Transcript of oral history interview with Gary Slaughter |
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Object Description
| TITLE | Oral history interview with Gary Slaughter |
| INTERVIEWEE | Slaughter, Gary |
| SUBJECT | Texas John Slaughter; Bush Valley Fort; Mormon Church |
| Browse Topic |
Agriculture Education Family and community |
| DESCRIPTION | Gary Slaughter talks about his ancestors homesteading in Alpine, Arizona. He is related to Texas John Slaughter. John Horton Slaughter was a Civil War soldier, Texas Ranger, Indian campaign army scout, and driver on the cattle trails. He served as sheriff of Cochise County, and later served a term in the Arizona Legislature. |
| INTERVIEWER | Luger, Jay; Jones, Lenore |
| TYPE |
Sound Text |
| Material Collection | Oral Histories of Alpine, Arizona |
| RIGHTS MANAGEMENT | Property of Alpine Public Library. For reproduction permissions, contact us at 928-339-4925. |
| DATE ORIGINAL | 2011-03-15 |
| Time Period |
1910s (1910-1919) 1940s (1940-1949) 1880s (1880-1889) 1960s (1960-1969) 1980s (1980-1989) |
| ORIGINAL FORMAT | Oral histories recorded on digital media with transcriptions. |
| DIGITAL IDENTIFIER | index.cpd |
| Date Digital | 2010-2011 |
| DIGITAL FORMAT |
MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3) DOC (Microsoft Word) |
| File Size | 890 Bytes |
| DIGITIZATION SPECIFICATIONS | Oral histories were recorded on an Olympus WS-6005 Digital Voice Recorder. |
| REPOSITORY | Alpine Public Library. PO Box 528, Alpine, AZ 85920. www.co.apache.AZ.us |
| Full Text | Gary Slaughter Eagar, AZ Interview: March 15, 2011 My name is Gary Slaughter. I was born April 6, 1945, in Morenci, Arizona. My mother is Helen Skousen and she was born on the ranch right here in Alpine, on June 20, 1917. My dad, Austin Hardin Slaughter was born in Clifton, Arizona on Friday, November 13, 1913. Family history My great-grandparents on my mother’s side came from Norway. They joined the Mormon Church, went to Utah and settled in Draper. Then the church called them to settle in Joseph City, Arizona. After two or three years, they moved to Springerville, then to Alpine. They homesteaded here, what I have always known as the lower ranch. There is a sign on it right now that says The Ranch. My granddad was probably about two years old when they came from Utah. On the lower ranch, the house that they built is gone now. My mother has a board or two from it that was in the doorway. They didn’t have nails in those days, so they drilled round holes in the wood, then they’d cut a peg to hold wooden parts together. When Granddad got old enough, he homesteaded a little place up here in Alpine where the big barn is on the hill. You can see it from the highway (180). Their house was built there, and that is where my mother was born. My family was among the first settlers of the Alpine area. My grandparents ranched, farmed, and freighted. My granddad ran freight wagons from Socorro, NM to Alpine to bring in supplies they didn’t have here, such as salt and sugar. My parents also ran about 120 head of cattle. George Webb Slaughter was my great, great-grandfather, and he came from Missouri to Texas. His son, Pete Slaughter, was the first one to bring cattle into the White Mountains of Arizona as range cattle in about 1882. His son married a Laney from Luna, and they had my dad. Dad married my mother from here in Alpine. The famous Texas John Slaughter was my great, great-granddad’s cousin. He had the San Bernardino Ranch, down by Douglas, which he claimed was the prettiest place he had ever seen. I disagree. That’s because I grew up here. Alpine is God’s country. My great-granddad, on the Slaughter side, got along with the Indians. When he would come across a bunch of Indians, he’d go out and kill a beef and they would have a big all-you-could-eat meal. If they needed more food to take back to their families, he would give them more. So he never had any problems with the Indians. Then when the white man came around and wanted to rustle his cattle, he went back to Texas and gathered some gun hands and brought them here. After that, if people wanted to rustle cattle, they went around the Slaughters. The forts around here also interest me. The Bush Valley Fort is just east of the library. I don’t know how the settlers around here found out that the Indians were on a rampage, but they would go down to the fort until the Indians all calmed down. There is another fort out at the ELC because there were quite a few settlers at the time, and it was used to protect them from the Indians. My Great-granddad, James Neal Skousen had two wives when he came out of Utah. Great-grandad and a Mr. Flake from over in Snowflake, spent time in the penitentiary for polygamy. When he got out of the pen, he took one of his families to Mexico and kept one of them here. A lot of the Skousens down in the valley in the Mesa area, are from that part of the family that was in Mexico. Besides being a farmer and a rancher, my dad was the LDS Bishop in