Grandma & Grandpa Erwin

by Helen Erwin Campbell

Grandma Erwin had a very quick temper and a very sharp tongue. All of her grandchildren in turn must have learned to stay out of her way most of the time, just as I did. Grandpa, in contrast, was soft-spoken; a gentle good-natured Scotsman.  And, when he was in his favorite rocking chair, his lap was always a place for a grandchild in need of cuddling or comforting. When Grandma started on one of her temper tirades, Grandpa just let it roll over him while he went about his business.

Mom told me a story about Grandma Erwin: It was at a time when she and Dad were living in a little house in back of our grandparents’ home. One morning she crossed the yard to visit Grandma Minnie to

see if there was any mail for Odes and herself, but when she was about to open the screen door she saw Grandma holding a letter over a steaming teakettle. Mom backed silently away and returned to her own little house. She returned later and found that there was a letter addressed to her from her Aunt Ellen. I asked if she had confronted Grandma about the steamed-open letter. She said, “Oh no, I never said anything about it.” But that was Mom’s way.

Grandma often liked to talk about her own childhood. She was born in Girard, Kansas in 1870, as Minnie Olive Freeman, but the 1880 Federal Census shows John R. Freeman, his wife and three daughters in Carthage, Missouri.

My brother Clifford remembers the stories Grandma told about Jesse and Frank James. She claimed that her father was a friend of the outlaw brothers and often offered them safe haven when they were running from the law. She recalled one instance when she was small when the James boys and a few others rode in one evening and tied their horses to the corral fence. They were given hay to feed on, and a bale of hay was placed

behind each mount, with the saddles placed on the bales.

Frank and Jesse, and the other riders, had their saddles and cinch straps laid out just right so that if a lawman or posse rode in the gang members could each throw his saddle on his horse, pull the cinch, and be gone in just a few seconds.

Grandma related that she played around the bales, but was told, “Don’t play with the saddles!” Being curious, she continued to play close to the saddles. Finally, her father sternly said, “Don’t even touch the saddles.”

The James gang had supper with the Freeman family that, and Grandma remembered that Jesse told a story about riding down to the river with the law in hot pursuit. According to Jesse, he jumped his horse into the river and they swam to the other side. When he got far enough from the river to be out of range of the gunfire of the lawmen, he turned around and slowly thumbed his nose at them as they watched from the high bank across the river.

Clifford later repeated the story to my father, and his reaction was, “Aw, I don’t think that ever happened. She probably just made that up.”

However, Clifford later discovered that there is a tourist attraction on Highway 71 in Missouri where a plague proclaims the spot to be where Jessie James jumped his horse into the river while running from the law, but Clifford had heard the story from Grandma some thirty years before.

The James brothers told another story around the Freeman table about how they sometimes got away from their pursuers. They would be running hard with their would-be captors behind them. If it was dark they would suddenly duck in behind some timber or brush, dismount quickly, and grab their horses’ noses to keep them from whinnying. The lawmen would thunder on by, and the James boys would double back in another direction.

Grandma was a tall, gaunt woman who never seemed to have an extra ounce on her. She was also slightly crippled. One leg bowed inward from the ankle up. The story she told was that she was driving a buckboard when she was about sixteen, and something caused the to bolt. She was thrown off the buckboard and her leg was broken when she landed on a rock. Due to poor medical attention, her leg was not properly set, thus causing her deformity. However, it didn’t seem to be much of a problem for her, even though she used a crutch in her later years. That leg also never kept her from moving fast enough to swat a disobedient or rambunctious child or grandchild if the need arose. My youngest brother Donnie recalls that when he was sixteen, and attending a Sunday dinner at Minnie’s table, that he made some remark that Grandma apparently didn’t appreciate. She swung her crutch around and smacked Donnie on the side of the head. He always kept his distan

ce from that crutch after that.

Grandma was an excellent cook and always set a good table. Even though she and Grandpa moved almost as often as my family, she almost always had a large garden. As a youngster I recall that she pretty much stuck to the basics: peas, potatoes, cabbages, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. I also remember that her garden would also have various flowers around the edges, such as sweet peas, morning glory vines or hollyhocks that had big blue blossoms on five- to six-foot stalks. One of my most colorful memories, however, is of a dishpan-full of ripe strawberries from her own patch that ended up in a delicious strawberry shortcake.

Grandpa Mike Erwin was born in Carroll County, Arkansas in 1867. He brought his family to southeast Kansas in 1898, traveling in covered wagons and bringing with them 99 head of cattle plus a few extra horses. My father was ten, Dale was eight and Tom was six. The family settled on a rented farm outside of Longton in Elk County. The two-story house, which still stands, is built of limestone rock and is on a bluff overlooking the lower-lying fields. This farm adjoined one owned by Thomas and Ellen (Hayworth) Stillwell.

Grandpa Erwin and his sons farmed that land for several years. He raised hogs and cattle, plus corn, oats and barley. During that time-period he kept, on average, sixteen head of work-mules, and taught his sons how to handle and care for them – in other words, how to be a “teamster.” He used a team or two of horses as well, but the big 1800-pound (on average) mules had more stamina. He also used horses and mules in the oilfields, as well as rented them out when he operated a feed barn and livery in Oklahoma. First-born son Odes – my father – learned the teamstering lessons well, and later in life would often state that the horse or mule didn’t live that could get the best of him.

During the 1922-1923 years there was an unusual amount of rain and snow, and at one point the Walnut and Little Walnut Rivers flooded all of the low-lying areas in Butler County, especially around Augusta where the two rivers meet. Two local lumber yards were faced with the prospect of watching their lumber and timber stocks float away. Both contracted Grandpa Erwin to move their merchandise to higher ground, as well as to round up and retrieve some that was about to float away. While one crew moved the dry timber, Grandpa used his big gentle grey team of horses named Dick and Dan – who would move or stop on verbal command – to pull a wagon in the shallow water, while he and two helpers waded around collecting the floating boards, then float them back to the wagon. He and his crew worked for several days gathering up lumber.

Grandpa Erwin once confided to my brother Clifford that it was always his dream to own his own farm, but that early-on he could never get enough money for a down payment. And later, he drifted away from farming to become a full-time teamster. He and his crews followed the early “oil booms” in Kansas and Oklahoma, and later as a teamster southwest Kansas much like a trucking company operates today. Starting about 1925, however, the early internal combustion-powered trucks quickly put Grandpa’s mule teams out of business.

In the late 1930s, however, Grandpa and Grandma did finally buy some real estate, but this was their retirement home in Severy, Greenwood County, Kansas, only a few miles from Longton where they first lived in Kansas in 1898.

Grandpa Mike died in 1953, and Grandma Minnie passed in 1960. Both are buried in the Longton Cemetery. In a sense both had come full circle.