ANNIE ELIZA HAMBLIN-LEE

Bright, vivacious, glad to tell her life 's story is Annie Eliza Hamblin Lee. Born February 1, 1864 in Clover Valley, Nevada. Her father William Haynes Hamblin died there, and her mother Betsey Leavitt Hamblin left there when Annie was eight years old and with her uncle Jacob Hamblin went to Kanab, Utah. Her uncle advised them to take their cattle and go to Piarrah (Paria—near Page, AZ), which was then included in Utah, but later became part of Arizona. Later when they came to Arizona to colonize in 1876, they brought about 100 head of cows and horses. They stopped for a short time on the Little Colorado at the settlements already started there. Some of the family had gone to the northern part of the state near the New Mexico line to a place called Bush Valley, now known as Alpine so the others followed. They got there in April 1879 and began at once putting in wheat on land they had taken up, and then built themselves log houses.

The location was beautiful, the valley was surrounded by tall pines and quaking aspen and the grass was getting high enough for the horses and cattle to eat. There were many ice.cold springs in the Mogollon Mountains and quite a stream ran through the valley.

The new settlers planted potatoes, grain such as wheat and barley, the altitude was too high to grow corn and many of the vegetables. The wheat was frost bitten and that made the flour very sticky, and bake it was always black and sticky. After a few years the seasons changed or they got a different variety of seed, for they raised good grain and some of the hardier varieties of vegetables.

In July, of this first year, when everything was growing fine the Indians made a raid. The Commanding Officer at Fort Apache sent word to the settlers to "fort in" as the Indians were on the warpath, so a log fort was quickly constructed and the families all moved in. The roofs were of logs covered with dirt, and most of the floors were dirt, but some of the more ambitious had "punchin" floors (logs smoothed off on one side and fitted together.). In one corner of the enclosure was a large corral made of thick pine logs. All of the animals were kept in there and the men took turns standing guard at night.

Food was very scarce in those days. Their bread was made of barley bought at Springerville, washed and ground in small coffee mills. All had plenty of milk and butter. A few had chickens but they were too valuable to kill. There was an abundance of wild game such as deer antelope and turkey. In the fall there were wild grapes from which a delicious jelly was made, there were "dill berries" (a small red berry) and ground cherries.

Annie is a lover of nature, and says that she had often thought that was the most beautiful mountain scenery that eye ever looked at, especially when frost came and the quaking aspen turned a golden yellow.

Never could these people up in the mountains feel perfectly secure as they were so close to the abode of the Apaches. Always the cattle and horses had to be guarded. The young boys took turns doing this. At one time when Annie’s brother Dwane Hamblin 17 years old, and Will Maxwell two years older herded the horse out in a grassy cove where the horses were sort of protected, the grass was so good and they had herded there every day for a week bringing the horses in at midday when they came for their lunch, but as they had seen no signs of Indians in all that time the boys decided they would leave them long enough to go and eat. When the boys were returning they saw eight Indians ride out of the pines.

The Indians started for the boys, waving their Winchesters. And motioning them toward the Fort, and the boys had sense enough to go, and the Indians started rounding up the horses. The boys rode as fast as they could go to give the alarm. The men had their work teams on their farms farther up the valley, and as luck would have it they just drove in as the boys came up. They hurriedly threw the harness off their horses, mounted them, never waiting to saddle them and took after the Indians. When they saw the men coming they left the horses and started toward the fort, knowing the men would go.back to protect their families and then they drove the horses away. Among them was a pet team belonging to Mrs. Hamblin, Old Carrot and Fan--this team would follow the road when hitched to a wagon, and were so well behaved they did not need a driver, so it was a great loss when they were taken, and when Dwane found his fine gray race horse "Silver Tail" was gone, he swore vengeance on all Apaches. It was not considered safe nor wise to follow the Indians at that time as the fort was so far from other settlements, so the horses that were left were kept in the stables at night. About two weeks after the saddle horses were taken Annie's older brother went out to the stable one morning and found all the work teams gone also those belonging to a neighbor named Burns, so they decided they would have to go after them. This was what Dwane had been hoping for. With the best mounts that were left to them, Mr. Burns, Will and Dwane took a pack horse and started trailing the Indians. Their anger and resentment against the marauders kept them hot on the trail for a day and a half when the older men began to reason that it was no use, that they were just being lured into the Indian country and would all be killed, but the boy would not listen, but said he would follow them till he died rather than to lose Silver Tail. He started on alone. The men looked at the determined boy then at each other, long and earnestly, then turned and followed the kid. They rode across a big mesa, when they heard firing. They secreted themselves as best they could until it ceased then they rode to the brink of the mesa and there had been a fight. When they rode up they saw a bunch of white men and found that it was the sheriff and his possee from another county, and that it was not Indians but a couple of Mexicans that had stole the horses from the stables. Both Mexicans had been killed, and the horses were tied to nearby trees along with two saddled ponies belonging to the Mexicans. The sheriff told the boys to take those horses as their owners were dead and it might in a way pay them for their trouble. So they got their own horses and these two belonging to the Mexicans and started home. They had not gone many miles when they came to a camp and there were two Mexican women. They were young and good looking and neatly dressed. When they saw the Americans leading their horses away they inquired what had happened. The men told them and started to ride away when the girls begged so for their ponies that they had not the heart to take them.

