Firmin Bruner Oral History Part 1 of 2
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CHURCHILL COUNTY MUSEUM & ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
an interview with
FIRMIN ASCARGORTA BRUNER
October 28, 1991
This interview was conducted by Bill Davis; transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Norma Morgan; final typed by Pat Boden; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of Oral History Project/Assistant Curator Churchill County Museum.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewer and interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Churchill County Museum or any of its employees.
PREFACE
Firmin Ascargorta Bruner, 92-year old Spanish Basque with a phenomenal memory, was interviewed with his wife present. They both are active and devoted to their family. He tells of arriving in the U.S. as a 3 year old and the family's life in Elko. He talks about growing up in Berlin, Ione, and Austin, Nevada. He hauled goods all over the area from Fallon to many mines. When the family moved to Fallon, he worked as a mechanic, helped his folks on a ranch, worked eighteen years for T.C.I.D. as a shovel operator. He also worked in many places over the West. Firmin was interviewed because of his vast knowledge of the T.C.I.D. District operations and of early day Berlin-Ione-Austin region.
Interview with Firmin Ascargorta Bruner
BILL DAVIS: Today is October 28, 1991. My name is Bill Davis and I'm going to be interviewing Firmin Bruner. We're sitting in his dining room at 47 North Broadway in Fallon.
DAVIS: Okay, let's start out with your beginnings, Firmin.
BRUNER: Well, when my great-grandparents died, they left two girls. My grandmother was just a young girl then and hadn't attained the functions of womanhood yet and she was left with her youngest sister. But, as was the custom those days, the oldest in the family took over the running of the farmette.
DAVIS: Now, where was this?
BRUNER: That was close to Bedarona, Spain. The little farmette was called Olava. She found that she couldn't very well handle the estate, like I say, it was customary that the kids take the property although they had been paying rent for years previous to that, I don't know how many years, it still fell to the oldest in the family. So she looked around then for a good man to help her run it and she found him. His name was Josandres Ocamica. They were married and took over the responsibility and the debts which were never paid until her first grandson had been born. But they had faith in each other and in God and they worked diligently and brought forth a fine family. There were three girls and two boys. My father and mother were more or less friendly from .. well you might say . . . way back. Mother had another fellow that she actually liked better than Dad but he was a timid sort of a fellow and course they used to do their courting from on top of the grapevine to the second story window. Dad would come along and he'd see this other guy there so he'd go back down the road and start whistling and then this first guy'd take off. Then, of course, this first man and mother had some kind of a quarrel and they broke up. Dad guarded Mother. He was a kind of a playboy and was pretty well cock of the walk and he watched her very closely. When they were twenty-nine years old they got married. Then Dad went to work in the Merchant Marine.
DAVIS: Now, did we get the name of your dad?
BRUNER: Pio Ascargorta was my father's name. He would come home occasionally. He went all over the world you might say. I remember him talking about being in Galveston, Russia, Italy, and different places. He said the poorest class of people that were working around the docks were the Russians and the Russian women were loading lumber right along with the men. He said about all they had to eat was black bread. I remember that part. Apparently he was a fireman and then after that he got to be the mechanic's helper. When they'd come to dock why they would sell all the old brass and stuff, and divide up the money. But he said there was a lot of new brass went along with the old also, so (laughing) they was a little bit crooked I guess. Eventually he got, he called it tercianac in Basquo, so I don't know what it was unless it could have been malaria. And he came home and was recuperating at this farmette, my grandfather's house, when I was born. When I was born the women customarily has their babies from a sitting position and Dad held Mother on his lap while I was born. That's very unusual for nowadays.
DAVIS: Now were you the first?
BRUNER: I was the first boy.
DAVIS: What's your birth date?
BRUNER: September 25, 1899, was when I was born. Eventually Dad left the Merchant Marine. I don't know just how soon after that, but he came to America and he came to Elko. He got a job near Cherry Creek out of Ely. He got a job herding sheep there but he didn't have any dog, so at first when the sheep would get strayed why he'd whistle and they'd bunch up but pretty soon they found out he didn't have any dog so his whistling didn't do any good. He just couldn't control them so he abandoned them and went to town and he went to work for the O'Neil brothers. The O'Neil brothers was a shady bunch. They got run out of Cherry Creek I understand for some of their shady dealings, but they had two ranches north of Wells. One was called Sun Creek and the other one was called Burned Creek. Apparently my uncle came, my father's brother, Felix Ascargorta came with Dad because he was located at Burned Creek and Dad was farther on toward the border at Sun Creek.
DAVIS: Now Felix was younger than your dad?
BRUNER: Yes, he was younger. So, anyway, they kind of liked Dad because he couldn't talk English and he was a good worker and Dad said that he figured there was something wrong because every once in awhile somebody'd come along and hide out for awhile and then go on. (laughing) So, I don't know just how accurate this is but these were Dad's impressions. So, after he worked awhile, why he got a little money and he gave it to one of the brothers to send to us.
DAVIS: Now, what was he doing--what kind of work?
BRUNER: Ranch work. This was a cattle ranch. He gave the money to 'em and we never did get it. After awhile he had accumulated enough money to pay our passage so he gave that to 'em and we got that right away because they figured if he had his wife there that he would stay. Dad was a good worker. Uncle Felix's wife, Gregoria, and her son, Ted, and my mother and I and Gregoria's brother--we called him Uncle Charlie-Andres Barainca came with us. That would be five of us came together. Well, they forgot to put us off at Wells. They took us on over to Elko and then the next day they sent us back. But before that when we left Spain my aunts were very concerned about our well being on the passage so they included some salt pork in her valise. (laughing) So I often wondered what the Customs guys thought when they opened that up and saw that salt pork there. Then we got on the train and we were on our way west. When we got into Chicago they stopped for everybody to get off and eat, probably at a Harvey House. So we went in and sat down at the table and they brought us a glass of water and some bread and probably asked what we wanted. Well, we just sat there and sat there and nobody paid any more attention to us. About that time the train whistled, time to go, so Mom grabbed me and the bread and paid, probably paid for a full meal and away we went. Well, we never did get off the train after that, but it was bitter cold weather. There was steam pipes going through the coaches for heat and Mom would warm the salt pork or cook it or whatever on these steam pipes. So I often wondered what the other passengers thought about that. Anyhow we ate it and we survived, we made it. But, like I say, they dropped us off at Elko finally.
DAVIS: Now how old were you at that time?
BRUNER: I was three years old. This was in March. We stayed in Elko. At home I was a pretty bad boy because the minute I'd start acting up and Ma'd try to correct me why my aunts would snatch me and take me off and save me. So I had my way pretty well. So when we got to Elko I decided I wanted to go back to the old country, I guess, (laughing) so I was settin' it up and Mom couldn't stop me and finally the hotel man came and told her you're just going to have to hush him up. So she took me out on the porch and warmed my tail end. The first time I'd ever gotten a good beating.
DAVIS: (laughing) Did you remember that?
BRUNER: No, I don't remember that.
DAVIS: But you heard about it though. (laughing)
BRUNER: Momma told about it. Then I decided that this wasn't too bad of a place after all. The following day they sent us back to Wells. The snow was very deep and they couldn't find anybody to take us out. I don't know how far it was to Burned Creek or to Sun Creek. They finally found someone to take us out and so we went to where Uncle Felix was at Burned Creek. It was just a little bit of a cabin (laughing) and we didn't have any bedding or anything and there was five of us moved in with Uncle Felix. None of them had ever known that we had even showed up. So finally they sent word to Dad up at Sun Creek and he came down on horseback because the drifts were four feet deep and he couldn't come down with a wagon, so he came down and visited us and then went back. While we were there, course we were sleeping on the floor and no bedding, probably old horse blankets and gunny sacks or whatever they could find and Mother got pneumonia. Apparently it was pneumonia. She was very, very ill and Auntie then put her in the bunkbed, Uncle Felix's bunkbed where they'd been sleeping--they slept on the floor--and she took care of my mother and brought her out of it which was a very remarkable thing. Tender love brought her out of it. So then eventually when the sun melted the snow so he could come down with the wagon he come down and got us and took us back up to Sun Creek and Uncle Shorty went with us. They didn't have anything to eat hardly and Uncle Felix didn't want to do anything that would go against the grain with these brothers because he thought that they was going to give him a herd of sheep to run or something like that. Well, Auntie says, "It's more important that we don't die than it is for you to go on the possibility that you might get some sheep to run." So they finally killed a beef and had plenty to eat, I guess. Dad took us to Sun Creek. Mother had been raised in a very primitive farmette. Everything was very primitive and when she got to Sun Creek everything was different. For instance, there was a cook stove, and there was possibly a washboard and the food was probably hams and bacon. Those hams and bacon the way they used to cure them would keep indefinitely because there was no refrigerators, they were different from now. Canned goods and stuff like that where they'd have to bring in a supply to do for a month or so. So everything was strange to Mother. The only thing that she saw that was familiar was potatoes. (laughing) To illustrate, nobody showed her how to use the stove or wash clothes. There probably was a washboard there, too, but she didn't know anything about a washboard so he'd go out in the creek and wash the clothes like they did in the old country by rubbin ‘em and slappin ‘em on the rock or something like that. She became with child right after they come here so she didn't like it there but we stayed there during the summer. I remember going from one ranch to the lower ranch to do work down there and Dad would build a fire and we'd sit around the fire if it was cold. Dad didn't have any gun and the coyotes was very aware of it and when we went from one ranch to the other they'd follow along on both sides. (laughing) They was after the dog, but the dog knew they was after him so the dog would get under the wagon just behind the horses' feet and trot along under the wagon. (laughing)
DAVIS: Now how old were you about that time?
BRUNER: I was still three years old at that time. That next September I became four years old. But, anyway, I remember these coyotes going along. While we was there the O'Neill girls came to visit us one time and I was a little boy and they liked me so they were going to go somewhere. Mother thought that I ought to have something to eat so she fixed up some bread and honey or jelly or something and gave it to me. So while we was goin' why I ate this sandwich, whatever it was, but my hands was pretty sticky so I wiped it on one of the girl's dresses and I remember she (laughing) gave me the devil, but I don't know what she said. (laughing) One thing that kind of bothered me there was there was a well alongside of the house and Uncle Shorty, as we used to call him, Andres Barainca, he wasn't an uncle, but he was like an uncle. He wanted me to sing. Well, I didn't feel like singing all the time but there was this song that was on a paper and it showed a picture of a man singing with his mouth open, so I called it All Salanin Contia, Wide Mouth Song, and it went like this [he sings in Spanish]: "They tell me get married but the notion never did strike me to get married. This insistence that I get, that I should be married often makes me cry bitterly." That was the song. Well, I wouldn't want to sing it so he'd take me out and he'd hold my head down on this well and I could see my reflection down there and he'd keep, "You gonna sing? You gonna sing?" and he'd be pushing me down in there. Finally I'd have to give in because he sounded like he meant business. That was one of th'e flies in my ointment. Another one was they had an old meat house there and it had nails that was coming out. Dad caught me pulling these nails out so he gave me hell. So I went in and told Mother. I said, "Dad scolded me and just killed me." Of course Dad had been living alone a long time and I suppose he was a little bit irritated too with the family and she says, "He does me too, my darling." (laughing) He killed her too with his scolding. Mom got worried about having this baby out in the wilderness so we moved to Tuscarora.
DAVIS: Now what was in Tuscarora in those days?
