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.
Even though Tilly was my first cousin, she was more my mother’s age. One must understand that in the early part of the twentieth century, poor girls generally married young, hoping to escape the poverty of too many mouths to feed, only to discover that the cycle of poverty would repeat with them when they found themselves pregnant, most often before they achieved their eighteenth birthday.
They too often found themselves married to a man they envisioned as Prince Charming, but who in reality turned out to be a high school dropout who could find work only at menial, low-paying jobs that never seemed to cover all the bills incurred over a month’s time.
Tilly’s mom, Ruth, was much older than my mother, and where she fell in the procession of my maternal grandparents’ thirteen offspring, I have no idea. No doubt she was in the first six or seven. My mother was number twelve, so she really didn’t know some of her older siblings well. Many of them were out of the house by the time my grandparents moved to the small town of Encampment, Wyoming from Iowa in January of 1925. My mother was four months of age.
No doubt, she was much better friends with Tilly than her own sister.
My grandfather had grown up as a fireman on the steam farm machinery in the fields of Iowa, and because of that skill, he secured employment in the same capacity on the steam locomotives for the Union Pacific Railroad that traveled between Encampment and Walcott Junction, built several decades earlier to service the failing copper mining industry near the old town of Battle, west of Encampment.
Having a penchant for the bottle, he could be a real bastard at times, according to my mother. My aunts married young, mainly, I think, to escape their home life. My grandfather apparently felt that his sons should be making their own way in life starting at about the age of fifteen, so they were pressured to leave before finishing their state-sponsored education. I have no idea how many of them graduated high school.
I do know the last son, the thirteenth child, stayed at home long enough to graduate high school, but only because my grandmother finally put her foot down and informed my grandfather that Charles could stay as long as he wanted.
My mother may have been the only female child to graduate high school.
Strangely, my dad never talked about my mother’s father, and my mother’s accounts of him were minimal. Both of my maternal grandparents died before I was born, so all I have is a few ancient black and white photos, hardly enough to get a sense of who they were as people.
My grandmother had her first child at the age of seventeen and her last one at forty-seven, which to me is more than a little surprising because, according to my mother, my grandparents really didn’t get along all that well. Apparently, my grandfather felt that he had married beneath him, which is even more surprising to me because the social strata of rural Iowa at the time was pretty thin and probably ill-defined anyway. Both of them were probably raised hugging the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Both of my parents grew up in Encampment during the first half of the twentieth century. My father was born in 1920 and my mother in 1924.
They were married on my father’s twenty-second birthday, just before he was shipped over to England as part of our country’s participation in the European Theater during World War II. My mother would not turn eighteen for another month.
As in all small towns, employment opportunities were limited, of course. Most men worked in the timber industry, on nearby ranches, or for the Union Pacific Railroad. Very few residents worked at the limited number of businesses in town and even fewer held government jobs.
People were poor, but everyone in the community was in the same boat, so folks didn’t really know how poor they were until they traveled to other places, and could see how other people lived. Very few could afford to travel any further than Saratoga, eighteen miles north, and even fewer to the metropolis of Rawlins, 60 miles away.
When asked, both my mom and dad mentioned that the coming of the Great Depression in 1929 didn’t affect their lifestyle much. Folks couldn’t get much poorer.
I seem to be rambling here, but I mention Tilly because when I was writing my last column about Fiddler’s Lake in particular and public land in general, for a couple of those 4th of July camping vacations, she and her family would meet us at the campground and we would spend a few days together.
I didn’t even know she existed until I was about nine years old, when this family of strangers suddenly invaded our home one day. My mother seemed to be unusually happy and acted like she was seeing a long-lost friend, which I guess, in essence, she was.
Tilly and her family had just moved to Riverton, where her husband worked as a toolpusher on oil drilling rigs around the area. At the same time, Tilly’s sister, Julie, had also moved to Riverton, and her husband also worked in the oilfields. Both men proudly defined themselves as “oilfield trash.”
Over the next few years, we spent a couple of 4th of July and other holidays together, as they were our only family nearby.
At the time, Tilly was with her second husband, raising her second family. Her first marriage was at thirteen to a man from Chicago of all places. How they connected, I’ll never know, but I met him and his much younger wife once at a reception following Tilly’s memorial service several decades ago at my mother’s tiny apartment in Lynn Gardens on the corner of Fourth Street and Garfield, here in Lander.
I could not imagine any two people being more complete opposites. Wherever the topic of conversation landed, he was an expert on it. I grew really tired of him in a very short period of time. Out of respect for Tilly and my mother, I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, but it was hard.
Tilly lived a hard and deprived life throughout, although I’m sure she would not describe it so.
My mother and Tilly were of the same generation, and thinking of their lives, I am amazed at the amount of grit and resilience they demonstrated every day to carve out a life for themselves at a time when the lives of their husbands and children took priority.
From birth, disadvantaged girls and women of that era faced tremendous societal pressures to marry young. Graduating from high school was nice, but not needed, and in many cases not expected.
Any girl who demonstrated aspirations of post-high school education was met with overwhelming pressure to reconsider, both from society and within the school system, seemingly because it was felt that having women become professionals and postponing or even forgoing having children would upset the natural order of our society.
Or maybe it was because those in power (white men) didn’t want women to get too uppity.
I think there still is a small segment of our population that holds those beliefs.
My mother finally broke from tradition and went back to school at the age of fifty to earn a Licensed Practice Nursing certificate, a decision for which she was extremely proud.
It’s gratifying for me that for many American women, what we expect from them and for them, as a society, has changed dramatically over the last one hundred years. With scholarships and grant opportunities now available, it’s financially feasible for anyone who has the desire and a single-minded determination to succeed in a career of their choice to further their formal education.
But for many children born into families of poverty, I’m not sure a lot has changed, especially for girls. However, when I was teaching, especially at Lander Middle School, I witnessed encouraging examples of both boys and girls, disadvantaged since birth, rise above those seemingly insurmountable challenges and put themselves on a path that I hope guided them to a successful future.
By success, I don’t necessarily mean attending a college or a university to achieve a goal. Learning a trade through schooling or experience is an equally important measure of success and is often more lucrative than a profession that begins with a college degree.
When students left the middle school, oftentimes I would never see them again. But occasionally, I will encounter a former student somewhere downtown. It’s always interesting to see how they have changed physically since becoming an adult. While I generally recognize faces, it’s the names that often have me stumped.
Of course, being the nosey type, I’ll ask how they’re doing and what they’re up to, and while I’m writing this, I can’t think of one instance after which I left disappointed.
Rambling complete.