Firmin Bruner Oral History Part 2 of 2
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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.DAVIS: Okay, today is November 1, 1991. I’m Bill Davis and I’m back talking again with Firmin Bruner. Okay Firmin, can you bring us up to date here?
BRUNER: In 1917, my folks decided to move to Fallon. He and Billy Bell had been working for the Nevada Cinnabar Company, a quicksilver mine in Ione, and they were getting salivated. When you get salivated from breathing the fumes at the furnace your teeth all get loose and eventually they'll come out. Their teeth was loose but they grew back in after they were down here awhile. So they decided to come down and try farming. Neither one of them knew anything about farmin', but they bought the cattle from A.E. Grennel and leased the ranch out in the St. Clair District. So they went into the dairy business. It was close to where Tommy Pflum lives now. I don't think the cattle were very good butterfat cattle because they didn't make anything there. They had a few turkeys, but they seemed to be lousy. So one day Billy Bell come in from town and he says, "I found out what'll kill the chicken lice on the turkeys," and he brought home some lye. So instead of puttin' the lye on the roosts and stuff they proceeded to put it on the turkeys and, of course, they all died. Mom said it was pitiful to see what those turkeys went through before they died.
During the haying season my sister, Georgina, was about twelve years old, and, of course, they gave her the job of driving the derrick. Driving the derrick is one of the most difficult jobs in the old style of haying because you had to back up the horses and carry the traces back and the horses usually were pretty hard to make back up. Then you drove them forward and they picked up the hay with a Jackson fork and hoisted it on the stack. But each time with each load you had to go through this procedure of backin' up. One time poor Georgina was doin' the best she could but it didn't suit Billy Bell so he said, "Well, Georgina, we'll tink about da hay, about da sweetart after da hay." (laughing) I don't think that made Georgina feel too good.
During that time the veterinaries didn't seem to know too much about cattle ailments. We lost several of the cows because they had impaction. Of course, probably, they didn't get first class crops either because they didn't know too much about irrigating and in that time Mom got real sick. They said it was typhoid but I doubt that it was typhoid. See, I wasn't here at that time. I was still up at the mine. Dr. Lehners that built the house where Berney's real estate office is now was his office and residence. Dr. Lehners brought her out of it. Billy was a good-hearted guy but while Mom was sick and things were goin' bad, he went into the bedroom one day and he says, "Well, Mary, don't worry about the money. I got account in two banks. We got plenty of money." Like I say, I doubt that he had a hundred dollars combined in the two banks.
After that they decided there wasn't enough in the one place for the two families. Course Billy was single then. So they decided to split up. The Grennel place was a good ranch, good heavy soil and Dad wanted Billy to move, but Billy wouldn't move. So Dad rented an old shack over in the Sheckler District between the Mills and the Capucci ranch. It was just an old shack, all full of cracks and when the wind blew the piles of sand inside were almost as big as they were outside. So, Dad went to work temporarily feeding cattle for Art Downs, then he worked for Wightman and then he also worked for Henry Miller that lived on Harrigan Lane. Then they decided they would buy this place. So the first thing they had to do was build a house and Fred Schindler built this quite large house with three small bedrooms, a big kitchen, and a big front room for one thousand dollars. It had redwood siding which was supposed to have been fancy stuff. It did turn out that this redwood siding was a benefit because prior to that every town that we had ever lived in had bedbugs and the bedbugs are pretty smart cookies. Dad used to put tomato cans with water in and put the bedstead legs into these cans. Well, that didn't bother them any. They'd just go up the wall and get up on the ceiling and then drop down. I can remember Mom and Dad trying to kill these bedbugs but when you turn the light on the bedbugs'd all scamper and try to hide. About once a week we'd have to take the bedsteads outside and scald them with boiling water and the smell of these bedbugs was just terrible.
DAVIS: They put kerosene in the water too?
BRUNER: No. They probably did someplace, but we didn't have no kerosene because at that time we didn't have any kerosene lamps. We used candles then. After that the bedbugs left and that was quite a relief.
DAVIS: Because of the redwood,
BRUNER: It seems like. After that we never had any bedbugs. You never hear of bedbugs anymore, but a bedbug wouldn't bite me so they didn't bother me and I don't know why it was.
DAVIS: Now you said there was about eighty acres in that ranch?
BRUNER: Yeah, there was eighty acres and fifteen acres were leveled. The price was six thousand dollars. Well, we didn't have the six thousand. We had one thousand dollars to pay down. I helped the folks until I was forty years old. Dad never did (laughing) make the place pay so then I went in partners with him when he was about to lose it. Only fifteen acres in and we used to irrigate with four feet of water and we had a lot of washouts. When they would see a washout start Dad would holler for my brother, Bingo, and Bingo would lay in the water and then Dad would shovel against my brother and that way they stopped (laughing) the washout. Did you ever experience anything like that? Not in your day?
DAVIS: No, we put brush and everything else in. Now you said there was a lot of sand hills on the place?
BRUNER: Yeah. For instance, this ranch was the last ranch that was homesteaded in the Sheckler District. The one sand hill, for instance, started near the Sheckler Road, and extended, oh, three or four hundred feet back to the corral. It was so high that coming from town – the house was quite a tall affair – but you could just barely see the little ventilation window in the gable end on the roof and the house was quite a tall affair. So that gives you an idea how high the sand hill was. Well, Dad went to work trying to level it. He bought a tailboard scraper which was a new invention at that time. George Spryer that had a blacksmith shop on West Williams was the inventor. He had it patented and he used to make a lot of them, even ship them to the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Some of them were real long. Oh, I'd say they would be around twenty feet long. They dragged the dirt along. You'd just get a load in front of it and drag it. Dad had a smaller one that he pulled with four horses and he wore out four sets of horses trying to level that ranch. It was quite a headache but finally we got it almost level before we finally sold it. The place hadn't been proved up on yet so we all got out of it was the privilege of homesteading it. So that's what Dad had to do.
There was a few cows on the place and I later worked with a man named Wilson. We bought it from Mobley and Wilson said, "I did the thing that I was never ashamed of so much in my life." He said, "Mobley had me come over and chase those four, five head of scrub cattle off." After we'd paid (laughing) him six thousand dollars for that darn thing. Well, we paid a thousand down and the rest we borrowed from my uncle in Austin. You never want to borrow from a relative because there was times when that ranch wasn't worth the mortgage on it. (laughing) The soil was so light that we never got over a fifty per cent stand on that ranch. One time Rebol came over and we had just levelled and planted four acres in between the house and the road and he said, "That's the purtiest stand of alfalfa I ever saw." That night there wasn't a spear standing. The wind came up and killed every one. It seemed like the wind blew more at that time. Probably because there wasn't any trees or somethin' because it just blew hard it seemed like every Sunday. It just seemed like it'd wait for Sunday and it would blow and so we had a lot of trouble. But, in later years, why, a fellow told Dad if you planted a nurse crop wait 'til June or else wait 'til July when the winds wouldn't blow so much why you'd get a better stand. But the soil was so light that we hardly ever got better than a fifty per cent stand on it. One time hay came down to four dollars a ton and butterfat was down in proportion. I don't recollect what it was but butterfat was down and Dad didn't know anything about grading cattle. He thought if a cow gave a lot of milk that that was all that was necessary. So our cattle wasn't very good butterfat cattle.
