by “Ursus Major”

Not much is left of the historical record of Mithraism and especially how it may have carried on during the last millennia and stayed in the public’s consciousness. ‘Ursus Major’ writes an account and speculation of how it may still be relevant in understanding Freemasonry and even Christianity.

This is republished from an old defunct FTP site, where it was found in 2003. A Google search seems to confirm that it has been lost — until now. I do not know who ‘Ursus Major’ is/was but found the paper quite thought provoking. – Editor

Update. I have since found this article on the website: https://skirret.com/papers/mithraism-freemasonry_connection.html

I. BASIC PREMISE AND BACKGROUND

Freemasonry is transmogrified Mithraism. One must understand that the Picti (the inhabitants of Calidonia, before it became Scotland), copied the Romans in just about everything: from kilts (taken from the Roman basic tunic), to bagpipes (what the Romans marched to), even to the sporan, which is based on the chain-mail to protect a legionary’s groin, now transformed into a purse!

The Romans spent centuries on that wall! They didn’t spend all their time fighting the Picti. They simply enforced a cordon sanitaire: a zone in which the Picti were not allowed to dwell. If the Picti were rash enough to build a village in this zone, the Romans went and burned it down. The Romans expected to be obeyed, and they played hard-ball! (An interesting aside is that if a Pictus saw the Romans coming, he would use a burning cross to warn the others the Romans were on their way, so a burning cross as a warning comes from deep inside Race-Memory.) But, if the Picti played by Roman rules, they got along o.k. Sometimes they traded — selling POWs was a wide-spread commerce at that time, and the Picti often fought among themselves — the Romans cash were buyers. (Picti prices for captives were cheap.) Over the centuries, these Picti got to know a lot about the Romans, and they copied a lot from them. (After all, the Romans were top dog, and that’s usually who gets copied.)

The major cult among the Roman legionaries was a cult which had come out of the Middle East called “Mithraism.” Mithra is an ancient Indo- European name. (Mitra is still one of the principal gods in Hinduism, which is a lot older than Judaism or Christianity.) As this cult moved westward out of Chaldea, the figure of Mithra changed. He looked more and more Graeco- Roman, and not like a Persian or Hindu. The name is about the only thing that stuck — that and the iconography. Mithra was depicted slaying a bull, and in the carving were usually also a dog and a scorpion. (The above illustration is from a Mithraeum. There’s also a full-scale Mithraeum at Yale Univ., in New Haven, CN — in case one wants to take a look.)

Mithra became identified with the sun, so much so that (for religious purposes), by the time of the Emperor Diocletian (~305), Sol Invictus — Mithra was proclaimed “The Protector of the Empire.” The Unconquerable Sun and Mithra were fused. (Diocletian was an old soldier himself and a Mithra follower: one who hated Christianity and persued the last great effort to stamp out this Death-Cult.)

Why this fascination with Mithra and the symbols (most Mithraea were caves or grottos)? Nothing particular about the rites — because the Christians simply incorporated ALL of them into Christianity, and made up the requisite mumbo-jumbo to account for the Seven Mithraic Sacraments becoming the Seven Christian Sacraments. (Note: sacramentum is a military term: it means the solumn oath, the oath a soldier swears to obey without question.) The Christians even took the word — and they made Mithra’s birthday Christ’s birthday: the winter solstice — December 25th (at the time). The tie-in between Mithraism and Christianity is well indicated in Christianian lore.

Remember the story of the Three Wise Men, or Kings, or Magi? Well, Magus is the word for astrologer: star-gazer, wizard. They “followed the new star.” How did that get in Christian lore? Because it came from Mithraism. The Magi were the ones who promulgated Mithraism, and so they had to fit in Christian lore, which is a hodge-podge of Jewish, Hellenistic, and (most importantly) Mithraic lore.

The Magi were star gazers and had been for hundred and hundreds of years. (Aster is the Greek [and also Late Latin] word for “star.” They named their calling “astrology”: knowledge of the stars. When real science took up the subject, it had to devise a different name; “astrology” was polluted. One could have “biology, zoology, minerology” but not “astrology,” because that was a superstition; so they came up with astronomy, which means “star measurement”!)

The Magi had been studying the stars a long time; so long in fact that their records went back to when the Vernal Equinox occurred when the sun was in Taurus: the constellation represented by a bull. But the equinoxes change. The earth “wobbles” on its axis, producing The Precession of the Equinoxes. The ancients discovered this about 130 b.c.e. They knew what, but they didn’t why. (It wasn’t until Issac Newton, that the why became known — and that lay far in the future.)

According to the “science” of the time, the earth was a sphere at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, plants, and (most distant) celestial sphere (stars) moved around the earth. The Equinox, the start of spring and new life, had occurred when the sun was in Taurus; but a Mighty God, mightier than any other, had reordered the whole universe, “slaying” the bull and moving the equinox into Aires. (Where it was when Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales: “the sonne its course through the Ram [Aires] hath runne …” Now, it is Pisces, on its way to Aquarius — you know “The Age of Aquarius.” It takes about 26,000 years to complete the Precession; about 2,000 years in each zodiac sign.

II. CONDITIONS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

By the time of Diocletian the term “Senate and the People of Rome” had become a pathetic joke. The Rome of Scipio Africanus, that hardy Celto-Germanic stock, had been mongrelized into non-existence. Well over a century before, Martial wrote, “Orontes in Tiberem defluxit!” (“The Orontes [a river in Syria] empties into the Tiber [the river that runs through Rome]!”) The city had been overwhelmed by aliens. The Multi-Cultural Mongrolians of its day left it only two things: the Latin language (now corrupted) and the institution of the Empire. Otherwise, nothing about Rome was Roman! Alien races, alien cultures, alien Emperors (Diocletian was a Bosnian!) had overwhelmed the native Roman stock. It became so absurd that the Emperor Caracalla made every freeman of the Empire a Roman citizen. One was a Roman “citizen” or a slave; there was no in between.

Amidst this chaos, there developed an intense longing for some symbol of unity, and the all-powerful, unconquerable sun had been chosen as this symbol, named Sol Invictus. But the ability to move even the sun from one position to another indicated a Supreme Godhead, and so the sun was proclaimed Sol Invictus — Mithra, Protector of the Empire. Mithra was regarded by the army as their god, and the Empire depended upon the legions for its survival. The sun was the brightest object in the sky, but the brightest object in the celestial sphere — the sphere of fixed stars — was (and is) the constellation Orion, and Mithaics held it depicted Mithra’s triumph over Taurus. What is the brighest star in the night sky? Sirius, the dog-star in the constellation Canus Major, who faithfully accompanies Orion (Mithra) in the slaying of Taurus. The scorpion? Ah, when the vernal equinox was in Taurus, the autumnal equixon was in Scorpio. (It’s now in Virgo, moving toward Leo). So as Mithra eliminates the bull, his dog eliminates the scorpion. Hence the hymn of the Legio XXX Macedonia, which put Rome above all nations and Mithra above all.

Macedonia? That’s not Rome. That’s the wild area north of Greece, where Alexander the Great came from. Why does the 30th legion have this name? Because the legions were no longer recruited from among (nominal) Romans. Army life was too hard, for those getting their “welfare” and blood-soaked “Super-Bowls” from the state. Pan et circenses: bread and circuses! No one used to that was going to stand duty at a frozen wall in the far north of Britain, so that after 20 years of service, he’d be given a small farm and a smaller pension. The legions were drawn from semi-civilized tribes, able to endure the hardship entailed. (A legionary on the march lived off porridge: oatmeal without milk, sugar or butter to make it tasty. How’d you like to march from Scotland to Iraq, living off unflavored oatmeal? Only a rugged semi-savage could endure the hardships required of a legionary. And one should remember that the Roman Emperor [from Bosnia] was once a common soldier also.)

III. WHAT WAS MITHRAISM?

It was a soldier’s cult (women were not allowed), in praise of the all-highest, most powerful of gods. The services took place in caves or grottos. There was a baptism, which ushered one into the Militia Mithrae, the Army of Mithra in the eternal struggle against Evil. A communion too, but bread and water, not wine. There were also “ranks”: a novice was called a Corax (a “crow”). Why it’s not known. What is known is that the sacredote was called Pater and had taken a vow of celibacy. As faithful service in the legion led to “veteran’s benefits,” so faithful service in the Army of Mithra led to Eternal Salvation. The dogma of Mithraism is hard to reconstruct, because there was no supreme authority. At most there was a Pater patrum, a sort of bishop, but nothing beyond that. The myths have Mithra as a warrior from conception (from a rock), to combat Ahriman: Evil and Death. Mithra was both the creator of man and his mediator between this creation and the transindental gods: Infinite Time and Light (Mazda). Another myth is Mithra dining with Sol Invictus and their being fused as a result.

What rank a man held in the outside world had no significance: only the Mithraic rank counted. A slave might be the superior of a Senator in the Army of Mithra. (One must remember this. We will see it again.) The parallells with Christianity are striking. The total exclusion of women was a great weakness; furthermore, the Christians held that Christ was an historical person as well as being God incarnate. There was another great difference: NO JEWISH LORE IN MITHRAISM: The Mosaic mythology was totally absent.

When Contantine first assumed the Imperial Title, it was in the name of Sol Invictus. Christianity’s elevation a religion of the Empire was not immediate, and it came as a complete surprise. Christians were a very small percentage of the population. There were far more adherents to Mithraism. The pacifism of Christianity was not welcome in the legions. Mithraism lingered there far longer than in any other segment of society. Indeed, given the similar tenets and rituals, the Mithraic cult should have been easily absorbed, especially as the Christians arranged that Mithra and Christ should have the same birthday; but the legions didn’t like the Jewish lore.

What was going on in the Mediterranean basin was not immediately felt at that frozen wall across Roman Britannia. It’s reasonable to assume that many Picti accepted Mithraism. After all, all men were equal in the cult: Roman or Pictus, slave or free. Certainly there were Picti who had, over the centuries, accepted Roman values as they were later to accept Roman dress and implements, modifying them to their own design. It should also be noted after the errection of Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine “wall” (more an impressive earthern work than a wall) was errected and manned for a while. This subjected areas of Caledonia to Romanizing (and Mithraism). When the Romans abandonded the Antonine Wall and returned to the stone wall of Hadrian, no doubt a number of Romanized Caledonians joined in the evacuation. That there were Picti in the Army of Mithra seems certain.

IV. POST -ROMAN BRITAIN

The separation of Britain from the continent has been the single most important factor in its history. During the circa 400 years of Roman occupation, there were a great many events which served to isolate Britain from occurences in other parts of the Empire. On more than one occassion, the local commander tried to set himself up as an independent potentate, requiring action by the Imperial government and resulting in a localized civil war, which effected the Roman residents, but not the local Celts. This estrangement was already in place when Constantine pulled his coup of installing Christianity as the state cult and moving the capital east to “his” city of Contanstinople. While there was a love-hate relationship with Rome, Britain had nothing in common with the Eastern Empire. Greek was virtually unknown (outside the drawing rooms of large landowners). The Celts gladly cultivated the black walnut trees the Romans had brought from Persia [!], but the violent squabbles of this new state cult, which didn’t even know what its beliefs were, held scant interest for the residents of Britain. If anything, it made Mithraism (which at least was a known entity, and devoid of heresy as it had no dogma) that much more attractive. Not that there were that many adherents, but those who were, were mainly concentrated in the north, with many co-religionists in the legions stationed along the wall.