BRUNER: It was an old time mining camp. Dad got a job there and we moved in with a Mexican guy. He had a large house and so we moved in with him. I liked watches and he'd pick up old dollar watches and bring 'em and give 'em to me and I'd shake 'em and then he'd shake 'em and listen and he'd say, "Christo como comita." That meant, Christ, how it runs! (laughing) I don't know if they run or not but I was tickled to death anyway. But the neighbor had two daughters and of course the two daughters really liked me and they'd take me for rides on their bicycle and all that, but I'd raise a kind of a racket. This guy was working night shift so when Dad covered up the well or shaft that was right in front of our house, put board covering on it, I wager this guy would just as soon he'd left it open (laughing) so I could fall in it so he could sleep. About noontime I'd disappear. There was a mill close by there and right in front of the door this old steam engine was going sh-sh-sh. I was kind of scared of it but I'd crowd the other side of the door and I'd make a rush through and when I got in everybody had good things to eat. So they'd divide up their good things with me in there. Well, Mom would come after me and then I'd get away from her and I'd climb on the mine dump. Well, she'd have to go around and by the time she got up to where I was I'd slide down the dump and then by the time she got down there I'd be climbing straight up the bank again. I don't remember her chastising me after that but I got a good memory anyway. But even there she got a worrying about having her baby among strangers. In the meantime, Uncle Felix and Aunt Gregoria and their son, Ted, had moved to Berlin. She had a boarding house there so we decided to go to Berlin. So we moved into a little room in one corner of the boarding house and then it had a big, big room and Auntie's boarders slept there on cots. There was some boarders, she had others too. The only way you could get into our place was to go through where all these guys slept. We had a little stove there and, of course, we was pretty short of money and the only thing I remember about having for breakfast was sometimes we'd have hot chocolate and bread but sometimes we'd have burnt bread, just burn it and then put it in the hot water and it would color the water, then we'd eat the bread. Course Dad'd be working, I suppose he got more.
DAVIS: Now what did he do there?
BRUNER: He got a job there as a helper in the machine shop and he was a very good helper. He tended business and years later, a man named [Harry] Schoonover that had been a hoist man there told me, he said Dad kept his mind off of the women and liquor and he tended to business so they liked him. He was a blacksmith and machine shop helper then. So then after Auntie had, her baby, Felicia, which was a blue baby, she gave up the boarding house. Oh, one night though, somebody had been watchin' Dad get in through the window at night when he'd come home he'd knock on the window and call Mother. So somebody'd watchin', so one night somebody came to the window and said, "Mary, Mary," (laughing) and Ma knew it wasn't Dad so she never did anything about it. While we was there my brother was born. Bingo, Domingo Ascargorta, he was born then. Auntie would hire an old Indian named Dick to cut the wood and they made a oven, one of these like a beehive. She would bake her bread in there and the bricks are still out there and so she had quite a few boarders and she would feed this old man, Dick. I remember the old man, Dick. His granddaughter, Nettie, was deaf and dumb. She'd feed them both.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the Indians in that area?
BRUNER: Yeah, I'll come to that in a little while. So, anyway, then there were two houses available, in Union Canyon-that would be one mile south--so they moved into them. Our house was the last house down the canyon and Auntie had the one next to it. They were made of standing logs and dirt roofs. While she was running the boarding house we was down below Bob Johnson's saloon. The fellow that came out to Berlin two or three years ago and went through the tour I gave, told about this sporting lady wearing hoop skirts (laughing) and going out to get wood in hoop skirts. Well, she didn't wear no hoop skirts but he made a good article anyway. Anyway this lady was a Cuban lady and she spoke Spanish. She boarded there with Auntie and whenever they needed something from the catalogs she would order it from 'em and it-was very handy. Well, in this boarding house we was a long way from water, so Auntie borrowed a mule from somebody and made a drag and put two whiskey barrels on it and we'd go into Union Canyon about a mile and hoist water out of a well there alongside of Cirac's mill and bring the water. You can imagine how it would be cooking on a wood stove, water that scarce. Yeah, they really went through a lot. And this sporting lady, when the men go after work sometime, why they would get the water but sometime Auntie would run out of water and have to get water during the day. So she'd hook up the old mule and sometime this sporting lady'd go with her to help her. Well, on the way back, somebody come out of the tall brush down the lower Union Canyon and started getting kind of funny and the old sporting lady just reached in here--they had side pockets under their skirt--she pulled out a six-shooter and he beat a hasty retreat. (laughing)
DAVIS: (laughing) Changed his mind.
BRUNER: Yeah, he left 'em alone. So then after we moved there to Union Canyon why the men would walk to work and Dad got sick. So Dr. Bruton was the doctor there in Berlin so he didn't have any horse and buggy or anything. He walked everywhere they went except if it was too far they'd have to go after him with a buggy. So he stopped to look at Dad and so he gave him some pills and Dad thought that all pills was for was to physic. He says, "I don't need no physic" so he wouldn't take any. So the doctor stopped again and he wasn't improved and he left some more pills. Mother tried to get him to take 'em. Well, finally, he took one and, by golly, he felt better. So then he took the whole box and he was all right. (laughing) While we were still in Union Canyon why they had labor problems in Berlin.
DAVIS: Like what?
BRUNER: Well, the thing of it was they had a Portuguese that was the foreman and there were Portuguese and Italians and Basques and Cousin Jacks and all kinds of people working there but because he was a Portuguese he would favor the Portuguese. And so this Andres, Uncle Shorty as I call him, thought it was his turn to go to work and the foreman says "no",--his name was Gomes--"it'so and so's turn." So Uncle Shorty got worked up and he kind of grabbed him and choked him up and roughed him a little bit. Well, so then he sent for the sheriff and they came and they'd been havin' quite a bit of trouble around there and . . .
DAVIS: The sheriff came from Tonopah then?
BRUNER:
Yeah, and apparently they brought a judge and everything with them because there had been quite a bit of trouble. This just brought it to a head. So, they held court there and they arrested Uncle Shorty and chained him to one of the pillars in front of the company store. There was no jail, so they kept him there in the daytime and at night they'd take him inside and chain him to the cot. They kind of settled things up and they fined Uncle Shorty fifty dollars, which was a lot of money. Later I asked Auntie about it and she said a hundred, but I don't think it was a hundred. I would say it was fifty dollars. But in the meantime Mother and Auntie thought that they would take Uncle Shorty to Tonopah and they were praying, I remember them just praying because they figured if they took Uncle Shorty to Tonopah it was like banishing him up to Siberia. They held court there and they fined him and they recommended that the foreman be released which they did. The name of the foreman was Gomes and his wife's name was Del. They released him and they put in somebody else as a foreman. So things went on pretty good after that. After this trial they came in an automobile and Mother heard the automobile coming up the canyon past our house here. Then it circled around behind Chinee Sam's saloon and up on the plateau and went down the valley on the way to Tonopah. So she woke me up when this car passed our house by the road and rushed me to the south window and I looked up and saw the first automobile. That was my first automobile. That must have been possibly the first part of 1906 or it probably was 1905. So from then on, I had all eyes for an automobile. Eventually, I started school [in Union Canyon] in 1905 and when I came home why I had a piece of chalk and I made a big B on the door and Mother thought that I was very, very brilliant to be able to make a B in the first day. Apparently all this brightness flowed out of me because in 1908 when we moved to Austin I had to take the first grade over again. (laughing)
DAVIS: (laughing) You had one brother at that time when you went to school?
BRUNER: Yes, he was about a year old because Georgina, my sister, was born in Union Canyon so he was a little over a year old. The school house was a log house uprights and a dirt roof and so forth. We had a good teacher there to begin with. It was one of the Kennedy's, but she got married to the stage driver. Then there was a Johnny Mayette. This is the school house. This is in 1902. I started in 1905 and this lady here I corresponded with her up till oh three or four years ago.
DAVIS: And her name?
BRUNER: Her name was Celia Petar. They were from Carson and she taught Ira Kent in Stillwater.
DAVIS: Oh, really?
BRUNER: Before this.
DAVIS: Fascinating.
BRUNER: Well, anyway, they didn't have too much room there so Marie Cirac and I sat together in this little chair and this little seat. I don't think the teacher was too good because in defining, I remember this from memory, in defining what the gender of a ship would be. You would consider it feminine, a ship, and different things like that and that was one of the lessons I remember the older guys was gettin'. So you'd say well, a ship is super fine, instead of saying feminine genders, it was fine, and a man was fine and the woman was super fine. So that's the terms she used, you see. So it's no wonder I didn't get too far. (laughing) So then, like I say, I had to take the first grade over. Then we found two houses in Berlin that were vacant so we moved to Berlin and from then on we walked from Berlin to the schoolhouse at the upper end of Union Canyon.
DAVIS: How far would that be?
BRUNER: It would be somewhat over a mile. If I started out with the other kids, the Stevens kids, why I'd get there in time but there was a little Indian girl, Hatty Dyer. She married a fellow named Dyer. Do you remember the Dyers out here? Hatty Dyer and I, if we didn't go with the other guys we'd get along there looking for gophers because the Indians was having a hard time making a living and you see these mountain squirrels they look like gophers but they're ground squirrels.
DAVIS: Now what did they do with the gophers?
BRUNER: They ate 'em. (laughing) Food was kind of scarce
then. We'd get there at recess sometimes and you couldn't tell what time we'd get there. But they never said anything. The folks didn't know anything about it and it suited us all right. We was gettin' along all right. So that's the reason that I didn't do too good.
DAVIS: Where do you remember the Indians as living?
BRUNER: After we moved to Berlin then the Indians lived either down just below the road that comes in--there's a marker there--or they would live below the barn and below the miners' union hall.
DAVIS: Did they live in huts?
BRUNER: They lived in tents. I thought they worked but later Billy Cislini said that the Indians didn't work but I'd know they'd be gone, probably on a rabbit drive or something like that and sometime they'd move down below town and sometime they'd move over south part and below the big company barn and miners' union. Anyway when they lived below town there was an old, old squaw. She was blind and just couldn't get around anymore. And the Indians'd leave her with just a canopy made out of sacks and a couple of sticks sticking up. Probably assuming that she would be dead but Auntie would feed her. (laughing) When they'd come back, she'd be livelier than ever. But finally the old squaw died and I remember goin' down and seein' her layin' there and so a fellow named, Patsy Graham, Bodie Graham's brother.
DAVIS: Now this would be an Indian fellow?
BRUNER: Yes, and he had a harelip. He conducted the service and they rolled her up in a blanket and took her down below one of the tunnels there in Berlin. There's a marker there that I put up where she was buried and they buried her there. Of course Patsy put on a regular ceremonial and my brother happened to be watching. So after that when he'd get unruly all we had to say was Patsy might be watching so you better straighten up because he didn't want old Patsy to bury him. (laughing) So he was a good deterrent for my brother. When we was in Berlin I had the run of everywhere and I figured Dad was the most important man there was but after the master mechanic died at the machine shop he was showing somebody where to do some assessment work and there was deep snow and while they were going up he died right in the snowdrift and so then the guy went back and got help. He was boarding with Mrs. Phillips. He left her five thousand dollars, which was a lot of money then. So then after Dad went to work at the mine he worked in the blacksmith shop and tool sharpening section there. I'd go up there and try to be there at noon and Schoonover said that they would give me good things to eat. They had all kinds of good things for me to eat. He said I'd just set there and wouldn't say a word and my old chops'd be goin' eatin' that good stuff and I wouldn't say anything. Well, I couldn't because I couldn't talk English. I remember they didn't have State compensation then and for that reason I went all over in the mills and everywhere and was with Dad. I remember climbing in the bin sometime when the ore'd run a little short and they'd have to scrape it down to keep the stamps runnin'. I remember goin' in the mill and crawlin' down in these bunkers and bein' with him and everything, so I pretty well had the run of the town. There was always water running out of the mill that took the tailings, the rejects after they'd been through the mill and they had been ponded up but in the meantime some way or another this pond had broken. Us kids would go down there and we'd make dams with the sand and maybe the water'd be a foot or so high. We didn't know anything about swimming because if we had of I know we would of got in there and tried to float or something but we'd, to our recollection, never seen any body of water so we didn't know anything about swimming but we'd take our shoes off and walk around in it. Then after we'd played around there awhile why we'd break the dam and there was a huge flood, maybe two or three hundred gallons of water, this huge flood would go down. We'd watch that thing flood. So we kept busy and we had a lot of fun. We played. Even Mother Nature cooperated with us because if it was hot and we wished it'd rain, we'd kill a horned toad and put him belly up in the sun and, sure enough, it seemed like (laughing) the few times we did it, it clouded up. It clouded up--we was regular rainmakers.
DAVIS: Now, where did you figure that one out? I mean, did you do this on your own or did someone tell you?
