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Table of Contents (Note: Reference books should always have a Table of Contents, but novels do not require one. If you don’t want a Table of Contents, simply delete this entire page.) Foreword ......................................................................................... 1 Preface ............................................................................................ 3 Introduction ...................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 ......................................................................................... 7 Chapter 2 ....................................................................................... 21 Chapter 3 ....................................................................................... 37 Chapter 4 ....................................................................................... 71 Chapter 5 ....................................................................................... 93 Chapter 6 ..................................................................................... 101 Chapter 7 ..................................................................................... 113 Chapter 8 ..................................................................................... 233 Chapter 9 ..................................................................................... 247 Chapter 10 ................................................................................... 261 Chapter 11 ................................................................................... 281 Chapter 12 ................................................................................... 293
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Foreword Replace this wording with your own foreword. A foreword is written by somebody other than the author, and usually tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the author during the writing of the book. Also, be sure to spell “foreword” properly. When it is a part of a book, as it is here, it’s spelled “Foreword”. When it’s a direction of travel, it’s spelled “Forward”. If you don’t have a foreword, simply delete this entire page. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Introduction Replace this wording with your own. An introduction generally states the purpose and/or goals of the book. If you don’t have an introduction, simple delete this entire page. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter One
In the Beginning Do you know the muffin man? The muffin man, the muffin man. Do you know the muffin man Who lives on Drury Lane? --Popular Nursery Rhymes circa. 1820
D
escendants of the Mercer County Drurys carry stories in the family that their ancestor was the one that Drury Lane –as in “The Muffin Man” -- was named for. This smacks of the genealogies that were "sold" in the late
1800's connecting people to famous names or places. But who knows, it could be true! What we do know is that William Drury, a Quaker, came to Philadelphia as a lawyer’s copyist. He was married there and he and his wife went first to live in Pickering County, Ohio and then to Wayne County, Indiana. William’s son, Edward Drury, was born in Philadelphia and served as a soldier in the War of 1812. The Edward Drury found in the 1806 tax list in Fairfield County, Ohio, married Jane Burns in Ohio. The children of Edward and Jane Burns Drury were: Harriett Drury born approximately in 1806 in Ohio; William Drury born 9/17/1809, in Ohio; Clarinda Drury born 7/28/1811, in Wayne County, Indiana; Chariah Drury, born 1814, Indiana; Cecelia Drury, born 1816 and died 1822, Indiana; Margaret, born 1818 and died 1832, Indiana; Courtney Drury, born 11/23/1820, Indiana; Maria, born 1823 and died 1833, Indiana; Nancy Theresa, born about 1825, Indiana; and Edward 8
Drury, born 12/21/1827, Indiana. The will of Edward Drury, written 11/2/1829, in Wayne County, Indiana naming all of the children except Cecelia, who was deceased. Milton and Orpha Apparently, after Edward’s death, Jane Burns Drury married William Willits as his third wife on 3/4/1832 in Wayne County, Indiana. She died 7/16/1878 in Mercer County and is buried in New Boston Cemetery. Several of the Edward and Jane Burns Drury children above also married into the Willits family. In the land records of Wayne County, Indiana, Isaac Willets and Edward Drury bought adjoining parcels of land on October 24, 1811. It is possible then that the Willits and Drurys may have come together from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Daughter Harriett married Eli Willits, son of Jesse and Sarah Van Horn Willits, on 4/13/1826 in Wayne County, Indiana. Harriett died in 1851 and her children were raised by a nephew of Eli (Levi who married Harriett's sister Clarinda). This is where the story of Garber Agribusiness begins – the marriage of Harriet Drury and Eli Willits—but it is important to remember the success of Harriet’s brother William, as he figures prominently in the family history.
¹In 1848 they sold out to Courtney Drury and James Thompson.
³History of Mercer County, Illinois , 1882--Pages 93-94
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CHAPTER 2 William and Vashti Drury
S
on William Drury did quite well for himself. According to the History of Mercer County, 1882, "In 1833, Mr. Drury came to Illinois to look at the country, and for the first time saw real prairie land - quite a curiosity to one who has been reared in a wooded country. Drury determined to make this his home, made a selection, and in
1834 returned and made a claim, and settled down at the foot of the bluffs. Through his influence several families came with him. So disgusted with things were they, that they threatened a dissolution of friendship with him if he did not desist in speaking in praise of the country.� Numbered among the voters in the first election of Mercer County in 1835 included William Drury, Silas Drury, Isaac Drury, and Eli Reynolds (this list is taken from the actual poll book so is proof these men were in Mercer County in 1835). When the court convened in April 1835, it included Commissioner Isaac Drury and Sheriff Silas Drury. Among the grand jurors selected were Isaac Drury, William Drury, John Reynolds, Robert Reynolds, Eli Reynolds, John P. Reynolds, and one Drury Reynolds (son of William and Sarah Drury). William Drury filled the office of county recorder for a number of years. At the first regular court term on June 1, 1835, William Drury was appointed clerk and served until October 1837. His signature on legal documents was made with a characteristic flourish. A legend has it that his successor was found one day sitting barefoot trying to imitate Drury's flourish for his own signature in the sand. In 1836, he commenced a small trade in dry goods and groceries in partnership with Levi Willits, under the firm name of Drury and Willits. They bought pork, grain and other products, and shipped them to St. Louis. They did the first pork packing in the county. In 1850, Drury set up a small cash store, which he conducted until 1853, when, on account of failing health, he sold out his interest and gave his attention to the importation and raising of fine stock. In 1871, in partnership with other wealthy men of the county he assisted in organizing a 10
Farmer's National Bank, at Keithsburg, of which he was a large stockholder and president. Drury was quoted as saying he “has made it a practice all his life, that “at the end of each year his income shall be greater than his expenses.” He thinks this accounts for his large estate, and not to any mental gift. This he would recommend to all young men starting in life.”³ In 1840, Drury married Vashti Lewis, daughter of Caleb and Mary Willits Lewis. Together they purchased a huge estate known as “Verdurette” -- 130,000 acres of fine farming land in Illinois. Verdurette was an elegant Gothic mansion east of New Boston, in 1855, surrounding it with a deer park filled with buffalo, elk and deer.
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(L to R) – Eugene Garber, Vic Garber and Vic Garber returned to New Boston, Illinois in XXXX to visit the Verdurette House, which is now an historical society. In 2013, it received its exempt organization status 12 from the IRS and now brings in $41,558 in annual income.
In his will, William Drury provided that all of his property should be held during the lifetime of his wife Vashti for her benefit. Upon her death, the property was to be converted into money for the establishment of an institution of learning, which was to be named William and Vashti College (1908-1918), and established in Mercer County. The city of Aledo, having offered more than any other locality in the county, secured the school. Drury’s vision was a non-denominational school where the student could not only secure a complete classical or scientific education, but where he could also secure such practical instruction as would fit him for some particular employment. A campus of about 16 acres was acquired and the main college building, a boy’s dormitory, a gymnasium, a heating plant and residence for the president were erected.
The attendance has steadily increased since the opening of the school until now there are about 300 students enrolled in all departments. A preparatory course is run in connection with the college and under the same management. “The students of the college are provided with all that goes to make college life desirable and profitable. The customary literary societies flourish, a Young Men's and Young Women's Christian association, the glee club, the oratorical societies and the press club are all well 13
attended and
excite a lively
interest.” –
Past and
Present of
Mercer County,
Ill. – 1914.
“
“The baseball team for the coming year promises to be as good as, if not better, than any in the history of the school, which considering the triumphs of the teams in the past, is speaking well for it. This year the baseball team will meet such teams as Augustana, Lombard, Hedding, Bradley, Illinois Wesleyan, Millikin and Illinois. The athletic spirit in the college is of the best and the slogan has always been, "Honorable defeat is preferable to stolen victory." – Past and Present of Mercer County, Ill –1914. The campus and buildings
were purchased and used by the Roosevelt
Military Academy from 1924
to 1973. The Administration Building was
torn down and the spot was
used for a nursing home. The remaining
two RMA buildings, Niles
Hall and North Hall, are unused.
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CHAPTER 3 Remembrances of Vie Willits Garber As told to grandson Roy Garber
W
Vie Willits Garber XXXX il
liam Drury died in 1827,
just three years before I visited his widow Vashti.
