The McConnell Place

 

Doyle Russell bought his first house for his family of six in 1946. It was a substantial, good looking house with matching outhouse, big, nice barn, chicken house and shed set on 160 acres of open land in Weld County, Colorado, just west of Pierce. At the time he purchased it his friend and farmer Harry Boyd was living in the house so taking possession and moving Frances and the four kids into their new home took some time as Harry Boyd moved his belongings out at the same time the Russells moved in. Bob's sister Mary, nine years old at that time, remembers this, "Moving day was Hell.  The only two of Doyle's friends and neighbors who took the time and effort to help us move that day were Alex Kennan and Charlie Cozad.  Several had promised Doyle that they would  be there.  Only Charlie and Alex showed up with their old farm trucks. That really hurt Doyle's feelings a lot because Doyle had been so darn good to everyone in the community--helped with castrating and dehorning and helped two neighbors dig the basements for their new house foundations.  That was way back when no one had back hoes, etc and other power equipment.  They used a work horse that pulled a "slip" which was a big scoop about 3 feet wide with a horse  hooked up in front and two handles in back for the operator to aim down at the next few inch-layer of dirt and scoop up a shovel full and then the horse would drag ite load out of the hole and go to the dump pile and dump it out and then repeat this lots of times.  It was strenuous work but Doyle never charged any friend or neighbor a penny for his assistance.  It rather soured Doyle on his unneighborly Nunn community neighbors when they failed to return the favor."

The owners/sellers of the house and property were Cecil S. McConnell and his wife Emma who had lived there about forty years. In fact, they homesteaded that piece of land, filing their intentions in 1905 and receiving their completion certification in 1912. They raised five children there to adulthood. I don’t know the circumstances of their moving out and having Harry Boyd move in prior to selling the place to Doyle but I did read in Cecil McConnell’s obituary in 1960 that he farmed in the Greeley area for years after selling his homestead. 

 

 

 

That whole year of 1946 and most of 1947 Doyle and Frances worked hard making the McConnell place their own. They both kept diaries and wrote of moving equipment and animals from east of Nunn to the new place and cleaning, painting, and furnishing the rooms after they moved in.

 

 

 

 

 

The Russell family lived at the McConnell place for the next seven years until buying a larger farm in Larimer County in 1952 and slowly moving all their possessions north and west, one truckload at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This story is not about their years living at the McConnell place, although that would make a great story about trying to make a living on that acreage of ever-shifting soil where the wind had its way. Doyle grew some fine wheat but almost every summer as the heat built up and the storm clouds rolled across the Rockies the hail stones fell and pounded the wheat into the ground, destroying Doyle’s main source of income in a matter of minutes.

This story is about Emma Carolina Fransen McConnell, the woman who immigrated to the U.S. from Sweden, married Cecil McConnell of Manhattan, Kansas, and homesteaded in Weld County, Colorado. I learned about her from my husband, Bob Russell, who was only four years old when he moved into the house that she built, one cement block at a time. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Emma Carolina Fransen Larsson was born on September 16, 1874, in Björsäter, Östergötland, Sweden, the daughter of Lovisa Hellström and Frans Larsson. I don’t understand why most records show her last name as Fransen yet her father’s name was Larsson. She married Cecil Stanley McConnell in Denver, Colorado, on January 3, 1908, when she was 33 years old. 

 

Cecil had already filed a homestead application on September 27, 1905 with the Department of the Interior at their Denver office for the 160 acres that would forever more be known as the McConnell place.

 

Cecil McConnell was the same age as Emma and appears to have come to Colorado with his brother George and their father James Culbertson McConnell after their mother’s death in 1901. I would love to know how Cecil found Emma. Maybe through mail order.

 

George also filed on a homestead not far from Cecil’s but he soon moved on to Oklahoma while their father farmed the Weld County land.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cecil and Emma had to build a house to fulfill their homestead requirements but they didn’t have money for that, so Emma drove a team of horses pulling a wagon from farm to farm in Weld County, milking cows. She continued this hard work as she became a mother year after year until there were five children. I don’t know what Cecil did for work in these early years of their marriage but my mother-in-law described him as small and sickly.

 

When they had saved enough money they bought a kit house, possibly from Sears & Roebuck. There were wood framed kit houses available but this one was a concrete-block house made with “Rusticated Concrete Blocks” advertised as more sanitary than wood.

 

 

 

When Doyle and Frances asked Emma how long it took her to make the blocks for the house she answered “On a good day I could make two blocks, on a bad day, just one.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The kit probably included bags of cement for the basement walls but they would have needed help forming and pouring those walls. Bob said his family never had a leak in those basement walls.

