The Recollections of Ernest Everett "Sharkey" RawlesPart II: 1916-1920 Transcriber's introductory notes: Ernest E. Rawles was born January 27, 1897, at the Rawles Ranch, located in the Anderson Valley, just north of Boonville, in Mendocino County, California. The Rawles family (with various spellings including Rawles, Rawls, Rawle, Rowle, Raule, Rawell, Raley, Rawley, Raleg, Ralegh, and Raleigh) has been traced to West Somerset, (with written references as early as 1267) and later St. Juliot, Cornwall, England. According to family historian and genealogist Henry W. Rawls of Montgomery, Alabama, the first members of the Rawle family to settle in America were most likely Francis Rawle and his son of the same name, who landed at Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of June, 1686. They came on the ship Desire , which sailed from Plymouth, England. Franics Rawle, the elder, died in 1697. He was succeeded by Francis, Jr., and his descendants, who have been continuously located in Philadelphia ever since. One of the descendants of Francis Rawle later settled in South Carolina, thus establishing another major branch of the family. Yet another branch of the family settled in Pickaway County, Ohio, sometime before 1810. It is not clear whether this branch of the family originated with the Philadelphia or South Carolina Rawle contingents. At some point in time, most likely before 1800, the terminating letter "s" was added to the Rawle family name by members of the Ohio branch of the family. Joseph Rawles (Ernest's grandfather) was born and raised in Pickaway County, Ohio, where he lived with his parents until age 20. (About 1828). He then moved to Indiana, where he raised livestock for 10 years (from about 1828 to about 1838). In 1830, while living in Indiana, he married Sintha Ann Bilderback. In about 1838, they moved to Missouri, where they ranched for 10 years (from about 1838 to about 1848). According to the book Grass Roots of Anderson Valley, they then moved to Iowa, then Nebraska, and then back to Iowa. According to Ernest's account, Joseph and Sintha Rawles lived in Lebanon (Warren County), Ohio "before heading west" in about 1856. He said that they "left their land in someone else's charge." (One descendent, Joseph P. Rawles, who had a wife named Eloise, lived there as recently as 1916.) The town of Lebanon, Ohio was built up on the old Rawles home site. According to Ernest's account, in about 1851, Joseph and Sintha Rawles moved to Springfield, (Sangamon County), Illinois. In about 1855 or 1856 they travelled to St. Joseph ("St. Joe"), Missouri, where their wagon joined an emigrant train that headed west (most likely in the spring) in either 1856 or 1857. (According to the book Grassroots of Anderson Valley, they left with a emigrant caravan from Mills County, Iowa.) According to oral history Ernest recounts hearing from his father, they crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains via the Donner Pass. The Rawles family settled in Boonville in 1857. Ernest Everett Rawles was the second son of Robert Henry Rawles (about 1845-1911) Robert Rawles was the seventh child of Joseph and Sintha (Bilderback) Rawles. Robert was about 14 year old when his family made their overland trip west. His first wife, Margaret (Brown) Rawles died in childbirth only a year after they were married. On Sept. 27, 1885, Robert Rawles married Delcena McAbee (1857-1951) Robert and Delcena Rawles had six children: Vernon Robert Rawles 1886-1948), Vera Winona (Rawles) Babcock (she later remarried, to a man named James Galway) (1889-1961), Lois Elaine (Rawles) Clow (1892-1960), Ernest Everett Rawles (1897-1985), Zelpha (Rawles) Michelson (1895-1956), and Thelma (Rawles) Faught (1899-1984). Ernest married Jane Eloise Wallach (born January 29, 1897, Boonville, Ca.) in 1919. Eloise was the daughter of John E. Wallach (1869-1951) and Martha "Mattie" T. (Burger) Wallach (1879-1953). John Wallach was the son of William Wallach and Gertrude (Priller) Wallach. William Wallach was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia). Eloise had one brother and one sister: Kent Burger Wallach (1893-1959) and Ermine Gertrude (Wallach) Turner (1911- ). Eloise died on March 3, 1976, in Oakdale, California. Together, Ernest and Eloise had three children: Doris Gayle (Rawles) Brower (born August 14, 1920), John William Rawles (born April 28, 1928, died May 5, 1982), and Donald Robert Rawles (born December 24, 1930, died September 2, 1985). This installment of E.E.R.'s oral history details his life from 1916 up to the end of 1919. The first installment of this oral history covered E.E.R.'s life growing up in Boonville (1897 to 1916). A third installment will cover the later period of his life, including his lengthy career as a engineer with the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power system. He retired in 1962. Part II. "They was wild old times down there in those days..." Soon after I graduated from high school, in 1916, after a job as a stake puncher with the Northwestern Railroad Company, I got a job with the New Cornelia Copper Company, just outside of Ajo [pronounced Ahh-ho], Arizona, down in the southern part of the state. Arizona is an entirely different place nowadays. They was wild old times down there in those days. It had just recently become a state [in 1912]. It was the last of the mainland territories to get statehood, and for all intents and purposes, it was still the wild west. The first time I went to Arizona, it was in July of 1916. I got off the train, it was the Southern Pacific Railroad, in Gila [pronounced Heel-ah] Bend, about 4:30 in the morning. It was a hundred and two [degrees F.]. They had a little green spot in front of the station, and people were laying out on that lawn, asleep. Some of them were half-dressed. If I'd had money enough, I'd have gotten back on the train, I'd have turned around and gone straight home. Normally I would have taken another train [to Ajo], but they said that had just had a big storm and washed the railroad out. So I had to go by a bus--it was really more of a truck with some seats on it. There wasn't much of a road, just a track across the desert that paralleled the railroad. In places, we just followed the bottoms of the arroyos. We left at 8 in the morning, and it was sweltering hot by the time we arrived in Ajo. There was no Highway 85 in 1916. I had come to Arizona at the invitation of my brother-in-law, Carl Clow [the husband of Ernest's sister Lois]. He was a surveyor who was laying out the Electrolytic plant for the New Cornelia mine. My first job was as a chainman on the survey party, laying out the plant. It belongs to the Phelps-Dodge outfit. When my sister had written to me, she had said, 'be sure you bring some light clothes.' I didn't even have a suit. When I got down to Los Angeles, I went into a place and bought a suit. It was