When I was sixteen, Father sent me out on the freight road with six horses and two wagons, hauling lumber from the mountains to the mines of San Pedro and merchandise from La Villa Ahumada on the Mexican Central Railroad to Colonial Juarez.

In 1896-97, I got my first introduction to railroading. I worked with father, helping to build the railroad from El Paso to Colonia Dublin. When we got through working there, father started an independent store in Colonia Juarez and put me in it to run it. I remained there until January 1, 1899, when I went with father to Colonia Chuichupa.

Chuichupa was a little town of about thirty families located in a beautiful valley in the tops of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The valley is about two miles wide and three and a half miles long, completely surrounded by stately pines and low rolling hills running back to high mountain peaks and ridges. The valley is about 7000 feet above sea level, with black alluvial soil and in the summer it is a veritable flower garden-seemingly thousands of different colors and kinds of flowers.

Father had taken a contract for building a trail from Chuichupa to the Seven Star mine in Guaynepa Canyon, a distance of 22 miles through a very rough, rugged, wild country. We established a little store in the home of J.W. Heder, and father left me there in charge of his affairs. It was there where I met and wooed Anna, the daughter of Brother Heder.

I became interested in the mines and did considerable hunting and prospecting, and it was there that I became actively engaged in religious affairs. I had always been a prayerful boy and thought a great deal of my religion, but never had taken a leading part. I had a strong testimony of the Gospel and tried to keep the commandments of God the best I could. Although I had been thrown among the roughest kind of cow camps, railroad, and mining camps, and on the freight road, I tried to keep myself clean and did not use profane language, or indulge in liquor or tobacco.