My name is Juanita Mae Wilson Miller. I was born in a small town in Tina, Missouri, not far from Carrolton and Chillicothe, Missouri on November 17, 1908. That is east of Kansas City, Missouri. My mother was Minnie Mae Yehle Wilson, my father William Bert Wilson. Both were born in Missouri. My Grandpa Yehle had a brick kiln and lumberyard in Tina.

My first memory is getting ready to move to Kansas City. We lived there for a few years, maybe two. I had a darling Aunt Ethel who lived there. My Mother, Aunt Ethel and I would walk to a certain place to get on a streetcar. One of the things I remember so much happened on our way to catch the streetcar. I had on a pretty white muff and fur set and a warm coat, it was white also. Both my mother and aunt kept telling me to be careful and not fall. Well, guess what I did? I reached the end of the sidewalk, looked both ways, then started across the street, fell flat on my face, white fur, muff and coat into a gooey mud puddle. Of course I cried.

They took me back to our house and I suppose they cleaned me up, dressed me in clean clothes. I guess I had another coat, but not another white coat, muff and fur.

I remember being on the streetcar; there was an opening in the wall where the window would roll down. I was a very curious little three or four year old. I wondered what was down in that crack, besides the window. So I decided to put a little hankie I had in my pocket down in that crack. As you can guess I never saw my pretty little hankie again.

The next thing I can remember was moving to La Junta, Colorado. I know I wasn't five years old yet. I remember once we had company. I had been taught not to go to the table until my mother told me I could. Our company had a little boy about my age. He got up on a chair, then on to the table, helped himself to a piece of the meat that was in a platter, on the table.

I remember laying on my stomach in the yard, watching a parade go by.

We lived upstairs in an apartment house. In an apartment on the lower floor lived a family that had a boy and girl. They would come to our house while the father slept; he worked nights and slept days. One time after they had been in our apartment for quite awhile the mother called them to come eat. In a few minutes the little girl came upstairs to our apartment. She reached under the seat on several of the chairs. My mother asked her what she was looking for.

She says, "Our gum. We chew it during the day while my Daddy is sleeping, then when he wakes up he wants it and we put it under one of these chairs in your apartment." I guess she found it.

I lost a pretty doll I had received for Christmas. I looked everywhere but never could find it. The toilet in one of the apartments stopped up, a plumber was called. He worked quite awhile, finally found what was causing the toilet to be stopped up. My dolly had been put into the toilet. You can imagine my heartache when I saw my poor dolly who was filthy. She had to be put in the garbage. You can imagine that I did not enjoy playing with that little girl anymore.

Next we moved from La Junta, Colorado to Montpelier, Idaho. My mother's brother worked for a railroad up there and got my Daddy a job with that same railroad. In this town were many Indians, mothers with babies in back packs on their backs. One mother was in a little store at the time my mother and I were there. I was fascinated with that little Indian baby in the cradle, or backpack on the mother's back. The baby was hungry I'm sure. So the mother bought a banana for the baby, gave one half to the baby, ate the other one half herself. The baby had been crying, but quit when the mother gave one half the banana to the baby. She would jump up and down, hoping to quiet the baby. As soon as she would stop jumping the baby would try to put the banana in his mouth. But as she kept up the jumping every few minutes the poor little baby had no more than got the banana in his mouth before the mother would jump, the baby would miss his mouth. The banana would miss his mouth but be all over his poor little face. I don't remember if he ever got to eat any of the banana or not.

Next I remember living in Denver, while my Daddy and several of his friends were going to a small town in the mountains near Steamboat Springs to work on opening up a new mine.

No house for the workers to live in had been built yet. There was just one house that was used as an eating place. My mother was going to help the lady running the small hotel. We had a very small tent close to it. There was a mattress, a water bucket and wash pan sitting on a box. The lady running the hotel had a son about five years old, just my age. He kept teasing me, which I hated. After putting up with his teasing as long as I could I picked up a board and hit him with it.