a light color suit, but it was wool. I didn't wear that much in Arizona, but I wore it out afterwards, after I went home. It does get cold out on the desert in the winter-time, though. I lived in a tent cabin outside Ajo. The rent was a $30 a month. I spilt that rent with Lon Huneka. He was native Californian like me. He was of Polish descent, I think. Later, for a time, I had a house in Ajo. I shared that house with two Quinn brothers, Enoch Quinn and 'Spic' Quinn. His right name was Enoch, but we called him Kirby. My first job at Ajo was on Carl Clow's survey party. They were just working on the baselines at that time.It was so hot that we couldn't do accurate work in the daytime, because of [optical distortion of] the heat waves. We'd have to get up early in the morning--usually about 4 o'clock. We'd do our most accurate baseline work just after daylight in the morning. We'd check in the minor stuff later in the day. To set up the plant, they set up the baseline around the area. We used a coordinate system--a grid--on 100 foot squares. The design of the plant was done by Reprath and MacGregor, an engineering and construction firm in St. Louis, Missouri. All of the structural steel came from Kansas City. After we had laid the plant out and the survey work was mostly done, I found out that I could get a little bit more money as a steel inspector. I was supposed to have been able to learn how to read blueprints [in order to get the job]. Well, at least I was learning [on the job.] Some of the steel frameworks were 75 to 100 feet high. I had to climb around and check the rivets, to see if the guys had put the rivets in solid--good and tight. The riveters would have a little coal furnace with bellows where they heated up the rivets--practically white hot. Then they took tongs and threw them up--buck them up--one at a time to be used. Up above, another riveter would catch the hot rivets in a metal contraption they held in their hand--it worked like a baseball mitt. When I first started in, I'd mark the loose rivets, using a brush and a small can of red paint hung from my belt. Every rivet I painted had to be cut out and re-done. Pretty soon, these riveters got wise to what I was doing, and they decided they'd try to intimidate me out of making them re-do part of their work. They started 'accidently' zinging hot rivets past my ear, to keep me ducking. Well instead of getting scared, I got mad. Each time they threw a rivet at me, I'd paint two more, even if they were only marginally bad. After about a week, once they figured out that they couldn't run a 'Sandy' on me, they stopped throwing rivets at me. I hadn't been in Ajo very long until the soldiers arrived. I didn't even realize that the soldiers had quietly come in and set up an encampment until I was stopped by a camp sentry. There was a trail to where my sister and her husband Carl Clow lived. Sometimes, I used to go there to eat with them in the evening. I was walking in the dark up this path, along a narrow part, and a soldier stepped in front of me with a Springfield rifle. 'Halt' he says. I halted all right. It scared the hell out of me. He said 'Advance and be recognized.' I said, 'How the hell am I going to be recognized?' I walked up to him, and he had the rifle and bayonet pointed right at my belly. He said, 'I've got to take you on down to the camp to see the captain. I talked with them there at the camp, explaining where I was going. They said that if was to use the trail in the future, what I should say to the sentry whenever I went through there again. They had the army there because they were afraid of another raid by Villa's men, and also to try to stop the arms going across the border. They had arms going both ways, mostly south. They sent out "Blackjack" Pershing and lots of troops. You see, the raid on Columbus, New Mexico was very much on everyone's mind. The raid had occurred in March, and I arrived in Arizona in July of the same year. It was in the middle of summer and they were using Papago indians as laborers. They would only work at one speed. They were wheeling concrete There was a Swede from the Michigan group that thought that if he imported some Swedes from Michigan to work hauling concrete, that they could speed the indians up. They were ahead of the indians for a little while, but by noon, the indians were running over the top of them. They couldn't take the heat. Most of the labor was done by Papago indians, and some Mexicans. All of the crafts were brought in from other places. They had one group of craftsmen that worked for $2 or $3 an hour, which we thought was tremendous wages. They were lead burners. All these pipes, and tanks, and pumps, that they pumped the copper sulfate solution through had to be lined with lead. The copper sulfate would eat up ordinary iron. Everything was lined with lead. Those fellows got big wages. Even then they wanted more, because it was very unhealthy. They inhaled lead fumes--it gave them heavy metal poisoning. It would kill them. Some of the Mexicans that came across the border were pretty tough hombres. Some of the deputy sheriffs were pretty tough too. A lot of them were ex-Texas Rangers. When I started at The New Cornelia, I got $108 a month base pay. That was based on the price of copper at 25 cents a pound. The base bay was $75 a month and then for every cent or two cents the price of copper went above 25 cents [a pound] you got another $10 raise. Something like that. I don't remember, exactly. The price of copper kept going up and up, because the war was coming on. It got up to 45 cents a pound. My pay went from $125 a month up to near $200 a month. That was big pay in those days. When war was declared, the government stepped in an pegged the price of copper at 25 cents. That meant a reduction in pay for the employees. The whole outfit struck. They had a bloody mess down there. First the lead-burners struck. Then the electricians struck. They all moved out. The shut everything down but engineering. [As part of the engineering group], I went back to work on the survey party. We used to go back and forth to work on the railroad grade. At that time we were cross-sectioning the mine, so we had to go back and forth to the mine on the railroad bed. We had to contend with the Industrial Workers of the World [The IWW or "wobblies"]. The IWW moved a soup kitchen into the strike camp. Free soup. The winter climate in southern Arizona was pretty good, so here come every out of work IWW member in the country. Bums from all over the country. There must have been a thousand [men that] moved into the camp. They picketed the employees that were still at work--there was only a few of us. We had to go to work with them [the IWW] hurling insults--and sometimes much worse--at us. They'd yell "Picha la muta" and things like that. To keep the peace in this whole mess, the company had brought in a bunch