BRUNER: Well, somebody told us. You know, we had plenty of information with all them miners around there. Then if we'd get caught out and it was rainin' and we felt uncomfortable all you had to do was pick up a rock and throw it right straight up and it'd quit. Well, it never did shower over a minute or two on the desert anyway, so we could stop the rain also, so we had everything our own way. Down toward the cemetery where the city dump was where they took the old burnt buildings why there was a stove there and us kids put this thing together. There was a lot of snowbirds, so we killed a snowbird. Harold Stevens and I killed a snowbird and we plucked it and cleaned it in the snow and cooked it. But you can figure there ain't too much to a snowbird but it seemed like we had all we wanted to eat anyway. (laughing)
DAVIS: Are there still snowbirds around? I don't know.
BRUNER: Oh, yeah, yeah. They used to flock in. Well, we called 'em snowbirds. They were kind of like these birds around here . . . sparrows. They were similar to that.
DAVIS: Not very big.
BRUNER: Just about that size. Anyway, Harold and I divided up this cooked snowbird and ate it. Mrs. Servaski told us that if you'd put salt on their tails you could catch 'em. They never would look at us and they didn't know we had the salt. She said if they knew you had it they'd stay all right, so we'd run around showin' them this salt.
DAVIS: How did you finally catch a snowbird?
BRUNER: We had a wire with a nut tied on the end of it and you just swung this around like that and threw it. It would be a split wire about three or feet long with this big nut on it to carry it. So we threw it into a bunch of these and we got one. Just below was the cemetery and we respected the dead. Beyond this certain tree nobody said any bad words. But if they did, if we caught 'em sayin' a bad word there we'd give 'em a kick in the rear. But it seems like the souls rested very peacefully because we respected them.
DAVIS: How long were you in Union?
BRUNER: In Union, we was only there…
DAVIS: But you moved back to Berlin, so how long were you there in Berlin then?
BRUNER: We must have moved into Union in the first part of 1905 and after I started to school. By the time they had the Christmas tree there we had already moved to Berlin. Now they had this Christmas tree and entertainment there and Dad drove me over.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the Christmas program?
BRUNER: Well, one of them was that Chester Douglas, he was a little guy and he wasn't in school yet, but he got up on the stage and he said, "The thunder's roaring and the lightning flash, broke Grandma's tea pot all to smash." That was one of the things and Bob Dixon was the Santie Claus and it seemed like some of the miners in Berlin had donated a dollar and it seemed like some of the favorites got a little toy but all I got was an orange and some nuts, but I was happy all right. But I though that it was funny that Santie Claus brought other things to other ones, but it was all right too. They sang My Merry Oldsmobile. I remember that. From then on I tried and I tried, I remembered the chorus but not the verse so here about two years I wrote to General Motors, Oldsmobile, and the lady called me up and wanted to know about it and I said yes, I says, I thought it was the lady over here at the Oldsmobile. I says I'd just think you're the nicest lady there is if you'd send me that and sure enough, here it come from Detroit.
DAVIS: Wonderful.
BRUNER: So the next time I held a tour in Berlin I sung the whole thing. But I used to sing that and the tourists would go along with me. It was fun when we had these tours that I gave recently. That was two of the things I remembered but not too much more.
DAVIS: How long were you in Berlin?
BRUNER: Then when we moved to Berlin why Mom got sick. She had another baby.
DAVIS: Which child was this?
BRUNER: That would be the fourth child. But it got pneumonia and died within about a month.
DAVIS: What name would that be?
BRUNER: Her name was Josephine. When she died why they went up to the company store and got a big parkin' box and took it apart and made a little coffin for her and lined it with black cloth and when we buried her--somebody had a buckboard--and Dad carried the little coffin on his lap down to the cemetery. There was quite a few Mormon ladies around there and the Mormon ladies sung some hymns and we said a prayer and buried the baby there. She's still there waitin' for the great resurrection in Berlin. That was in 1907. Then in 1907, the miners decided that they wanted more money. They were gettin' three and a half and they had a miners union.
DAVIS: Three and a half dollars a day?
BRUNER: Yeah. So then they struck for four dollars. The superintendent told 'em, he says, "Our company isn't makin' any money and if you strike they'll shut down and that'll be the end of it." The mill heads was runnin' around sixteen dollars but they were losin' two and a half a ton, gain' down into the tailings and they just wasn't makin' any money and runnin' short of ore too. They thought "Oh, well, he's just bluffin." So they gathered him up and took him down to the bottom of the hill about a mile and told him to keep goin'. Well, that night he come back and got the company buggy team and went to Tonopah. He come back with a sheriff and he took charge again. Then it was the miners that had to leave.
DAVIS: What kind of ore were they mining?
BRUNER: It was quartz, gold and silver, mostly silver. Then Dad waited there for seven months hopin' that they would open up again and we finally starved out and had to go to [Austin] . . . in that seven months Dad only worked two days over at Grantsville . . . The Basquos used to gather at our place in the evenings and have coffee or have a glass of wine and talkin'. And about that time the San Francisco earthquake was all the talk and of course the Basquos was just about as smart as I am and they was talkin' about this fire. Somebody said that this fire was spreading underground.
DAVIS: Oh? (laughing)
BRUNER: Not long (laughing) after that the chip pile by the mill caught fire where they used wood for boilers and they had a big pile of chips around there and they caught fire. Well, they put it out and it was out for a day or two and then here they didn't put it clear out so it broke through to the surface again. When I saw that thing I thought, oh, oh, the fire is coming up from San Francisco and you can imagine the helpless feelin' I had wonderin' where it was going to bust through next. While we was there Josephine was born and we had the doctor that time.
DAVIS: Now they named the next baby Josephine?
BRUNER: Yeah. Before that, my mother would be midwife for Auntie and Auntie would be midwife for my mother and they had no trouble with their babies. But when they had Dr. Bruton--I am just assuming this--he probably had her lay down and she became ruptured and that bothered her all the rest of her life although she had it fixed a time or two, it bothered her. Then after that she had a miscarriage and had to go to Reno to be doctored on. She went on the stage, all day drive to Austin, and then the next day you get on the train, ninety miles to Battle Mountain on the narrow gauge. Then from there to Reno, so traveling was not too good at that time. She was there possibly a couple of weeks. In the meantime I was pickin' up--Dad was brutal--I was pickin' up chips for the fire in the morning and I wasn't pickin' fast enough or somethin' and Dad come out and gave me a kick. Before Mother left, my navel got infected I guess and so she thought it was from the kick but it healed it up all right. But it was a worry to her. When they come back they was broke and not too long after that the miners went on strike. In all that time Dad only worked two days at Grantsville. We's there seven months and the mine didn't open up so we moved to Austin. At that time, even in the old country, if you had sons and daughters your credit was good. I remember gettin' a hold of one of the books that Dad had and he owed seven hundred dollars, huge amount, to different guys that had just given him the money because he had sons his credit was good. So we moved to Austin and we rented a house, a big house, from Mrs. Smithline right where the post office is now and we had one common kitchen. There was a bedroom and a big hall in front and we lived there awhile. The rent was five dollars a month. Eventually, Dad would rustle work. He was pretty good about rustling and he worked for old man Whooley, from Reese River. They were laying cement sidewalks and doing cement work. Anyway (laughing) one night Dad got kind of polluted and he fell down, couldn't get up, on the way home. We were sleepingoutside because there was too many bedbugs inside. We was sleepin' in a kind of breezeway between the cellar and the house and Dad come staggerin' along. Mom heard him staggerin' and he'd never done that before. I remember, oh, she says, "Who is it?" "Oh, it's me, Mary." (laughing) The next day he couldn't go to work and boy, you know, it looked like he's going to lose his job. So he told me to tell Mr. Whooley that he had overindulged and he just couldn't make it and Mr. Whooley said, "That's all right, lad," he says, "I like a man that tells the truth. You tell your father to come to work the next morning." So he didn't lose his job. While we was there I had to take the first grade over in Austin. Jobs was pretty scarce then, too, but we always had good credit because if Dad got a dollar he would always go to Maestretti, A.P. Maestretti, had a grocery store and he'd give it to him. We had good credit with Mr. Maestretti because Dad, anytime he got any money he went there first and paid what little he could. I remember toward the last there we owed about fifty dollars and my aunt, who lived in the same house, if she got a dollar or so why she'd go to the Austin Commercial where things was a little cheaper and buy there and so he cut them off. She was pretty burned up about it but it was business but then they got a job on a sheep herd and she and the two babies and Uncle Felix went on this sheep, I think it was lambin' job. So they left and we were left alone in the house. This house had one common kitchen and we cooked in that one common kitchen, but of course there was bedrooms on one side and bedrooms on the other side. It was big enough for two families all right and there was no bathroom, of course. You had to come out and go through this breezeway that I talked about to go to the toilet and while we was there Josephine was born. It was in the evening and it was the third of December, 1909, and Ted and I had to go outside and stay outside while Josephine made her entrance. You darn near froze but Auntie was the midwife and my other sister, Josephine, was born there at that time December 3, 1909. I used to have to take care of her and I used to think, "Well, when she's my age, I'll be a young man and have a job and I'll be really gettin' along."
DAVIS: How was the house heated?
BRUNER: Well, all we had was, I don't remember whether there was a heatin' stove in the big front room or not. We just had to huddle in the kitchen.
DAVIS: How long did your dad's job last there?
BRUNER: This was only intermittent, whenever they had a contract to build sidewalk. But Dad bought a saw and some wedges and sledge hammer and he'd go out and cut wood when people'd want wood cut to stove lengths. He'd go out and cut it for two dollars a cord which was quite a job because he'd have to chop it up into small pieces and carry it in and all that but it made groceries. There was, I think, three rooms in the school and there was about three grades and then they had a high school on the west end of it. One night when we came out in the evening why I felt pretty hilarious and I was yellin' and the professor called me in, Professor Graham and he told me to sit down there. So I sat down and he said something about scrapbooks or something and the only scrappin' I knew about was when you had to put up your dukes. (laughing) So I was wonderin' what. kind of scrap I was gonna get into. But when school let out he let me out and then it was all right. Dora Waters was a young lady going to high school there and I used to run errands for her. She married a fellow. named Black up in Winnemucca. They had a drugstore up there and his boy still comes down here and works at the Raley Drug. I was the messenger for Mrs. Dyer and she was waitin' for Dora to have the baby up in Winnemucca. She was anxiously waiting for the letter to come and when the letter came I put it in my pocket and in front of the Catholic Church there was a kind of a porch there at the assay office and I sat there and the letter came out. Well, I went back and looked and the letter wasn't there and I didn't have the nerve to tell Mrs. Dyer that I'd lost the letter and, consequently, she didn't know anything about it until long after her daughter had the baby. Then I used to work for Tom Dalton. He had the variety store there. Dalton and Clifford was the name of the outfit. Clifford had some kind of a store in Reno and Dalton took care of this drug and variety store there and I would get fifteen cents an afternoon working for him. I would deliver. He had vegetables and all that kind of stuff. We had a strap over the shoulder and a little box and we'd put the stuff in there and I'd carry them around and deliver them. Walter Pinana was the paper man there. He was a little older than me. He had to help deliver one time and he went up to Fred Leutgen's house and Fred Leutgen had the butcher shop. When he went up to the house, of course we'd just open the door and go in. They'd leave the door open, and he walked in. Irma was in front of the kitchen stove takin' a bath so she jumped up and screamed and put a towel over her up here and Walter was amazed because he didn't figure that that part needed covering as bad as the other part.