Christianity was mainly limited to the south, that area closest to the continent. In 383 c.e., following the confusion of Julian and the all-too-brief pagan restoration, C.E. Maximus, another imperial pretender, siphoned a number of troops from Britain. Then, a few years later, Gaul was under Frankish rule, cutting off Britain from Rome itself. Romano-Britons were left isolated. As their forces were meagre and manpower small, they turned to hiring Saxons to repel other Saxons. This led to the two Saxon factions coming to an “understanding” and both turning on Romano-Britain. (The legend of King Arthur, a Roman of distinction rallying the Romano- Britons probably dates from this era.) Still, Saxon force proved stronger, and as the Romano- Britons were being driven west and north, the Celtic element began to predominate, as the Celts were always in the majority and rarely bothered to learn Latin. The decline of Roman Britain meant the extinction of the “Romano” and the severe restriction of the Britannic.

The situation in the north was somewhat different, as the Angles were the main Germanic tribe, not the Saxons. The transition to Christianity among the Romano-Briton- Caledonian population near the wall had resulted in virtually a unique religion, one in which the Pelagian heresy was the prevailing form. British-born Pelagius preached a doctrine that Divine Grace played a small role in a man’s salvation. This, of course, would find favor among those still attached to Mithraism, because there is no “Divine Grace” in Mithraism. Salvation is attained by consistancy and courage in the relentless war against Evil. In Ireland, a distinct brand of Christianity emerged, the Celtic Church. It has its own rituals and dogmatic basis (including the distinctive “Celtic Cross,” which remains to this day). Eventually, the Celtic Church agreed to conform to Roman rites and dogma, but the position of Christianity in the north was tenuous at best; while in the south, once Christian Romano-Britain was thoroughly pagan, due to the Saxon conquest.

Caledonia (Scotland) had to be re-converted by Irish monks (Columba being the most famous), but the Calidonians tended to cling to the Roman ways: the legionary’s tunic became the kilt, etc. And as for Mithraism, it simply went underground: not practised, but not forgotten: much like the “wee people” among the Irish Celts. The difference was that this special diety was to re-emerge in substance, if not in form, with the appearance of Scottish-rite Freemasonry.

V. THE EMERGENCE OF “SCOTLAND”

Scotland and Northumbria — those areas where Mithraism had been strong — were late in adopting Christianity. The Scottish lowlands were subject to the Angles, Danes, and Mercians. The highlands underwent Irish-Celtic settlement. ( Scotus meant Irish.). While the lowlands under Roman occupation had introduced Christianity in the late 4th century, it was confined to small areas. Even by the 11th century, when St. Margaret came from Anglo-Saxon England, she found Christianity in Scotland to be virtually a unique form. There is scant history, as Norse raids left the monasteries in ruins. Consolidation of these diverse tribes (clans) into a kingdom required nearly 200 years. The Picti became absorbed, but the contrast between Nordic barbarism and Roman civilization was so great, that much of what the Romans had accomplished probably passed into forelore. As shown, the Scottish national dress was a remembrance of Rome. The “unique” Christianity Margaret found in Scotland probably was a product of Mithraic influences being mingled in.

The similarities between Mithraism and Christianity are very strong: a ritual of baptism, a communion, and a central figure incarnating The Light and the Good, in perpetual conflict with Evil. Margaret found that Scotish Christianity had the same date for Christmas (birthday of Sol Invictus — Mithra) but a different date for Easter. The Scottish Easter of her era coincided with the equinox, when Light assumed a greater portion of the day than Dark. (Given its extreme northern location, the contrasts in seasonal daylight in very dramatic in Scotland.) Unlike most European countries, there was no great flowering of monastic life in Scotland. The Kingdom of Scotland received official recognition only in 1328, when both the Pope and the King of England affirmed Robert I the Bruce as “King of the Scots.” The problem was that the papal bull, authorizing coronation and unction (annointing) was not issued until six days after the death of Robert the Bruce in 1329. For the remainder of its history as a totally independent nation, the King of the Scots was beset by the encroachments of the English and the defiant independence of the clans. Rarely in the course of Scottish history was the whole country under the actual rule of the monarch. Clan independence meant the preservation of clan folklore, and the re-emergance of Latin with the founding of universities affirmed the echo of that distant Roman past.

VI. THE EMERGENCE OF FREEMASONRY

Freemasonry started as a type of “Y” among stone masons. Unlike other guilds, masons didn’t set up shop in a fixed place. A tailor had his shop, but a mason had to go where structures were being built of stone. These were usually castles, cathedrals, and monasteries (many more in England than in Scotland). This period saw the drawing up of The Old Charges: a rule book for the lodges, which were indeed lodges: providing food and shelter for the masons working on projects like Windsor Castle, etc. The oldest one in existence comes from 1390, but it is known there were older ones, which did not survive.

As Euclid and Roman writers had praised masons as true craftsmen (technoi in Greek: like “technology,” the science of skilled use), it was considered a fit calling for the younger sons of minor nobility: an alternative to the celibate church, hence the term free mason, as no person of servile origin could be a true mason, merely a bricklayer or hod-carrier. In Anglo-Saxon times, King Athelstan had the lords draw up the “Constitution” for these master craftsmen of genteel origin. As master masons were “genteel,” a rather fanciful history was invented for the guild: the Masonic Fraternity had built the pyramids, the Temple of Solomon, on and on. This gave them “status” above, say, a shoemaker. Masons were supposed to deport themselves as gentlemen, and were held in high esteem.

As the wages of a true mason were much higher than a mere bricklayer, and masons moved around a lot going to where the work was (one couldn’t bring the castle to them), there was the obvious temptation for one unqualified to pass himself off as a mason. To prevent this, the masons developed secret handshakes and ways of knocking at the lodge’s door, to prevent pretenders from passing themselves off as true masons. This was the era of Operative Masonry, when the lodges were indeed places of repose for qualified stone masons.

VII. THE RISE OF “SPECULATIVE MASONRY”

The Masonic Guild was less rendered by the Reformation than most other guilds. They were already a closely knit fraternity of sorts and were horrified at seeing people calling themselves “Christians” massacring each other, being burned alive, tortured, over something as absurd as whether King Henry (in England) should be allowed to remarry, or Queen Mary (in Scotland) allowed to practice her faith. They didn’t see much “brotherly love” among the Christians, just a lot of heads being chopped off and the beautiful monasteries they had built destroyed.

During the medieval period, Masons were required (translating out of the Middle English of the time) to “love God, the Holy Church, and all Saints.” (Notice there nothing about the Bible.) In 1583, “saints” was dropped; and by 1717, the Constitution had been simplified to “Moral Law” and to respect the religion in which all men agree, [who are] Men of Honor and Honesty, irrespective of what Denomination or Persuasion they profess. In an age when Catholics were being hunted in Holland and Sweden (and treated like cattle in Ireland), and Protestants were still being burned in Spain, here was the first profession of total toleration. (Jews were admitted after 1723.) In 1738, Pope Clement XII forbad Catholics from becoming Masons, stating it was, “a pagan religion.” He was probably correct: Freemasonry being revamped Mithraism.

How do we know? Well, we don’t know for sure: there’s no specific connection between the long vanished cult of the Roman legions and this new “fraternity,” which required merely the profession of belief in “A Supreme Architect of the Universe,” but there are a lot of indications — strong ones.

VIII. MITHRA DONS A POWDERED WIG

The most grandiose stone structure even constructed in Britain was, and is, Hadrian’s Wall (much of it still standing): over 74 miles long, with mini-forts every mile. No operative mason could have failed to be impressed by it. It was unprecedented, not only in Britain but in the known world at the time. (The greater one in China wasn’t known until much later.) Obviously, a mason would have been curious about those who could construct such an edifice, and in learning about who built it — now relegated to folklore — they would have encountered that other aspect of the folklore: that those who built it were in the service of The Supreme Architect of the Universe, who brought forth the celestial spheres — Mithra.

Mithraism was a religion with no dogma, no “original sin,” no revelation, no history of absurd “miracles,” totally tolerant, stressing benevolence (no “divine grace”), possessing ranks as (secret) initiation rites in consecrated Mithraism — and barring women. The Speculative (or Accepted) Masons didn’t subscribe to some of the Mithraic dicta; they subscribed to ALL of it — including barring women (who formed their own auxiliary organization called “Daughters of the Eastern Star”). If sheer coincidence, there’s a staggering amount of it. I’d call 100% a staggering amount.

From the formation of the first Grand Lodge in 1717, Freemasonry quickly spread through out Europe and European colonies. As in ancient Mithraism, the rank of the individual in the secular world had no direct significance in the Masonic lodge (although kings, who happened to be Masons, usually found it easier to attain the rank of Grand Master of their lodge than others). By the latter portion of the 18th century, it was usually easier to ask which luminary was not a Mason, rather than which was. Despite the ban of the Catholic Church (repeated in 1758 by Pope Benedict XIV), Holy Roman Emperor Francis I was a Mason. This resulted in a rather sticky problem, as Vienna lay in the Archduchy of Austria, whose ruler was his wife, Maria-Theresa. She was badgered by the cardinal to suppress these “neo-pagans.” The Masons still preserved their identifying handshake and knock on the lodge door, to verify they were truly Masons. To this was added another “special knock”: that of Maria-Theresa’s police! This provided ample time for her husband to exit via the back door, before the front door was opened to a very patient police chief; thereby avoiding putting the Holy Roman Emperor under arrest for participating in forbidden rituals. (How would one handle a wife arresting her husband — when he happened to be the Holy Roman Emperor?)

It was no less a luminary than Frederick the Great who coined the term “Scottish Rite.” It seemed to differ from the vague “York rite” (which didn’t mean much of anything), in that it had more grades. Like Mithraism, Freemasonry had a number of levels, each with an arcane name and a secret “trial” as a form of initiation or elevation. The Scottish Rite became the principal one on the continent and in the U.S., with a host of levels up to the 33rd degree, which was purely honorary. Again, like Mithraism, benevolence was the prime focus. The French Lodge, Grande Orient removed even the requirement that one profess a belief in a “Supreme Architect.” It had no qualifications or disqualifications whatsoever. The sole aspect was the stress on benevolence.

Mozart was a devoted Mason, as was his father — and Haydn too. George Washington took his Masonic affiliations very seriously. He wouldn’t set foot inside a Christian church, but was the Grand Master of two lodges. With Ben Franklin, it was three: one also in France. The Prince of Wales (later George IV) was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge; several kings of Sweden and Denmark were also at one time Grand Master of this London- based Grand Lodge, and all the future monarchs of the U.K. from George IV through George VI were Grand Masters. (Queen Elizabeth II, being female, is not allowed to be a Mason: Mithraism casts a long shadow.)

