Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Work was easy to find and paid well in the 1970s. The rigs were hiring, the mines were booming, and the construction world was in desperate need of strong young men to pour concrete, tie iron, build forms, and run shovels. It was so good that one year I bought a new car for $5800, which was most of my summer earnings and went back to Laramie on the savings I’d put away the three previous summers.
It was tight budgeting augmented by doing odd jobs for our landlord Mildred, and officiating basketball. My roommate and I made ends meet with a steady supply of wild game and fish. Deer, grouse, ducks, geese, and dozens of rabbits kept us fed in our two-room apartment on Grand Avenue.
It was just a taste of how life was for both of my grandmothers as young mothers during the Great Depression.
Grandma Sally and Grandma Gasser, Sally Tucker of rural Mariana, Arkansas and Clara Voch Gasser of rural Riverton faced hardships that few Americans could imagine, much less survive. These conditions still exist for most of the world, but we’re spoiled, soft and indignant to the existence of most of the people on the planet.
My dad and grandfather taught me how to hunt and fish as a youngster in Arkansas. Frank, my roommate, had the same experience in Minnesota with his family. In Laramie, with the proximity of the Snowy Range, the Laramie River and the pothole lakes north toward Medicine Bow the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easy to embrace.
Grandma Sally enjoyed fishing. She had a friend, about her age, named Lulu Belle (yes, her real name), whom she often went fishing with. They’d catch blue catfish, channel catfish, buffalo, bream, and largemouth bass, but they were usually after crappie. These gals could outfish any man on the multitude of rivers, streams, oxbow lakes, and farm ponds dotting the eastern Arkansas countryside.
One day, they hit it big in the little 12-foot Johnboat they fished from. My grandpa Forrest used the same boat to jug fish, set trout lines, and hunt ducks.
My grandmother had a clipping from the Memphis Commercial Appeal that she was proud of. There she was, all 5-2 of her, with her equally short friend Lulu Belle, with a record catch of crappie. The yellowed clipping was on her refrigerator for years.
A stout teenager, a kid at least 6-2 and 200 pounds, was holding a huge string of crappie between the two smiling women. Grandma and Lulu Belle were tiny in comparison to this teenager. The kid towered over them. He was straining with over a hundred pounds of crappie hanging from several metal stringers. The headline read, “Local women do well on L’Anguille.” The L’Anguille is a tributary of the St. Francis, which flows into the Mississippi.
Sue and I had our honeymoon on the L’Anguille in a resort cabin owned by my Aunt Sugar, grandma’s sister-in-law.
Fishing was their adult form of play.
My dad roamed those woods and waters as a kid with his cousins Johnny, Dude, Buck, Orthalis and Billy. He’d had a little sister, Goldie, but Goldie died when dad was five years old and she was just three from diphtheria. Grandpa couldn’t afford a doctor in economically devastated 1936 Arkansas and none of grandma’s home remedies worked. Life was hard.
But on to happier times.
When grandma and Lulu Belle got home they started dropping off fish to her stepbrother Brooks Jones’ family, and to grandpa’s brother Fred and sister Joy and all of their kids. No “Ridge Runner” as they often called themselves ever turned down free fish.
Though they wouldn’t meet until 1960, my other grandparents, Eugene and Clara Gasser, were living a similar existence, not in the bounty of the Mid-South, but rather in the harsh, arid, frigid wilderness of 1920s Wyoming.
Grandma Gasser grew up a child of privilege in Switzerland. Her family was big in the Swiss rail system. Grandpa wasn’t on the same societal level. He was intelligent, hard-working, and engaging. To the dismay of her mother, she agreed to move to Wyoming and marry him.
Their first year together was in a sheep wagon near the ghost town of Hailey on Beaver Creek. It was a long way from the cotillions and balls in Bern or Zurich.
One thing those Swiss finishing schools taught her was how to cook. From my own experience and those of my cousins, they were incredible instructors.
Grandpa found a job homesteading on the Bar G near the base of Black Mountain in western Fremont County. He cleared timber, sagebrush, and planted barley and oats.
He managed work crews during threshing season, and this is where Grandma shone.
She was a dead shot with her .410 single-shot shotgun and with an open-sight .22 bolt-action rifle. Family legend has it that she went out one morning to hunt rabbits and came back with 22 cottontails. When grandpa checked the box of shells, there were four remaining. She’d taken 22 rabbits with 21 shots.
They raised chickens on the Bar G, mostly laying hens, but Grandma hatched out young chicks every spring.
They moved to rural Riverton (Gasser Road is named after them) in 1938. A hawk had taken a couple of grandma’s six-week-old chicks, so she started carrying the .410 out to the clothes line when she hung up laundry.
The hawk made a fatal mistake. It swooped down and grabbed a chick, but Grandma saw it coming in. The hawk had barely lifted above the coop when a blast of feathers dropped onto the ground. Scratch one hawk. Amazingly, the chick survived, living to a ripe old age as a laying hen.
The Gassers had troubles with disease as well. Their second child, Ruth, came down with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever during the spring runoff. All the roads were impassable by car, but Grandpa’s skills as a horseman and teamster came into play. He drove a buckboard with Ruth lying in blankets on the bed, 70 miles across the base of the Owl Creek Mountains to Shoshoni, where Dr. Jewell, a world expert in tick fever, successfully treated her.
We hunt for fun and complain about the lack of health care in our community. These women of the last century lived a life of hardship and strife that we can’t truly comprehend. They lived to tell the tale and future generations need to know their story.