Saving Grandma's Cabin
Candy's hair-brained idea to keep her family history intact.
Categories: Westward Home
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2008
He already had hewn a home, literally, from the pine trees that grew on Evening Star, a ridge above the ranch on the east slope of the Sierra Madre. The cabin he built had two rooms with long windows on all sides and doors into both rooms. Each log was skillfully blazed flat on one side to form the interior walls. Peter also carefully cut smaller poles and shaped them into triangular chinking pieces, and he added a board floor. Eventually the walls were lined with muslin and the door and window trim painted with blue milk paint.
At the homestead, Peter and Emma began improving their ranch, adding more crops, enlarging the garden and having children. Six years later, in October 1909, my grandmother was set to give birth to her fifth child. Peter left her to get a neighbor woman to help. It was a fateful trip. When he opened a gate, the team spooked and as Peter tried to climb aboard the wagon to stop the runaway, it careened over him. Peter died nine days later, leaving my grandmother with their five children: Helena, Lillian, Alice, Sam and the baby, William "Butch." She could speak no English, had a ranch to run and desperately wanted to return to Belgium, but she had no money to pay passage for her and the children.
For two years, she ran the homestead with the help of Charles Vyvey, another Belgian whom Peter had hired in 1907, and then she married him in 1911. In the meantime, she had taken more homestead land in her own name and she had registered the VX brand. She began another family with Charles: Carl, John, Rene, Albert, Grace and Arthur "Fox," my dad. Their first-born daughter Ruth had infantile paralysis and died of diphtheria and pneumonia as a baby.
Years passed. The ranch established a reputation raising draft and saddle horses. My aunts and uncles broke them to ride and drive; the girls were as good at the job as the boys. The two eldest girls also milked dozens of cows every day until they were in their late teens and took off for Colorado to lead their own lives. Lena returned home, claimed her own homestead and eventually moved to Saratoga. Lillie remained in Colorado where she killed herself, or perhaps was killed by a lover-the family story isn't clear on that detail.
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