Minnesota Fishing Trip - 2018

The group decided to do another Minnesota fishing trip but this time, instead of portaging into the boundry waters, we decided to take our boats and fish Lake Winnibigoshish.  Lake Winnie, as it is commonly called, is located in north central Minnesota near the town of Deer River.  Winnibigoshish means "dirty" water in Objibwe (the local native American tribe) but it is anything but dirty.  The water is crystal clear and you can see the bottom in most places.  Interestingly, it is an impoundment which dams up the Mississippi River whose start is Lake Itasca, about 60 miles to the west.

There were five in our group, only two of which went on the canoe trip last year.  R.B. and I had made that trip but we were looking forward to a somewhat safer, less stressful time.  R.B.'s friend since high school, Ronnie, was the third member of our team and he and R.B. supplied the boats.The fourth member was Clint, Ronnie's cousin, who lives in the Oklahoma City area.  Clint's friend, Denton, rounded out the group.

R.B. and I left Mannford about 8 am on Thursday, June 7, and the other three guys left Morrison about the same time.  The plan was to meet in Owatonna, Minnesota, go to Cabela's, for last minute items, then spend the night and caravan to Lake Winnie on Friday.  We were running late, however, and didn't get to Cabela's until the next morning.  We then drove the remaining 4 1/2 hours to our cabin at the Northland Lodge at the lake.

We fished hard Friday and caught a few walleyes, northerns, and largemouth bass but not a large number.  Saturday was a repeat of Friday with a few fish caught but not a lot.  Sunday was a rainout and we fished Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

All in all we caught six species of fish: walleyes, northerns, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, rock bass, and yellow perch.  Most of the bass and northerns were caught on artificial lures, the walleyes and yellow perch were caught on live bait.  Unlike in Oklahoma, leeches are a popular bait up there and I really like to fish them because they are extremely hardy and stay on the hook good.

Thursday morning the 14th, we got up early and headed for Oklahoma.  We drove all day and got back to Mannford about 9 pm.  That was a long haul!

My measure of a good trip is being able to say the next day that you would do it again.  I could say that about this trip although I would do a few things differently next time.  Certainly I would drink less whiskey - the five of us drank four gallons in six days!  I'm just beginning to recuperate.

The Vehicle Accident

An insurance claims adjuster told me once that the odds are you will have a minor accident every ten years and a major one every forty years.  I got my major one out of the way early, in 1967.

I was working as a welder's helper at National Tank Co. and was on my way home from work about 5:00 pm one December day.  I was in Fisher Bottom about three miles west of Sand Springs on Highway 51.  As I was often prone to do, I was "tailgating" the car in front of me.  Suddenly, he swerved into the bar ditch and there was a Mustang in my lane coming right at me!

Apparently, I thought I had a better chance of missing him by going left, because that's what I did.  Unfortunately, my maneuver wasn't successful and we collided.  The driver of the other car was Maurice Rogers McSpadden, a disc jockey for a local radio station, who went by the name "Boomer".  His car wound up on it's top in the bar ditch and my came to a stop on the highway, still right side up but badly damaged.  In fact, both cars were "totalled".

In those days, we didn't have EMT's or paramedics so the local funeral home ambulance showed up.  I sat in the front passenger seat holding my arm, which was broken, and McSpadden was on a stretcher in the back. I remember that the untrained attendant told the driver that he thought McSpadden was dead.  They transported us to what was then called Oklahoma Osteopathic Hospital (now OSU Medical Center).

Someone passing by the scene of the accident recognized my car and called Mom and Dad and told them about it.  On their way to the hospital, they had to pass by the cars, which were still there.  When Mom saw the shape my car was in, she was sure that I must be dead!

Later that evening, the highway patrolman who had investigated the crash came to the hospital to talk with me.  I told him what had happened and that coincided with his initial thoughts.  While I was laying there with a broken arm, however, he did chew me out for not wearing my seatbelt!  I was surprised to find out that, while McSpadden had suffered numerous facial injuries, he was not critically wounded.

I had to have surgery to repair my arm since the break was where it could not be set.  However, I had no problems with either it or the follow up surgery to remove the pins that the doctors had put in.