IX. FREEMASONRY: THE FLACK-CATCHER

Freemasonry has two things going against it: it definitely isn’t a Christian institution (which makes it anathema to Bible-Thumpers), and it has the residuum of the Mithraic secret initiation rites. This “secrecy” has made it anathema to totalitarian regimes. In went from being banned in the Third Reich to being banned in the Soviet-puppet G.D.R. (Totalitarian regimes don’t look fondly on “secret” societies, but few have been as silly as the Nazi Anti-Masonic Expo, which “showed” the “poisoned pen” the Mason Goethe used to murder Schiller [?]!) Funny no one ever comes up with allegations that the Elks or Rotarians are bent on world domination. (I’m not so sure I’d object to a world dominated by neo-Mithraics.) What makes Freemasonry unique is that it does not accept the Mosaic mumbo-jumbo. The “Chinese Wall” between membership and religious tenets is older and stronger in Freemasonry than in The U.S. Constitution (which was written by a much of Masons, for the most part).

X. CONCLUSION

About 400 c.e. Hadrian’s Wall was abandoned. But it stood, and it reminded. It reminded those who were kept out by it and those protected by it of a concept called “civilization.” It passed not only into folklore but also into the Collective Unconscious, or the Race-Culture; and with it went the concept of a deity, whom those lonely men from a far off portion of the world worshiped: a soldier’s god, a man’s god, The Greatest Builder of them All. These lonely men served in Europe’s army, carrying their Eagles. This army they served with their stamina and with their swords. They also served in another army, the Militia Mithrae, which they served with their dedication and acts of kindness: that there be more Good in the world than Evil, and that eventually Good would overwhelm Evil. No god commanded them to do it; they were volunteers.

Stones last, as does the memory of good men, among those who will remember. Did some remember this non-judgmental, tolerant, and effective deity, and — in their own way — follow the example these lonely men on a remote wall had set: an example of loyalty, bravery, obedience, and benevolence?

… I tend to believe so: U.M.

-FINIS-

Please send Suggestions, Comments, Ideas, … to Ursus Major at: Legatus@hotmail.com

http://sric-canada.org/Mithraism.htm 3/10/2003

Plato’s “Republic” excerpt of Book I: Of Wealth, Justice, Moderation, And Their Opposites — 380 BCE

You don’t come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation. Do not, then, deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with us.

I replied: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you, who have arrived at that time which the poets call the “threshold of old age”: Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give of it?

I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is: I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away; there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too, being old, and every other old man would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, “How does love suit with age, Sophocles — are you still the man you were?” “Peace” he replied; “Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master”.

His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

A memoir

Brownie Bower left a memoir covering his life as a cowboy in the early 1900s as well as his experience in WWII serving in the U.S. Army in the Philippines.

The text has been left ‘as is’ written in his own words. There are many references to people and places in this text. It is our hope that you will enjoy and perhaps connect to a bit of your own personal or family history.

Clarence ‘Brownie’ Bower was born March 30, 1920 southeast of Perry OK, the son of Art and Lola Bower.

He married Louise Ferguson in Las Vegas, NV in 1941. To that union, three daughters were born: Kay, Donna and Toni. In 1961 he married Betty Kordis of Kingfisher OK.

He served in the 32nd U.S. Infantry Division in WWII in Guam, Luzon and the Philippines. He covered difficult roles within his unit including sniper as well as the company armor — keeping weapons functioning properly and doing repairs.

Brownie worked on a few ranches in Bakersfield California and a short stint in Oregon. He and his family moved back to Perry OK where he purchased a farm.

Later he purchased a drive-in restaurant in Medford OK and a few years later he opened another drive-in in Kingfisher. He also owned a sporting goods store in Kingfisher and worked for a local cement company before retiring.

Brownie passed November 16, 1999.

Selected Cowboy and World War II Stories

This book is dedicated to my wife Betty. If not for her, I probably would have never told of these happenings of my life. — Brownie Bower December 25, 1992

In 1935, I left home and went to work in a garage for a man named Mack. I made $7.00 a week, worked on cars and trucks. Sometimes worked half the night on the old P.W.A. trucks. Also broke horses for a Mr. Hilly. I was 15 years old and lived for a while with Pearl and Virgil Bradshaw, a Aunt and Uncle.

Then I moved into a tent at the south corner of Perry OK. It was at the edge of a wheat field, across the creek from the old light plant. I lived there with Charlie Carpenter and his wife, Violet. It was just a army tent, dirt floor and a wood cook stove. They had a baby that winter that I spent with them.

There was a big dairy and we would go out in the middle of the night, with a lariat and a bucket, and get about a gallon of milk every other night. The man at the dairy would probably have given us the milk but we never thought of that. We just thought we had to get it by moonlight, and feed that baby.

Mr. Hilly gave me a lot of encouragement in breaking horses. Seems he couldn’t find any I couldn’t break, and so in the spring I decided the Rodeo was more money and a lot more excitement. I went and told my Dad I was going to make the Rodeo circuit. He asked if I had any money and I told him I had $6.00 and a tank of gas. He told me he had $5.00 he could let me have. I told him no, I could make it on what I had. I could find some kind of work. We shook hands and he wished me luck. Pete Hager, George Reiley and I were on our way.

We got what they called mount money. $1.00 a head for every one rode, horses and bulls, 8 seconds. Traveled about 25 to 30 miles per hour and we went to rodeo’s in Pawnee, Guthrie and White Horse, Kansas. Others that I do not remember. We went to one rodeo at Goodnight OK. Goodnight was just south of Perkins OK. I don’t think the town even exists anymore. The arena was a big alfalfa field with barb wire all around it. We met up with a boy, who was originally from Tennessee. We didn’t know anything about him but he wanted to go with us, so now there was 4 of us.

We went to Jumbo OK and stayed there about 2 months, gathering cattle for a Mr. Smith on the Basket Ranch. They had Brahma cattle, and the mountains were full of whiskey stills. Mr. Smith advised us boys that if we came upon a whiskey still to keep riding at the same speed and if we was asked to stop, stop, if not, pay no attention and go on. The men working the stills stood around with shotguns and rifles. I remember going past stills and looking straight ahead and the hair on the back of my neck standing up. None bothered any of the boys. When the cattle were all gathered it was getting along toward fall of the year, so we moved on in my 1927 Chevy. Went to Tyler TX for a rodeo. We went through Ft. Worth and Dallas with no brakes. Ran a few people that were waiting for street cars back out of the streets.

Headed for Del Rio TX. Needed money so stopped at some town in Texas and started down the street with 32–20 Winchester rifle over my shoulder. I met the biggest man I ever saw, looked 7 foot tall to me. He was a Texas Ranger. He asked if the gun was mine and I told him it was, and that I needed to sell it. He told me of a place down the street where I might sell it and I went there and sold it for $7.50. Made a few more rodeo’s and got to Telegraph TX, one night just after dark. There was just one store there, grocery, hardware and all in one. You had to ford a river at Seven Springs. These was gravel roads, and I had no headlights, so one stood on each running board and argued about where the road was. Seemed awfully rough and where we entered the water we were below the ford and water ran through the car. We all waded out to the bank and put on ropes and all pulled and got it out. Went to bed and next day stayed all day washing clothes and swimming. We could see the falls farther up the river.

Started on the next day for Del Rio. We thought there was a ranch there where we could get a job. We were getting low on groceries and about out of money so we stopped at a little country grocery store and bought a loaf of bread and 4 pieces of lunch meat and we had a dime left, so we asked what was the most we could buy for a dime and he said a stalk of Mexican bananas. They was hanging up and before anyone could say anything, Pete was up on the counter cutting the rope down. We camped and ate and got dysentery from eating the bananas.

Pawned a pair of chaps next for $7.50. Got to 10 miles from Del Rio and went north and passed the Pecos high bridge and went to Langtree, TX. Stopped and looked, not much there then. Saw three or four people and one store.

Then we went east 25 or 30 miles to Square and Compass Ranch owned by Wess White. One of Wess’s nephews was the cook and one was the cow boss. They had cows and angora goats. The ranch house set on the west side of the Pecos River and I did ranch work. Pete broke horses and he lived at the ranch house. The rest of us lived out in the open. Most of what this ranch had was rock rattlers.

Pete got sick and I took him to Del Rio to the doctor, about 100 miles. Busted the head on the car going to Del Rio but made it in. Rode my first elevator in a building there. Went to a picture show, it was a double feature, one in English and one in Spanish.

We left the car there and hitchhiked back to the ranch. It took 2 days. We walked about 25 miles of this and stopped at a ranch that had pomegranates. I didn’t like them but Pete did and he scattered seeds all the way back to the ranch.

We got back and went to work. Month or so later, our 4th buddy was sent to Del Rio with a load of posts to sell. He sold them and forged the ranchers name to the check and took off with the money. That’s when we found out he had stolen some cattle back in Oklahoma, up in the Osage, before we had met him at that rodeo.

I went back to Del Rio to get the little car. The man at the station where it was parked said he thought there might be a old head back in some big weeds behind the station. We dug around and found it and cleaned it up. Went to an auto supply and got a head gasket set and put it all together and drove it back the ranch.

Stayed at the ranch 4 or 5 months, then George got into it with boss’s nephew and got fired. I agreed with George, so I quit. Pete stayed there and broke horses, then in the spring he went back to the rodeo. He was a bull dogger, and the next year he went to Madison Square Garden for the National Finals Rodeo. George and I decided to go north to Hobbs, New Mexico, where I had an Uncle, Perry Bower. Perry worked on drilling rigs and because I wasn’t old enough, all I could do was help rig up and tear down. The rest of the time I spent building a house of poles and cardboard boxes, with an old fellow named Mr. Bobbit and his son Francis. Stayed part time with Uncle Perry and his wife so I could take baths.

Got to make one deer hunting trip at Sitting Bull Falls north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Bad storm came up and we had to go home, didn’t get any deer.

George and I started our own business. We shot rabbits and sold them to the grocery stores in Hobbs, 15 cents each, cleaned and dressed. Shells were 10 cents a box for 50 shells. We usually got 50 rabbits per box. Just walked around the sand hills that had formed around the mesquite. We did that until nearly spring when someone in Lubbock Texas got rabbit fever and we got scared and quit.

George, Francis Bobbit and I decided to hunt for bat caves in Arizona because bat fertilizer was worth a lot of money. Didn’t find any but crawled in all the holes we could find. Was going to go and look for the Lost Dutchman Mine.

We drove one night without headlights in the rain. Sometimes a car would go by and we could see where the road was and we finally came to a service station and the man wanted 50 cents for headlight bulbs and I wouldn’t pay that much, because they should have been 10 cents. The man had an auto court and we asked for a cabin. They were all full so we asked if there was anyplace we could get in where it was dry and he said he had one cabin which had a caved in roof, and would rent it for 50 cents a night, so we took it and slept against the outside walls because the rain was pouring in the center. Stayed fairly dry and started out the next morning. The sun came out but we couldn’t go on because sometime during the night there had been a landslide and it had covered the road. We waited until noon and they got the road cleared and we went north.

Went to Apache Junction, south-east of Phoenix. Bought supplies and went to hunt the Lost Dutchman Mine. Everyone told us not to go because everyone who went didn’t come back. They claimed they would be found with bullet holes in their skulls. We hunted for a couple of months.

The Havalina hogs would chase us up on rocks and we shot a lot of them. Mostly sit real still up on a rock and let them get tired and leave. George had a single action 45 Colt, and I had a 44 single action Colt. Didn’t find any gold and decided to go on to California.

