Interview with
Ethelyn Fay Pettis Daugherty
September 29, 2005
By Joyce McBride
Show Low Historical Museum
And I started to the fifth grade at Forest Dale. My dad, my dad built a trading post at Forest Dale, which is just 8 miles south of Show Low.
JM: Is it that one that you can see? You pass that, you pass the buildings! Is that it? Your dad built that! Oh!
FD: Yes! Yes! My dad built that! And he had heard that they were building a road from Globe up through Salt River Canyon. And he got the maps and figured out and he decided that would be a good place to build a trading post, which he did. And we moved out there and we lived, we lived there before the house was built. More of less, oh! We moved, there was over the hill there was a place where, I guess it was a stockman station, that we lived while he built the house at Forest Dale. And we had to either walk or ride, or we had cars, but while he was building the house, we lived in, it was like a two-room shack where there was a spring. And we had a milk cow.
JM: This was before the road was built.
FD: Yes! Yes, this was before the road was built. There wasn't even a road there when he started building the house. And my dad cut guard-rail posts for the highway.
JM: Huh! So it was pretty close to coming if he was doing that. So did he run the trading post once the road was through?
FD: Our family did. Once the road came through we, it took a good year or more to build the road through. And we lived . . .
JM: A short time the way they build roads nowadays!
FD: Yes, yes. And we lived over the hill. And he farmed that year and we had wonderful crops. And even when we moved over to the main big house at the trading post, we had a cornfield at the other house. And we'd have to go over there to get the corn. We, here we are, 8 or 9 miles south of Show Low and I had two brothers and me that should be in school. So my dad was right up on it. If you have 9 students the county would supply you with a teacher and textbooks and desks and so forth. So he built, he had already built what he called our washroom, where we did our laundry? And we converted that into a schoolroom and there were other Indian children that lived in the neighborhood that were still being carted off to the boarding school. And he, one of his cousins that was a Skidmore, he had three boys. And we rounded up enough children. We had to have nine children for a school, but my sister Ina was only 5 ½, so the county allowed her to come to first grade at 5 ½ for us to have nine students. And they hired a teacher that lived in one of the bedrooms in the house. And the washroom became the schoolroom. And I had 5th, 6th and 7th grade at that school. And in addition to our nine, which only one child wasn't a relative, the Skidmores - there were three Skidmore kids, no. (Interruption) Audie, Ralph and? Anyway, we had the nine kids for the first two years and in the third year, the highway camp brought us where we had up to 15 students that year.
JM: And so these were, now you've got not just Indian kids but you've got highway . . .
FD: Yes, highway construction people, yes.
JM: So was the teacher?
FD: The teacher? Her name was Fanny Payne.
JM: Fanny Payne - she taught all the grades.
FD: And she, yes! Yes!
JM: And so she lived with you how many years?
FD: Oh gosh! Well, 5th, 6th, three! Three years
JM: Three years - that's great! So you went through the 7th grade there. And then what happened?
FD: Well, it was time. The highway camp was finished and so my dad, thinking ahead, said, they either had to transport us from Forest Dale to Show Low for elementary school and then the only high school was in Snowflake and it would be awkward. But there was a high school in McNary so for 8th grade my dad said we are moving. We are moving to McNary for school. And the people that were living in Cooley Ranch, I think they died. I don't know! I don't remember. I think that the Hewey father died. That's how it was. And they were no longer living in Cooley Ranch so my dad arranged for us to move to Cooley Ranch.
