Joe: Yeah this has to run just a little bit before it records. I think its fine now.

Nina: When we at last got out on the deep our troubles began. I think there is something in the doctrine of mind over matter. Jake and Dora had a mind to be deadly (___) so they could blame their mother for tearing them away from their dear, old happy home. Their mother was really worried and feared that mal de mer, this is supposed to be French it says, this is prove to be fatal, but after 14 days, and people have doubted that, we arrived all alive at Hoboken and the next day Josey met us at Castle Garden. We now look for Josey as an old experienced American who was supposed to be thorough English linguist an old crony of Josey came over with Josey also over the underground roots taught me my first English that night. It was to say, “Good evening.” It took a course in school to make me forget my first lesson. Josey showed us the town of New York thoroughly. I saw wild beasts for the first time in Central Park menagerie. We stayed in New York for eight days when we, again, overcome by the love of the deep with all its stickler pleasures and sensation. We pulled up anchor on Vanderbilt Steer called the Grenada and sailed away for the shores of Nicaragua. We had all become fairly good sailors by this time except Jake and Dora. The sailor’s heaved up anchor that remembered some other days overcame both and they heaved up everything that was at all heavable; all through Key West and the beautiful coast of Jamaica. It was all dead (___) to both of them. At last we landed at San Juan and embarked on the river in small cat boats. Sometimes we had to get off and walk while men pulled boats over shallows and ripples. On the river we saw our first Indians and some were stark naked which scandalized our overly prudish passengers. The third day we changed for boats on the lake and sailed the length of it. When we arrived on the other side, we had traveled 12 miles along Mule Team or if you preferred you could do like valem and ride on an ass. We chose the form Mule Team. Jake and I consistent drivers as so not to miss our boat. Now we embarked on the grand Pacific. My recollections are more dim on this home stretch. I remember we celebrated the 4^th of July. We also ran into the fog as we neared our destination and at last landed at San Francisco about July 8^th, 1867 at night. Next morning we put at the Atlantic Hotel somewhere on Jackson near Perney. The following day we took the boat to Sacramento. There was no connection (___). We put up at Emperor’s Hotel; they had just been redoing that in Sacramento; then a very pretentious building with marble (___). Josey and Louise got their bearings and started for (____) right away while the rest of us laid around on the porch in front of the hotel and mistook every driver of any vehicle that came our way as our long-lost brother Jon who Kate and I had never seen. He left before they were born, I guess. At last a man with a hay wagon moved in site. Hitched to the wagon was a little gray mare and a tall brown horse. The gray mare was Verne. It’s V-E-R-N-E Germanized by Jon that older boy surely remembered and the man on the wagon was our brother Jon. His mother knew him right away; leave the mother alone for that. Kate, Jake, and I did not. Dora claimed she recognized him too. Well, our brother Jon took us home and we saw first Europe mother Jake, Mary, and Louise all little (____). I was somewhat surprised and disappointed in mare. We had expected nothing but dark horses and wild (____) and all that belonged to bloody frontier, but the dried up country sitting out a field to us, you’d know how dry Antelope looks in July and August, but then the country was only in the making. No fruit trees, Jon just experimenting and had landed some peach trees and was very much surprised that the trees did not die during the dry summer months. For the first time he had planted tomatoes and low rain or no rain they bore prudent. I think he was the pioneer to summer falling and so his grain before his grain before the rain and trusted providence for the rest, and yet when he left Antelope, the experimental stayed had hardly begun. A few weeks after our arrival at Antelope, a sail across the horizon and sister Mary with Herman cruised into port. That was Mr. and Mrs. Dutchkey. I fell in love with Herman on first sight and never thoroughly over it. When Mary and her husband returned to Ione, Louise, Josey, and Jon’s tractor went with them and Ione Valley gripped them for good. When we left Germany, mother had scrapped together about $5,200. When we arrived here, mother had about $3,100. She intended to buy a farm and have the boys work it. Jon monitored to buy the Mutler Ranch adjoining his place in the east along the railroad 620 acres. It was held at $3,000. It had no improvements and looked its very worst this time of the year. When the folks struck Ione, they fell easy victims and bought the Potter Ranch; that’s right here. It was improved with the house painted white and green shutters to its windows. What little things figure sometimes in shaping destiny? We paid $1,800 for 138 acres and moved on in September. Father strained away one day when we were not watching him. We could not find him until the next when a character called Crazy Jake came and told us he had seen a man of that description about four miles away. We went down that way and I spied him climbing a hill near (____). I think that’s a mistake; it’s another name. Father died about a month after we settled. After an affliction of about 26 years, we soon began to realize that I almost, (___________) of only preparatory. Going to extensive mining, the Greek had changed its course and overflowed at the slightest propagation bringing Johnson fever. One day, six of us were in bed and only mother was abroad. Jake had attached himself for good to his brother Jon, so escape for preparatory for the rest of us were taken. The boys had to start at the bottom to learn California farming for they knew absolutely nothing and in that respect had nothing on their little brother Nile. Kate and I started to school and we certainly grew attention. We stood at the teacher’s knee with the little toddler’s and learned our ABC’s. Kate out stripped me in the start but she still got cold feet and quit. I was regarded as a (____) dropped down from the moon. The boys slipped up at my feet to regard with wonder the (____) and irons on my top boots which were exactly like the trench shoes our boys brought home from (____). The teacher put me by the side of a young (____) (____) Frank Burris certainly opposed to how education asking in sub (_____) everything associated with…