In Southern California, we saw old stage coach roads made of railroad ties. Went to Petersville (porterville?) and it was fall and the only job we could find was cutting spinach, picking olives and oranges. There we lived under a bridge.

Spring was coming and along about March or April, there wasn’t much more work to do so George Reiley, Francis Bobbit and myself decided to go prospecting on the White River. At this location we lived in a tent and made about $1.50 a day apiece. Was hard work shoveling and digging. We made a rocker with a riffle board in it. Built a dam and stayed two months and it came a real hard rain and washed our dam out. I told them it was about time for me to go find a job at a ranch.

I had heard about a big ranch at Bakersfield California, so I went down there and talked to the cow boss. His name was Carter Arnett, and he put me to work. $40.00 a month, room and board and slept in the bunk house every night.

Name of the outfit was Kearn Co. Land and Cattle Co., Diamond A brand. The ranch ran from Bakersfield south to Wheeler Ridge, west to Cresco Plains. I was told it was 400 miles around the outside fence. They shipped in cattle from old Mexico and New Mexico, 600 head at a time. Then we would work these cattle. Brand, dehorn, ear mark and get them settled on the range and another bunch would come. This went on all winter.

In the spring we would have a roundup. The biggest roundup we had was 3,000 head out of the mountains. This was just the cattle out to the hills. The 3,000 head was strung out for 7 miles. We drove them from Santa Medio (San Emidio?) headquarters to Cresco Plains, this was about 100 miles. These were all 2 year old steers.

On this one roundup I was riding a sorta clumsy colt and the herd started running down the mountain, so I had to get in front of them and turn them so they wouldn’t run all the weight off them. I whipped the colt with a double of a rope so I could get more speed out of him. He kept stepping on his own feet and falling down, but he never did fall plumb down and he never did quit running, and I finally got in front and circled them till more riders got there. Slim Holder, an older cowboy, said he just followed me close enough to see how bad the wreck was going to be. When we got all settled down the colt had lost all his shoes but one. While working there I broke horses.

Down in the valley, we were gathering Mexican steers in the mesquite thickets. I was riding a colt and chasing a steer thru the mesquite trees and the colt wasn’t bridal wise. The steer went under the tree and the colt went thru the middle of it. The colt turned over and I went on ahead of him and landed in a ditch.

The colt came down on top of me. Broke my right arm and pulled ligaments loose in my back and shoulders. Was laid up for a few days, had to go see a Doctor and get my arm in a cast. I would have somebody saddle my horse and I would hook my elbow around the saddle horn to get on and would up with a stiff wrist.

One time we was gathering cattle in the heavy sage brush and we saw the biggest bobcat I ever saw. We was all trying to rope him and couldn’t get the rope down thru the brush. I finally got him in a little clearing and roped him right around the neck. He ran until the rope got tight and then he turned and came right back down the rope. I spurred my horse and jumped him forward, the cat went right behind my back, over the horse. I was hollering for somebody to get a rope on him and a Mexican named Smokey Joe, got a rope on his neck and stretched him out and killed him.

Smokey Joe always wanted to stomp rattlesnakes and I kept trying to find them for him. I figured he would get bit. One day I found one out in the sagebrush and I hollered at him to come and stomp this rattler. He was riding a young horse and the snake was crawling in some brush. Smokey got off his horse and ran to the end of his hackamore rope. He jumped up in the air to jump on the snake and scared his horse and the horse jerked his head back and Smokey Joe landed on his back on top of the snake in the bush. I never seen so many arms and legs flying and he never did get bit, but I never could get him to stomp any more rattle snakes after that day.

One day I was breaking a young colt in the corral and Smokey was sitting up on top of the fence and he was hollering “spur him” (in Spanish estimularlo!) and the horse bucked into the fence and Smokey fell off the top of the fence, backwards, and broke his shoulder. Smokey was a real good friend. He and I sawed all the horns and did the ear marking on every train load of cattle that came in to the ranch. He made me a raw hide rope and a raw hide hackamore.

After I had worked for the land Company one year I got a weeks paid vacation. That year I came back to Oklahoma to see my folks. I rode a bus. At the California state line they took the suitcases off the bus. I had an old tin suitcase. When I had put my clothes in the suitcase I laid my old 44 on top of the clothes. It was fully loaded except an empty round under the hammer. That’s the way I always carried it.

I seen that they was opening all the suitcases and lockers so I got up, to take them a key, as I had it locked. Before I could hardly get out of the seat the man had his own key and had it open. He looked at the old pistol a little bit, pulled it out of the holster, seen that it was loaded. He called the inspector over. They spun the cylinder, seen that it was sitting on an empty, and they put it back on an empty cartridge and put it back in the holster. I thought for awhile they was going to take my old colt.

While I was at the Diamond A Ranch I saw a couple of little bobcats in some brush. There was two of them. They didn’t even have their eyes open.

I jumped off my horse and grabbed one, somebody yelled “look out Brownie, here comes the mother”. I got back on my horse in a hurry, with the little bobcat in my hand. It was doing a lot of squirming around and I had to hold it pretty tight.

We went about a mile and came to a gate, I guess I had been holding the little cat too tight because he was limp as a rag. I wooled him around and got him moving again. Put him inside my jacket and he rode along fine.

I got milk from the cook and would dip a rag in milk and the cat would eat. A couple of days and his eyes was open. Then I got to feeding him from a teaspoon. He would eat right out of the teaspoon.

Took him with me to a cow camp near the foot of the mountains and I would buy eggs and milk and hang them in a desert ice box, in a tree. A desert ice box is made of lathes and screen wire with a gunny sack, wetted, and throwed over the outside, and let the wind blow thru. I kept milk, eggs and bacon in it. Have to wet the sack a couple of times a day and it kept everything pretty cool. The cat seemed to like milk and eggs, so when the eggs would get about 10 days old they would get kinda rank and I would feed them to the cat.

I stayed there in that camp about 3 months. I would feed him in the morning before I left, enough to last him until evening. He grew pretty fast and got pretty tame. He would rub on my leg and purr just like a house cat. He slept under my bed.

He was about 10″ tall by this time. Carter, the cow boss came one day and said he needed me down to another part of the ranch to move a bunch of cattle. Said I would be back the next day. I put out enough food for my cat for 2 days. It so happened that I didn’t make it back for 3 days. When I got back he was mean. Didn’t want to let me in the cabin. Kept jumping at the screen door. Finally got in and he ran under the bed and wouldn’t even come out to eat in the day time. Would eat at night sometime.

In about a week I had to move to the main headquarters at Santa Medio (San Emidio). I put him in a screened in porch on the bunk house and told everybody to leave him alone. He sorta gentled down and I would take him out in the yard and he played with a big old dog. They had a lot of fun together. He seemed to be getting gentler.

They had a farm boss at this camp. His wife had, I heard, been with a circus. She got him out one day. He was about a foot tall by this time. She was carrying around over shoulder. Something must have startled him and he tried to get away. He scratched her all over her back. Things was kinda in an uproar about my cat.

In a few days I came in and my cat was down in the back. Couldn’t walk on his hind legs. I figured the farm boss had went in and hit him with something.

In a couple of days I sold the cat to a man that came by the ranch for $5.00.

The second year I had a 2 week vacation and I took off with a fellow that did farm work there on the ranch. We loaded up our saddles and bed rolls and decided to go to Oregon. There was a ranch up there, the brand was JHB, it was owned by the same company as the Diamond A. We thought if we liked it we might just stay up there. It was pretty country in south eastern Oregon. We went to see the superintendent about a job. They was getting ready for round-up and he told us he was sure we could go to work but he sent us up in the hills to see the cow boss, who was of Portuguese decent. He put us to work.

We worked around camp for 3 or 4 days, shoeing horses and fixing packs. Seemed like it was going to be a pretty nice place to work.

We had a Chinese cook and about 4:30 every morning he would get up to start breakfast and before he started breakfast he would go to the outhouse about 40 yards away. Somebody decided after dark at night we would all go out and move the little house back about 4 feet.

The next morning we was all at the windows, watching the Chinaman go to the outhouse. He was reaching out for the door when he walked off into the pit. The pit was pretty deep and we had to light lanterns and get a tree limb to fish him out of there. He was a mess. He was doing a lot of talking in Chinese and I figured he was cussing the cowboys.

The cook quit right then and there and if I remember right, there was 7 cowboys and the cow boss fired every one of us.

We loaded up my little 27 Chevrolet and felt so bad about this we didn’t even stop to get our pay. Headed back for California.

We stopped for one night and panned for gold on Feather River. I panned for about 30 minutes, the other boy got us something to eat and the next morning while he fixed breakfast, I panned again for about 30 minutes. He hollered at me and told me somebody was coming. I threw my gold pan and bucket in the pickup, covered it with a tarp, because when we went in it said “No Trespassing”. The man showed up carrying a rifle, he was pretty grumpy and wanted to know what the hell we was doing in there. We told him we had been on vacation and pulled in there after dark to sleep. He told us it belonged to a big mining syndicate and we better get out as soon as we could. We thanked him and started putting stuff in the pickup.

We pulled out at noon that day. We stopped at another river and I finished panning out this gold. Took it to a Assay office in Portersville and he weighed it. Had exactly one ounce, and gold was worth $32 then. Paid for our trip and was the most gold I ever found in 1 hours time.

We made it back to Bakersfield to the ranch before our 2 weeks was quite up. Never told anybody about working on that ranch in Oregon for a long time.

Some camps had Chinese cooks and while working at the Diamond A , I got pretty well acquainted with this one. He told me what his name was but I couldn’t understand it, so I called him Charlie. He told me several times what his name was but I still called him Charlie. Seemed to be alright with him.

He told me one day that Chinese liked owls to eat. I told him I could probably get him some. The farm hands would put up great big stacks of alfalfa hay. Some had set there for several years and I had noticed owls flying in and out of holes in them. So I got an old leather glove and I would ride out to these stacks and I could stand up on the saddle on my horse and reach back in these holes and every once in a while I would get ahold of an owl and I would pull him out, and take him in to Charlie. Usually the horse I was riding didn’t take too kindly to catching owls. Charlie had a cage and he would put these owls in and on Saturday night he would put them in a sack and I would haul him and the owls to Bakersfield. I kept a close watch on the cage when we had fried chicken but they never seemed to be missing.

The farm hands irrigated alfalfa fields and every once in awhile they would drown out a badger. They would bring them in and throw them in a big old stock tank. No water in it. We would wait for an old stray dog to come by and catch him and throw him in with the badger. Sometimes it really was a good fight. We would finally take the dog out and turn him loose and he never would come back again. Have to take the badger out and shoot him, and then wait for a new badger.

The cow boss sent Lawrence Crockett and I out one day to bring in a steer. He told us to leave our ropes at home so I left mine in the saddle shed but Crockett took his rope anyway. It was real thick mesquite where we found this steer. The steer had screw worms and he wasn’t too happy. He didn’t want to be driven anywhere. It was getting close to dark so Crockett roped the steer and threw him. I got off my horse and put a half hitch in the steer’s mouth to make him lead better. Crockett asked me, “Is the rope under his tongue?”, and I said it was. It wasn’t and it cut the steer’s tongue off. We got him in to a holding pen after dark, and next morning we went to doctor the steer and his tongue was gone. Carter, the cow boss, told us if the steer died we were to roll our beds and leave. I kept the steer on good grazing and watched close after him. He didn’t make the next shipment, but a month later he went out with that shipment.

