by Rhonda Schulte
November 9, 2000

     Dressed in a burlap bag and wearing a wig made of black cotton hose braided with beads and flowers, 14-year-old Beatrice Slane had no way of knowing in 1925 that someday she would be the last living white woman to have sung in the original Gift of the Waters Pageant choir.
     At age 90, Bea continues to help with the pageant production and is involved in the VFW and hospital auxiliaries, Daughters of American Revolution, Historical Society and Pioneer Association in Thermopolis, Wyo. She is a longtime member of First Baptist Church.
     Bea's longevity has provided her with the perspective of how life is often balanced with good times and bad. Through poverty, her parents divorce, epidemics, world wars and the Depression, Bea has kept a positive attitude and sense of humor.
     Once a skilled home beautician and seamstress, today Bea spends as much time as possible working in her yard, mowing, raking or tending flower and vegetable gardens at her home on Broadway Street where she has lived for more than 50 years.
"Yard work, that’s my life," said Bea, dressed in her typical work clothes of jeans and a sweatshirt with a red bandana tied around her neck. "I'm not in the house when it's nice outside.”

 
Homesteader parents

     Bea was born in a log cabin on Nov. 2, 1910, on her parents Owl Creek homestead in Hot Springs County. That same year the first passenger train roared through Thermopolis.
     Her father, George David, was a common laborer who left Illinois in 1905 to work on the railroad as it was being built through the Wind River Canyon. When land was opened to white settlers on the ten miles square bordering the south side of Owl Creek in 1906, her father homesteaded, as did his brothers, Elmer and Clyde.
     Bea learned to value hard work from the example set by her father. Mr. David was an enterprising man who taught soldiers in the U.S. Calvary how to horseshoe, was a blacksmith at Pearl Harbor during World War II and built the blacksmith shop replica now on display at Knotts Berry Farm in California. He sharpened the tools used to build tunnels for the first road through Glacier Park.
     Her mother, Blanche Mann from Missouri, was a midwife and practical nurse. She was one of the first night nurses at the Wyoming Pioneer Home when it opened in Hot Springs State Park in the early 1950s. Mrs. David also worked in Dr. Carter's hospital when it was housed in the building where The Blessing Christian bookstore in Thermopolis is currently located. Later she was a nurse at the Carter Hospital when it set on the Holiday Inn site in Hot Springs State Park. She also worked for doctors at Worland.
     "(My mother) nursed lots of people," Bea said. "She was a loving person – children loved her.”
The David family included Bea's brothers, Walter and Jack, and sister, Georgia. Although they lived a harsh life on the farm, Bea prefers to remember the good times they shared.

Fire threatens lives
     In 1915 the family moved to Missouri to be with Bea’s ailing maternal grandfather. While there, 5-year-old Bea started school at the country schoolhouse near Pierce City that her mother attended as a child. The family then moved to Drumright, Okla., where Bea’s father took a job in the oil field as a horse teamster responsible for moving huge equipment. The pay was good, but life was rough and people lived in dangerous conditions.
     "The gas fumes choked you," Bea said.
     So perilous were conditions that the David family nearly perished in a house fire. They lived in two tar-paper shacks set together. The two sisters, baby Jack and their parents were sleeping in one room and Walter was asleep in the kitchen when a fire broke out. It was set off when a mouse chewing on a box of farmer matches started a spark that ignited the gas fumes permeating the oil fields, Bea said. Fortunately the family escaped unharmed, and the fire was extinguished by a bucket brigade. Typical of Bea's sunny personality, she enjoys telling about the humorous sight of her father who fought the night blaze clad in his underwear and rubber boots.
     "There's always something funny," she said.
True to southern hospitality, a family they barely knew took the Davids in and helped nurse Walter and Georgia, who had the measles and got terribly sick after going out into the cold night air. At the time of the fire, Bea's family had already packed to return to Wyoming. With all their possession in ashes except a few clothes, they traveled lightly by train back to their arid, sagebrush covered Hot Springs County farmland.
     "Praise the Lord, great day!" Bea exclaimed as she described their arrival. "I was never so tickled to get back to that log cabin. It looked like a palace."
     They sold the original homestead to Andy Ready, and the Davids moved to Mud Creek, then to a home near the turnoff to the Padlock Ranch. Her father worked at the ranch shoeing horses and repairing equipment.

Social gatherings

     The Padlock Ranch was huge with a grocery store and office, recalled Bea. It is now the main part of the 368,000-acre Arapaho Ranch on the Wind River Reservation.
For much of the 20th Century, country school houses were the central gathering places for rural residents. For Bea, many warm memories were made at the Morningside, Padlock and Middleton schools she attended.
     Carrying their lunches in makeshift lunch pails created from a five-pound lard bucket or a Karo syrup bucket, the oldest David children walked a mile or more to school. In cold weather the three would straddle Old Nellie for a ride.
     "(Nellie) wasn' t really old but was as gentle as a kitten," Bea said.
     At recess the children played hide-and-seek and pom pom pull away.
     "I could outrun any kid that went to school," Bea said. "They was always trying to get me on their side.”
Country life suited Bea, who fondly remembers the literary meetings and dances held in the school buildings.
     "Everybody was friendly and neighborly," she said. "It was a very happy time."
     After students recited memorized pieces, sang songs and performed comedy skits everyone danced until the early morning.
     "They would hire some musician in the area to play until 2 a.m. but if they could take up a collection (to pay the musician more), they would stay longer," Bea said.
     Bea is an eighth-grade graduate of Middleton School. The one-room schoolhouse is now on display at the Hot Springs County Museum annex.
     "I thought it was a pretty big building," Bea said. "If you could believe it ... they did four squares of dancing in that building.
When Bea was 14, her parents divorced, and her mother and the children moved into a cheap rental house in Thermopolis. 

