| I was born in Limestone County, Texas, October 3, 1862. Yes I
reckon you'd call me a Civil War baby. Pa, Samuel A. Bartee, was a private in
the Civil War and was away when I was born. Ma said, he never even seen me
until I was about two year old.
I was born in a dugout--they call 'em storm cellars now-a-days. Ma said they seen the cyclone coming and all darted into the dugout just in time for me to be born right in the middle of that cyclone. She said they were all so excited at the time that it was hard to tell just which baby was her own, or if I was twins; they cyclone dropped a new-born baby girl right on the cellar door, and when they heard it cry, they opened the door and took it in. Ma, claimed both of us and raised us as twins; she named the girl Gracie Bartee, and one of us never did know just who that baby was, or where she came from; she was kidnapped by the Indians in 1865 and has never been heard from since. That cyclone blowed our house away and destroyed everything Ma had in the world, except what few things she happened to have in the dugout that night, which wasn't very much to take care of a family of nine children on. We lived on there in the dugout until Grandpa Bartee and some of the neighbor men managed to get a one-room log cabin put up and then we continued to use the dugout for a kitchen. I have often wondered how children born under such circumstances in those days ever managed to live at all, but it seems that some of us did live through it all somehow. Of course, it was much harder for girls to live in those days than it was for boys, more dangerous, I mean. During the Civil War, and for several years afterward, the bushwhackers were as about as bad as the Indians to kidnap girls, kill people, and destroy property, and a lot of their deviltry was laid to Indians. Every family in our part of the country had a dugout, not only for storm purposes, but also to hide their girl children at all times. Yes, girls had to be hid out like criminals you might say. Some of the dugouts were in a thicket of dense underbrush, generally, some distance from the house, and had a secret tunnel, sometimes as much as a mile long, to afford an escape in case the dugout was found and attacked. There was a tunnel like that leading out of our dugout, only, the dugout was in plain sight, of course. Ma kept a chest of drawers over the entrance to the tunnel, so it would not be found so easy, in case of an attack; our tunnel came out in a dogwood thicket almost a mile from the house. The night the Comanches attacked dour house, on the 8th of June, 1865, Ma managed to get all of us children into the dugout and barred the door and then piled furniture, and everything we could find up on the steps so we would have time to get into the tunnel before they could break in. Pa, had died of wounds received in the he war a few months after he was sent home to die, about a year before then -- before the Indian attack, I mean -- and there was only Grandpa Bartee and Uncle Bob Bartee, who was also a wounded soldier, there to protect us; they were both shot down with arrows before they had time to get into the dugout. Of course, I was too young to recollect much about the details of that attack, but I have been told all about it was I grew up, and it seems that I do recall hearing Ma say that the Indians had already set fire to the house and out buildings when were started into the tunnel. My own sister, Annie Bartee, who was about fourteen, was carrying Gracie n her arms and Mother carried me; the boys all carried something, the two older ones, twins, Ted and Jed, were about twelve, they carried lanterns and led the way. Frank, eleven, John, nine, Willie, seven, Robert, five, and Gracie and me (James three, and mother, all went into that tunnel that night, but only six of us came out alive -- six boys, fatherless, motherless, and homeless, have-starved waifs, left to root-hog-or-die. When we got to the end of the tunnel, Jed went out first with his lantern; then Mother set me down and followed him; Ann went out with Gracie still in her arms; then there were screams and war whoops, and Ted put out his lantern and shoved all us smaller children behind him and began piling up rocks, or whatever he could find to stop up the tunnel. I don't recollect what all happened to us in that tunnel, I remember wanting water and afraid to cry for it. Ted said the smaller boys had carried buckets of food along when we started, and that after the Indians had gone he went back to the dugout and tried to get through the entrance, but couldn't -- the Indians must have caved the dugout in. The first that I do remember clearly was riding on a horse in the arms of Captain Dullas and his Negro soldiers riding with us; they had found us there several days after the attack, half starved; they trailed Ted back from a water hole to the tunnel, and they said they had an awful time making him realize that the Negroes were soldiers and friends. Grandpa Bartee, Uncle Bob, Mother and Jed were found murdered and scalped, but Annie and Gracie were never found or heard of again. Us six surviving boys were taken some place to a fort and kept