Too Much Handsome, Too Much Devil

I was only four or five years old at the time. But whenever the name Garth was mentioned I was aware of a wave of sadness passing between Martha and Schuylar Crowe, my paternal grandparents. Garth was a brother of my father, Max Crowe.

During the early ‘40s I stayed with those grandparents often. They lived at the lower end of Riverton near a drainage canal. The waste water treatment plant is located on the site today. Their house, though larger than a shack, was tar papered.

Camel, Darky, and Schuylar.

(family album)

Schuylar was an anachronism. Cody Simonson, my maternal grandfather, made his living driving trucks. Schuylar still made his living driving Camel and Darky, his mismatched pair of work horses.

Families in Riverton often grew their own vegetables. Many had back yard gardens that were too big to work by hand and too small for a tractor to maneuver. Every spring a long list of customers hired Schuylar to bring in his team to plow, disc, and harrow their gardens.

Old time self sufficiency

He gardened his own plot next to the house, an acre or two if I remember correctly. Thanks to Martha’s canning and storing it helped feed their family year around. They raised a few sheep too.

And chickens, of course. Grandma Martha bragged that Donnie (a name I no longer answer to) could eat a whole half a fried chicken, all by himself. I remember the double wonder of discovering warm, newly laid eggs in nesting boxes, and that eggs sometimes have two yolks.

The family album includes a photo of Garth, identified as the “camp tender,” next to a sheep wagon with Camel and Darky tied in the background. Cryptic captions on other photos taken at the time suggest the Crowes were in the mountains cutting and hauling out poles, probably to sell to ranchers who were building corrals.

Schuylar told about being hired to ride in the great Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889. He was 14. Having been provided with a fast pony, he was among the first wave to arrive and took possession of a quarter section in the name of his employer.

After a time his boss pulled up in a wagon, paid the boy his wages, cocked his shotgun, and said, “Git off my land.” Schuylar slept in a ditch that night, taking shelter from the bullets flying overhead as new land owners drove off claim jumpers, real and imagined.

Grandma and grandpa Crowe with my father Max. 

Front row: some dorky kid playing soldier. 

(family album)

A Communist in the family?

After Schuylar died I found among his possessions a small red volume entitled The Constitution of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Was he a Communist? Many people were then, or had been. Even Communism was becoming anachronistic.

Martha was a bit of a puzzlement as well, because of her tinted pigmentation. According family tradition on my father’s side, she was half Cherokee.

Years later my maternal grandmother dismissed that claim with a disdainful snort. “She wasn’t an Indian. She was a gypsy.” I was surprised. I knew my grandmother was thoroughly bigoted. But I didn’t know gypsies were even lower on her scale of prejudice than Indians.

Garth Crowe, handsome devil. 

(family album)

What Garth did; what happened then

            Aware of the dark emotional power the name Garth had in the Crowe household when I was a child, I recently started searching for the cause.

            The trail stayed obscure for a couple of years. Garth was recorded as buried in the Riverton cemetery. His headstone declared, cryptically, “Son.” There were hints of court proceedings in Rawlins, plus information suggesting he may have met his death there. Because Rawlins was the location of the state prison, questions regarding criminality, perhaps even execution, came to mind.

            Then it turned out he had actually died in Eden, Wyoming, a tiny town 150 miles from Rawlins, though still in the same legal jurisdiction at the time. That clarified nothing.

            One day an email arrived from Julia Shehata, a Crowe cousin I'd never heard of before. She passed on the sordid, prosaic story. Garth, a handsome devil, was known to be inordinately fond of other men’s wives. In 1940, just about the time I started hanging out at Martha and Schuylar’s place, a husband took exception and shot him.

C. 1928. Max Crowe (left) with three of his brothers, Wayne, Jimmy, and Glenn. 

At 14 Jimmy ran away from home and was never heard from again. 

(family album)

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