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Interview by Ellis J. LeFevre with Pappy Clay on August 14, 1974 Pappy Clay was born at Promontory March 11, 1884 making him 90 years and 4 months old. Ellis J. LeFevre: Walked over grounds with Mr. Clay and got some of his remembrances and talked with him a little bit. How far was it from the [Golden Spike National Historic] site here where you were born? Pappy Clay: It was practically 300 feet South West, a little bit west of south. Is the big house still up there? E.J.: No it's gone but it was in that direction. A little bit north. P.C.: I am turned around a little bit now. The road runs west after you get out to Rosel and that way, you know. After you go past that mountain there. But, now my father was a night operator at Promontory Summit during the years of 1883 and 1884. I was born about 300 feet west where the Golden Spike was driven, March 11, 1884. My father then got to be the day operator and agent at Blue Creek which is 7 miles East of here by wagon road but 12 miles by the old grade. Because Promontory Hill was a rather steep hill and they had to come up in a big s shape to get up to Promontory Station. He was an agent and a telegraph operator at Kelton in 1894. Then in 1895 he was the agent and telegraph operator at Tucoma, Nevada and then quit the railroad. E.J.: Tell me a little bit about what you remember as a boy living here at Promontory Summit. P.C.: I was very small you see. For the first 8 years of my life, was spent mostly at Blue Creek. E.J.: I remember reading the histories you have written and your accounts of the Chinese and your association with them. Tell me about how you lived there. What was you home life like? P.C.: Well, at Blue Creek there was a water tank at Corinne and there was one at Blue Creed and one at Rozel. Every train going either East or West stopped at the Blue Creek water tank for 15-20 minutes or maybe they would be there for an hour. And they would swing that big spout down and fill there tanks. And it took that much water to get from the Blue Creek water tank and over the Promontory Hill and over to Rozel Water Tank. That was a full tank of water. Well, a train would come from the the east and they would stop for 15-20 minutes there to take on water and there might have been 25-30 hobos on that train. Well, the brakemen on that train there was 2 brakemen, a front brakeman and a rear brakeman. Each of them had pick handles and they would try to get the hobos off of that train, before it started up. And they would swing pick handles at them and everything at them that way and so after the train would start a lot of the hobos would run out and catch it anyway. It was usually maybe 15 hobos left between trains at Blue Creek. Well, then my father was the operator there and my mother. And he was teaching my aunt to be a telegraph operator. With those instruments I gave you. And these hobos then they would come and beg for something to eat. They would say we haven't had anything to eat for a week and we are stranded here and they just kept the folks here poor handing out something for them to eat. There was all of 15 or 20 hobos there. I'll show your a picture of the water tank. We've already got this picture. I enlarged 600 negatives that I had. I was a photographer. The swallows would build those clay nests up under the eaves of those water tanks and they were always throwing rocks up to break those nests. So I took this picture from exactly where the the old depot was. You see there was an old shade tree there. And I was a little kid and I go out and I'd see those broken nests with little dead birds around where the hobos had thrown rocks at them just for their amusement. E.J.: Tell me about why would they kick them off there rather than in, line Brigham City and ... P.C.: They would try to kick them off every way they went and out of Ogden, Blue Creek was the first stop. Sometimes they stopped at Corinne, but they would usually go all the way from the Ogden Terminal to Blue Creek with one tank of water. So that's why they were mostly kicked off. Well now, the Promontory Hill was very long and steep and they would bring trains from the east to Blue Creek. That was too big too long and too heavy to take over the hill even with the Promontory haul. So even with those two locomotives they couldn't take all the cars up over. So they had a holding track there. There was two tracks there was a regular size track and a holding track and when there got to be enough cars on the holding track the helper would go down the hill and pull them up into Promontory. And they would park them here at Promontory so that the next train coming along west would pick them up here and take them on down to Rozel and Lake Station and on out to Kelton. And, so on this holding track and toward the