By Mona Lange McCroskey
John Nathan Hays was born in Missouri and taken to California by his mother after his father, Upton, was killed in the Civil War. Upton had freighted on the Santa Fe Trail in the middle 1800s.
In 1912, John Nathan came to Arizona to look for a place to raise steers for shipment to his California ranch for fattening. He and his partners in the Hays Cattle Company came on the train to Kirkland, where he ran into his old friend, Charlie Rigden. Rigden steered John to the Akard Brothers Ranch in Peeples Valley, which he purchased along with several other small ranches in the area. Having acquired the land, the partners returned to California.
In 1915, Hays' son Roy returned to Arizona with his new bride, Hazel. They established a home in Peeples Valley where the ranch headquarters are to this day. For a few years, Roy and Hazel and their growing family (Margaret was born in 1917, Elladean in 1919) drove back and forth to spend the summers in California while he cared for the steers that were shipped from Arizona.
Hazel became a busy ranch wife, caring for her family, cooking, and at times manning the chuck wagon. Water was pumped outside and brought into the house, and they didn't have electricity until the late 1930s. She did not garden; she had grown up in California where people gardened and canned until she was sick of it! In the early days, they shopped at L.J. Haselfeld's store in Kirkland, which was an active ranching center because Mr. Haselfeld had access to the railroad and could get fresh goods on the train every day. Once a month the family went to Prescott to buy supplies in large quantities--sacks of flour and beans--at Gardner's or Sam Dreyer's. They butchered their own beef in the winter; in the summer they used lots and lots of canned foods and dried fruits because there wasn't any way to keep the meat fresh. They hung sacks of jerky from the ceiling in the cellar to keep them from the rats. They had their own chickens and turkeys, which they had to chase down and cut off their heads, and the chickens flopped around while the girls were trying to keep it all very quiet. Then scald, pluck, and clean. It was quite a job preparing a chicken dinner!
Hazel was always very interested in what was going on at the ranch and she was a good horsewoman, too. She won a race on the Fourth of July in Prescott and bought gold rings with her winnings for her husband, herself and for Cort Carter, who owned the horse. (Elladean followed in her mother's footsteps when she team-roped with her father there in 1941.) When Hazel's girls were small, she hired an Irish friend to care for them and she rode with the men. She went along when they brought wild cattle yoked to lead oxen out of the Sierra Prieta Mountains south of Prescott.
The Hays' daughters entertained themselves by acting out plays, dressing up in Spanish costumes or being knights and riding their horses up and down the road. They built miniature corrals and ranches, using black walnuts for cattle and they kept books the way they had seen the adults do. They were usually outside and they didn't play with dolls much. Of course, they had their own horses and they rode. They worked on round-ups. They remember that sometimes there was hardly a day that they weren't on horseback! The girls and the "less valuable cowboys" held the cattle in loose bunches because there were too many to corral. Until the McCarran Act was passed in 1937, the ranges were unfenced. Elladean remembers: "Holding those cows together, and then cutting off calves and having all those bawling calves and cows wanting to get back to 'em and all that, it was big-time. And we always had a cook. On the desert, we still had the ranch cook, the guy that moved, and the wagon and the chuck box and all that. And so, those were our entertainment times. Those were when other people came and helped, or didn't help. Those were good times that we all looked forward to.
Dad's word was 'never make the cook mad.' The whole outfit would have to stop if we lost the cook. Like the French army, the ranch moved on its stomach. So, we were told not to make bad remarks about the food and give him respect and take our turn, and clean our plate. We sort of cleaned our tin plates out with a piece of burlap, giving real meaning to the term 'greasy sack outfit.'"
When the girls grew older and their brother, John (born 1928) was a baby, Margaret stayed home more to help her mother. Hays' cattle ranged as far as Gila Bend and Arlington on the open desert, and to Wikieup and Aguila on the west. One time Roy Hays retrieved an animal that had ventured to Kingman. There was a line camp where a cowboy lived at Congress until the mohair goat raisers moved in. Roy would send a "rep" on round-ups with other ranches, to sort out their cattle and drive them home. There were no trailers or trucks, and it was a long, long way.
Mrs. Hays took great pleasure in anything with music in it; and she liked to drive. She drove her daughters to Prescott to see stage plays and musicals at the Elks Theater. Margaret remembers seeing "Abbie's Irish Rose," when it came from New York. In their high school days, they went to Phoenix to see Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, and the first Fred Astaire movies. Hazel played the piano, and her girls took music lessons from Miss Penelope Cutler, who lived in Skull Valley, a circuit-riding teacher from Boston, who drove to Walnut Grove, Hillside, and Peeples Valley to give lessons.
(Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of this article.)
(Mona McCroskey is an oral historian and volunteer at Sharlot Hall Museum.)
Members of the Hays family will tell family and ranching history stories at The Gathering, at 1:00 p.m. Saturday, August 19, in Esther Hall, United Methodist Church, across Summit Street from Sharlot Hall Museum.
The 19th Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering takes place August 17, 18, and 19 at the Sharlot Hall Museum, Yavapai College Performance Hall, Phippen Museum, and the 1905 Elks Opera House. Visit www.sharlothallmuseum.org or call 445-3122 for details.
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(pb164f28i11)
Reuse only by permission.
Left to Right: Roy Hays, Margaret Hays, Carl Trohom, and Lon Ferguson at Hays Ranch, 1935.