March 16, 2008

• Grandpa Cyrus’s Stories

  This is my entry for the current Featured Grownups Challenge:  Songs, Stories and Tales.

  The Douglasses, my father’s family, have three family traditions of long standing, that I know of:  tinkering or mechanical ability, music and dance, and storytelling.  My father, who died in 1951, played a fiddle, but couldn’t read music.  He played by ear, only needing to hear a tune once or twice in order to play it.  The tunes I heard my father play included many popular songs like You Are My Sunshine and San Antonio Rose, instrumentals such as Orange Blossom Special and Flight of the Bumblebee, and a number of traditional folksongs.

  He also told me a number of stories.  Since some of them were traditional tall tales such as the adventures of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, as a child I did not understand that many of the family stories he told me were true.  When I began researching my family tree and made contact with genealogists in the family, I learned that my father wasn’t making it up when he said that one of the men who crossed the Delaware with George Washington had been an ancestor of ours.  It was my great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham James Douglass (or James Abraham), born in Scotland about 1740.

  I’m pretty sure the story of where the family got its surname was made up.  Daddy told me it came from one of our remote ancestresses, who had let her chickens into the house when she had bread rising on the kitchen table.  The chickens scratched the dough onto the window and thereafter the old woman was known as Old Lady Dough Glass.  “Douglass” actually comes from Scots Gaelic, dubh glas, dark water or black water.

  My great grandfather, my father’s grandfather, Cyrus Dow Douglass, the white-bearded old man in the photo below, was born July 28, 1835.   As a teenager, he crossed the plains from his home in Ohio to the California gold fields.  Later, he went back on a side-wheeler down the Pacific coast to Panama, and rode on the railroad that crossed the Isthmus of Panama before the canal was built.  Cyrus fought for the Union in the Civil War, was wounded and received a pension.  He homesteaded in Southwestern Nebraska, where many of my relatives still live. 

  Grandpa Cyrus spent the latter part of his life in a wheelchair and would often call one of his grandchildren over to him and tell stories to pass the time.  Some of those stories came down to me through my father.  Twenty-some years ago, a cousin of mine, Karen Douglass Jackson, wrote down the stories of Cyrus’s that her father, Albert Douglass, could recall, and I received a copy of her collected stories along with genealogical data from our cousin Adele Richard when I managed, through the internet, to make contact with my father’s family.  Here I’ll share just a few of Cyrus’s stories.

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  Frontier Justice
  [No clue where this was, whether it happened in the California gold fields or in some settlement along the trail.]

  A man came riding in on a horse that was lathered up from being ridden hard.  The guy jumped off the horse and just dropped the reins across a hitching rail, saying, “Why, there’s the son of a bitch now!”  Then he pulled a butcher knife from his boot and slit a man’s belly from side to side, and his insides just rolled out.  The guy fell over on the street.

  People unhitched a couple of wagons, rolled the front ends up together, and roped the front wheels together to make the raised wagon tongues into an A-frame.  They strung the killer up right then and there, no trial, no nothing.  Nobody knew why he had killed the guy, what the other man had done, or anything else.  They just lynched him instantly.

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  The Millstone and the Donkey

  They wanted to set up a grist mill up in the mountains where wagons couldn’t go.  They needed to get a millstone that weighed about 500 pounds up some narrow trails.  They used a little donkey that weighed about 600 pounds to carry the 500 pound millstone.  The stone was padded and balanced on the donkey’s back, with four men walking alongside to steady it.  Every quarter mile or so, they’d cut sturdy sticks, and prop the stone up on four legs to let the donkey rest.

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  Hydraulic Mining

  Cyrus and his partners had a mining claim they worked, “in the mountains,” probably the Sierra Nevada.  They salvaged canvas sails from ships that had been abandoned by their crews, who had deserted the ships and headed for the gold fields.  They sewed the canvas into hoses, and strung them from a water source high enough above their mine to provide enough water pressure to wash the soil out of the hillsides, moving more dirt with less work than using a shovel.

  Their water supply came from a ditch they’d dug around the side of a mountain.  They had a pretty good little mine and were making money on it.  Then came an extra rainy winter.  Their ditch washed down the hillside with a mudslide, down to the bedrock.  The three partners would have needed some financial backing to replace their ditch with a wooden flume and resume mining.  Instead, they sold the claim to a bigger outfit.  Grandpa Cyrus headed back to Iowa, via the Isthmus of Panama, arriving home with about $6,000 from the sale of the gold claim.

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  The Coastal Storm

  On the sidewheel steamship between California and Panama, they got into a storm.  It was just about to drive them onto the rocks.  They broke out fat pork from the food supplies, throwing slabs into the boiler to increase the heat and get more steam.  The captain drafted Grandpa Cyrus to hold a piece of lumber as a lever over the boiler’s safety valve, so they could generate more pressure and get more speed from the drive wheel.  The captain said, “Here, hold this.”  Cyrus says to the captain, “Well, you’ll blow it up.”  The captain replied that he’d blow it to hell before he’d let it run onto the rocks.

  The boiler must have held, ’cause all of Cyrus’s offspring, all the subsequent generations of this branch of the Douglass family tree, were born after he got back to Ohio.
   

  

  The young man second from left in the back row is “Eddie,” Cyrus Edgar Douglass, my paternal grandfather.  A click on this picture will enlarge it greatly, for a closer look at Cyrus’s sons and my great aunt Caroline, in center front, between her parents, Cyrus and Louisa.
  

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