Lee S. Manwill, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Luke Kelly, July 11, 2001: Saving the legacy tape no. 267

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Lee Manwill Jul ll 2001 west of Main treet except swamps and railroad tracks. And we w nt d wn ther , and hopped on a freight train, and started for Denver. I remember as we crune up the summit on the way to Price it was g tting late evening. And we were getting kind of hungry. And the train would stop for a little ways, and then move forward maybe a hundred yards, and then stop. We got off the train and went down to a house there, and asked the lady if she could fix us a sandwich. And she was real sweet and kind, and she fixed us some sandwiches to take with us. So we got back on the train and ate the sandwiches. And they took that boxcar off. It was an empty boxcar. They took that off I think in Price. And during the night we got on top. There was no empty boxcar, and we got on top of a full boxcar and spent the night there traveling through the night. We were starting to get sleepy, and I knew we'd all be killed if we rolled off of that boxcar. There was a narrow catwalk that ran the length of the car. It was like made of2 x 4's, maybe just a little bit heavier, with a space of a couple of inches in between each one. And the catwalk was maybe two feet wide, two to two and a half feet; something like that. So I got the idea and said, "Why don't we take off our belts and wrap them around our ankles and around one of these 2 x 4's, and then if we go to sleep we'll be safe. So we did that, and we spent the night on top of that boxcar. We slept part of the time as we traveled through the night. Of course, needless to say, our hair was full of cinders, and our faces were relatively black by morning. But we finally made it to Denver. Back in those days there 9