The accident did have a significant impact on my life.  It provided me with the means and motivation to go back to school at Oklahoma State.  I had dropped out in 1966 after two years of having fun!  The settlement I received from the wreck, $10,000, was a huge sum back then, at least to me.  It was enough to pay my tuition and living expenses till I graduated.  The motivation certainly was helped by having been a welder's helper for a couple of years.

I never talked to Boomer McSpadden after the accident.  I always wondered whether the wreck had as much impact on him as it did on me.  Some 20 years later, my wife, Louise, and I were at the Tulsa State Fair and KVOO radio had a booth there.  We walked into the booth and there he stood.  I walked up to him, introduced myself and Louise, and told him how we were linked.  He just stood there like he was unable to speak and after about 30 seconds of awkwardness, we turned around and left.  To this day, I don't know whether he was afraid I was angry at him or whether he was traumatized by hearing who I was.

Mr. McSpadden died in 1999 at the age of 54.  Did our accident somehow shorten his life?  It seems that the older I get, the more questions I want to answer.

Wilson Ranch History

The Wilson Ranch was founded in Archer County, Texas, in the mid-1880's.  It was an offshoot of the  130,000 acre 099 Ranch, owned by Mr. J. H. Stone.  Mr. Stone divided the ranch into three parts and Luke F. Wilson, an investment banker in Kansas City, bought one of those parts.

My grandfather, Milton Walker "Cap" Alexander, began working for Luke Wilson in Archer County as a cowboy.  In about 1900, Mr. Wilson purchased several thousand acres in Creek County, Oklahoma, and Cap brought a herd of 5000 steers to Mannford from Archer City.  He stayed in Mannford and in 1906 married Mary May Stephens who was running a laundry in Mannford.  He continued to work for Wilson until about 1920, when he started his own small ranch, located near where Coyote Trail crosses State Hwy. 51 today.

Little is known about Luke Wilson at this time.  He was born in 1842 in Palestine, Illinois to Isaac Newton Wilson and Hannah Decker.  The elder Mr. Wilson was a prominent farmer in the area and had migrated there from Virginia, as did many people of the time.  Luke married Sarah McCrory in Illinois in 1869 and shortly after that, they moved to Kansas City.  Sarah's parents were also well-to-do farmers in Illinois.  Luke and Sarah lived in Kansas City for the rest of their lives.

Luke Wilson's nephew, Glenn Wilson, was the head of the cattle operation and Cap Alexander reported to him.  Glenn lived in Archer City while his uncle Luke resided in Kansas City.  Cap's son, Tommy (my father), remembered both Luke and Glenn from his childhood and talked of them often.

Allen Parmer was the original foreman of the ranch in Archer County.  He had been a member of Quantrill's Raiders during the Civil War and was considered a mean "hombre" by most of the people who worked for him.  He did get backed down, however, by a woman with a shotgun.  He went to drive Mrs. Matthews, the nester, out of her dugout home and she wouldn't be driven out.  She apparently was regarded as a heroine for her actions at the time.

John McCluskey was another of the Wilson Ranch people.  My father referred to him as Uncle John and he spent quite a bit of time traveling back and forth between Archer City and Mannford.  Little is known of him today except that he apparently never married or had any children.

Tom Porter also got his start on the Wilson Ranch in Mannford.  He had come from southeastern Oklahoma as a thirteen year old and found himself being raised by a Zickefoose family in the Keystone area.  He was enrolled at Keystone School in the fourth grade.  By about 1910, he had gone to work for Cap Alexander as a cowboy.  DNA results lately have shown that he, not Cap Alexander, was the true father of Tommy Alexander.

Tom Porter was apparently asked to move to the main Wilson Ranch location in Archer County, since he was located there in 1917 when he registered for the draft.  In 1929, Tom married Margaret Cox and they had two children.  His daughter, Minna Lo, is 96 years old and lives in Tulsa today.  Tom worked on ranches and in the oil patch for many years before opening a saddlery in Seymour, Texas.  He was running the saddlery in 1974 when he died.