DAVIS: (laughing)
BRUNER: (laughing) But, anyway, he eventually married the girl years later. One time when mother was sick and we were still living together up in that house why Auntie told me to go down to the butcher shop and get some bell chops. So I went down and I told Fred that I wanted twenty-five cents worth of bell chops. He says, "You mean veal chops." "No, bell chops." So he just gimme me some old steak, (laughing) so when I got home Auntie says, "I didn't want this, I wanted bell chops." And I said, "Well, he told me that I probably wanted veal chops, but," I said, "veal sounded something like an entrail part to me and I knew you didn't want that." So Mother didn't get no veal chops anyhow. They had a big bobsled there and everybody would coast down Main Street and have big time and they were good to us little kids too. They'd always make room for us and we had great times sleigh riding. During one of these times I used to have sore throat quite a bit, my tonsils, so I went over to Ray Chattele's house to play with Ray and his mother come out. She says, "What's the matter with you?" I kind of looked dumbfounded and Ray says, "He's got diphtheria." She said, "You got diphtheria?" Well, it sounded as good as anything to me and I said, "Yeah." Boy, she really run me out of that yard. This lady had been married before to a Laurent and she had other family but then eventually she married this Frenchie Chattele and he wasn't too much on the work. He'd get pinched every once in awhile for raidin' the freight wagons. He wasn't much on the work, but during election they gave him a job. They would make two tepees of wood, one in front of the Watt Hotel and one in front of the International Hotel during election and his job was to take two anvils and put black powder between 'em. He put black powder on the bottom anvil and then put this other one on top of it. They had this big fire agoin', bonfirin' these tepees, and he had a long rod and he'd take that rod and he'd touch it to the anvil and it'd make a hell of an explosion. (laughing) So then he'd go and put some more powder on, piled it, (laughing) and other anvil on it again, but in the meantime somebody got guyin' him and made him mad. But he always wore his pants so that sometimes you could see a little bit of crack and so he took after this guy with this hot iron, but the guy outrun him. He was pretty well hobbled with them pants. They used to have movies there and a time or two they had a big drum looking thing on a stick and you put the thing on your shoulder and it had a candle inside and it said, "Show tonight at eight o'clock sharp" and if I'd take that thing and walk up and down the street with it so that they could see, why they'd give me a free ticket. But Mom figured that was too much like beggin' so I didn't get to see too many shows. Then there was Cahill, and another guy. They opened up a movie in the Watt Hotel. This was at the International. The building was owned by Robert Hogan but the hotel part was leased out to George Watt and he was a cattleman. They had Extensive Lender Livestock Company and he was head of that and then he had this Watt Hotel. He had a fellow named Ingram running it for him. Up in the hall Cahill and this other guy had the movies. They lived in the next house below us and Mother did the washing for 'em. She had quite a bit of washing and they'd come and get one. Well, we'll have the money so and so and they'd come and get one. Finally Mother says, "Oh, take 'em all and then when you get the money you can pay me." So in the meantime Dad was working over at New York Canyon and he'd ride over and back.
DAVIS: Now where is New York Canyon from Austin?
BRUNER: North of Austin, mining outfit. Maricopa Mines Company. So this dog took up with Dad. Course he'd ride the horse back and forth and the dog took up with him and Dad got kinda attached to that dog but he had to have a dog tag for it. We had two and a half in the house and Mother says, "Well, go ahead and buy this dog tag and I'll have this . . . " She had about another two and a half coming from this Cahills, so he went in and bought the dog tag. But after they got all their laundry they never did come back, so Mother never got the other two and a half. In the meantime, the darn dog got mange. (laughing) Anyway all the hair come off of him so Dad was ashamed to have him following him around so he had to do away with him. That was a case of all the finances went up in bad stock. To begin with, when we first moved to Austin, after Patsy Graham buried this squaw up in Berlin and we moved in to Austin and, of course, it was celebration, fourth of July, when we moved in there. The first thing that my brother, Bingo, saw was old Patsy there. So here was Patsy watching him again. He still had to live straight for fear old Patsy get ahold of him. Then they had a balloon ascent and it was right by the courthouse there. They run a pipe and then an upright inside the pipe and there was a whole bunch of guys holdin' the balloon and there was a fellow inside callin' out numbers and this fellow outside would throw kerosene into this pipe and then the flame would go in and up this stand pipe and he was tellin ‘em how high the flame shot so they wouldn't put in too big a charge and set the balloon on fire.
DAVIS: And this was probably a fabric balloon?
BRUNER: Yes, apparently canvas or something like that. They were quite awhile gettin' it inflated and to work. By the time they got it inflated to where the guy thought it was good enough why it was pretty well into the evening. In fact, I think the sun had gone down. He got on this trapeze thing hanging by his knees here and when the guys let go, the balloon went up and it just barely cleared the telephone wires (laughing). When it got out on the street it started coming down. But in the meantime when he went up the guy lost his hat. So it -Floated up over the wires and then come back in the middle of the street and I thought he came back to get his hat. (laughing) Course the evening breeze had cooled it off. The next morning after the sun got warm they inflated it again and that time he went up and he floated about three or four blocks. He cut loose with a parachute and he landed in a tree in George Crowl's yard, but it didn't hurt him. Then the balloon went on up over the summit and the guys went up horseback to retrieve it.
DAVIS: Fascinating.
BRUNER: That was Fourth of July, 1908. We were still in this Main Street house when Haley's Comet--well we were supposed to go through the tail of it--and that was the end of the world. In the evenings why people would get out on the street and speculate about it and watch it. Well, eventually, it got to where it wouldn't show in the evenings and it was showin' later in the night. It got to where it would be visible about two o'clock in the morning, so George Litster and his father, W.W. Christian--they owned the Austin Commercial Company and George was bookkeeper then. They got a box of powder and they took it up on the hill south of Austin way up on top and about two o'clock (laughing) in the morning they exploded this box of powder. Well, it woke everybody up and being up there it just sounded like it was right in your back door and so it woke Mom and Dad up and Mom says, "What was that?" and she says, "I guess the comet must have struck." So they laid thereawhile and nothing happened, so Dad got brave enough to get up and go outside and look. He says, "Everything looks all right. The comet is goin' on." But they never told anybody what it was until years later. If they would of some of the people were pretty badly stirred up about it because it woke 'em up and scared the hell out of 'em. It would, you know, expecting the comet to hit.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the Stokes' Castle?
BRUNER: It was already built when we got there, but a fellow named Frank Pifro and Jacob Kunkel, he was a little stonemason, a little diminutive short guy. I have a picture of the crew that built the castle. It's in the museum in Berlin and it showed these two--they were the only ones I knew of that had worked on it--and Willy was a boy about my age and he was standin' near his. father's [Frank's] knee. He was married to a squaw and this Willy was part Indian and part Italian.
DAVIS: What was the state of the castle at that time? People living in it or . . . ?
BRUNER: No, I guess Stokes might have come there and stayed maybe once or twice but I doubt that it was hardly used.
DAVIS: Did they ever furnish it, finish it off?
BRUNER: Oh, yes, it was furnished.
DAVIS: Did you ever get to visit out there?
BRUNER: I never did get to go in it. Stokes was the millionaire that built the Nevada Central Railroad and he bought Berlin and formed the Nevada Company. Stokes never made any money in Nevada. Apparently when Tonopah struck he sent the engineer there, and the guy turned it down. That was the only chance Stokes had of ever making any money. Berlin, always just barely nip and tuck and Austin the same way and he built that narrow gauge railroad and this Stokes Castle looks down on the valley there and down around where the depot used to be.
DAVIS: What was the local people's attitude toward Stokes?
BRUNER: He was a godsend because he was bringing money into the area. Later on I found out that--I don't whether it was he or one of his boys--was the specialist that took care of United Fruit Company. A specialist in the stock market, do you understand? In other words, in the stock market if you have a stock you can sell it or you can buy it and this specialist is the cushion. If you have stock to sell he sees to it. If there's no order for it, he sees to it that you can sell your stock and then if you want some why he always has stock to furnish in case nobody else wants to sell. So Stokes was--I found out later--that he was what they call the specialist. I deal in stocks quite a bit so I'm interested in that.
DAVIS: What about the Halloween?
BRUNER: Oh, this Halloween party, they had it at Nibs Merrigan's house. They were a couple of kids. They're a little older than me and a whole bunch of us was invited to it. We had jack o'lanterns made out of shoe boxes and we went up there and they had diving for-apples and all kind of that stuff. You know, you dive down in the tub to get a apple and all that kind of stuff. Then we decided to go around town. So we went by one side and we passed the deputy sheriff's house. Course his backyard was excavated into the hill and there was a board fence there so nobody could fall in. So we threw all our jack o'lanterns in there and went on. On the way in front of the Methodist Church there was a gate on one of the little yards there and we picked that gate up and we carried it up the road a ways. Then this Frank Pifro that I told you worked on the Stokes Castle, his house was a gable end in front and then toward the back he had a shed roof, for his bedroom and it was excavated into the ground. Of course, there was a little gap. When we got to his place we threw this gate down over the dump and it went rollin' down (laughing) and then landed on top of Frank Pifro's roof so you can imagine (laughing) the scare he got when that thing landed on his roof. Then we run and we went up to the schoolhouse and we's gonna figure how in the heck we could get up on top of the schoolhouse to take the rope off so they couldn't ring the bell. About that time Tom White, the deputy sheriff--we had awakened him--came up over the bank and he hollered, "Halt!" Course I halted and a couple of others but Philomina Berrago had on a pair of Levi's, of course you never saw any women with pants on in them days, so he caught up to her and gave her a kick in the rear and went on trying to catch the rest of us. We all scattered. I don't know if he got anybody or not (laughing) just as soon he went a certain way, we went the other way and headed for home. Eventually I got a job with this Marcel Dupuy workin' at the store. He was a nice old guy, really nice fella. He used to make cocktails and I had this box with the strap over my shoulder and I'd take 'em down to the cat house. They used to buy these cocktails and the girls was nice' to me, you know I was a little boy and I guess it reminded them of their brother or something and they were nice to me. I enjoyed working for Marcel except that the boys would torture us by saying Marcel had at one time been hauling wood. He was an immigrant from the old country. When he came over he was just a lad and on the way from New York on the train he had misplaced his ticket. About that time the conductor was coming through and he was frantically looking for this ticket and the lady close to him there had hoop skirts on and (laughing) she says, "Get in under here." So he got under the hoop skirts until the conductor passed and the only comment was he said, "It sure was hot under there." But eventually he found his ticket. Then he was hauling wood and some way or another he fell off and the wagon loaded with wood ran over him and they had to amputate his legs.
DAVIS: Was that in Austin or somewhere else?
BRUNER: That was after he got to Austin. So then he had what you call cork legs. They weren't cork, they had a joint on 'em and they would swing back and forth. But with crutches he could get along pretty good. The kids would torture anybody that worked for him by telling 'em that we was exercising his cork legs in the basket out in the backyard. " Well, I was not." "Well, ya too, I saw ya from up there." (laughing) And probably he would raise a little bit of lettuce and green onions and stuff in the backyard and we'd have to go out and water them, us kids, and that's what they claim we was doin' when they was exercising his legs, so everybody would quit him finally because of these tortures the kids give 'em would get to 'em. And that's why I quit, eventually, myself. But in the meantime he outfitted this wagon with candy and firecrackers and stuff like that to go up to the Gooding Ranch up at the head of Reese River where they were having a Fourth of July celebration. So a fellow named Fred Pedroncini, at one time he had worked for a painter named Green and so they called him Green's monkey and it got down to Green Monkey. But he didn't like the name so if you see him on the street you just holler "Green Monkey" and run cause he'd chase you. He wasn't too much all there. He and I went up the river with this wagon and we stopped at all the ranches--at that time I was probably ten years old--we stopped at the O'Toole ranch and they weren't too well off but the mother came out and bought a few firecrackers and so Joe O'Toole was kind of anxious to see what was in the wagon and his mother says, "Go shoot your firecrackers, Joey." But, no, he wanted to see what was in the wagon. We had candy and popcorn, and all that kind of stuff. We stayed at the Keough ranch and slept in the barn and it really turned cold. Well, the next day we went up to the Gooding ranch and started selling this stuff. Fred'd leave me to watch the wagon and he'd go watch the ladies driving nails into the trees and all that kind of contest. Of course, I was pretty hungry and I'd sneak a little candy and stuff on once in awhile too. Well, then that night it got really cold, froze everything up and so the next morning we went on up the river as far as the Warner ranch. Warner used to sell meat and stuff in Berlin, but I'll tell about that later. We sold stuff all along and then we went down through Grantsville and on to Berlin. In the meantime Berlin had started up again by some leasers and they used up what wood and supplies there were. But when that was it, why it didn't pay, so they closed it down. The name of the leasers was Feenaman and Farman. One was a mailman and the other man was a mining man. But the values just wasn't there so after they used up the supplies that had been left there during the strike they shut down. We went on to Berlin. Bob Dickson had moved the recreation hall from Union Canyon where they held the Christmas celebration that time in the back and he had started a roadhouse down below Berlin. Stone walls and everything still there so we stopped there and slept on the ground and we boarded there with Bob Dickson. On the way back we stopped in Ione and talked to Fred Schmaling, the man that owned the store there. He talked to Schmaling awhile and he says, "You see anything around here you want?" Golly, that surprised me that he was going to gimme somethin' so I picked out a knife, twenty-five cents. Okay. So we went on down the river and we met the stage between the Whooley ranch and the Hess place and so we pulled off the road and the stage stopped. Ed Derringer was the driver and he says, "Who won the fight?" "Jack Johnson." "Huh, I lose five dollars." So away we went. It was the Johnson-Jeffrey fight.