south end of the string there was a car load of shoes being shipped from some shoe factory in Massachusetts. Boston, maybe on the way to a dealer in Los Angeles. Now these hobos they had great piles of new ties there at Blue Creek stacked up these square cut ties. And the hobos built kind of little houses out of them, well anyway a bunch of these hobos got into this car of shoes and they lifted 8 or 10 cases of shoes. I showed Tom the Cave about a mile further east of Blue Creek on that side hill there is a big cave and us kids always called it the Old Shoe Cave. Well they carried these cases of shoes over and took them back into that cave and then they changed shoes. Their old shoes were left in the cave and they came out with new shoes. So the railroad detectives noticed that there was a lot of hobos going up and down the track with new shoes. And they didn't really miss those shoes until that car got to Los Angeles and they saw these cases were gone, so they sent their detectives out and I was a kid 8 years old at that time and I guided the railroad detectives to this old shoe cave and you can go to that cave right now and you can see a lot of old shoes. You see what hobos would do, they would change shoes and go along the track and tell other hobos that if they went to that cave they would get a pair of shoes and leave their old shoes in that cave. They wanted to leave them in the cave so they wouldn't be see and so that the cave right now and find some of those old hobo shoes. And that was about 1892. E.J.: That would have been the time of button shoes. P.C.: Yeh, some of them were. Some of them were what they call gaiters with the strap up the side. An elastic strap up the side. E.J.: Gaiters yes, oh yes. P.C.: I've got a picture its a rare old picture, it doesn't have anything to do with Promontory, its a picture of the First Desseret Sunday School general board, and its a large picture. I have it mounted on an easel and nearly all the guys in that picture had button shoes. And they nearly all had beards or whiskers or mustaches or something. E.J.: That's great, well.... You left here Promontory Summit when you were a young boy. P.C.: I was about a year old. All the rest of the time was spent at Blue Creek. E.J.: You're probably some of the last of those that were really here. P.C.: I can remember when we used to come up to Promontory a lot of times I was tremendously interested in steam engines. Like that. And I often rode the old engineer up Promontory Hill. They had a turntable at Blue Creek but they didn't have one here. They had a "Y" off there where they turned around. They didn't have a turntable up here. E.J.: Can you point out or tell me where you remember that "Y"? P.C.: I came up here a few years ago and we found it, of course, this is all dry farming now and it is plowed over and like. But the west and east of the "Y" was about a quarter of a mile down the railroad down here. And then it went off up towards that hill there for about a quarter of a mile and then it came back around in here. So that the Promontory hog turned around on the "Y" but when they went down to Blue Creek they turned around on the Blue Creek Turntable. E.J.: Would you describe a hog to me? P.C.: A hog was a locomotive, it might have been a Baldwin or some of the old time locomotives. But the drivers were much smaller in diameter. E.J.: How many drivers? P.C.: 6 drivers, three on each side, it was called a 4-6-0. Well, then we were talking of me riding up to Promontory on the hog. E.J.: How many of these "hogs" did they have. P.C.: They had about 5 hogs at the roundhouse here. E.J.: About 5 hogs kept here. We found the foundations of the roundhouse just out there last spring. A year ago. Do you remember anything about the roundhouse standing here? P.C.: I can't remember anything about that. No I can't. I can remember the old school that was just to the other side of the roundhouse over there. Off in that part. You see Promontory Station was quite a little town here. At that time. There was a couple of stores here a saloon or two and this big eating house. All the what do you call them. East and West travelers. It is a lower grade immigrant car. They always stopped here for meals. E.J.: Do you remember anything about a long wooden building? Right along in this area somewhere? A loading dock? P.C.: Yes, that was, and the eating house was in that building. That was part of the building. The office was there. E.J.: Was the telegraph office in the building? P.C.: Yes it was. It was in one end of that building, the telegraph office. One of the old early engineers that was on one of those hogs that and I used to ride with him quite a lot. His name was Jim Donagee. And one of the foreman was, Bob Toy. And Bob Toy later became an engineer and finally he became what they call the traveling