| OCR Text |
Show Comments Nancy Jacobus Taniguchi Helen Papanikolas has told us a great deal about the women of Carbon County who came here to pursue the dream of America. As she has explained, some were pioneer women, others were immigrant women, but they all became part of our community and our history. However, it was only through their own hard work that the promise of America came true. The American dream was real enough to those who came here, so real that they came to a semiarid country where there was plenty of work in the mines, plenty of work in the boardinghouses, plenty of work raising children, plenty of work keeping house. Nothing but hard work faced them, yet they held onto that dream. To their friends and families in the old country, as Helen explained, they sent money, photographs of themselves, and requests for brides. They also wrote what were called "America letters." These letters are now found in archives throughout Europe and are still known by that name. They describe America and they describe its promise. America letters spanned the ocean by the thousands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were passed from hand to hand. Villagers who could read would read them to others who couldn't, to give them news not only of relatives overseas but of what life was like in America. They played a major role in picturing American life, the life of the West, in particular of the frontier, to the rest of the world. Here are a few examples from these America letters, taken from Ray Allen Billington's America's Frontier Culture. A Norwegian folk ballad based on some of these immigrant experiences stated, "I know that venture would cost me dear in the hardships of exposure, to sun and storm in fierce battles with scorpions and serpents and wild beasts in 103 Nancy Jacobus Taniguchi deadly duels with drawn daggers." (You wonder what people were writing home about, don't you?) "But that is better than to fight one's own people and get nothing for it." As Helen explained, people were forced to leave by the fighting that was going on in their own countries or because of the domination of other people. The promises of America remained: land of one's own, plenty of food and meat every day, every meal if desired. This was something very unusual in many of the countries from which these people came. Here is an Irish slogan: "The only place in Ireland where a [person] can make a fortune is America." Even more important was equality. If any phrase appeared more often in America letters than "We eat meat three times a day," it was "Here we tip our hats to no one." I wish Helen had included a lovely slide from her collection showing two Greek women with hats on. She has explained that in Greece these women would not have been allowed to wear hats because of their class. Only upper class women were permitted to wear hats. But in America anyone could wear one, and in America they tipped them to no one. Class distinctions here, of course, were based on wealth, not lineage, so anyone could have a chance for the top. That was part of America's promise. There were no peasants and no landlords, not in the European sense. People living in company towns may have suffered, greatly sometimes, from the abuses, but they had other options. They had the opportunity to open businesses, or to start farms, or to move on. Many Carbonites have brothers or sisters or cousins who left, mostly it seems for California, but a majority of the immigrants who came to Carbon County stayed right here. With equality went liberty. This is what someone wrote home: "No emperor and no king has the right to demand us to do anything.""Here I am free," was a repeated phrase in America letters. The writers felt that way in spite of all the hard work that faced them. They may have been tied to the home, in the case of the women, to the children, to the boardinghouse, to the store. Their husbands may 104 Comments have been tied to their jobs, and yet they were free, they had other opportunities, These were the promises, the dreams, but the hard work was real enough, a grinding part of the daily life that was endurable only because the dream sustained them. Women worked especially hard, as Helen has told us. In the last few years I have done some research on Spring Glen and interviewed many of the residents. Here are some of their impressions of life in Carbon County. Filomina Fazzio talked about her mother and father who were separated for years: "They had three children in Italy and the mother was left home with the children while the father was here in America working. He'd come home long enough to leave her pregnant and then he'd come back to America. Finally, the grandfather was getting tired of raising the kids, so when the father came home again, he said, 'Either you stay here or you take her with you.' So they came to America." Of course, when they came and as the children grew up there were certain difficulties to be faced. As Helen mentioned, many immigrants brought their customs, among these the outdoor ovens that the Greeks and Italians used. Quite often they were a part of almost every farm. Filomina's mother used one, but this particular oven has been torn down. This story shows one of the difficulties faced by a woman with so much work and so many children. Filomina's sister had been watching their mother work outside, watching her singe a duck over a fire built by the oven. The young girl pretended to do what she had seen her mother do and burned herself very badly. That caused her mother to tear down the oven because, she said, "If I didn't have the oven, the fire