DAVIS: Oh, I see.
BRUNER: 1910. So anyway when we got into Austin why Marcel said, "You bought a knife in Ione, but I won't charge you anything for it." So the Green Monkey didn't give me anything after all. But it was quite a trip. After I moved to Austin I went to work for Dr. Mann and he was a great Spanish-American War veteran. He called me orderly and everything was military but I would sweep the office and clean up around there and he called me orderly. Among other things, he had a lot of boxes in the back-and so he had me chop them up and I forgot to tell you about Mrs. Cervasci that took our pictures in Berlin, but we'll come back to that later, see? Here's one of them right here. She was a nurse and she had moved to Austin. She had a little clinic of her own up by the school house so he wanted me to cut this kindling and take it up to this little clinic, or hospital like. So. lo and behold, it was Mrs. Cervasci that had been in Berlin and had been Dr. Bruton's nurse too. We'll come back to that later.
DAVIS: How much were you getting paid?
BRUNER: Twenty-five cents a Saturday. When we went to Ione that time I was moonlighting. I was also cleaning around the office there for Dr. Mann but he wasn't there when I left because we left there about noon so by the time I come back he had gone away from Austin so he still owes me twenty-five cents. (laughing) When I went to take these kindling up to Mrs. Cervasci's he bought me a nice little wagon down at Dalton's store, a beautiful little red wagon that pulls. So I was very pleased with that. That was good. At one time when I was cleaning up outside, A. P. Maestretti had a lot of friends and this Italian guy was a friend of his and he had an infected thumb. So Dr. Mann cut the thumb off and of course they only used chloroform then and he chloroformed him and A.P. Maestretti was there him and they cut it off and I could hear this Italian moaning. Apparently he wasn't clear out or it was hurting him and he was cutting his thumb off. I don't know how he cut it off, whether he sawed it or not but the next time, when I was cleaning up in the back burning up the papers and stuff here was the thumb (laughing) out there so I finished burning it up out there. When we moved to Austin I didn't remember coming in on the train or anything when we went to Berlin originally so they said that the train came into town down at the depot which was about a mile below town. So I decided to go down and see it. I went down there and they were unloading express and freight and stuff and the old engine was a puffing and steaming. I was up in the brush. I figured there was room enough for them to turn around if he wanted to and I was up the canyon. So after they got everything unloaded and he rang the bell and toot, toot, and kind of took inventory. Maybe I'm a little close, so I run farther up the canyon. But, anyway, they used to just go back and forth and switch, and turn the cars around so that they could go the next morning. They'd arrange the coach in the back and the empty freights there in the canyon floor, so I didn't have to run: Then later we used to like to go there and we'd sit in the coach and they'd be doing their switching and they'd pull this coach back and forth and we would ride just across the canyon and back while they was switching. Then the highlight was when they got through they'd run it over to the roundhouse and there was a turntable there. They'd run this engine on a turntable and then two or three guys could turn it around and we'd help turn it around. That was big, too. We used to go down there when the train'd come quite often. There was three buses that met the train. One was from the Watt Hotel, Francis McGiven took the passengers to the Watt Hotel and another guy, Steiner, had the bus that took the passengers to the International Hotel. He had a livery stable there. Francis McGiven had a drayage and livery stable on farther down the canyon and then just below that was John Recend--he had a livery stable. John Recend's bus--these others were two long seats on each side and a long bus is what they were, but John's was kind of like the old time stage coach. He'd set up in the front and it was all yellow. He being a Portuguese he favored yellow, I guess, and one of the guys say, "Watt Hotel, Watt Hotel?" And the other guy say, "International Hotel," and old John, "Any place in town twenty-five cents." The other guys were charging fifty. He didn't exactly monopolize it, but he'd get a passenger. This one time we'd go down there to see the train and old Tom Griffin was the station master and he liked kids and he'd talk to us and everything. So we'd go down to meet the train and see what was going on. If they didn't have very many passengers these buses'd let us ride up. This one day there was very few passengers along. So they let me ride and I don't know who else was with me, why I might even have been alone, but he went all through town and this lady didn't get off. She was a tiny, beautiful little lady. She didn't get off and then after he had delivered everybody uptown he turned around and she was going to the cat house. So he then went down and delivered her at the cat house and so we got a long ride that time. Not too long afterwards--she was very popular--and there was jealousies or something. Somebody shot her and that's when I learned to respect the dead. It was Decoration Day and we were taking flowers down, walking down. When this funeral caught up to us Mrs. Alec Dyer made me stand off to the side and take my hat off and she sympathized with the girl. She said, "The poor girl," and sympathized with the girl which was nice. It showed that you were supposed to respect the dead regardless of their station. There was a Chinaman right alongside of this variety store and his sign said, "Lee Kee Ham Chung Company Restaurant," and he was an old, old Chinaman, Lee Kee. He had a boarder that was named Madden. He was a mining engineer but he drank a lot and he was out of a job most of the time, but Lee Kee would feed him all the time. He'd come there and eat and Lee Kee fed him and respected him and when Madden got all the money that he had comin' someday he was gain' to pay Lee Kee's passage to China. Lee Kee and I'd get out there and talk together and old Marcel in the afternoons would lay down and sleep. He had his bedroom in the back of the store. Lee Kee was crabbin' about somebody was killin' the cats. He had a whole bunch of cats 'cause he'd feed 'em and every stray cat would stop there back of Lee Kee's restaurant. He said somebody was killing these cats, he didn't know who, and I didn't say anything. But Marcel thought I told him that he was killin"em, which he was. He was puttin' poison out there for 'em (laughing) and so he give me hell. And I said, "Well, I didn't say anything." But that didn't convince him, but, anyhow, that was all right. He promoted me to seven and a half a month then which was good pay. But the kids guyin' me all the time about exercising these cork legs was more than I could stand so I quit him. Not too long afterward he took strychnine and committed suicide. Poor old Marcel. He was a nice little guy.
Then I went to work for Dalton. I'd deliver for Dalton's variety store and he was a very kindly guy. He liked kids and everything was wide open. We could go and look at the newspapers but we'd always fold 'em and put 'em back. Any toys he had there or anything we could pick 'em and fiddle with them, too. He was a druggist and one night when Mother had a miscarriage and it was in the middle of the night and we called Dr. Clark and he in turn called Dr. Heinzmann. Then they sent me down to the drugstore to get something they needed--they came to the house. When we called Dr. Heinzmann, he had me go get Dr. Clark--that's the way it was. Years afterward when he had moved to Battle Mountain he run across somebody that was from Austin and he says, "I sure felt sorry for that little boy." He said, "He was sure leading me as fast as he could." So then they sent me down and I rousted old Dalton out and he give me a prescription. J.M. Hiskey was Stokes representative in Austin and his office was in the Wells Fargo Express office. He was over all of the railroad and what mining interests that Stokes had. There was no parcel post then--so the erxpress office did a big business and the express was very cheap. A. P. Maestrestti's nephew, George McGinnis, uncle to McGinnis here at the radio station, came up to the house one time. Dad had a two-wheel cart and a horse so he came up there and he says, "Ask your mother if we can use the cart and horse and go up to the brickyard." The brickyard was right on top of the summit where they had made the brick for the town. Mother says, "Okay, but don't go swimming." It was early in the spring and there was snowdrifts all around. So when we got there the water looked awful good so we built a fire and took our clothes off and. went in swimmin' and then we thought well, maybe the other water's a little deeper so we picked up the fire and the clothes and moved and we went swimmin'. When we came out my clothes was just darn near all burned up. So here we was, there was the evidence we'd been swimmin'. So we was comin' down the hill and George was drivin' and I was lookin' over the side like this and the wheel was a rollin' in the mud and a big clod come up and hit me in the nose and I started bleeding. There was no way of mopping it up or anything (laughing).
We's goin' on down, me half naked, and who do we meet but Gladys McIntire and Helene Trollson, two young ladies out for a Sunday walk and I was stuck on Gladys. I was hoping old George'd go by them. But, "Whoa," and he got to talking to the girls and here she was looking up at me and me all blood and the clothes burned up. I didn't make too good of an impression, I don't think. (laughing) What a guy goes through. I was all over blood, of course, when Mother saw me, all over blood, she was pretty scared but she saw that I was okay why she didn't do anything about it.
I was quite a trader. We never did have any money. Dad was out quite a bit of the time without no work and he would cut wood or whatever he could. But this one time why there was a lady came from the orphanage to the school and she said that they were hard up at the orphanage. She gave them an envelope and asked all the kids to go home and get a donation, whatever they could get. Most of the them only give a nickel or a dime. I remember when we'd go to church we'd give five cents in the collection. I told Dad what it was and told how bad off they were and Dad had a fifty cent piece in his pocket and he says, "I've carried that a long time," but he put the fifty cents in the envelope which was very nice of him. I probably brought the biggest amount and we was the poorest of the bunch. Yeah, poor people are generous. Yeah.
But, like I say, I was quite a trader and I would pick up old socks, unravel them, and make balls and then I'd sew 'em up and I would make pretty good balls and I used to trade 'em to the other kids. I remember there was a couple of kids there their father, Triplett, was the editor of the Reese River Reveille and I don't remember the boys' names now but I'd give anything to be able to contact them. But one of them, we called him Soupbone (laughing), that's the only name I remember of him and the other younger one I don't remember his name. But old Soupbone Triplett had lots of toys and I used to go there and play with their toys and like I say I'd trade around. Well, Dad never was too mechanical and every time he shaved all hell broke loose. He couldn't sharpen his razor. I remember one time he was really raving and Mama says, "Well, let's see if I can sharpen it." So she took it on a file, mind ya, and done something and it shaved him. Of all the wonders, it shaved him and so that saved the day. Then there was some kid named Marvin Porter and he had a Gillette safety razor. I guess he just picked it up from his dad, I don't know. His dad drove for Lander Livestock. He was a chauffeur and they were left alone a lot of the times. The wife'd go and these kids'd be left alone. He had this Gillette razor and I traded him out of it. I don't remember what it was I traded for him. Probably some balls or whatever else I could make look attractive and I took that Gillette home and that ended all the shaving problems. After that Dad would shave and peace reigned in the house. This Marvin, he was a nice boy, he went duck hunting down on the river and accidentally shot himself with a shotgun. Of course, kids'll have fights. Auntie was very restless, so they went hunting for greener pastures and they went and worked for Flanigan--Flanigan, the town north of Reno. He's the man that started the Reno power, light, and water company. And then they had been in Verdi. He worked in the lumber mills there awhile. Flanigan was a sheep man. But, something or other, they came back to Berlin and that was just before it shut down. So of course my cousin, Ted, come back and he was very world wise. So when we went to Austin he said, "We'll have to fight because they haze ya when you come." They called it hazing. Newcomers are supposed to prove themselves. So, I and everybody was suspicion and finally why Willy . . . I can't think . . . Anyhow he was a real peaceful little kid. He and I got in it and of course I had to fight and after that why I was all right. But there was a kid, Butch Hogan, he was quite a fighter and we was pretty well matched and the big kids liked to see us fight. They'd say, "Well, Butch whipped ya." "No, he did not." And I'd tell. "Butch, Firmin knocked the tar out of . .” "Well, he did not." So here we'd go again and we'd fight like hell and then a week or so later we had to prove it again. So we did a lot of fighting but one day why I was going home and I don't know it was a bigger kid. I think his name was Chick Prietta. He was a bigger' kid and he picked on me and we was fighting and I was kind a getting the worst of it but Ida McGinnis come along. That would be this guy's aunt. She and her sister, Marguerite, come along and they saw us fighting there and it was a unequal fight so she got swinging her bookcase and we whipped the tar out of old Chick Prietta.
