Branson from Branson

Preface

Today Branson, Missouri is a very popular place with a lot of entertainment options.  My neighbor up here in Central Idaho took a train across Canada and then down to Branson on one of many potential travel options.  He really enjoyed his stay in Branson but noted that the trip could have been more interesting if I wrote a book about some of the original Branson’s, particularly a namesake.

The town is named after one of my grandfather’s brothers.  There were nine boys in all, my grandfather being Jefferson Davis Branson (he went by Dave).  I am being told the history by my father who got most of it from stories told around the campfire in the early 1900’s.  My father, Joseph David Branson was born in 1890 and I was born in October of 1942 so he was 52 when I was born.  He was almost 60 when he first started telling me the stories.  I was born six days too late to enter elementary school in Boise, Idaho so I had to sit out another year.  During that year my father and I and my mother and I developed a wonderful relationship, though totally different. This is a story primarily about the relationship I had with my dad, Joe Branson.

In 1948 when I should have been in school, my father was trying to develop an already proven gold mine that was forced shut when World War II broke out in Hawaii. Because I was like a well-trained puppy and could be depended upon to do what I was told when he wasn’t present, I traveled to various mining projects with Joe and the long trips were always spiced with stories of his earlier times. In modern era Joe would have been arrested for leaving me in the places he did while he talked mining affairs with people who didn’t really want to share their secrets with a six year old.

There was one trip to northern Nevada where he cautioned me to maybe refuse food at a mining camp because the meat in the stew was Jack-rabbits from the local sagebrush. That night we drove to Winnemucca where Joe would deposit me in the hotel room after dinner and then go join in the gambling he dearly loved…as well as the ladies that came with it.  On the way back to Boise the next day we stopped in the last ditch town of McCormick for lunch and to play some slot machines.  I was too young to legally pull the handle on the machine, but he said he would spot me a dollar and when it produced 14 silver dollars, I was one happy kid.  He said later that I counted the silver some 100 times on the way back to Boise.

My life was almost shortened a great deal when dad had hired Howard Austin with his D-7 bulldozer to so some development work on mining property in Grimes Creek near the grandparents’ home area. I really loved to be around equipment like a bulldozer and I was hanging out above where it was operating.  I got too close to the fresh cut bank and it gave way and I fell down behind the bulldozer while it was backing up towards me.  My dad saw it all but could cowboy whistle really loud and vary the pitch such that it could be heard over the squealing tracks.  Howard stopped just in time. The rollers on the tracks are not lubricated and constantly squeak, but pretty much the same pitch. By varying the pitch, say as young men do whistling at a pretty young lady, it can be heard over the tracks.

This shortened my career as a bulldozer watcher temporarily and earned me the right to stay in the cabin after breakfast and sweep, do dishes and other chores.  But I shortly recovered although I had to stay near wherever dad was standing except when Howard would let me ride with him.  I learned a lot about driving bulldozers back then though I wasn’t strong enough to steer the cumbersome handles on them in those days. I learned a lot about building a bridge heavy enough for logging trucks…all sorts of good stuff for the potential budding engineer?  My dad always told me I was going to be an engineer and go to college and, by the way, I would pay for it myself.  He turned out to be right.

My tour as housekeeper let me know a lot about the grandparents, Dave and Irene.  Dave died in 1937 five years before I was born and Irene died when I was four years old and I don’t remember spending much time with her or being at the cabin when she was still alive.  But I really got to know about it when Howard, dad and I were there for several weeks. Howard had questions he would ask of Joe and those discussions were very enlightening when accented with all the furniture still remaining in the cabin. Details will be expanded later in the chapter Grimes Creek.

Dad played the banjo and could do a few chords on the piano. The photo of the band that constituted Dave, Irene, Joe, Maggie and her girl-friend back in Pagosa Springs, Colorado is included below. Joe was certain that Dave’s violin was a Stradivarius because it said so inside. However, when I began to play it in the 1950s, my instructors all said it was a very good copy, but still a copy. Because I was not able to attain the tone quality I wanted at that time, I gave it up in a couple years. Later in life, I figured out what was wrong with my technique but it was a little late to start again.

 

The photo is in the 1908 era and taken in Colorado.  The story of how this group of Branson’s migrated from SW Missouri to Colorado and on to Idaho is an amazing story of fortitude.  You can see in the background grandpa Dave Branson playing his Model 1727 Stradivarius violin (copy from Germany) which I still have today and played in my early teens in Boise Idaho.  Seated in front of him is Grandma Irene who played the guitar which I eventually took up and conquered to some degree.  The younger sister Aunt Maggie played the piano and a friend of hers Emily Healey is in the background.  My dad Joe is to the left and played the banjo even up into my childhood times. He did chords on the piano when he thought he was alone.

I don’t believe anybody with the possible exception of aunt Maggie could read music.  They played by ear and had a manual crank phonograph which played cylinders instead of the more modern discs we see in modern times.  I have included a photograph from Ebay of a model similar to the Branson model.  These were the only type of phonographs available prior to about 1915 and the Branson machine traveled from Colorado to Idaho via wagon and was part of “the junk” Joe thought he was transporting 1000 miles by horse drawn wagons to Idaho from Colorado.

 

My dad Joe thought his dad Dave could really make the “old Stradivarius” sing, as he liked to say.  He really believed it was an actual Stradivarius because it said it was inside the violin.  However, as it turns out there were many copies made of the various violin models that Stradivarius constructed and it was common to make a copy and indicate what the design was by writing in the original Stradivarius “nameplate”, so to speak.

The bow has a series of lithographs of four famous violinists, some who were not born until 1810-1820.  However, Dave had the violin in the 1908 photo and obviously already knew how to play it.  There is some likelihood that he and Irene met via common interest in music playing at a contest in Missouri.  Assuming the instrument was not brand new, it seems likely to have been made around 1840 to 1860.  If Dave’s dad also played the violin, then it all fits together.