wouldn't have been there, if the fire hadn't been there, then my daughter wouldn't have been burned." There was other work, too, but there was also fun. For Christmas the Fazzios invited their family and close friends up to Spring Glen where the Blue Hill Dairy used to be. All the bachelors would come from Sunnyside and stay three or 105 Nancy Jacobus Taniguchi four days. The mother cooked for everybody. They would enjoy old-country talk and celebrations, and then they'd go home. Margaret Ariotti talked about another one of the women's domestic duties-the housekeeping chores: "The men had made a table out of big two-by-fours with a top and put oil cloth over it. The chairs had probably been bought, but they were so dilapidated that they had them wired together and none of them were the same color. We used to scrub them with lime water. We used to scrub them until they looked so pretty and white; the wood would turn white. On Saturday we used to scrub the kitchen floor and that would get all white and it would be so pretty and clean, but then you'd start cooking and some grease or something would drop on the floor and you couldn't wipe it up; so gradually the floor would get dirty again. So every Saturday that used to be a big thing, to take the chairs outside and scrub them with the wire brush and lime water and scrub the floor. Then you'd have to let it dry and maybe it would last as long as Saturday night." Mrs. Ariotti also talked about farm life and coming down to Helper to go shopping. A trip to Helper was always a treat because they had to work so hard on the farm. Everybody helped each other. When it was potato time all the kids would go on one farm and help and then they'd go to the next farm and help them. That's how the townsfolk communicated. They thought nothing of going to the other end of town to help. They also thought nothing of walking to Helper to get all their groceries: "The only thing hard to carry was a broom. It stuck up and there was no good way to hold it." Of course, one of the problems with coming to Helper during the 1922 strike was that guards were stationed at the town. Filomina talked about this. The whole family had the flu. They weren't well liked by the guards because they knew that her uncle was Frank Bonacci. Her mother had nine children so Filomina had to go for commodities to help her. They had only $6.00 a week to live on. She walked into 106 Comments Helper, afraid because the guards were all men and they checked everyone coming and going to make sure that they didn't bring arms and ammunition. She, a twelve-year-old girl, walked down from Spring Glen, got the supplies for the family, and walked back through the guards. All family members had to exhibit courage at this difficult time. However, there were also good times. In spite of the difficulties people found a positive way of looking at their life in America. They still believed in the promise. Margaret Ariotti tells this story about Jess Haycock, a peddler in Spring Glen: "He used to sell Watkins products. He came up to Castle Gate when Keno was a kid and sold products which included linaments, pie fillings, spices, everything you can think of." Margaret remembers when she first moved into her house in Spring Glen that "he came and knocked on the door. When I answered it he asked if there were anything that I would like to buy. I said, 'No, and I don't need a thing,' and he said, 'My, you are a lucky woman.' I've remembered that many times since and often thought about what he said." The final story comes from Gladys Saccomanno. She and her husband, Ernest, who recently passed away, built many of the buildings out on their farm in Spring Glen. She told me about the times they went up to Indian Canyon to bring out lumber to make the rafters for these buildings. They used lodgepole pine because it was so long and straight. Ernest drove the wagon and Gladys helped him snake out the lumber around the bends in the canyon. They both told me about it: "We put it all up and put up the buildings and did what we could, put in the windows, did all the wiring, the plumbing and stuccoed it. Yep, that's right, we stuccoed it. What a job." Gladys said, "Sure, even then I didn't know it, but I belonged to women's liberation." So, those were the experiences, some of them, here in Carbon County. Helen tells them so much better and tells so many more. But these stories, taken together, are only representative of the hundreds and thousands of lives that were spent in Carbon County. I am sorry I can't tell a story 107 Nancy Jacobus Taniguchi for everyone. Helen has told us much, much more about the promise of America and given us a wonderfully clear explanation of the people, especially the women, who worked to make that dream come true. Did they succeed in achieving that dream? Look around. Here in Carbon County is the flowering of that promise. The immigrants and the pioneers, the first generation, planted the seed, their children. The second generation made it grow. Their grandchildren have brought it to flower. We are all part of that dream. When the first immigrants wrote their first "America letters" home they described misery, sickness, and hard times. Yet, the present life we enjoy is what they were working for. Through their work and ours the dream has come true. Helen has done us a great service by retelling that story so beautifully. She has told our own story, what made all of us and what made Carbon County what we and it are today. We can all be proud of that achievement. Ms. Taniguchi, a resident of Price, is a doctoral student in history at the University of Utah. 108 |