When they first came down, Dad came down with his horse and cart and I don't know how Billy came down. Maybe he came with Dad and left Mom up there at Ione. After awhile I brought my brother, Bingo, down. They would pasture their cattle out in the brush. Bingo's job was watchin' those cattle. There was another kid named Jim Smeltzer that used to have their cattle out there so they would bring their cattle in every night. When I brought my brother down we went into the Barrel House and had somethin' to eat and I bought him a root beer. They had a big root beer barrel on the bar and it seemed like it was a wonderful world to him (laughing) drinking this root beer and having a dinner at the restaurant. So then I took him out the ranch.
I was still working for the Bruner mine. So eventually after they got the house vacated so we could move in, I brought my mother and my two sisters down with the company pickup that belonged to the- mining company. We left there in the morning and started out. We had sandwiches. It was quite a job to come in here at that time. Ione was fourteen miles beyond the Bruner mine and Bill Bruner used to brag that there was no one could beat his time coming in to town the seventy-two miles in four hours. So you can figure how the roads were. You only went a little ways 'til you almost had to come to a stop on account of a chuckhole or something like that and the cars didn't have any shock absorbers and once you hit a chuckhole you bounced for about another twenty feet (laughing) and almost threw ya out. I don't remember where it was but Mother used to remember about a hitch hiker we picked up. Well, it
started to rain. Mom had (laughing) a parasol and this pickup just had a wagon-type body on it, no top or anything, just a seat (laughing) and we was all clustered up trying to get under this umbrella but the old hitch hiker took a little bit more than his share we figured, so some of us got kind of wet. But we finally made it in but it was quite an ordeal.
One time when I came in for a load of freight I decided to go out in the evening and not knowing about the mosquitoes I took (laughing) off across the field in order to order to make the journey a little shorter. Well, the mosquitoes just about carried me away all right. Yeah, I learned a lesson there. It was bad enough on the road.
Dad got almost all of it leveled off but it seemed like, he not being a farmer, he just couldn't make the place pay. So I held up the deficit until I was forty years old. In fact, I figured, "their debt, my debt." In the meantime I had a family too so between the family and her folks who needed a little help once in awhile too, I never was out of debt 'til I was forty years old. That's quite a thing.
I stayed up there 'til they came down in 1917 and I stayed at this mining camp 'til about 1919 I think. And the roads were terrific, like I say. Especially the Four and Eight Mile Flats. If it rained they were just a mud puddle. There was a small grade that had been thrown up in the early days by Fresno but the big teams rolling over it, in a lot of places it was even lower than the surrounding area. The road maintenance was very poor and they got to wondering how they could gravel the Four and Eight Mile Flat. Savage Tire Company sent a man out and he camped on Four Mile Point and his job was to fill sandbags and have somebody that was going by pick up this sandbag and drop it in a chuckhole some place (laughing) and they figured they'd eventually get the thing graveled that way. Well, he didn't have too much luck so they called him off. Irving Sanford, Sr. was driving stage for Benadum to Wonder and one day he says to me, "That guy needs a separator." And I says, "What does he need a separator for?" He said, "To separate the hot air from the baloney." He didn't use that word, but apparently he was a pretty good talker.
Finally, along about 1918 the state hired a drag line and he started out on this end of Eight Mile Flat and went clear through to Sand Springs on one side casting the dirt from one side to the middle and then he turned around and went back from the other side and cast it in, in order to widen it. Well, between the holes on each side and the bank it looked like was a high bank. Well, it was plenty high all right, but it was narrow. Only about a one-way road and every quarter of a mile or so they'd make a little wider space so people could pass. So if you saw anybody comin' it was a good idea if you was near one of those wide places to wait because if it was real dry you could pass one another with a light vehicle. But if you had much of a load why it was pretty hard to pass. If it rained it was impossible to pass over it because it was so slick. A fellow named John O'Connor, that had worked for the mining company when I was up there, moved to Rawhide and he and a friend of his was coming into town one evening. He had a Model T and it had been raining and he tried to cross on this road. Well, he slipped off into the barrow pit and landed upside down. So after they landed he says to his partner, he says, "Can you get out?" and the guy says, "No," he says, "the front seat is across my legs and I can't get out." And O'Connor says, "Well, something will have to be done
pretty soon." That was the last thing he said. His face was pushed into the mud and he was drowned there and they laid there all that night. The next day somebody went by and saw the thing and they got this partner out. Well the seat had been across his leg and cut off the circulation. But apparently it didn't cut it clear off because after they brought him into Miller's County Hospital out here on Sheckler Road, why after a long stay he recuperated and they didn't have to amputate. So it didn't cut off all the circulation. But that shows you how bad that was.
Whenever it rained, even before that grade was thrown up, we used the sand road. You took off to the left at Salt Wells and skirted the flat all the way around but if the sand wasn't wet why it would be pretty easy to get stuck. So if the sand was wet you could make it. So that's the way we used to go. To illustrate how treacherous this original grade that had been thrown up by Fresnos: Tedford used to be the hauling contractor from here to Fairview and Wonder and he would subcontract a lot of his hauling, too. Bert Sales had a wonderful eight-horse team that he used to haul with. Another, Cherokee half breed Indian--I can't recall his name now--(laughing) he had asthma so bad he could hardly talk but he had a whole herd of little scrawny things, I think he had about twelve of them. (laughing) Every other word was a swear word but he hauled pretty good loads with them scrawny old horses. He'd sleep under the wagon. Well, they had to if they had a long haul. Then Tedford bought a Holt Caterpillar with a tiller wheeler in front and he had two wagons tied behind it. Walter Dudley was driving this thing and he got out just on to the Eight-Mile Flat and down he went. So I made a trip to town and got back two days later. He was still blocking and jacking trying to get out. He eventually got out all right but it was quite a job getting out. If you broke the crust there's nothing underneath. So that shows you how bad it was. [He had a] smaller tractor that he used to haul out to the Bruner mine then and the charge was twenty dollars a ton. One winter we was short on machinery and the mills began to be almost finished so we paid him thirty dollars a ton that time. You know that was pretty good money.
DAVIS: They put a wagon on behind the tractor?
BRUNER: Yeah, you just pull these wagons. Well, these long string teams--you're familiar with it--but in case somebody that doesn't know. Usually the summits had steep slots in them. In that case instead of pulling the two wagons they would drop one and pull one to the top, then go back and pull the other one up and connect up. It was quite an ordeal. When they came to a steep hill they couldn't rely on the brakes too much so they would put rough locks on them. Have you ever heard of a rough lock?