DAVIS: How did it come about that you left Austin? -
BRUNER: Dad was working at New York Canyon which is six miles north of Austin and they were only paying three and a half. Up at Ione, Mercury Mining Company, quicksilver outfit, was paying four. Auntie and Uncle Felix was already up there so Dad decided to go up there but before that, one time, I was still working for Marcel and when I went home in the evening why Mother said, "Your dad forgot his lunch and I sent Bingo"--my brother--"with the lunch to take the shortcut in case he went down through town and maybe he could meet him down at the other end of the hill with the lunch." So I started out looking for my brother and it was five miles out there and we both got there. He was there just ahead of me and I got there, too. It was way late at night. So we was sitting there in the change room at the mouth of the tunnel, settin' and a guy come out to put some wood in the stove at the change room. His name was Fuller and when he saw us there why he took us down. By that time the company had established a boarding house and bunk houses at New York Canyon, so he put us to bed in his bed. Well, I didn't sleep very good. I was worried all night and I knew Mother'd be worried and I didn't know what to do. Uncle Shorty used to gamble a lot. He made his living gambling quite awhile there in Austin and so he came home late that night and Mother told him that we were both gone so he went down to the livery stable and got a horse and come over there. They told him that we was in bed so the next morning we got in the cart with Dad and came home. He was quite a gambler but there was fellow named Cooper that was kind of the owner of the tenderloin district down there and it was kind of nip and tuck. They was gambling, the money would change back and forth quite a bit. But anyway finally old Cooper cleaned the Basquos out of a thousand dollars and he took off for San Francisco and spent it. So the Basquos never get a chance to get it back. (laughing)
There was a Indian uprising while we were in Austin. Some Indians had killed a man and there was a quite a uprising and they had quite a time rounding up these Indians. Us kids, we was real brave. We'd go up on the ridge where the Indian camp was down below and we'd stand there just defying them and on the way back, somehow or other, why we passed Dick Jones' house. Dick had been a foreman over at New York Canyon and so as we came back there was Evan Jones. He was a kid and he wasn't too popular. Well, we got in a fight and I was trying to hold him and he had a rock and he was hitting me on the head. Well, if he'd a hit me anywhere else I probably would have collapsed but on the head (laughing) it didn't bother me. About that time his dad come out and boy, he took after me and did I go! Then later when the town of Carroll, opened up they made a strike there [Carroll Summit] why Jones got Dad to take him out there to get a job. Dad was out of work right then, so Dad got the cart and a horse and he took him over there. Well, soon as he got him over there old Jones just forgot all about him. There was nothing there and Dad didn't get any job so he came back to Peterson's, that's Brown Station now. He stayed overnight there and this old gal had gone over there to start up a business too but (laughing) no business there so she rode back into Austin with Dad in the cart. I remember Mom and Dad quarreling. Well, "he says, "we didn't do anything.” (laughing) They was a quarreling about him bringing this girl back to Austin.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the Indian camp? What was it like?
BRUNER: At Austin? Well it was a long canyon just below town and the Indians was camped down in this gully down there.
DAVIS: Now they had tents. What type of tents?
BRUNER: Well, tents. They all had tents. Those days the Indians had tents.
DAVIS: Do you remember any Indian kids?
BRUNER: I don't recollect any Indian kids going to school in Austin. I don't recollect any. In Ione they did.
DAVIS: But there were some Indian workers?
BRUNER: The Indians used to work. Yeah, they'd work out and pick pinenuts or whatever. They'd work if they had to. They weren't too ambitious about working. They kind of liked their natural life better but they would work out.
DAVIS: And you said they purchased their tents, I mean they were bought tents?
BRUNER: The tents were all bought tents.
DAVIS: They all had ponies?
BRUNER: Oh, yeah, they all had ponies. There was a great big Indian. He had goiter and his neck was out just about as big as his jaws and he was the head Indian. I don't recollect his name, though. I wish I could.
DAVIS: How many were in the encampment maybe?
BRUNER: Oh, I wouldn't say much over twenty five or fifty or something, just guessing at it, not too many.
DAVIS: And they were known as what tribe?
BRUNER: They were the Shoshones. All those Indians up in that area were Shoshones and these down here were the Paiutes. Dad went to Ione and got the job there. Billy Cislini came in with a load of empty beer bottles to be returned to the brewery and we loaded everything up in his wood wagon and we started out, Billy, my brother, and I. The next morning my mother came on the stage with the two daughters and we made it to the home ranch the first day because it was late. Then the next day we made it to the Whooley place and when the stage come by the Whooley place my mother had got sick so they left her off there and we all stayed at Whooley's that night. Those people on the river were very generous. If you went by mealtime you always had a meal. They'd call you in and all of us stayed here that night and they fed us and they didn't charge us anything. But Billy and I and my brother, Bingo, we slept in his bed during the night and of course Billy was a young man then, he was about twenty-two I guess, Billy Cislini. He would sing I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now. That was one of the popular songs. So then we moved on to Ione.
DAVIS: Let's go back now to Berlin and Unionville 'cause there's a few things that we missed there.
BRUNER: One morning after I got up I went down below town in the brush.
DAVIS: Now this was Union Canyon?
BRUNER: In Berlin. I was looking around like a kid would, interested in whatever you could see, and my mother called me for breakfast but I didn't go right away. So she came out the back porch and hollered again and held up her hand kind of threateningly. So I didn't think I wanted to get whipped that day so instead of going home I went over to Union Canyon. Willy Wing was . . ..we always thought he was half Indian and half Chinese but later he made himself all Indian so he'd get the Indian benefits in Sparks. So in the book that I wrote I wrote that he was an adopted son of Sam Wing, the Chinaman that had the saloon there. He had a saloon in the lower part of Union Canyon. So I went over there and of course, they fed me and Willy had lots of toys and everything was okay and I was supposed to sleep in this old house in the lower part of town. We went down there and we stripped the lining off of the walls, picked up a few sacks and made a bed and I was supposed to sleep there. I often wondered, after it got dark if I ever would had the nerve to go down to that old deserted house and sleep but I didn't get that far. In the evening when the wood wagons came by with the load for the boilers at the Berlin mill they'd stop there at Sam's to have a drink and old Sam put me on one of those wood wagons. So back I went to Berlin. Boy, I was a meek little boy that went down the street. I didn't know what was going to happen, but when I got home Mother greeted me cheerfully and well, a mother's love is boundless. I'd run away but I came back.
DAVIS: Now this was Sam Wing?
BRUNER: Willy Wing, the boy, was tied on a horse at one time and the horse bolted and his back was injured. So he always wore crutches. We used to go out and burn brush sometime. I remember we went out south of Union Canyon one day and we was burning brush, just having a big time, and one of them finally says, "Golly! There's a lynx cat!" And we all bolted. We run for town and purty soon we heard somebody bellering and we looked back and here was Willy trying to catch up with his crutches so we run back and kind of coaxed him on so this lynx cat wouldn't get us. (laughing)
In Berlin they had a miners' union hall there and they had a union there, Western Federation of Miners. And the parade badge is over here in the museum. You turn one side it had American flags and a number of the Union and the other side it said, "In memoriam". You turned it over and put it back on the pin and you wore it in case of a funeral. So they used to have dances at the miners' union hall there and the McCombs lived in Grantsville. They had two daughters, Louise and Frances McComb and when they'd have these dances in Berlin why they would play accompaniment on the piano and the stage driver, Ed Derringer, would play fiddle and they'd have dances there. They'd put candle grease on the floor to make it slick and play Sweet Evalina and Whippoorwill Waltz, I don't remember any other ones, but they played those. The old man McComb had a few head of cattle and they raised vegetables and they would peddle them around . Berlin and he bought a Winten automobile. He found out that it was too much for him so he sold it to Louie Cirac. The Ciracs was a big family there. There was Louie and Leon and one of them even had the Stillwater hotel later. He sold this Winten to Louie Cirac. He was a kind of a promoter. I don't remember Old Louie ever working, but anyhow he bought this and so they'd come over to get the mail in Berlin, a mile, and then they'd take the lower route just down below Berlin and take a little longer ride back in. Of course the old Winten didn't always make it home but I remember this first ride I had. It stopped down by old Sam Wing's saloon and at recess or at noon I went down there with Willy Wing and Louie the boy and they got the car started. When they got it started why they said, "You guys pile in." So I got in the back seat and it was just like riding on a fleecy cloud. It was so soft and I always remembered that what a fleecy cloud it was. But usually it was broke down. They used to have a lot of tire trouble so we'd go and buy rubber to make flippers, ten cents, or five, I don't remember which it was. So the tire part come in handy.
DAVIS: From the tubes? You bought the rubber from the tubes?
BRUNER: For five or ten cents we'd get enough to make a set of rubbers and we'd make, we called them slingshots. Marie Cirac is the daughter, and I were in the first grade so we set together up at the school and then there was the Douglas boys and there was a number of them. I got a list of the guys here that went to school at the time. Because they were trying to discourage drinking, I guess, they had these charts and it showed the inside of a man that drank liquor and it looked like a raw beef steak. That should have discouraged any of us from drinking liquor. Here's the school kids that was there. There was Clinton Dixon and two girls walked over from Grantsville, Beatrice and Carrie, Jim and Harry, Jean and Winnie Stevens, the mother run a boarding house at Berlin. They were originally from Salt Lake and apparently the mother and the husband broke up and she came to Berlin and she had this boarding house there. She had two other boys. Dave had a few cattle that he ran around Berlin and made a living at that and she kept boarders. The kids' names was Jim, Harry, and Jean and Winnie. Winnie married, I can't recall his name now, but he later run, until recently he run the fish hatchery in Verdi. But we used to walk from Berlin to Union Canyon and the school house was at the upper end of Union Canyon so it was about a mile. If we started out all together why I'd get there in time for school to take up. We carried our lunch in a five-pound lard bucket and one time I took the sugar over instead of lunch. (laughing) Jim, Harry, and Jean, Winnie Stevens and Hattie McCary, that was later Hattie Dyer, lived here at Stillwater. Do you remember her?
DAVIS: I remember the name.
BRUNER: Ted and I and then there was Louie and Marie Cirac and Joe, Claude, Roy Douglas. The Douglas boys are still here. One of them worked for the telephone until recently. He was one of them. At that time just Joe and Claude and Roy went to school. These guys came later and then one of the mine foreman's boy's name was Alfred Kelly but we always picked on him and we'd say, "Alfred Kelly with a buckskin belly and a rawhide tit," and boy, the fight was on.
DAVIS: (laughing)
BRUNER: Lady there that was a kind of a nurse and she took this picture here. She took pictures to supplement her income. Her name was Servaski. Bruton was the doctor there and he was a very good doctor. He carried the satchel with him and took care of the people. If it was too far away they'd have to come after him with a wagon and he stayed in Berlin till after it completely went out so then he moved to Austin and he had a office kind of back across the canyon from the court house and he didn't have very many customers and I guess he was plumb broke and anyway one day he told somebody there that he didn't have hardly any patients and those that did have couldn't afford to pay him. So he committed suicide and it wad very, very sad that he did because he was a very good man.
DAVIS: How did he do that?
BRUNER: He shot himself. It was back of where the bank was in Austin. Where the bank was used to be a blacksmith shop and there was right behind that he had his office and he shot himself. Infirmary there in Berlin, just a cot in case somebody got hurt or something. I went over there and he pulled a tooth for me one time.
DAVIS: What was Ione like?
BRUNER: Ione had been dead from way back but they discovered quicksilver out of Ione. One was two and a half miles and the other one was five miles out and they produced a lot of quicksilver. One of the company's name was Mercury Mining Company from San Francisco and the other one was Nevada Cinnabar Company. They were from Salt Lake and they built furnaces there and extracted quicksilver and it shows here the brick yard. They made the brick right on the job, built these retorts. They were huge, oh, I'd say about ten by ten brick. It stood up about fifteen feet.
DAVIS: Now, they dug clay locally and made the bricks right there?
BRUNER: Yeah.
DAVIS: They used local clay?
BRUNER: To build the bricks. They burned them. It shows a picture of them making them here some place. Dad went to work for the Mercury Mining Company, quicksilver outfit, two miles and a half out of Ione up in the Shamrock Canyon. Then we went to school there. They started school, they had run the school for a month or two just before June in order to get it going. Before that it'd been all shut down and so then they started school and we started there. I think I must have been in the fifth grade when we got up there and moved up there in 1912.