She lived at their
beautiful home – Verdurette – and always had “open house” for all relatives and visitors every Sunday afternoon and evening. I got to be there and meet
other Drury people.
Interesting to me was the fact that I was always introduced as Hattie (Hattie was a nickname for Harriet Elizabeth) Orr’s daughter because there were so many Drurys’ and so many Willits’ in 15
that community that it seemed everyone was designated by the first names of their parents. When I was born, Papa named me “Vie” for the nickname he had always called his sister Elvira. He said, “Remember, your name is Vie, which means to “strive for the highest.”
My papa J.O. Willits was born the son of Harriet Drury and Ely Willits in Indiana in 1846. When he was only four years of age, his mother died of consumption. His next older sister soon died. Of course, that worried his sisters. Aunt Clarinda Willits – Clarinda Drury, the sister of Ely Willits— came back to Indiana and took Papa and his next older sister Elvira with her back out to Illinois to take care of them. He lived there and worked while going to school in
the uncle’s store, which was a
general merchandise business. He learned to keep books and to write a very splendid business hand. He had learned from the time he had to stand on a bench behind the counter. But, growing weary of that and the Civil War having started, he decided he would go west. So he ran away at the age of 16 and went with the wagon train where he learned to handle a team, ride a horse and do anything to be useful on
James Orr “J.O.” Willits
the trip out. He worked after he got there for Wells Fargo and found himself right back in a store most of the time doing the things he had run away from.
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In 1852 Henry Wells and William Fargo founded Wells, Fargo & Co. to serve the West. The new company offered banking (buying gold, and selling paper bank drafts as good as gold) - and express (rapid delivery of the gold and anything else valuable). Wells Fargo opened for business in the gold rush port of San Francisco, and soon Wells Fargo’s agents opened offices in the other new cities and mining camps of the West. In the boom and bust economy of the 1850s, Wells Fargo earned a reputation of trust by dealing rapidly and responsibly with people’s money. In the 1860s, it earned everlasting fame - and its corporate symbol - with the grand adventure of the overland stagecoach line. – History of Wells Fargo
After about four years, he decided to go home and started by steamboat and walked across the Isthmus of Panama with the $4,000 in gold dust he had saved for wages hidden in the made-to-order hollow heels in his boots. He had kept a diary of his return by way of New York. Unfortunately, I never read it and he himself destroyed it after my mother’s death. Growing up in Illinois, James Leslie Willits, my father, was neighbor to a cousin Leslie Willits. Of course, the two Leslies got their grades in schools and their love letters mixed up. My father was determined to change his name and took the name “Orr”, which nobody else but him took until – when he was 16 years of age – he ran away and went out to California with an emigrant train and wrote back and told his family to write to him as “Orr Willits.” That was how he became to be “James Orr Willits” the rest of his life. Back at home once again in Illinois, J.O. Willits decided to go to college at the Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant, Iowa where one of his favorite cousins –Edna Drury
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Cole—was attending. It was she who introduced him to Mama who was one of her very good friends. Upon meeting Hattie Clark, she did not make over him like all the other girls had because he was just fresh back from California. She just said, “How do you do, Orr Willits?” and went about her work. He had no dates with her until her senior year in the year of 1869. She stayed out of school and went out and taught a country school because her parents were not well to do. She taught in order to be sure she had money enough to get her graduation clothes and the necessary expenses. She studied hard and took examinations on the classes she was missing.
Harriet “Hattie” Clark
While she was out there in the country, she had a letter from him (Orr Willits) asking if he could come there and visit, which, of course, she granted and he did. It was then that he first asked her if she would be engaged to him. I don’t think she was altogether cordial about it and kept him worrying a good deal but I’m sure she was very much impressed in being asked. Anyway, they were not openly engaged until after she had graduated in ’69. Then, he went back to work in New Boston, Illinois with his brother in the cattle-feeding business, harder than ever, and then started building a house, which was right there at the edge of the town of New Boston near where his brother Wells Willits lived. They (Papa and Mama) were married in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on July 21, 1870. Then they went on a train to Burlington on the Mississippi River. From there, they took a boat for their wedding trip up the Mississippi River to the head of navigation. On returning, they stayed on the boat and got off in New Boston, Illinois and walked into town to his brother’s house just in time for Sunday dinner. Of course, Mama wanted immediately to help her sister-in-law with the dishes, but Papa said, “No, we are going to take a walk. I have to show you where some friends live.” He took her across to some heavy oak tree timbers to their own new house and to her astonishment, pulled out the key and unlocked the door and ushered her in. They lived there for the next ten years and my brother Paul and sister Nellie were born there. Papa worked with his brothers in their milling business and used any grain they got that wouldn’t make the highest class flour for stock feeding. In connection with that stock business, they operated a farm over in Iowa across the river.
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Papa went almost daily over to that farm in summer always rowing a skiff and in winter on skates across the ice. For safety, he always carried a long, very slender hickory pole. It was about ten feet long in case the ice should break. How I know that fact is that my mother had a carpet fork that was made to fasten to the end of that pole. In my childhood, after they had brought it to Wyoming and I was old enough to be useful, I always hung on the end of it pushing a carpet to be tacked, using it for a carpet stretcher. When his brother sold out his their milling and cattle feeding business and moved to Nebraska, Mama and Papa spent the next summer out in Colorado around Denver deciding where to move and determining if their health would be better. They certainly enjoyed it and were much better off. All that summer of 1880, the hotels and rooming houses in Denver were full of tourists. Not tourism as we speak of it today in 1970, but health resorts – especially those suffering from tuberculosis who like those were out their to benefit from the dry air and sunshine—many of them had come with doctor’s orders. There were so many cases of tuberculosis that it was not allowed for anyone to spit along the sidewalk or on the street. It was even an ordinance that anyone suffering from tuberculosis should carry a disinfected cup to retain his or her spittle. They were so afraid of spreading the disease further. Papa and Mama had many jolly friends their own age. One time, when they were with a group with whom they associated often, someone started the idea of each one telling why they were ill, what was the matter and what would they do if they had their lives to live over again. Mama said, “I would certainly marry a doctor.” Papa spoke up and said, “Well, I would certainly study medicine!” One old maid in the crowd clapped her hands and cheered and said, “Oh, I knew he’d say something sweet, he always does!”
Denver and tuberculosis
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Many present-day hospitals had their start as sanitariums, including Swedish Medical Center and Craig, Lutheran, National Jewish, Porter and St. Anthony hospitals. This picture of a men’s tuberculosis ward at Denver General Hospital – now Denver Health Medical Center – was taken in the early 1940’s.--Source: The Denver Post. Photo courtesy of Denver Public Library. It was the vision of Frances Wisebart Jacobs that made Denver a center for the organized treatment of tuberculosis in the United States. The daughter of immigrants from Bavaria, Frances Wisebart was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky in 1843. At age 20, she married Abraham Jacobs and the couple moved to Colorado. In 1872, Jacobs launched her first foray into organized Jewish charitable relief by forming the Denver Hebrew Ladies’ Relief Society, which assisted Denver’s small population of needy Jewish residents. Jacobs left her most enduring mark in the area of tuberculosis relief. Hundreds of TB victims from the industrial Northeast, Jewish and non-Jewish, who made their way to Denver in search of a cure found that "no facilities existed to give them treatment or even shelter." Even worse, "Most of the Denver community ignored those who roamed the city coughing or hemorrhaging." Unafraid to touch the ill, Jacobs would help them when they fell on the street, get them to a physician and pay for treatment. However, as there was no place for tubercular individuals to stay during treatment, many were transported to the local jail.