 

 

 

The photographs of the finished house tell the story of how much work Emma put into that house, forming the blocks one at a time, waiting for them to set up, removing the forms, then setting them in place along the top of the basement walls.

 

 

Bob says it was a cold house and that the wind blew in around and through those four large windows on the north side of the house. He recalls waking up to find such a thick layer of snow on his quilts that he couldn’t see the quilt pattern below.

In the basement there was a coal furnace and coal storage on one side and on the other food storage for glass jars of canned goods and home cured meat. The main floor had a kitchen and a large bedroom. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one for Ken, one that Mary and Gladys shared, and Bobby had the other one. And there was an attic.

Bob believes the barn was built at a later time, all wood construction.

 

Emma McConnell died in February 1948, just two years after the sale of her life’s work. Although the Russell family moved to Larimer County in 1953 they all revisited the McConnell place from time to time and took photographs. Once they found solar panels had been installed! The last time Bob and I were there we had come from the annual summer celebration in Nunn and had our two youngest grandchildren with us in the car. They were very young, perhaps four and two. As we detoured from our usual route home to revisit the McConnell place we found the roads to be just as bad as Bob remembered them, blow sand obliterating tracks, ridges and troughs for a roadway making us fear becoming stuck. I recall Bob saying, “This is dumb. No way should we be out here with no one around and our two little grandbabies in the back seat.” That was about eighteen years ago. I believe it’s time for me to make a little road trip and see if the McConnell place is still standing.

Mayan Ruins in Mexico 1988

 

In just four days, on February 9, 2025, NFL Super Bowl #59 will take place in New Orleans pitting the Kansas City Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles, a game highly touted for its record-breaking possibilities and behind-the-scenes drama. I am very excited to watch this game, and it brings to mind another highly anticipated Super Bowl, XXII, January 31, 1988 in San Diego. The Denver Broncos, our favorite NFL Team, played against the Washington Redskins and our hopes were high for the Broncos to take home that much sought after trophy.

 

Just a month earlier, December 1987, I started a new job as a brewer with Anheuser-Busch in Fort Collins at their newly constructed brewery located just a few miles southeast of our home. My world dramatically changed from that of an over-the-hill lumber sales person whose work future was grim to that of a forty-year-old woman given an opportunity to learn new skills with a respected employer who paid really well. I had won the job lottery!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In January of 1988 I was totally immersed in the intensive training at the brewery and our son, Patrick, was away at college so Bob saw an opportunity to fulfill a longtime dream of exploring the Mayan ruins in Mexico. I’m sure the cold January weather in Colorado had something to do with his choice of longtime dreams to pursue. He and his friend Bill West share many interests and Mayan Culture is one of them, so they put together a plan and soon found themselves on a plane bound for Cancun. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 You may wonder what this has to do with Super Bowl XXII? On January 31, 1988, Bill remembers that everywhere they went that day in Cancun and Chichén Itzá Bob asked if anyone knew the results of the Super Bowl game. Bill pointed out to Bob that in the big scheme of things the results of the football game had little to do with their activities in Mexico and the score results could wait but Bob persisted and finally learned that the Broncos lost to the Redskins 42 -10, not even a close game. This was the third time the Broncos had played in the Super Bowl and it would not be until ten years later that they won their first, Super Bowl XXXII, when they defeated the Green Bay Packers 31-24.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From what I heard about their time in Mexico I don’t think the football game put a damper on Bob’s and Bill’s fun at all. Upon their return to Colorado after a week-long trip Bob and Bill told Carol and I bits and pieces of their exploration of the ruins, the great meals, a flat tire in a taxi, acquiring a new friend named Bud who was in Mexico by himself, even a party with some pretty women from Washington State, participants in an Apple Growers’ convention, but knowing these guys I suspect there were stories that went untold. Bob brought back a handful of silver bracelets and several rolls of undeveloped film. Bill and Bud both took photos, too, and shared their photographs with us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really enjoyed all the photos they took and the stories that accompanied each photo. Thirty-seven years have elapsed since I heard those stories so I have forgotten most and will let the photos speak for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was talk of another trip like this, a visit to the pre-Columbian Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico. It is now the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Bob and Bill never made that trip to New Mexico and that time of travel and off trail hiking has passed. But their inquisitive minds and insatiable curiosity are very much alive, I'm happy to report.

