Pilgrimage of Joy . . .

“KETCHERSIDE TOWN”
by W. Carl Ketcherside

It is difficult to describe a mining town in the early part of the twentieth century to those who live in our present urbanized culture. The village in which I was born, Cantwell, was one of a string of towns on the surface of the earth loosely following the vein of lead hundreds of feet below. There were no city limit markers for there were no city limits. Cantwell, Desloge, Flat River, Elvins, Esther, Rivermines, and others were flung down in a heap as if some giant hand had deposited them with no attempt to gather them into orderly units. Six miles from Cantwell, in the other direction than the towns mentioned, lay Bonne Terre, which means “good earth,” so called by the French because of the richness of the ore deposits.

Most of the villages were not incorporated. There was no city government and “every man did that which was right in his own sight.” Families tended to huddle together in the same village and Cantwell was sometimes called “Ketcherside town” because some dozen or more frame shacks were occupied by members of our clan. The land was known as “company ground” because it was owned by the mining interests out of New York. There was a row of company houses, all built exactly alike, and anyone who rented them had the five dollars per month extracted from his check on payday.

One could build his own house by leasing a piece of ground from the company for ninety-nine years, with a carefully spelled out notation in the lease that the right to all minerals below the surface belonged to the company. The company also retained the right to set up a diamond drill anywhere for the purpose of prospecting for ore. A diamond drill had a bit which was set with diamonds and which, by rotating, could cut through the hardest rock, sending a one-inch core to the surface which could be analyzed in the laboratory to determine the direction in which the underground tunnel for taking out the ore should be directed. When a drill was set up it operated night and day and nearby residents did not sleep soundly until they became adjusted to the jarring noise.

There was a company store in our village where all of the miners traded “on time” as credit was designated. Each family had its own account book, and when the storekeeper assembled your purchases on the counter he entered the amounts on a ticket in your book and gave you a duplicate to take home and keep in the spring clip which hung on the wall by the comb case above the wash pan. Everyone used the same towel and comb, and no one used a toothbrush.

On payday the miners lined up at the store to cash their checks and make a payment on the grocery bill. When such a payment was made each miner received a little striped sack of candy called “a treat.” It was rumored that if you paid in full you received a double portion, but I cannot testify as to the truthfulness of the rumor because we never paid in full. The company store created a way of life for many people and made of them economic slaves as long as they existed. The idea that you could “buy now and pay later” was dangerous for families like ours which were always on the brink of poverty. The first thing I did when my father was killed was to take the meager amount of insurance remaining and payoff his obligations. It may have been the first time my mother was completely free from debt.

One of my earliest recollections of my boyhood is that of the saloons and the vice associated with them. The saloons were tough joints. They bore such exotic names as “The Blue Goose” and “Klondike” although the one which stood in full sight of our house was called “The Star.” Every payday was characterized by a drunken brawl. Frequently the men staggered outside and we saw them crack the skulls of one another with beer or whiskey bottles, the foaming contents mingling with the blood and gore flowing from gaping lacerations.

There were always prostitutes hanging around outside the saloon although no one called them that. The men called them “chippies” while the women called them “painted hussies.” I used to look through a crack in the fence and watch them take half-soused men into the woods and while I did not know what it was all about I was aware, from what I heard the adults say about them, that it was not “nice.”

I remember two occasions which caused those who were referred to as “decent women” to rejoice. One occurred when a little tiny woman got fed up with the “goings-on” and took an axe-handle and laid in wait for the woman who had solicited her husband. Although the chippy was about twice her size and hard as nails, she “worked her over and beat the tar out of her” as I learned by lying on the floor with my ear glued to the crack under the door. This source of information almost proved my undoing, for one day when the gossip was not especially interesting I fell asleep, and someone threw the door open and flattened me against the wall.

The other time of gladness occurred early on a Christmas morning when the village was awakened with the yell of “Fire!” The Star saloon was aflame. A goodly number of neighbors gathered in front of our gate to watch the welcome sight. It was a great spectacle. Bottles burst like machine-gun fire and bottle caps whined through the air like bullets. The women alternately cried and laughed for joy, hugging one another and saying it was a divine judgment and the greatest gift God could have given on Christmas. The saloon was never rebuilt and the chippies all left except for the two who continued to receive customers after dark at the third house up the street from us, the one next to the chat dump, as the massive tailing-pile composed of crushed rock from underground was called.