After a month or so a tent house was put up for my parents and me to live in. It had a wooden floor, the walls were wood about two or three feet up from the floor. Then the rest of the walls and roof were canvas. Over the tent was another canvas roof, called a "fly" that kept the snow off the tent in which we lived, keeping it a little bit warmer. Though there was a small cookstove in one end of the tent and a small heating stove in the other end, after my mother got breakfast, before she could get the dishes washed, the coffee left in the bottom of the coffee cups would freeze. So you can guess it was very hard to keep the "home fires" burning and keep it warm in there.

The only way we got water was to go to a river that wasn't very far away, break a hole in the ice and dip the water up.

It wasn't long until there was a real epidemic of typhoid fever, caused by the water being polluted from the several small towns to the east, Steamboat Springs being the largest one. My mother boiled all the water we used, so we escaped getting typhoid fever, but before some knew what caused it there were several severe cases in the town of Bear River.

The first Christmas I can remember was in that little tent. By this time a few houses had been built, one was used as a schoolhouse. I remember going to a Christmas program, I was too young to go to school, but the three of us went to the program. Each child received a small sack of candy and an orange. Then when we got home I was so sad that Santa had not come to my home. But Mama and Daddy told me he would probably come after I went to sleep. Well, he did. He brought a tiny set of doll dishes, a tiny doll bed with a tiny pillow and blanket and a doll. I was so happy.

The best birthday I had was when I was six years old. My mother made red Jell-O, it was the first I had ever tasted it.

Then later on a house was built for us, it was down in sort of the river bottom, but since the river hadn't gone over its banks the year we lived in the tent, no one thought it would ever go over the bank, but it did.

Before that a new schoolteacher came to live with us, Miss Coin was her name. She and I had to share a room. She was engaged to a man from a town several miles to the west, near Hayden. He gave her an engagement ring, which she wore most of the time. All at once the ring disappeared and she accused me of taking it. It snowed that winter, she had washed some clothes, put them on a line in the back yard. She got mad about the ring disappearing and moved in with another family who lived close to the school.

When the snow began to melt and before the river went out of its banks my mother was hanging out clothes one day when she saw that ring in the path where Miss Coin had lost it. If my mother hadn't found it when she did the river would have washed it away as it came in the yard of that little house when it went out of the banks.

There was a company store in Bear River. It was owned by the coal company that owned the land and mine in Bear River. The mine closed down one winter and the store ran out of everything to eat but beans and bacon. There was a town to the west not as far as Hayden, called Mount Harris. It had a larger store that had more food than the Bear River store had. So some of the men walked to a town called Milner where a bridge was being put across the Bear River (called Yampa River now) so they could earn the money to buy food at the store in Mount Harris. Times were very hard but everyone was suffering the same hard times. My father did work on that bridge to get food for us.

The coming spring my parents took up a homestead about five miles up a canyon from Mount Harris. Daddy cut logs and hired some men to help him, they built a log cabin. We moved in when there was just one half floor in the log cabin. There was a spring about one half a block from the cabin. We carried our water from it.

One time my Grandma Yehle and an Aunt Ella, and her son Frank came to visit us. By this time my Daddy had built another room on the log cabin, but it was out of lumber, not logs. There was a field growing on the homestead. Frank said we could get some straws from the wheat field, lay down close to the spring and drink water through the wheat straws. We did and I fell in, head first. I could not get out. Frank pulled me out. If he hadn't been there I might have drowned. My Daddy walked to work every morning; he worked as a carpenter in Mt. Harris that summer. When he got home he gave me a spanking. I'm sure I would never have tried to drink water from the spring through a straw ever again anyway. Then he made a top over the spring out of lumber so I could never again fall in.

When I was just a kid we had no church to go to but my Mother and Daddy had a huge Bible with so many pictures, along with stories about different people of Bible times. My Mother would read those stories to me and I can still see in my mind's eye the pictures that went along with the stories. My Daddy could really sing the old church songs, I can remember them so well, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," "In the Garden," "The Old Rugged Cross," "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." We had a songbook with all those good old songs in it.

Daddy played the fiddle and could dance a jig, which always tickled me. He has told me about when he was about ten years old he went to a county fair and won $10 in a fiddle contest and another $10 in a jigging contest.

