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Show Record were there and some came directly after we got there. We built a fort there, log cabins in a square, and settled down and went to 594 farming. My father built a store and traded with the Indians. I have always worked. We did not go into the cattle business soon after our arrival there. We were 15 miles above Bluff. We lived there possibly 3 or 4 years. My father put in a water wheel. The river when we moved into that country was confined in a permanent 595 channel, more so than it is now. There were willows and bull berry bushes on each side of it, sloping grass banks. We could ride ponies across it most anywhere we came to it without fords. As the country settled up, livestock tramped the grass down, made trails into the river, and the timbers were cut off the head waters, and the floods started to come, and the big flood that hit Monticello and Montezuma first came down in August, after we had been there two or three years, and it tore our water wheels out, took the farming land away from those settlements and they all left there except three families. We were one that remained. I was on the range from the time we went there as a boy. You come into the range country in the high sections where they summer their stock 40 or 50 miles from the river on the North, from the top of the Blue Mountains, better than 9000 feet, down to Bluff, 4200 feet. That is where they drift their stock down in the winter and winter them on the sand flats. I was put on the sand 596 flats when I landed there. We lived at Montezuma a little better than 3 years. After that my father built a store about 9 miles below Bluff at the mouth of Chinle Creek, and after the store was about 14 or 15. I continued to ride the range in that country. My father traded a great many horses to the Indians for cattle and 597 sheep and we boys run them. I never saw an Indians have a boat. My father established a ferry to cross the river at Chinle Creek. He put in a cable boat across the river at the mouth of Comb Wash, and put in a big flat bottom boat there. The Indians rode that with their - 92- |