of old Texas Rangers. They had four or five of them mounted on horseback [patrolling] every day. You couldn't get them off a horse. They'd ride down these picket lines. They'd just wade through a crowd of strikers on horseback. I saw two or three times when a [IWW] guy thought he'd try to get tough and pull a ranger off of a horse, or throw a rock at a ranger. They'd reach out and whang 'em on the top of the head with the barrel of their revolver, and down they'd go. I've seen them lay out a half dozen at a time. Most of them carried single-action Colt Peacemakers, either in .45 Colt or .44-40. Usually they had the 7-1/2 inch barrel, although a few carried the guns with the shorter 5-1/2 inch barrel. This stuff you see on TV of turning the gun around and using the butt to hit someone on the head is a bunch of hooey. That's suicidal. You hit 'em with the flat of the barrel, and down they go like a sack of potatoes. I remember one time [during the strike] a couple of guys who worked in the [company] office were coming down the street in a Model T Ford and somebody took a shot at them. They got out of the car so fast [before it had come to a halt] that the car kept going and hit a fireplug. The water came out and went 30 feet in the air. It wasn't uncommon for shooting to occur during the strike. Where the [mining] pit [near Ajo] is now, there was an exploratory shaft, about 600 feet deep. They had cross tunnels from the base of this shaft, where we took sulfide ore samples for analysis. That was first experience with tunnel work. That's where I learned to plumb a shaft. I played on a baseball team while I was at Ajo. We played in the winter and spring. We had made baseball diamond. We didn't have to good of equipment to do it, but we pushed the cactus way out in the outfield, we had plenty of room. Some guy came up to bat and he knocked a big high fly, and I was playing right field. I kept going back and back, running backwards, and reached up and grabbed it. Just then I stepped on a Cholla [cactus]. Hell, I couldn't even get the shoe off. They had to cut the shoe off me. They cut the spines, and they tried to pull them. I couldn't get all of the spines out. Then the doctor tried, an he thought he had got them all. Six or eight months later, some of them worked their way out of the top of my foot. Clear through my foot. We had three teams there. The soldiers had a team, Gibson had a team, and there was also the Ajo team, called the Clarkstons. I got to know the Gibson family very well. Mr. Gibson, he had a little store in the town of Old Ajo, where the [mining] pit is today. I went out to play one evening, and evidently Mr. Gibson like the way I played, so he asked me to be on the team. He was the manager of the baseball team. The Gibsons had two daughters, Grace and Gwendolyn, and they had a boy, I think his name was Ellsworth. He ran the store. Gwendolyn Gibson was about the most beautiful girl I ever saw. She was about sixteen and a I was about 19 or 20. But at that time I was very much in love with Eloise. I used to get lots of letters from Boonville. Grace Gibson was the postmistress. She used to kid me all the time about getting all these letters. She'd say: 'I wish you'd go home and marry that girl so I wouldn't have to sort all these letters all the time.' The father of the Gibson family, I don't recall his first name, was a diamond driller. He had come into Ajo early, and done some drilling. In fact, I had taken some samples from his diamond drilling. Mr. Gibson had also filed [claims] on a bunch of land down there, which is now the town of Gibson. It is right next to Ajo. They had a town-site in their name. It mostly all tent-houses. There were actually three towns: Gibson, New Cornelia, and Clarkston. Clarkston just had a few stores, and the red light district. There weren't many women around here in those days--just Papago squaws, a few Mexican girls, and prostitutes. Eventually, there were a few married women that settled in. The only three unmarried women that I can remember. There was a school teacher, I don't remember her name. There were also the two Gibson girls. The town of Clarkston doesn't exist any more. It is all on company land, now. In fact, where the town once was is now an enormous pile of tailings. New Cornelia normally went by the name of Ajo. The name of the railroad [line] from Gila bend was the 'Tucson, New Cornelia, and Gila Bend.' The railroad was never built from Ajo to Tucson, but it was built from Gila Bend to Ajo. They were just finishing the railroad when I arrived there. In the spring of 1916, and again in 1917, the best players on the three baseball teams were selected an we went to play an exhibition game against professional baseball teams [during their spring training.] The first year, we played the Chicago White Sox. There were about three or four of us from our team that were selected. At that time the White Sox were in spring training up in Tempe [Arizona]. We later played at Casa Grande against another professional team. I can't remember which one it was. I think that they were from Chicago, too. It took two days to get up there and back in an old fashioned bus. We had to start early in the morning. They beat us, but we were ahead of them for a while. As I recall the score was 7 to 5. We did all right, but we weren't as well organized as they were. They knew how to lay the ball down, and had fast runners. All we did was stand up and slug at it. There were two young fellows on the team who lived at Gun Sight, which is northeast across a big basin from Ajo. You can see across the basin quite well, but once you drop down into it, there's no vantage point. These boys used to take the road around the basin to Ajo, for the games, but once they decided that they'd take a short cut across the basin. They got turned around in the maze of arroyos. They spent a whole day wandering around, with no water. One boy gave out and laid up in the shade. The other finally found his way out. By the time he found his way to a ranch, he was irrational. He could tell them that there was another man out there, but he couldn't tell them where. They got word into town. Some of us went out, and the soldiers went out. We didn't find him. It was the soldiers that finally found the other boy, after another full day of blazing heat. The soldiers had set up camp, and lit a camp fire. Apparently the lost fellow saw the fire, and he commenced to holler for help. They found him only about a quarter mile from their camp. They gave him water and wrapped him in wet blankets, but he died before they could get him to town. What was left of him weighed 98 pounds. Originally, he weighed 150 pounds. He had lost that much--dehydrated that much--in two days. They found low spots where he had scratched in the arroyo, looking for water. His finger were worn right down to the bone, digging like that. That