"Bob Fry" wrote in message
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My grandfather, born in 1878, grew up literally with horses and
buggies. He died in 1970, just long enough to see man land on the
moon. Would he have thought he would see that as a young man, say at
age 20? I can't believe so. What an amazing age, and more to
come...if fundamentalist nut-cases don't do us in.

My great grandfather Eli was born on March 20, 1859 and walked from Iowa
City, Iowa to Ogden, Utah when he was less than three years old. The Civil
War was at its height. He died in Annis, Idaho in 1952.

The land that Eli walked across was barren wasteland and open prairie. Most
of the forts and outposts had been burned. Only elite cavalry units in the
Union armies had repeating rifles. Otherwise the land he walked across was
little different from how Lewis and Clarke found it. An eastern Idaho
author, Vardis Fisher, wrote novels about the era and what life was like
there. The McGrath family in the Vridar Hunter novels is a thinly disguised
reference to the Campbells who apparently made life miserable for him. The
Fisher family, of course, were renamed "Hunter" in the novels. They were a
rough lot in those days. Fisher's contemporaries did not deny that things
were pretty much the way Vardis described them (from a certain point of
view), but they considered him to be an insufferable whiner, richly
deserving of whatever torment they could inflict on him. Most of the
incidents in the novels are described fairly accurately as they happened in
life.

My grandfather, Wallace (a.k.a. "Mickey," his real nickname and the one he
kept in the Fisher stories), was born in 1893 in Lewisville, ID. There was
regular freight service (by wagon) and the mail came fairly regularly.
Indian attacks were still considered possible. Many rivers still did not
have bridges. He raised his nine children in a small stone house with a dirt
floor. The privy was located next to the water pump. Most of his children
suffered from rheumatic fever and many of them later had heart trouble
because of it. One of his sons, Rex, was one of the very first recipients of
a pacemaker.

Wallace died in 1977, having lived from the days of range wars and horse and
buggies to the space shuttle and the beginnings of personal computers. He
had a college degree (rare for his generation), farmed in Idaho, hauled
freight by wagon, ran a gas station and post office, helped build the
nuclear facility at Hanford (he was blindfolded every day and driven to the
site), and finally retired from working at for a petroleum distributor.
Three days before he died he sang Maori lullabies to my new-born son, having
been a missionary in New Zealand almost a hundred years ago.

I have met descendants of the Maori chief who befriended him and virtually
adopted him, giving him gifts of cowry shells, a stingray tail to keep his
future wife in line, and a jadeite war club (now on display at the Idaho
Museum of History in Boise). They tell me that the chief spoke fondly of my
grandfather all of his life and told stories about him to all his own
children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. This chief bragged that he
had been a fierce cannibal, having eaten the hearts of many men, but that my
grandfather had taught him the way of peace. Neither his descendants nor I
completely believed all that, but my grandfather certainly did. Perhaps the
old guy was really like that once upon a time.

I think the days of those men were so different that they may as well have
come from another planet.