We were living at that time in a rock house in old Ashley Town three miles from Vernal. One day I was watching my step-father pack one of his horses. I was a small boy then, but I remember it well, and Mother came out and asked him where he was going. He told her he was going to Alaska to hunt for gold. So she said when are you coming back, he said I will be back when Flossie is eleven years old, she was just a baby then. Mother said arn't you going to leave us any money, so he handed her $3.50, said that was all he could spare. So he went and never came back. A few years later, we read in the paper about a Charley Jones who had taken a bath in champagne. We knew that it was him, for he would do such things when he had plenty of money. Then later on we read in the paper of a Charley Jones who had one of his arms chewed off by a bear. We never knew if that was him or some other man.

So my Mother was left a widow with nine children and my brothers and myself had to make the living. So a little later my Mother decided to go to Colorado at Rangely on the White River, about one hundred miles from Vernal. So she hired two men with two covered wagons, four horses on each wagon, and so we took off. We had at that time nine head of cattle but no horses of our own, so we boys took turns walking and driving the cattle behind the wagons. It was quite early in the spring and some places there was a lot of snow and if it wasn't snow, then it was mud. Some days we only made three or four miles. There wasn't any road, just wagon tracks, through the sage brush. The indians were attacking at that time too. But did not attack us. It took us about ten days to go one hundred miles. It is only about sixty five miles at the present time, as they have changed the route.

We had to ford Green River and also White River, for there wasn't any bridges nor ferrys at that time. So we finally got to Rangely, Colorado. One man owned the little town, his name was Coltharp. The town then consisted of a large general store, hardware, clothing and groceries and a Post Office inside the store. There were just a few dwelling houses. We could not hear of any empty house any where, so they told us there was an old dugout down the river about eight miles. There was nothing else, so we went down there. We got there about the middle of the afternoon and when Mother took a look at that old dugout, she sat down and wept. We children tried to comfort her and told her we would fix it the best we could and later on we would try to build a house. So we unloaded everything out of the wagons and the two men who Mother hired took off.

If you could have seen that old dugout and knew that you would have to move into it with a family, you no doubt would have wept too. It was about 18X20 feet dug down in the ground about six feet, with two very small half windows one on either side just above the ground, and a dirt roof. The entrance was on a steep encline, so that when the snow would melt on warm days, the water would run into it and then freeze solid at night. It had just about two feet of ice in it. It looked like it might storm that night, so all of us boys took axes and cut willows and packed them in until we had them about a foot thick on top of the ice, then made all of our beds on top of the willows. The next day we chopped and picked the ice out and built fires inside, so then it was nice and dry.

We did not have any horses, so we had to walk to the store eight miles at Rangely and pack our groceries on our backs. Very often we would pack fifty pounds of flour home on our back and thought nothing of it. Of course we took our time and would rest often. We were often chased by wild bulls and we had to be on the watch for them. Then one day a cowboy rode up to our dugout and told my Mother that he had 160 acres of land along the river about two miles from us that he had homesteaded it, and had just a little shack on it. No ditch yet, nor none of the land was in cultivation, but was level and good farm land. He said he was leaving the country and he wanted us to take it as a gift from him if we would accept it, and of course we did. He signed it over to us, so then we left the old dugout and moved down on our 160 acres, into that little shack and built a brush shed by it and Mother did the cooking in the shed and also we ate our meals in it.

At one edge of our land was a rock bluff about 80 feet high and just on top of the ledge was an old rock fort and at the bottom of the bluff on our land there were horses bones in some places. The bones as much as two feet deep. The cowboys just a few years before we came there had gotten the Indians cornered on top of this bluff and had crowded them off over the ledge, horses and all. There were graves all over the steep hill sides, with just a slab rock stuck up for a marker. You could not tell whether it was Indian or white man burried there.