DAVIS: No.
BRUNER: Well, a rough lock is a thing that has two sides on it, just a piece of iron about, oh, two feet long. In front a heavy chain is hooked to that and then the chain is hooked to the bed of the wagon just ahead of the back wheel. You set this rough lock in front of the wheel and then you pull up on it and then from then on it just drags. That wheel stays stationary. The funny part of it is that usually the hill would also be sidling but you had to put the rough lock on the sidling part which made it look more dangerous, but if you put it on the other part the rough lock would have the tendency to pull into the center and that would your back wheels over the bank. So teaming was quite a chore.
In order to control a team on a jerk line with say sixteen, eighteen horses you had a single rope that went up to the lead horse on the left side and from the lead horse's collar to the lead horses on the right side there was a light pipe connection and that was connected solid to the right side horse's bridle so that he had to follow this lead horse on the left. If you wanted the horses to--say we came to a forks in the road and you wanted the horses to take the right-hand fork you would holler, "Gee. Gee, whatever the name was." For instance "Gee, Buck, gee," and if he didn't respond too quick you'd jerked on the line. You just really jerked it and that hurt his mouth so he knew what that meant so he would turn to the right. Well, if you wanted to turn to the left why you just pulled on the rope steady. Then the horse would take the left-hand road. The teamster didn't ride in the wagon. He rode the wheel horse that was connected to the tongue and they had a rope that fastened from the brake and onto the saddle on the wheel horse so if he wanted to set the brake he just reached back and pulled on the rope. A lot of times they'd walk too but then when he wasn't walking he would ride this wheeler. They were usually large horses and capable, pretty strong. Mules weren't quite as flighty as horses and they made better team horses because they wouldn't get too nervous and they seemed to stand it better and they had big mules. They bred them up and they had big mules. A lot of people wouldn't know how you procure a mule. A mule is a cross between a horse and a burro and in order to have the larger mule you would need a big horse. A mule can't reproduce.
[tape cut] Drove truck up at the mine. I stayed up there until about 1919. The mine didn't pay. When they run the first batch of precipitates why it lacked three thousand dollars of paying the payroll. It was a Kansas City outfit. So then Bill Bruner, the manager shut it down and paid the labor off out of his own bank account and we moved into town. Before that it was quite a chore freighting over this road with the hard rubber tires that usually didn't even have a tread on them. They were smooth. When it was snowy and so forth it was quite a chore getting over some of the snowy summits. For instance, one time I left Fallon here in the afternoon and I went around the sand road and I only made it to Sand Springs that night and I stayed at Sand Springs. A fellow named Brock was running it and he had a catalog bride, a picture bride, and the looks of her would stop a eight-day clock but that lady could cook. They always had a lot of people stop there to eat. So the next morning I got up and left Sand Springs. Eight o'clock that night I was still about four miles from camp. I'd battled the snow all day long. I twisted off a drive shaft and I was relieved to think that I could get home finally. (laughing) So it shows you how difficult the roads were at that time. Like I say, with a little runabout it was nothing faster than four hour drive.
To show a little of the camp life why we all had bunkhouses. There was only one lady in camp and that was the stage driver's wife that carried the mail from Frenchman Station to the Bruner post office. His name was Walter Bean. He was Ray Weaver's brother-in-law. After he left there Ray Weaver took over and he carried the mail. His brother came out there to work in the kitchen. Finally after the company bought the second truck they used the first little truck that had been made by taking the back wheels off of a Model T and putting sprockets on them and then there was a heavy frame with solid tires that had chain drive. You would bolt this Model T frame to that truck and it made a ton truck out of it. After they got their second truck they used that truck around camp so they promoted Ray's brother, Ferla, to a camp truck driver. This old Ford had the habit of jumping out of gear. It had a gear transmission that would lower the gear ratio way down to where you could of climbed a tree with it.
(laughing) He was going down this steep hill toward the mine and it jumped out of gear. Well, the brakes wouldn't hold so he banked it and tipped over. He bent the frame, the wishbone and all that stuff was pretty well shot. So the next time in town I took the parts out and he put it together and he says, "I wasn't worried about myself. He said, "The foreman was riding with me," and he says, "I was afraid he'd sue my folks if he got hurt." After he got it fixed, he went down to the bottom of the hill and turned around and came back. When he got up on top of the hill and started coasting down this long slope toward camp it jumped out of gear again. Walter Bean happened to be looking out and says, "Here come Cully with his eyes sticking four feet ahead of the radiator trying to keep that thing in the road." (laughing) I went to work for the company at fifty dollars a month and board. I had been getting sixty dollars and outside expenses at the store in Ione but I thought that the chances for advancement were better at this mine. So I stayed there until they raised my wages to eighty dollars and board. Being that the folks was so hard up I was trying to help them. The way we had to make money to go to the show and stuff was I'd go without eating (laughing) in order to buy the ticket and the next day I'd buy a box of crackers for fifteen cents and I would charge the meals out just the same so that way I made spending money. But I usually sent the full check to the folks which were trying to get established here. It took about eight hours traveling with a loaded truck to cover the seventy-two miles. The roads was terrific. The mining companies were very adept at collecting the poll tax. They used to collect poll taxes. This poll tax was intended for improving the roads, but very little of it went on the roads. They'd send a man out once in awhile like Charlie…
DAVIS: How did they collect that? Put a man on the road or what?
BRUNER: The mining companies was real good about collecting it because they'd let the superintendent keep part of the collection. It was a dollars a head and they would keep part of it so the superintendent usually saw to it that everybody paid poll tax all right. If you couldn't produce a receipt from another job why you got docked a dollar. But they were very good about putting up signs at all the crossroads because a lot of people would be walking looking for a job. In case they got confused and took a wrong road it would be disastrous. There was a fellow walked into Ione one time and there was no work in Ione so he decided to go on to Phonolite which was fourteen miles. There was deep snow on the ground. When he got pretty close to Phonolite somebody come along on horseback and gave him a drink of liquor. Of course he was pretty tired so he sat down to rest awhile and he went to sleep. The next morning they found him and he had pneumonia. They brought him back to Ione and built a fire and put him in one of those vacant cabins up the creek and you could hear him breathing real loud. He died that night.
DAVIS: Who saw to it that the signs were put up?
BRUNER: In Nye County there was a man named Derringer that had a ranch over on Reese River and he would put up signs. Once in awhile if a bridge or something broke or something he'd go and fix it.
DAVIS: Did he do this on his own or was he reimbursed?
BRUNER: Yeah, they reimbursed him.
DAVIS: The state or the county did, the county probably.
BRUNER: He made signs by getting a piece of galvanized sheet and he would make holes to make the mileage and the names of the towns. After we quit up there and shut the mine down as far as Bruner was concerned we moved into Fallon here to a house where the Petrolane outfit is down here. We bought that from Fred Frankie, he did, and I went to work for the Ford Garage and I worked as mechanic there for awhile and then they made me night man and I would stay there all night.