Another ranch hand on the Wilson Ranch at Mannford was Herman Weer.  He was the son of John Weer and Elizabeth Yakel (from Indiana and Illinois, respectively), who had migrated from that area to Labette County, Kansas, to the Tulsa area.  Herman was, in fact, born in Labette County in 1887.  Herman's father, John, tried in 1896 to be added to the Dawes Rolls as a Creek Indian but was denied.  It is doubtful that he had a legitimate claim to be added.  Interestingly however, his son Frank married Edna McIntosh, a full blood Creek Indian.  The McIntoshes were one of the most prominent Creeks in Indian Territory.

Herman Weer died in 1978 and is buried in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.  No evidence exists that he ever married or had children.

The cooks on the Wilson at Mannford were David Casper "Buster" Henkell and his wife, Sarah Ihrig Henkell.  I can remember Buster coming by our house to visit my father when I was a child.  Sarah was my father's first cousin and a sister to Ernest "Twenty" Ihrig, a long time resident of the Mannford area.  Buster died in 1957 at the age of 69 and Sarah died in 1986 at the age of 85.

Ernest Ihrig was another of the early cowboys on the Wilson Ranch at Mannford.  He was born in Indian Territory, the son of Marion Francis Ihrig and Mahala Stephens Ihrig.  "Aunt Mahala", as we called her, was a sister to my grandmother, Mary May Stephens Alexander.  Ernest, or "Twenty", was Cap Alexander's assistant foreman on the ranch and the two were usually seen together.

The last cowboy of interest on the Wilson Ranch was at the Archer County location.  He was Lee McMurtry and is presumed to be a relative to Larry McMurtry, the author and screenwriter.  Larry was born and raised in Archer City and still owns two bookstores there.

I am continuing to study the Wilson Ranch history and I'll let you know further as I progress.

Fishing in the Boundry Waters

My friend, R.B., and I were planning our next epic adventure, a fishing trip to Lake Winnebigoshish  in Minnesota, when it dawned on me that I hadn't documented our trip last year.  It was during that period when I couldn't seem to ever find time to write.  So here is the story.

In early 2017, R.B. asked me if I wanted to go on a fishing trip with him and three other guys.  They were planning to fish the boundary waters in northern Minnesota.  I said, "Sure!" so we began planning the trip.  Planning, of course, involved several meetings at restaurants for food and drink.

On the appointed day, Saturday, June 10, 2017, we left Tulsa in my motor home.  The five people going were R.B., his son, Bobby, James, Travis, and myself.  The first night we drove to Owatonna, Minnesota, a distance of about 670 miles, and stayed in the parking lot of a Cabela's store there.  Of course, we went into the store and spent a boat load of money on fishing and camping gear.  The next morning, we left early and drove on to Ely, Minnesota, another 300 miles.

When we arrived in Ely, we met the outfitter that R.B. had contacted for gear and made plans to begin our canoe trip the next morning.  We spent that night, our second night out, in the motor home.  We got up early the next morning, Monday, and found a wonderful place in Ely to eat breakfast.  After filling our bellies with biscuits and gravy, we went back to the outfitter's place where we had parked the motor home and began to unload our gear.  As is usual, we had way more "stuff" than we needed and left some of it there.

Unloading our Gear in Ely

The outfitter dropped us off at a landing on Fall Lake about six miles northeast of Ely.  We loaded our canoes and began our journey.  I hadn't been in a canoe in about 60 years so it took a little while to get comfortable!  Our canoe trip took about five hours and included two portages of a quarter mile each.  We went from Fall Lake to Newton Lake and then into Pipestone Bay.  Once on Pipestone, you could, if you so desired, canoe into Canada.

Each portage involved dragging our canoe onto shore, unloading all the gear in them, hauling it all along with the canoe to the next lake, and then reloading everything back into the canoes.  These usually took about three round trips to get all our gear moved.

Bobby and Travis in the Canoe

By the time we got to our selected campsite, it was about four o'clock and we quickly got our camp set up.  We were the only humans on the little island in the middle of this lake and that made it kind of eerie!