My oldest brother Wilber was packing the mail by horse back from Rangely, Colorado to Mecker, Colorado sixty five miles up the White River. He delivered mail at White River City on his way to Mecker, he said he thought we could do well at White River City if we go there and take in boarders and roomers. So we went and soon found that it did not pay very well. So we came back to the ranch and built a log house, set out an orchard and had a ditch surveyed. Then Mother got a letter from her Father in Vernal that he had just bought a 160 acre ranch with water on it. 24 acres in alfalfa, a log house, barn, sheds for stock and lots of outside range. He said the place was eighteen miles from Vernal on the Little Brush Creek at the foot of Diamond Mountain. He told Mother if we wanted to come and move onto the ranch that we could have all that we raised on it. But he said everyone that knows the place says that the place is haunted, and I bought it for almost nothing from an old soldier, his name was Jake Slowmaker a bachelor. He homesteaded the land and worked hard to make a nice place out of it. But he said there was ghosts all over the place. He said the awful noises that he heard so many times were enough to scare the wits out of anyone. He said that many others have heard too and it scared them so bad that they wont come near the place any more. So Grandfather Fairchilds asked him what the noise was like. He said there was women screaming like they were being murdered, dogs barking and some kind of language like Indian language. It was terribly loud and he could never tell in what direction it came from. It sounded like it was coming from all directions and the noise was always the same everytime he heard it. He said that he was through with the place and that the ghosts could have it.

Well now none of us were afraid of ghosts. We felt quite sure that we could soon find out what the so called ghosts were. So we came back to Vernal and moved up on the old haunted ranch. Our closest neighbor lived up the creek three miles. One afternoon Mother was alone in the house and she looked out the window and saw a man on a horse and he was coming through our field awfully fast. So she thought maby someone was hurt and he was coming for help. So she went out to meet him. He said did you hear that awful noise just a few minutes ago, she told him that she didn't and that she was inside the house she supposed. He said he never heard such a noise in his life, so Mother asked him what it sounded like. The way he described it was just the same as the old soldier had said, Well he said I hope I never hear it again and went on his way.

One afternoon I was alone on the place, the folks had all gone away for a few days and I was working in the garden and I heard this awful noise. I looked in every direction for I always thought if I ever heard it I would find out what it was. So as I looked I saw quite a dust raising in the air across the creek in a ravine that was all sandrock from the top of the hill to the bottom. I saw that there was a big whirl-wind coming down that ravine and I noticed when the whirl-wind had got to the bottom of the hill that the noise stopped. So I went over to look at the place and all up this rock ravine were holes of every shape and form, many of them three feet deep. So when ever a whirl wind came down that ravine all those different shaped holes caused the different sounds. So at last the ghosts on the old haunted ranch were solved.

This ranch was at the end of the road eighteen miles from Vernal, Utah. Then there was a trail that led through the hills and over Diamond Mountain into Brown's Park, Wyoming. At that time there were many outlaws in the country. Bank robbers, train robbers, cattle rustlers and others. They usually would take this trail by our ranch, as they travelled back and forth. They travelled mostly at night and quite often they would come to our house tired and hungry and we would feed their horses and get them a good meal. When they had got rested, then they were on their way again. Most of them would ask us what the bill was, we told them that we never charged anybody for our services. But usually they would throw some money on the table, sometimes much more than enough to pay the bill. We knew some of the men for we had seen for we had seen them many times. There was Lay and Casedy, Mat Warner, Joe Rose, Harry Tracey, We knew what they were doing, but we did not dare turn them in, for those that did as a rule did not live very long. The officers of the law did not have much chance with them. The outlaws just about ran the country. Most of the men packed guns, some of them had a gun on each hip and a rifle tied on their saddle, and when they got in an argument and it led to a shooting scrape, usually the ones that were the quickest on the draw were the ones that kept on living.

One winter my Mother went to Vernal to send the girls to school and my brothers were all away working and I was left alone on the ranch.I was about 14 years old then. We had a lot of cattle, a few horses, pigs and chickens to feed. So I had to stay there and take care of them. The snow was about two feet deep and sometimes from 30 to 40 below zero. I had to feed all the stock, out the wood and milk the cows. At night I would sit by the fireplace in the old log house and listen to the coyotes howl and the mountain lions roar and other animals. Then when the wind blew along with the howling and roaring of the animals, it sure was a lonely and dreary sound. I was there two months and never saw a living human being. So I could only talk to the dog, cats, cattle and horses.

We did pretty good on the old haunted ranch. Made a good living and finally bought it from our Grandfather John Fairchilds.

Written by: E.A. Linderman
Compiled Dec.10,1996, by Forrest D. Linderman