My Grandpa died at 84 years old when I was seven. He was born in Childress, Texas in 1876, the year Custer was massacred at the Little Big Horn. At fourteen, he was in the first Oklahoma land rush with his father and at sixteen, he was on one of the last big cattle drives from the Texas panhandle into New Mexico which brought two thousand head of cattle driven by 14 cowboys, a cook with a chuckwagon, and a remuda of 22 horses to reservation Indians after they had suffered a long, hungry winter. He taught me how to play guitar, shoot a .22, fly fish and drive a sixteen penny nail straight—he could do it in two whacks in his eighties.
He loved to tell stories about the old days, before the cars replaced horses and the oil derricks littered the land. He had been a cowboy, farmer, music teacher, jackboot circuit preacher, builder, and when none of that worked, he cheated at poker. In 1898, he joined the rough riders and followed Roosevelt to Tampa, but got sick with fever there and was sent home. He outlived three wives and had three sets of children, my mom being the last. In ‘37, his land blew away and he, my grandma, my mom and two aunts went to California with the other Okies to pick fruit and live in Hoovervilles till FDR started the camps. Within a couple of years, he was building homes in Sacramento, a section of town he named Gardenland. There’s a street named after him there. He was quite an original guy.