For the next four days, we fished for walleye, pike, and smallmouth bass.  Most of our fishing was done from the bank, right in camp, because the weather wasn't good enough to spend much time fishing from the canoes.
.

Edd With a Smallmouth

Sleeping arrangements were hammocks strung between trees.  I was absolutely amazed at how well we slept and stayed dry in them.  On two of the nights, we had thunderstorms with lots of lightening and rain and I never got a drop of water in my hammock!  In the evenings, of course, we sat around the campfire, ate Nutter Butter cookies and drank copious quantities of whiskey.  We didn't catch a lot of fish but everyone caught some and everyone had a good time.

On Friday morning, June 16, we got up, fixed our breakfast over the campfire, and loaded the canoes for the trip back to our take out spot.  The wind was howling and we were all a little apprehensive about the trip.  As the morning progressed, the winds got stronger and stronger and we sure were glad to see the landing spot in sight.

By the time we got checked in with the outfitter and took a shower (which we all needed badly), we decided to load up the motor home and drive all the way home overnight.  We left Ely about 2 p.m. and, after a stop in Joplin for breakfast, arrived home about 8:30 Saturday morning.

I've been on several trips like this and, for most of them, the day I returned, I would say I would never go back.  That was not the case with this trip - when we go home I wold have turned around and done it again that day!

Misadventures as Art

A while back Louise and I were down in the shop and I showed her my "collection of shame", parts which had been damaged due to my negligence or stupidity.  A couple of days later, she asked me if she could have some of them for a project.

I had no idea what the project was but I said "yes".  After 48 years of marriage, I know the correct answers to most of her questions.  What she did was to use these as art to decorate our bathroom!

I must say that it is a very unusual choice of items to use as art.  I must describe each of these items.

On the upper left is a 32 penny spike which I accidentally left in the yard south of our house.  Years later, our neighbor, Roy, was doing us a favor by mowing that area.  He ran over the spike, which was at least 75 yards from the house, and threw it through our glass block window in the bathroom.  It traveled across the bathroom into the water closet where it left a deep gash in the sheet rock wall and landed on a small glass table in front of the stool.  Roy felt horrible but I was the one who left it in the yard and he was mowing our grass after all.

The nut in the lower left box was what was left from a trailer hitch which I grossly under designed.  We were returning home from a fishing trip to Lake Taneycomo in Missouri when the hitch failed, letting my boat and trailer come loose and almost roll over.  Ironically, my insurance agent, who was also my fishing buddy was following me at the time and almost had a heart attack!  The nut, which was holding the hitch ball on took the brunt of the incident and was ground almost nearly in two.  It took weeks to get all the asphalt out of the boat!

The large center frame holds a bent connecting rod from our '46 Chevy cabover, known as Butt Ugly.  I drove it to work at Tulsa Winch one day and a rain storm came through.  Well, the engine sits in the open behind the cab but I had no idea that that much water could get through the air cleaner!  When I went out that evening to start the truck, it turned over about twice, fired and then locked up.  The cylinder that that rod was in was full of water and it "hydrauliced", bending the rod.  A week later and some mechanic work and it was good as new.

The item in the right box is the only one not caused by my stupidity but I found it very unusual.  My neighbor, T.J., asked me to replace the PTO seal on his old Ford 600 tractor.  When I got the old seal out, I looked at it and was amazed!  The seal had the original Ford logo on it and the wiper on the seal was made of rawhide.  Early seals used rawhide as the wiper but I had never seen one.

If you get a chance, come by and look at the museum in our bathroom.

How Far Would You Go For A Coney?

Today I was searching around in my blog and I searched for "coney".  Not a single use of this word popped up.  So I've decided to change that!

For the past three or four years, I, along with friends Larry and Hugh, have had coney outings about once a month.  Normally,we would meet at Larry's wife's place of business, BS for a while and then drive to Dean's Coney Island in Sand Springs.

Well, things have changed recently.  Hugh moved farther away, down south of OKC, and Louise and I spent the winter in the Rio Grande Valley.  So coney outings have become less frequent.  The other day, as we were preparing to come home, I decided to set up a new coney lunch but in Hugh's neighborhood, Oklahoma City.