engineer. He was the foreman for old Jim Donagee. To start with. They had one stall roundhouse that at Blue Creek just the other side of the turntable and sometimes they would run the locomotive in there between (in the winter) trains to keep the pipes from freezing. E.J.: Can you tell me anything about what a meal would have been like for the immigrants that stopped here? Would it have been meat and potatoes of Uh, Uh? P.C.: Yes, I think it would. But prices were much cheaper then, you know. 2 bits would get you the best meal that could be put on. In 1895-96 there was a tremendous excursion from the East to the West called Christian Endeavor and they just ran all kinds of trains one right after the another. From the East, immigrant trains and my father was the telegraph operator at Tacoma Nevada at that time. And there was a big copper mine, they called it Copper Mountain out to the South of Tacoma Nevada and they had a loading dock where they would haul the copper ore down from this mine and the cars they would load this ore into coal cars and the coal cars went underneath, it was kind of built up and the coal cars went underneath. And the Chains would haul the stuff; in over the top and they would dump in over the top. This copper ore. E.J.: Are you getting tired standing up here?.... I'll take you in the house there. P.C.: This doesn't have much to do with Promontory, but I was a kid there and I can remember going over and getting this copper ore, you know how pretty it is green and blue, and I was peddling that stuff to these immigrants. You know in these cars. I'd go through these cars and I would sell them 5 pieces for a quarter. They'd pick up our 5 little pieces and during that summer that excursion lasted for several months all during the summer. I sold enough of those ore samples to these people that I had a whole cigar box full of dollars and half dollars. E.J.: I was interested in your account of the orange wreck down on the east side. Um', could you tell me about oranges all over the hillside or what was that like? P.C.: Well, yes, there's a place down on the east side. I'll tell you in those very early days, they didn't have Westinghouse automatic. They had straight air you see and the engineer could only control 15 cars from the locomotive. That's all they could control. So then these two brakemen would take the rest of the train and do hand braking on that. So going down Promontory Hill and the engineer would pull on his air brakes and it would put the air on the front end of the train, but the rear end of the train didn't have any braking capacity, except for these two brakemen and they didn't tighten them up fast enough so there was a place in the middle where sometimes the train would buckle you see. The rear end would come down because it could come down the hill easier, not being braked and it would buckle and both the orange wreck and the tea wreck happened that way. It happened in about the same place. The middle of the train buckled up and rolled down the hill there. E.J.: Well we have a pretty good account of that.... Wild horses and Wild Women? P.C.: Any relation to the big house? E.J.: Yes, I have read the stories, but we are always ready for something else or some more of it. How do you really connect wild horses and wild women? P.C.: Well, the only way I can connect them is that they were both wild. I'll tell you. The Big Four, that was Crocker, Huntington, Stanford, _____. Here's what they would do. Their headquarters were Sacramento and they built that great big house there and they ordered the railroad company owned every other section for 20 miles on each side of the grade as a Government grant. So then these big shots they organized a company called the Promontory Livestock Company, using this railroad land. In the summer of 1887, they brought in a large herd of very valuable Hereford cattle, and they put them on this range here. This is another story I haven't told. Now, those Hereford cattle were not use to the range here and in the winter of 1888 was a severe winter and about 9,000 of these cattle died that winter. And so that kind of put a stop to them. This big house up here the young bucks from Sacramento would come up here with their girl friends. And they would stop. Here's what they did. They would harvest a car load of ice from the Sacramento River and send it to Promontory and then take it up and they had and ice house up at the big house there so they always had a place for their drinks and like that. E.J.: Do you suppose there were any soiled doves or anything like that around? P.C.: This is at any rate where the wild women came in. E.J.: This is connected with the wild horses up here? P.C.: Well the wild women would ride the horses. I don't know. But any rate this was a kind of hideout for the Sacramento group, you see. And