Lawrence Crockett, one of the cowboys there was a third cousin of Davey Crockett. The cow boss had sent him into an area one day to see how many cattle were in there. He came back and told the cow boss how many he had seen and this other cowboy told Crockett and the cow boss there wasn’t that many in there. Crockett asked if he was calling him a liar. This other cowboy said, “I guess so”. Their horses were facing each other, Crockett spurred his horse forward and as he passed he hit the other cowboy under the chin and knocked him plumb off his horse, backwards. When we went to gather the cattle there was the number of cattle that Crockett said was there.

The living quarters at this ranch was a big bunk house, cut up into rooms. There was 1 to 3 guys to each room. There was a porch down each side of the house, had a separate wash house where you could wash your clothes and shower. It had big tubs and scrub boards.

We had a mess hall. A big long building with a kitchen on the end. Long tables and benches to sit on. One time the cook was going to have Christmas dinner, turkey, and he got drunk and cooked the turkey plumb off the bone, so he just mixed the dressing and turkey all together and we ate it.

The rules were that if a cowboy wanted a horse and then couldn’t ride him he had to leave, and go try to find another job at another ranch. There was a young man just out of college by the name of Bob Beechner, who went to work at the ranch to learn more about the cattle business. We got this old spoiled horse in, about 7 years old and Bob wanted this horse. Carter told him that he would make a different deal with him, if he couldn’t ride him he could still work there. So Bob took the horse out and went to gathering steers and the horse bucked him off and I wanted that horse. Next morning I went to the coral a little early and saddled him up. I rode him all around the coral and galloped him and rode him into corners and stopped him and about that time everyone else was getting there to saddle their horses, and he bucked me off. So I went in the saddle shed and got my chapps and put them on, got back on him and we started out together to gather the steers we were going to ship to market. The old horse tried to pitch a time or two, but I kept him under control. When we had the steers all cut out, one steer took off in a run, and I ran the old horse to turn the steer back. Just as the steer turned back the old horse downed his head and went to bucking. I spurred him just as hard as I could, and he bucked for a while and he quit. I got back up to where the rest of them were and they said that they could hear me spurring him, sounded like somebody driving posts with a maul. One man said he jumped so high he could see Mt. Whitney under him every jump. I thought that sounded like a good name for him, so I named him Whitney. He never did buck again, with me.

I had heard about Snedden Land and Cattle Co. It was in mountain country and they had a lot of wild cattle so I thought I would like to go run wild cattle and I went to see them. They said yes they would be glad to have me. They had heard a lot about me, so I went to work for Snedden Land and Cattle Co.

I had always used a 32′ rope, tied hard and fast and the first thing they told me was that I needed a lot longer rope. The first morning that we went out to round wild cattle, I was mounted on a young colt that wasn’t even bridal wise and they put me on a spot to watch. An old cow and a 2 year old heifer came my way and I tried to turn them back, couldn’t control the old colt and we didn’t catch any wild cattle that day. That night I told them that I would like to have a little better horse and maybe I could catch some cattle. They told me that cowboys from flat country couldn’t catch wild cattle anyhow. The next morning they gave me a strawberry rone by the name of Tony.

They put me in the same spot as the day before and I waited, finally an old cow and a big yearling came my way. I roped the old cow and watched the calf. I tied the cow to a tree, circled around and caught the calf, and tied it to a tree. I rode back up on the hill where they had left me. About three hours later they came back, and they still hadn’t caught anything. I asked them if they didn’t want to go tip the old cow’s horns and they looked surprised and said, “Did you catch one?” , and I said yes. We went back down the side of the hill and tipped the horns on the cow. They started to ride off and I said, “Don’t you want to look at the big heifer I caught?”. They was really surprised. I caught everything that came my way, and they never did say anything about cowboys from the flat country.

I decided that maybe I did need a longer rope, so I got a 40′ rope. The hills were covered with scrub oak and brush and you couldn’t hardly ride a horse through it, but old tony was a wild cow horse deluxe.

One day I caught an old cow just as she went out of sight over a bank. My horse slid right up to that bank which happened to be 30′ high, and I couldn’t get slack to get the rope loose so I had to set and wait until some other cowboys came and got the rope on the old cow and got my rope loose. They said, “See, we told you you needed a longer rope.”

The time that we stayed in there running wild cattle that year, I caught more wild cattle than the old timers that had lived there, and I felt pretty good about this.

Then we moved the gentle cattle to Lockwood. That was high country, summer range. They put me in a cow camp there. It was originally the old Snedden homestead. Had a big adobe house. The walls were about 2″ thick.

Just as we got the cattle moved in, there was a big forest fire. So I packed dynamite in for them to blow fire lanes. Had one mule, they are supposed to be real sure footed animals. One day I had two cases of dynamite and one of caps loaded on this mule. I was going around this trail and it was pretty narrow. Rocks sticking out the side of the mountain, and the old mule hit one case of dynamite and knocked him off the trail. I turned the lead rope loose and he went down the slope end over end for about 50 yards.

I knew it was going to blow up and blow me plumb off the mountain, but it didn’t. The old mule got up at the bottom with his legs all spread out and brayed like he was please that he didn’t get blowed up.

I finally found a way to get down to him. He was skinned up all over but the pack saddle stayed on and both cases of dynamite and the caps too. This was all packed in wooden boxes. I packed him on in to the fire. It finally burned 7,000 acres before they got it out. I thought then it was a big fire.

In this same area at another camp sight called Mutah, was a old log cabin. Had a fireplace in it, had been abandoned for years. While locating the cattle we thought we would stay there. Got pretty cool at nights so we all rolled out our bed rolls on the floor and got ready for night. Built up a big fire in the fireplace. Seemed that rattlesnakes had made a den in the outside of the fireplace. Fire warmed the rocks up and the snakes got all upset and came out, so we all gathered up our beds and went outside to sleep.

I hadn’t been at Lockwood too long until I saw a big bear track right down by camp. I didn’t want that bear hanging around camp. Most of the bears that was in there was called outlaw bears. They had gotten mean in Yosemite and the rangers would capture them and bring them there to turn them loose.

I started following this bear. Didn’t get to see him but I guess I was making him unhappy. I would find places where he stood up and slapped the bark off pine trees 6′ above the ground. I followed him for a week and got awful close quite a few times because my horse would get really upset. I always wondered what would have happened if I had caught up with him, but I took a day off to go to the mail box. It was 7 miles away and I only went once a week.

When I got my mail I had a letter from the government saying my friends and neighbors had selected me for the army. I really didn’t have any neighbors so I don’t know what they was talking about. Anyway I had to report the next day for my physical.

As I was going out of there the next day I stopped by a widow woman’s house that ran a few cattle. I told her about a couple of steers I had seen up in a canyon that belonged to her. I told her I was going into the army. She had a daughter 16 or 17 years old that said, “Ye Gods, old bow legs, hell of a soldier you’ll make.” Dave Snedden told me he could get me deferred. I told him I wasn’t any better than anyone else and I would see him in about 6 months, not thinking the war would last any longer than that. Seen him again three and a half years later when the war was over. He had kept my job for me.

At this time I was 22 years old.

I took my basic training at Camp Roberts, California. They put me in the infantry and I was put in the Michigan, Wisconsin National Guard unit, which was the 32nd Infantry Division. Their insignia was a Red Arrow. They were already in Australia and not full strength, so I was sent as a replacement.

When I got to Australia, they called me in and said they had looked through my records for basic training and said I had a marksmanship with a rifle, and asked how I would like to be a sniper. I said I could shoot better if they would let me shoot left handed, they said if you can shoot any better than this left handed you just do it that way, because I had nothing but bullseyes in basic training, where I had to shoot right handed.

While we were in Northern Australia, one of our men went on a pass to a town nearby and he bought a Singer sewing machine, standard size but with a gear box on the end and a crank. They were in the mess hall trying to thread the bobbin up through the bottom of the machine by hand, and they weren’t having much luck, and had worked a long time at this. I came by and watched them awhile and I had watched my mother at home on her sewing machine and I told them I could get the thread up there I thought. The man that had bought the machine said if you can get it up there I will give it to you — he was pretty upset. I turned the crank and it brought the thread up. He said, “My word is good, I will give it to you”. We spent a lot of time altering our fatigue clothes and got in a lot of trouble for doing so. Wasn’t supposed to alter government property.

We had some amphibious training in Australia and then shipped to New Guinea. We left Australia on a small boat, Company B. 126th Infantry, 32nd Div., my company and just before we reached New Guinea, two Japanese Zero’s attacked our boat, which was an all wooden deck where we all had to stay. We had one 50 cal. machine gun. The zero’s kept circling and strafing the boat, and we shot everything we had at them, rifles too. One of our men didn’t have a shirt on and he dove under the 50 ca. gun for a little protection and kept hollering, “I’m hit, I’m hit”, but later we learned that he really wasn’t wounded, it was hot 50 cal. cases falling on his back. The boat ran up on a coral reef and when it was all over we got both of the Jap zero’s and we only had one man killed. The deck of the boat looked like woodpeckers had ate it up. We had to swim and wade the rest of the way to shore. The army flew in shoes and clothes and rations. Some of us didn’t have any clothes left.

The Australian army had taken an air strip away from the Japs in lower New Guinea. The army moved out and left only the Australian engineers. They got word that the Japs were going to try and take it back. They got all the guns and weapons that they could find and set them up on both sides of the air strip where they could get a cross fire. They let all the Japs get off the ship and march up the middle of the air strip 8 or 10 abreast. When they all got just right the Aussies opened up with their machine guns and killed all of them. The count was 700. They dug a long trench beside the air strip and buried them all in one grave. They put up a wooden marker for them. I saw this several times when I was in this area.

We walked over the Owen Stanley Mountain Range to get to Buna where the first conflict was.

The battle at Buna lasted 40 some days. We started digging out the Japanese, they had told us that the Japs were little people, like myself, but the first ones that we encountered were the Japanese Imperial Marines. They were 6′ tall and over. We fought with the Australians on our flank. They were quite the people. They would stop at 10, 2 and 4 to make tea. The Aussies said they had fought against the Germans in Crete and said, “they were bloody good cobblers to fight with”. Said they would rather fight the Germans a year as to fight the bloody Japs one night. The Aussies said the Germans didn’t shoot their aid men and when it was necessary to remove the dead and bury them, an aid man was sent to the German line and a armistice was set for this purpose. At the appointed time, both sides came out without rifles and no one was shot. The Japs didn’t work this way and shot aid men so our aid men carried rifles. The Germans also allowed the Aussies to go to the bathroom if they held up their shovel and came out of their hole without their rifle.

Seen one of them take a mirror and flash it from a foxhole trying to find a Jap sniper in a coconut tree. He would stand up and flash the mirror and holler, “Here I am you bloody bastards”. Finally the Jap sniper got him.

After Buna they shipped us to Goodenough Island, Sept. 1943 for R & R. There we lived in tents and still kept training. This island was a condemned island, the natives would not live there. We stayed there and we could hear Tokyo Rose on the radio, and she told us she knew where we were, and the Japs would fly over at night and bomb us.

We went to Finschhafen and fought in that area and cleaned it up.

