Part 8

Both Bill and Holiday raised excellent gardens. To be fairly safe against frost they never planted until the snow melted up to a certain level in the Tetons. They raised many vegetables. Their cauliflowers were as big as footstools. They raised currents and raspberries galore, and made jelly and jam. And they raised flowers. Holiday always had pansies on the north side of his buildings. He called them tansies. He and Bill always gave freely of their vegetables, berries, and flowers.

During the wild berry season, Bill would charge "huckleberry rates" to the local people--fare one way only--when the berries were ripe along the ridges and around the lakes under the Tetons.

Holiday would can between 50 and 60 quarts of huckleberries during a season. And since he drank periodically he made wine. At any rate that is what he called it. He would make it of berries, raisins, prunes, beets, plus whatever else was handy--and never wait for the mixture to mature.

It would knock his hat off.

At five one summer morning, neighbors stopped at Holiday's returning from a dance. They were cold. They needed a stimulant, but Holiday had no wine. He had drunk it all. So they drank a cocktail made of gin and huckleberry juice--half and half. After finishing their drinks, 2 young men in the party decided to go shoot a rabbit for breakfast. They did.

"We shot it right in the eye," one said, holding up what was left of the rabbit.

The hind parts were shot away, slick as a whistle.

That is what gin and wild huckleberry juice did to a rabbit. Holy Savior, yes! What might Holiday's wine have done to it?

Holiday enjoyed the summer visitors in Jackson Hole. Bill probably enjoyed them also, but they could not lift him from his natural state of grouchiness. Once, after looking over the miles of sage that covered the levels of land that rise from the river to the mountains, an Eastern lady said to Bill, "Mr. Menor, what do you raise in this country?"

Bill, a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, looked at her and said, "Hell and kids and plenty of both."

He enjoyed startling people.

And he apparently knew what the "outsider" thought of a Jackson Holer. In 1915 he made a trip to the World's Fair with his neighbors, Jim and Mary Budge. When they had boarded a San Francisco-bound train, after a strenuous trek out of Jackson Hole, both Jim and Bill felt in need of a long drink of whiskey. Entering the smoker with their concealed bottle, they found one other man there. They did not like his looks and they felt no need of him. Bill walked up and looked down at him with his eagle stare. "Do you know where we're from?" he said. "JACKSON HOLE!"

The man made a quick escape.

Though Holiday was more jovial than Brother Bill, his neighbors steered clear of him when he was in the process of making lime. He made and sold lime to neighboring ranchers. Some of them, like Bill, whitewashed their houses inside and out with it. Holiday chinked his houses with it. He also used it as a cure-all for man and beast. When he made lime he had to keep a steady fire going for thirty-odd hours in the kiln just behind the house in the bank. During these hours he was not fit company for man or beast. But his neighbors accepted his limy disposition as a necessary part of the process. Holy Savior, yes. What of it?

When late fall brought bitter winds, heavy fogs, and snow, the ferry was beached for the winter. From then on all teams had to ford the river. A little platform was hung from the river cable to accommodate foot passengers. It would hold 3 or 4 at one time. The passengers mounted the platform from a ladder and sat down. Bill released the car; with a quick swoosh it ran down the slack in the cable where it dipped within 10 feet of the river. Then the frightened passengers would laboriously haul themselves up the relaxed cable to the opposite shore.

In later years, when travel became heavier, a winter bridge was flung across the main channel. Putting in the winter bridge was the responsibility of everyone, friend and enemy alike. When the time was ripe, word was sent to nearby ranchers. On this day of days all cars and wagons were stopped and the occupants asked to help with the construction. If they protested, Holiday would say, "Do you want to use the winter bridge? Well, then help put it in!"

Giving a hot meal to the crew that laid the winter bridge became traditional with Mrs. Dornan. While they carried logs and hammered, she baked and fried and boiled.

To find a crew to lay the winter bridge was never very difficult, but to find a few who were willing to help remove it in the spring was a very different matter. The ferry was running full blast. No one needed the bridge. No one was enthusiastic. This was spring; time to plant and build and plan. No time to tear down. To get men to the river for this seemingly useless task was worse than trying to get a fresh cow on the ferry without her calf.

So it came to pass that one spring there was only Holiday and one other man to move the bridge pole by pole, nail by nail, oath by oath. As a result any log that looked too heavy for 2 men to lift was rolled into the river. "To hell with it," Holiday would say, and dust off his hands. "Holy Savior, yes!"

In 1918, Bill sold his ranch and the ferry. The new owners raised the prices. Soon after the ferry changed hands, a Jackson Holer came along on foot. Finding the fare doubled he leaped, fully dressed and full of anger into the Snake River and swam across. The pilot stood on the ferry, cursing the swimmer and yelling that he hoped he would drown.