DAVIS: Who was running the Ford Garage and what was it like?
BRUNER: C.L. Benadum owned it and they called it the New Dorris Garage. It was a very good make of a car at that time. So I was night man there. Dr. Dempsey would come in occasionally and sometimes he'd have a flat tire to fix. I'd fix it and then he'd get his stethoscope out and listen to the tube and see if it was leaking after I'd patched it. There was a guy of a prominent family that used to come in there and he'd come in just uglier than a bear. His temperament would be terrific and I'd go out to wait on somebody and I'd come back into the office and he'd be in good spirits. So one day he offered me some snow but I didn't take it. (laughing) He belonged to a very prominent family here in Fallon.
DAVIS: Now you said snow--that would be …?
BRUNER: Well, it looked like it was white stuff to me. I don't know what it was. He offered it to me so that explains why his mood was changed so quickly. I was night man there until Benadum went out of business. But before he went out of his business, his son, Orry, Oroville Benadum, got married. Wonder had shut down at that time and he bought a house up there and he had Ed Kellond go out and take it down in sections. So he sent me out there with a Dorris truck and trailer and we loaded that on and by the time I left Wonder and came on to Eight-Mile Flat--we didn't travel the grade, we just traveled alongside of it 'cause it was dry weather--it was just about dark and I went down in one of those soft crossings. I worked all night getting that out. The next morning at daylight I pulled into the Grimes Ranch and asked that fella if he had any gasoline. I knew I was pretty well down on gasoline so he drained his Model T and gave me the gas to come on into town. Orry rebuilt the structure out here right across from the Oats Park School. Then after he sold out--he sold the Ford agency and everything out--course one of the reasons that he went broke was Ed Schaeffer was the foreman there and he was accepted and lived with the family. But he kept digging in the till and finally it broke him. But Benadum's daughter was stuck on him although she had a husband and so she never would reveal this stuff. So finally Benadum went broke. After that they started the oil drilling out here.
DAVIS: In Stillwater?
BRUNER: Yeah, Stillwater and all over. They had one at Stillwater, one on the divide between Eight-Mile Flat and Stillwater, Big Four here on the Crooks' ranch, Syndicate Oil Company out there on the Jones and Jewell Ranch. Those were the main ones. Bill Bruner put up the first five thousand dollars so that they could order the second-hand machinery and get going. That is they gave him stock for it. I went to work out there driving truck hauling water for the boiler from Stillwater. Pump it by hand and haul it out there. They had a driller from Wyoming and he used manila rope instead of cables. The rope was practically two inches in diameter.
DAVIS: Big rope?
BRUNER: Great big rope. Something happened to his drill pipe down at the bottom. So he decided to put a charge of powder on there and open it up but the drill wouldn't go by. It got witched. So that was the end of the drilling as far as he was concerned. From then on he was afraid to go through it on account of his manila rope. He was afraid to jab it in as it'd cut the manila rope and he just pounded and pounded and pounded and we'd bail out chunks of pipe that'd been pounded up into pieces. About the time they went broke they let him go and they had the crew come over from the Lahontan Oil Company which was on the saddle between Eight-Mile Flat and Stillwater. Art Reid and Wakefield--Wakefield was the tool dresser, so Reid put on steel cable and so--I had stock in it, too (laughing)--five hundred dollars worth--and I was working for nothing trying to keep it going. I came with a load of water one time and Tony Castleton, after Reid left Wakefield was the driller and Tony says, "We've hit it, we've hit it! Come out and look at the dump." And we looked out there and here was long strings of black oil. Come to find out, after that steel cable had had tar coating on it and got down in that warm water the tar came out and we was bailing out a tar pit. So it was a disappointment all right. But, I worked there 'til they owed me five hundred dollars and then they discontinued. They didn't have any more money. After that went broke I went to work for Lahontan Oil Company and it was financed by a madam in Reno so they was pretty well fixed for money. We was down below two thousand feet there when we left.
DAVIS: Where was that?
BRUNER: Right on this ridge between Stillwater and Eight-Mile-Flat. We had gas there. When the bailer was brought up it would be bubbling and if you touched a match to it it would burst into flame. That was down around two thousand feet so that was pretty well down. Over here at the Jones and Jewell area they've had gas near the surface there for years. Even before they started drilling there they had gas there. So they call that tule gas so we thought that it was just a bunch of tules that'd been covered by dirt. They [Syndicate Oi Co.] went down the deepest in the area. They went down to three thousand feet. Wingfield was interested in that and it was rotary tools. The others were cable tools. Anytime we thought we made pretty good headway why the Big Four would either catch up to us or exceed us and it was kind of nip and tuck. Course everybody was trying to sell stock in the deepest one. They [Fallon Oil and Gas] struck oil south of Stillwater at six hundred feet and it was real fine refined looking oil. But they only kept it open about two days and then they cemented it solid and moved off to another spot. They'd dumped Zeroline oil into it. But the stock went from ten to fifty cents and these guys that was running it unloaded and made a pocketful.
DAVIS: And left.
BRUNER: Yeah, and one of them was a very respected business man here in town. You'd just be surprised what a man that appears to be honest will do if he sees a dollar. So they moved over a quarter of a mile and started another well, but they couldn't get any more money. I guess people found out that they were crooked so they wouldn't buy any more stock. The Pioneer Stock went from ten cents to twenty-five and Bill could have unloaded and I could have unloaded but we had faith in the outfit, so finally it went to nothing.
We went to Calingo. J.L. Heady that owned the Grand Hotel--he was a real estate and insurance man. I was working in Tonopah at that time and so they decided that they would go to Calingo and sell this stock. They got track of an outfit that was interested so they told me to come from Tonopah and we borrowed a Bush car and I was the driver. We went to Calingo, but when we got to Calingo there was a strike on there and the Cheney Brothers was the name of the trucking outfit that was interested. When they struck down there everything was very uncertain so they didn't buy any. But on the way back we stopped in Fresno and they had an automobile race there. We got to see a regular automobile race in a saucer. But during the race one car broke over the railing and landed on the outside of the saucer upside down and killed the driver. We came back, course Bruner wanted to get me out of the Tonopah mines anyway because they were very unhealthy.
So I went to work for the T.C.I.D [Truckee Carson Irrigation District] then. That was the latter part of 1921. We were working up at Gilpin. We were taking out the old timbers that were giving way under the railroad track and so we'd take out the timbers and each one--they had quite a crew there--each one'd shoulder a tie and carry it outside like a bunch of mules and set the tie down on a pile. Then we'd single file back in again. While we were waiting for the last guy to come up the trail why I sat down. Art Garner's half-brother--I can't recall his name [Simons]--he was foreman there and he says, "Don't let me catch you sitting down anymore." And I said, "Well, okay."
DAVIS: Where is Gilpin?