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Jacobs insisted that the Denver community face the reality that the city was attracting needy tuberculosis victims. According to a Denver journalist at the time, "Everyone put down his pencil to hear her tell of the crucial need for a hospital. Although she could move any hardboiled editor, the response was always the same – ‘What you say is true, but this is the Queen City of the Plains, and we can’t blacken the name of the city’" by making it a TB refuge. Jacobs found an ally in the newly appointed rabbi of Denver’s Temple Emanu-el, William S. Friedman. In 1889, Friedman argued from his pulpit in favor of Jacobs’s plan to build a Jewishsponsored tuberculosis hospital. In April of 1890, Denver’s Jewish Hospital Association was incorporated and, in October, a hospital cornerstone was laid. A month later, Frances Jacobs contracted pneumonia while visiting among the city’s poor. In early November, she died at the age of 49. The hospital’s trustees voted to name the hospital for her, and construction was completed in 1893. In Colorado’s state capitol, there are 16 stained glass windows depicting important state pioneers. The only woman represented there is Frances Wisebart Jacobs.,
CHAPTER 4 The Move to Wyoming
With her health improved, Mama and Papa determined to move west and returned to Illinois to New Boston to sell their property and get ready to go early in the spring. They soon got a very good chance to sell their house and so began to make preparations to get all the business closed up. As soon as the weather turned warm at the end of March, Papa took the train and went out to Cheyenne. From then on, he wrote Mama a long letter each Sunday reporting just what he had
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done during the week and what he had seen and all the details of his trip down to Fort Collins to talk to some cattlemen. There, he bought a horse and saddle and got it outfitted, bought a rifle to go alone and rode back to Cheyenne, then north until he hit the Bozeman Trail up toward Fort Laramie. Then, he continued on across Wyoming. In those letters that he wrote to Mama, he tells the details of what he had seen and how people lived and the conditions – the dead cattle that had died and work oxen that had starved in the winter – all the time accumulating the facts about what to do and what not to do. He rode, as the letters tell, all the way to Fort Custer on the mouth of the Little Horn River on the Big Horn in Montana. He decided there that the nicest place and the most livable was the Little Goose Valley near Big Horn, Wyoming6. He wrote to Mama that he would go back and leave the horse in Big Horn with the French people and get on the stagecoach and go back to Cheyenne to save time and hurry back to Illinois. They could get started west with the emigrant car sooner. They did and arrived back in Cheyenne with the household goods on the end of June. The family started north in the wagons on the last day of June and they were three weeks coming up the trail. The different events of most importance were told in the Big Horn Pioneers in the chapter written by a grandson – Richard Story Garber. The many events of life after they came and after the log house was completed and inhabited are told on these tapes. Papa decided pretty soon that he couldn’t go in the cattle business in a big enough way to pay without having partners or putting or money into it than he could with what he possessed. He decided, instead, that he would go into the horse raising business in a small way, which he did. He ran horses on the land that is now Jackson Creek Valley just west of Little Goose until he moved into southern Montana. For a number of years, he ran a horse camp there. Those details are recounted in Richard Garber’s story of the Willits story in the Big Horn Pioneers so there is no use to go over that again. In September, word came that over in Rock Creek, a sawmill was being put in that was equipped to make shingles. Papa decided that he would put on a few more logs on the walls and make an upstairs with three bedrooms and wait for the shingles instead of putting on a dirt roof. It was then that Mama and
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Nellie and Paul continued to live in the tent in the yard while Papa and Henry (Chattard?) went back to Cheyenne to get the piano and the rest of the things that had been left in storage. They got back so that everything was in order; the shingles were on and the family moved in in comfort before any severe weather in December. Mama did a beautiful job of making tint-colored whitewash on the log walls to match the calico curtains on the windows and the calico curtains on the closet doors. In fact, all of the partitions upstairs were just white muslin on wooden frames because Papa feared that the rafters were not strong enough to hold up weight of wooden partitions. The chimney holes from the downstairs stove in the big kitchen and in the big sitting room were put in the chimney in the upstairs so that the stovepipes went up through the floors through five-gallon kerosene oilcans that made some heat through stovepipes up in the upper part. As heat always rises, the upstairs was really very comfortable. Our house really was comfortable and pleasant. There, sister Aureli (nicknamed Areli”) was born in 1885 and Vie – myself – was born in 1884. Mama’s mother – Grandmother (Sarah C. Stantial) Clark – had moved with Grandfather Henry Clark and two of Mama’s brothers –Frank Henry Clark and Charles Badger Clark 8 -- out into eastern Dakota soon after Papa and Mama came to Wyoming. But now, Grandfather Clark died so as soon as the Northern Pacific Railroad into Montana and up the Yellowstone Valley almost to Billings, Grandmother Clark came by rail to Rosebud Station. Papa met her there with a spring wagon and team and brought her to live with us, which she did for five years. She was a wonderful, happy, jolly soul. Really, as I remember it, she tended to us little girls, baked the bread, always gave us our baths, blacked our shoes and always got us ready for Sunday School, which Big Horn had at the schoolhouse or wherever there was a place for public meetings from the time I can first remember. Grandmother Clark went back the same way – Papa taking her to Rosebud Station – then putting her on the train that would take her back to Dakota. Paul was wanting to go East to school. The Burlington Railroad was building east to Sheridan by 1892 and the passenger train had gotten as far as Arvada when Paul went by stage to meet the train in the fall of 1892 and attended Business College in Valparaiso, Indiana where he took and had graduation recommendations from…(unintelligible…bookkeeping course?) Then the railroad came on in to Sheridan. Then the celebration of that, the coming of the passenger train was held in ’92 by a big ball at the Sheridan Inn to which Papa took Nelllie. They stayed all in town
23
with our friends the Coffeens who had moved their store from Big Horn to Sheridan several years before. Mr. Coffeen said that it wasn’t fair that Areli and Vie hadn’t gotten to see a passenger train and made Papa promise, which he did the next week. He took us into town to stay all night at the Coffeens. Mr. Coffeen took us out on his back porch from his residence on Coffeen Avenue. By the way, his was the only house on Coffeen Avenue and all that part of Sheridan was/is horse pasture where he pastured his horses for his delivery wagon for whom his horse business in Sheridan. There we saw the passenger train come down the track. I’ll never forget that weird feeling from the string of lights in the darkness when the train came out of the cut east of town and down to the depot. Well, Nellie was planning to go to Boston to continue her musical education. She had been practicing piano all the years since her girlhood. In the fall of 1893, she had started to go to Boston in the winter when she was called at home by Areli’s death. There was a typhoid fever epidemic. It was rampant in this community and in many cases and Areli died in October. Nellie did not go then until the next fall. Then she stayed the next two years not even coming home in the summer, but teaching music and staying out in the company with some Mama’s relatives in Massachusetts. The next summer she did come home and she had graduated in a tuning course. She tuned many pianos for friends. On the way home, she taught the music in the Big Horn College in the fall of 1896. That April, she married Guy Wood. That was the wedding that occurred in the old log house. Guy had a large family, a sister in law and many cousins. His immediate family and parents were the guests at the wedding and the log house was full. Guy and Nellie set up housekeeping on a ranch in lower Soldier Creek and Nellie kept her music classes in Sheridan. But that fall, she was offered to teach at the primary room at the Big Horn School. They moved back and lived in the Hannah house where Guy fed cattle at the Hannah ranch that winter with Lou Burgess. The Spanish-American War came that spring. Paul (my brother) went in Company E of Torrey’s Roughriders7. They spent the summer in Cheyenne training and then went to Florida by railroad train. A wreck caused an injury to Col. Torrey’s foot. Then they were detained and never got beyond Jacksonville, Florida. It was in August of 1898 that Nellie’s first child Beth was born at the Hannah cabin. The exposition in Omaha was in progress that fall and the Burlington offered a round-trip ticket excursion to Omaha and back from Sheridan for $14. So, Mama sent Vie (me) to meet Paul in Omaha and attend the exposition and come home together, which was Vie’s first traveling experience. Papa was getting ready to build a
24
new house. He was feeding sheep – fattening—and making money enough that he planned to build a good, permanent, stone house. He sold four heavy draft teams to a freighter, John Fordyce, to pay to bring the stones delivered to the yard. It was four years before that order was completed. During that four years, Papa had planned everything possible to make money to pay for the house. That was when he had started the sheep feeding. First, he rented the hay and grain lands from all his neighbors on both sides of the lane that ran west of the homestead – a two mile stretch – making it possible in that way to get grain enough ahead and hay enough ahead. This meant hiring a lot of hired men in the summer time and mama feeding that including that hay crew, which she did, much of it putting up lunches to send noontimes. Even the irrigation, he had to oversee and hire the men who did for all that grain and hay land. The project increased year by year because he kept buying more lambs in the fall. He almost always get a good strong lamb contracted in September for December delivery at approximately $1 a head and near enough in Southern Montana that he could drive them home to the ranch during December. Then he got them on to feed the last week in December and the plan was always to keep them on grain three months. That made it so that they were shipped to Chicago for the week following Easter --usually was the best highest price for fat mutton. The feed yards, he made at the east end of the yard on Little Goose under the steep creek bank, which made a great deal of protection along with the heavy growth of brush and trees and almost all of the fencing under the creek bank was done with brush fences – very little woven wire to hold it in places. He build log granaries to hold the grain and fed the grain by means of a heavy handcart that he himself, Papa, could pull loaded with grain and pull it astride the feed troughs that he built himself so that all expense possible was kept down in order that what he was obtaining was real efficiency in the feeding business. He always stayed there in person for three months during three months of grain feeding. Hired men, of course, hauled the hay in hay wagons. Papa attended to the grain feeding in person and never had any illness or bad luck in that respect. Finally, the spring of 1900, he had increased the number being fed up to 2,000 and he went out with that flock so beautifully fatted that the Rosenbaum commission company bought the entire bunch and shipped them themselves Clearmont, Wyoming to New York and across the ocean as live ballast on a cargo vessel to Liverpool, England. That pleased Papa very much because he had fatted cattle in the days of milling and cattle feeding with his brothers in Illinois and some sufficiently fatted steers that had gone live ballast across the ocean. (10 See family lore.)
