Chapter 1

And so the tillers of the soil and merchants came,
Men, women and children intent on having their way with the land.
And the land lay like a virgin waiting to be possessed,
Rich in promise and of unproven worth.
Then came drought, pestilence, and government,
Dreams shattered like glass falling on rock.
And still the migrants came intent on a better life.
Where was the soul of the land?

- 1937 -

My grandfather James Arthur Atchley was one of the homesteaders who came to Idaho after running away from home in Tennessee with his brother John Preston Smallwood Atchley in the summer of 1900. Thirty-seven years later the twilight of my grandfather’s life began as silently as a thief slips into a house. Just as surely as an intruder steals our most valuable possessions, so was my grandfather robbed of his life.

I wish I could remember my grandfather’s face but when grandpa became ill I was barely two years old. Try as I may, my memory of him sticks in my mind as a badly blurred image, like a picture from an out-of-focus camera. The story of his life comes from word of mouth handed down over the decades and substantiated as far as possible by letters, family records and legal documents.

I was Grandpa’s third and youngest grandchild, and from what my mother Bonnie told me, we were great buddies. I wanted to go with him and Grandma Alice the day they left on a trip, but Grandpa said I should stay home with my parents. He was going to have another operation to fix a hernia. Just last summer a doctor in a clinic in Missouri repaired it, but it broke open again and was getting bigger. He could no longer keep it in with a truss, whatever that was.

To me a hernia sounded ugly. I guess Grandpa wanted to reassure me that it wasn’t so bad, because just before he left, he let me touch it. It was off to the side below his belt, about the size of a small grapefruit and felt like a water balloon. I couldn’t resist squeezing it and I jumped when he shouted, “Ow! Don’t do that.” I didn’t mean to hurt him.

After the operation, Grandpa and Grandma were going to Arizona for Grandpa to recuperate. He said the warmer weather would help the ache in his bones. He thought he might have a touch of rheumatism. They would be home in the spring. Grandpa was a farmer and even though the doctor wouldn’t allow any lifting, he had to get back home in time to supervise the planting of the crops. Neither the operation nor the trip turned out as he planned.

I can’t remember anything about the day when Grandpa and Grandma left on that last trip. Grandpa wanted to leave after finishing the harvest, but there was a problem getting an appointment. He said there wasn’t anything more important than being home with his family for Christmas so he scheduled the start of his trip the day after Christmas.

Christmas day Grandpa awoke with a tickle in his throat. By noon it had turned into a pesky cough. When he went to bed that night a raspy persistent hack kept him awake. He often developed a cough. The doctor called it bronchitis, but it never turned into anything serious. Grandpa didn’t expect this time to be any different.

However, the next morning Grandpa awoke gasping for air. His cough was much worse. Grandma rubbed his chest and neck with a mixture of Vaseline and eucalyptus oil, and covered his nose with her hand. The coughing subsided as he sucked in the fumes. Impatiently, he waited while she wrapped his neck in a white flannel cloth and when she finished, Grandpa declared himself fit to travel.

The sun had not yet shown itself above the distant Teton Mountains, when my father, Preston, arrived with a team of horses and a sleigh. They followed standard procedure for travel during the winter months. First, they went by horse and sleigh past our house two miles away, and then another three-quarters of a mile on to the highway where their car was parked in a shoveled-out space. Finally, they traveled another four miles by car to Ashton where they boarded the train.

Instead of going on south through Idaho Falls, Grandpa and Grandma started their trip by taking a two hour train ride in the opposite direction to a small town near the end of the line in the Teton Basin. There, they spent the first night in Driggs, Idaho, with Grandpa’s half brother Shelby and his family. It must have been for something other than a social visit because the next day they had to pass back through Ashton before traveling on to Rochester, Minnesota. Shelby was an attorney. I suppose their visit had something to do with a legal matter, but I never learned what it was.

While at Shelby’s that night Grandpa became feverish. By morning, Grandma also had a cough. Shelby and his wife, Edna, wanted them to stay for at least another day, but Grandpa wouldn’t listen. He had an appointment to keep at the Mayo Clinic.

Against his better judgment, Shelby put his visitors on the train. By the time they reached Idaho Falls, they decided to see a doctor. Grandpa was too sick to argue when the doctor pronounced them unfit to travel and insisted that they both go to the hospital.

Grandma recovered quickly, Grandpa much more slowly. When the fever and coughing subsided, there was an ache in his joints that made him feel even worse than before. A few days later Grandma felt well enough to be discharged from the hospital. She took a room in the Idaho Hotel near the hospital, but stayed with Grandpa most of the time.

Four months later in April–it was early spring in the upper Snake River Valley of southeastern Idaho–I danced a little jig when I saw an old snowplow rolling up huge chunks of snow as it tore up the packed sleigh road. Finally, after five months of traveling to the highway by sleigh and then by car to town, we could soon make all of our weekly trip by car. This time however, it was especially important. Grandpa and Grandma would soon come home.

At first, only motorized vehicles passed our house in the mornings while the mud was still frozen and hard enough to support their weight. Gradually, the wind and sun dried the road.

One afternoon, my father took Grandpa’s ‘33 Pontiac sedan and headed up the road toward Grandpa’s house to determine if the road was passable during the day. When he returned a while later, mud from pools of water still standing in the low spots streaked the shiny blue paint. Two half moon smears marked the windshield where the wipers had swiped at the mud. Amazingly, the only untarnished object was the chrome ornament of an Indian on the front of the hood. “There’s still water in the low spots,” he said, “but I got through. I’ll go to Idaho Falls tomorrow.”