BRUNER: The other side of Fernley on the Truckee Canal. They had a camp there and on Sundays we'd walk over to Wadsworth and get a sandwich or whatever we wanted and come back. But if you worked all month you'd only get sixty dollars clear after paying board. So I got thinking about how I'd been getting five and a half in Tonopah because it was during the time that silver was high and the miners went on strike. This company paid five and a half in order to keep going and get working men. I was down in Bishop when I heard they settled the strike. I came up and course I looked like a kid and I had a hell of a time getting on but I finally got on and then, of course, I went back here. Then, of course, when I went back I was well known at the company. So I quit [TCID]. I was running mixer towards the last. 'After we got all the timbers out and the frames in I was running mixer. Walter Wallace was the project manager. So then I went back to Tonopah on a motorcycle. I had a motorcycle that Bill Bruner had given me years before so I went to Tonopah on this motorcycle. It was just getting dark and the lights shorted out so I was scooting along trying to get into Tonopah before dark and I happened to hit a little rut that had been made there by a car passing while it was wet and the motorcycle flipped out from under me and the motorcycle and I went scooting down the road. (laughing) Of course, I learned to say a few choice words during the time I was riding that motorcycle on these bum roads.
I changed my name--it was probably 1920. I got the citizen papers there. See I had to take out citizen papers 'cause I was born in the old country and Bill Bruner wanted me to change my name to Bruner and so I did. Bob Walker and Bill Bruner were my witnesses. Judge Guild was the judge that granted me and so then he also changed my name legally so my name is Bruner legally. It wasn't something I took to hide crime or anything. So I got my job back.
DAVIS: What can you tell me about Lahontan Dam? Were you aware of anything that was going on there or…?
BRUNER: After I left Tonopah, Bill and I went toward Death Valley and had a lease there. We worked all summer and we didn't make anything so then I came back to Fallon and I went to work for the county, and Charlie Howard was the road supervisor and Coot Rogers-the reason they called him Coot, he said he was about eight or ten years old and he'd never had a name. They'd never named him and they used to call him Tom Tit and all that kind of stuff. Finally he says to his dad, "Dad, I want a name." His dad was reading Gulliver's Travels at the time. They called him Coot too because some French general named Coot kind of took his eye and he kind of admired this guy and I guess he was quite enthused so the kids called him Coot. So then his dad told him Gulliver Coot. He says, "It makes good initials." So that's all he went by and he was uncle to Bill Boman's wife. So Coot and I were the mechanics and Whit Harmon and Glen Dudley were the truck drivers. The way I got on there was, Charlie Howard hired me because Glen Dudley had been loading the gravel cars over at Hazen. They had a trestle and a tunnel down underground and Bill Lehman had the contract of taking these horses and scraping the gravel into this hole. From this hole there was chute that came down to the car tracks. They would pull seven mine cars at a time and up at the end of their thing--it was up on a trestle alongside railroad cars, four of them, and we would dump this gravel into there and they had been taking ten hours to load four railroad cars. [tape cuts] A lot of times during the winter the day wouldn't be long enough and they wouldn't get the four cars loaded. Charlie Howard, the road supervisor, said that the man that worked there had left temporarily and if I wanted to work there why I had the job. We tended to business and we got them filled very comfortably to begin with in ten hours and then later as we got more efficient we'd load them before that. But we always got paid for ten hours. He just used that as an excuse 'cause he didn't let Glen go. He still worked for the county but he was trying me out to see if I loaded them any faster. Rogers would run the double drum hoist up the end of the trestle. He would pull the cars back by cable and we had a block in the bottom of the tunnel and they would pull the cars down and then pull them up. It was slightly up hill. One time one of the horses fell in the hole and, of course, there was no way of notifying down below that he was in there and we drained it down to where they had to shoot the horse. Lehman would hire Mike Hart and sometimes he would work instead of Lehman. Anyway old Mike Hart was a very religious man and he got razzing him about there wasn't any God or anything and poor Mike was about to be in tears so I kind of supported Mike Hart. After that he said, "That Bruner is a fine man." I wrote all about that for the county here. I'll give it to you. Describes the whole situation about how we loaded them and they brought them in and the pit they dumped them off was where the county yards are now.
DAVIS: We should make sure we get a copy of that.
BRUNER: Yeah, I'll give that to you. So, I worked for Berney on this Floriston job and . . . after . . . I went there as a truck driver. Then I went to work as an oiler on the shovel. They'd keep getting these prune pickers from California. But the snow was deep and they didn't like the snow so they'd quit. Then they decide to break me in. So I broke in. I worked four half days and the other guy wanted a twelve hour shift anyway. He left the guard off from behind the hoist drop. On that night he left a big stump up on the slope. I was getting along fine so they told me to come back and dig the stump down. Well after I dug it down we couldn't even raise it with a chain. So they told me to go ahead and start digging again. As I was moving--I don't know whether I didn't have the brake latched good, or I was nervous and tripped it with my foot. Anyway, the bucket dropped and he had taken the guard off behind this drum and the cable got unwound and there was frictions right behind it going around. One of them caught that and jerked out a casting. So then they decided that they were behind on the yardage and they put me in as a mechanic so then I was mechanic and I sharpened steel and did all that kind of stuff for them. Every once in awhile though I'd get a day or so in as operator while they would replenish the guy that left so toward the last I got a whole week of operating and I thought, "Boy! I'm a first-class operator." So I quit and went to San Francisco.
Well, I damned near starved! I couldn't find a job. At first I was asking for a shovel job and then I was asking for oiler's job and then I was looking for anything I could find. My money was running out. I had them move me from the front to the back in the rooming house where I was. It was right on just the dividing line between Skid Row and the decent part of town. Finally there was a guy come in--I was at the employment agency there and he come in off from northern California. I told him I was looking for a job. "I'll tell you where you can get a job," he said. "You go over here to B. Rosenberg and Son, " it was not too far away, and he says, "You get a job there." So I went over there and one of the boys was doing his own repairing--it was a construction outfit--and I asked him for a job oiling. I knew I could do that. Well, they didn't need anybody. I thought, "Well, the guy told me I'd get a job," and I just felt it in my bones I'd get a job. So instead of walking off, I said, "Well,"--after we said a few words--"what do you pay oilers?" "Well, we paid them four dollars." "Well," I said, "I wouldn't even work for that." "Well, what would you want?" "I'd want six dollars." "Okay. You show up in the morning and I'll take you out there." In going out we was trying to get up on Van Ness Avenue off of a steep road and we had a blowout and he didn't have no spare so we was running on the rim and we couldn't make it. He'd go back and he'd get a run and I'd wait for him and push and finally we made it over. Well, he took me out there--it was on Pacific and Webster--so I worked there as an oiler. At night why I'd do oiling after the shift and during the day I kept grade real good and they liked me. This old Dutchman he kind of liked me. One night he came there to do a little repairing and he said, "You said you was an operator. Let's see what you can do." Well, it was an entirely different kind of machine but I got up and I picked up a bucketful or two. He says, "I can see you've operated. Next time the guy on that other shovel gets drunk you've got the job." But, in the meantime, they sent for me to come back to Floristan and he says, "Kid, I canned the other two operators. If you want to come back and finish the job, it's your job." So I came back and finished the job. I'll tell you, it was tough going down there. I couldn't get a job. A.M. Castle had an ad in the paper. They wanted some help so I went there and they had a big glassed-in office in the middle of this warehouse so we sat around like a bunch of pigeons on a bench. When it become my turn I went to the window and he says, "This ain't a warehouse job." Well, that didn't help my feelings too much so I just got to where if you'd asked me if I could shovel dirt I would've said, "Well, I'll try." I was just really down. To tell you how nice people are though, while I was up at Redding I had met a German blacksmith and his name was Wagner. We called him Cryin' Bill because he sounded like he was about to cry all the time, little fella, and he'd sit on the edge of his bunk and he'd go wheezing along. He'd be talking to himself and shaving with no glass or anything and when he'd get through he'd pick up a quilt and wipe his face. One day, after I got this job, I was walking along Third Street there in the evening and here's old Cryin' Bill. So we walked around together for awhile and come time to go to bed, he said, "You broke? You need any money?" And I said, "No, I've got a job. I'm okay." But wasn't that nice of that old guy to offer me money just having known me up there at Redding for a short time while I was driving truck?