Some of the settlers got paid from the Government for their horses but the lawyer Mrs. Hamblin had employed on the case went to the Spanish American War, the case was dropped and she got nothing for them.

Brother Will bought several teams on time payments and went to Holbrook to work on the railroad. Then the family had their first decent bread in many months. Will got his teams paid for and in the spring went back to Bush Valley to put in the crop. The Hamblin family had established a reputation for honesty and the merchants in Springerville would give them credit from one harvest to the next if necessary.

Widow Hamblin and her family moved to Nutrioso where there was a sawmill, brought in by the Brown Brothers from Pine Valley, Utah. Here they lived in grand style with wood floors, doors, tables and bedsteads. The rough log walls of the front room was lined with an unbleached muslin called "factory". Annie says "I love to think of them days because they were so nice". Someone brought in a rag loom and as soon as their clothes were so worn that they could no longer be patched, they were ripped up, washed and the best parts pressed and used in quilts and the rest torn in narrow strips, then ends sewed together and woven into carpets for the floors. Until a family was fortunate enough to have a carpet the floors had to be scrubbed to a snowy whiteness with sand, and a lye made from cottonwood ashes.

Never a scrap of cloth was thrown away. The smallest pieces were hooked into burlap sacks for rugs. Some very pretty designs were worked out by the artistic fingers of Annie. Wool was bought, washed, carded into bats and put into the quilts for batting. Flour sacks colored with dock root a bright yellow furnished the linings for the quilts. The hooks used for the rugs were made from the heart of the quaking aspen trees.

Goods boxes were used for dressers. These had curtains made of white cloth, and were trimmed with tucks and home made lace. Annie's mother had a fluting iron and the neighbors used to bring their ruffled dresser scarfs to her house to flute the ruffles. Made stiff with a starch made of flour, they stayed clean a long time, because, too, the children were never allowed to go near the dresser nor the bed in the day, a pallet on the floor served as a resting place in the daytime. All pioneer woman took pride in keeping house and yards clean.

Here Mrs. Lee paused in her story to say '"We were very happy as we were good and kind to each other, and honest, too. I always say ‘my angel mother’ when referring to mine, because she was never cross, never raised her hand to strike one of us."

Her school days began in Clover Valley, then in Kanab. She went to Springerville to school and stayed with a cousin. When her shoes wore out she had to quit school and go to work. Never got more than her board and $1.50 a month. Slates were used to write on at school. Annie got to be a fair speller.

In their home modesty was one of the chief virtues, and the front room often served as the family bed room the boys would go outside while their sisters went to bed, the lights were then put out, and boys got into bed and in the morning they would dress before it was light, and the girls would dress in bed.

Just before she was seventeen Annie became the bride of Ezra Taft Lee. They had only met a month before, fell in love at first sight, and were married in September 1880. The wedding took place at noon, a fine dinner was served to the family and friends, and a big dance at night. Annie's uncle Jacob Hamblin, the famous Leather Stocking of the West, performed the ceremony. They could not buy a wedding ring so the groom whittled one out of wood which she wore, and they often laughed about that. Even though they gave a wedding dance the young folks were not content and came to the house and serenaded them with old tin pans, buckets or anything on which they could make a noise.

Mr. Lee was a good worker, he could paint, could make and burn brick and build a house from foundation to roof. Worked so fast that he only took contracts for his building.