One of the famous violinists in the bow is Henri Francois Joseph Vieuxtemps (1820 – 1881) and had a violin made by Giuseppe Guarneri called the Vieuxtemps Guarneri which last sold for $16 million.  The wife or daughter of Guarneri may have made violins in Germany but that would have to have arrived in the USA fairly soon for Dave to have it by 1878 era.

The cabin layout is attached.  It was designed to have music jam sessions around an old wood stove still at Lowman and the cylinder type crank player for some of the favorite songs.  Not many could read music so they generally played by ear.

 

Very much later in the later 1940s Joe had built a relationship with the owner of the Melody Shop in Boise next to the Idanha Hotel where he had all his three children make recordings of songs they could sing.  I sang “Old Buttermilk Sky” when I was about 4 years old.  I think my brother and sister sang a Gene Autry song or two.

My mother Pauline was the real musician in the more recent family.  She graduated from Washington State University with a degree in music and often played for the silent movies in Pullman, Washington in the mid-1920s.  My relationship with her was like in a different universe from my dad, but still very important for my development. Try to imagine how you go from playing classical music in concert for professors, living with your uncle, a banker, and having your own governess to marrying a man at a remote gold mine in Idaho.  Yep…that is what happened to her.

That gives the reader some background on who is writing this yarn. I had a successful engineering career rising to engineering manager, plant manager and vice president of a large consulting firm. Before complete retirement, I started consulting and writing expert computer control systems for various manufacturing plants, usually smelters of aluminum, zirconium and titanium.

Happy reading

James David Branson

Chapter One….From Branson to Colorado

The paternal starter was named Andrew Jackson Branson, named after the general and president on the $20 bill.  Andrew Branson hated that name, yet he named my grandfather Jefferson Davis Branson, who also hated his name. Somebody had some paternal DNA in order to have 9 boys and it apparently was passed onto my sister who had six boys, but of course their name is not Branson. But one can imagine if you have nine boys with a last name Branson, the Branson population in that area is going to blossom forth at a pretty high pace. If the later community only had 100 people, half of them were probably Branson.

One of the brothers became the postmaster of a small rural post office in the area where Branson is now.  Other workers at other post offices would ask about a certain letter and the postmaster would say, “Oh that goes out to Branson”.  Makes sense they would eventually name the small town after him.

In the late 1800s, Andrew, Dave and maybe some other Branson’s decided to move out to Alamosa, Colorado with their wives and kids. The Homestead Act of 1862 was knawing at everyone and bottom land in Missouri was getting pretty tired. In the Alamosa area there were several rivers and creeks and water could be ditched easily with the slope of the land. I was fortunate to visit the old ranch in 1956 when my brother enlisted in the Army at Fort Carson just north of Alamosa. It was the trip back to Lowman, Idaho that year that started the intense story telling of the life in Colorado and the trip out to Idaho. I guess I helped by asking dad questions about it, particularly when I wanted to divert his attention away from something he was lecturing me about.

My dad Joe always talked about how his dad Dave and mother Irene could be having the most intense argument and then one would pick up their instrument and start playing and the other would soon join in and after a while nobody seemed to know what the argument was. I guess that is what you call, “Getting lost in your music”. Joe said both of them were humming all the time and I remember Joe singing when we were taking long trips in the car.  It was before radio really worked very well in the rural areas. There was only AM radio.

Dave was good with his hands and always had some work horses for contracting heavy hauling and construction. My dad Joe was actually born near Alamosa in 1890. In just six years Dave and Andrew grew the move bug and Dave, Irene, Ada, Maggie and Joe moved to Pagosa Springs, Colorado around 1896. The picture of the ranch in the year of their arrival is below. One major problem for the trip was the 14,000 foot mountains in between Alamosa and their new home.  When we went over the Wolf Creek Pass in 1956, the sign said they try to get the road open by the middle of June (10,850 ft elevation). And that’s with modern equipment.

Dave had ridden his horse for about a week on a scouting trip from Alamosa up Elk Creek Trail and took in the beautiful view down below of the San Juan River Valley reaching down to Pagosa Springs and beyond to the Colorado River. He came back and told Irene they were going to move to the most beautiful place on earth. Paternal Andrew was getting fairly old and would follow later and eventually died and was buried in Pagosa Springs in about 1904. So the father of Branson Missouri is buried in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

While the Homestead Act of 1862 was in effect, few people were careful to file all the papers and pay for the surveying.  In the 1920s there were still homesteads being filed in Idaho.  However, the act was intended to provide up to 160 acres with a fee of $1.25 per acre.  With wages running less than $10 per week, $200 was almost half a year’s earnings if one had a steady job. And while working in the rural area where land was available for homesteading, there were seldom jobs of any kind. In modern day Idaho I don’t know of any successful homestead of less than 40 acres. Either Dave didn’t do the math or he just never intended to file for a homestead and just squatted on the land even though he did build cabins, barns and make improvements.

 

It wasn’t until the US Forest Service was formed that the bureaucracy began to resist homesteading.  People who did a lot of procrastinating found themselves living on land that couldn’t be patented.

 

When Dave and Irene and family got to what they called the Columbine Ranch in 1896, there were already some structures there and the previous tenant had died or moved on.  I saw the ranch in 1956 and it didn’t look all that different from the old pictures.  Today it is still federal land and has an RV Park on it. There may not have been more than about 15 acres above the flood zone of the river. See Google Earth image.