Joe: By any chance we they (___) (____)?

Nina: I don’t think so.

Joe: (_____)

Nina: …camp and his bulldog captured 2,000 Germans. I tried to convince the boys that Germans had simply elbow crossed King George and made the victor (___) George Washington, but I had to demonstrate to them that there was a yellow streak in this German boy it was only skin deep, and could very easily be rubbed off. Well things went on very slowly on the farm. The road to success was certainly upgrade about two years after the stark Louise went to San Francisco; eight days later he wrote to prepare for the bride and arrived in new (___) time. Andrew and Josey decided to let loose at the ranch alone and they left but I was part of the ranches (_____) and also mother. After a very few months, it became apparent that the saying, “No house was big enough for a mother and daughter-in-law should be amended to include the farm.” Of course there are some exceptions to this rule and our family must never forget a remarkable exception. At home was mother. Well mother left the place but I stayed on. Mother settled with Louise and Josey and Andrew took up the farm again with Kate and (___). Mother soon after took the bed and was helpless for 28 years. I wonder if we give Kate and Louise full credit for their work. Well the Almighty does. The boys bought the Vandosin place. (____________) of ten acres that had been sold off (___) ranch in 1862 and afterwards thought that Billy Wells ran to the 108 acres. They were beginning to have quite a nice place. The creek no longer overflowed as mining had been stopped. The chills and fever had disappeared, but farming was never profit until Alfalfa came to the valley in 1871. Of course (____) was still carried on in the old way by (______) and so forth, but it left you a little pay for your labor. When I became 14, I worked on the pressure machine in summer and for the boys in the winter. When 20, I worked on Petaluma pay press and the next year I bought one. I had intended to follow the family calling, mainly farming, which I was stupid. But the following year I started (____) (___) get away from myself and forget. I went to school for a while when Jake wrote me to go north with him to look for land. I went but my heart was not in it. We started up one side of the valley through our (____) German town Willows Redbluff on Cottonwood Creek we found a place that suited us 900 acres, 400 acres assorted the creek (___). The price was $9,000 but Jake could never say yes. We offered the man $8,000 thinking he would take it. He came down…We came down through (____) county and so forth to Ione. I drifted back into town and Bob Louis had (______) business. Through the scheming of the partner, the deal was called off the partner got it. Then through the help of a half interest swindler, I was roped in to buying half interest in a small (_____) staple. My partner was a (____) daisy shoer and the experience is the next five years with people moving picture (___) in sensations for a month, but Providence was kind to the poor (_____) (___) and the man who had done up my two predecessors and did up my three successors are made very little material. As a makeshift, I thought paper boot and then I found a good girl who was going to take a chance in a desperate game. Did she win or lose, I don’t know, ask her. As the game went on and the margin we put up the game player we propelled to see the game through, and here we are still at the game after 31 years. I have been on a newspaper route about 33 years with eight months off. When Jonny took me along to Alaska with him, I came back and took up the reins where I dropped them and I can surely say God leads in a mysterious way.

Joe: Wow what your connection with this man who wrote the letter, Nina?

Nina: Well he was my husband’s uncle.