Annie recalls one incident that might have been a hazardous one, but at the time she thought nothing of it. She and her husband went over to Fort Apache to move her brother's family back. There is a long steep hill called Seven Mile Hill, and just before they reached the top one of the tires ran off a wheel. It happened on a small level place with a spring near by. At first Mr. Lee thought he could fix the wheel but found he could not but would have to go to Ft. Apache to get help. He hated to leave his wife there alone but she told him she would be all right so he got on the only horse that would ride and rode away. When he got to the Post he got a man to go up the hill with the running gears of his wagon and get the wheel. They took it down to the blacksmith shop and agreed to bring it back as soon as it was fixed. Mr. Lee came back and they waited around the rest of that day. As they were eating breakfast next morning two Indians rode up. They said they were going out hunting. "We gave them their breakfast and they rode away" recounts Mrs. Lee, "We waited and waited for the man to bring the wheel but he did not come so after awhile I insisted on my husband going to see what was the matter. I told him I would sit in the wagon with a 22 rifle across my lap, so he went. I wasn't afraid only I thought I would make myself safe. When Mr. Lee got to the Post he saw the mail carrier and asked him if he would bring the wheel in his buckboard. The driver said he surely would so went and got the wheel. My husband rode back as fast as he could, which wasn't very fast as it was up hill all the way. Just as he rode up, one of the Indians came back. He watched my husband harness the horses, and the mail driver came with the wheel, and the Apache rode away. The buckboard driver looked at me and said 'Madam you should never have done this. When you get on top of the hill you look on the mesa and see the graves of the people the Indians have killed when they have been traveling. The man that carried the mail before me was killed. When you get up you can see the tracks where he swerved his buckboard around among the trees and the Indians shooting at him. 'We saw it as he had told us. We went on to Blackriver before we stopped. There we found a company from Utah waiting for the River to go down so they could cross. We were very glad to meet them. There was a cable across the river to pull a flat boat with a wagon on it. The teams were taken over separate."

"We went on and got my sick brother and his family and started back. When we got to Black River it was raining terribly, and we could only see when it lightninged. We had to cross the river after dark as we were afraid it would rise and we couldn't cross. Then we had to go up an the hill to camp as there was where the wood was. We had a time getting a fire started, but we finally did, got dry, a good hot supper and soon felt better."

Mrs. Lee was the mother of eleven children. When her two eldest were small, they took scarlet fever and diptheria and died within two days of each other.

The family moved to Moab, Utah, lived there two years and then moved onto the Gila. When they started back to Arizona., Annie had a baby only two weeks old. The trip was a hard one, although they were fixed as comfortably as possible. They had two teams and wagons; Mr. Lee drove one of them and Annie drove the other. After passing Fort Apache, when they had reached the top of the hill, an Indian squaw on her horse caught up with them. She had a letter from her cousin who was in school, and though she spoke some English, she wanted Mrs. Lee to read the letter for her. This she gladly did. Mrs. Lee had some left-over baking powder biscuits and asked the Indian woman if she wanted them. She was glad to get them and then told her not to go any farther, that the Indians had broken the reservation and that they were all on top of the hill a little ways off, that they were all drunken on tizwen and were awful mean when they were drinking. Mrs. Lee called her husband and told him what the squaw had said. They were then in the narrowest part of the canyon, there was only room to turn out of the road and draw the two wagons together. By the time they had taken care of the horses and had a fire started, it was getting quite dark. Mrs Lee spread a Navajo blanket before the fire and placed four of the children on it leaving the baby asleep on the wagon. From their campfire, they could see the spark from the Indians' fire and could hear the Indians whooping and yelling. Suddenly they heard a horse coming down the road and a moment later, an Indian and his squaw turned and came to their fire. Both were drunk and jumped from their horses. The old squaw could hardly stand, she reeled around the fire and asked for some of the bread Mrs. Lee was cooking. She gave her part of the cake she had in the frying pan. In the meantime, Mr. Lee had taken the Indian off to one side and had given him a smoke. The squaw suddenly went to the blanket where the children were and with her finger marked across them and said, "We are going to cut you up with our knives tonight and kill all of you." The Indian had noticed the squaw and ordered her to go away and leave the children alone. He then put her on the horse and climbing up in front, rode away to Fort Apache for more "tizwen."

As soon as supper was over, Mr. Lee put out the fire and put the children in his wagon and he sat in there and kept watch over there that night. The next morning they arose early and started on once more. It was twenty miles to Black River and they didn't stop until they got there.

The next day they reached the Gila River, and though the river had recently been very high, they drove up to the bank and were about to drive in when some men on the other side of the river yelled to them and told them not to cross there on account of quick sand. Mr. Lee turned to his wife and told her they might as well have dinner, that the only thing they could do was to travel along on that side of the river until they could find a place where they could cross. This was a difficult matter as the old road had long been abandoned. After much anxiety over the Indians and a very hard journey Safford was reached. Here the Lees settled for awhile and then moved to Layton, Arizona, to rear their family.

When the World War broke out three of Mrs. Lee's sons enlisted. Two of them went to France. Of this trying time Mrs. says "When my boys took the train to leave for war I said as I kissed them goodbye 'Boys I would rather see you die on the battle field than to see you hiding while brave men go to fight for your country’”. They returned but two of them died from the effects of the war, all brought honorable discharges, so the mother was satisfied.

Dainty little, unassuming, Mrs. Lee, beautiful in spite of the years and hardships she has endured, is still very active and spends her time in usefulness. Most of her winters are passed in the sunny Salt River Valley, where with her many friends she often lives over the stirring days so familiar to all Arizona Pioneers.

Anna Eliza Hamblin Lee died in a rest home in Salt Lake City, Utah March 15, 1954.