 

 

My dad Joe loved it on the San Juan River. He, by necessity, became a really good fly fisherman.  As would be repeated again in Idaho, Dave used his work horses to improve a ditch out of the San Juan River and irrigate a large garden run by Irene and the kids. There was also room for some hay for use in the winter.  This area is about 7300 feet in elevation and still far enough north latitude to have serious snow at times.  The ranch was about 5 miles north east of Pagosa Springs where the only school in the area existed.

Dad always liked to joke that he had thought the only way he would make it out of school was if it burned down.  Son of gun…it did burn down but was replaced quickly, so no good luck that time.

Getting to school in winter was a serious matter and lots of people simply schooled at home the best they could part of the year. There were no buses in those days but people who lived further northeast generally provided rides to those closer to town if they had room. As a child I remember seeing dad’s slate that he used in school (before the common use of paper) and of course his collection of marbles with a few agates. Some of the agates were not all that round. But a taw (shooter marble) needs to stick inside the circle so one gets additional close range shots, so not being round maybe was a good thing.

He also had a slingshot like David with Goliath in ancient times.  It was made of goat skin in the pocket and strings.  It had a small diamond shaped hole in the pocket for securing odd shaped rocks better. This really got my attention and I have had a 5 foot slingshot (from leather shoe laces) all my life.  I was on a Forest Service lookout after high school and it had a 1000 foot cliff right out the back door.  I loved slinging rocks down where they would hit a lake and sound like a gun shot.  One day I was looking down there with the binoculars and saw somebody fishing.  I gave up throwing rocks down there.

Dad used to really rant about how all the relatives would come out from Missouri in the summer and stay all summer and eat up what little grub they had. It makes sense that somebody traveling some 1000 miles and over some pretty stiff mountains would want to stay a while.  Most of them picked up odd jobs and helped with the groceries and did some hunting for meat. But when Andrew died in 1904 (Joe was 14) it is very likely that many of the other Branson Family members came to pay their respects. It would make sense with all that tension that Joe would come out on the short end of any arguments with his mother.

The 700 mile trip from Branson to Alamosa was mostly on the plains but the elevation in Alamosa was over 7000 feet so mud was still a problem in May and June. River and creek crossings were always a challenge and more than one person died on the trips. But each trip gained a little more experience and they finally took the final leg south towards Santa Fe, New Mexico and then west over a lower pass and up modern day 84 to Pagosa Springs. This portion of the trip was some 150 miles but much easier than the 100 miles over the much higher mountains around Wolf Creek Pass.  In 1956 the Hiway over Wolf Creek Pass looked pretty new and I didn’t notice an old road alongside in places nor did dad mention anything about people traveling that way.

In 1896 rail service was still pretty spotty and roads were not maintained well enough for the cars of those days. Railroads went generally east to west and crossed in the far north around Spokane, also down near Salt Lake and Wyoming and then further south at Santa Fe. Dad said letters from Irene to folks in Branson often took near a month to make a round trip. But she liked to see as many relatives as she could so there were plenty of invitations going out.

When dad Joe went into the army engineers in 1917, he was 27 years old and barely weighed 100 pounds at 5 foot seven.  He always thought his mother had stunted his growth when he was 14 by taking his plate off the table as punishment for some infraction. He could never remember what the problem was, but from other stories about his social life it sounds like he was quite a scrapper.  This would actually help him later become a blacksmith, usually a trade handled by oversized men, sometimes nearly three times the weight of Joe.

With a large garden it was near a full time job for a dog just keeping the wildlife out of it.  Joe finally learned to pick stuff for the neighbor out of the neighbor’s garden upriver in trade for a meal or two or at least some fruit or salt.  For meat Joe learned to fish successfully and with a pan he “barrowed” often cooked his catch out alongside the river. I am guessing this made him a little cocky towards his mother and he would get sentenced to the barn to sleep the night without dinner. Dave would just shake his head at how stubborn Joe had become.  Of course, Joe got punished later in real life by his own son Jerry who had a lot of his dad in him.  If things were going well, he had to fix it.

There were some pretty big fish in the San Juan River and dad learned to trade some of his catch to neighbors for food, maybe a pocket knife…things a boy would want. This routine seemed to make him interface with strangers well and helped later in life when he was a supervisor.

The fishing hole below near the Branson Ranch would be a quiet spot in a creek in the South Fork of the Payette area of Idaho.  But if it had fish, who cares how big it is.

 

Dad had a natural drawing to blacksmithing and learned to help locals holding bulky steel and iron for pounding on an anvil. I know a lot about this because I did the same thing when he was superintendent at Birthday Mine and also did their blacksmithing, mostly sharpening picks, bars and drill steel.

Below is a single jack hammer on the right for hammering the steel drills that look like long chisels.  The other hammer is used on an anvil for certain projects and the tongs are just one of set of tongs Joe had to fabricate while an apprentice.

Joe got a real break when he was graduating from high school.  representatives from the Amethyst Mine up high in the mountains northeast of Pagosa Springs came to the high school and presented an apprenticeship program for becoming a mining blacksmith. You paid for it out of your wages and still had money left over.  Room and board was provided.  It was almost an ideal situation for young Joe and would eventually make it possible for the family to move to Idaho. He finally became a hero in his mother’s eyes later in the move to Idaho.

I suspect Joe was significantly under 100 pounds when he was 18 though he never talked about it. Of course, scales were not all that available except in feed stores. But he had Popeye forearms when I knew him and even at age 65 could curl a 100 pound anvil with one arm. The people at Amethyst were very skeptical that he would make it thru the program but gave him a chance. He not only made it thru, but became somewhat of a local legend.