Then we made a beach landing at Saidor in Jan. 1944. We fought in that area up and down the coast.

At Saidor we was to push back and meet the Aussies and annihilate all the enemy in between.

While we was on patrol up in the hills one day all strung out, I heard our radio man hollering. We went back to see about him and the New Guinea head hunters had drug him off the trail and was trying to drag him off in the jungle. We got after them and made them turn him loose. No one was really hurt, little scared.

We finally met the Aussies and we had taken one prisoner. We didn’t know what to do with him, nobody wanted him. The Aussies had a hand grenade that had to have a fuse put in before you used it, which I didn’t know at the time. The Aussies asked the Jap if he wanted to commit Hari Kari, and the Aussies gave him a grenade and the Jap pulled the pin and I took off to get out of the way, and the Aussies just stood around the Jap. He set down on it and I wondered why they didn’t get the hell out of there, and the Aussie grinned and said there ain’t no fuse in it. The Jap set there for about 10 minutes, sweating, waiting for it to go off, finally one of the Aussies shot him, and we went on our way. We were told not to take prisoners.

The Australians paid the New Guinea Natives one shilling for each Jap head that they brought in. They would bring them in, in baskets made out of vines. Sometimes they just carried them by the hair of the head. A Schilling was approximately twenty-five cents. Some of the natives got pretty wealthy.

Sometimes we would get to where our field kitchens were and get to eat the mess sergeants cooking. Sometimes we went fishing. We used TNT to blast the fish out of the water. Got great big fish, which we ate.

It rained all the time. We would lay down and sleep wherever we were. Sometimes water covered half of your body.

We had a Navajo indian named Ben who was a scout. On patrols we would watch him real close. He would be out in front and when he would stop and touch his nose with his finger we would all hunt for cover, because we knew there were Japs about. He could smell them.

After every campaign we would have replacements come in to bring us up to strength. We always talked with the replacements to see how things were back home. We didn’t get paid only every few months, and we couldn’t spend any money because there was no place to spend it. I had a carton of Bull Durham tobacco sent to me, but in the islands it was so damp that it all molded. We smoked it anyway, it didn’t taste very good.

We had one man in our outfit that chewed tobacco but didn’t smoke, and he couldn’t get any chewing tobacco, so we all saved our snipes and re-rolled them until we couldn’t stand them any more and then gave them to him to chew. He would gather up a bunch of them and make him a chew of tobacco.

The jungle was full of mosquitos, leaches and flies. All kinds of spiders and birds, parrots of all kinds. There were rats as big as possums. I killed one, one night with my hunting knife. I thought it was a Jap trying to sneak up on me.

The nights were so dark in the Jungle, in the dark of the moon that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The officers were interviewing one boy that had gone berserk, and he said yes he could see everything at night, Jap’s and trains and everything. I don’t think he was in too bad a shape, because when you stared long enough into the dark you could see things that weren’t there. I saw Lady Godiva on a white horse, one night, but when I looked away and then looked back she was gone.

We had several battles among ourselves at night from people hallucinating. Far as I know no one was ever killed. Mostly guns got shot up.

One night we had a new replacement from Texas and before we made the landing he was going to win the war by himself. We took a air strip, dug in on the back side for the night and the boy from Texas, after dark, thought he could see Japs coming in on top of us. He got everyone excited and we went to shooting. I remember he said, “Shoot right over my head, shoot low, but don’t shoot too low”. We decided we was fighting among ourselves and somebody got him tied down and they took him away next morning and I never saw him again. I guess the war was over for him.

We ate lots of coconuts. We would give the natives a cigarette to climb a tree and knock down coconuts. I had tree climbers as I was a sniper, and when there wasn’t any natives around I would climb the tree and knock them down. We would cut stalks of bananas that were starting to show a little bit of yellow, wrap them in a shelter half, bury them in the hot steamy ground overnight, and next morning they were ripe and would melt in your mouth. We ate some kind of potatoes out of the ground, that the natives ate. We ate Papayas.

The native men wore breechcloths, or lap-laps. The women wore a grass skirt only. When they would cross a stream the women would gather their skirts and pull it all up in front of them so it wouldn’t get wet. We talked pigeon english to the natives, because we couldn’t speak their language.

Our next beach landing was Aitape on April 1944. We set up a perimeter, didn’t run into too much resistance. Started sending out patrols. One night I thought I heard a cow bawling and I told a boy from Kansas about it and he said he thought he heard one too, so we took off into the jungle, just the two of us to see if we could locate these cattle. We located a small heard of Brahma cattle in an abandoned coconut grove. We finally crawled close enough and I shot a 250 Ib. heifer. We dressed it out and put it on a pole and carried it into camp. The first person that we ran into was our Company commander. We told him we had some beef steak, he said you can’t eat that, it isn’t government inspected. We went right on and delivered it to the mess sergeant. We all ate good steaks for a few days, something we weren’t used to. About the second or third day the Co. Commander came to me and said, “Cowboy, we are out of meat”. So about ever 3 days the boy from Kansas and I would go out and get another brahma. The Co. Commander never did say anything about it and he ate it like it was government inspected. The last time we went out it was about a mile and a half from camp, up in the foothills, where we found these cattle and something spooked them and they stampeded out of there and about ran over us. The boy from Kansas shot one and while we was dressing it out we could hear a bunch of jabbering over the hill and a pig squealing. We thought it was natives. We carried the beef about 10 yards to the stream in the edge of a coconut grove. We would usually take turns when we got a beef. One would stay with it and the other would go back to camp to get help to carry it into camp. It was the boy from Kansas’ turn to go back and get help, so I was sitting around there waiting. Decided I needed a little better cover because I didn’t know where the Japs were. I crawled back up into some coconut sprouts to get better concealment and I had set there about 20 min. and around the hill 5 or 6 Japs came carrying a pig on a pole. I set there an watched them go by, as I had a Springfield rifle and I didn’t know if I could get them all or not. A little while later the detail got there and we carried the beef in. That was the last beef we got. The heard started out about 30 and we ate about half of them.

While in the 32nd Division, I had made a lot of friends, but a boy named Arkie, from Arkansas and Presley Brown from Tupelo, Miss., was my two best friends. Arkie got killed in combat, and Presley was on a patrol up the coast, trying to clean some Japs out of a village. In the process Presley got shot in the arm, most of the bone gone, another boy was wounded, can’t remember his name. The message came in to our command post that they were wounded and needed a barge up the coast. They were about 2 miles inland thru the jungle and hills. We got a barge to go pick up the patrol and the wounded. The operator for the barge stayed between half and a quarter of a mile from the beach and wouldn’t go any closer. We saw the patrol coming down out of the jungle and I told the barge operator to go into the beach and he wouldn’t do it. I jumped down in front of him flipped safety of my rifle and told him if he didn’t go in to the beach I would shoot him and I would take the barge and go in to the beach. He took me at my word and drove the barge into the beach. The one boy that was wounded was dead by this time. Presley had walked in on his own but he was in bad shape, loss of blood. Presley was shipped out back to the states and discharged.

Had already lost a lot of friends and after Arkie and Presley, I didn’t ever make close friends after that.

We were still at Aitape, and we got an intelligence report that there was about 70 Japs at a place down the coast by a village named Yakimul. We was at full strength by this time. 1,000 men in the battalion. We got on barges and landed at Yakimul without any problem. Everything seemed to be quiet until after dark that night. Half of the battalion had gone inland on patrol to try to locate those 70 Japs.

Not long after dark all hell broke loose. Japs were coming from every direction. I was in a hole with a mess sergeant, and the mess sergeant got wounded. The Japs stuck a automatic weapon in the hole and turned it loose. All I got was a bunch of dirt in my mouth, eyes and ears. D Company had a 30 cal. machine gun set up on a trail coming in and when the fight started the gunner and the assistant gunner and the ammunition carrier all got killed or wounded and a Co. Clerk from D Company took over the gun. He fired the machine gun and carried his own ammunition all night.

The fight was still going on the next day at 10 O’clock, there wasn’t many of us left by this time. They called in barges to pick us up, and at straight up 10 o’clock we was to leave our positions and try to make it to the barges on the beach. We pulled back to Aitape, had to leave the dead. The group that went inland took 2 days to get back thru the jungle and in that one nights fight and what was lost in land patrol in the two days, we lost 500 men.

We spent the next month in Aitape. While in this area the Company Commander asked me to take a message to battalion. I was coming down with malaria, running a high fever, but thought I could beat it. While on the trail back to battalion I had such a high fever that I was out of my head. Went into a engineer camp and they got me and gave me attabrin and wrapped me up in some blankets for the night. By the next morning I had sweat it out, and knew what I was doing and where I was. Ate breakfast with the engineers, thanked them and started on back to battalion, and delivered the message. Could have wandered into a Jap camp and not been so lucky.

While we were in this area they brought in some natives from the Figi Islands, as they were skilled at maneuvering in the dark. They put on a demonstration. They put us out in the weeds and grass at night and the natives would sneak in and we couldn’t hear them moving and wouldn’t know they were there until they ran their hand down the inside of the neck of your fatigues to feel your dog tags. If you had been the enemy you would have lost your head. They could tell by the shape of the dog tags if you were the enemy or not. Pretty spooky.

While at Aitape we had the area pretty well secured and they asked for volunteers to go on a patrol 20 miles behind the Jap lines. I volunteered. There was a radio man, a Russian boy that they sent without volunteering, and one other man, I don’t remember who he was. A Australian soldier was to be our guide. We had 60 natives to carry rations. We was to sneak in and get information. Try not to get in any fights. We had got quite a ways behind the Jap lines maneuvering among the Japs, no conflict.

We ran across a Jap truck one day loaded with brand new rifles. We drained gasoline out of the truck and set the whole works afire and burned it up. Kind of a mistake because by this time they knew that we were in there somewhere. Natives told us that the Japs were coming, we beat it back to a swinging bridge across a canyon, made out of vines. We was all running hard as we could go crossing this bridge and the Japs were coming right out after us. We got across, took machetes and took turns shooting and chopping the bridge. Bridge went down with a lot of Japs on it, and we estimated it to be 100 Japs.

In all this commotion our observation plane spotted us and thinking that we were all Japs, they directed artillery at us. We ran down a trail about a mile to a native village where we set up our radio and tried to get a message to battalion, where they had coded the message, and they couldn’t de-code the message. We cranked on that damn radio all the rest of that day and all night, They kept pouring in the artillery rounds, we seemed to be in a dead spot behind a hill. They never did hit the village, finally the next day they decoded the message. We were quite a few miles from our company and couldn’t get back. Our Australian had come down with malaria. He was out of his head with fever. We had to half carry him. We went thru a swamp of mud and water nearly to our waist, dragging him thru, we pulled both of his shoes off and lost them. We wound up in a leprosy camp and stayed there about a week, before we could get back to the company.

I had a old deck of cards about a inch thick as they were so old and had been used so much. I gave them to the natives and they would play cards and laugh. I watched them for several days and never could figure out what they were playing, they had a great time, and I guess they knew what they were playing. I worried about leprosy for quite a few years as I thought it was contagious.

By this time we were up to full strength again, we had gotten replacements. We went back to Yakimul, ready for a fight. We stayed in there for 40 some days, sending out patrols and we would end up getting credit for 700 Japs, instead of the 70 that intelligence had reported were there.

