Soon Edmund began considering high school for our young folks, and decided upon the church academy in the Gila Valley in Arizona. The move to Thatcher was by degrees. I was expecting a new baby, my fourteenth, and so dreaded the trip by train, that Edmund sent me over with Brother Stout in a “white top” wagon.

Eddie, Aunt Sade’s son, took care of the livestock and drove one of the teams and eighteen-year-old Lenore was chosen to drive the other. She accepted this responsibility with considerable fortitude. She had been instructed to keep both animals pulling together, but one had a tendency to shirk his responsibility. No one knows how it tried her nerves to get the team to pull up out of the gullies after having been dragged back by the heavy load. Sometimes the other team had to be brought back to help the discouraged animals out.

During the trip I became blind at night, and in the ordeal Lenore had to be my eyes. I don’t know how we ever pulled through that trip, so many impossible things happened. Two of the young calves were sick and had to be taken into the Wagon with us. Their kicking and odor was almost unbearable. But at last we reached the cabin of Ralph and Geneva Richardson above Safford where we left the children. Eddie drove me on to Eden and Aunt Tressie’s house and we arrived after dark. She took me right into her home and heart. The next day, April 28, 1914, she had to prepare hastily to receive another visitor. This time it was our ten pound baby, Ivan.

I stayed there until Ivan was two weeks old, then moved into Uncle Sullie’s homestead above Safford. In the fall Edmund rented the Gurley place at Thatcher-a large brick house with screen porches and lawns, orchards, and shade trees-the nicest home I ever occupied. We lived there two years. Annie, Edna, Flossie, Lenore and Elmer, Annie’s husband, all attended Gila Academy at this time. (Madge had developed severe eye problems, which prevented her from further school attendance.)

Edmund needed a place to run the cattle brought from the Corner Ranch, so when he discovered a grant of land on the Graham Mountain, I filed on the piece at his proposal and lived there two summers at the time of World War I. The children were charmed with the place: creek, waterfall, Indian ruins, trees and high hillsides. But to me it was a bit intimidating.

Aunt Tressie was visiting on one occasion when we had an alarming experience. During the night we were awakened by the sound of approaching hoofbeats. In terror, as I knelt at the bedside to pray, we heard a man’s voice swearing as he hit the corner of the cabin, then a mounted figure appeared in the moonlit window. Our panic turned to relief, however, when he went on by without harm and the hoofbeats began fading in the distance. We learned later that a man had confessed to being, perhaps, more frightened than we. He had been lost during the night, then he stumbled on to a cabin and passed the window, it appeared that a man was kneeling with a gun poised in his direction.

Edmund bought eight acres of land called ‘Haven’ just south of Thatcher and built Aunt Sadie and Daisy each a home. Aunt Sarah had previously gone to live at Snowflake where her father left her a house. He began one for me and was still building the walls when I moved in. We lived there two or three years and Nelma was born on January 25, 1918 in this unfinished house.

During her first summer Nelma took very ill with summer complaint. I didn’t have enough “nurse” to feed her, and the Doctor told me that if I didn’t get her on breast milk she would surely die. She was just a bundle of skin and bones and cried constantly. I knew I must get to someone, but there was no one to whom I could turn. Then I thought of Edna in Hachita, whose son, O.J., had recently arrived June 24th. I took Nelma and Ivan by train. Madge, who had purchased my ticket, went along as far as Lordsburg to help me. It was in the hot summer and I had to change trains and layover there. That was quite a trial for me for us to find a hotel and put up with two babies, one crying all night, among strangers and mosquitoes and bedbugs.

I arrived in Hachita and found my way through town toward where I remembered Aunt Lizzie Mayben lived. I could have stopped some stranger and inquired where Orson and Edna lived, but I have always had a mortal fear of talking with strangers. I was trudging up a street carrying Nelma and a suitcase, with Ivan was running at my heels, when I heard a cry, “Mama!” Looking back I saw Edna in the doorway of a house I had just passed. She was barely getting around after her confinement with O.J., and had heard Nelma crying out in the street. She hadn’t known me at first, but recognized me as I changed arms with my baby and suitcase.

At first Nelma refused the new mother and I was frantic and bitterly disappointed. But my anxiety was short lived. When the breast was forced into her mouth and a drop or two tasted, she clutched Edna like a young lion and refused to leave. We stayed several weeks until Nelma fully recovered. I have always thought Edna (with Madge’s help) saved the life of my baby girl.

The Haven project was abandoned while Nelma was a toddler and Edmund purchased a modest home for me at the south edge of the town of Thatcher, just north of the railroad. It was good to be living closer to the church, school and to neighbors. Later, however, the house (an old adobe) burned down while I was visiting Utah. Edmund replaced it with a tin-roofed lumber house of two rooms, moved from a desert entry in the foothills and we got by. But later he added a sizeable kitchen, pantry and bedroom, which made it quite comfortable. I was even able to furnish living quarters to two of my husband’s grandchildren, Rene and Carmen, who later needed student housing. We were living here during the several years Edmund taught school in the eastern end of the valley at San Jose. (He hitch-hiked back and forth on weekends.) Also, during a dozen or more years in this location, I took in home laundry, which I did by hand, often doing two washings a day.