Faye Turner
Interviewer Marie Chisolm

2002

Faye Turner interviewed by Marie Chisolm in 2002?

Can you remember when the Turners first came to the Park?

No, I don’t remember the year, but I remember the sequences of it.  Greg Turner’s father and grandfather, Holland B Turner came from someplace–some other states before crossing the Missouri River.  And he had a son.  And on the boat, they took for a distance before they headed west–he met and married a woman.  So Frank’s father was the only one of that family and all the others were half sisters and brothers.  Hiram B Turner was a mason.  He started building houses of stone, up in –it would be 85 now–up into the Park.  And they found a place and its what’s called Turner Gulch. They built cabins there and spent the summer.  They were afraid to stay in the winter, so they left their oxen there.  When they came back in the spring the oxen were fat, and they’d done good.  So they stayed and built homes.  Then there’s a gap in my knowledge of what happened.  The next I knowed was in 1898.  Frank’s father’s name was William B Turner–became the postmaster at Garo, but it was not in the big building.   Later it was moved into the big building.  And the big building was just the center part of that big store.  Then he later bought from a man named Newitt; it was our railroad they moved to Buena Vista. And they abandoned that railroad.  So he bought and had put up on the cars, before the railroad went out---the sides that went on the building.  And that’s how come the building was the –let’s see, it would be on the West, you could still see where it had opened out onto the depot.  The train ran three days a week  narrow gauge then for a long time.  And then when that went out they changed to the front and an old dirt road went by.  And they sold gasoline by then and they had a little building out there that they had oil and different things that they’d need.  And Mr. Turner was an agent to sell Buicks—They had those.  Then there’s a ?glitch again.  So I went up to the park in 1934.   Married Frank Turner in 1936.  He had two daughters, one named Veronica and one named  Jessica.  They were sixteen and twelve when I went there.  And it was a good life on the ranch.  But before–I have to backtrack a little.  The log cabin that was built in the store there.  Frank and his older brother Fred and Clara were school age.  Mrs Turner come up from the ranch and she stayed there during the school week, then she would go back.  Then finally after Mr Turner got the building , of course then they were all older and bigger.  He kept the post office.  And I think Clara was postmistress.  Then Ann was postmistress until it was taken out in 1955.  The cabin’s still there.  The log cabin.  When I left I donated it and they moved it to South Park City.  They took it up there. They took the wash things, you know, the wash tubs and the old irons and things in that building that were probably still there.

And the school house that was there across the road..

The school house was also donated and taken up there.

To South Park City.  The other house that’s across the highway now, is that a neighbor, or did someone live in there, do you remember?

Well, when I met Gil in Colorado Springs he had this trailer.  And I sold two lots across there to the Bimsons.  And they moved it up there with all of Gil’s things in it.  So then he took them out and took them up to Alma to his home.

But the other house, the one that the cattle get into and things.  That’s over where McDowell lived...it’s just across the road, but it’s just a kind of a shell of a house.   Do you remember who lived there back in those days?

Yes, Guy Spurlock lived there.  And his wife committed suicide.

Oh–while there?

Yes.  They had gone to I think Canon City, or to some city.  And she left and came up to there to their  home there.  Turners got a telephone call and asked if they would go over and see here, that she was in a bad state of affairs.  So they went over there and found that she had committed suicide.  She was dead.

About what year was that, do you recall?

Years I don’t recall very well.

That was before you went up there wasn’t it?

No, I was up there.

Clara and Ann were Frank Turner’s sisters, right?

Yes, Clara was the oldest.  Then there was Fred who died in World War I and then Frank.  There was two children that died and were buried in Hartsel up on the hill where that cemetery is. And then there was nine years before Ann was born.  That was the family.  And I went up there in 1934.  And Mrs Turner had died and they were having the funeral the day I went up there.

Frank’s mother.

Yes, I never knew her except by pictures.  He looked an awful lot like her.  You’ll have to ask me questions. I don’t know where to go from here.

Frank Turner bought the ranch between Garo and Hartsel and he ranched that for a good number of years.

We ranched that until the last two years of his life, when we moved up to one of the large rooms in Garo and rented it.  The people that had it built up a big fire in their stove and it exploded and burned the house down.

The ranch house–when did Frank start ranching that, do you recall that?  Was it before you were married?

Oh yes. See his daughters, Vee was sixteen and Jessica  twelve when I went up there.  And they were divorced.  His ex-wife was still alive living  in Denver.  And the children were down there going to school.  And the young one wouldn’t go to school, they couldn’t keep her in school. So they brought her home, so she went to school in that little school house there.  They had a big crew to put up hay each year at the ranch.  And she met one of the young men there and they got married.  In later years she had one child, and they didn’t move and she divorced this man and she moved out to Las Vegas and she was married to Frank Tupper for forty-some years.