We went back to Aitape, got replacements again to full strength, and word had gotten around that we was to make another beach landing.

We were supposed to get an issue of so many bottles of beer per month and we had never gotten any, so for a treat they brought in this beer. Our Company Commander was a real nice guy, he gave us our full back issue which was a case and a half per man. The first Seargent and three more of us took our case and a half of beer in the Sgt’s. tent and dumped it all around the center pole. Proceeded to get drunk on this hot beer. When we ran out, we took up a collections and went to a Australian camp and paid them $1.50 a can for our own beer. We went back the second time to get beer, and they wouldn’t let us have any. Said you bloody yanks go on back and go to bed. I had a cot set up out under a coconut tree and I couldn’t even get in my cot. Finally went to sleep on my knees with my head and shoulder in the cot. Woke up feeling terrible. By night fall we were loaded up on a ship ready to go make another beach landing. We didn’t know where at the time.

126 of my outfit was loaded on a small ship, had artillery guns and jeeps on the deck, and that’s where we had to sleep. The front of the ship sat higher than the back and we would crawl under the jeeps to sleep. It rained a lot. Of a morning, cigarette butts and garbage had washed up against you from the front of the ship. We finally found out that we was to land on a island in the Netherland East Indies, named Morotai. We was making our way to the Phillipines. It seemed like the Japs had heard about the landing so we didn’t have much of a problem there. There wasn’t many left.

We rested up there for about 2 months. We trained and they kept us busy.

My platoon took several weeks for special hand to hand combat training, we was to be loaded on a submarine and taken to a island, that I never did know the name of. We was to be put in rubber life rafts and sneak in at night and take over a radio station. This fell thru right at the last minute. Intelligence reported that they had moved out.

Then we were all loaded on a ship again, from Morotai, headed for another beach landing on Leyte Island in the Philippines. We landed there in November 1944.

When we anchored in the Lyngaen Gulf off the Philippines we were loaded into landing barges to be let down the side of the ship. There was hardly standing room in the barges, loaded in there like sardines. Jap zero’s came over strafing. The navy left us hanging there just over the edge of the ship. They went to man their guns and all we could do was hang there. Bullets ricocheted all around, but nobody in our barge got hit. Zero’s went away, they let us on down in the water, we was circling to get lined up for the landing. Zero’s came back, we saw one fly right in the galley of the ship that we had just gotten off. I guess a lot of sailors and engineers were killed.

While we were in Layte, up on the hills, they couldn’t get ration trains up to us, so they was flying in rations, dropping them to us with cargo planes, which we called biscuit bombers. They got mixed up on our location and dropped them to the Japs. We could see them run out and try to catch the rations while they were coming down. Rations boxes weighed about 45 Ibs. Seen a box hit one, one day, and it drove him plumb in the ground. He never did get up. This went on and we was without rations for 5 days. We had water, but nothing to eat. Tried eating leaves and roots and never found anything that tasted like it was good to eat. After the second day I wasn’t even hungry anymore. We finally was pulled back. The outfit that replaced us was getting ready to have Christmas dinner. They didn’t get to eat their dinner, we did, and they was pretty unhappy.

From Leyte, we went to the island of Luzon in the Lingayen Gulf. When we got to Luzon we got some rest in a rest area there and I had the sewing machine out doing some work with it. The Filipino women saw me, they lined up to use the sewing machine. They didn’t have patterns. Just knew how to cut them out and they fit. One was cutting with the scissors one day and I asked her what she was making and she said trousers. I asked who they were for and she said, ”for me”. They were panties but I had embarrassed her and she didn’t want to tell me that.

They would make dresses out of parachute material. Some would dye them yellow with the atabrine pill that we took for malaria.

There was a little Filipino boy approximately 7 years old, clothes were all ragged and he didn’t seem to have any people that he belonged to. When I would go to chow I would get the mess sergeant to give me extra and I would take it back to the tent and share it with this little boy. He was really hungry. I decided to make him some new clothes. Took some old khaki trousers, ripped them up and made him shorts, which all Philipinos wore. Once in a while I would say I sure would like to have a coconut, and this little guy would disappear, come back a little later carrying 3 or 4 coconuts. He would climb the tree and get them for me.

He really got attached, just like I was his daddy or something. When I had to go back up to the front the little guy cried and wanted to go with me. I told him it was too dangerous and I couldn’t take him. He said he didn’t have any relatives. I hunted around and found a Filipino family that said they would look after him. Never did come back to this area and never did see the little boy again. Hope he made it alright, kinda missed the little guy.

While we was in this rest area in the Phillipines a Filipino man came rushing into the area all excited. He needed a doctor, his wife was having a baby. All we had was a aid man, and he said he wouldn’t deliver a baby, he didn’t know anything about it. I told him it wouldn’t be no problem, that I had delivered a lot of calves and I told him that I didn’t have too many problems with that. He said if you will go with me I’ll go and try to deliver this baby. So I agreed to go with him. We delivered the baby in a grass hut, and the mama and baby seemed to be just fine. The daddy was the most upset of anybody. Guess they got along alright because they never came back to see the aid man again.

While we were on Luzon we fought there to take a resort town by the name of Baguio. As we was climbing the hills on our way to Baguio, someone had captured General Yamashita, and was bringing him off the hill. We fought right up to Baguio, not too much resistance, we were to take the town the next morning, they relieved us and sent in another unit.

Said they had a different job for us. We was sent to another part of island, to take the hills on what was called the Villa Verde Trail. They told us when we went in to take the trail and the hills around it, we would take it or there wouldn’t be a man come back.

At about the time of the first conflict on the Villa Verde Trail, I had enough points to come home. and they sent in a replacement for me. The man was scared to death when he got there so the Company Commander sent me and my replacement back to battalion, which was about 2 miles through enemy territory, to get a ration train.

On the way back to battalion we was shot at by machine guns and snipers, and by the time we got there the fellow was so scared that I thought he was going to die of a heart attack, and we was to take the ration train back to our company. The ration train consisted of about 12 Filipinos (civilians) carrying boxes of food. When we got to battalion headquarters, my replacement was scared, sick, throwing up, and I told the commander that he was sick and I didn’t want to take him back. He was to be on one end of the ration train and me on the other. The battalion commander told me that he wasn’t sick, he was scared. I told the commander that I could take it back by myself better than having him with me. Battalion commander finally agree. I found one Philipino that could speak pretty good english, put him at the rear of the column, and told him to keep men coming and how we were to get thru the open places which was run like hell.

We went in on a new trail that I had picked out, somehow the middle of the column went down the old trail and got pinned down by machine fire. I finally coaxed 2 of them to get up and make a run towards us for cover. One fellow I had to threaten to shoot him to make him run for our cover. There was a hail of machine gun fire but he made it OK. Felt bad about having to tell the man to do this.

Made it all the way back to the company and didn’t get anybody wounded or lose anyone. We had boxes of fresh bread and it was all dirty from being spilled and gathered up. Everybody really enjoyed that bread.

The carriers stayed there all night and were to go back next day by themselves. I told them that the shelling would begin about dark and they better start digging them a hole to crawl in. They acted like they didn’t understand and watched me dig my hole. Then the shelling started there was one older man who wore a straw hat. He got hit in the hat and went to hollering around there and they all started digging. The man was OK. The bullet was just hot. Anyway I had a nice deep hole and the shelling finally stopped a while after dark and I went to sleep. In the morning when I woke up I was about a foot above ground. The Filipinos had burrowed under me in the night.

Several days later we decided to pull out of this areas and the Company Commander told me, “Cowboy, you know the way out better than anybody, so you take the lead”. We had about a hundred yards of clearing to cross. You ran as hard as you could run and you could only get about half way and you would hear artillery shell coming in and you had just an instant to hit the ground. The first time I hit the ground, my knife flew out of my boot, artillery shells went off and I jumped up and made a circle, picked up my knife and started running again for cover, heard another shell coming so I dove for a ditch. It was shadowed by trees and I saw several people that I thought were Japs. I rolled over and came up swinging my rifle as a club and they hollered, “We’re friends, we’re friends”. Happened to be an outfit coming up to relieve us.

I believe this was the scaredest I ever was, during the whole war, The rest of the company got thru safely too. We rested up a few days and then got assigned a new hill to take.

While on patrols we would run into Jap pillboxes. They had logs across the top of them and port holes to stick their machine guns and rifles out. We would throw grenades but couldn’t get them thru the port holes, so we decided that if we plugged up the port holes with tree limbs and somebody with a Thompson sub machine gun would drill a hole in the top, we would throw the grenades in and stick another limb on top, to keep them from throwing them back out, we would get them. The Japs trick was the bottom of these pillboxes was sloped from the outside to the center and right in the center they would dig a hole straight down about 6″ in diameter and 3′ deep. Grenades would role to the center and down in the hole before they went off. We would finally get enough grenades in there to the get the hole shut. We bypassed a lot of them before we found out that we weren’t getting them cleaned out good.

We kept gaining a little ground each day, not enough to suit the higher ups. They relieved our Battalion Commander and our Company Commander as we wasn’t gaining enough ground. We had to pretty near crawl all the way, because the hills were so steep and the Japs were dug in on every hill top. We was trying to take one hill and a Sgt. was crawling up the embankment throwing grenades over the top, and he got clear to the top, and we was all throwing grenades trying to run the Japs out and get rid of them. The Japs shot the Sgt. and was trying to pull him in a hole with them. I got him by the leg and tried to pull him back. They was pulling us both up the hill and somebody got a grenade just right and I got back safe.

Across from us on another ridge the Japs were running around, it looked like ants. Artillery couldn’t get them out. They called in Ack Ack guns. These guns had three barrels on each gun. They lined them up on the ridge for half a mile, wheel to wheel. They fired these guns all day long. The rounds could be set to go off at a given range and they would explode above the ground and the shrapnel would go down the Jap emplacements. They dropped napalm bombs from airplanes and we could see the enemy running around on fire. They finally got them thinned out enough that we could get thru to another hill.

Part of the time we would hold high ground and the Japs would hold low ground. There wasn’t enough of us left to hold the high ground and go to get water. We would hang our ponchos by the four corners and maybe we would catch showers or dew at night in our helmets. One place another boy and I thought we needed water awfully bad. We was going to try and sneak thru the Japs and get water. As we was going down the hill, a Jap artillery general and a non com were coming up the hill and they was looking down at their feet climbing the hill. We got their canteens, saber, brief case and his stars (insignias) and a nice big pair of binoculars. I wanted to keep those binoculars, you could look directly into the sun with them. Battalion wanted to look at them and promise to give them back to me, but I never did get them back. The briefcase had their gun emplacements of artillery all mapped out. Our artillery had these to go by for their fire. We got back to what was left of our company with two canteens of water anyway. I still have part of the stars, and a Jap flag the general was carrying.

Beings I was a sniper, when we would take a hill and have it secured I would crawl off to a spot where I could get a good field of fire and where I could hide good. This one day I found a good spot and about every 45 minutes I would see a Jap come out of the brush and head for a trail. He would run around a corner of the trail and a shell had blowed a big hole in the trail, on the side of the hill. He would stop to see a way across there and I had gotten 3, at a range of 600 yards. The first Sgt. heard this and he thought maybe I was in trouble and he came out and stayed with me that afternoon, watching thru binoculars. All together that afternoon I got 8. No more came out. That was the most I got in one spot. Most places I had to shoot one time and then get out.

