The Mouse Drowns, the Butter Survives

My great grandmother, Ellen Simpson, finished churning and poured off the buttermilk. A drowned mouse splashed into the bowl.

Downtown Cambria, c. 1890

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

This would have occurred in the early 1890s. By then the family, having escaped abject poverty in Denmark by emigrating, was settled in Cambria, a coal mining community 8 miles north of Newcastle. They were living well. The Cambria Fuel Company, desperate for a stable work force, imported whole families from Europe. It probably paid their passage. Almost certainly it clothed them, settled them in a company house, and had been paying my great grandfather good wages. The family even milked its own cow.

Mine workers were paid in Cambria Trading Company script. Cheaply made coins in smaller denominations were called "clacker." 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

Cambria Boilers, c. 1890. 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

It's not free if you have to pay for it

Today it’s difficult to grasp how a dead mouse could trigger a crisis for a young mother raising a family. But in those days my great grandmother was poor because she believed she was poor. And despite living in comfortable prosperity in her later years, she stubbornly remained poor until she died well into her 80s. After her death her bureau drawers were found stuffed with brand new underwear, received as regular Christmas and birthday gifts, then hoarded. The drawers also held the ragged underwear she had worn daily for years.

 The family recounts a story from when, as an elderly lady, she lived with her youngest daughter and son-in-law in Sheridan. Her greatest pleasure . . . what got her out of bed in the summer . . . was her vegetable garden. She spent her mornings tending it and watered it lavishly.

Then she discovered the City mailed them a water bill each month. “We have to pay for water?” The bill was for only one dollar, and at a flat monthly rate to boot. But she would not be convinced. From then on she was seen walking between the rows each morning, bucket in one hand and dipper in the other, carefully watering each plant.

So we can understand why, in Cambria many years earlier, that dead mouse floating in the bowl of buttermilk had posed an insoluble dilemma. She could not bear to throw out a perfectly good pound of butter; nor could she bear to sit at the table watching her children eat it, knowing the image of that floating mouse would come to mind.

The butcher does a good deed

She sought rescue. Those in the community who churned their own butter wrapped it in paper, wrote their names on the package, and took it to the butcher at the company store. He kept it for them in his cooler.

She explained the situation to him. She was certain the butter was okay. The problem was that she knew about the mouse. So would he just exchange her butter for someone else’s? They would never know the difference, and she would feel much better.

“I understand,” the butcher said. “Glad to help out.” Disappearing into the back of the shop, he returned shortly and handed over a package in the familiar paper with her handwriting on it. It obviously had been newly wrapped.

She went home happy, taking her tainted butter with her. My grandmother said the butcher, years later, told her what he'd done. He unwrapped her mother's package, rewrapped it, and gave it back to her.

Cambria School, 1910, where my grandmother went to school. 

Kids got daily exercise. They had to climb about 365 steps 

to get to the schoolhouse at the top of the canyon. 

(Wyoming Tales and Trails)

Election Day in Riverton

My grandparents, Cody and Ellen Simonson, were second generation immigrants. They considered voting an important right and civic duty. At mid morning on election day he would drive home from the truck company. She would be waiting in a changed dress with her hair freshly combed. They would drive to the polling station together and cast their ballots.

Each stepped out of the booth knowing the other had voted a straight ticket for the opposite party. In every election, they conscientiously fulfilled their civic obligation by cancelling each other's vote.

The GOP didn't need Cody's vote. Even 60 years ago Wyoming voted solidly Republican.

Cambria teenagers have fun cross dressing, c. 1914. 

My grandmother, Ellen Simpson, is smoking the cigarette, perhaps the first in her life long habit.

The tall young man beside her is my maternal grandfather, Louis Parker. 

He left the family and Wyoming long before I was born. 

Cody Simonson, "my grandfather" in many of these stories, was a step-grandfather. 

(Family album)

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Guns in the National Park, and Why Each Was Needed

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Special supplement: 1936 Photo Shoot