He must have had some raw talent that I didn’t have.  As an apprentice you got all the crappy jobs that the veterans never wanted to do, like holding bulky and hot metal flat on the anvil where it could be struck with a ten pound hammer using both hands of the veteran blacksmith. If the blacksmith aim was off just a bit, the hammer struck the cooler portion of the metal and if that section wasn’t perfectly flat against the anvil, a shock wave would travel up the holder’s whole body while sparks flying into anything they could. After a while you learn to cover everything and then pretend it is just a bug bite if a spark goes thru your shirt. By the time you feel it, it is too late to worry about it. You are going to have a little brown spot there.

This was very important training because at the mine shop they had power hammers driven by an elaborate belt system powered by a water turbine in ditched creek water. The power hammer hit with a huge force of hundreds of pounds capable of launching the holder to the moon if it wasn’t flat.

There are two things in the blacksmith trade that take aim on the body…heat and fatigue from holding the hot metal and hammering with the other hand. Most of the heat is transferred by radiation (not nuclear) and cross-sectional area of the body plays a major role.  Being smaller cross-section was a blessing. Besides, Joe was an inventor and he realized that heat was an accumulator and by putting up a shield while heating the piece it would cut down on the accumulation of heat daily. And of course, drinking a lot of water helps. Much later in our relationship hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, he never passed a stream without a drink.

I can talk most effectively on what I experienced with him. We typically had miners that were worried that a big rock would fall out of the ceiling of the tunnel and smack their helmet down around their knees.  Of course, a rock only falling a couple feet before it hits you is not that big of danger.  Anyway, the miners dulled a lot of picks and bars trying to be sure all the loose ones from the blast were down before working in that area.  And even when compressed air or steam driven drills were available, often the stopes where the ore was being removed were so narrow there was no way to get a heavy drill up inside. A seasoned miner could hand drill a foot depth hole in about 30 minutes. Blasting in the stopes was always with a light powder loading to keep from blasting down the wood cribbing which was how the miner got up there to drill in the first place.

Dad always sharpened several picks in the same group so that the heat from the forge was less per pick.  It helped to get into a routine so it went faster. When he pulled a pick from the hot forge, he didn’t fool around with it.  He got it right on the anvil so he could quickly turn it back and forth 90 degrees and draw the metal uniformly down from the thick portion towards the sharper end. The total basic sharpening blows happened in less than a minute. Then that pick was put back in a cooler place in the forge and set up for hardening, or tempering.  It is very important that the metal be as hard as it can be on the tip without the shank  becoming brittle. If the end is broken off, a major amount of effort is needed to get the metal drawn down to the sharp end and the pick becomes shorter. A lot of what a pick is used for is prying out “to loose rocks”.

The people at Amethyst became believers when he was still there two weeks after coming and earned the respect of the other blacksmiths.  One day he was working with a friend and the friend pointed to the office area where about six people were watching Joe work, laughing and shaking their head. Joe was realistically less than half the size of several of the nearby veteran blacksmiths.

Joe was not exactly good with words  (except 4 letter words), but his ideas got into the apprentice manuals and made learning faster because he got right to the fundamentals that made it work. He was also pretty good at procedure modification to make it easier in the heat and stress. I remember when I would get out of school for summer break and he would show me his new tools that invented to replace me when I had helped the previous year.

One day the general foreman at the Amethyst Machine Shop had somebody call Joe into the office where he was introduced to a mining engineer who had just come off a development project in Grimes Creek, Idaho at the Grimes Pass Golden Age Mine.  They had a portion of the developed power from a dam on the South Fork of the Payette River which supplied power to pump water out of a shaft that went down about 100 feet. The engineer told Joe to contact him when he graduated from the apprentice program and he would write a letter of recommendation for him to get a job about anyplace, but the Golden Age he thought would be a particularly good first job.  In those days not only were mining engineers in short supply but so were blacksmiths in some areas, especially Idaho where so many small mines were being started up. Of course, this mining engineer had done the engineering analysis for the Golden Age and was deeply respected by the owners.  On the other hand, since the engineer had been paid partially in stock, he had every reason to want it to succeed. I was an old engineer before I figured that all out.

Joe completed his apprentice program and worked at the mine for a few months and made more money than he ever imagined possible.  This also improved his relationship with his mother Irene. Feeling the wealth, Joe bought a new riding horse and lariat.  He was pretty good at roping and found a target of opportunity in a bagger.

 

Unfortunately, the lassoed bagger took rope and ran down his hole.  Joe tried for hours with the horse to pull the rope out of the hole.  No luck.  He finally had to cut the lasso end off of the rope, the most valuable part and leave it behind.  He must have told me that story a few dozen times in his later years. But…there was no chance of me being able to lasso a badger….or a dead log for that matter.

The next year Joe’s sister Ada got married and later she, her new husband and Joe’s younger sister Maggie decided to go to Montana to try their luck at logging and eventually wound up in Pomeroy, Washington, just west outside of Lewiston, Idaho. It wasn’t long until Maggie found a rich wheat farmer and got married. I met Maggie in 1965 in Torrance, California and after marrying a “hot girl” myself realized, Maggie was hot in her younger years.

In the meantime many letters were exchanged about traveling conditions expected in 1910 and Joe got his letter of recommendation from the mining engineer and they collectively decided to head for Grimes Creek, Idaho as soon as winter would let them.  As it turned out, Dave had not paid for a survey nor hired attorneys for the patenting process so he sold the Columbine Ranch for a piddling amount and decided they would need all the cash they could round up to make the approximate two month trip. Joe never told Dave how much money he had. He had converted it to gold and silver coins and kept them in his water bag (canteen in modern times).

Chapter 2…Off to Idaho

Irene didn’t have all that much household stuff to take, but what she had she really treasured.  Dad always referred to it as junk. Dave had one huge wagon and two younger work horses he wanted to keep.  They loaded it as heavy as you could and then brought the bedding, camping gear, guns and smaller items in the small buck board pulled by Joe’s new riding horse and one other horse.

