The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

Years later, after I had made a lot of changes in my way of thinking, and had repented for many of my shortcomings, there came a time when a daughter of one of those same kinfolks wanted to own a saddle horse in the city where they lived. And there was a time when it looked as though the girl was fighting a losing battle with her mother, who was not altogether in favor of her owning the horse in town. The mother was finally getting a look at a situation similar to the one I had years ago, but from a different viewpoint—viewing her own pocketbook instead of mine. I sent word to the mother not to be cruel to her daughter as I had been to Dennis. I told her, "By all means, let the girl have the horse, regardless of the cost." The girl got the horse all right, but he cost a fortune in trouble, money and inconvenience.

During those last years we lived at Royston, Calvin Carriker built a new house at his River Farm and wanted to put a butane log in the fireplace. But he was unable to find an artificial log that would burn butane, they all burned natural gas. He searched everywhere, and finally brought home a gas log and asked me to change it over to burn butane. I worked on it in my spare time for several days, as well as some time that was not spare. I even went to junk yards and got parts that I had to drill and shape and alter until they would do what I wanted them to do.

After a good many days, I had it burning pretty good. Calvin stopped by the shop one day and left his wife, Nell, sitting in the car. Then, when he saw how well the log was burning, he called her to come and see it. She came in, looked at it and asked, "Calvin, is that the log you bought at Rotan?"

He told her it was, and she said, "Calvin, didn't you tell Clarence that the factory man said they hadn't been able to make a log that would burn butane successfully?"

Calvin said, "No, if I had told him that, he might not have fixed it. He didn't know it couldn't be done."

I remember one day one of Calvin's bulls got through the fence and into the pasture west of his barn. He saddled a horse and went into the neighbor's pasture after him. Well, he came back telling Max and me about a rattlesnake he had seen, but couldn't find anything to kill it with. He wanted the three of us to go hunt the snake and kill it. Max took a 22 rifle and Calvin and I each took a hoe.

It was early spring and the snakes had begun to come out of their dens in the heat of the day. The grass was short but we took no chances. We walked side by side, very slowly, and watched closely. We soon found our first snake, lying at the mouth of a hole, which was about like a hole a badger might have dug. We stopped and stood motionless, whispering plans of what we should do—or at least try to do. We decided that Max was to shoot the snake, and in case he missed, Calvin and I would cut him to pieces with our hoes. Our idea was to hurry and try to keep him from escaping into the hole. Well, we got all set, Max slowly raised his gun, aimed, and fired.

We still don't know whether or not Max hit the snake. We do know, however, that the snake went into the hole, along with four or five or six others. Who knows how many? It all happened so fast. We just stood there—frozen in our tracks, trembling, scared and surprised. We had not seen any except the one snake lying near the opening of the den. We quickly looked down around our feet to see whether there might be others that we had not seen. If there happened to be one behind me that wanted to get into that hole, I sure wanted to jump aside and let him go by.

It was some time before we regained our composure. We were well aware that we must be more cautious and watch more closely than we had been. Then we walked forward, more slowly, closer together, almost stumbling over each other. We walked about 100 yards, moved over a way and took another swath coming back the same 100 yards—and killed 27 rattlesnakes. There were others, to be sure, but we had had enough for one day. And somehow, hunting rattlers was not as alluring as it had been an hour before. We planned to go back some day, but we just never did get around to it.

All my life I have seen cattle round-ups, but people always seem to do things the hard way. And that wasn't for me. A cattle round-up at our Royston farm was unlike any other round-up in the world, so far as I know. We had saddle horses but we hardly needed them. Our cows were in the habit of coming into the feed- lot to eat bundled feed. By simply closing the gate behind them, the round-up was ended. The work we had to do next would take a little more time than the rounding up did. But it was easier and faster than any system I have ever seen.