One night we had to make a approach march in the dark and we came under fire and everyone scrambled for a place to get. I fell in a foxhole that the Japs had dug. It happened that I was ahead of my own company. I was afraid to tell my position because I was between the Japs and my own men. They fought all night long, I figured I was fairly safe so I settled down and got some sleep, as we didn’t get too much sleep anytime. About two hours before daylight I heard somebody yell, “Cowboy has been killed”. I didn’t feel very dead. There was a boy named Lower instead of Bower. I waited until daylight before I gave my position and they knew where I was by then. I threw out my pack, then I threw out my rifle. Jap machine guns opened up each time I threw out something, finally after I waited a little bit, I dove out of there myself, machine guns opened up again. Got a few holes in my clothes but not a scratch. Holes in my canteen, helmet, pant legs, and pack.

On one hill that we was on the Japs would start shelling about sundown, and you could hear the shells just a instant before they hit. We heard a shell coming in, we all dove for the ground as we didn’t have foxholes dug yet. There was 14 men killed and wounded all around me. A couple of nights later I was on guard duty on the outside of the perimeter, it was pouring down rain, I was sitting in a foxhole, and I could hear a movement down below me. I knew it was a Jap trying to crawl into our perimeter. I stood a extra hour of guard duty waiting for him to come in. As he crawled over the top of the foxhole, I shot him and he slid right in the hole with me. I threw him back out over the bank and went and woke the other guard up.

We heard about another company, I don’t remember what one it was, that tried to take a hill, three mornings straight and was driven back each time. The fourth morning they attacked the hill again with what was left of the company. All of them got to the top without firing a shot. The Japs had pulled off the hill, and left it covered with explosives, and blew up the whole company. We heard that there wasn’t a man left alive. I really don’t know about this but it was the information we got.

McArthur finally decided that he wanted prisoners but no one brought in a single prisoner, as he had said before, no prisoners.

Now he was wanting information, so he gave a reward to anyone who brought in one — a case of beer. That didn’t work so he said a case of beer and a three day pass. He got 2 or 3 prisoners after that. One man would take the beer and another man would take the pass. I didn’t get in on any of this.

We had finished the campaign of Villa Verde Trail and marched down out of the hills after 114 days and only 21 men left out of 182. The red cross met us as we came out of the hills, they gave us a half canteen cup of coke and one donut. We had been wearing the same clothes all this time, pretty shabby looking bunch. We had all shaved and looked the best we could. I weighed 107 lbs., when we finally came out.

General McArthur told us when we died we would all go to heaven because we had done our hitch in hell. I didn’t really like McArthur, but he knew how to fight a war.

We set up camp at the bottom of the hills for rest and replacements. We was about 70 miles from a town. We decided we needed some alcohol. We got our money together and I volunteered to go get the whiskey. I hitch-hiked 70 miles. It would take me all day to get to this town, drank a little, stayed all night, started back with a case of whiskey, catch rides with whoever came by. Even officers would pick me up and haul me, always got back to camp by night. We would drink up the whiskey that night and the next morning I would start back to town for another case. One time as I was going back to camp with a case, I got a ride as far as a marine camp and I was standing on the road waiting for a ride. They had a field kitchen down below me and they was all in line to get their food. Heard a big commotion, lot of hollering and looked down and they as all running around everywhere. There was one shot fired and marines all got back in the chow line. One of the marines came back across the road where I was, and I asked him what all the excitement was and he said a Jap had got ahold of some soldiers clothes and got in the chow line. They shot him and all went back and lined up again.

I went back and forth from camp to this town carrying whiskey for 7 days. The last night that I was in town it kinda dawned on me that I was awfully hungry, and I ran into some engineers that was having a big chicken dinner. They invited me to come eat with them and it sounded fine to me. A fight broke out between Americans and a Filipino. The Filipino was knocked back into me and I took a knife away from him, pushed him back out in the middle of the room. They went on fighting and I got back behind a table and must of ate 3 chickens, till I couldn’t hold any more. I didn’t drink any more after that. Took the case of whiskey back and told them it was all theirs.

Then in a few days they moved us back to Baguio, where we finally got our replacements. They told us we was to go before long, and make a landing on the mainland of Japan. I had been pretty lucky up to this time, but didn’t think I could be lucky thru another landing.

Then they dropped the atomic bomb, and they reported that the war was over. The Japs had surrendered. I remember I was laying in a foxhole reading a funny book, when this word came in. I didn’t even get out of the foxhole, I couldn’t believe it. There was still Jap snipers out in the area. About 2 days after the war was reported over, a bullet nicked me on the left shoulder. About the worst I got in the whole conflict.

They loaded us on trucks and hauled us down to a railroad and we rode a train from near Baguio to Manilla. The engine on this train had been disassembled by the Philipinos. When the Americans came back in, they reassembled this engine to pull the train load of soldiers back to Manilla.

At Manilla we loaded on ships and headed for the states. He had been gone nearly 3 1/2 years. We had credit for 664 days of front line combat time. The 32nd Division had credit for annihilating 28,000 Japs, known dead.

On the way home we got in a typhoon, wind blew 100 miles per hour and the ship had to travel off course for 2 days.

The world series was on and I was wanting to play poker as I was having a lucky streak, and seemed like everyone else was wanting to stop and listen to the PA system to see how the ball game was going.

He all had to do KP and wash metal trays. The sailors on the ship said we looked in a lot worse shape than the people that were in the hospital being sent home.

When we got across we couldn’t land at San Francisco as the harbor was full of ships. They took us on to Seattle, Washington. They ran us thru a big mess hall, we could pick out anything we wanted to eat or drink. Everybody got a big tray full, and couldn’t hardly eat any of it because our stomachs were shrunk up from eating C rations.

The next day they loaded us on a train. Took us to Camp Stoneman, California, where we had left 3 1/2 years earlier.

There was one man that went overseas with me by the name of Coeger. He and I were the only 2 that returned. We was processed out of the army and given a bus ride to the nearest town. I bought a Stetson hat when I got off the bus, still in uniform. Cowboy was home.

We were now on our own. My brother was in the marines and I had to wait a week for him to be discharged in Oregon, so we could come back together. On the way to Oklahoma on the train, I got off at Bakersfield and called the ranch, Snedden Land and Cattle Co., to see if I had a job. They said yes, come on when you are ready. I had left my saddle and equipment there for the 3 1/2 years that I was gone. I told them I would be there the first of the year. I was having malaria attacks, about once a month.

Got back to the ranch and went to work. They had saved one old horse that they couldn’t break. They finally decided to keep him till I got home. He was really a spoiled buckskin horse. Every time you rode him he had new tricks to pull. One day I rode up a gully to the top of a ridge where I could look for cattle. Something spooked him and he turned straight back. He was bucking down this gully. He was hitting one side then the other, back and forth. Had sorta a rhythm going there. Then he made two jumps on one side. I hadn’t planned on that and he bucked me off. I landed on my back. with my head down hill, in the bottom of this gully. Was real narrow and I didn’t have room to roll over. I could see the horse coming down on top of me. His front feet slid off each side of my hat. His back feet landed on my chest. Knocked the wind out of me for awhile. The horse ran down to two other riders and they caught him. I finally got my wind back and got up and walked down the hill. Got on him and I was pretty mad. I rode him up and down a dry sandy creek bed until he was staggering and wore out. Finally got back to the ranch. I was hurting pretty bad. Burt Snedden told me I better go to the doctor. I told him I didn’t think I would go, I thought I was just bruised up.

The next morning I felt a little different about it. I thought I ought to go to the doctor. I could feel my ribs kinda grinding on my right side. I went to a little old country Doctor at Taft, CA, about 35 miles from there. He took a X-Ray. The X-ray was so dark you couldn’t see ribs in there. He said, “I don’t think you have any broken bones. I will tape you up from your waist to your arms”, which he did.

I went on about my work. The Doctor told me if it got to blistering under there to take it off. About 4 days it was starting to blister so I took it off. Made it thru the round up. Branding, throwing calves and roping. Then we moved the cows and calves to the high country for the summer. I was still hurting.

Mack Cuddie and I was out checking cattle one day and we stopped at a little stream to water our horses. We was about 20′ apart letting our horses drink. We heard rocks rattling, looked up and on the side of mountain saw a big buck deer chasing a doe. they was both about played out, their tongues was hanging out. Really don’t know why but I got my rope down. Built a small loop. The doe came right between us and I roped the doe and the buck, turned off and went down the hill. Mack had to catch the doe by the hind feet so I could get my rope off. We had a big laugh out of this.

I had signed up to ride bulls in the Taft Rodeo, the 4th of July. They moved me over to the ranch north of Bakersfield and the morning of the 3rd of July, I couldn’t breath laying down. Thought I better go see a doctor. I found a doctor in Bakersfield that people had told me was a good one. He X-rayed me and got a good picture. All the ribs on the right side were broken and still hadn’t knitted back. My right lung was filled with fluid. He put me in a 7 Day Advent Hospital, as that was the only one that had any room.

I was in a ward with 4 other patients. My Doctor called in a lung specialist and Dave Snedden, my boss, came in next morning to check on me. He asked the Doctor how I was, and I didn’t know until later that the doctor told him he didn’t think I would live thru the night.

They would take me to the operating room every 2 days, draw as much fluid off my lungs as they could, and in 2 days it would be filled up same as it was before. They did this 10 times every 2 days. Didn’t seem to be doing any good. Penicillin was a new drug at the time for infection. They gave me a double shot of penicillin every 4 hours. They finally called in a lady lung specialist. So that made me have a doctor and 2 lung specialists. The lady lung specialist said the next time they took fluid off my lungs, which would be the 11th time, to put that many CC’ s of penicillin back into the lung. Really built a fire in my body. They had to keep me sitting up and awake for all this procedure. I started getting a little better and then got a attack of malaria. My bedding was wet from chills and fever and an aid got me up out of bed to change my sheets and bedding. I got real cold while this was being done and the next day I had pneumonia, which didn’t help any. My weight went down from 145 to 107 again.

Finally after 7 weeks, laying in the hospital, they discharged me but told me I couldn’t work for 4 months. I had to go back for a check up once a week. I stayed with my good friend Slim Holder and his wife for about a month. Kinda got my strength back. Finally went back to work before the four months was up, but didn’t tell my doctor. Lungs still hurt real bad. Doctors told me I couldn’t never ride horses again, but I fooled them. I did decide if I couldn’t do hard work I better find something else to do.

I bought a quarter section of land in Oklahoma. Moved back and built a house on it. There wasn’t much work available. Did a little oil field work on drilling rigs. Broke a few saddle horses. Raised a few cattle, but my real cowboy days were over.

Appendix:

Brownie worked for Snedden on the ranch in California. They kept in touch and in a 1986 visit in California, took this picture.

Picture taken of Brownie and Lawrence on a ranch in California in 1941 or 1942 just before Brownie was drafted into WWII. Word has it that Lawrence Crockett was a 4th cousin of Davy Crockett.

Probably taken in 1944 or 1945, no other information is known concerning the friend nor location of photo.