While I was working for the county the second time, Berney come along and I asked him for a job. They had just gotten this Floristan job and he said, yeah, that I could go to work for him. So I went to work there and I started out as truck driver and then they broke me in on the shovel.
DAVIS: How long did you work there?
BRUNER: I worked there two or three months, I guess.
DAVIS: And from there you went to where?
BRUNER: From there we went to Yuba Pass, and the snow drove us out of there and then we went down to southern California to Azusa and we worked building a railroad there in a canyon and then from there we came back and he'd gotten a job between Fernley and Lovelock. Andy Drumm had the job next to us. Dodge had the job one side and Andy on the other. When we finished that we shipped the shovels back to Yuba Pass to finish up where the snow had driven us out. While I was there they got the job at Zion Park on that tunnel and highway on each side so they sent me down there. I had taught Billy Williams to operate shovel and they gave the job to Billy and I went down there to this Zion job. That's where I met my wife. After that was completed I worked on the next contract that built the bridges. They were stone bridges and I did the excavating for another company. It was Whitney and Reynolds.
DAVIS: Now the bridge is in that area?
BRUNER: Yes, for this same job. While I was working for
Whitney and Reynolds it was pretty well toward the end of it why Berney's company, Nevada Contracting Company, had gotten a job down in New Mexico. They asked me to come down there. So I kind of felt obligated to them because they had broke me in on the shovel and everything. So we went down there and we worked on a dam job for the Southern Pacific Company.
DAVIS: Whereabouts was that?
BRUNER: It was just out of Capitan, New Mexico, and the pipeline run thirty miles to Carasosa. At that time they were still using steam engines.
DAVIS: Now how long were you on that job?
BRUNER: I was there from May to January then my wife wasn't feeling good and it was cold. So I quit there and came
to Cedar City, Utah. Then I went to work for Jasper Stacey Company of San Francisco on Grand Canyon. While I was there why I got run over by a truck and it broke my hip so then I came into Cedar, a 190 miles. They didn't know anything about first aid. It's a wonder I didn't bleed to death from the bones grinding. It broke my hip. Riding in the back end of a car was painful. (laughing) But after twenty-eight days--my wife had a long ways to come to the hospital to see me and was carrying our second daughter. I asked the doctor if I could go home and he said, "Yeah, if you'll stay in bed." Well, after I got home I felt pretty good and I got two chairs and I'd walk around and she was giving me the devil. But then he eventually cut my cast off. A little while after that Stacey come and wanted me to go back down and run the cleanup shovel. I got hurt on the fourth of March and the twenty third of April with a broken hip I had healed enough to where I could operate shovel. So then after that job was finished Lord and Bishop had another job down in that area and I went to work for them there. Well, I worked there, I don't know how long, two or three months or maybe and she was about to have the second child, [Norma], so I told-them I'd have to leave he said "What would we have to do to keep you here?" I said, "Well, I just gotta leave now." So I left there [in September] and came to Fallon. We built another little house out on the ranch and that was our headquarters from then on. But even then I went back to work for Berney, Nevada Contracting Company, on the job between Cave Rock and Stateline.
DAVIS: At Tahoe.
BRUNER: We dug that tunnel. Before that there was a fairway around built on stilts and it didn't look really safe.
DAVIS: Wooden, wasn't it?
BRUNER: Wooden one. It went around that bluff. We built that tunnel through there and I run shovel there from there to Stateline. From there we went to Sequoia Park and we worked there all that season.
DAVIS: On roads.
BRUNER: Yeah and we finished that job. In the meantime Berney got a job in Moapa and we went down there and worked all winter up 'til May. It just got too hot so the family couldn't stand it. So then we came back here to Fallon. That's when I went in partners with Dad. They had bills coming due so I paid the last five hundred dollars we owed on the mortgage and there wasn't any jobs around here so there was a job on Mt. Rose road and I got a frying pan and a coffee pot and bedroll and went up there and landed on one of those picnic areas. I had been state highway foreman here for a little over a year. Politics got to where they was clear up to my chin so I quit there and I went to work for Wells Cargo as foreman on their excavating up at Virginia City. I was foreman there for awhile. Then the Boca Dam was being built and there was also a job on the highway on the old original route that I had worked on in 1925. They were re-doing it.
DAVIS: What year would that be?
BRUNER: Around 1941. This company was CIO and they didn't have any operators and AF of L wanted to bring in their operators but CIO wanted to keep it CIO. So one day-I was still working for Wells--we had gone to Lake Tahoe and on the way back we stopped there in Truckee and I saw this headquarters there and I went in and registered. I didn't think I'd get on, but sure enough awhile later they called me. I gave Wells notice and I went over there. On the way up why I run across a compressor man there and I says, "How far up is the shovel?" And he says, "Are you the new operator?" And I said, "Yeah." And he says, "Well, regardless of whether you can cut her or not, you're gonna stay." (laughing) They had tried several and they couldn't cut the mustard because they didn't have any regular operators. So when I went up there why this old one-eyed guy had the shovel, warmin' it up. So I got up when the time come and I picked up a bucketful and I swung around over the truck and I swung back and set the bucket down in the pit and I shut it down for an hour and a half. Of course, I wouldn't have been able to have done that but I had worked for that company before and I knew I was solid. It was all out of adjustment. You couldn't run the darn thing. So at the end of an hour and a half I could see these guys grumbling around there, and at the end of the hour and a half we fired up and I run right straight through to noon. One of the truck drivers says, "Golly, you're a pretty good operator." (laughing)
DAVIS: You got it adjusted in the meanwhile?