Life was not unpleasant for us although we were under stern instructions never to step a foot outside the yard without permission. Every yard had a wire fence around it because the area surrounding the village was “open range.” This meant that anyone could turn his cows and hogs out to roam at will. Animals were not fenced in, but fenced out. Each family had its own earmark, which meant that all of its animals had pieces cut out of their ears for identification. One man might say to another, “If you see a sow with a bit on the front side of the right ear and a swallow-fork in the left, please tell me, as it is my hog,-and I want to put her up.”

Sometimes in the middle of the night a family of razorback hogs would put their snouts under the fence and pry up the wire and creep in under it. They would literally clean out a garden before daybreak. Most of the houses were built up off the ground and set on rock pillars at the corners. This was to avoid damp rot and termites, but it also provided a shady place for the dogs to lie and scratch fleas. One morning our neighbor arose to see that her garden had been devastated during the night. As she looked out of the kitchen window she saw the north end of a southbound lanky sow protruding from under her house. She carefully heated a dishpan of water to the boiling point and poured it on the rear half of the razorback but was wholly unprepared for the cataclysmic result. As the sow departed for fairer regions she knocked the back porch off the house and took with her the underpinning from one corner, leaving the bedroom aslant and the furniture slowly slipping down toward the outside wall. Life in the village was not always drab and unexciting.

Although we could not go outside our yard we could always play with the children on either side “through the fence.” There were two girls on one side and a boy and girl on the other. Their mothers “took in washing” and worked hard over the scrub-board every day. We were never allowed to mention their fathers because both men were in “the state pen.” One was doing time for murder and the other for stealing stuff from the lead company. This last was not regarded as a crime by anyone except the lead company.

Every day we made mud pies and other articles and played store. We cut “money” out of the pages of a Sears-Roebuck catalog hanging in the toilet, and used bottle-caps for “change.” The situation was complicated due to the fact that everyone wanted to be the storekeeper and take in the cash. We settled the question by putting a counter on each side of the fence and the storekeepers sold to each other. As my little sisters began to grow up they always wanted to play house, and wanted their brothers to be the papas and come home with their dinner buckets and kiss the dolls like our father kissed us. It was years later that I realized the neighbor children never wanted to play house. They had no father to come home and kiss them.

As I think back upon my childhood I recall one woman who said to my mother, “All children are different, but Carl’s differenter than any youngun’ I’ve ever seed.” That was because of my utter fascination with printed words. It became an obsession with me. I carried the mail order catalog around with me and every time someone came who could read, and there were not many of them, I’d thrust the catalog into their hands, point to a description of an article and ask, “What does that say?” In my innocence, bred of ignorance, I sometimes pointed to something embarrassing, and they would quickly flip the pages over to the farm machinery. I soon learned which pages were off limits although I did not then know why they were.

I had to do the buying at the company store by the time I was five because my mother could not read English. When I bought something, if there was no other customer in the store, I’d ask Mr. Watson to read the labels on the cans and boxes. He not only did so but taught me to read on Clabber Girl baking powder cans, Arm and Hammer bicarbonate of soda boxes, and Old Dutch Cleanser and Bon Ami containers. He saved reading material which was undeliverable in the little post office, and apparently told others about me because they brought their Horatio Alger books to pass along to me. If there were too many to carry home with the groceries I’d leave the groceries at the store and take the books home first. I knew my mother would make me go back after the groceries but might not let me go back for the books.

One of the proudest days of my life was the one on which I started to school in the little two-room village educational plant. The folk had managed to save and secure my first pair of new store-bought knickerbockers, as knee length pants were called. My blouse, as boys’ shirts with a puckering string at the waist, were then called, was home-made. So was my underwear which bore the bold label across the seat, “Gold Medal Flour —Eventually, Why Not Now?” I took my lunchbox in one hand, and my slate and Elson-Runkel first reader in the other and marched off bravely. I stopped at the corner and looked back. Mother was standing in the door. The early morning September sunshine bathed her presence. She was drying her tears with her apron. She knew life would never be the same. And she was right! —139 Signal Hill Dr., St. Louis 63121
 

 

An honest man is the noblest work of God. — Pope