The old West

We grew up with guns.  When my oldest brother, John, was 12, Dad gave him a .22 and a single-shot .410 shotgun for Christmas, or maybe the shotgun came the next year.  At that time, John kept his guns in the front, basement bedroom he shared with Jim.  All of us boys had rooms in the basement, and only John & Jim's room had a finished surface - the rest of the rooms had plain, concrete walls.  But the front one had wood lathe attached to the concrete, with plaster troweled over it, which was what they did before sheetrock was invented.

  One afternoon when we were all home and I was in my bedroom, John was showing Jim how to clean the shotgun.  You probably already know the next part.  I heard a big bang, followed by little dribbling sounds as BB's and little pieces of plaster rattled around the bedroom next to mine.  I walked over there to see John and Jim sitting on a bed with the shotgun across their laps.  Just to their left there was a 4" hole in the lathe and plaster.  They both looked kind of stunned, but at least there was no blood.  About a second later Mom and Dad came running in and I got pushed out, so I never heard a first-hand account of exactly how it happened.  Over the next couple of years, that whole wall slowly fell apart.  It seems like the blast cracked the plaster throughout and little pieces kept working loose as the hole slowly grew until it was all that was left.  That was the end of keeping guns in the bedrooms.  I never really knew where the guns went until John made a gun cabinet in high school wood shop.  That gun cabinet got screwed to the wall in the garage (it never had a car in it - just like mine) and Dad kept the only key.  That didn't mean we didn't have access to the guns as we grew up, but we had to get permission and return them to the gun cabinet when we were done with them. 

John soon traded his single-shot .22 for a repeater of some kind.  Jim got a single-shot .22 when he was 12.  When Jim was 14 and I was 12, he got a 12 gauge shotgun and I got a .22 bolt-action.  2 years later, he got a deer rifle, and 2 years after that I got a deer rifle.  The .410 shotgun was used by each of us in turn, but it became Dad's somewhere along the line.  I never had a shotgun of my own back then, but there was always one available if I needed one.

After I left home and entered the World, when I'd talk about living in a small town, people, especially city people, would ask, "But what did you DO for fun?"  I always thought that was funny.  I'd answer that we had a movie theater in town, and between the church, American Legion, and school there were dances quite often.  But the real answer is that when we could get away we headed for the hills, either going up the creek to fish, swim, tire swing, or catch tadpoles, or into the foothills to hunt jackrabbits.  Mostly we pretty much ran wild.  Jackrabbits are a large hare and were plentiful, and they had the habit of stopping to look back when they got far enough away to feel safe.  They make great targets.  We thought of them as vermin, and since they sometimes carried a disease called tularemia, it was thought that the best thing to do was to kill them off, which suited us kids just fine.  Hunting them was THE standard activity almost all boys in the rural West shared.  But you should know that while we did keep a sharp lookout for jackrabbits at all times, the term "rabbit hunting" was used very loosely.  What we really did was shoot anything that moved - song birds, squirrels, spiders, owls, crows, cotton-tails, mice, and ant-hills come to mind.  When we got tired we'd sit down and rest where we could see something stationary to shoot at.  Sometimes we'd find a box or something and we'd just shoot at that until it was either time to go home or we ran out of ammunition.  We also spent quite a bit of time searching for arrowheads, and this too was covered by "rabbit hunting" since if we saw a rabbit while looking for arrowheads, we'd naturally shoot at it.

In addition to that, we had the usual formal hunting/fishing seasons.  The opening day of fishing season is a fun time that comes in the spring.  If Dad could get away we'd go somewhere with the boat; Fish Lake, Koosharem, the reservoir west of Beaver, or some place like that.  Sometimes we had to settle for going up Chalk Creek and catching "planters" which are innocent, young trout recently planted in the stream by Utah Fish & Game.  They were easy to catch, but they didn’t taste as good as the ones who’d been in the creek for a few months.  It might have been the fish food pellets they’d been eating, or it might have been that they were flabby from growing in tanks instead of a stream.

The big hunt of the year was deer season, of course.  All the years when I was growing up, Dad put an ad in the Los Angeles papers that he would guide deer hunters and guarantee each paying hunter a buck.  So it was a big deal in our household.  The hunters arriving the day before opening day had to be fed and Mom would go all out and put on a big spread.  The older boys got to go along on the hunt and the family rule was that anytime you saw a buck you'd shoot it whether you had a tag or not, because somebody would need that deer.  We had some great times, even though we were kind of the unpaid gofers / dishwashers / personal servants and horse handlers.  When we got home we'd hang the deer in the garage to age.  After the dudes left, we'd skin and butcher whatever was left and package it up to go in the freezer.

Pheasant season was usually sometime around Thanksgiving.  Deer hunting is kind of an individual thing because we'd spread out to cover the most territory, but pheasant hunting we always did in drives where we'd walk along through weeds or fields about 15-20 yards apart, and we could talk to each other as we hunted.  We'd always get some pheasants and Mom was very good at cooking them.  If we were a little short (rarely) she'd fill in with some chicken, so we'd have big platters of fried pheasant with mashed potatoes, fresh home-made bread, and all the fixings.  It was almost like Thanksgiving all over again.

The informed reader will note that several things I've described are currently against the law.  What I've described took place many years ago when rules were not as tight as they are now, and we did not willingly disobey any laws.

J Earl Ashurst  J