Modern climate data indicates Pagosa Springs gets 24 inches of rain and 124 inches of snow.  But it is pretty far south of Idaho and gets a lot of sunshine too. However many of the mountains in the area are above 10,000 feet and retain their snow for an extended period.  This makes creek and river crossings a bit of a challenge.  While the main route west into Utah had bridges over the larger rivers, many of the creeks were still a forging situation. The railroads never did even in modern times come to the San Juan Valley so there was no option to “catch a train” not that they could afford to ship horses and wagons. There was a small railroad that ran north and south in central Utah which served the Garfield Smelter which eventually Joe would be shipping ore to from the Birthday Mine. This was a private mining company held railroad and wasn’t available for non-mining purposes.

When Joe and I were returning home from the 1956 trip to Alamosa we stopped and slept in the back of the 1951 Ford half ton pickup to avoid snakes and count stars.  That is when Joe told me of the trouble they had near Green River with some potential bandits. The general modus operandi of the Branson trip was to try and make about 20 to 25 miles in a day, set up camp, turn the horses loose under the watchful eye of their trusted dog whose name I can’t remember. Typically Joe would go ahead late in the afternoon with the light weight wagon and find a camping spot with grass, water and firewood. He would get things pretty much set up so that Dave and Irene could relax and try to get some sleep. Handling the heavy horses and wagon was not an easy job and definitely not a job for Irene. But that didn’t keep her from playing her guitar on numerous occasions.  Dave would sing along with her while driving the team. From the brief discussions I had with dad regarding any writing of songs, it sounded like nobody could read or write music but simply commit things to memory and then “play by ear”.  He thought perhaps that process was one of the reasons Dave and Irene were so close….at times. That would sure make the trip time go by easier.

When Joe got to the Green River and saw there was a bridge and he found a good place to camp.  Plenty of firewood and a fire rock ring.  He was just getting things rounded up when four men appeared on horseback with multiple guns and gun belts and looking very Mexican. Upon them seeing a young man all alone and small in frame, they decided to camp too close for Joe’s ease of mind.  He had his twenty two Winchester pump leaning against a tree.  It is an amazingly small weapon but will shoot far more than six shots in a very short period of time.  And Joe was a very accurate shot. The casing is about 1/3 longer than a modern 22 and has about 1/3 more killing power.

He can hear the men talking in Spanish and laughing and imitating shooting a small rifle and knows there is likely to be trouble.  He also knows Dave and Irene are at least an hour behind him. He is just about to start picking up and move on when another wagon pulls up.  It turns out to be a fellow Joe and Dave had helped a couple days earlier.  He had a broken axil out in the middle of nowhere and was he ever glad to see a blacksmith come along.  Joe had brought some repair metal with him given to him by friends at the Amethyst Mine. We would call these truss splices in modern times.  These were basically, metal plates with a lot of holes in them.  Joe and Dave were able to pull the axil together with some sheaves Dave had and put some powdered glue mixed with water in the joint and then splice it with a pair of metal plates, making it almost as good as new. He would just have to sit for a day for the glue to cure and then be on his way, heading to Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City.

When the wagon pulled up, he just sat there looking at Joe and then at the Mexicans.  The Mexicans were laughing at him too because he appeared to be unarmed. But he just stepped down from his wagon, stretched a little, then reached back under the seat and pulled out a gun belt right out of a John Wayne movie, according to dad.  He then reached into his shirt pocket and pinned on a badge and started walking towards the Mexicans who scattered like flies looking for fresh horse shit.

He then came back over to Joe and again thanked him for helping him with his wagon earlier.  He said he was sheriff in a small town in Utah and was delivering the stolen wagon back to his friend in his town. He said he had passed Dave and Irene just a few miles out and they should be here shortly.  He said he would wait until they came into sight. I think Joe gained some religious thoughts that day.

As it turned out, everybody this sheriff saw for several dozen miles into Utah he told them about the Branson’s and how they had helped him and wouldn’t take any pay for it. As it turned out, the people of the town got together some supplies they knew Branson’s would need and sent a wagon out to meet them when they camped close by. Dad could not remember the name of the town or the name of the sheriff.

Laying there out under the stars in the pickup in 1956 dad talked about how many times he had ridden his horse high up into the Rockies and watched the stars.  They always seemed so bright you could reach out and touch them. Even at Green River in 1956 they were pretty bright.

In 1910, there were rumors about the Mormons around Brigham City, Utah. Dad again about got himself in trouble when he went over a high bridge on a small creek and noticed naked young women taking a bath in the creek below.  I guess he stopped and starred a little too much and some men appeared to help adjust his manners. Fortunately, Dave shows up with the double barrel 10 gauge shotgun and was able to convey his apologies appropriately. Most of the time Joe followed behind Dave and Irene in the populated areas and only rode ahead to make camp in the rural areas late in the day.  I fired that 10 gauge when I was about 15.  It had a separate trigger for each barrel.

There was a stubborn wood pecker trying to find a girlfriend pecking on the metal roof of our woodshed in Lowman early each morning.  Dad told me if I was up to shoot it with the shotgun.  Having never shot a 10 gauge, I put each of two fingers on the triggers and pulled one.  It kicked so bad, the other barrel went off too and I was on the ground.  The woodpecker flew off but we had a whole bunch of holes in the metal roof. Later there is a picture of that woodshed.

Dave also had with him a Winchester 40-82 single shot that looked like it was right out of a Clint Eastwood movie.  It had the sights capable of adjusting for wind and distance.  He liked to say Dave could shoot the cigarette out of the mouth of a whore at 200 yards…I am not quite sure what part the whore had to do with anything. Below are some similar rifles but I couldn’t find a picture of the sighting mount.

