My Great Grandma has become my hero over the years. At first she was just funny...then I realized she was a hoot...and then she became spunky...and then I realized I wanted to be just like her.
My mom requested a family story from her dad...an avid journal/history keeper. This is one of his memories of his Mother: Marjorie Eyre Hardy Bailey Carter. (She outlived 3 husbands)
"During the summer of 1948, my Dad and Mom worked at Johnson’s
Saw Mill, high upon the Big Horn Mountain, about 35 to 40 miles east of Lovell,
Wyoming. Dad worked as a laborer at the
saw mill, and mother worked as a cook for about 12 men. She helped feed the men working for Mr.
Johnson three meals a day. We lived in
the mountains the whole summer. We went
to town about once per month, to get supplies. On one of our supply trips, my Grandfather
Hardy who was a beekeeper, and sent us a five gallon can of honey. Up to that
time, we had not seen any bears around camp. We saw a cougar, plenty of deer
and elk, a few moose, and lots of ground squirrels and other animals. My mother
didn’t know what to do with that much honey. My dad suggested that she make
honey taffy out of some of it.
"Soon after that, Mom got a picnic lunch ready for the men. The
men were working in the timber several miles away from the camp. She did as Dad has suggested. She used some
of the honey and made honey taffy and cooked it over an open camp fire. She
boiled it until it was just the right consistency (softball stage), and let it
cool a little, and then she buttered her hands and would pull it into long
strands. She would pull it in strands, as long as she could stretch her two
arms apart, and then would bend it in half and stretch it again, until the
color was right and it was cool enough to wrap. She then cut it into bite-sized
pieces, would wrap the candy in waxed paper. She took plenty of candy for the
men to enjoy with their lunch.
"We drove as close to where the men were working in our
car. She took the men’s lunch in a lunch
basket with their food in it, and when she got back, we were going to have our
lunch with her there in the woods.
She had four small children. My older brother, Ed was eight
years old, Beverly was six years old, I was four years old, and my youngest
brother was, three years old. She took the lunch up into the timber to the men
and left us four children in the car to await her return. Soon after she was out
of sight, the four of us got out of the car to play around. Near the car,
someone had built a lean-to table against one of the big pine trees—that was
where we were going to have our lunch. She placed our lunch on the table, with
the food, plates, and silverware, and covered it with a dishcloth, in order to
keep the flies off our food, while she was gone. As she was taking the lunch up
the trail, she ran into a bear coming towards here—down the trail. She saw him
coming and stopped and put the picnic basket on the ground. The bear didn’t
stop. Apparently he smelled the candy and continued coming towards her.
"During that summer, Mom didn’t have too much to do between
meals. When she wasn’t otherwise occupied, she took a small hatchet, and got so
good that she could throw the hatchet and stick it into a dead tree, about 99%
of the time. She had her hatchet with her, as she carried the lunch up the
trail. She got the hatchet in her hand and when the bear didn’t stop, she threw
it and hit him right between the eyes—he fell dead! Then she didn’t know what
to do with it. She took the lunch up to where the men were working and told my
Dad what she’d done. They were afraid the Game Warden would find out about it.
Some of the men helped Mom and Dad hang the bear up, in a tree. They left it hanging
in the tree until my Dad’s shift was over, and then the two of them went back
to get the bear, Dad skinned it and cut the head off. He said that it looked
just like a man hanging there in the tree. They had to get rid of the evidence!
"While Mom was gone, another bear showed up at the car while
we kids were playing around outside. We all jumped back into the car—thinking
that the bear would go away soon. He didn’t! We would get out of the car on the
far-side and tease the bear—and get back into the car, if he came in our
direction. This hide-and-seek went on for quite a while, until Mother got back.
When he saw her coming, he ran up the tree with the lean-to table, with our
lunch on it. While climbing up he picked up the tin can containing our
silverware..
He climbed up the tree about six or eight feet and stretched
out on a limb just above our table. Since Mom was back, we all got out of the
car. The bear took the can with silverware in it, and threw it at us one-at-a-time.
Mom suggested that if we left him alone, and got back into the car, that he
would come down and run off—he didn’t! He laid on this branch over our table
for about 30 minutes. Then he had to go to the bathroom and urinated all over the
table, our lunch, and plates. That did it! Mom got us back into the car, and we
went back to camp for lunch. Two encounters with a bear on the same day was
just too much. The surprising thing was, that up to that time, we hadn’t seen a
bear anywhere—from then on we had bears around camp the rest of the summer. We
think that it was mother’s homemade honey taffy that drew them in from miles
around.
"In order to get rid of the evidence, Mom and Dad took the
skinned bear to town, where my Aunt Cora Johnson and her family lived. My parents told the Johnson’s that it was a
deer they had shot and gave it to them to eat. To this day, t
he
Johnson’s said that that was the
best
deer meat they ever ate!."