When you did the haying in the park, did you cut it with team and horses?

At first it was all horses.  Then in later years we got these old tractors, they were cars like. And they stacked the hay.

You didn’t bale it, you just stacked it.

At that time, we stacked it first.  Then we had a baler that was an old kind of a steam baler that had long belts  that stuck way out here, where you’d pitch the hay in.  Then later on we got a better outfit and Frank and I baled a lot of hay ourselves.  He would pitch it in and I would run around and put the head block in.  Back around side of the bales with wire.

Oh my.  They didn’t have the automatic at the time.  And the baler was stationary–it didn’t go around the fields picking up the hay.

No, that’s the way we did it. And then later, after we rented the place, before it was sold they had those balers that had the string and twine.  It was a mess to pick up and clean up every year.

Who was the ranch sold to then?

Names get away from me.  A man that bought up a lot of land.  We sold to Augustine.  He bought the water rights and he straightened out all the ditches.

But he sold the water rights to Colorado Springs or Denver, didn’t he?  Wasn’t he one of the first ones in the Park to ever sell his water rights?

Yes, he started it.

And he had to go to court to get the right to sell the water.  Because I believe in those days the water was tied to the land.

After it left you it belonged to someone else.

And he was the first one in the Park that obtained the rights to sell it.

And then-- maybe you’d better ask me some more questions.

How did you get supplies to your ranch and to the grocery store in the early days?

We traded with Montgomery Ward.  We bought all the blankets and bedding for the bunk houses for the men that we hired to put up the hay.  We bought our coffee at another store.  And we bought then everything else that we needed, including tires and all like that, at Montgomery Ward.

Did you go to Denver to get it?

Yes, we went to Denver to get it.

That was a long trip, wasn’t it?

Yes, in those days it was a long trip.  The curves on the way were sharp, and a lot of trouble? as we started down out of the Park.

What year automobiles did you have during those times?  Did you get one every year?

Every two years. They always were Buicks.  And for a long time we traded in Salida.  And then we started trading in Canon City.  And the last one that we had was a big station wagon.  And Frank wanted a special engine put in it, which wore out the tires before you could turn around.  (Laughter)  Never thought of that when we bought it.  And I had that when he died.

And Frank died in what year?

1968.

He had a stroke and then he lived for about two years, didn’t he, after that?

Two and a half years.

And he was how old when he died?

He was seventy-eight.

So he was born in the 1890's, then-- 1890 something.

If we figured it out, we’d know.  But I know how old he was when he died and the year.  I remember those.

You came up to Wyoming in—?

1981.

1981–and you’ve lived here now with your sister in Wyoming since then.  And you’re now 91 years old.  You still have a good memory.

Not as good as it ought to be.  But we’d eat and load up with all kinds of vegetables. 

Other voice:   Faye and Frank milked some cows and separated and sold cream for a while.

Yes, Faye and Frank sold cream and milk for a while, and the Arthurs who were on the ranch, kind of nearby.  I can’t recall what their name was, but their last name was Arthur.  Who else raised gardens or fresh vegetables?  Or did they just sell eggs and milk mostly around there?

Nobody sold much of anything like that–I forgot that we did milk and sell the cream.  We had a milk cow.  The can had a screen on it so it would be good.  And we kept it cool until wed get a five gallon can and we would go set it on the railroad place as long as it ran. 

And then it was taken to probably Denver for making butter. 

Other voice: Meadow gold.

He remembers more than I do.

And you went to Canon or someplace else to get fresh vegetables then.

Into the gardens down there.  They were fresh gardens that had all kinds of vegetables.  I would go with Mrs Arthur every once in a while, when she got a pickup load.

How did you preserve your food–your beef and your vegetables and things like that?  Did you have a cellar of some sort that you kept things in?

No, we didn’t try to preserve vegetables much.  But we had what we called a meat house.  That’s where we kept milk.  But there was this screened-in place, so a fly couldn’t possibly get in there.  And we would hang half a beef, and we would try and sell half a beef and we’d do half.

But how did you keep it cool?  What kind of structure was it?  Was it wood or over a stream?

There was a stream that run underneath it, of course, and it cracked up the cement, but it didn’t come up in there; it was as cool as you could get it.  Of course a certain time of year if we were caught with it getting too warm, we had these huge big jars.  And we would put the meat down in them in a brine and corned it, so we had corned beef.  And every once in a while we would corn the fish.  Before Frank died, if he’d catch too many fish for us to eat.  Well then, when we finally got electricity, of course, that all changed.