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Papa was satisfied. He had accomplished his purpose, going over his books proved than he had netted better than $5 ahead and he now had the cash in the bank to pay the stonemasons to build the new house that he contracted. He put in a hydraulic ram to pump the water from the spring up into a barrel in the yard for the mortar man –the constant use of the mortar man. In August of 1900, when the hay crew finished the second crop, they tore down the original log homestead house, enlarged the cellar to fit the specification of the basement for the new structure and hauled in all the piles of boulders that Papa had accumulated at the sides of fields during previous years and brought them to be used as a three-foot wall to support the stone house. The family was camping in tents and cooking in a cook shack for the carpenters stayed on the job continuously, seldom driving to their homes in Sheridan or farther away. When the stone wall was pretty well up, the contractor came to my mother and said that since some of the walls were only one story high and some two stories, he couldn’t see how he was going to roof it. Mama said, “Don’t worry. I will show you.” That was at suppertime. The next morning when he came to breakfast in the cook shack, a model of the roof was made of pasteboard all sewed together at the gutters and the valleys. A complete model was made to scale of one-fourth of an inch to the foot, just has the plats of the floors of the house had been made by Mama and me. My mother’s (Hattie Clark Willits) father (Henry Clark, Vie Willits Garber’s grandfather) had been a contractor and she had played in his shop all her childhood so that she really knew what she was doing and could plan things far better than most men. The stonework was done and the roof was on and the plastering was done having covered the floors with heavy papers – there were no false floors put in. That was done by Thanksgiving time. Then, the family moved into the basement for living quarters and used two of the rooms above as some bedrooms. There was no glass in the windows yet, those all of the frames and doors were ordered. At that time, Papa (J.O. Willits) decided that though he had everybody paid up to that point that the carpenter work was running far above his expectation in cost, so he himself would put in his winter doing the inside finishing work. The worst handicap was the lack of light. As fast at they could, they would get the glass in the various rooms but in the meantime, Papa (J.O. Willits) worked with Mama (Hattie) holding kerosene lamps for him to see by. He had had some experience with carpenter work and was very handy with a miter box and his tools. So, we went through the winter with him doing that.
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********************************************************************************* ********** Guy was employed by Mr. Malcolm Moncrieff to break and train polo horses. They lived in several different houses on properties that Mr. Moncrieff kept buying. Iris was born April 13, 1900 in what was known as the Warren Austin Homestead House just above the Moncrieff brothers’ home. A year and a half later on October 23, 1901, Kennally was born at the ranch house on the JC Bar ranch, which soon became known as the Moncrieff Polo Ranch house north of the Malcolm Moncrieff residence, now the Malcolm Wallop home. By the fall of 1902, Guy Wood (Nellie’s husband) was disappointed in the renters on a ranch that he then owned on Soldier Creek giving notice that they wanted to leave. He began to make preparations if he could not get someone to go continue with that to move there himself. Before he finally decided to take the family there, he had camped a few weeks at a time in two different houses in Sheridan so that by the time he moved the family out to Soldier Creek, the children had been exposed to typhoid fever. Kennally was a victim of the disease and it was a long pull to save his life during which time Nellie entirely overdid herself and began to break seriously. By Christmastime, the children were exposed to chickenpox and all went through a siege of that. A kindly neighbor came to visit and sympathize with Nellie and brought a child who had the whooping cough. Weeks and months of whooping followed. By March, Nellie was feeling very run down herself and Mama (Hatttie) Willits, Beth and Iris, the little girls, home with her and kept them thereafter. Nellie did not regain strength as spring came on and by May, Papa (J.O) Willits began to be very worried. The Sheridan doctors were not helping Nellie apparently. She was not gaining strength and he sent for Vie to come home from her prep school in Laramie, which she did, and nursed Nellie on through the end of July when they became so hopeless and when they were greatly advised to take Nellie to Battle Creek, Michigan, they did it. Within three weeks after going, she was gone. She died in Battle Creek, Michigan on August 11, 1903. Of course, Grandma Willits had had Kennally too since May and the poor child was still having some coughing spells. Nellie was married on the 15th of August in the Big Horn cemetery, August, 1903.
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Papa continued running the ranch himself with hired help and all the time became more aware of the need for a greater amount of irrigating water. He was able to buy a right in the Big Goose and Beaver ditch and bring it seven miles to the ranch and in that way, prove up on desert claim at the west end of his timber claim property. About that time, Jim Glascoe, who was now a man with a family of growing boys asked if he could have employment as he wished to move back from Kansas. He had worked for Papa when he was a young man first married in the 1880s. Before the three years contract with Jim Glascoe was up, he – Mr. Glascoe – took on severe pneumonia and died in April of 1910. Papa had worked well progressing on the reservoir on top of the mountain. It was named the Willits Reservoir and was filled by water from Willits Creek, a small tributary high on top and then southeast drainage of Little Goose. Neither the creek water, which filled the reservoir, nor the place the dam was built had been named hitherto and then been mapped as Willits Creek and Willits Reservoir. Papa finished that as fast as he could. It is interesting to recall that all work was done with horse and scraper and all the dirt for the dam transported by a heavy cart pulled by one strong horse. In 1901, Alva LeRoy Garber came west from Golden City, Missouri with his sister Lina (grandfather Alvin LeRoy Garber’s sister) who came to teach at the Lone Star school in the Big Horn district. The old Lone Star building was just west of what we now speak of as the Brinton barns. It was September 11, 1901 that Roy and Vie first met at Chessamon Spear’s birthday party. Mrs. Spear was noted for the delightful parties she gave to the young people in the community at her large ranch home. Roy Garber was one of the guests at this party having been invited to come and be with his sister Lina. It was there at this birthday that he met Vie Willits. I think it must have been love at first sight for they always found plenty of excuses to meet in the months following. Before spring, Roy had transferred from the Beckton Stock Farm on Big Goose to the Moncrieffe Brothers…the farm…ranch at Big Horn where he and Vie found many occasions to attend the same parties and take many horseback rides. That was the fall that the Willits’ house was being built at the Moncrieffe Brothers Ranch. Fred Tollman was foreman. He had formally worked for Papa Willits and so the families were well acquainted and often visited together. Roy and Vie had many occasions to have happy times together and much horseback riding.
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Then Vie went away to the preparatory school at the University of Wyoming and Roy stayed on and worked at the Moncreiffe ranch and later for Dan Woods who had taken up as a desert claim the land below the foot of the red grade – that section that is now known as Valley View Subdivision. Many years later when Orr and Victor Garber bought that land along with some other acreage in that locality, Roy recalled he fenced about the time –Roy was doing the fencing for Mr. Dan Wood – Lina made the trip to Yellowstone Park, a camping trip with Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wood. While there, she met Noble Gregory who happened to be clerk of the school board and while visiting their camp said he was looking for a teacher. Lina stayed and taught the school at Moran, Wyoming and by the next spring was engaged to the clerk of the board. She settled down in sight of Jackson Lake for her married life. Roy – She even had to have her things sent to her, didn’t she? She didn’t even return to pick them up. Wyoming's ranch and farmlands are disappearing at an alarming rate. Farmers and ranchers have withstood development pressure, drought and mining threats and yet they have managed to preserve these important pieces of Wyoming's rural heritage. Agriculture produces more than food; it also maintains open spaces, contributes to the state's economy and supports family businesses. The story of Garber Agribusiness is not just history, but it remains vital today and highlights the importance of agriculture to Wyoming.