Doyle's Farm Equipment

 

When Robert Doyle Russell joined the Navy in April of 1962 he left his parents’ home in Larimer County, Colorado, a farm/ranch where he and his family had lived since 1953.  RD’s father, Doyle J Russell, was a dryland farmer who grew Hard Winter Wheat, “Turkey Red”, a grain that grew well on dry land with no irrigation water as long as a few rains came at the right time of year. Doyle also raised cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, and kept a milk cow. He was a successful farmer because he was a hardworking man, never borrowed money, bought used farm equipment, and carried crop insurance. Also, his wife raised the chickens and milked the cow, sold eggs and cream, and canned fruit and vegetables for winter use.

 

 

 

And then the State of Colorado created I-25 Interstate Highway that cut right through Doyle’s land. No longer was he able to pasture his cattle on the east portion of his property then bring them home at night. Nor could he drive his tractor directly to those eastern fields for crossing the interstate that way was illegal. And I am sure that losing his right hand man, RD, to the Navy, affected his ability to keep up the farm. Consequently, when RD came home from the Navy he was shocked at the change in his dad’s place. 

 

 

Doyle, being the resourceful man that he was, had sold the cattle and created a junk yard on his land. He soon became quite successful at acquiring automobiles, trucks, and other vehicles that people didn’t want or could no longer park in front of their homes, and then he sold off parts. Sometimes he sold entire vehicles but said he made more money parting them out. As the junkyard grew he accumulated all sorts of “stuff” that he could resell and he enjoyed it so much, loved talking to people who stopped in, made lifelong friends that way. And he made more money selling junk than selling cows.

 

But the junkyard was unsightly! It was an embarrassment to his family. He filled the yard by the house with things easily stolen, like bicycles, kiddie cars, and tools. And covered acres and acres with vehicles, furniture, tires, piles of wood scraps, all sorts of odds and ends. Doyle was not embarrassed, as far as I know. He knew right where everything was and could walk directly to it if someone came searching for a car part or TV or posthole digger. He kept track of his inventory in his mind, never made lists or maps.

 

 

Once, in the 1970s, he granted permission to a group of artists who wanted to paint what they saw out there on the farm land littered with treasures. I understand that, for I have often seen the beauty there myself. I loved the way the native grasses grew up around the old farm machinery. When I saw that equipment parked out back of the house my imagination caught fire. I could visualize Doyle preparing some fields for planting, lightly plowing others for summer fallow.

 

 

RD once told me how, at a young age, he learned to balance while standing on the back of the wheat planter, aka grain drill, as his dad pulled it with a tractor across the plowed fields. RD’s job was to make sure flow of grain into the soil was not plugged. Had he tripped and fallen into the machinery he would have been seriously injured so learning to balance and ride that rickety, bouncing planter was essential. Later in life, when he went through Underwater Demolition Training in Coronado, California, he realized that his years on the farm had prepared him well for the challenges he faced in the Navy.

 

I thought about the photographs I wanted to use to illustrate this story and I remembered that an artist I admire when asked the secret to his success as a landscape artist answered (and I paraphrase) “I paint what I see then remove everything that isn’t necessary.” So, I am not showing all the junk in Doyle’s yard. Instead I am seeing the beauty in the old farm equipment. And I see the images of Doyle making a living with a few pieces of used farm equipment and a whole lot of hard work.

 

Moffat County Revisited

My mother-in-law, Frances Smith Russell, was born in Craig, Colorado, during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. In her postpartum weakened condition, Frances’s mother, Nora Olive Jones Smith, succumbed to the flu October 23, 1918, in Craig, leaving five-week-old Frances and her three older siblings without a mother and Tom Smith without a wife. The family had been living temporarily in Craig so that Nora could be close to a doctor when her baby was born. After her death they returned to their distant cabin home ninety miles northwest of Craig, a place called Blue Mountain, a small community of homesteaders barely eking out a living while trying to prove up on their land.

The story of her Smith family there in rural Moffat County was told by Frances in her autobiography “From There to Here”, a self-published book written in 1985. I am in the process of integrating two version of that book that Frances wrote, adding illustrations, and plan to make it available online this year. But this story is not about those years from 1918 until 1923 when Frances and her family moved “lock, stock, and barrel” across the Continental Divide to Weld County, Colorado. This is about a trip Frances made back to Moffat County in 1980s in search of that cabin on Blue Mountain.