Bill sold because he had enough of high water and low water. He had enough of fog, rain, wind, snow, and sunshine on the Snake.

Yet he could not drag himself away. He hung around his house and at twelve-noon, and six-sharp he would pace what was no longer his floor and swear because the meal was not ready. Mrs. Dornan, who was then boarding at the Menor place, would get him to the door and say, "Go on out, Bill. The meal will be good when you get it." But this was no longer home. At last he dragged himself away from the ranch, away from the valley. He moved to California.

In 1925 the Gros Ventre slide occurred which brought tourists flocking to Jackson Hole. The great rump of Sheep Mountain had dropped away, damming the Gros Ventre River and forming a lake 4 miles long. This landslide occurred directly across the valley from Menor's Ferry and brought the owners a landslide of business. But Bill had sold and left the country.

By 1927 a huge bridge spanned the Snake not far from the Menor houses, so the ferry was beached and in time dismantled. But before the bridge was completed, Holiday had sold his land and followed his brother to California.

Now they were old men.

Just before leaving the valley, Holiday bought a new suit and a new hat. He stayed a few days in Jackson at the Crabtree Hotel. One night, while he was in town, the ladies of some organization were having a dinner in the Club House--the upper floor of a huge frame building. An outside stairway led up to the hall. Holiday happened along just as a woman stepped out on the stairway with a pan full of dishwater. She threw the water all over him. Holiday walked on to the hotel, wet and violently angry. After a string of oaths that would reach from one end of the Snake River to the other and all its tributaries, he said to Mrs. Crabtree, "A man gets dressed up once in 17 years and a woman has to climb up above him and throw dishwater all over him. Why couldn't it have been a minute earlier or a minute later? Hell!" And he stomped off to his room.

Shortly before Bill's death, Mrs. Dornan found the two brothers in San Diego, in a little hospital on Juniper Street. Bill was bedridden, but his mind was keen. He cursed the bed in which he lay, and talked of Jackson Hole. A sympathetic nurse had pinned on the wall at the foot of his bed a crude oil painting of the Teton Mountains.

Holiday was able to be up and about, but his mind had begun to fade. Mrs. Dornan took him mahogany "tansies" like those he once grew. Knowing he would never see her again, he gave her a handkerchief with his initials in one corner. H. H. M.

She knew that never again would she hear him say, "Now mind you, I'm telling you. This ain't W. D. Menor talking, this is H. H. Menor talking, by God!"

The brothers died within a year of each other.

But living or dead they belonged to Jackson Hole. They were vivid, strong-grained men.

Holiday's buildings are gone. But Bill's low, whitewashed house still stands.

And the mad Snake rolls by, and the shadow of the great mountains moves over sage, and building, and river.

FOOTNOTES

[1]Years later a peak almost due west from this camp, at the head of Waterfalls Canyon, was named Doane Peak, in honor of the Lieutenant.

[2]Prior to the construction of Jackson Lake Dam, completed in 1916, the natural water level was some 39 feet below the present high water line.

[3]Probably Moran Bay.

[4]Parenthetical statement crossed out in the original.

[5]Reprinted from Annals of Wyoming, Volume 5, Number 4, June 1929, with permission from the author and Miss Lola M. Homsher, Director of Archives and Historical Department, State of Wyoming.

[6]There is a discrepancy here, since Doane's report of his expedition indicates that Lieutenant Hall and Doane met some distance down the Snake River from Jackson Hole in 1877.

[7]Reprinted from _Saga_, literary magazine of Augustana College, 1955 with permission of the author and the editor of _Saga_. This narrative is based on detailed historical notes obtained by the author's father, Fritiof Fryxell, more than 30 years ago, in conversation with early settlers of Jackson Hole--including Pierce Cunningham himself--who were in a position to furnish reliable information concerning _The Affair at Cunningham's Ranch_. In the recording of these notes, and their use in preparing the present account, every effort was made to reconstruct the episode as accurately and fully as possible, except that the names of the posse were purposely omitted.

[8]Reprinted from _American Forests_, October 1935, with the permission of the author and editor of _American Forests_.

[9]Reprinted from the _Empire Magazine_ of _The Denver Post_ and from the _Jackson's Hole Courier_ with the permission of the editors and the author.

Transcriber's Notes

--Silently corrected a few typos.

--Added an ellipsis on page 44 where a word was apparently omitted in the printed exemplar.

--Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.

--In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.

End of Project Gutenberg's Campfire Tales of Jackson Hole, by G. Bryan Harry