Vie: Yes, Roy was here and gathered up the rest of her things that were at Mrs. Dan Woods’ and sent her things. She needed new clothes that he purchased at the Stevens-Fryberger that we used to call the “New York” store in Sheridan. So, Lina’s whole married life and children all centered around the southern end of Yellowstone Park. Roy: And this is about the time that the Tollmans left the Moncreiffe, right? Vie: Yes. Then about this time, the Tollmans decided to go homesteading in Nebraska near several of their Tollman relatives near Nebraska. Their friendship with the Garber/Willits family continued whenever they came to Yellowstone Park or came across this part of the country. I even stopped at the Tollmans several times when I went by there on the train going to or from Laramie. In later years, after Roy and I were engaged, he was going to school we would deliberately plan to stop to visit Susie and Fred Tollman at Belmont for a day or two. One time, we stayed a day or two longer than we expected because we talked earnestly that we drove too slowly and missed the train. The family never got over teasing us about that. When the Tollmans moved away, their daughter Amy (Uncle Vic Garber’s mother-
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in-law) was just a baby old enough to walk around. They had brought her back here several times on trips to Yellowstone Park. It was perfectly natural when Amy married Glen Miller, he brought her in their car back to visit the Willits and Garbers on their wedding trip. A year after that, the Millers sent a birth card of their daughter Phyllis (Uncle Vic’s wife who passed away in 2001), Vie answered congratulating them and said they hoped they would rear one of their sons fit to be her husband. Alvin LeRoy Garber had gone, induced by Mr. Speer, to drive the stage from Arvada to Moorehead, Montana, and of course, while doing that, got homestead fever and filed on a claim near Broadus, Montana. Later, his brother Eugene from (Carthage) Missouri came out and filed near him. So it was that when Roy and Vie had renewed their friendship of their younger days and were engaged, Papa Willits had asked Roy to come and do the fall plowing and put in the winter wheat before Roy went to school in the fall. The last year, while was finishing up her work for her Master’s degree, the Glascoes were friends of pioneer days who had returned to Wyoming from Kansas and to whom Papa had rented the ranch. When, before their first year was up, Mr. Glascoe died of pneumonia and again, Papa was left with no one on whom to depend to go on with the ranch, which included a lot of cattle as well as a herd of 20 or more horses and a lot of dry farming, which Papa was doing on an experimental basis and making a success of it. Roy and Vie were married on the 18 th of July 1911. Mama planned a small wedding inviting only those to whom she owed such courtesy through the years past. It turned out that there were 80 guests invited. The wedding was at 10 o’clock in the morning with a sumptuous wedding breakfast to be served. Nel Skinner came to the rescue and visited for several days beforehand. They concocted everything Mama planned to have it all just right. The menu consisted of chicken croquettes made in the form of little hams—the bone being furnished by a stick of cooked macaroni. There was raspberry shortcake, Boston brown bread…well, I can’t remember exactly, but it was a heaping plateful of breakfast--each article a specialty in its own right. I remember distinctly that I got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and made a huge, three-decker shortcake and had then baked before breakfast. Papa brought home a case of raspberries from the largest store in Sheridan without specifying just how many were in a case. They were beautiful berries in perfect condition, but even serving the 80 people at the breakfast they were not anything like all consumed. After the guests were all gone, Grandmother Wood, Guy’s mother, who was there and was one of the guests remaining at the house, began to worry that those raspberries were going to spoil. So, Vie turned in and, in true country style, made them all up into raspberry jam on the afternoon of her wedding day while the visiting girls and the ranch cook, hired for that summer, washed up all the dishes, many of which had been borrowed from neighbors, and got them all packed up ready to take
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home. That evening, Roy and Vie said they were going on their wedding trip and took the horse and buggy and returned the dishes to the neighbors north and south of the west lane. So, thus ended our wedding day with lots of jollity and many ridiculous things having had happened. One of the things that had caused the young people much merriment was that we took the hoop skirt that my mother had worn at her wedding, covered it with white cotton batting and gathered wild clematis vines and covered it until it was completely covered with the white blossoms, which were just in profusion at that time. Also, the girls made me an arm bouquet that trailed almost to the floor – the white clematis blossoms tied with little bows with baby ribbon, white. Dear old Grandmother Perry, the oldest person at 80 years old in the community and one of our dearest family friends was my matron of honor. She could not stand alone, but sat beside me and held my bouquet while we were married under the clematis bell made of the hoop skirt. That hoop skirt has remained on through the family and has showed up on various dress occasions but now is going to go in my mother’s trunk in the attic in the old stone house. We continued to live at the stone house with Grandma Hattie and Grandpa J.O. Willits. From that time on, Beth and Iris and Kennally Wood (Nellie’s children) were away at school very often – some—or all of the winter until after a few years when the girls were teaching school themselves. When we built the cabin, Roy did all the work himself. He was so proud of his notching of logs for corners and did a splendid job of laying good big logs. I think the room was 14 by 18 feet. Anyway, he used shiplap for flooring and we had a composition roll paper roof over the sheeting so the expense was very small and $100 cash had paid for all of the materials that went into it. Roy, who was very anxious at the first specifications, said, “Let’s get the door big enough…” for he had experience trying to get a cook stove out of a burning cabin where the stove was wider than the doorframe. He measured and put in a three-foot door just to his own liking. Low and behold, the day he went to hang the door, he had made the frame just two inches bigger than the door itself. Then, we laughed until we cried. He said, “Never mind, I’ll fix it.” The next time I went back to look, he had tacked up a (unintelligible- 14:10) on the hinge side of the door and got the hinges on securely and on we went, he and I looking at each other and bursting into grins and giggled every time we went through it the rest of our lives. This cabin was furnished for a bedroom so was Orr’s birthplace. In the next year, we built a large room to the north with two bedrooms above that large room so that we had ample space. The space between the two cabins was roofed over and floored so that it was our washhouse and separating room. It kept a great deal of dirty work out of the kitchen. It made it a very pleasant way to live from then on.
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Victor was not born until September of 1919. This cabin that Roy built himself became the nucleus for the now “rustic” residence …summer residence of the Kelly Howie family. In September 1921, Beth and Iris were both teaching at home down the railroad track east of Sheridan. When Grandmother Willits had a stroke and after a few days of coma died. Papa Willits continued to eat his meals with us. He lived alone in the house except when the girls came home weekends. In ’23, the price of wheat was high. Roy said that was a splendid time to try to put in wheat acreage, which he did—a hundred acres to get money enough to build a good frame house on a 22-acre tract on the west side of the county road, which Roy had just purchased from Grandpa Willits using the money he had received from selling his homestead down on Powder River. That building was accomplished and the house was completed so that we moved out the cabin completely and into the new frame house on the 17 th of December in ’23. But wheat, which had been ready early and well stacked – when it came to be thrashed late in December – was badly molded and rotten and very little percentage of it was good commercial crop. But, Papa Willits asked the bank to stand beside us, which they did gladly and everyone went on rejoicing. A year later on September 21st, 1924, Gene (Eugene, nephew of the Eugene Garber mentioned at the bottom of page 4) was born. Iris was tutoring at that time with the Gallatin family. Their son, who always went away to a boy’s private school when the family was ready to go east for the winter, needed tutoring at the ranch until they were ready to go. When Iris told us that she had consented to marry a young man she had known when she attended the University of Wyoming, on October 24th, 1924, she was married to Joseph Harold Hix. He was a West Point lieutenant who had been courting her for several years and had visited in the summer several times. Beth went with her to Chicago for the wedding. Then Beth taught in Sheridan and continued with her music and kept house for grandpa until October 24, 1926 when she married Rodney S. Dunlap, an attorney of Fremont, Nebraska with the understanding that grandpa would go and live with them winters. Then he would come back and live at the ranch in the summer and Rodney would be with them whatever time he could have for vacation. Grandpa Willits closed his house and went to Fremont to Beth at Thanksgiving time. The first week in January Beth wrote in detail that he had caught cold and was feeling badly. A few days later, she sent
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for me to come. I did go down on the train and on the 14 th of January 1927, he died. I was thankful to have been his nurse (tearful) and been able to take care of him myself with my own hands those last few days. Paul came home for Papa’s funeral. He had not left his railroad work to come at the time of Mama’s death but now, he seemed to want to stay nearer home and did. He had spent most of his year in railroad work of one sort and another. That year, after Papa’s death, he never went back to railroading again but had taken fence contract work out at the NX Bar (below) and down Powder River – several jobs – until even he had married a little girl – a friend of a man friend of his in Sheridan. They (Paul and friend) had lived together a few months in Sheridan. Just before his death, he had told me that he and this woman were divorced. They had not found their married life compatible and that she had gone back to her home in Nebraska. Then he came to visit because Mrs. Mary Glascoe was here from California. He picked the wash boiler full of peonies and other beautiful flowers from the yard. They spent Sunday afternoon strolling over Bighorn cemetery – he and Mrs. Glascoe – putting flowers on the graves of everyone they had known from Mrs. Glascoe’s girlhood and Paul’s little boyhood. The next Friday, Dr. Johnson phoned me from Sheridan that Paul had called him and that he was very ill. He told me frankly that his heart was in a terrible condition and that he could not lived long. Paul wanted to come home. So, I went and got him and took care of him that last few days myself, for which I am very thankful I was able to do. Death came early Sunday morning June 27 th, 1937. The funeral was very simple – in charge of the Veterans of Sheridan. The flag, they folded and handed to me from his casket is one of the keepsakes in the trunk in the attic. CD #3 Roy: To start with, how was Badger Clark8 related to the Willits family? Vie: He was Mama’s nephew. His father, the reverend, C.B. Clark 11, superintendent of the Black Hills Methodist Church, was Mama’s brother. They had come out here and visited several times and Badger had even come out on a bicycle in his boyhood days. Roy: Was he younger than you were then?
