Covered wagon at Amarillo

Camp Life & Little Dutch, 1923 Amarillo, Texas
Ansel's brother Baily is sitting on Little Dutch and Papa is holding the horse. You can see a dog poking it's head out from behind the wash basin near the fence post. Ansel said she's a "Scotch Collie" and says her name was Fannie. He can't remember what happened to her, but that she didn't leave Amarillo with them.

In their days after leaving Okemah, Oklahoma, they moved north to the Pawnee, Fairfax, and Ponca City area. Papa had started to train races horses in addition to running his freight wagons. After Ansel finished the third grade the whole family left Pawnee, Oklahoma in the covered wagon. Taking only what they could fit in it. They were a family of five; Papa and Mama, Vivian, Baily, and Ansel.

Ansel says he remembers being in Amarillo, his family living out of the covered wagon on land near the tracks and stockyards. They were squatters and there wasn’t hardly anything to eat. He and his brother Baily were in school. Baily was 12 and Ansel was 9 years old. He remembers many times the only lunch his mom could make for them was biscuits with bacon grease slathered between them like you would peanut butter. Sometimes there wasn't much to eat, but he remembers they were never were hungry. Not long after they got to Amarillo, they were down to nothing, Mama only having flour and water and bacon grease. He remembers that Papa had a big black percheron workhorse and he sold it for $3.00 to the coal company. They had plenty to eat that night. After that Papa went to work in the coal yard as a teamster delivering coal around. So things got better. From the time they left Pawnee, Ok. they lived out of the wagon a total of approximately 2 years.

There weren't any coal mines in the area, it was all shipped in by rail car. The coal was shipped in on the train in open topped bins, it was unloaded in the coal yard and then distributed around the city and ranches by horse and wagon. There weren't any trees or burning material around for cooking. They tried to burn cow chips and buffalo chips... but that didn't work very good. So every time a coal train would come to town, someone from the squatter camps would be delegated to throw the rest coal. When the train left out of Amarillo it had a really steep grade to climb up, and while it was getting up steam it went really slow. There were several squatter camps all along the sections butting up to the tracks. When the train would leave the station, and while it was going slow up the grade, one of the squatters would get on top of a full coal car and throw coal out as fast as he could, all along the tracks where the squatter camps were. Then all of us kids, we would all have to run up and down the tracks with gunny sacks collecting the coal for our family to burn in our camp.