Harriet Clemens was a friend of Frances who lived nearby in northern Larimer County, Colorado. Married to Quay Clemens, possibly a distant relative of our beloved author Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Harriet and Quay had both lived in Moffat County in the 1930s. Prior to that while still a bachelor Quay lived by himself in a small cabin near Blue Mountain and one night gave shelter to the man who murdered Frances’ grandfather and uncle on Blue Mountain the 5^th of October, 1921. That story is told in Frances’ book.  The murderer, A. S. Wilson, ran from his home, afraid for the repercussions of his actions, and late that night or the next appeared at Quay’s remote homestead. He told Quay, “If you know what I’ve done you won’t want to help me,” to which Quay replied, “I don’t care if you nailed Jesus to the cross for it’s been 90 days since I’ve seen a living soul. Come on in.” So, Harriet had an interest in that part of Colorado.

Fast forward to the the early 1980s, recently widowed Harriet Clemens was interested in visiting Moffat County again, approximately forty-five years after she moved away. And more importantly, Frances Russell wanted to locate the cabin where her parents lived in 1918, where she lived too, until age five. She had visited the area in 1980 with her son Kenneth and his boys, David and Doyle. They were not successful in finding the actual cabin of Tom and Nora Smith, Frances’ parents, but they did find other abandoned log cabins a few miles away.

Frances saw an opportunity to look once more for the old Tom and Nora Smith homestead, so driving a almost new, two-wheel-drive yellow Dodge Omni, Bob and I embarked on a trip from Fort Collins, Colorado, to a remote area ninety miles northwest of Craig, Colorado, with Frances and Harriet in the back seat, a weekend adventure we’ll never forget.

Frances relied heavily on the memories of her older sister, Ola, to prepare for the trip, as she had done when writing her autobiography. Ola lived in Blythe, California, and would not be traveling back to Moffat County but by way of telephone and letters the sisters made a map. They also had photos taken back in the 1950s when their father, Tom Smith, and several of his family members went back to the old log cabin and relived the challenges and tragedies of their years there, and visited the graves of their loved ones who never left Blue Mountain.

Harriet’s preparations were simple. She packed butter sandwiches for all, home grown pickles, and brought her nightgown and walking stick.

When we arrived in Craig we visited the Craig cemetery and took photos of the new headstone Frances and her siblings had recently commissioned and had installed over their mother’s grave. We spent that night in a modest motel in Craig, sharing a room with two beds, a frugal choice. Bob, a stranger to pajamas, waited until the ladies were finished in the bathroom and tucked into bed before slipping out of his clothes and into our bed.

After a hearty breakfast the next morning we headed west out of Craig and listened to the reminiscing in the backseat. Harriet remembered friends who lived along Colorado Highway 40 and thought she might like to stop and see if they still lived there but we decided to consider that on the return trip. That day our excitement built as we turned off the Highway 40 at Elk Springs and headed north and west in search of the place names Blue Mountain, Bare Mountain, (also spelled Bear Mountain), Cross Mountain and more, places Ola had recalled from her youth.

 

Toward noon, following the hand drawn map Frances held in her lap, we found ourselves on a rough, dirt road out in the middle of nowhere, feeling frustrated, when in the distance Bob spotted a pickup truck and beside it a man mending a wire fence. We drove up beside him and got out to talk, describing our mission and asking for his advice. He pointed off to our left and said that there was no road, we’d have to drive across the open prairie, but if we headed in the direction he pointed we’d come to place where the land dropped off, and if we’d park on the top of that ledge and walk down the steep slope, then turn around and look back we would see several dugouts in that hillside. Oh, how fortunate we were to come across that young man who knew about those dugouts!

So off we went driving that little Dodge Omni across the prairie. I remember how the scent of hot sage filled the car. It was great fun bouncing and laughing and all of us full of hope and behaving like teenagers. Only now, in retrospect, do I know how lucky we were that our catalytic converter didn’t start a prairie fire.

 

 

Sure enough, we came to a ledge where further travel in the car would not be possible. We parked and got out, ready to explore, only to realize that Harriet could not safely climb down the slope. We decided to spread out a picnic lunch and make it comfortable for her while we scrambled down the hillside in search of the dugouts.

There were several! We thought we’d hit the jackpot. But after examining each one realized none of the log cabin remnants backed into that hill matched the layout of the windows and door in the front of Tom Smith’s cabin! We had the photo right there with us to compare. We knew we were in the right area but never did find the exact cabin we were looking for. Our best guess is that the logs were hauled away and used for fence posts.

After we took as many photos as we wanted and cleaned up our picnic area we headed back in search of the log school house that the Smith kids attended when they lived in Bare Valley. Named the Yougal School, we did find it but it had been moved from its original location. At least our trip was successful in that regard. More photos, and then we headed back toward Craig.