Joe: Was his name Winter?

Nina: Yes. Yeah he’s Charles Winter’s father. You know Charles…

Joe: Charles was the minister at the Methodist Church at Sutter Creek for a number of years.

Nina: Yeah and Jackson.

Joe: Very well thought out.

Nina: Yeah. Well that was his father.

Joe: That was his father.

Nina: They sent Charles to Boston to school.

Joe: Oh that’s wonderful. I think that’s wonderful.

Nina: Isn’t it. I think it is but it’s a….

Joe: Very nice letter.

Nina: Yes and considering that he didn’t have a chance at very much schooling, but he was alert.

Joe: You know this is really great. Now we’ve got our tape pretty well used up which is fine. There were….

Nina: Well maybe they won’t care for the (___).

Joe: I think they will. I think they’ll love it. Oh that’s the real thing. That was written in 1930 and he was an elderly man then.

Nina: Yes.

Joe: So his memory went back to those things.

Nina: Charles is dead now you know.

Joe: Yeah not too long ago; last year or so. Well there’s two or three other little things here. Now when you came here, you had been a city girl and you came here to the farm and you were very surprised at the great amount of work that went on a farm, weren’t you?

Nina: I didn’t know anything.

Joe: You prepared much of your food from scratch, baked bread, preserved peaches, pears, plums, canned as many as 200 tomatoes a season tin cans the sealing or the sealing (___).

Nina: That’s right.

Joe: You butchered and chirred German meat and made sausage and rendered lard. See if anything else on here that I ought to think about. This thing about…that you saved the chucks from your corn crop.

Nina: Yeah that was for tamales.

Joe: And the boys from Princeton school so (____)

Nina: That was during the war, First World War.

Joe: First World War, some of the boys from this school came over and helped you prepare and (____).

Nina: Yeah did you ever read Carey McWilliams?

Joe: No.

Nina: Mrs. Angeer up town got a copy. I think she got an old copy that (____) something over $9 library (___). He was…worked with WPA. You remember they hired our (____) anything to get things started and he was one of those. And he was on the air just the other night. I called her up and told her this Carey McWilliams was on and she got to see him and she’s been reading this Factory’s in the Field that he wrote about hiring men from the prisons, you know, to work. That was in the First World War.

Joe: Now this Carey McWilliams?

Nina: Mmmhmm Carey McWilliams.

Joe: And he was in this area?

Nina: He wrote about it here in California, and he’s been editor of the nation. Are you familiar with the nation?

Joe: Not real familiar but I know about it.

Nina: Yeah well he’s been editor of the nation, and he was on the air here the other evening. He tells about prisoners working Factories in the Field was the name of his book. That (_________). I read it years and years ago when it came out in the 30s.

Joe: Do you remember when you prepared and bailed those corn husks? They were tamales weren’t they?

Nina: No they were for tamales.

Joe: Yeah but they were shipped from here to places where they make tamales probably.

Nina: They were in mails and I think they went by train.

Joe: But you had no connection with the people who made tamales out of the…

Nina: I don’t know what…

Joe: Do you like tamales?

Nina: I can’t eat (___)…

Joe: I love tamales.

Nina: Do you?

Joe: All those Mexican things. We think they got a lot of good food.

Nina: Oh they do (___).

Joe: It smells so good. Clair sometimes takes tortillas and warms them in the skillet and we make taco and oh they smell so good they curl when they warm.

Nina: yeah I like…

Joe: Smell lovely.

Nina: It is good. From the mines, slickens and stuff washed down onto the good land and they had an awful time ever getting rid of it. That’s what the mining has done.

Joe: Well they’re still doing some of this clay mining around here that tears things up too aren’t they?

Nina: That’s why I went to the Board of Supervisors and (____) something in their gardens. I don’t think they did it. And you don’t see a thing about that ordinance in the papers except little tiny print. Not why…

Joe: I just (_____).

Nina: When it is so important.

Joe: Well on of these days people are going to get hungry and they’re going to think, you know, we can’t spend all your farm land and not have any place to grow real food.

Nina: We had company Sunday at 2….

END TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Joe Grower

Interviewee: Nina Winter

Name of Tape: Ione Valley, Amador County

When: May 6, 1976

Transcriber: Dee-Ann Horn

Transcribed: 7/15/2017