until Uncle Frank Bartee came after us and took us to live with him in Llano County -- where we all stayed until we were about grown. We left Uncle Frank one at a time as we grew up and scattered to the four winds of the earth. I was the last to leave and I have never seen any of my brothers since they left But I do say that if they were all as productive as Pa and me, and my sons, there must be a lot of Bartee's scattered over the world by this time. My wife and I have had nine boys and one girl in our family and they are all married and have families of their own -- all that is living of them, I mean. Any my family has scattered out from Texas, New Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii. When I married Miss Ruth (I call here Louizie) Green, in San Antonio, Texas, December 25, 1882, we came straight out to Tombstone, Arizona, and I went to work in the mines there. My wife and I both joined the Christian Church a week before we were married and have never turned from the teachings of the Bible since. Tombstone was a wild 'n woolly western town at that time--a town never could have been named more properly. Killings in the streets and saloons and gambling joints, averaged about two men a day, besides the ones that were killed in the mines--by accident, or otherwise. I never witnessed any of the killings first mentioned, as I did not habituate such places myself, and did not hang around on the streets; if I had business to attend to at the stores, or the bank, or post office, I attended it and went home to my wife and babies, as any self-respecting man should do. I never carried a gun to church until after the Sunday morning that an outlaw called Lee Woods, came to the church after his young wife -- I reckon she was his wife--and shot up the church to keep here from going there again. After that, I and the rest of the men church goers carried our guns to church, just in case--but it never happened again. Elen Woods never did come to church again. I worked there twelve year. During that time six of our nine boys were born, and then a baby girl, born on Christmas day 1894. My wife and I were both in the hospital at the same time--I had been in there about three months. Oh! No! I wasn't having that baby girl--my wife did that. A slab of rock about the size of a house had fell on me and I was smashed up like an eggshell, and for months on end it seemed that I would never pull out of it but I am still here. From the time of the first baby, we kept a hired girl to help with the housework, but Louizie never seemed to find one that suited here exactly. One of the, a pretty little Mexican gal, almost stole us blind. Louizie kept complaining about the grocery bill going so high and never being able to keep anything on hand to eat; then one day she discovered why--the hired girl was taking things by the mere spoonful at the time. If Louizie hadn't been so mad at that girl, I could have had a big laugh out of it--but what man ever dared laugh when his wife was mad, especially at another woman. When she caught the girl stuffing something into the front of her dress, she grabbed her and jerked her dress right off her, right in front of me and the children. You could have knocked Louizie over with a feather when she seen little packages go scattering all over the floor. The girl just stood there and stared like a dumb burro; then Louizie began undoing the packages and found bits of sugar, flour, coffee, baking powder, beans, rice, and raisins--not more than a spoonful in each package. Of course, we got another hired girl, another, another, and another, old, young, tall and short, fat and thin, brown, black, and white, they came and went in a stream. I never knew from one meal to the next whether the food would be burned, raw, or well cooked. Until about two months before I happened to the accident that I mentioned, we hired a white girl; she was a nice girl and a good girl--so my wife said. She stayed with us until after I came out of the hospital. Then all of a sudden the cooked food began to disappear. We couldn't imagine what was happening to it; then one night I made the discovery as I was on my way home from town, just after dark. I passed an old shed at the back of our lot and seen the hired girl dart in there with a package in her hands. I sneaked up and took a peek; the hired girl had taken food to an outlaw called Billy Grounds, who had been wounded in gun-battle with another outlaw called Curlie Bill, and had escaped from the jail hospital. The girl, Jane Slaughter, had been in love with Billy for some time--but my wife sure didn't know anything about it. I went in and had a talk with both of them youngsters right there. I gave the girl permission to take food to him--as long as she didn't let my wife know about it. Billy Grounds was just a youngster, and not a bad sort at all--he just got into bad company that's all. I hadn't the heart to turn that boy over to the law. I thought about my own boys growing up in that tough place. Grounds was re-captured a little while after that, but I sure didn't turn him in. The girl disappeared after Bill was re-captured, we never knew what became of