time of year, there wasn't a drop of water to be found, at least not in that basin. I can recall once we were on a hilltop with a [surveying] instrument, and just for the heck of it we looked through it at some Mexican girls combing each other's hair in their back yard. Then we realized that they were picking lice out of each-other's hair. That kind of deflated any interest that I might of had in dating the Mexican girls. There weren't many roads in Arizona then. You'd travel right down the arroyos. That's how all the roads there were down in the southern part of the state. Once in a while one of those cloudbursts--from the storms that came in off the gulf--would hit the hill and pretty soon here come a head of water down the arroyo--just a torrent. Some places you couldn't get out. People would lose a car every once in a while. Down around Ajo, some of the Mexicans would live in the big culverts. When there was a rain, out would come the beds, chicken coops, Mexicans, and all, floating down the arroyo. I had one fairly close call. These Mexican carnivals would come by right after pay day. I think the company kind of encouraged it. A lot of the Mexicans, and a lot of the white people too, would spend their whole month's wages, and then they'd be broke. That kept them at work. This one carnival came by, and we went over to see it--three or four of us. There were mostly Mexicans there. It was over by Clarkston. We just got in, and started to get our tickets for something. We were right close to where they sold tickets for the merry-go-round. The ticket seller was up on a kind of a high stand or box. All at once, I heard a bang! bang! bang! right over my god-damned head. We thought that he was shooting at us. I saw him shoot one guy, and then two other guys started shooting at him. We started running to get out of there. It later turned out that he was shooting at another Mexican, and he was shooting back at him [the ticket seller.] There was deputy sheriff shooting, too. Three or four Mexicans had come in. The sheriff, a few nights before, over in the Mexican red light town, had shot a Mexican that got tough--killed him. These Mexicans wanted to turn it into a war, and opened up on this deputy sheriff. Then the guy in the ticket booth started blasting at the Mexicans [in defense of the deputy.] The deputy sheriff knocked one of them down, and the guy in the ticket booth knocked one down, and the other two ran off. The deputy got knocked down to, but the shot didn't kill him. We were running too, but in the opposite direction. We tried to get out the front, at first, but there was a crowd of people, so we ran right through the side of a tent. We ran right through a tent where some lady trapeze performers were changing their clothes, but we didn't stop to look. The next morning, they found one of the two men who had gotten away a short distance out in the desert [dead]. Apparently, he must have had on a better pair of shoes, because when they found him, he was barefooted. They figured that the other Mexican [the fourth man] had taken them with him. All together, there were three Mexicans killed. Two right inside the quadrangle [of the carnival], and one a short distance away. I can remember the Fourth of July celebration in 1917 in Ajo. In the celebration, they were going to have a prize fight. I can't remember if it was Mark Taylor or "Shine" Taylor. I think it was Shine Taylor. Most fellas thought that old Shine could lick most anybody down in that country. They brought a guy in by the name of Reed to fight him. Reed must have been a pretty good scrapper, because old Shine was getting the best of him. Finally, he flattened old Shine. Shine got up on his hands and knees, and he flattened him again. That made everybody at the ring-side mad. They started to crowd into the ring. I wasn't trying to get into the damned ring. I was being pushed from behind. One of these deputy sheriffs jumped into the middle of the ring, trying to hold the group back, and pulled out his Colt's .45. There was that thing sticking me right in the nose. Boy! It [the barrel] looked big enough to crawl in. That's all there was to it. I guess I should tell you about David Boles, a half-Mexican, he worked on the survey party with me. He was a helluva nice boy, too, and a good baseball player. He was also one of my friend s who went rock climbing. We climbed a mountain called Montezuma's Head together. We also climbed Hat Mountain. You can se that mountain from Ajo. It took us two days to get to the top of that one. To get there, [to Hat Mountain] we went on Mr. Gibson's truck. It was a delivery truck. a Ford, stripped down. It was hard to get gasoline in Arizona in 1916. He used to run it on kerosene, if you can believe that. As long as he could keep it hot, he could get it started all-right. Once he got it started, he kept it started. It took us a full day to get there. There were no roads to speak of. We just followed the arroyos, or old cattle trails, or just cut strait across the desert in the desired direction. We didn't arrive near the mountain until late in the day. We got close to it, but we still had a long hike to get to the base of the mountain. That took all of the second day. We camped the second night at the base of Hat Mountain. It took us all of the next day to climb the mountain. We came back down late in the evening. It was near dark when we got back to our camp. When we got on top of Hat Mountain, we found a bottle there [with a piece of paper] with some guys names on it. They had left it there the year before. One of the guy's names was Stevenson. I used to play basketball during High School with this fellow. He was from Lakeport [California]. Quite a coincidence. There was a fellow that ran the Mexican commissary, his name was Jerry McGimsey. I had heard the name, but I didn't associate the name at all with the McGimseys I had known in Boonville. You see, down in Ajo, they pronounced it Mac-Gim-see, and [in Boonville] we used to say it Mac-Gimp-see. Well, one day I was walking down through Mexican town, and I ran into him. It was the same Jerry McGimsey I had known in Boonville. He sold dry goods, and also furnished a lot of the Mexican employees for the company. He had been across the border, working in the mines, and had married a Mexican wife. She was auburn haired, and awfully pretty. Arizona had no pollution then. On clear moonlit nights in the fall and winter, you could look north from hilltops near Ajo, which is near the southern border, and see the moonlight reflecting off snow on the San Francisco peaks. Those peaks are in the northern part of the state, near Flagstaff. That's visibility of 200 miles. It was so clear. They tell a story about a man who took a walk toward a hill. An he walked, and he walked, and he walked, and he walked. Finally, he came to a place had a little irrigation ditch. And