they came up here and I may have yet I had two or three bill of lading where these carloads of ice came up from Sacramento to Promontory, and then who was going to pay the freight and first one and then another, no one would pay the freight then finally someone would say OK blank it, or something that way you know. It went higher up and higher up so that they got their ice up here free. E.J.: In the summer time ice would be important? P.C.: And they had corrals there for their riding horses and everything that was. E.J.: They were looking for a place more out of the way, than scenery. P.C.: Yes, that's exactly it. E.J.: Let's go in... P.C.: I want to show you about the old shoe cave. I can probably find it. E.J.: I want to have you tell me about this key you have brought with you. P.C.: The key to my _____. Well, my mother had a younger sister. Her name was Sarah Middlemiss and she stayed with the family for years and years and years. She wanted to learn telegraphy and my father said O.K. I'll teach you telegraphy. So they got this key and this cylinder that you have here. This was at Blue Creek down at the station there. She was in a separate room in the _____ there. From the telegraph office and she had this key and cylinder and he had it connected up with the telegraph instruments the sound comes in on what they call relays to start with, but it is kind of weak. And then they got batteries there to make it a lot louder to go through this cylinder so it is easier to hear. There was a switch board up on the wall with a lot of pegs that you could put in that switchboard, for the different lines. There was a Western Union Line and a Commercial line and a dispatcher's line everything like that they got pegs and they put them in. Well now, the wires that came in from the telegraph poles came into that switchboard and sometimes if there was a storm near Blue Creek or within a few miles of Blue Creek my father would tell us kids to keep away form the switchboard because once in a while you would see a spark jump across in that switchboard. They would come up the wires and would jump across in that switchboard. They plugged into get the different lines with a kind of a plug that would put the two into lines together. And the telegrapher's desk and they had two sets, two relays, of keys and cylinders. The story of a railroad telegrapher explains a lot of this, did I? Think I did. But at any rate I was a kid I remember the dispatcher's lines and the call for Blue Creek was a Big K Dicka, Dicka Dicka Dicka three or four times. Sent out 5 balls and then sign their name over the wires so they knew who it was. I tell you about that in some of the stories there. I knew the Morse code pretty well as a kid. Prairie dogs, horses, coyotes, slip lizards, rattle snakes, horn toads, spit ants, badgers, rabbits, country was over run with jack rabbits. They put a bounty on them to get rid of them in Box Elder County. 5 cents a pair of ears. When I was a kid I had a twenty-two rifle and I used to make money shooting rabbits and turning in ears. Rabbits would get a disease and the whole population of animals would all die in one year. It's rocky mountain spotted fever. Well there was a store here at Promontory. Tom Brown run the eating house and he had a store here. And I was born up there. He had a cousin, a half-witted cousin by the name of Billy Brown and Billy Brown knew my father pretty well. When I was born I had a great big hair lip and a crooked nose. And old Billy Brown came in and looked at me laying in the crib there and he went out and he shook his head talking to my father and he said "Poor little feller, he ain't going to have a hard life of it he has a mouth like a god damn fish." But they took me to Ogden you know and the surgeon sewed it up and it doesn't show much now. I guess I was a sorry looking specimen before. Promontory Ranch and Livestock Company it was owned by the Big Four click you know. They had the Blue Creek rights, the conner spring ranch, they had a ranch down on the east side of Promontory, they had ranches all over. They ran an awful lot of cattle for a while. A good many years later they sold out their rights to the Browning Brothers' Company, and then they had a corporation they called it. The Browning land and livestock company. But it lost them money. All; kinds of money. And went out of business. When I was a kid I never went to school until I was 9 years old. My aunt taught me to read when I was 8 years old. And I could read very well I couldn't write but I could read very well. They subscribed to a magazine for me called the Youth's Companion to read that. That was 1890-1894 along in there. When I _____. Here's something I don't know if it has anything to do with that on not. I'm a scientist, I am an inventor. I have a lot of patents on. I particular