Editor’s note: This article was submitted for publication Fall 2018. This is a late upload.
By: Wayne Head
My paternal grandfather was Pamunkey and Catawba Native American. His parents left the Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina in 1887 after converting to the Mormon faith. He was born on July 5, 1901 in Sanford, Colorado, the eighth of twelve children. Grandpa was raised in Farmington, New Mexico and lived most of his life in that northern town. I am going to tell some stories about my grandfather, George Jeston Head Sr.
When Grandpa was five years old, he accidentally killed some of his mother’s geese and she spanked him. He left the yard crying and walked down the trail to the San Juan River. He was gone for a while and his mother became worried that something might have happened to him, so she went down the trail to find him. Suddenly, she heard him coming and she hid behind a bush. He was literally talking to himself. He said, “and then she hit me” and he asked himself, “hard as that” as he slapped his hands together. Then he asked himself, “hard as that?” Slapping his hands again, “harder than that” was the reply. Finally, he slammed his hands together asking, “hard as that?” and he replied, “hard as if a cloud fell on you.” His mother fell out of the bushes laughing.
After graduating the eighth grade, Grandpa’s father tried to send him to an Indian Boarding School. My great grandfather was using the boarding school as a high school for his children. Grandpa went by horse and wagon heading to the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School near Hay Gulch, Colorado in 1914. Grandpa had heard from his older siblings that the staff were mean and beat the children, that the buildings were cold, and the food was not edible. Grandpa had decided that he did not want to go to that school, so he jumped off the wagon and walked the rugged miles home. He got home before the wagon returned to Farmington. His father told him that if he was going act like a man he would work like a man. His father gave him a wagon and horse team and sent him north of Aztec, New Mexico. Grandpa then hauled hay from the fields to Farmington. He was a working man the majority of his life after jumping off that wagon.
When he was a young man, in his teens and early twenties, he would ride his horse up to 50 miles to go to Grange Halls to dance with the pretty girls. He was often accompanied by his maternal cousin, William Buck Canty. They thought nothing of riding 50 miles to dance for several hours then ride 50 miles home. He once told me a story of a cowboy who was riding south of Farmington, near the bluffs near the San Juan River. It was a very foggy morning and suddenly his horse stopped still. No prodding or spurring from the cowboy could urge the horse forward. Angrily getting off the horse, the cowboy took the reins and stepped forward only to find his left foot hanging over nothing. He realized that he had ridden to the edge of the bluffs and that he had almost fallen a hundred or so feet to the valley below.
In his twenties he would travel with his older brother, Heber Head, and they would hustle pool for money. One of his favorite jokes was to try to stand quarters on their edges. He would make a big show about trying to stand them up and letting the quarters fall spinning onto the bar. He would then announce that it couldn’t have been done. No way could a fella stand a quarter on edge. Someone in the bar would eventually state that he had done this trick many times and that it was very doable. Grandpa would then say, I will give you a dime for every quarter that you stand on edge. The fella would think this is a good way to make 15 cents several times over. He would then line the bar with quarters on their edges. Grandpa would then go to each quarter, pocket it and put a dime down in its place. When the fella would protest, Grandpa would tell them that he had promised to give them a dime for every quarter lined up on its edge.
Grandpa was an accomplished boxer in his youth. He once told a friend that when he was 21, he could have whipped Joe Lewis, the Brown Bomber, heavyweight champion of the world. The man asked in awe, “when you were 21, you were that good at boxing?” Grandpa replied with, “no, when I was 21, Joe Lewis was three. I could have taken him then.”
Grandpa told me about a fella he knew who had three coyotes that he had raised and treated as dogs. He said that one coyote was killed by a visitor to the ranch who shot the coyote before seeing the dog collar on his neck. One was run over, and I do not remember how the other died. When I was a child, I met an elderly foster parent. He asked if I was related to George Head, I replied yes, my grandfather, father, and brother. He said well this story is about your grandfather. When this man was a young boy, about nine-years-old, he found a den of coyote pups and dug them out of the den. He put them in a burlap sack and hoisted them over his shoulder, until one of them bit him in the butt. He came across this farmhand who was working there at Hay Gulch, Colorado. The farmhand bought three of the pups and the young boy bought two pairs of Levi’s and a shirt with the money. The farmhand was my grandfather, George Head.
Grandpa worked as an iron worker with his first cousins. They worked on bridges and many storied buildings. He told me a story about two of his cousins, who were brothers to each other, and one was heating up the rivets and throwing them with tongs across the empty expanse to his brother who had a funnel to catch the red-hot rivets. After missing several in a row, the brother put the funnel between his legs and cupped his hands saying throw it here I can catch this one. His brother insisted that he pick up the funnel before he would throw another heated rivet.
Grandpa was one of the thousands of workers who built the Manhattan Project buildings at Hanford, Washington during World War II. He later worked in one of the units. He told my father that secrecy was so strict that for as far as they knew they were making pocket combs. His nephew, Frederick Jackson Head, was in the first unit that stepped ashore at Hiroshima, Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped there. Jack told me that they were dropped off by a landing craft and they waded ashore with 70-pound packs and their rifles strapped to the top of their packs. He said that once ashore, they marched between two lines of Japanese military officers who were wearing blue uniforms. As the first man stepped between each pair, they about-faced leaving the remaining men to walk past the backs of the surrendering officers. He said that when they first went past the officers he was afraid that they might un-sheath their samurai swords and slash his unit while their rifles were tied up behind their heads.
After he and his wife divorced, he took five of the eight children and raised them on his own. This was almost unheard of in his day and time. His close-knit family was around to lend a hand from time to time, but the major responsibility was shouldered by my grandfather. On a working man’s pay, he saw to it that all his children were fed, clothed, schooled, and healthy. Family was always an important dynamic in his worldview.
When I was going to college at the San Juan Community College in Farmington, New Mexico in 1975, Grandpa took me to an insurance agency to get my car insured. The owner of the building knew that Grandpa had poured the foundation decades earlier. He told Grandpa, “George, I need to show you a small hairline crack in this foundation.” Grandpa said, “show it to me and I will go home and get my tools to fix the crack.” The man laughed and said that there was no crack. He was proud of the job that Grandpa had done years before.
All of these stories represent my Grandfather, who would be 117-years-old if he were alive, but none of them fully explain or describe the man who raised my father. I am proud to be George Jeston Head Sr.’s grandson.