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Vie: No. He was about three years older than I. Roy: But he was born in South Dakota? Vie: No, he had been born in Iowa just before his folks moved to South Dakota and was a lad almost ready for high school when they had come from eastern South Dakota to the Black Hills when his father was made superintendent of the Methodist Church. Then later, he had spent much time in Arizona because he was threatened with TB (tuberculosis), which was a disease his own mother had died from many years before Uncle Charlie married Anna Morris. Anna Morris was really the inspiration to Badger’s writing. It was she who pushed him and got him over the brink of doing it. It was to her that he sent the first of his poems when he was in the southwest living in Arizona for his health and she got them published. That gave him the idea that he could do something that people would buy and put him into the poetic world market. Roy: Was his poetry pretty well received by people at the time? Vie: Very well indeed! It was published in a western magazine that had a lot of it copyrighted. Then, he published (unintelligible), which contained some of his very finest poems – all of those he had written in early days. He was a dutiful son and his father was feeble and pretty well housebound the last few years of his life. Badger stayed right there at home and helped Aunt Anna take care of Uncle Charlie to the end. Then he went up to Custer, South Dakota and picked out a place that he loved and got himself permission to build a cabin, which he did – a very nice pleasant home he called “Badger Hole” right near Legion Lake. Then he really settled down to write and he had many poems published. He did a lot of lecture touring and gave the commencement addresses at ever so many high school commencement exercises in South Dakota. He was really well known among the young folks going on to college in South Dakota and was soon titled “Poet Laureate” of South Dakota, which he held until the time of his death and those are the words on his tombstone – “Poet Laureate of South Dakota.” Roy: The Garber family then traces back to the family tree – the Garber name appears in connection with the German soldiers, which were hired and sent to America to fight the Revolutionary War. Vie: Hessian soldiers.
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Roy: Yes. Vie: Father Garber’s mother’s father – name was Paith – and he was a Hessian who did not go back after the Revolution was over but stayed in Pennsylvania. Mother Garber – father’s name was Kinsinger and he was from the Black Forest in Germany. Mother was the eldest of seven children and had kept house for her father when her mother had died and did not marry our grandfather Garber until after her father married a second wife when the first children were quite well grown. Then, he had another family of children, many of whom we know because some of the families came west and came by and stopped to visit Mother Garber. We still correspond with various ones of those relatives. One young couple whom we knew personally – the man had visited here as a boy – were down in Puerto Rico when Vic and Phyllis went there four years ago. They visited them and entertained them. And so it goes on – we kept finding different connections with some of the Garber and Kinsinger relatives. They are all grand old families and all of them started out as Mennonites. Some still are and some of them have gone into other denominations but they are all fine Christian people wherever you find them. Roy: How many generations had passed up to the point that …how many generations in between when they first showed up in the United States and Roy Garber’s father? Vie: Four. Roy: Four. He was the fifth generation then? Vie: I think that is correct, but all of the family record that we know is perfectly copied in the typewritten sheets that Jean has kept. There is a complete copy of that right here. Roy: Then Roy Garber came west with his sister right? Vie: Yes. Roy: Like everybody else that came west it was the place to go for no particular reason or did they have jobs before they left? Vie: Oh, you could always come and get a good job if you were capable in any line, you could come west and get right in.
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Roy: Where did they come from when they headed west? Vie: From Oak City, Missouri where the folks had lived ever since they had moved there from Illinois. If you go back and follow that part of the family history, they had come to Illinois from Ohio because you could do it all on the water. You could down the Ohio and get into the Mississippi and then go up or down the Mississippi or up the Illinois River. That’s what our direct descents had gone – up the Illinois River. Grandfather Garber had worked at the brick factory in Peoria, Illinois. Roy: In later years, then…. Vie: They moved to Missouri. I don’t know why or when. Most of his 11 children were born in Missouri. Roy and his brother Eugene were the two youngest of the 11 children, eight of who grew to maturity. Roy: Then in later years, Mother and Father Garber came west and spent considerable time here with you, did they not? Vie: Yes, they went to Manual, their oldest son, who had organized a sheep company up in Montana. They went up there and lived and Father had never used his homestead rights and there in his old age, he proved up on a homestead in Montana. It was at the end of that duty that they came here to visit Roy and see their daughter Lina who was ill here. After Lina had requested to be buried here and was, they changed their minds – they had always said they had to go back to be buried in Missouri because they had a child buried back there. But they decided they wanted to be buried here beside Lina and they were. Roy’s brother Eugene (Eugene Garber – 1883-1966), in his old age and last illness, asked if he could be buried here beside his brother and he was. Roy: It was not too many years after Lina had moved to the Jackson area that he became ill and returned here, was it? Vie: Well, here married life had all been there and she had five children – the youngest one not old enough to be in school – when she found out from a “tourist” doctor that she became very ill and was stricken with scattered cancer and could not live long. It was then that she asked to be taken back to Bighorn for me to take care of her and she would rather be buried here then at Jackson. Lily, her sister who had lived during the years that Lina had lived at the edge of Yellowstone Park – Lily had lived at
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Meeker, Colorado.
She asked Lily to take the children and finish putting them through school, which
Lily did. Some of them finally went back and lived there in Yellowstone with their own father and finished school. And now, after being scattered hither and yon, they now are living there all right there in Jackson working together in a service station and tourist business. Lois has a musical and entertainment business in Jackson operating very successfully, happily and financially successful right now. Roy: After Lina died, you said that Father and Mother Garber stayed with you and Grandpa. How long was that? Vie: Oh, it was quite a long time. Father lived until we had been in the new house two years and a little over when his death came. Mother lived on for another eight years after that. Roy: I find it interesting all of the history that goes along with the Wagon Box Fight 9 and especially to me, is all of the effort that people put into getting it located in its proper location. The Wagon Box fight8 was an historic event in Western history in that it was the first time, or one of the first times, that shell-loading rifles had been used to fight the Indians. The events that led up to the Wagon Box fight I think did more to cause the problems of its exact location later than anything. It seemed, as near as all written records and stories of the fight that the wagon boxes had been placed in a circle where the fight actually occurred, not as a fortification, but they had been put in this location as a convenience to the teamsters. It was quite a ways away from water, which was poor judgment for a military person and it was out in the middle of the open. So, when the men who were cutting wood that day were surprised by the Indians and the fight occurred, they had to fight in the wagon boxes even though it was a very poor location for the battle. After the battle, they became a little more conscious of where to prepare for another such battle if it were to occur and they dug a set of fortifications the next year then, which were to be used in the case of another attack. I presume that when, after the fight, which occurred in 1867, right? Vie: Yes. Roy: That when people went back to look for where this historic event, they naturally didn’t look where it had happened, am I right? Vie: It was only a half-mile away from where the fortified rim was. Nobody had ever found a written record of it until recent years, an old diary was discovered, gotten ahold of and copied in which a young man told he was sent with the guard to the woodchoppers and went back a week following the original
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fight. The first thing they were put to do was to make a fortified ring with rifle bits and everything to protect themselves with. Roy: What steps were taken in later years as the country became settled to mark the sight of the Wagon Box fight? Who was the first person that bothered to try and find it and put up a marker? Vie: It was the commercial clubs in Buffalo and Sheridan. Each one started out in almost a case of rivalry because it was right on the border of the county line. There was a newspaper reporter man came here who had been in Omaha and interviewed Sgt. Gibson, who was one of the young boys in his teens at the time of the fight. He even stayed in government service and was down at the Omaha to handle supplies and talked to this reporter and the reporter got his story.