the guy was working down the line just a little ways. The guy hollers to him, 'Have you got a board?', and he answers, 'What do you need a board for? You can step across that ditch.' The other guy says, 'I've been walking towards that mountain there all day. I come to this and I thought it might be the Colorado River.' I used to say that you could see farther, and see less, than any other place in the world [in Arizona.] After all, it does have an attraction. I did some hunting while I was there. I mostly hunted rabbits and quail. The rabbits weren't very big--Cottontails. We used to go out and hunt by them by moonlight in the summer. There were also wild hogs, called Javelins, down closer to the border. It's of course against the law now, but back then, we'd go out on picnics at night-time and take a match and set the spines on a Saguaro cactus on fire. It made the most beautiful background you ever saw for a picnic. Grace asked me "How would you like to go quail hunting?" I said, "Fine, but I don't have a gun with me. She said, 'That's all right, father can get you a gun.' On this first hunt, we went down near Quita Vaquita--which means little calf or little cow--once time, and had an interesting experience. There were three couples in our party. There was Grace Gibson and I. And there was the school teacher and Grace's brother, and a fellow named Freeman and his wife. They had been recently married. We went down to Quita Vaquita in an flat-bed Ford truck that the Gibsons used to deliver groceries. It ran on kerosene, because gasoline was hard to come by. Grace wasn't shooting, she didn't have a gun with her. I got after a bunch of quail. We followed these quail from this little lake. Every once in a while, I'd get one. Before we knew it, we were a mile into Mexico. There was no fence to mark the boundary, at that time. We turned around and started back for the border. Between us and where the truck was parked up on the hill [on the other side of the border], there was a big bunch of men with guns that had ridden up. We could see Grace's brother behind the truck, with a rifle pointed at these men. We thought that they were part of Villa's gang, so we tried to sneak up an arroyo, [out of sight back across the border to where the truck was parked.] When got up close to them, and Grace said, 'They're not Mexicans, they're Papagos.' She could speak some Papago. We went up to talk to them. We asked if they had anything to eat. One of them said, 'Not much. We eat yesterday.' We had some of our [picnic] lunch left over, so we gave it to them. The chief of the bands took us around a building there and said: 'Bad place. You go home. Man hung!' There was still a rope hanging there. He said, 'He steal horse.' We got the hell out of there. We got about halfway back to Ajo, and the old truck wouldn't go any further. It didn't run well on kerosene, especially when it was cold. By now, Mrs. Freeman was sick. I guess that she was pregnant. Here we were stranded out in the desert. It was about 15 miles back to Ajo. That night, we saw a light heading across the desert in the [near] distance. Mr. Freeman ran down the arroyo and headed him off. He went on into town, and sent somebody out to rescue us. One of the men that came out was a boyfriend of Grace's. He was mad. He said, 'You should have had more sense than to come down to this country!' She told him to go to hell, I remember that. When Mother [Eloise] and I took a trip to Arizona a few years ago [early 1970s] we stopped by Ajo and enquired if any of the Gibsons were still in the area. They said that Grace was still alive, living in Tucson. She was a court reporter, and had just recently married. Mother insisted that we drop by for a visit. Her new husband turned out to be a cranky old boy. Grace was very nice to us. Ajo was little more than a tent town when I arrived. There were a few adobe structures in the town of Old Ajo, but mostly it was tents. In the year and a half that I was there, they built a lot of permanent structures, most of which are still standing today. The plaza in the middle of town, and all of the buildings surrounding it were built when I was there. I punched the stakes for the survey in laying out the plaza. I can remember siting the band stand in the center of the plaza. That was in the fall of 1916. We used to have dances around that band stand. There was a family living there [in Ajo] named Quiros. They were very musical. They used to play for everyone. Its a nice plaza. Of course they have buildings all around it, now. There's a big church facing it. Its one of the nicest plazas of any of the border towns, really a nice spot. I can remember them bringing in palm trees to plant around the perimeter of the plaza. They came in wooden boxes and only stood about six feet high. I remember staking out the holes for those palm trees. The last time I was there [in the early 1970s] they must have grown to 80 feet high. Jim Potter was the chief metallurgist for New Cornelia. He perfected the electrolytic process for the reduction of copper ore. He had been out there for some time, and had set up a pilot plant in which he had worked out the electrolysis process. He was the brains of the New Cornelia Copper Company. I came down when Potter had proved out the electrolytic process, and were getting ready to lay out the big plant. Mike Curly was the head chemical engineer--he ran the laboratory and that end of it. John C. Greenwood was the general manager. There were quite a few people from Michigan. They came from the parent company. A fellow named Stiles was head the construction engineer. My brother-in-law Carl Clow was the head surveyor. When I got there, they were surface mining on these high hills. They had a standard gauge railroad that ran around the base of the mountain. They loaded this ore into dump cars, with big Marion-Osgood [steam] shovels They'd get maybe 20 cubic yards onto a car. They had several types of rock crushers there. The first crusher was a cone, like the frestrum of a pyramid, turned upside-down. In the middle of that, they had a big piston. It weighed probably about 10 tons. It was swung just a little off center. As the rocks slid down this cone, it would crack the ore up into pieces three-inches minus--three inches or smaller. That came out the bottom. On conveyors, the ore then went into fine crushers, a series of maybe 30 crushers. They crushed to ore down to about the size of a pea. Then another series of conveyors [brought the ore] to a series of concrete tanks. A great long series of them. There it [the ore] was treated with sulfuric acid--making a copper sulfate solution. The copper ore was a carbonate ore. The sulfuric acid would leach the carbonate ore, and you'd get copper sulfate, which is the same as blue stone. They are still mining at Ajo, but they now have a deep pit mine. The carbonate ore is only found near