DAVIS: What kind of a house or where did you live there and how . . . ?
BRUNER: Our house was mud and willow with dirt roof and it had two rooms and a little room made out of boxes and stuff like that.
DAVIS: Did they weave those willows or tie them together when they made them?
BRUNER: They had posts stuck up and then they had willows nailed on to them and they filled in with mud in between. I went to school there. They brought a teacher from West Virginia and that was Bill Phillips' mother. She was a very good teacher and I went through the eighth grade with her, but by her being a good teacher our education was just about as good as the high school is now. After we went through the eighth grade why we didn't have no money for me to go away, so I went to work at the store there. A fellow named Nate Shapiro--he was a Jew--and he's the only Jew I ever. knew that worked in mines. But he worked up at the Mercury and so Fred Schmaling decided to move to Fallon. Walkers--you know the Walkers here? Mrs. Walker was an adopted daughter. He married the widow. We didn't have money for me to go to high school so we thought that we would kind of review the eighth grade but then Nate Shapiro bought this store and offered me a job. At first it was weekends and I was going to school. And then that wasn't too satisfactory and he said that if I'd quit school and go steady he'd pay me forty dollars a month. So I went over to Reese River and Bill Pfeifer had a horse and a buggy over there and I went and got them. So that was my job then delivering in the surrounding area. Business got good. Things picked up and so then he bought a big wagon and another horse. This teacher that had been in Union Canyon--they have relatives here so I won't mention the name--that we went to school all the time and had to take the first grade over again. She wanted the job and, of course, they didn't want her. They wanted somebody else there. People knew her and they didn't want her. So they hired Clara Jo Hendricksonher from West Virginia and she was an excellent teacher. She taught us all kinds of other things beside school and then she married Harry Phillips. Harry was Bill's father.
DAVIS: What was his line of work?
BRUNER: His line of work was bringing in the horses. He had a whole bunch of horses and burros. His mother had the boarding house and she supported them and all he did was bring in the horses.
DAVIS: From where?
BRUNER: He'd turn them loose out in the hills and he'd bring them in once in awhile, look them over, and when he brought the burros in why we'd ride the burros over there in the corral and get bucked off and all that stuff. Then, of course, after he married her, why he got rid of the horses and had cattle which he should have done all along. But as long as the mother was running a boarding house why there was nothing to worry about. She was boarding there with Mrs. Phillips. We made our own fun. We played Ante Over and she taught us to make, well among other things we made a hammock out of strings and all that kind of stuff. Anyway Mother was sick, so I used to have to wash the clothes. At noon when I'd go home why she'd have everything ready and I'd wash a few duds. But my hands'd get all white and wrinkled from the water so on the way to school I'd get off and scrape them in the dirt so I'd look like I was a he-man. (laughing) So then Mother was ruptured and they decided to take her to Tonopah. In fact, Sadie Bell over at the Bell Ranch was sick and they brought the doctor from Tonopah and on the way back he stopped to see Mother and he told her to go to Tonopah. So Billy Cislini loaned them five hundred dollars and they went to Tonopah and she had the operation there and while they were gone why me and my brother and two sisters was alone there. So I was the chief cook and bottle washer and, like I said in the book here, by the time I got anything cooked they could've eaten shoe leather and thought it was good but it was the best I could do. Mostly we had lots of eggs 'cause we had chickens and potatoes and stuff like that, but nobody crabbed. We got along real good. My cousin, Ted, and Auntie kind of looked after us, Gregoria. But she used to make me wash our own clothes and stuff but to soften the blow she'd make Ted wash their clothes. Ted wouldn't bellyache, so we'd wash clothes side by side there. I'd comb the girls' hair and all that. We got along real good. Then eventually why Mother came back and she felt better. These mines work sporadically and for some reason he [Dad] went to work at the cinnabar mine and then, of course, he had to board up there. It was five miles out of, a little farther out, so he stayed there.
DAVIS: How often did he get home?
BRUNER: He could come home anytime he had the horse. He'd come home quite often, but in the meantime Uncle Shorty'd come down too and that was the big-day. My brother and I and sister slept in the one bed because there was only two rooms and a kitchen and he'd sleep with all of us and that was a big thing. It was a little bit crowded in the bed-so we'd take the clothes out and lay them in the kitchen and we'd all sleep together with Uncle Shorty. In the morning he'd get up real early and walk the five miles to camp. To show you the values not knowing anything about the outside, I thought the ideal life was to be sitting in one of those bunk beds, working and earning money and somebody'd say, "Well, Firmin is a nice man." That was the ultimate. We had a very narrow vision of life, yeah, very narrow vision. After we finished the school, though, I worked five dollars a week for Nate and he said, "Well, if you go steady, I give ya forty dollars." So then he got this team and I would deliver all over the area. If it was too far, like Goldyke; I'd go down one day and come back the next with these two horses. I used to deliver all over. One instance was where Jim Travaski was a kind of a, well, he drank a lot, and his team was just as balky as he was, so in order to rest the two horse that I had, there was deep snow why I took his team up to Johnny Dick's wood camp. Johnny Dick was cutting wood for these furnaces. DeLampa and Cislini had the contract and he was working for them. They sent in this order for some groceries. So I thought, "Well, I'll give the other horses a rest because Nate was feeding these horses anyway," so we went up the canyon. We encountered a snow drift and it was about belly deep to the horses and it was snowing cats and dogs. So the horses decided that was far enough. They were balky. They had balked on old Jim once before and they wouldn't go so he had a axe in there and he cut one up a little bit until the other guy that was with him grabbed the axe and run away with it. So the team was just about as balky as he was. But anyway they decided that was far enough. I couldn't make them go. So finally I decided well, I'd unhook the tugs. So I unhooked the tugs and tried a makin ‘em go and finally one of the horses stepped a little farther ahead and the tongue dropped out of the neck yoke. Well, when they found out they was loose why they went up to the end of the snowdrift and come back. So then I hooked them up again, traces and everything, and then I unhooked the traces and I spoke to them again. Well, they were a little bit skittish but it was all right. They took off pretty good. So we made it up to the end of the snowdrift and back again. By that time we had a pretty good trail broke through. So the third time I didn't unhook them but I had a club. This was right alongside of an old barn there that had been an old camp and (laughing) I had this piece of two-by-four and the minute they started going I played Yankee Doodle on them and didn't give them time to think about anything else and we made it in good shape. But another time I was delivering from across the valley to Elsworth. There was a little activity in wolframite . . . scheelite at that time .
DAVIS: Wolframite?
BRUNER: Yeah, wolframite is a certain kind, scheelite is another. They're both tungsten. At Elsworth I had some more to go over to the Bruner mine so I took the back roads there and I was going down this gulch and all at once the horses stopped. I realized that we were bogged down almost to the horses' belly and up to hubs in soft ground there in this gully. It was a narrow gully and the horses wouldn't go. While I was trying to coax them to go a guy showed up on the bank alongside of me and he said, "Let me show you how to make those horses go, Lad." So he stepped over from the bank onto the wagon and took the reins and he asked their names. He spoke to one and the horse stepped forward and he held it back and then he spoke to the other one. He did that two or three times and then he called both names and they pulled us out. I never did see the man anymore. I never saw anybody around there that knew of him being around. If I had ever seen him I would gladly have given him a bottle of whiskey which is a very acceptable gift at that time but nobody ever saw him so sometimes I almost believe in miracles. Winter time when the snow was deep why instead of the wagon we had a homemade sled. Just a couple of two by twelve runners and a deck on it and I would deliver. So if the snow was deep why sometimes I'd use this balky team along with the regular team and the front team would break trail and help. One day Jim Preston came over from the Bruner mine and ordered a bill of grub. The next day we started back and, of course, me being a kid everybody'd that ever rode with me didn't think I could drive so he was driving. We was going through this gully full of snow and we decided that if we got up on the side of the road, the side that ran through the sagebrush, it might not be so deep. So he went to pull out and the runner caved in on the sled. After we pulled out we unloaded everything and we peeked around in the snow and we found a rock. We turned the sled upside down and drove the nails back and put the runner back on and then turned it back over and drove the nails back on and away we went. But anyhow when this thing caved why I always had a optimistic view of things anyway, and I started to laugh and he says, "Kid, if I had your disposition I'd live to be a hundred years old." So I'm kind of pretty close to that hundred myself now so that was a good thing.
But, anyhow we delivered the stuff and then, of course, I went back by myself. Another time Jim and Bruner came to Ione to get mail and some groceries and the mail was late. It had snowed quite a bit and on the way back they came to a pitch. They didn't have any chains so they had to get out and shovel to the top of this little pitch. So after they shoveled why they came back and started going and the old radiator was froze and it started to steam. So Jim told Bill, he says, "Well, all we can do is just hike back to Ione." So they hiked back seven miles and stayed overnight. The next morning we got some water and wood and stuff and went out and built a fire and thawed things out and went on. Well, a number of years afterward when I went to work for Bruner, we went to Luning and there was a bitter cold night and when we left Luning we got off four or five miles and the radiator started to steam. Bill says, "Golly," he says, "we'll have to walk all the way back to Luning now." And I said, "No." I got a canvas out of the back of the car and put it over the hood and everything and just let the motor idle and pretty soon it got circulating. Of course, we always carried water then because you had to replace the water in the radiator all the time. So we replenished the water in the radiator and Bill didn't say anything for a long time. Finally about the worst language I ever heard him say was, "The sucker," he says, "the sucker. To think that he made me walk seven miles when that's all he had to do!" A very nice man.
I used to use pretty foul language sometime being a kid. I remember a few years ago out here across the flat and he was driving. We's going along and I was describing something that was homelier than I don't know what and I used some kind of a word and Bill didn't like it. So he had been a railroad man--he knew all the language all right--he didn't use them. He says, "Well," he says, "if you want to be nasty about it, why don't you say it was homelier than a handful of Chinese bung holes?" Now, that would be quite a sight, a handful of that. (laughing) Bill was quite a guy.
We made it back to camp. Well, I kind of jumped ahead of myself on that but I'm still talking about Ione. After they got the car I delivered with this little Model T and I'd go to Mina and the narrow gauge'd come over from Bishop and bring vegetables up. I'd pick them up off of the morning train on the narrow gauge and bring them to Ione to sell them. One time I was just leaving Bruner, I hadn't gone to work for Bruner yet then and the hind wheel dropped off. It broke the axle. Bill took me to Ione and took the vegetables and stuff, too, in the company pickup and the next day John Abby was working for Bob Johnson that had the saloon. He and I come over and we took the thing apart. We had an axle because I had broken one once before. So we put it all together and loaded what stuff we had left there and he said, "Okay, go ahead." So I pushed on the low pedal and went backwards. I pushed on the reverse and it went forward. (laughing) We hadn't noticed which side of the pinion gear the ring gear was and it fit either way so when you'd go forward it'd pull the wheels backward. So he says, "Well, it's too late now. I'll go on and you follow me in reverse and we'll fix it tomorrow at camp." So I went out about a half a mile and, of course, in reverse you had to hold the pedal down besides all the time you were going and it was about half as fast as low and I thought, "Well, I'll just back around." So I turned around and threw her into high gear and I come into Ione just a little ways behind him. It was about fourteen miles. I backed up fourteen miles. That was a long backup. Well, just behind him here I come in high gear up the street in Ione. (laughing) Everybody looked at me coming up that street backwards. But I had a lot of experiences with that pickup.
DAVIS: What kind of an automobile was it?
BRUNER: It was a Model T. In low you had to hold your foot on the pedal and reverse. The first trip I made to Fallon I come here and got ten sacks of potatoes. I'd had a little trouble so I was late leaving the garage to go out and I went through West Gate just about dusk and I got up the canyon and lost a wheel. So I walked back to West Gate and asked the lady and the guy that was running the pumps for Fairview--if I could stay overnight so I stayed there overnight and she fed me supper and breakfast and the next day--he was a kind of a mechanic--we loaded some stuff and I had an axle with me so we put the axle in and I started out. Pert near every summit at that time had a sharp pitch at the last and it wouldn't pull ten sacks up there so I unloaded five and took five up and unloaded them and come back and loaded the other. By the time I got the last sack--I was just a kid and nothing to eat all that morning--I didn't have much strength but I finally got the last sack in and we went to Mud Springs. There was a little station there then so for fifty cents I got dinner and then I was good as new again.