Today, the trip from Tremonton, Utah located in northeast Utah via old Hiway 30 or modern day I-84 into Idaho at the Snake River is essentially a barren wasteland. The railroad thru the area looked pretty new in 1956 because in 1937 the ore shipments went to Pocatello before heading south to Garfield, Utah. When Dave was talking to the sheriff and mentioned where the Branson’s were going, the sheriff told him if you take the shortcut (some 100 miles) versus the route thru Pocatello (150 miles) you will need water for the horses and if it leaks out, you are screwed.

I know now where I get my love for animals.  It was a no brainer for Dave to go the two day longer route to protect his beloved horses.  And it turned out to be a major lucky break for the young blacksmith and his resourceful father.

Pocatello was then and still is a major railroad transfer and repair facility. As the Branson’s pulled into the outskirts and ran into some folks, the message from the sheriff in Utah had already reached them.  God knows how clear up there. But they were welcomed into the railroad property to a camping area especially made for travelers and railroad employees. One thing after another finally led to a discussion of blacksmithing expertise and Joe got asked if he could fix a beloved spittoon.  Are you kidding me? What in the hell can go wrong with a spittoon?

As it turns out, the folks in the railroad saloon had some problem with their modern indoor bathroom with indoor water (imagine that) and the drinkers had to leak outside.  Getting a big kick out of it, they decided to pee in the spittoon until it ran over.  Not being too careful, they went home drunk and left it outside. In the night it got cold and froze and broke a big crack around the curved section.

Now this wasn’t just any spittoon. One of the railroad foreman had won it in a rodeo and it was gold plated….no kidding…a gold plated spittoon. Well Joe might be little, but not able to refuse a challenge…not a chance in hell. While that image is soaking in, something else was happening with Dave.

Apparently a major support timber in a spur line trestle had caught fire and had to be replaced.  Trains were being rerouted on the mainline and causing delays. Now how many people go on a cross country trip with a sawmill aboard?…yep…Mr. Dave.

Dad said that Dave could sharpen a crosscut saw to rip wood and pull 5 inch ribbons with ease.  Dave had rigged up some supports under his big wagon to support a log in various places so that a long log could be sawed lengthwise. The wagon being heavily loaded, the log was very stable.  So Dave figured if it was going to take Joe a few days to fix the spittoon, he could saw the folks a new timber.  A new timber had been ordered but it was coming from someplace in Minnesota and wouldn’t be there for another couple weeks. Most of the power sawmills in the area could not cut longer logs.

Now days it would take an engineer to certify the new timber if not factory produced, but the rail yard foreman had balls.  Dave simply told him, if you don’t like it, don’t use it.  If you use it, you can replace it with the one you ordered when it gets here. Dave recommended that they creosote it to make it look official. The original timber was what I would call scab wood from Minnesota and the local Douglas Fir was far stronger, but they maybe didn’t know that if they didn’t work in the mines.

Way back in Missouri Andrew had taught Dave how to select the butt end of a tree for cutting something you didn’t want to crack in the sunshine. It took more sawing but you ended up with something that would stand up to weathering conditions. We were still re-learning that at Trus Joist in Boise, Idaho when I was the Machine Shop Manager in 1983.

Of course, the timber had to have major bolt holes drilled in it but the Branson’s had a brace and bit (which I still have) for such drilling.  The failed timber still had the bolts so there was no issue with the metal components.  As it turned out, Joe was done with his project far before Dave with his.  But these two affairs so affixed the Branson’s with the railroad folks that they would have gladly shipped the whole entourage to Boise free of charge….but….nope….not Dave’s horses.

So now back to Joe and the spittoon. Gold melts at a relatively high temperature compared to brass but it becomes pretty malleable at much lower temperatures…even room temperatures. But the basic underlying metal, brass, doesn’t really have enough strength to be hammering on. In modern times, we would braze the brass with a gas welder and then electroplate the gold onto the spittoon. Here is what Joe did.

He fashioned a metal shoe, he called it that fit on the horn end of the anvil and could penetrate down into the spittoon to where the crack was. Just as mentioned about drawing metal in the desired direction, the spittoon was heated a little and then the brass hammered to draw the crack together. This was a slow, painful process requiring several reversals to make it happen. The spittoon would probably have worked with any type of coating to make it not leak, but Joe had to show off his welding expertise.  Yep…you can weld with a forge…normally iron based metals.  The only flux he had was for iron based metals but why not try. Even though the melting temp of gold is far above brass, Joe concentrated on getting the brass connected.

After he thought the brass was essentially sealed, he carefully filed grooves in the brass at the cracked area and roughed it up.  This allowed him to beat some gold to a very thin layer and then pound that into the roughed area providing a secondary seal above the cracked brass.  Some of the gold engraving had to be fixed by a local artist, but happy is happy.

Now the truth be known, the crack was above where any spit would normally  occur anyway…but…it is the thought that it might leak…or something. I think they just wanted it repaired.

You would think Joe had saved a dozen drowning babies from the river.  He was the hero of the railroad yard and two decades later when he was shipping ore from Lowman, Idaho to the smelter at Garfield, Utah, going thru Pocatello the switchyard foreman marked the car identity, “Hey Joe…old Lionel is still working”…Lionel being the name of the spittoon.

The rail folks were so happy they provided the Branson’s with a written note declaring them welcome to graze on any railroad properties for the rest of the trip to the Boise area and onto Grimes Creek.

The trip down the Snake River from Pocatello was much easier as some water, grazing and firewood was always available. Even today there are few bridges over the Snake River. They had to go downriver along old Hiway 30 almost to Glenns Ferry. Dad felt like there was a bridge and they did not take a ferry. The railroad is probably still where it was then and they were trying to keep the railroad in sight because of their letter of recommendation from the events in Pocatello.  There was a bridge under construction over the Snake River in 1910 so maybe it was finished enough that they could use it.

