Cowboy Spur Maker: The Story of Ed Blanchard

Chapter 3 The Making of a Cowboy

As Tom Kelly Remembers [ 40 ] C H A P T E R 3 The Making of a Cowboy dward Fred Blanchard was born in Water Canyon on September 26, 1894. Ol’ Ed was like any kid—he wasn’t an angel. He ran around over the mountainsides just like the rest of them and messed in his pants and peed in his britches. My grandmother Tinguely taught school in Water Canyon in 1896 and 1897. She had Ed’s older brothers and sisters in school, but she didn’t have Ed. He wasn’t old enough. Ed, like my dad and his brother Jim, went to school down the canyon in the little red board schoolhouse on top of Ranger Station Hill. The teacher stayed at the ranger station and walked over the hill to the schoolhouse. There’s no hill there anymore. It’s been leveled off. When the community quit using the school, Uncle Jim, Ed, and Pop hauled the building in a wagon down to the Flat to use as a bunkhouse on the Kelly Ranch. That was sometime after 1918. Forest ranger Steve Garst was sent to Water Canyon by the Forest Service about 1910. He lived at the ranger station and became a great friend of my dad’s. The ranger station was a three-bedroom house E E The Making of a Cowboy [ 41 ] with a big kitchen and a living room and a large front porch and a back porch. It was made of adobe. In 1939, the Conservation Corps tore it down and built the little rock cabin that is there now. I never heard where Steve Garst was from, but his father was a politician in Washington, D.C. Much later, Steve and a friend in the Forest Service became partners in a herd of cattle. They ran them on land acquired with a forest permit, and Steve was fired by the department . His father managed to get him reinstated, and then he retired. The last Blanchard child was Paul, who was born in Water Canyon in 1907 in the same house where Ed was born. Hermas dug up a white fir tree up the canyon and planted it in his yard when Paul was born. The house is now gone, but the tree’s still there. Times must have been hard about then, for Hermas worked in the mines at Kelly. Lilly and Hermas mortgaged fourteen two- and threeyear -old steers to the Ranch Supply Company in Magdalena for $354. Maybe it was for a bill they couldn’t pay or a draw for supplies. The Becker-Mactavish store acted as the “Territorial and Country Depository ” and was later considered the first bank in town. However, the merchants often advanced people money or credit to live on until time came to sell their cattle or wool. Possibly that was what the Blanchards’ note was for. That practice was not unusual. My dad said Hermas was a hard worker and a walker. The Blanchards lived in Water Canyon while Hermas worked in the mines in Kelly. He walked to work up this long canyon to the top of the divide between here and Kelly. It is five miles to the top of the ridge and about three thousand feet higher. Kelly is two thousand feet down on the other side. Hermas walked back and forth to work. Most of the time, he stayed in Kelly during the week and came home on the weekends. He always walked; he never rode a horse. The older Kelly boys worked in Kelly in those days, too. They lived two miles up the canyon above the Blanchards, but they always rode. They hobbled their horses out during the week, and then they’d catch them and ride back home on their days off. But Hermas walked and kept pace with them and never stopped to rest. As I earlier stated, apparently Grandpa Charles Tinguely had no objection to Hermas Blanchard marrying Lilly. However, as time went by and the old man was in his eighties, he became grouchy. The As Tom Kelly Remembers [ 42 ] original Tinguely house in Water Canyon was about halfway between the Kelly house and the Blanchard place on a little flat by the side of the road. When Grandpa Tinguely got old and grouchy, Grandma wouldn’t live with him. To be near her daughter, she stayed in a...