I was too young to understand, but after four long months in the hospital, Grandpa and his family had reached a decision. The doctor had tried everything, but Grandpa’s condition continued to deteriorate. Maybe letting Grandpa have his way really would help him recover. Even though the doctor didn’t agree, they decided to bring him home.

MY PARENTS AND I lived in a log house five miles east of Ashton. I say house because it had replaced the original Glover family’s one-room log homestead cabin that sat in ruins a short distance east of us. Unlike a homesteader’s cabin, the ribbons of gray sealing the cracks between each log were chinked with a mixture of sand and cement instead of mud. It also had a peaked roof covered with cedar shingles instead of sod or pine shakes.

Our house consisted of one large room built of logs that functioned as the kitchen, living room, and spare bedroom for overnight visitors. Heat came from a wood burning potbellied stove on the side considered the living room. A wood-burning cook stove heated the kitchen area on the opposite side.

On the east side of the house a clapboard addition was the only bedroom, and I shared it with my parents. The bedroom had no stove, but to keep the living room warm my parents insisted on keeping the door closed. During the colder winter months I slept in heavy flannel pajamas with mittens and booties that my mother sewed on to keep my fingers and toes from getting frost bitten. Indoor plumbing consisted of a large porcelain “thunder pot” beside the bed that was used only during the winter or emergencies during the summer.

Unlike most homesteader cabins, our house had the luxury of a large lean-to porch on the north side opposite the road. It also doubled as our ice box during the colder months of the year.

I was still asleep when my father left that morning to bring Grandma and Grandpa home. Our house had two eight-pane glass windows facing the road. I spent most of the morning annoying my mother by pulling on the white lace curtains while looking out the windows, or, as the day warmed, running outside and peering down the road to the west, hoping to catch a glimpse of them coming over the hill a quarter mile away.

The sixty-mile trip to and from Idaho Falls over a narrow, poorly maintained road was an ordeal. When traveling to Idaho Falls, most people made it a two-day trip. For a couple of months in the spring the trip took even longer. As the frozen road bed thawed, potholes appeared as if by magic. There were stretches where they ran together and the road resembled a war zone with chunks of asphalt and softball-size rock scattered helter skelter across it. Dust hung in the air like a heavy fog.

My father had learned to drive dodging roadway obstacles. With no time to spare, he made the trip to Idaho Falls in a record three hours. Returning took much longer as he worked to skirt the potholes and find the smoothest way.

Inevitably the car bounced and swayed. Grandpa leaned against Grandma in the back seat and gritted his teeth. His son was doing the best he could and crying out in pain would only prolong his ordeal. He hardly remembered the last two miles after leaving the main road. What a blessed relief when the car stopped in front of his house–a place he feared he would never see again.

GRANDPA WAS STILL ON his way home when after dinner–in those days dinner was the midday meal–my mother said, “It’s time for your nap.”

“A nap?” I shrugged as I looked out the window, “I’ll take it after I see Grandpa.”

My mother got my attention with a “Chan!” and a look that I knew meant there would be no more argument. Further resistance would have brought a familiar whack to my hind-side. I let her lead me to the bedroom and of course I was asleep when Grandpa’s Pontiac passed our house.

“Where’s Grandpa,” I asked when I awoke.

“He’s home,” my mother replied.

“Why didn’t he stop to see me?”

“He was tired from his trip. Here,” she said as she held out my coat, “let’s go see him.”

What fun it was to walk the two miles to my grandparents’ house. As we crossed the top of the hills, I kicked at the packed soil causing dry geysers of dust to erupt at the end of my shoes. I didn’t know it then, but my grandfather traveled this same road when he first came to this country from Tennessee looking for a homestead. Of course, it had been widened and graded since then, but it still followed a section line that disappeared over the hills like a roller coaster.

Where the road hugged the north side of the hills, snow drifts still embraced the white trunks of quaking aspens holding them in a deep freeze and leafless. In the low spots, where a draw crossed the road, there were pools of water furrowed with mud from passing vehicles. If the pools weren’t too big, we picked our way around them. Several times my mother lifted me onto snow banks rather than slosh through the chocolate-colored pools below. Sliding down the drifts on the other side tickled my tummy and made me whoop. I had so much fun, I almost forgot where we were going.

My mother and I crested the last hill and I broke into a run. No more than the length of a football field away, my grandfather’s white house showed through trees nearly as tall as his house.

My breath came in gulps as I reached the back porch. Before I touched the door knob, the door swung open. A tiny woman with an apron hanging to her ankles scooped me up. My grandmother was scarcely five feet tall, yet I struggled to breathe as she hugged me. She carried me to the kitchen and set me down on her lap. Reaching into an apron pocket, she pulled out a handkerchief that smelled like some flower. For a moment I thought she was going to wipe my nose, but instead, she wiped her eyes. She was sad and I wondered why.

Just then my father entered the kitchen from the living room. “Where’s Grandpa?” I asked.

“Father’s resting,” he said.

“Can I see him?”

Dad looked at Grandma.

“He’s so tired,” she said. “How is he?”

“I can’t tell. It looks like he could be asleep.”

“I doubt that. He doesn’t sleep much any more.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Your grandfather has a lot of pain.”

“Can I see him?”

“Let’s wait a minute. I gave him some medicine. If he’s asleep, it won’t be for long.”

While we waited, Grandma handed me a present. The teddy bear’s brown fuzz was so soft and warm, I nestled it against my cheek, but I still had a hard time sitting still.

Finally, I heard Grandpa’s call. In a flash I scooted off my grandmother’s lap, dropped the bear and charged through hands reaching to grab me.

“Wait,” someone yelled. It came too late. I was already across the living room and through the doorway into his bedroom. Wide eyed, I nearly fell as I slid to a stop on the hardwood floor.