     In those days Thermopolis residents attended the Whiting Theater to see moving pictures, got their watches repaired at Rothrock's Jewelry Store and could buy a Chevrolet car for $450 at Broadway Garage or a Brownie camera for $2 at Herod's Pharmacy. Ladies clothing stores such as Gugenheim Co. and the Parisian Garment Shop sold petticoats and corsets, velvet hats, hosiery and bed sheets. At Palace Clothing or the Harrison's Tailoring Furnishing, menswear included boys knee pant suits, dress Stetson hats and suits. Jacoby Byars Co. offered household furniture and undertaking while tires were sold for $12.50 each at Thermopolis Hardware.

 

Depression hits

     When Bea married James C. Slane in Worland in 1933 the country was in a depression and the Slanes lived from "foot to mouth," Bea said. Jim's family had staked a claim in the Lucerne area north of Thermopolis and owned business property in Thermopolis before the Wyoming Territory received statehood. But that early wealth was not enough to ease the poverty of the time.
     "We went from pillar to post work," Bea said.
     She did her part by working odd jobs for 25 cents an hour.
"It sounds worse than it was," she said, determined to maintain her positive outlook.
     Until the late 1940s Bea and Jim lived on his parent's Lucerne farm. Their oldest child, Clyde, was born on the farm in 1935.
     After the Slanes moved to Thermopolis, Richard and Dorothy joined the family. While giving birth to her sons, Bea received help from her mother and "Grandma" Richardson, a midwife who delivered her own five children, an amazing act for fortitude and self-sufficiency. According to Bea, Richardson ran a maternity home where she took in mothers who couldn't afford hospital care.
     "She delivered half the county," Bea said.
     Dorothy was born at home with the help fo Bea's mother and mother-in-law.

Hard times and lean years

     Many events from Bea’s past are now a part of history books, such as the Spanish Influenza. It hit Hot Springs County when Bea was 8 years old.
     According to the Oct. 11, 1918, issue of the Thermopolis Independent Record, to check the spread of the deadly virus the Wyoming Health Department ordered all buildings and public places where people met closed, including schools, churches, theaters, pool halls and lodges.
     Many people, young and old, often died after pneumonia developed.
     In a time before penicillin, an article in the newspaper offered little encouragement. “Nature is the only cure,” it stated.
     Two of the many victims were Bea’s young aunt and uncle, Elmer and Ruth David, ranchers on Mud Creek 12 miles west of Thermopolis. Ruth died at 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Elmer at 6 p.m. They left behind a 2-year-old son, Joe.
     “It’s something you never forget,” Bea said. “It’s a terrible thing.”
     That same week another couple and their baby died. The Dec. 27, 1918, Independent Record reported the “deaths of members of two families are the saddest circumstances yet chronicled in the history of the county during this devastating epidemic.”
     Bea’s family kept orphaned Joe until his grandfather came from Illinois to get him.
     Those who were well took care of the sick. Bea remembers a doctor from Thermopolis who came to check on them. The entire family was sick except for Jack, the youngest. Those who contracted the flu would cough and vomit blood, Bea said.
     So many people were dying across the nation that local undertakers were having difficulty getting enough caskets to bury the dead. According to Bea, bodies were stacked on the frozen ground waiting for burial once it thawed. A makeshift hospital was opened on New Year’s Day in the Hollywood building at 517 Broadway to treat flu patients. It closed Feb. 7.
     All this occurred as soldiers were returning from World War I.. Thermopolis news articles reporting the severity of flu and deaths were scattered amid letters from soldiers, pleas to buy war bonds and news of injuries and death on the battlefield.
     Bea can still recite war songs word for word. She remembers the farewell gatherings to send young men off to war and how it felt when she realized it could be the last time they would see them alive.
     There was “joy in camp” when soldiers came back, she said.
Bea has lived her life with the belief all citizens should give back to their country. She was active in PTA (Parent-Teacher Association), Scouts and civil defense preparedness and she took nursing courses through the American Red Cross.
     During World War II the county prepared its citizens for possible attack. Those involved with civil defense preparedness went through a drill in which they responded to a fake bombing and practiced bandaging “injured” people and transported them to the hospital.
     Bea was also among those who were pared by twos to watch for foreign airplanes flying over town. She remembers how her young sons were mad at her because she had difficulty identifying the aircraft.
     “They all looked the same to me,” she laughed.
     As she enters her 90th decade in the new millennium year, Bea has a deep appreciation for the blessings of life.
“We were probably poor but very rich because I have this heritage I love forever,” she said.

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