Cottonseed Kid – Childhood Memories of a Texas Life

$15.95

By Harriett Dublin

Don’t get any marbles up your nose!

Times were different then, and Harriett Dublin lived the childhood of our collective imagination. The family ranch was on White Deer Creek, a part of the blustery West Texas plains. The summer cabin on Bloody Creek in Kansas had a kerosene stove that smoked and an icebox that held a fifty-pound block of ice in the top. Instead of having entertainment handed to them, the kids made their own fun. They dug old clothes from the trunks, held a circus parade for the one-block town, and earned a nickel for ice cream at the drug store. Her mother raised the family without a fuss, and her father’s words of wisdom were “Don’t get any marbles up your nose!” Ride with Harriett through this Texas childhood on the back of the mule wagon chewing cottonseed cakes and working up a darn good spit.

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Description

Book Excerpt

Several summers of my childhood, our family went to a ranch in Chase County Kansas, one that my great grandfather homesteaded. The ranch was known as Bloody Creek, so named because of all the Indian battles that took place between the Kaws and other Indian tribes in the early 1800’s and because of the pioneers that were massacred there. (The Kansa Tribe, “people of the southwind,” were commonly known as the Kaws.) Cottonwood Falls was the nearest town and was the county seat in the heart of the Kansas Flint Hills, an area well known for its abundance of strong grass and water. Fady took cattle there every summer to fatten for the Kansas City Market, so he was always busy tending the daily needs, like sick cattle, broken fences, keeping a steady water supply, just to mention a few things. Naturally he was not going to leave us out of all this fun by making us stay home in Texas.

For my three sisters, brother and me, it was like being at a summer camp. We played in the creeks, meadows, swam in the ponds, ran up and down the cornrows, and had a ball. Occasionally Fady needed our help to move some cattle for one reason or another. We had some ole plug horses that we could saddle. One or the other of us would help drive the herd through a gate and onto a new watering hole, or we’d put animals in some work pens if they needed to be doctored.

Additional information

Weight 0.51875 lbs
Dimensions 5.375 × 7.75 × 1 in
The Cottonseed Kid - Childhood Memories of a Texas Life
Cottonseed Kid – Childhood Memories of a Texas Life
$15.95