Then, the newspaper correspondent
E.A. Brininstool – who was well known as a western reporter--went to Sgt. Gibson and got him to tell him the story of the fight as it had occurred. He got permission to have Sgt. Gibson’s story copyrighted in Brininstool’s name. That was all very well and satisfied everybody. Later, someone in talking with Sgt. Gibson asked how deep the fortifications were and when they were put there–rifle pits around the entrenchment and Sgt. Gibson said there weren’t any fortifications – it was just a corral to corral the horses out there on the flat. There was no thought of it being fortifications. Then, more than ever, people began to think, “Where was it?” Nobody could answer. Gibson insisted there were no fortifications
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Drury Lane is a street on the eastern boundary of the Covent Garden area of London, running between Aldwych and High Holborn. The lane led to the house built by Sir William Drury, Knight of the Garater in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Drury House, with a coach yard in front and a garden in back, was a scene of the intrigues that led to the ill-fated rebellion of the Queen’s favorite, the Earl of Essex. In the 17th century it was the London house of the Earl of Craven, then a public house under the sign of his reputed mistress, the Queen of Bohemia, but by the 18 th century Drury Lane had become one of the worst slums in London, dominated by prostitution and gin palaces. The name of the street is often used to refer to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which has in different incarnations has been located in Drury Lane since the 17th century, even though today the main entrance is on Catherine Street. The street Drury Lane is also where the “Muffin Man” lives as mentioned in the popular nursery rhyme. It is not known whether the song refers to Drury Lane in London or another town. The rhyme is first recorded in a British manuscript of around 1820 preserved in the Bodleian Library with lyrics very similar to those used today: Do you know the muffin man? The muffin man, the muffin man. Do you know the muffin man
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Who lives on Drury Lane? Victorian households had many of their fresh foods delivered; muffins would be delivered door-todoor by a muffin man. The "muffin" in question was the bread product known in the U.S.A. as English muffins, not the much sweeter cupcake-shaped American variety. The rhyme and game appear to have spread to other countries in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly the USA and the Netherlands. As with many traditional songs, there are regional variations in wording. Another popular version substitutes "Dorset Lane" for Drury Lane. -- Wikipedia Chief Black Hawk -- Black Hawk, born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, was a war leader and warrior of the Sauk American Indian tribe in what is now the Midwest of the United States. –Wikipedia 2
Chief Keokuk -- Keokuk was a chief of the Sauk or Sac tribe in central North America noted for his policy of cooperation with the U.S. government, which led to conflict with Black Hawk, who led part of their band into the Black Hawk War.—Wikipedia 3
New Boston is a city in Mercer County Illinois. The population was 683 at the 2010 census, up from 632 at the 2000 census. 4
Tuberculosis, also known as “consumption,” “phthisis,” or the “white plague,” was the cause of more deaths in industrialized countries than any other disease during the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the late 19th century, 70 to 90% of the urban populations of Europe and North America were infected with the TB bacillus, and about 80% of those individuals who developed active tuberculosis died of it. 5
For most of the 19th century, tuberculosis was thought to be a hereditary, constitutional disease rather than a contagious one. By the end of the 19th century, when infection rates in some cities were thought by public health officials to be nearly 100%, tuberculosis was also considered to be a sign of poverty or an inevitable outcome of the process of industrial civilization. About 40% of working-class deaths in cities were from tuberculosis. Big Horn, Wyoming -- an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Sheridan County, Wyoming. The population was 198 at the 2000 census and 490 at the 2010 census. 6
Torey’s Rough Riders -- The 2nd United States Volunteer Cavalry was raised by Colonel Jay L. Torrey, and as a consequence was known as "Torrey's Rough Riders". This regiment was composed mostly of men from Wyoming. The troopers left Cheyenne on June 22, 1898 for Camp Cuba Libre, Jacksonville, Florida. At Tupelo, Mississippi, on the 26th of that month, the second section of the troop train encountered those of the first section, which resulted in the immediate death of three troopers. Three others died later, and 11 others were injured, including Colonel Torrey himself. The record of Torrey's 7
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troopers in the Florida camp shows but one "scrap," and the affair never made it beyond the confines of the company street. One of the troopers described it to the officer-of- the-day in the following manner: "It didn't amount to anything, sir. One of the boys in the Leadville troop got a little too much liquor. He came over to our troop looking for something, and he found it. I handed it to him." These troopers of the 2nd United States Volunteer Cavalry never entered action with the Spaniardsthe war ended too soon-but they at least fully proved the quality of western manhood. Indeed, the struggle made by Colonel Torrey to get his regiment into action was energetic and persistent, but futile. The regiment arrived in Jacksonville on June 28, after the fighting had begun at Santiago. An urgent appeal was made and re-made to be included in the Puerto Rican expedition, but cavalry was not needed there, and disappointment followed. The regiment remained at Camp Cuba Libre until October, when it mustered out.—Civil War Badges Charles “Badger” Clark, South Dakota’s first poet laureate, appointed in 1937.
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A Cowboy's Prayer(Written for Mother) Oh Lord, I've never lived where churches grow. I love creation better as it stood That day You finished it so long ago And looked upon Your work and called it good. I know that others find You in the light That's sifted down through tinted window panes, And yet I seem to feel You near tonight In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains. I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well, That You have made my freedom so complete; That I'm no slave of whistle, clock or bell, Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street. Just let me live my life as I've begun And give me work that's open to the sky; Make me a pardner of the wind and sun, And I won't ask a life that's soft or high. Let me be easy on the man that's down; Let me be square and generous with all. I'm careless sometimes, Lord, when I'm in town, But never let 'em say I'm mean or small! Make me as big and open as the plains, As honest as the hawse between my knees, Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains, Free as the hawk that circles down the
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breeze! Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget. You know about the reasons that are hid. You understand the things that gall and fret; You know me better than my mother did. Just keep an eye on all that's done and said And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside, And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead That stretches upward toward the Great Divide. Badger Clark, from Sun and Saddle Leather, 1922This poem is in the public domain and does not require permission for use
The Wagon Box Fight was an engagement on August 2, 1867, during Red Cloud's War, between 26 soldiers of the U.S. Army and six civilians and several hundred Lakota Sioux Indians in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming. The outnumbered soldiers held off the Indians with newly issued breechloading Springfield Model 1866 rifles. 9
Wagon Box Fight site, near Fort Phil Kearney, WY
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Wagon Box Fight site, near Fort Phil Kearney, WY
Wyoming historical marker at Wagon Box site
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Family lore of the meaning of the word “shit.”
Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship ... well in dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, and one of the by products is methane gas . . . and as the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen, methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern . . . BOOOOM! Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening. After that the bundles of manure where always stamped with the term S.H.I.T on them which meant to the sailors to "Ship High In Transit". In other words high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.
The Reverend C.B. Clark, Vie Willit’s uncle, performed the burial services for Calamity Jane because no one else would. Calamity Jane was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery, South Dakota, next to Wild Bill Hickok. Four of the men who planned her funeral (Frank Ankeney, Jim Carson, Anson Higby, and Albert Malter) later stated that since Wild Bill Hickok had "absolutely no use" for Jane while he was alive, they decided to play a posthumous joke on Hickok by giving Calamity an eternal resting place by his side. Another account states: "in compliance with Jane's dying requests, the Society of Black Hills Pioneers took charge of her funeral and burial in Mount Moriah Cemetery beside Wild Bill. Not just old friends, but the morbidly curious and many who would not have 11
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acknowledged Calamity Jane when she was alive, overflowed the First Methodist Church for the funeral services on August 4 and followed the hearse up the steep winding road to Deadwood’s boot hill".