The last dangerous trek was from Glenns Ferry area up to Mountain Home and onto Boise. Up thru the central portion of Utah and at Pocatello, Idaho Dave had seen a taste for the industrial growth that he had missed since leaving Missouri.  Alamosa and Pagosa Springs were primarily agriculture areas and didn’t really have that much need for the type of work Dave wanted to do and that paid higher wages. And most of the Snake River area from Pocatello to near Boise, Idaho was either agriculture or arid grazing land at best. After the last three days before getting to Boise, one can imagine Dave’s excitement upon coming into the Barber area with the dam and saw mill in the post card below.  The dam was built by the Barber Lumber Company around 1906 and included a narrow gauge railroad up the Boise River to Mores Creek and then up Grimes Creek a few miles called the Intermountain Railroad.  This railroad primarily served for hauling logs to the mill but also served some mining interests in the Idaho City area.

Essentially there was a town called Barberton at the time that included a general store where supplies could be bought.  Unknown to Joe, Irene had mailed post cards to the Golden Age Mine folks keeping them abreast of their progress from Colorado. The development work had been done and the mine started in the spring of 1909.  By 1910 they really were looking for help.

Dave was advised to get his winter supplies early and the general store was amply stocked.  After providing his name to the store manager, he was asked, “Do you know Joe Branson?” to which he replied, “Yes, he is my only son”. The manager indicated that the Golden Age Manager had been talking about him coming from Colorado for a couple months and if Dave needed credit, it was available.

Dave loved his horses and decided he could put them to pasture for a few days and let them rest before the last run over Rocky Canyon toll road into Robie Creek, a lodge at the mouth of Robie (pronounced Ruby after the daughter so named) Creek just a few miles downstream from Grimes Creek.  He figured to camp there and try to make it into Grimes Pass late the next day.

Chapter 3  Grimes Creek Early Years

As it turned out many years later in 1946, the Joe Branson family of mother Pauline, myself and one older brother Jerry and sister Josie would return from World War II to rent and live in the same mine-provided cabin that was provided to Joe, Dave and Irene in 1910.  Therefore, I have a good understanding of what it was like.  And the whole Golden Age Mine camp was largely still the way it was in 1912 after the forest fire.

There were dredges working on Grimes Creek in 1910 from an area known as New Centerville up to a few miles downstream of Grimes Pass.  These dredges, and the Golden Age Mine, had electric power from a dam on the South Fork of the Payette River pictured below.

While the dredge picture is pretty fuzzy, one can compare it to a little more modern dredge in operation in the 1950s.

 This photo indicates Ada and Maggie came back to Grimes Creek on numerous occasions to visit with their parents.  Maggie’s husband Fred Hungate was a pretty wealthy wheat farmer near Pomeroy, Washington and even had an airplane and expensive car in those days. There was a stage running from Pomeroy down the Snake to Walla Walla and then over to Boise. The road now called US 95 was pretty challenging to vehicles in those days

 

That meant that the cabin the Branson’s would move into had running water inside and electric power. For the Branson’s it was like living at the Ritz Hotel. There was pasture close by for Dave’s horses and a place for Irene to garden. There was plenty of work for Dave and his horses hauling mining equipment for the dozens of mines nearby and of course Joe had a good paying job at the Golden Age machine shop as a blacksmith.

There was a two story hotel for visiting stockholders, a complete assay laboratory and about a dozen buildings with mostly two bedroom living quarters. As far as living conditions went with most mines, this was about the top of the line. There was a one room school nearby and stage service to Idaho City (14 miles) including mail.

The fairly detailed mine examination reports indicate about 2000 feet of cross-cuts and drifts where most of the early ore was removed.  There was a 100 foot shaft that had about 800 feet of drifts from the bottom of it. By 1915 about $200,000 worth of mostly gold had been mined and processed at the mill. At about $20 per ounce this was about 10,000 ounces.

With their work experience, both Joe and Dave could get extra contract work as much as they could handle. This also lead to making good friends with many miners in the nearby area and Dave was good at falling trees, dragging them in and then erecting a cabin. A man named Carlson had a cabin about 3 miles upstream from the Golden Age Mine Camp and had developed a diversion ditch out of Grimes Creek around to about a 5 acre flat area known today as “Branson Flat”.  Dave and Joe helped Carlson build another cabin much further upstream beyond any road at the time and Carlson relinquished (not patented) the lower cabin to Dave and Irene.

 

Another fringe benefit came to focus when the world around the Golden Age Mine found out that Joe, Dave and Irene were a small band and could play for dances.  The picture below shows the Pioneerville mining camp about six miles downstream where the building on the right was used as a dance hall on some weekends.

Eventually, Dave and Joe would build the cabin I cleaned house in 1948 when Howard Austin was doing cat work and Joe was trying to patent mining claims including where his folks had built a nice cabin but had not ever filed a homestead patent on it.  It could be there was insufficient land cleared for agriculture to qualify for a homestead patent.

When the ultimate cabin was built upstream on Branson Flat, it had a about half of it committed to a large living room with multiple chairs around the disk windup record player and the central heating stove.  Dave and Irene slept on one end behind a curtain if some jam sessions lasted past their bed times. The modus operandi was to play a disk and let people hear it and then play by ear in the same key and incorporate strangers temporarily into the band.  This served the purpose of advertising with people outside the immediate area

 

 

 

 

In the photo above, the dining room was inside the main window on the right and the kitchen just to the inside north of that.  The bedroom was thru the window on the left surrounded by vines.  The rest of the house on that side was the living room and musical center. Joe had a sleeping room in the attic in the central part upstairs entered from the back out of sight in this picture.  The large garden was left of the picture.  The ditch from Grimes Creek passed behind the cabin right to left at a level with the top of the windows.  The outhouse was just out of sight to the right. The chicken and pig pens were to the right a little further and can be seen in the garden picture below.

