Dear John:--
I want to express to you my appreciation for the opportunity of reading your article, “The Boy of Yesteryear” published in the Wetmore Spectator May 29, 1931.
I have never understood and have always regretted the fact that you quit the newspaper field. It has always seemed to me that with your ability to write, you could have been useful as a newspaper man. You have the happy faculty of getting and holding one’s attention from beginning to end.
Yours very truly,
E D WOODBURN
But my “idiotic” idea wasn’t so bad. The hunters a got a nice bag of squirrels on that side of the fence and in passing the spot again an hour later one of party thought she saw my mythical squirrel go into a hole in one of the top-most branches of that old monarch of the woods. So that was that. Kindly forget the ethics involved. We hunted the timber the full length of that place Dad’s old farm. Now there were big trees—and some tall trees. As I remember, there were big tall trees on that place when we lived there more than a half century ago. My father split rails from that timber to fence the farm, And as ex-woodsman he was he was inordinately proud of that rail fence, of his excellent craftsmanship. In his native state, with the straight-splitting birch and poplars, it would have been a simple matter. Here it was an accomplishment.
In that day there were two kinds of rail fences in general use. The “leaner” fence was constructed with posts set on top the ground in a leaning position and supported by stakes on the under side, with the rails nailed onto the posts. The “stake and rider” fence, also sometimes called the “worm” fence, was made by laying the end of one rail on top of another, in zigzag fashion, at an angle of about twenty-five degrees, so that the ends would lap, with a ground chunk under each section, and when built up to the desired height — usually seven rails—two cross-stakes were set in the ground at the junction of the panels, with another rail on top the cross-stake. My father’s fence was of the latter type. It took a lot of rails.
Also I recall seeing my father shoot a squirrel out of the top of a very tall tree with his Colt’s revolver. That six-shooter was presented to him by Federal officers during the Civil War for protecting himself against a band of guerrillas. More about the guerrillas later.
And on this October day I saw the spot where the old house stood on the south flank of that woodland—the house around which I played with my brothers as a care-free child, and where my mother almost cried her heart out because of loneliness. Also, it was here where my mother told me a story one day—a story of my father, of herself, of why we had left our home in the Southland. Our tears mingled over the telling of that story then. And there was sadness in my heart that October afternoon as I paused, reverently, for a moment in passing.
Although I was born in the sunny South where magnolias bloom and mockingbirds sing all winter long, my first vivid recollection of life was upon this bleak Kansas farm, hot and wind-swept in summer, cold and desolate in winter. The rigid climate of this new plains country home was in such marked contrast to the mild and even temperature of my mother’s native heavily timbered state as to her long to go back to her old home.