Larry and he both agreed that this sounded like a splendid idea so we planned to do it on Friday after I got home on Thursday.  Hugh found us a place in the City so we left Mannford about 10:00 a.m. and were going to meet Hugh at 11:40.

We arrived at the designated time and discovered that we had found coney nirvana!  This place has been in business since 1924 and, in spite of having the walls covered in OU memorabilia, it had all the charm a downtown coney place should have.

The name of the place is simply "Coney Island" and it's located at 428 W. Main Street.  One of our customs during our coney runs is to take pictures of the food and this trip was no exception.

This is me wolfing down one of my coneys.  Hugh and Larry better take pictures quickly if they want to capture more than just the paper lining in my basket!

So that's the story!  Yes, we did drive about 200 miles round trip and spend about five hours just to eat a coney.  Might oughta do it again next week!

Harry Wood Nash

Harry Wood Nash, 1869-1902

(My great grandfather)

Harry Wood Nash was born in Abington, Massachusetts, a southern suburb of Boston, in 1869. He was the oldest of three children born to Edward Everett Nash and Hannah Williams Nash.

The Nash's were long time Boston area residents – both Edward's father, Nathaniel Nash Jr. and his grandfather, Nathaniel Nash Sr., were from Massachusetts. Nathaniel Nash Sr. was born about 1780 but his birth location is not known nor is his ancestry. However, the Nash surname was most commonly found in Great Britain.

Edward Nash was a carpenter by trade and his wife, Hannah, was a homemaker. In addition to Harry, they had Frederick William Nash, born in 1872, and Neva Nash, born in 1875. Both Fred and Neva were born in the Akron, Ohio area, since Edward and Hannah had moved there shortly after 1870.

Fred was a metallurgist and mining engineer and we know from passport records that he traveled to Mexico at least once to pursue his occupation. Fred married Violet Irene Preston in 1901 in Denver, and together they had two daughters, Virginia and Consuelo. Violet was born in Denver in 1877. Before 1910, Fred and Neva moved to San Diego and stayed there the rest of their lives.

Family lore has it that Fred owned a company, Bullfrog Marble and Mining Quarry, and was killed in a car “accident”. His partner in the company then stole it from Violet and her daughters and left them penniless.

Neva was an “old maid” school teacher and never married. Although she was born in Ohio, she moved back to her father's home area, Massachusetts, and taught school there for many years before retiring to St. Petersburg, Florida. At least once she traveled to Cuba on holiday.

Although Harry was born in Massachusetts, he was taken by his father and mother to Ohio when he was about two years old. Because the 1890 Census was lost, we don't know where the family was in that era. There is no evidence that Edward or Hannah ever traveled to Colorado so Harry may have struck out on his own.

As we know, Harry married Susan Pearl Miller in 1891, in the Trinidad, Colorado area. At the time, he was 22 and she was 14, four months short of her 15^th birthday. It is likely that Fred followed his older brother, Harry, to Colorado since he married Violet there in 1901.

Harry and Susan had three children, Arletta Florence born in 1893, Edward Everett (his grandfather's namesake) born in 1894, and Sedelia born in 1897. All three of these children were born in Las Animas County in the Trinidad area.

In June, 1898, when their youngest child Sedelia was about 8 months old, Susan deserted Harry and moved to Pitkin County in the Aspen area. The whereabouts of the three children during this period are unknown. In July, 1899, Harry was awarded a divorce from Susan on the grounds of desertion. No mention of the three children was made in the divorce papers; it is assumed that they had been abandoned.

In July, 1900, Susan married Richard Leace Young in Grand Junction, Colorado. She and Richard had another ten to fifteen children, the exact number is unknown. In her obituary, it was stated that she was the mother of eighteen children. Some time around 1924, she divorced Richard and married James Adair. They had no children together. Susan died in 1939 in Twin Falls, Idaho at the age of 62.

At the time of Harry's divorce from Susan, he had moved to the Denver area, in Arapahoe County. He died in 1902 at the age of 33 and is buried at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia. At the time of death, Harry's occupation was listed as “labourer”.