We were real pioneers. My mother could and did shoot anything that she thought would harm anyone. I remember once a small brown dog came to our homestead, it looked very queer, had foam on its mouth. She sent me to the log cabin, said not to come out until I was told to come outside. She got a gun Daddy kept in the house and shot the dog. I'm sure he was a mad dog, rabid. Then she put a wash tub over it until Daddy came home from work when he buried it. No one ever came around to see if we'd seen a dog so we were sure he had wandered to our house. But my mother was afraid the dog would bite either the cow or me or maybe the horse we had at that time. There were coyotes and I'm sure many other wild animals around as we were very isolated.

Our closest neighbor was down the canyon, a mile or so. When it got dark, my mother would shut up the cow, horse and chickens and we would go into the cabin, close the door and wait for my Daddy to come home. I remember how scared Mama and I would get when the coyotes would howl and believe me it was enough to scare anyone.

We always had a garden, Mama would have a lot of good things growing, potatoes are one thing I recall. In fact Daddy had a whole field of them one year. When it came harvesting time Daddy said he would give me 50 cents if I would help. Well, I tried to do a good job. When we were finished digging or picking up those potatoes he said I had done such a good job he'd give me $1. That was the first money I'd ever earned and I was so proud of it. He had a wagonload of potatoes to take to town. I'm sure he didn't get paid very much for them, as times were very hard and no crops brought much money.

Mount Harris was west of the homestead, we moved there that winter. There were no empty houses, only a boxcar with a door and several windows in it. We moved into it. We always had a cow and some chickens. Daddy fixed a shelter for the livestock. One morning my mother found that the cow had got loose and run off. She started to track her, had to go many miles before she found her, but she did not give up until she had that cow.

I remember one time when I was about six or seven years old a kid took me riding on his sled, we went so fast he couldn't stop it and ran into an old piece of wood or something. Anyway I cut my chin very bad, had stitches taken in it. I'm sure I was a healthy child, living in the outdoors a lot because I can't remember going to the doctor hardly at all.

I went to a school in Mt. Harris. At Christmas we school children put on a program. A real good friend of mine, Wanda Hurst and I were to sing "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem." She was to sing one verse, we both were to sing the chorus, then I was to sing the second verse and so on through the song. When we each had sung a verse and the chorus she started to sing the third verse and I also was singing it when she put her hand over my mouth until she was through the third verse. I think I was eight or nine years old that year.

Then back to the homestead the next summer. The following winter we moved to Bear River, where my Daddy was still a carpenter. We lived in what was called a company house. There was no school in Bear River that year so all the kids went to school in Mt. Harris, which was about two miles to the west. My Daddy had always told me if I was punished in school he would punish me at home too. So I tried to be very good. One day two very ornery boys who lived in Bear River were passing notes back and forth. Since one sat in front of me and one in back of me it would look like I was the one doing the note passing. The teacher, who was very strict, saw the note go by me. Of course I got blamed. The teacher made me stand in front of the class for about an hour. You can imagine how terrible I felt, especially since I wasn't guilty of passing notes. That night those two boys who were really the ones passing the notes said they were going to beat me home to tell my Daddy I was punished at school and they hoped Daddy would punish me again. But I was so happy when he didn't believe the boys, but did believe me when I told him what had happened.

When I was about 12 years old my darling Aunt Ethel got real sick, she had T.B. and she wanted Mama to come and take care of her. Daddy had already sold the homestead and the mine wasn't doing very good financially so we went to Crowley, Colorado. We stayed with her until she had a very bad cold, got pneumonia and died. She died the last of that year of 1921.

After her funeral we returned to Bear River where Daddy was a watchman, most of the people had moved away. There was one teacher and just a few kids going to school. All that was left were some memories of that town.

After that last winter when Daddy was a watchman at the mine we moved to Cheraw, Colorado, north of La Junta.

Daddy farmed with my Grandpa Yehle. I milked several cows, they must have been very easy to milk because I didn't mind it at all. That was a terrible year, no crops, Daddy lost all he had saved while working in the mining towns, so we moved to La Junta, he went to work for the railroad in 1923 and worked for them till he retired at the age of 65.