She came up from a very hardscrabble life, unacquainted with bourgeois notions of decorum; she probably never knew financial security, but even in poverty she was known for her helpfulness, generosity, and willingness to undertake demanding and even dangerous tasks to help others. She was afflicted with alcoholism and wanderlust (and, perhaps, promiscuity), but, as someone remembered her, "Her vices were the wide-open sins of a wide-open country – the sort that never carried a hurt".--Wikipedia
When I was born, Papa named me “Vie” for the nickname he had always called his sister Elvira. He said, “Remember, your name is Vie, which means to “strive for the highest.”
Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com. Here, now, starts the filler text for the rest of the chapter. Alisi blam iure dolenibh ent incil dolorer iure etuerat. Quam iniamet, quat vel ilit la feui tio erat, quisl in ut accumsandre feui ea faciliq uisisi tat. To consenis esto exer sequismod tionsequat adit ipisi. Borperc iduiscilisl ut lute commy nonse molobor si. Ed minim augait voloboreet nostrud dion et, quisim irit lute dolore min hent utat doloree tueros nisci tissed dignis eu facipisl exerat. Tiscil doluptat nis nit, velenis ad ea facilis amconullan el ut ulput auguer ipsustin utat. Ut in heniamc onulpute vel iureetummy nisi eugue magna consequam, sim zzriuscidunt aciduis molorpe rostrud tat nummod eriureetum adit la faccumsandre eum niamcommy nim quat eugiate corper illa consequat. Ipis ea feugait auguer at digna ad tisse cons am num quam vulput nullum vendrercinim nulput praestie venis ex ea am, vel ullaorem vel in vel ipismodit adit, quis accumsandre mod te molortisi tio esto commolo rpercip suscil ulputat, venibh ese conse te ea feugiamet iriusci blam doluptat. Bore dolut diatue min vel el illa feu faccum qui bla facinissenis dolore dolor sed mod tatet prat. Sum zzriliq uissis erit lore feuipit lut aliquisi blam, consequat. Im del ercilit landrer aessim ent ut num nulput niam nullaore del eummodit iureet diam zzrillan ver ilisi. Ed eraesse quatum verat. Ut elisl dolobor tincilla faccum vel iuscinim do esequam illum ing er summod min ut lorero delesto odolum ipit, vero ectetue dunt irit lum vulla cons num zzrit erci tat accum quat. 43
San volobore ero et, qui esent nullaor alit et augiat iurem dipsusc iduismolore vel ut velis dolor alit atie veliquis deliquamcon henis ad dolumsandit do odigna consent prat. An vullan vullandit, vulla am ip ex eu facidunt et, sequi blandre vel et lore vendipit nibh eum zzril ipsum ad mincing ex ea feum quat aut acinit in heniat. Xeratum volortie magna adignim dolore corem nulla feummy nonsequat vero delenis eugiamc onsequis num ing eum acillaore mod ming euguero odignis autat, quat. Ut il iriustie tie velit dunt wisiscing exeraessisit num quate velit veliquatinim aciduis del ing exerit adit, coreetuer sequis ea faccum ad miniatum nismolobor acidunt dolortie mincin hent in ut luptat amcommod te dunt eu facipisl utpat dunt la feugiam quatisl ea feugue mod tem et euip et la feugiat, velit irit volesent del eniamet, vel dolenit acipit niat. Nullut accummod te commodiatue mod ming el il dolorperilit lum duipisse molut ing ent prat. An eum delenim dolor sum zzriuscidui erilit nis adiat. Duiscidunt lobor sed tat alit dolum dolor suscipit lummolent la conse conumsandip etuerostrud et wis dignisi. Vel delis eu faccummy nis do core magnis nim iustisim dolorercilit il er ipsustin volestrud exer suscinim num velisl elit vel doluptatum accum in vulla faccum ad diam, vel ea facinci esequiscinci elisis eraessed dip etue dolore et iustrud er aliquat. Ut at utatem zzriure feu feu faciliquat. Ut wisi. Ulla feu feu feui bla feugait lutpatuero conullandre vel iliqui blan utpat iliquat, velenim iril ullaore raesto dolummy nonsent luptatincip eu facin esed min utem dolobor acil dolum autat lore dipit adio dolendre feuiscillaor sisit la conse cor irit in eugiam, vel iurer sumsandrem eu feui bla facilisl dunt nos dolortionsed dolorer suscin exerilit utet veriure min henisse commod er iriure dio dionse dip exero cons nonsequamet dolortissim num do dolesto et, corpero od doloreet nostrud tem ip ea am volendreet laortis molore molore magna feugiam alit nos nulla feuguerit dolor adit volor si. Tio con er at nos alit veliquat ectem niamconse molore tet inim in vero ercin velis nullaorer sumsand ipsummolore vullamconum duisisi. Feugait adionsequate dolor sent euismodignit in ullan heniat la facinci lluptat ionsequi el eraesenibh euisl iusto cor irit amcon henit nit lum aliquip sumsan ullan eu feugiamcons nostisc iliquatem aliquisis alit, velessim dolute dolore exeraes siscip ea at. Ros nisim veliquis nit inim vullamcorem ip exero dolorti scipsum modiamet wisl eriusto od minit, quat delenim dolessenis alit ulput velit venim aliquis nostrud magnis nostionsed dolobor perostrud tatem nos exer sis nit wis nos nos delit nulluptatum alisim eum in velenibh ex eumsand reetuercip ero dip et ut utem ipsustisse delismo lobore magna conullam in et, quam, sed te minissi. Ipis eniat luptat, sed tem delis dui tem quip eugait verilis ciduis alit ip exeril et vullam, sit, velessim adit alit inci blan hendree tumsan ulla commy nulput wisit augueraessit nos ad dolummy nonsequat ad molorer sumsandre magnim dolortio dit lobor adio consent dunt praessed tat, qui tet, sed tio odolore exercin volore min venisci te doloboreet augait lut nos nullum 44
vulluptat. Duisi bla accum inim volestis ad ea feumsan ea feu faccum volendrem velent vullum vullan euguero od estrud ea cons ecte min veliquipisi. Enit irilisis exercil dolortin venisi exeros nulputem nonsequat aliquat luptat volesent nummolo rperosto od te vulla feum dignim digna commy nostism odoloreet at, quisit esto odit, commy nulla facidunt accum at utetum deliquisis augait lor sustin er amcons exer si. Ip ent adit ulla feugiat prat inibh er autat. Bor sum zzriusci bla augiati smolore modolendipit ilit adignit iriure facip eros nulluptatue vendre ea core vullut adit vulputet velit lor at, sequiss equissit in ecte tate delit nim quatio conullam veros alit ipis niamet utat prat ea faccum ing ex ex exero coreet, consendit vel ullamco mmodipisl esectet numsan utpat. Ut aut dolore ero diatumsan velisis nullam enibh exero consenit volore dolobor susci tie min volute molendion hent iure min voloreet lore tat, consenibh endre euisciliquis elit adiamcommy nisi. Ommolore ex ercipsum ad dolore modignisl ip er inisse digna augiam, si et, con vel ulputem ent lut irit adionsequip ecte min hendre tie vel deliqua mcoreet vel irilit aliquipit atum iuscillandio eum vulputatuero dolorem dipsuscin elit prat. Giat. Duismol oborer sit utat augiat non hendre dunt ate tat. Od dolum vel iusciliquis niamconse
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Chapter Two This is the beginning of Chapter Two. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Three This is the beginning of Chapter Three. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Four This is the beginning of Chapter Four. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Five This is the beginning of Chapter Five. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Six This is the beginning of Chapter Six. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Seven This is the beginning of Chapter Seven. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Eight This is the beginning of Chapter Eight. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Nine This is the beginning of Chapter Nine. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Ten This is the beginning of Chapter Ten. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Eleven This is the beginning of Chapter Eleven. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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Chapter Twelve This is the beginning of Chapter Twelve. Use as many chapters as you need. Delete unused chapters, or copy and paste the last sample chapter as needed to add more chapters to your book. If you have further questions, contact 48HrBooks. Our regular business hours are MonThurs. 8:30 am – 8 pm EST, and Friday 8:30 am – 5 pm. During these hours, you can reach us by phone, email or on-line chat. Outside of these hours, either call and leave a message or email us. Phone: 800-231-0521 Email: info@48HrBooks.com On-Line Chat: go to our website, www.48HrBooks.com.
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