DAVIS: Where was Mud Springs?
BRUNER: Mud Springs was between West Gate and Lodi Valley, the head of Lodi Valley. Tucker's Well was up the head of Lodi Valley. Discovered that a snake would commit suicide. I was coming out of Luning and going down and I saw a snake. So I got out and chased it and it went into a bush and every time it'd try to come out I'd throw a rock at it so it'd go back in. So then I set fire to the bush and he came out and saw me there and he just turned around and bit himself and in no time at all he just stretched out dead, committed suicide.
I was going by Austin and I was a little lazy. I didn't check the oil. So going down the river I got worrying about it so we stopped at Welch's home ranch and she was the only one there. I asked her if she had any oil. "Well," she says, "I got some linseed oil here." Well, that was better than nothin' so I poured the linseed oil in. So I went into Austin and they were dealing with Austin Commercial. I got a load of stuff to take out for the store there and I told Christian about it. I says, "I'll have to get a gallon of linseed oil to give Mrs. Welch that I borrowed." "Oh, yeah," he said, "that's all right. Even water would do." He'd just bought a car a little before that so he knew just about as much about a car as I did, if water would do. I returned the gallon and then sometime later I was going back to Mina to get these vegetables and there was two Swedes wanted to ride to Mina. Coming down out of the canyon I hit a rock that was in the middle of the road covered with a bush and knocked the plug out. So, we lost all the oil. One Swede says, "Golly, if I was where there was some tools I could fix that." So I walked to Ione which was a mile or two and got a guy and a team and we towed it to Berlin. There was still a few tools around there and he drilled four holes and he got a little piece of copper plate but he peened it too thin and it got a slight leak. But we had five gallons of oil so we headed for Mina, drove pretty well all night those days and it was pretty well in the morning and I was sleepier than the devil and comin' along and all at once they let a war whoop and here I was headed for the bank into the wash. (laughing) Well, that woke me up all right so then we went into Mina and of course we had to put a new crankcase on. There at the garage he took it apart and we looked inside and it was coated with rubber coating. That linseed oil got hot and it just coated the whole thing with rubber, looked like, so he was scraping that off and a guy come in and he says, "Golly, what happened there?" And the garage man says, "Well, he was coming down the Luning Summit which was really steep and a tire blew out and he couldn't stop and the tire went up through the exhaust pipe and got in the crankcase and got all chewed up." The guy looked at it and he says, "Golly! What a mess!", went out and, of course, we laughed. Well hardly anybody knew anything about automobiles them days. That was believable. Yeah, this tube came up through the exhaust pipe.
Sometimes I would get the vegetables at Luning and sometimes at Mina and this one time I got them at Luning. I started out and the thing'd keep cutting off but I'd have enough speed I'd put it into low quick and it'd start up and it'd get going again. So I got into Ione Valley and was going down this gully. Then we had to crawl out of the gully and we went down on the plateau toward the center of the valley and going up this narrow gulch it quit on me. I cranked and cranked and it'd just shoot a couple of times and wouldn't go. So then I decided--it was about twenty miles hike--we had carried a rifle because there was rabid coyotes then. I got the rifle and started walking. I looked back and thought, "Well, maybe if I tried it once more I might get it going." Well, it wouldn't do it. So then I thought, "Well, I'll turn it around and head down, put it in low gear, and it'll start." It did, but what amazed me years afterward I went up in that gulch and I don't see how in the world I turned that thing around by hand because it was just barely wide enough for the thing. But a kid can do a lot of things. Then I thought, "Well, it won't go up the hill so I'll go on down the gulch." Well, it's a good thing it quit right away because I'd really been fouled up if I'd a went down the gulch. So then I didn't know what to do and I took the plug out off the magneto. The magneto was the flywheel included. The flywheel had magnets on it, great big magnets as big as my fingers' vee like that and then the coils were stationary and these magnets going around would make the electricity. So I took the plug off where it came out of then flywheel case and there was a little lint on it off of the brake bands and I thought, "Well, lint won't short it," but I cleaned them up and put them back in and tried it again and away it went. I figured I was the best mechanic this side of the Mississippi. (laughing). They had a spelling bee between Reese River and Ione.
DAVIS: That's while you were going to school in Ione?
BRUNER: Yeah, while I was still going to school with Miss Hendrickson. Millie Pendry and one of the Schmaling girls were reviewing the eighth grade because they didn't have money enough to go to high school same as me. I went to work. There was a girl named Evelyn that was very pretty. In fact she was the ultimate. (laughing) We went over there and we had this spelling match and everybody got spelled down except my cousin and I on one side and Evelyn on the other one, the one that I thought was really pretty. The word was "tractable" and she was in the seventh grade and we were in the eighth. She spelled it with an "i" and Gil Phillips' mother says about me, "Firmin was so surprised that his mouth just dropped down that she would miss a word that easy." Well, it wasn't that. It was either I had to down her or I knew my cousin would down her, so I finally swiped her off. Yeah, I downed her, but it wasn't easy. I can tell you that.
They wanted me to go to work for the Kansas City Nevada Consolidated. That's at the Bruner mine and I was getting sixty dollars for the store in Ione but they offered me fifty dollars and board so I thought that the opportunity was greater at the mine so I went to work for the mining company. I hauled from here. .
DAVIS: From Fallon?
BRUNER: Yeah, out there
DAVIS: To there.
BRUNER: And it's amazing the difference in the roads. At that time it took eight hours with a loaded truck to drive this seventy-two miles because the road was full of chuck holes and there was half a dozen roads that went alongside the other, you might say, where one'd get chucky and then somebody'd drive . . .
DAVIS: Was it any surface or was it all just gravel and rock?
BRUNER: Just natural. Like coming in one time why we'd started another road and there was tracks over it but there was brush in the middle. This brush broke the crankcase in my truck. It was an aluminum crankcase and it broke. It broke a chunk out and cracked it. So well, there I was, the other side of Frenchmen's but we always carried extra oil and cup grease. We used cup grease them days where you screwed them down. So I got thinkin', "Well, I got this cup grease and I got plenty of rags and balin' wire." So I got this rag out and I smeared it with cup grease and I put it under that crankcase and wired it tight up against the crankcase up above the oil level and I drove into town with it. Yes, sir. Then we had to get a new motor, of course. It was a secondhand truck that we had and they could get a new motor.
DAVIS: What kind of an old truck? Do you remember?
BRUNER: It was a Case. Made by J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company. It had a starter on it. In Austin this salesman was selling--I forget what the name of it was-but there was no starter on it and the other one had a starter. Of course, people would say, "Well, this Case's got a starter on it." "Yeah, but it's no trick at all to get out in front and just give it a half a turn." Well, that didn't work out. This one had a starter on it.
DAVIS: So how long did you work for them?
BRUNER: I went to work for them, I think it was the latter part of my sixteenth year and I worked 'til along about 1919 when the mine closed down. Then Bill Bruner, the manager out there, and I, moved into town here. We was down here where the propane is now down by the railroad track.
DAVIS: That's on A Street, B Street?
BRUNER: Yeah, and so he bought this house and we moved there and I went to work for the Ford garage.
DAVIS: Mechanic?
BRUNER: Yeah. I was a very poor mechanic, but . .
DAVIS: (laughing) Who was the boss down there?
BRUNER: At that time, Benadum owned it and Ed Shafer was the foreman. Ed Shafer and Tillie were good friends and so old Ed Shafer would ransack the till and that broke Benadum. Finally Mrs. Benadum says, "Either Ed leaves this house or I leave." So Ed had to move on. (laughing) [Tillie Caselton was Benadums daughter; Tony Caselton's wife.] Tony and I worked out at the oil wells when they were
drilling for oil. Bill Bruner would ride to Fallon with me in the truck sometimes. He'd come in with me and sometimes stay in town and I'd pick him up the next trip. So after I-'got back into camp one time why here he come with an eight cylinder King car. He bought that so that I could go over to Reese River and take these Pendry girls out, in fact Evelyn. Of course, I was bashful and I didn't do anything about it so he went to Ione and he got old Watson that worked at the store to call up Clear Creek and make an appointment for me to take those girls to the dance. So I went up there with this King Eight and took them to the dance. But I never did learn to dance and so I was dancing with somebody--it wasn't Evelyn--I don't think I ever danced with her--but probably Millie--and old Schmaling says, "Hey, you'll have to do better than that." I was very conscientious so I never did dance anymore.
DAVIS: What was your King Eight car like?
BRUNER: It was one of the few eight cylinder cars at that time and it was quite sporty lookin'. In fact if you took the top off of it and put it back it was really sporty.
DAVIS: It had a folding top?
BRUNER: Yes, I'd take it down when I'd take it out or go anywhere and Bill didn't like it that way and he'd put the top back up when he used it. But he bought it special for me and Bill was a nice guy. He loved me just like his own kid. He never bought a suit of clothes but what there was a suit for me and he had been an alcoholic and many a time when we'd come to town he'd say, "Kid, stay close to me," because he was tempted to have a drink. But he straightened up, yeah, he straightened up. So he and I moved on to this house down here. He used to buy clothes for me. Woodliff run the store over here and everything that they had that they couldn't sell they'd try to sell to Bill. So one time he come out with these leopard skin button shoes. Well, I refused them. Then another time he bought me a pair of coveralls. In those days you didn't take the coveralls off if you wanted to go. You just had a dropseat like . . .yeah, you remember that?
DAVIS: Not really.
BRUNER: They charged him six dollars and I thought they wasn't worth over a dollar and a half them days but, anyway, Bill paid six dollars for 'em and brought 'em out. Then, I don't know whether he bought that hat or I did, but, after I'd worked there awhile you got up to eighty dollars a month but I thought I should have more money. So I asked for a job building the mill. They were just building the mill there.
DAVIS: The mill?
BRUNER: Up at the Bruner mine. They piped water across eleven miles. They didn't know anything about drilling them days and built this mill. So, anyhow, I got this hat. He must have got it for me and I wouldn't wear it. It was the damndest looking thing you ever saw. So this tall guy and I were up on the roof laying down the roofing and old Bill Pfeifer was down there framin' lumber and I'd given this hat to him. He was glad to get it and so he looked down and he says, "Golly, I wonder where Bill got that c. s. hat?" I never said a word. (laughing) I didn't say a word. (laughing).
Bill Pfeifer got arrested when he was in Austin before he came to work for us. He got arrested for giving liquor to the Indians. So he had to go to the prison and while he was in prison why he and some others made these canes made out of cattle horns and [my wife'll] show it to you in a minute and so he sent them up. He wanted five dollars apiece so Bill just sent them all back except one and sent him five dollars. So I still got the cane. After the prison term, he came out and he was working there as a carpenter and timber framer and the old guy didn't like to go outside at night. So he made a hole through the wall alongside of his bunk so he didn't have to go outside. The guys next to him objected to that (laughing) so they went out and put some pins in the tar paper outside and so the next night when he tried to use the thing why there was a surprise and nobody made a sound. We all pretended to be asleep. But the next day he went out and plugged it up. Yeah, that was enough for him.
The company boarding house--we had quite a few men there--so we'd have hogs. When it come time to butcherin' why Bill Pfeifer was the only guy around there that knew how to butcher. So it was a red letter day for old Bill. He strutted around there and we'd run this hog down. This one hog, in particular, we'd run him down and laid him up. Bill Pfeifer had stuck it and the old hog was quiet and we's about to dump him into the hot water to get the bristles off of him and Ed White come along and Ed says, "That hog ain't dead." (laughing) So he finished stickin' it and then we went to dump him in the hot water and got the bristles out. Well, there was a fellow named Nelson there, Alvin Nelson, and we was usin' spoons to scrape the things off and he thought that maybe the safety razor'd be better (laughing) so he went and got the safety razor. But before we had calmed the pig down why he and I was holding the legs. We had a rope around one of the legs and Nelson decided to change hands someway and he stuck the rope in his teeth. About that time the pig give a kick and he jarred some teeth loose. Well, he didn't get them clear out but they did set back in again.
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