the surface. Nowadays, they are mining for the [copper] sulfides. They use a smelting process to extract the ore, rather than an electrolytic process. They have a huge open-pit mine, where the hills used to be. It has railroad tracks spiraling down into it. The scale is just tremendous! You can count four or five trains running along those tracks [in the pit] at one time. There was a big crane on an overhead gantry with a scoop that they used to empty these tanks. From there, the copper sulfate solution went to the big tank house. There, they had a series of tanks in two rows. Each of these was similar to a battery cell. Each tank was about 4 feet wide and 20 feet long. There was a series of these tanks, and I guess that building must have been 800 feet long. There were negative and positive plates in each tank. They made lead plates--I believe they were the positive ones. They had thin 'starting sheets' of copper [on the other side of the tank,] about four or five feet square. They only weighed six or eight pounds a piece. They turned DC current into that, and the copper would ionize out onto the [copper] starting plate. When they took the plate out, they'd weigh probably three or four hundred pounds. After the plant was built, I went home to visit for three or four weeks. When I came back, the chief engineer, old man Potter asked what job I'd like. I thought it might be nice to run that [gantry] crane, up in the top of this building. I got good, so I could run that crane down the building, and pick up the plates out of the electrolytic tank. Then they went down an got let them down in surging water to wash them off, and then they'd take them out load them onto the platform for shipment. I had that job for about two weeks. Those damned copper fumes come up through there, and it was about 150 degrees up in the top of the building. I only lasted two or three weeks. I got sick. They put me in the hospital and I damn near died. I had a high temperature, and they couldn't get anything through me. The doctor, I think his name was Patton, finally got me fixed up. After that, I said that I didn't want any more of that job. So they put me back on the survey party. We were building some little tunnels back into the hills, because they were going to pull off another big shot. They wanted to get these holes back in there to get powder underneath so that they could lift the whole damned hill. We were taking core samples from the diamond drills, into the sulfides. My job was to keep track of the elevation on those core samples. Some of the samples came up in sludge. I had to put that [liquid] in tanks, let it settle, siphon off the water, and let the sample dry. We kept a fire goin' there with about three 36-inch tubs. In drying it [the sample] out I had to be careful no to over-cook it. It would melt out the copper. Then it was put into sacks. They used that for what they called that a sludge sample. Besides that, we also had the core sample. The core samples were each put into a box, labeled as to elevation. They were sent up to the laboratory, where they actually ground those up to get [an analysis of] the amount of copper in the ore. They had one sample to check against the other. So you had to be awful careful with that sludge sample, to get it to agree with the core sample. I worked on that for a bit. Then my brother-in-law, Carl Clow, sent for me to come work with him up at Cottonwood. It was a place called Verde, at that time. They were building a smelter there, an Carl was doing the surveying, laying it out. I took the Santa Fe train to Cottonwood, by way of Gila Bend and Maricopa. There was a branch line, as I recall, that ran from Maricopa all the way up to Ash Fork--or perhaps it only went to Phoenix. I stopped off in Maricopa. The town wasn't much more than just a train stop. There was a saloon and boarding house. I stayed in a ground floor room at the old hotel for the night. In the middle of the night I heard a gun fight just outside my window. There were several shots fired, and people hollering. I got up to see what had happened, and there were dozens of people who were also looking out of their windows, doing likewise. I had to leave early the next morning, so I never got the full story of what had gone on. When I got on the train, to continue on to Ash Fork, there was a deputy sheriff with two boys in manacles. They were both young, in their early twenties. One had red hair, and looked worse for wear. He had dried blood all over him. I suppose he had been either grazed by a bullet or whacked on the head with a gun. The other was dark complected, and looked a lot like me. He even had a flat top cap on of the same pattern and color as the one I was wearing. The railroad went by Florence Junction, where they had the penitentiary. The deputy took them off there. There was on old lady sitting next to me, and I remember she said 'I don't want to seem impertinent, but was that boy your brother?' She had evidently noticed that the guy looked a lot like me. I stayed in Cottonwood until Vernon was drafted into the service, and then Mother [Delcena (McAbee) Rawles asked me to come home because she couldn't handle the place by herself. Vernon was drafted in what they called the "First Draft." Vernon was in The [Army] Field Artillery [Corps] for about two years. He was stationed at Fort Lewis [Washington], and later went to Germany. He worked with the caissons, bringing up extra shells for the artillery. One time there was an [German] artillery barrage, and Vernon took cover in a shell hole [crater]. Apparently some mustard gas was still in the hole--it settles in low places, and it affected his lungs. That was the only trouble he ever encountered over there. I was down in Arizona, of course, when the war broke out. Mother [Delcena] sent me a letter, asking me to come home. So I went home. A few months later, they dropped the draft age down to 18. I wanted to enlist in the Army, but I had an agricultural exemption which I couldn't get out of. I had been working with a young fellow down in Arizona named Frank Luke, Jr.. He was a rambunctious individual. We [Frank Luke and I] used do all sort of crazy stunts together. We used to go mountain climbing, and rapelled down to Indian cliff dwellings, and that sort of thing. The cliff dwellings we explored were around Clarkdale. They were small ones. Just one here, and one there, on the side of the bluffs. Frank had a brother who ran a store in Clarkston. Later he [the brother] moved down to near the [Mexican] border. That's how the town Lukeville got its name. Just before Mother [Delcena] sent for me, I had made up my mind that I wanted to volunteer just like Frank did. He had already had some experience flying. I had been up with him a time or two. It sounded like a grand idea to me. He said, 'There's nothing to it. You come out and we'll get you in a plane in the [Army] Air Corps.' Well, he went in the Air Corps, and I came home. When I got home, I had to register [for the second draft]. They put me in class 3J -- an agricultural exemption. In the first draft, you had to be 21, in the second draft, they wanted 18 year olds. I stayed home, but in September, 1917 Frank Luke went in. He first volunteered for enlistment in the Army Signal Corps, and then wangled an assignment into the flying branch. He took his pilot training at the School of Military Aeronautics near, Austin, Texas. The course was normally nine weeks, but he finished in seven. He was what they call a natural stick and rudder man. Frank got his commission as a Second Lieutenant in January, 1918. He went to France, assigned to the 27th Aero Squadron, which was then located near Chateau Thierry. He had a short but celebrated career as a 'balloon buster,' strafing captive balloons. In a period of only seventeen days, he shot down more than 18 German observation balloons and aircraft. This was risky business, because the balloons were always well defended by machine guns on the ground. Eventually, he got shot down. I remember reading newspaper accounts about it at the time. He was shot down on the 29th of September, 1918. That crazy kid Frank, he didn't want to surrender. One of his arms was injured, but he tried to shoot it out with the Germans, armed only with a .45 revolver. I suppose he thought that if he could hold the Germans off until after sunset, he could slip back across the lines in the darkness. As I heard it, they finally shot him in the middle of a graveyard. [Editor's note: Luke Field, later called Air Force Base, Arizona is named in memory of Frank Luke. Luke was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously] When I got home my brother [Vernon] was in the service, but I worked the ranch. I put in some extra crops--some wheat. I plowed up some land that had never been cultivated before. I sold that [grain]. When I got married I only had two or three hundred bucks. I had wanted to enlist, but couldn't, because of my agricultural exemption. One time I went as far as San Francisco to enlist. When I went to enlist, I had to produce my draft papers. I was class 3J. The guy said, 'Hell, we can't sign you up. You have to go back home and get your draft board to sign you a release.' I went back to the draft, and Mother [Delcena] said, 'You're not going to go. You're the only boy I have left.' She went over to old Judge Mather, who was head of the draft service. He wouldn't change my draft status. Some domesticated hogs kept getting after our sheep, killing lambs. They'd first start eating the afterbirth, and then they'd start eatin' the lambs. They'd pick up the lambs as quick as the ewes would drop 'em. People had these homesteads out through the ranch. There was Charlie [Charles W.] Sanders, he had a place, and Jim McNeil, Maurice Tindall's father, and Ferreter people. They were all inter-related, and tough as nails. They'd run hogs--just let 'em run wild. We used to let it go until lambing season. At lambing season, we expected them to get their hogs up, and keep 'em up. Sometimes they would, and sometimes they wouldn't. It got so finally, that they wouldn't get them up, and we'd have to get them up and bring them in. Pretty soon they'd knock a picket out of the fence, and they'd be out again. They didn't have enough feed for them penned up, so they wanted them out on our open range. It got to the point where we weren't going to take it any longer. We told them we'd shoot 'em. They said, 'Oh, you won't do that!' We said, 'The Hell we won't do that, if you don't get those hogs up!' One day [after that], we were out the ridge, and we 'd get first one bunch of hogs, and find one with their marks on it, and we'd shoot it, and leave it right in the trail. We'd go on a little farther and find another one, and shoot that one, and leave that in the trail. We'd come back and tell them where they were--they'd have to go out and get them. That was about the only way we could handle the situation. Once they found out that we were really going to shoot their hogs, they got them up. They didn't want to have to go out and pack them in. We told them where they were. One time [sometime before 1911] Vernon and Fred [Rawles] killed a bunch of hogs during lambing season, and a whole damned bunch [of the homesteaders] came down [to make trouble about it] to the ranch-house. They were going to raise hell, and they all had guns apiece. Dad [Robert] said, "Well, you boys come here with guns, then I'm going to get mine!." He went back in the house, and you should have seen those guys go back up the hill! I was about 8 or ten years old, and he was an old man by that time. When I was running the ranch by myself, I had several skirmishes. I was out the ridge, and ran into a whole bunch of them [the homesteaders]. They said that they were out looking for their hogs. What they were really doing was hunting deer in the winter-time [on Rawles Ranch land]. They had a bunch of their dogs with them. I said, 'Well, when you are out after your hogs, keep your dogs with you, don't let them out loose, and they'll be all right, as far as I'm concerned. Just be careful that you don't run the sheep into the gulches.' Well, I was kinda suspicious that they weren't doing what they said they were going to do, so I took a round-about acrost the canyon, and came in ahead of them. Here come a bunch of sheep with the dogs in behind them, after the sheep. So I got off my horse, and when the dogs came by, I killed two of them. They heard me shooting. Pretty quick, three of the guys came up. I told them 'There's your dogs. I told you not to turn your dogs loose and get after the sheep.' [They were saying] oh what they weren't going to do to me. I said 'Well, I killed your dogs! [Implying that they might be next.] Go ahead and start in if you want to.' I got my rifle ready. They decided that they wouldn't. I was lucky I didn't get my head blown off. Those guys were tough old guys. But you had to be tough as they were, or they'd run you off your place. We also had problems with people's dogs getting after the sheep, killing lambs. We'd set the hounds on the scent, thinking that we were on the trail of a coyote. Pretty soon the [scent] trail went right into Peachland, and under a house or into some guy's yard. Sometimes, it was indeed coyotes. We'd set the hounds after them, following on horseback. It was regular sport. We'd even blow a hunting horn like Englishmen on a fox hunt. Sometimes we'd catch them, and sometimes we wouldn't. Generally, we'd trail them down toward Hopland. Sometimes we'd run them all day, clear past Hopland. They'd lose the trail, and have to back-track. Farther down the valley, another rancher would set his dogs in [on the scent.] Some of the old dogs that couldn't keep up would be half a mile behind. The