BRUNER: Yeah. As I went to work for the CIO I had to join the union, of course, and they would have these meetings up there at Truckee. Red Adams was the head of the union and he was a pretty much Communist, pretty bad hombre. He says, "Where trouble is, that's where you'll find me." So they would take vote on something. One time they wanted to go on strike because the Italian men would talk Italian and this guy couldn't understand them and he got p. o.'d and he wanted them all canned. But it didn't pass. But a lot of things just as about as radical as that you'd see that it didn't carry and he'd say, "One, two, three, four," and you could tell that it didn't carry and he said, "It carried." So he'd have his own way. (laughing) Not long after he left there I see where they had him in the clink in San Francisco. He'd kind of overstepped down there some way. So after we finished that job why I had to go back there the next year. They must have shut down for the winter. So anyway they bought a new shovel. This company never would buy a new outfit but this was secondhand shovel. It was the shovel that I had driven down in Grand Canyon. So the guy come along and he says, "We got a new shovel coming in and you're going to get it." I said, "No, you'd better leave me on this shovel here. It's pretty rickety and I can handle it." I had run it all the season before with only a cracked dipper stick that laid us up until they got that stick welded. I said, "You'd better leave me." "No, no, you're entitled to the new one." So, okay, I went on the new one. So [laughing] one day the superintendent come down and he motioned for me to stop and he pounded on the deck. He says, "How is it you're the only son of a B on the job that never breaks down?" I says, "Well, I told you you'd better leave me on that other one." Both the other ones was broke down. It's been a lot of fun working for that. So from there----
DAVIS: You went to Sparks.
BRUNER: They were building the highway between the city limits and Stead Base. That was the first leg of it. I went to work there and when we finished that they had another one from Stead to the state line and I worked on that job. Then we moved to Fallon. That was in 1945. So I went to work for TCID then on drag line and I worked for them eighteen years. I retired in 1964.
DAVIS: What about those years as far as drag line? What did you do for the TCID?
BRUNER: I did all kinds of work. At times, like when Meister, the master mechanic, was away, I took over on the repairs and run drag line. During that time the tunnel at Gilpin started caving in. Before that we had timbered it up while the water was down. We had a special thing that you could pedal to go up and down. The water was down and just a little trickle. But then these timbers started washing out and they wanted to put steel arches in. So Phil Hiibel told me, he said, "I want you to go up there and take charge of putting in these steel arches and we're going to have the water running and we'll start at the lower end." I said, "No, absolutely not." I said, "Those timbers are all going to wash out. That bunch come through there you'll drown like rats." So then we started at the upper end and we'd take out the old timbers and drill into the walls. Where it was cracked bad we'd fill it with rocks and re-concrete. We had these steel arches that went out into the walls and held the ceiling up. But even there the ceilings were very dangerous. So I had Meister make a piece of pipe that we would put ahead of us just beyond the platform that we worked off of. It was nine feet of water going through there at that time. And we'd set this up to kind of hold the roof while we drilled the walls so the roof wouldn't cave in on us. Then after we'd get the braces in and cemented then we'd take this stiff leg out and move it down to the next archway.
At Lahontan the dome gate that controls--they have side gates that lets the water into this well--then down at the bottom there's a circular gate that they raise and lower to control the water. The water going around thrashing against this control rod would break the rod and everything would be down in the bottom. So then they decided to build a cement case up and down the wall of the well and encase this rod inside of it so the water wouldn't thrash around it. After that they didn't have no trouble so that was my job there drilling and putting this casing protection. We'd have to shut the water off and then the bottom of this gate used to wear out and we'd pour concrete in it to build up the base, too, you know, because where it dips off. We did that a couple of years. One time the water was high and it was coming in from one of the gates and was trying to block it off with wooden wedges and a hammer. I drank about half the water in Lahontan. But I finally got the water stopped. I sure did drink a lot of water that time. But, anyway, when we were drilling the wall we'd put iron pegs in and then fill them full of sulphur, hot sulphur. We'd melt the sulphur and pour it in to make these pegs solid to hang this covering for the column. We had a platform that we raised up and down and Walt Ferguson and I were working that afternoon and the current was going down so we was in good shape. All at once the darned thing turned around and started coming up and we was breathing those sulphur fumes. Poor old Walt was a coughing and a heaving and finally we got the guy to hoist us out.
DAVIS: What did the sulphur do?
BRUNER: The sulphur took the place just like pouring in cement. The sulphur, when it's melted, runs and then it becomes solid.
DAVIS: And it was solid enough to do that?
BRUNER: These pegs were into the wall the full length of ninety feet and that holds up this cement thing that the rod works in.
The Truckee Canal washed out there by Bango so they sent me up there with a bulldozer to try to block it off but there was too much water running and I couldn't block it off so then we got some heavy equipment and more help and we blocked it off. By having another bulldozer--they hired another bulldozer--the two of us stopped the flow and so then we built it up there.
DAVIS: Do you remember what year that was? How old was Donald?
BRUNER: In the winter time they were trying to catch all the water they could and there was lots of ice in the Truckee Canal so I used to ride the canal.
DAVIS: You rode the canal?
BRUNER: We was riding herd on the canal in case there was an ice blockage and in that case we'd run up and shut the gates but they were trying to salvage all the water they could and one of those times Donald was a little boy and he rode with me and that was the first time he'd ever stayed up all night and he says, "Dad, it sure was fun riding with you, but it's always fun to be with you," and it made me feel good. I was the highest paid man and, therefore, I was supposed to take the lead. There was a big flood came down and we were trying to keep the timbers going through the spillway and a lot of timbers coming down.
DAVIS: This was on the Truckee Canal?
BRUNER: That was on Derby Dam. Finally everything plugged up and we couldn't keep it clear. We was working out there on this boom that went out where you could walk out into the dam and then kind of push the debris out into the middle when the water was raising. We decided we'd better get out of there and we run back, quite a few of us, and just as we got to the end of the boom it broke loose. (laughing) Boy! if it'd broke loose a little bit before that it'd caught us out there. But we made it across and then we saw that we couldn't control it. So I told everybody to go home and I would stay there with Mr. Chews, the ditchride tender. It looked bad and so I stayed there for kind of morale support. Well, we were closing the gates and the wind was blowing pretty hard and we was talking real loud. So as this crew left walking across the dam to get to the car to go home we were talking real loud and Donald, my boy, who was working for the TCID thought his daddy was calling for help. (laughing) Well, the ditchrider had a bottle cached out there so he had something to come back for but Donald came back because he thought his daddy was hollering for help. The water was spilling over nearly knee deep then. That shows you how devoted he was. Well, then we were trapped there and we was sitting there. In the meantime, Couch and Phil Hiibel came by the canal road to the ditch house up on the southside. So they said, "Well, you can stay here or if you want to ride out in the back of the pickup why we'll take you to Fernley." So, okay, we decided to go to Fernley. They had left my car there at Fernley and so we rode in the snow. It was snowing and raining but we was happy because we was going home in the back end of that pickup. We got to Fallon just about daylight and by the time I took this ditch rider out to his ditch house out here why coming back Silvio had his light on.