I have some patents on 3'd on pictures that you can look back into. And so I as a kid I had a younger brother and younger sister, but they were so much younger than me that I went with the old folks all the time. Now a Blue Creek water station there in the winter of 1892 I became extremely interested in religion. I was 8 years old and I was a religious fanatic. My father had been a preacher in this religion "hard shell" Baptist. His father had been a preacher in this religion starting in New York and moving west from one parish to another. You get me started talking and I never stop. Well, at any rate there at Blue Creek there was my father who was well versed (where is my album) and my mother was a Canadian Presbyterian. My mother had a cousin by the name of Annie Cain that came from Boston, Massachusetts in the winter of 1892 came out to visit us. She was a Christian Scientist. She was a reader in Boston. A Christian Scientist pardon is called key to the scriptures. It's called Christian societies health and key to the scriptures. Christian Scientist bible. When she came out to Blue Creek she tried to convert everyone to her religion. Everyone around were Mormons. There was about 10-15 ranchers along the east side up around the Promontory and up at Blue Springs _____ a Mormon. A manager for the Bar M for this Promontory land and livestock company. A play thing of the Big Four from Sacramento. Then there was a let's see L.C. Lee offer at Connor Springs ranch Bar M Ranch. They come to the station there and they would argue religion. I didn't have anything to do you know and I was right there listening to them all the time. Well there was four different religions and I was trying to figure out which one of them was right. I was like Joseph Smith when he went into the forest you know. Up above the station to the east of the station there is a hill where this pipeline come out just south of Thiokol there where the Blue Creek water tank station was. So the next day after I heard an argument like that I would go up on that hill and I'd sit there and I'd say now which is the right religion. I was trying to figure out which was the true religion. I was only 8 years old. You see I didn't go to school I didn't have any kids to play with, I didn't haven't any radio, I didn't have any television. So it was a natural environment for me to use my minds in inventions. I was very interested in all kinds of mechanical inventions. So that's when I began my inventive career there. And I kept it up ever since. I've got in particular I'm stressing inventions in 3'd in this depth perception. I've got 5 different methods of getting this depth perception in three D. It takes a lot of money to put those things over. You remember these old terriscopes. You even have one. I have one but it is broken down. I once had one thousand views, now I only have 500. I've lost a lot of them in the mean time. My inventions are along that line. But on a large scale. I worked quite a lot on a rotary engine when I was a kid now they have practically quite a lot like my old drawings what they call the Mazda rotary engines. A whole lot like I invented six years ago. Rotary engine is a lot harder to construct than a reciprocating engine because it is hard to seal it off. A reciprocating engine is harder to seal off. Well, in those days well I was 6 years old my I was at Blue Creek there I was a little tad I had knit knee stockings, short pants, and what was called a blouse which kind of hung out over it. I had a dog named Jip, she was a brown cocker spaniel. She went with me everywhere I went all the way to Rozel when I found that cave where the old shoes were. Jip went with me. I came this way until I came to the blue creek comes down through those hills by Thiokol there. In those days they use to call it Calimore and then later on they changed the name to Lampo one of these pictures is of Lampo. Now it is called Thiokol. Between Thiokol and Blue Creek is at the bottom of it. I got down in that wash and it got so steep that I couldn't get off of it. I was wondering how I was to get out and I kept going down and down and it was getting worse and I heard Jip growling and there was a great big coyote behind here and I was just a little cuss. And that coyote wanted to get me and come up to me and she turned and jump and growl at it. The coyote was little bit scared of her and he would back off and I was in a panic to get out and I ran down this gulch and I did find a place where I could get out and the big old coyote didn't follow me. I believe that the coyote would have first killed the dog and then me. I was about a mile and a half from the station I cut across country and went back home and didn't tour the gulch any more. Vaughn Nielson: Was Blue Creek south of Lampo? P.C.: Two and a half miles south. V.N.: So