Marian Greenlee - more stories from her life

I remember going to school and learned fast so they put me into the second grade but they gave me a torn book and I cried so they put me back into the first grade.


The railroads went on strike and Daddy had no job so he went to work as a tool dresser out at the oil fields. This was closer to Medicine Bow so we moved to Medicine Bow. One cold day, he came home in great pain, he had been working on a chain, and go his thumb caught in the chain. He thought it was just his glove, but when he took his glove off, the end of his thumb came with it. When he got home, he had to take the train to Laramie to have that thumb taken care of. Many years later in Idaho, he would say, "They must be having a blizzard in Wyoming, my thumb is so cold."
One time at Medicine Bow, a terrible blizzard came up and my mother strung a rope from the house to the school so she could come and get us from school and find her way home again. That winter the snow got so deep it was up even with the eaves of the barn next door. We would take a sled and get up on the peak of the barn and ride the sled down.

Later, Daddy got called back to the Railroad, so we moved to Rawlins, Wyoming. We first lived in one end of a long little house. Daddy's half-brother, Jim, and his wife, lived in the other end. I was in her house one day. She swept the floor and put the dirt in the stove. A twenty-two shell exploded and it came out and went up through her nose and made a groove in her forehead.

It was in this house I got the small pox and school and brought them home. I wasn't very ill, but poor Evelyn, she got them and nearly died. Daddy got them also, but Mamma didn't get them.

We later moved across the street to a bigger house. It was just across the street from the high cement wall of the Wyoming State Penitentiary. We watched one time when the built a scaffold to hang a man. They hung him at four in the morning so no one could see. It was in this house when I was almost eight years old that Mamma came in Christmas Eve and told us there was no Santa Clause.

The next summer, Uncle John Kiger, Mamma's sister Nellie's husband, was driving a team of horses with all their belongings to Idaho. Daddy was back on the Railroad and we had passes to go on the train to Idaho with Aunt Nellie. Well there was something amiss in the way the passes had been made up so they put us off the train at Green River. I don't remember how long we were there before they got our passes okayed and we proceeded on the train to Idaho. I was never a very healthy child, and was so sick all the way out on the train and most of the time in Idaho. We went to my little great grandmother Whipple's house and was there until it was apple picking time. Mamma and Aunt Nellie picked apples. We took a barrel of apples back to Wyoming with us. Don't know when Uncle John arrived in Idaho, not while we were there, I don't think.

I guess Mamma talked about Idaho so much and next spring, Daddy was laid off again from the Railroad so we decided to move to Idaho. There were two other families and us all in old beat up cars that left Wyoming early part of May and headed for Caldwell, Idaho. It took us three weeks to make the trip. If one of the old cars was not broke..... (there are more pages to this story, but they are not with this page so I'll add to this when they turn up... Also, I have updated the punctutation as I retype this... Charlotte)