Alpine twice. My mother was raising kids. She went to NAU, which wasn’t NAU then, it was Arizona Teachers’ College. She graduated from there with a teaching degree and taught school for a year before she met my dad. Later on they got married. She taught school here in Alpine for several years, and also in Nutrioso for a year. In later years my dad finally had to sell his ranch on Black River. He wasn’t making enough money to feed his family. Then he and my mother bought the Alpine Mercantile store and the post office in about 1960. My mother became the postmistress. She did that for twenty-four or twenty-five years. I have two brothers and one sister. My sister is dead. My older brother lives in Deming, NM, and my younger brother lives in Orem, Utah. Memories of Alpine when growing up I can remember when they built the café, which is still here. That is now the Bear Wallow café. The Alpine Cabins were right there by the Bear Wallow. The Judd’s cabins were right across the street from us. Then there were the Coronado Trail Cabins. The old red rock school house was here, and the Mormon Church, which is now the Alpine Community Center. We went to church there. Then after I got a little bit bigger and got more enthused about it, I walked around and found the rock quarry where they found the rock to build both of these buildings. I have memories of my brother and me walking to my granddad’s and my uncle’s farm on a place over here in the meadow. We helped on the farm. Then in the fall, I helped them chop and thrash the grain that they had raised. They raised enough to feed the cattle and horses during the winter. Then, my dad had the PS Ranch over on the Black River. My brother and I would go over there when we were nine or ten years old, and live over there for a week or so at a time, and farm that place. It was just a lot of fun being a kid here. We didn’t have to worry about anything. We could do just about anything we wanted to, after we got the garden weeded. One of my friends was Arthur Whitmer, and his dad was Harold Whitmer, who had a ranch. There was a saw mill over there where the present day school is. It burned down and they never built it back. Later on they used it for the Alpine Conservation Center. There was a Chevron gas station in town, and Dick Judd had a gas station across the street (from the library). I don’t know what kind of gas he sold there. At the Alpine Mercantile, they sold Union 76 gas. Schooling I went to high school in Round Valley, which is actually in Eagar. I never called it that. We always referred to Eagar and Springerville as Round Valley. In my opinion, they should do away with Springerville and Eagar and call it Round Valley. Having one mayor and one police department would save a lot of money. While in high school one year, it was snowing very heavily. After being in school all day, we got into the school bus to come back home. Clarence Jepson, who lived here in that big rock house across the road from the store, was the bus driver. He told us kids just to get in the bus where we would be over the top of the wheels on the bus, and he came up and over Picnic Hill and didn’t have any trouble at all. The next day the Arizona Republic came out and said that the school bus from Alpine had been snowed in at Springerville and couldn’t get home. I don’t know where they got the information, but it was wrong. There were only a few times we’d be late to school. It would be real cold and we couldn’t get the bus started for a long time. But we always made it down there. After high school I went to college down in Thatcher, at Eastern Arizona Junior College. I partied too much and never did get a good education. I just came back here and went to work. I worked for the Forest Service here at Alpine from 1963 until 2003. One time I was a tree climber for the Forest Service. Over near Luna Lake, I climbed the tree where an Osprey nested, and built a platform for it. It’s the same place where the eagles nest now. Along in the mid-‘80s, my Uncle Willard Skousen got too old to run his ranch, so he sold it to a guy named Dean Sellers. I took on a second job of managing it for him for a couple of years. Then he lost his money and the ranch went back to the bank and they sold it to other people. |
| Sort Order | 03030 |
Description
| TITLE | Transcript of oral history interview with Gary Slaughter |
| INTERVIEWEE | Slaughter, Gary |
| TYPE | Text |
| Material Collection | Oral Histories of Alpine, Arizona |
| RIGHTS MANAGEMENT | Property of Alpine Public Library. For reproduction permissions, contact us at 928-339-4925. |
| ORIGINAL FORMAT | Oral histories recorded on digital media with transcriptions. |
| DIGITAL IDENTIFIER | Gary Slaughter.docx |
| Date Digital | 2010-2011 |
| DIGITAL FORMAT | DOC (Microsoft Word) |
| File Size | 77444 Bytes |
| DIGITIZATION SPECIFICATIONS | Oral histories were recorded on an Olympus WS-6005 Digital Voice Recorder. |
| REPOSITORY | Alpine Public Library. PO Box 528, Alpine, AZ 85920. www.co.apache.AZ.us |