younger dogs would over-run the trail, and then the older dogs with the experienced noses would catch-up and put them back on the scent. We usually caught up with the coyotes eventually. All of the ranchers kept a horn to use on the hunts. Vernon had one. If a dog got on a cold trail, you'd use the horn to call them back. Usually they'd quit and come back. If you got on a hot trail, you had a signal system, you get on the horn 'toot-toot-toot,' which way the dogs were going. Then the next rancher, maybe a couple of miles ahead, he'd hear it, and turn his dogs in [on the track.] One time I was out and my dogs cornered a coyote in a culvert under the county road. Cars were backed up a couple of hundred yards, [stopped to watch what was going on.] There were dogs on both ends. A couple of them [in the cars] were saying, 'Don't shoot the poor thing. Don't shoot the poor thing!' At one time there was $60 bounty on coyotes. We didn't catch enough to make it pay. If you occasionally got a bounty, that wouldn't hardly pay for your dog feed. That got to be a racket. Some guys were catching pups over in San Joaquin valley, and bringing in them in to Mendocino County [to collect the bounty.] They'd find a den with three four pups and a bitch, that was a pretty good find. They finally quit that. The telephone company was coming through the valley, putting in a coaxial cable. They wanted a right-of-way through the property. That was after my brother had passed away, and I was still managing the property. I told them that I didn't have any objection if they kept the line up out of the valley where the farmer was done. I also said that I wanted something in return [for the right-of-way]. They agreed to give me some dozer time. There used to be quite a gully between where the old house is [was] and the knoll where the old hotel used to be. I had them take the dozer and flatten that all out. I figured that someday I'd build a nice house there. That was as far as I ever got in building my house. While I was gone, Mother [Delcena] had bought a little "Baby Grand" Chevrolet. I got in [the car] with my sister [Thelma] to drive to school. I said, "How do you shift this thing?' She asked, "Did you ever drive a car?' I replied [indignantly] 'Oh yes, I've drove a car all the time in Arizona. That's old stuff. But as far as shifting the gears are concerned, they all shift a little different.' Well, actually, I'd never driven a car in my life. She turned it around, and I got behind the wheel and headed down the hill. I come to the road, and I thought, 'By God, how do I stop this thing?' I pressed the [clutch] lever down, and nothing happened. Then I thought about the brake, but I forgot about the foot brake, and pulled the hand brake on. Anyway, I drove it around that day, getting used to it. The next day, the kids were going over to Davis for the college spring picnic day. Pop Roesman [Thomas J,. Roesman, the high school principal] says, 'Can you take some of my kids?' I said, 'Oh sure. I'll take the car. I'll drive them over. Hell, I'd never really driven, and I didn't know where Davis was. I thought it was just over the hill. Anyway, one of the kids had been there once before. We started out, and we got to Cloverdale. We almost got pinched there, because one of the kids got out and swiped a flag. A cop saw him and said, 'You boys put that flag back. Boys will be boys, but you can't do that in this town.' We started out of Cloverdale, and I was doing about 50 miles an hour. There was a just a narrow road coming down there, back then. Where the Verdun winery is now, where Dry Creek comes in, there was a narrow bridge, and a curve. Well, I missed that bridge entirely. We flew across the ditch, and hit on the other side so hard that it blew out a tire. I did have a spare. We drove on over to Davis. We got to Davis to the Picnic Day, it was around. Pop Roesman, the school principal was there. He had some in his car. Kent Gunnely also had a car. Thelma was in that car, with about half a dozen others. They decided to come back by way of Vallejo. We had wanted to go back the way we had come, by way of Napa. Pop Roesman wanted us to see what a battleship looked like. None of us kids had hardly been out of the valley, except me--I'd been to Arizona. We went down to Mare Island and saw the battleship. The war was still going on then. Vernon had just gone over. So, we went [back] by way Vallejo. How the hell I ever drove back through traffic, when I didn't know how to drive properly, I'll never know. We got home, though. Eloise's parents had an early Chevrolet. On that car when you pushed the clutch in, if you kept going, that put the brake on. Our first car was a brand spankin' new [Ford] Model T. I bought that after we moved to Richmond. It was a 1917. I paid $648 for it. I learned pretty quick how to drive the thing all right, but Eloise was used to the little Chevrolet--she'd driven it a few times. She knew that if you pushed the clutch down hard, that was the brake--that caused it to stop. On the Ford, however, if you pushed [all the way] down on the clutch, it put it in low. If you take your foot off, it comes back into high. That was the only shifter. We were coming down the street, [in the Model T] and there was a car coming across the other way. She could see the other car about halfway down the other block, about the same distance from the corner. She commenced to shouting, 'I'm going to hit it, I'm going to hit it, I'm going to hit it!' She kept pushing down on the clutch, and of course the car kept going. I said, 'For Christ's sake, take your foot off,' and away the car went. By the time I finally stopped the car with the hand brake, we had taken out three little sapling fruit trees by the side of the road. She quit driving for a while after that. [End of verbatim transcript] Transcriber's addenda: Sometime between 1912 and 1919, Ernest Rawles wrote a poem about a dance held in Philo on a Christmas Night that degenerated into a brawl between the Boonville and Philo contingents. This much celebrated event is still talked about today by the residents of Anderson Valley. This poem is titled The Devil's Dance: Johnson gave a blowout They came in rigs and horseback Were the Etens and and Ralph Brown, There was Tige and Pete and Honky, The dance progressed quite smoothly, He made a pass at Pete, Yes, Cutey dashed at Peter Boggs was quite a scrapper Yes, Boggs, the old sinner Baldy Brown was terror stricken But the organist, the Queen of Philo Terror reigned among the maids Magic Max the Mighty Then Jake's boy from his corner Giffie from the outside Little Ronald Wallach Jack and John and Choppy And Jinks the old peace maker A Cureton and a Chipman Still the fight went on For hour the conflict raged He talked long to the Boonters At last the night was over It was a mighty conflict
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