DAVIS: That's Silvio Moiola?
BRUNER: Yeah. So, well, it was Christmas morning so, "Let's go in and say Merry Christmas." Well, we went in there. Claire cooked us up a real nice breakfast and oh, it tasted good!
DAVIS: Do you remember what year that was? How old was Don about?
BRUNER: Well, he was old enough to work then so he must have been . . .
DAVIS: So that was probably sometime around 1950?
BRUNER: Yeah. Approximately. Sagouspi Dam was about to go out and the District had a little old, I forget what the name of the doggoned tractor was but it wasn't much bigger than a baby buggy, it looked like, and you had to push the muck right up to the end, you know, and no lights. I just had a couple of coffee cans with oil or kerosene in for lights. I was down there alone working on that damned thing. That was the poorest judgement any man ever did, but anyway I worked there on that.
DAVIS: And you were keeping it from washing out?
BRUNER: Yeah, keeping it from washing out and you'd push about a spoonful at each time but, anyhow, why we saved the Sagouspi Dam. Later why they were reinforcing the wings on the Sagouspi Dam and I was pushing the dirt from one of the side sand hills. There was a lot of gnats and I didn't have any netting or anything. A mosquito don't bother me too much but a gnat really makes me swell up. So when I came in I just had one eye open and it looked like it was really gonna close up too and Meister says, "You're the worst looking sight I ever saw." Face was all swelled up to one side and this one eye had a defiant look on it but I couldn't go to work for another day or so because I was all swelled up. I couldn't see.
DAVIS: That was about the only time you didn't go to work then.
BRUNER: Yeah, that's the only time I recollect not working. So the next time I went out I had a netting to put over my head and I reinforced the dam with a bulldozer. A D8 Caterpillar. You see when I went to work the old original takeouts were all decayed and falling to pieces. Phil Hiibel built up all these cement head gates. My job was mostly excavating for these head gates.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the CCC's? Were you here when they were?
BRUNER: Yeah. Let's see, I was in and out, I guess. Erminio Moiola, he was a kind of a foreman.
DAVIS: But you didn't have any . .
BRUNER: I didn't work for him. They [City of Fallon] built the first cement water tank on Rattlesnake Hill. They were supposed to hire all local town people. Well, I lived out in the country so I wasn't eligible but I came in and rustled and they was having trouble to get anybody to go out there. It was hotter than a pistol. It'd just cook you out there. You get down in that tank, you know, we's finishing up and all that kind of stuff. Anyway they had a load of cement come in and the sugar factory was still up then. They pulled this car of cement in there by that sugar factory and the sun beating down against that building--oh! How hot it was! Well, nobody'd work for them so they hired me and I worked up there.
DAVIS: What year was that?
BRUNER: Well, we were still on the ranch then. It must have been about 1946.
DAVIS: That was the first one?
BRUNER: That was the first tank. Yeah, I didn't work out there anymore.
DAVIS: Was that a city of Fallon project?
BRUNER: Yeah, I believe it was. You had to live in the city to get a job there and, of course, I was working for the Nevada Contracting Company. Then they needed some more help so my brother got on. So the two of us worked out there. We's out in the country but we got to work on it. Because I had good control.
DAVIS: This was for the new head gates?
BRUNER: New head gates, concrete, to replacing the old wooden structures clear from the Diversion Dam clear to the end of the project. We put in hundreds, you might say, of them and they had me mostly excavating for those because I had good judgment for level and I had good control of the bucket and when I got through it was just practically ready for the forms without any hand work. So I worked on that. I worked on that a long time.
DAVIS: You cleaned a lot of ditches, probably dug a lot of ditches.
BRUNER: Oh, yeah, yeah, cleaned and dug new ditches. When the earthquake hit, the bad earthquake [July 6, 1954], why, there was a drain ditch culvert plugged up down there Stillwater. My son was working as oiler for me then so we loaded that old drag line on that makeshift trailer they had, two-wheel outfit, and we headed out. When we got down to where Perazzo lives there's a policeman there and there was a crack right down the center of the highway for, oh, maybe, six, seven hundred feet or a hundred or maybe longer, and he says, "You can't go through." I says, "I gotta go through. We gotta washed out, plugged up culvert down there. It's flooding the whole area down there in Stillwater." "Well," he says, "do you think you can get through here?" and I says, "Yeah." So I got out in front and my son drove the truck and we'd move back and forth an inch at a time sideways and we made it through and I got down there and unplugged the culvert.
But the funny part of it was they claimed two squaws going down home during the night and all at once they hit this solid bank in front of them where the earth had dropped and it scared them so bad that they could hardly talk yet the next day. (laughing) So that's getting pretty scared, I would say. In the Indian cemetery over there it had little geysers coming up all over where the graves are and some of them'd bring up bits of rag and stuff like that and (laughing) you couldn't get an Indian in a thousand feet of that cemetery for awhile. It did look kind of leery. These little geysers coming up from ground puddling. There were places there where there had been ditches four or five feet high that was puddled down to perfect level and we'd have to haul in dirt and build up the ditch banks there. That night, why, Donald had a little room alongside of my garage where he slept. So, okay, the chimney fell down, the bricks all fell down, and so we went outside and Donald thought that it was somebody shaking him and so he finally realized what it was so he got up and we's talking there and so I says ,"Donald, you better come in the house and sleep." "No, I'll be all right here." The next thing I knew there was another aftershock and it looked kind of scary so he says, "On second thought, I believe I will come in the house." (laughing)
The original highway into Fallon came down through the Grimes Ranch and then it went south right near where that checkerboard thing is there. It went south for a mile and then turned west and went past Cushman and Wightman 'til it got to what they called Harrigan Road now and then it turned north there. The teams going out usually would load at the depot and they'd go to Beckstead's store. A fellow named Beckstead had a country store there. Usually if they left Fallon late they would make to that country store, these big string teams. They had what they called a feed wagon on the back of these loaded freight wagons. At night they would chain the horses to this feed wagon and feed them there. Well, Beckstead had a bunch of heifers around there that kind of mooched off of these teamsters and they got tired of it so one day why a guy had some turpentine and he put some turpentine on the tail end of those heifers. Well, the heifers was running around and kicking up and everything and old Beckstead looked out and he says, "By golly, them heifers sure feel good." (laughing) The teamster didn't say anything.
You've heard of tin canning a dog--how they'll run? There's not too many people are aware of that. We had a couple of tramp dogs in Berlin when I was a kid and one of them was a nice big friendly dog and the other one had been fixed and he was fat and lazy. We used to hitch this poor old dog and have him pull stuff around for us kids. Anyway, somebody tin canned both of them and the old lazy Shepherd dog didn't run, but the dog that we liked took off down the hill and never did come back. They run 'til they've dropped.
DAVIS: This is the end of the November 1 interview.
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