Dave did some hauling for a sawmill over around Placerville and got most of the lumber in trade.  He hand sawed some of the beams. He got the windows from a house being torn down. A lot of stuff was donated by people who really appreciated the Branson Family and the hard times following the burning of the Golden Age mill.

The picture below shows most of the garden with the fruit trees on the upper left, cabin, pig and chicken pen.  This is taken fairly early as there were no vines on the south end of the cabin and the pig pen looks fairly new. The garden was irrigated out of the ditch so it was fairly low at the upper side of the garden. In 1948 when I was there the fence was pretty well all down except just a few places.

 

Dave and Irene had picked this place out long before they built on it.  They transplanted the fruit trees while still living at the Golden Age so the trees were bearing fruit when they built this cabin.

There was a walk-in cellar with a dirt floor on the far side of the house in this picture.  In 1948 there must have been more than a couple hundred quart jars ready for canning from the garden and game killed nearby. Irene traded canned goods from the garden for additional jars, sugar and sealing lids.  She had accumulated a major stockpile of canning equipment including some large pots for canning seven quarts at a time.  There were some large porcelain pots.

Below is a color picture of Dave and Irene taken before the metal roof was put on the cabin and on the west side facing the garden area and there was about 400 square feet of flowers in that area.  Immediately inside was the living room and music center.

 

Irene had a pretty fancy kitchen for those days.  She had a nice cook stove and the picture above is quite similar and costs $6300 these days.  There was a sink but no piped in water.  The water from the ditch ran down a split rail log about 2 feet above ground at the discharge end and a couple buckets were used to pack in water even in winter.  The kitchen stove did not have a water jacket or a hot water tank.  But this type of stove put out a lot of heat besides cooking and so the living room heater did not have to work all that hard.

With no inside plumbing one did not have to worry about the house freezing up if you were gone overnight.  Food stuff was protected in the cellar which had about 3 levels of 2 foot wide shelves that would hold some 2000 quart jars and crocs and all sorts of fruit, potatoes and vegetables in woven baskets and burlap bags.

The matching outfits in the Branson Band picture were all made by Irene on a foot-peddle powered Singer sewing machine like the one above. In 1942 she made matching plaid coats for my brother and sister from one of Dave’s old coats.

Irene was far tougher than any female I have ever known.  Dave died in 1937 and she lived until 1946 and stayed all year around at the Grimes Creek cabin mentioned numerously above. From 1937 to 1943 son Joe Branson was fairly near in the area and took care of getting firewood and killing a deer and elk which she canned.  Of course, she had the chickens and pigs for other protein. During the war from 1943 to 1946 Joe made the trek back to Idaho once a year to be sure things were going ok.  But Irene was resourceful.

A young man in Garden Valley, named Sterling Alley, used to ride his horse about 12 miles one way to come up to Irene’s place and hunt for a couple weeks. He would kill as many deer and elk as he could and eat really well while he was there.  Irene had a secret weapon called gooseberry pies that no young man could refuse.  He would hunt in the early mornings, sometimes in Irene’s front yard and garden area. Later he would cut some wood and split it small enough that Irene could further split it if necessary. He had a nice warm bed to sleep in upstairs where Joe had stayed when he lived there years earlier. When he got ready to go home, he put as much fresh meat on his pack horse as he could and of course took home some fresh gooseberry pies.  It was a union made in heaven. I heard about it when I bought mine timbers from Sterling’s sawmill in Garden Valley in 1980. I doubt Joe ever knew about it.

Of course, there were dozens of other younger friends who came up during the winter to check on Irene.  For all these tough times, it seems strange she died after Joe and Family got back from Long Beach after the war. Must have just been her time to have a stroke and die of ramifications.  I remember holding her hand in the hospital when I was four and she felt cold as could be.

When the Branson’s got to the Golden Age Mine in 1910 there was an entertainment center in combination with some general store items.  It wasn’t long until Dave was playing his fiddle and then Irene joined in.  At first Joe was so busy blacksmithing that he was too tired to play banjo.  After he got caught up, then he started playing on the weekend.  Soon there were others that joined in and one could expect to hear music almost any time. The mine was paying some 40 miners and mill operators and they mostly had families so essentially there was a small town but very remote by modern day standards and still is today.

It was very unfortunate that a forest fire came to the area in 1912 and the first bad news was that the powerline from the dam burned down and the mining at the lower level serviced by a 100 foot shaft was flooded because there were no backup pumps.  In 1912 there were cars with gasoline/kerosene motors but standalone motors for pumps were very uncommon. The upper drifts and cross-cuts added up to about 2000 feet overall but the additional 800 feet at the low level was largely not mined. The company continued to pay about 15 men for another year to salvage what they could from the burned mill.

The picture below was taken right after the fire and it had pretty much been cleaned up by 1948 when I was roaming around as a kid. Even in 1948 there was still talk that it might open up again but it never did.

This had a dramatic impact on the Branson’s.  Since the miners had to pay rent on the mine cabins, the Branson’s made a deal to take over the first Carlson cabin in exchange for helping him build a new one further up the canyon on his claims up there past White Cap Creek. The Carlson mill consisted of a burro on a pole going round and round and turning a large rock atop another larger rock.  Ore was fed in between the rocks and the burro put to pasture when it was being cleaned out.  Carlson apparently made enough to get by and lived up there still in the 1940s.

Without the population at the Golden Age Mine, the Branson’s music took a serious hit.  The nearest place where they could play was about six miles downstream from the Golden Age Mine at Pioneerville, still in existence today and shown in the photo below.

Jim Branson

Retired Professional Engineering Manager

-bransonjim9 at gmail dot com