her, but we always thought she ran away with Curlie Bill, who was still t large when Grounds was re-captured. Well, by the time our baby girl was a few weeks old, that mine hole was plumb deep enough to suit me. I didn't want my boys growing up to be outlaws and tough mugs, and that seemed to be just what happening to them. James, Jr., eleven year old, had already got into a jam with some boys who had robbed a boxcar and hidden the loot in that same shed where I had found Billy Grounds; James, along with the rest of the boys was about to be sent to a reform school. I resigned my job, sold our home, and spent every dollar I could get hold of to keep that boy out of the reform school; then I took my family and went back to Texas to starve with the rest of the people there--a drought would have to come along about then. I rented a farm in Limestone County and farmed there five year. In 1899, I raised and sold 400 bale of cotton and sold it for from five to seven cents a pound. By the time I paid for the picking, paid the landlord one third, and paid the note at the bank that I had made the crop on, I had just twenty-four dollars left for my years work. I was so disgusted with my five year of lost labor that I just sold out lock, stock and barrel, and headed back to Arizona and the mines, where I could at least, feed my family and give my children the advantage of good schools. Of course, there were schools in Texas--more than there were in Arizona, at that time--but the system was not the same, and I couldn't make a living there to save em. We had three more boy by that time--another paid of twins in the Bartee family, named Jed and Ted. We came to Clifton, Arizona, and I went to contracting work in the he small mines around over this part of the country. I bought a house in Clifton and left my family there while I worked, and the children went to school. James, was seventeen, in 1900, and had developed into a find young man, he wanted to enter the ministry and we had saved up enough money in that first year here to send him away to school. He made a fine minister, that boy of mine, who barely missed the reform school at eleven. In 1909, I bought a ranch over near Silver City, New Mexico, the Bar T Ranch, and moved my family over there while I continued to do mine contract work. Then in 1916, came the World War. My sons, James, Samuel, Frank, John, Elmo, and Robert all went to the war; Ted, Jed and Willie, were not old enough to go, but the twins threatened to run away and go anyhow. Elmo and Robert are both sleeping in the grave of the unknown soldier some place in France; the other four came back to us without a scratch, and they must have been good soldiers as they each have a pocketful of medals. James, is now in Hawaii, preaching the gospel to the natives there. Jed, is in Canada on a cattle ranch. Willie, died of a busted appendix in 1928, at Helena, Montana where he had went to take part in a rodeo there. Sam, John and Ted, are working at East Camp mine near Duncan, and Frank lived over at Wickenburg, Arizona, Gracie, lives here in Duncan. And besides our own nine children, my wife and I have raised two adopted girls; they are both married and live in El Paso, Texas. We adopted those two orphan girls in Texas, the year we left there; they are no blood kin, but we love them, and they were just as welcome in our family as any of our children ever were. All eleven of our children are members of the Christian Church, and are trying to live a clean, Christian life. We are proud of every one of them. We have 30 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. Oh yes, there was all kinds of outlaws, killings, and other deviltry going on in the mining districts when I moved my family back here in 1900 to be exact, December 28, 1899, but as I said before, I had as little to do with that class of people as possible, and paid as little attention to whom was killed, or arrested, or hung for murder, as I could. I think I had enough excitement in my childhood to last me all my life, so I have tried to keep out of exciting happenings ever since I have been old enough to do so. After the war, and after my three youngest sons left the ranch--after Willie died, I was getting most to old and ill to do much cattle ranching any more, or to do mining work, so I sold out the ranch over in New Mexico in 1930, and moved here to Duncan, where I have lived ever since. I have been suffering with this cancer on my nose the past twenty year or more, but it never gave much trouble until about seven year ago, when it started eating into my head. I had a paralytic stroke in 1938, and now it looks as if I won't be here so very much longer. I am ready for the call of the Master when he sees fit to call me home where there will be no more sickness and death, and I believe all my offspring's are ready too. I expect to meet them all someday, in a land where we will never have to part. It is my believe that I will now, then, just what became of Sister Annie and Gracie, and I will know just who Gracie was, and my two boys over there in France will tell me all about it, when we meet over there on the other side of death. |