Chapter 5   RAMAH

When we got out to Ramah some of the older boys married off and the rest of them, the younger ones, took over the family duties taking care of Mother and the four sisters that were still at home. This didn't fall my lot until about 1919. I'd got a job at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and I moved Mother over there and she lived with us. Three years later Verma Nicoll and I were married and Mother continued to live with us, along with my sisters until they married off.

Ramah was a little Mormon settlement that was built in the early seventies, when they first came from Utah down to Arizona and New Mexico. I imagine at one time there were probably five or six hundred people living there. Some of the old timers are still there. Some of the boys that were born in Ramah are up in their seventies now and are still living in this little town. There was one ward there, there's never been more, and we belonged to the St. John's Stake.

I remember Grandfather BloomfieId when we first came to Ramah. I thought he was the oldest man in the world because he had long whiskers and he was about eighty years old. I didn't think anybody ever lived to be eighty years old, but my mother lived to be ninety-three years old before she passed away. Grandpa Bloomfield lived about six years after we moved to Ramah, near as I remember. Grandpa died first, then Grandma. After Grandpa died, Mother moved into Grandpa's house and we lived there. Mother was to keep the property as long as she lived. She died on that same property.
There wasn't much work around Ramah for us boys so we went over to Greer, Arizona. Brother Nelson, who was in Mexico with Dad and used to be his blacksmith at the ranch, had a sawmill over there and he hired three of us boys to go work for him on the sawmill. I worked there for three years on the sawmill and went to school up in Greer in the wintertime. I also worked at night on the sawmill while going to school.

When the First World War broke out my older brother, Abe, was drafted into the army. He moved his family back to Ramah where his wife's father and mother lived so we moved back with them and lived there during World War I. Brother Nelson offered me the top job at the sawmill if I'd stay there and look after Mother and also a chance to go over to Gila College at Thatcher and go to school with his boys in the winter. That's one of the big mistakes I made in my life, not staying there and working on the sawmill and going through college. But I elected to go back with the folks to Ramah.

I had worked one summer in Ramah and saved up a little money and decided to go to high school in Gallup. After I attended high school for two or three months I could see I couldn't get a job in Gallup. I decided if I couldn't get a job I couldn't go to school so I went back out to Ramah and did odd jobs until one time I decided I'd have to go find a trade school of some kind.