the rows and there was a man on the back steering the cultivator.

After two or three years, Uncle Nephi and Aunt Jessie took their family and moved back to Raymond, leaving us alone on the homestead. Once again, I was alone with no friends to play with. I felt like an orphan. I was much in need of kindness and much in need of friends.

George was an experienced horse trader and when the work was slow, he would drive around with a team and democrat and trade horses with the neighbors. In the four years we lived there, he increased his herd from one team to twenty-four head.