-
8. Thoroughly Modern Mojella
- TCU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
✥ 8 ✥ Thoroughly Modern Mojella Mo jel l a m o o re of Alpine is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated , and beautiful woman of eighty-one who lives in a ten-room, ranch-style house north of town. Her living room has wall-to-wall carpeting and is furnished with comfortable easy chairs, couches, and a flat-screen television set. Her ample kitchen is equipped with a refrigerator, a dishwasher, and an electric stove. She is firmly planted in the twenty-first century. She was wearing slacks and a chic top the day I visited with her. She is a modern woman. But Mojella (she was named after a character in Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona) Moore spent her childhood in the nineteenth century, even though she was born in 1929. Her first home was a one-room adobe house on the O Ranch, northwest of Candelaria and below the Candelaria Rim, where her parents, Joe Bailey and Edith Rogers, raised goats. Her father added an adobe screened porch to the front of the house, with canvas flaps that could be lowered, and that porch served as a bedroom for Moore, her two brothers, her parents, the schoolteacher that occasionally boarded with them, and “whatever strays came along,” she said. The other room was furnished with a wood cook stove, a table and some chairs, and some cabinets. There was no electricity. A fireplace provided heat, and kerosene lamps gave light after dark. Moore told me that once, during the Depression, her family went for a year without going into town. She said during that time she asked her mother if they were poor and her mother said, “No, we’re not poor at all. We just don’t have any money.” However, they had goats, which were kept “under herd,” 34 ✥ meaning that goat herders with dogs tended the goats from camps on the ranch. The herders were usually from Mexico, and would spend six months or so in their camp and then go home for a month, to be replaced by a friend or relative. The goats were Angoras. They were hair goats, not meat goats, and were raised for their fleece. “As far as I know, we never ate a goat,” Moore told me. The goats were driven to the ranch corral and sheared twice a year by a traveling gang of shearers, and that was about the only out-ofthe -ordinary event in the young Mojella Moore’s life. “It was an occasion I really looked forward to,” she said. The half-dozen shearers, their boss, a cook, and a swamper—a man-of-all-work— brought a gasoline-powered shearing machine, to which mechanical clippers were hooked up. It took about ten minutes to shear each goat, and the shearers were paid by the goat. Moore recalled that the boss handed each man a lead token when he had sheared a goat, and the tokens were redeemed for cash when the shearing was finished. There was work for Moore and her brothers, too; they combed the burrs out of the goats’ fleece before the shearers got to them. Moore’s family eventually moved from the O Ranch to the nearby Dow Ranch, and she remembers driving herds of goats on horseback up the Candelaria Rim to the Brite Ranch, where they were loaded into trucks. She told me that she rode horseback as a baby, sitting on the saddle in front of her mother, and by the time she was five she could ride by herself. “I learned to ride on a horse named Dunny,” she said. “Dunny taught several aunts and uncles and my brothers to ride, and he taught me, too.” In 1948, Moore married Ed Moore, who was a river rider for the Department of Agriculture, trying to prevent Mexican cattle infected with hoof-and-mouth disease from crossing the Rio Grande into Texas. The river riders worked in pairs, each man patrolling an eleven-mile stretch of river each day. One went upstream from their camp, one went downstream, and the next ✥ 35 [44.192.129.85] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:55 GMT) day they switched. The Moores’ first married home was a tent at Porvenir, up the river from Candelaria. “It was a government tent,” Moore said, “but it was better than the adobe house the other rider lived in.” Ed and Mojella Moore eventually built a store on the Juan Prieto Ranch between Candelaria and Ruidosa, and Mojella...