Frances and Harriet talked all the way back and we knew Harriet held out hope of locating an old friend or two but Bob and I were tired and wanted to get home that same night so we more or less convinced Harriet it would be too difficult looking up friends from fifty years ago. I am sure she was disappointed. We continued eastward. I don’t remember our route back to Fort Collins but I believe we turned south and stayed in Colorado coming back along the Poudre River route.

That’s the end of my tale of our great adventure with Frances and Harriet but that’s not the end of the story about Blue Mountain and Bare Valley. Bob’s older sister, Mary Simms, organized a return trip there with many Smith relatives in 2011. After much research, they located and marked with metal signs several homestead sites, hopeful that later generations of the Smith clan will visit and find evidence of this time, now about a century ago, when the Smith family homesteaded on Blue Mountain, Moffat County, Colorado.

 

 

Doyle Russell and the Hooey Stick

Doyle Russell liked magic tricks. He had little boxes with springs, strings, wires, and sliding drawers that he could pull out of his pocket and engage a stranger’s attention with his magic tricks as they stood at an auction or waited in line for a drivers license. I remember one trick in which he had three curved, flat pieces of wood, similar to boomerangs, that when aligned a certain way were the same length, but when Doyle said his magic incantation and pulled one of those pieces under his armpit to “stretch” it, lo and behold, it was longer than the other two. And, unbelievably, he could push it back under that arm and shrink it back up! Another was an elaborate set up using sheets hung over a doorway and shadows on the ceiling, a parlor trick. Over the years Doyle’s family would give him store-bought magic tricks for his birthday or Christmas and he would try them out, laugh a couple of times, then set them aside. He preferred those he made himself.

 

Sometime in the 1950s Doyle’s wife’s cousin, Tilford Barton, came to visit Frances and Doyle from his home in Oklahoma. Apparently, Til and Doyle were kindred spirits for Til brought with him his own favorite tricks and one of them was a “Hooey Stick”. (Other names for this Appalachian folk toy are Whimmydiddle, Gee Haa (horse commands for left and right), and Truth Stick.) This is a little wooden folk toy that is a simple round stick about five inches long, 1/8” diameter, with notches carved along the length of it with a small piece of wood nailed onto one end to create a sort-of helicopter blade or propeller. Holding the hooey stick in one hand and in the other a popsicle stick Til could make the propeller spin by rubbing that popsicle stick along the notches. The magic came in when Til could make the propeller spin clockwise then stop and spin counterclockwise at will.

 

Doyle was smitten. He loved that Hooey Stick and soon he was carving them by the dozens and collecting popsicle sticks to go with them. He kept several in his overall pockets, year 'round. And he added his “gift of gab” to his presentation in this way. If he met a family with a shy child he might show them the hooey stick and ask a few questions, such as “Hooey, if this little girl has blonde hair, spin to the left” and that’s what Hooey did. And the girl and her parents were impressed. The next question might be “Hooey, if Susie is wearing white shoes, spin to the right” and immediately without any seeming change in what Doyle was doing, the little blade spun to the right. And then he would say, “Hooey, if this little girl likes boys, spin to the left again”, and, of course, Hooey spun to the left. And that brought on the laughter, giggles and denials. Usually, Doyle would end up selling a Hooey stick to the parents for one dollar, but he didn’t explain just how to get Hooey to change directions. They had to try to figure that out themselves. With no internet, no Google, and no YouTube, those Hooey Sticks were probably tossed away after some frustrating attempts. Rather than explain the magic, I am inserting a YouTube link. https://youtu.be/nPcOXeBsSiQ

Doyle suffered a stroke when he was in his seventies. We received a phone call that he had been taken to the hospital. Bob and I didn’t know what to expect when we got there, didn’t know if his dad would be paralyzed or not, didn’t have any idea of the severity. When we walked into his room Doyle was perched on the corner of his hospital bed in that little gown that tied in the back, a nurse standing in front of him while he said, “Now Hooey…..”

Doyle created his own Hooey Stick style using multi-branched weeds, like tumbleweeds, which he carved with notches and nailed on the spinning pieces so that he could tell Hooey to spin two or three propellers one way while the other two or three spun the other direction. Over the forty-some years Doyle made and sold his Hooey sticks he took in hundreds of dollars selling them for one dollar each and somewhere along the way increased his price to two dollars.

 

A couple of weeks ago Doyle’s first cousin once removed, Liz Buness, visited us for the very first time. In telling her about her cousin Doyle we got out a few Hooey Sticks and demonstrated their magic, sending her home with her own. Doyle was an interesting man and we could have spent hours telling Liz about his life, but it seemed fitting to introduce her to Hooey Sticks and let her associate her cousin Doyle with his
Hooey magic.