it would be pretty close to where we come out here now. One half mile south of that. It's where the pipe line comes up where the gas line is. P.C.: That's where the station was right there. V.N.: Can you remember T.G. Brown. Didn't move out of the railroad restaurant till it was torn down he built a house behind it. P.C.: Yes, I think he was out of it before. I think he went out of it and into the store business. They tore it down. So the house was pretty close behind the station that he built. Then he, let's see, many many years later Promontory went to the dogs of course, but they maintain the Western Union Line, they didn't put it across the lake and it went on over the hill. The section house was here I was the telegraph was in the section house. Earlier there was separate lines. In 1941-42-43 I was selling radios all over this country here. I sold about I made myself what they call a crystal set before it was audio it was international code that's a little bit different Morse code. They were sending out these messages in international code and I made a crystal set hot springs, Utah. Bonneville, a mile north of Hot Springs. I was receiving KGKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when they set the first voice out over air. Before it had all been code. That was 1921. The distances that you could receive were a lot further then. Too much interference now. I heard KHJ come on in Los Angles I heard KPO San Francisco. In two years. KZM for people from Desseret. I got to manufacturing radios and manufacturing 25 radio sets before you could buy them, out of the store. I manufactured them and I sold those radio sets all the way from the point all the way up the east side of Promontory I sold one to the section boss at that time. I sold one to Lou Whitaker I sold one to him. I sold one up at the head of Blue Creek. I sold 3 radios at Salt Lake City before it could be bought in a store. I was able to get parts (telephone parts) tuning coils, different parts I could make a set on a table. I intended to bring up a set here and give to you. It is the same kind of set I sold to the section boss here in 1943. You should have that in your exhibit because that is one of the first sets made. V.N.: You and Lou Whitaker were pretty close to the same age then. P.C.: Yes, Yes. Old John Witaker's father, they lived in Willard. There was a willow thicket south of Willard and old John Whitaker there was a bear came down out of the hills and he was raiding their chicken coops and like that. And a lot of the ranchers and farmers got this bear cornered in this thicket. About a mile and a half south of Willard. So then they surrounded the thicket but they wanted someone to go in to flush the bear out. Lou Whitaker's father volunteered to go in. He went in to the thicket and he was in. Pretty soon that bear raised up and came down on him and he tore all his clothes off and just tore him all up and just blood and Old John I'd seen throw back his shirt and you can see where those claws were you know. He flushed the bear out and they got the bear. They killed the bear. That would have probably been in the 1890's around there. Promontory Station. I had written up a story about when we lived at Kelton and they just had one hog at Kelton. These drivers were a lot smaller in diameter. There was a tow bar in front of the cow catcher and they would raise up the toe bar when it was down it went right down to the peak. It went right up and it was coupled into the smaller tender of the hog you know. The drivers of the hog were a lot smaller in diameter so they went up the hill and the hog was going lots faster bigger cylinders so the hogs and four times the pulling power of the road engine. But couldn't go over 40 miles per hour because of size of drivers. One set of drivers is one quarter ahead of the other set. The springs under the locomotives gave a kind of rocking motion. It rocked that way when went hard. I went up the hill with old Jim Donahee and Tim Toy to the eating house and surroundings and then back down. They decided to gravel the road in 1893 from Corinne to Promontory Summit. Life of a Chinese Cooley was about the time this happened. I don't know if I described this there or not. It was a gravel train took out the hand brake where the cars come together and put the hand brake down so that it turned the wheels from the side instead of on top. They had an iron plate from one flat car to another, you see. And then they had stakes all along the engineer's name, Old Stake, the gravel pit was about two thirds of the way up the hill. What's the name of that station there, it was this side of Culmore but the other side of Promontory Summit. Serven was South of Blue Creek. Culmore was north. Do you have an old SP map or time card? |
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