About what year did you get electricity?  About 1939?

I don’t remember that.  But it was IREA that came through.  I sort of remember, because just as we were about to get it a war started.

World War II, that was in 1941.

So then we didn’t get any electricity until about four years later.

So that was after the war was over.  Because they were taking all the copper and everything else for the war effort.

Yes.  We had bought an electric iron and an electric refrigerator so they sat there.  And Clara was better off, they had one of those gas refrigerators.  And so we used to take a few things up there.

How did you do your laundry–did you have a washing machine?

We had a Maytag washing machine that was a motor [gas engine].  And it made a real loud noise.  But that’s what did the washing.

And of course you hung them on the line.

Oh yes.  And sometimes it would freeze and just break it off right whatever was folded to the line it would break it off right there.  And I used to bring clothes in stiff like this and my arm was sticking out like this. And everything in the house would be damp.  But that was life.  You never thought a thing about it.

How did you heat water?

I had a little wash room when we were at Garo.  At the ranch we had a little wash room.

And up at Garo we had a little wash room.   You heated your water on a stove on a boiler.  And then just dipped and poured it in.  And you had to empty it by a bucket.  Because we didn’t have any where to run it.

Didn’t have any sewer or septic system–you threw it all outside.

We put it out in a little ditch of water that run by us–it just run on down.

And bathing was pretty much the same.

You took your bath.  We called it a ‘spit’ bath.  You just got you a pan of water, a rug to stand on, a washrag.  You washed, dried with a towel, washed, dried with a towel until you got all of yourself took care of. 

Then Jen went to Denver to stay with a friend.  And she took care of her for a long time.  But finally she was in a nursing home in Denver–I can’t recall the name of it–when she died.  And she was seventy-four and I was married to Gil then.  And we came down.

So it was Ann or Clara who that spent her entire life in the store.

Clara.

No one else ran the store, did they, other than the Turners.  The Turner family in one respect or another in that building.

There was another building there that the post office was in first.  And I can’t recall who the postmaster was.  But in that store Mr Turner was post master.  Then Clara, then Ann. Then it went out in 1955.

They must have had postal service way back in the 1800's.

That’s something that reminded me.  There used to be a little town way over on –85?  285.  And Frank would go from Garo across the pastures everything with mail for a little town that set there.  It was just a very little settlement.

Was it Buffalo Springs?

Buffalo Springs.  He took the mail.

By horseback?

That’s right. I remember he did that.  It wasn’t very long.  Not over three years.  That was long before I came to the Park.  He was a young man then.

So you did about everything to make a living, to earn money.  Did the family kill wild game for some of their food? 

They must have back then.  By the time I was up there Frank was pretty well settled in the ranch and the store was doing good business.  The roads of course were dirt.  And we did ranching.  You cut your hay, put it up, sold it. 

But you also had cattle.

Many people had cattle.

You didn’t?

Well, Frank had a big bunch of cattle when I went there.  The banker had had to repossess from someone else, and he asked Frank to put them on his place.  After that was over, Frank never run any more cattle.  He had a lot of horses, of course, to do the hay, but he never had cattle.

That’s interesting because I thought every ranch had cattle.  All he did was make his living raising hay and doing other jobs like the postal service or something like that..

After I was up there in later years, we took hay down to Fort Carson. And we had to pick out a wire grass, which is almost pure protein, for the officers’ horses.  Then we’d take these bales that were truck loaded   Take it down there.  We’d start through an aisle like this.  And those soldiers would come over there and have it unloaded in five minutes almost.

But they reserved the wire hay just for the officers’ horses but everything else went to the rest of the horses, is that the deal?  That’s interesting.

I thought of something else.  You know where the Academy is now?   We used to haul hay to the ranch there and they tore down all the buildings.  

Do you recall the name of the people there?

No, I don’t.  But we hauled lots of it east of Colorado Springs.  We’d stop in Colorado Springs for lunch.  You got six hamburgers for a dollar. 

I suppose hamburgers were kind of a treat because you didn’t have them on the ranch.  You never cooked them.

No.  That was fun.

A special treat.

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Les Brown, and all different ones.

So you went to a lot of fancy shows and things.

Oh yes. That’s not very –

Oh, it’s interesting, because a lot of the ranchers just stayed at home.  They never hardly left the ranch.  I think its interesting that you and Frank would dress up and take time to enjoy the finer cultures, let’s say.

Oh we did.  And we’d go to that real fancy restaurant down there.  I can’t think of the name of it now.  But anyway they brought finger bowls out.  Towels when you got through eating you used..

Really your life wasn’t a financial struggle then like so many ranchers in the area was it?

It doesn’t seem like we ever had very much money, but you didn’t need a lot.

But you did enjoy what you had, apparently.

Oh, yes, we did.  We hauled hay down to the Broadmoor and up to their zoo, to the little animals out that way.  Bruce has been in the Broadmoor, to a big meeting, but I was never inside. 

You only got as far as the hay barn, huh?

It’s funny, but we had to stop, and a man would come out and he’d stick his finger in and pull out a piece of hay, then he’d look at it and pull out another piece of the hay and look at it.  Then yah, we passed inspection–I don’t think he knew what hay was. [laughter]  But you had to go and see that rigamarole.   Another thing we saw that always made me feel kind of bad was seeing the Japanese people that they had taken from the coast and put in these places.  They were down there.

Down in Colorado Springs?

Out on the flats, out below.

In kind of a fenced compound, and you could see them from the highway?

Yes, it was neat and clean, and the houses looked small, but they were decent looking.  But they had been taken from good homes.  But they were out there.  I remember that I always felt kind of bad because those people weren’t ?conser--?  But you couldn’t tell who might be.

It was not anything that they could distinguish an enemy from a friendly.  That was unfortunate.

I remember that in World War II.  I remember having one of those men–Remember that big old Swede that could take a whole big biscuit and put it in his mouth, one of my big biscuits.

So your sister was Ruth Arnold, and she would come to the ranch and help cook for the ranch hands.   How many ranch hands did you have?

Other voice: About twenty-eight.

Oh my goodness, twenty-eight ranch hands during hay season.

Well, we needed them.  There was a big bunch.

Other Voice:   You had to have the mowing machines.  And the rest of them, you know.  I had four men on the hay stacks, besides the guys that were running the buckrakes and mowers.

And it was all horses then.

I remember my mother and I cooking for Herman Rost. And we had  thirteen to cook for.   That was a big job.  We got up at four in the morning and started and we didn’t get to bed until after ten or eleven and I was certainly glad when hay season was over.  So hay season brought a lot of people to the Park and a lot of them stayed.

Other voice: All the ranchers had extra help.

All the ranchers did just like us.  And one time, I was scared silly, I had to go to Denver and pick up some extra hands, and I had never done that before.  Another ranchers wife had always done it. Frank said, if she can do it, you can.  But I went, and I got them.  Pretty near all that you got that came out of Denver was winos.  They would work until they got their first paycheck and that was the end of it.  Then we started to get young kids working.  Some of them were local.  Bob Pokoff?  I can see their faces, but I can’t remember their names.

It wasn’t Ray and Dick Smith, was it?

Some of the local people came down and helped. One time we done a dirty.  Well everybody needed help and help was hard to get.  These guys come in here, there were about three of them and they were hunting the ranch above us.  We kept them.  That’s the only time I remember doing something I shouldn’t. 

The only time in your whole life, huh?

Well, I wasn’t by myself, Frank was with us.  That wasn’t right, but we did it.  And I guess they got their hay up.  That was Lloyd Collard–Collards run that ranch.

You took his hay hands, huh?

Yeah.   Mr and Mrs Carruthers, his paternal grandparents owned the ranch. 

The Collards later owned the ranch didn’t they?  Were the Collards related to the Carruthers?

No, they weren’t related, and I don’t know if they later owned it.

Lloyd Collard was related to Frank Collard over by Como, the ranch at Como.  A lot of people in the area stayed close within a few miles of the Park.  They all kind of stayed in the Park and married local girls, because they didn’t travel too far to find any more women.  But everyone stayed married pretty much in those days.  They didn’t get too far away from their local area to find brides or to marry somebody.  They married somebody local like school mates.  But they  stayed married, there wasn’t the divorce rate like there is nowadays.

Back then our ranch pasture, when I first went there had barbed wire with little square wooden blocks between the spines, the barbs.   Then it was twisted real heavy down to the next one and the same thing.  The whole fence was enclosed with it.  And it was a material that did rust, but we didn’t want it anymore, we wanted the other kind like everybody had.  And you know I don’t remember what became of that.  Nowadays, it would be treasured.  You see barbed wire collections.  That was in the back and it was quite an old, old thing.

Yes, it would be.  What did you do with your trash on the ranch?

Around about the ranch was a hill and a sort of a wash came down out of it, and we went away around back and piled it up there.  We also had a temporary one until we got ashamed of it up above the bunk house. 

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