Gone to Fetch a Bucket of Water

Dora Imogene Stewart was born at home in 1919. Throughout her growing up years, in the 1920s and the depression years of the '30s, her family moved from place to place, and state to state. As the result of these frequent moves she didn't start school until she was eight years old and after she had finished the 8th grade her mother ended her schooling. As her mother put it at the time, "There's no need for a woman to go to high school." More importantly Dora Imogene was needed at home to help her mother with household chores and caring for several younger siblings. At seventeen she eloped to escape her domineering mother and a year later in January 1938 she was an eighteen year old mother. By the time she was divorced at thirty-seven in 1956 she had six children. She went on, with a job in a small town factory, to buy and pay for her own house (she even managed to pay the mortgage off three years early) and to raise her children on her own. She put in thirty-one years at the factory before retiring at the age of sixty-two in 1981. She enjoyed a long, well-earned retirement. At sixty-seven she hiked the Grand Canyon. She enjoyed her grandchildren and great grandchildren ... by the time she reached her eighties she had over sixty descendants. That count is now over seventy ... and still growing. Her married life started on a winter day in January 1937 when she left a water bucket at a well

Patrick H. Boles was born in Owosso, Michigan and grew up in the nearby small town of Corunna. He arrived in the Southwest courtesy of the U.S. Air Force when he was assigned to a base in Albuquerque, N.M. He received a B.S. degree in biology from Eastern New Mexico University and a M.S. degree, also in biology, from New Mexico State University. He has worked as a biologist, ecologist, and land manager for government agencies in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona. The author has spent over 20 years working with long time ranchers in Arizona and listening to their stories of ranch life and ＂the old days＂. He spent many days roaming over ranches and backcountry afoot, in four wheel drive vehicles, and horseback. He filled several journals with notes on the field work and the conversations with ranchers/old-timers as well as on his own experiences out on the ranches. He has published two novels set in the 1950s on the P Bar J Ranch in north-central Arizona. A third, and final, book in the series is planned. He has also published a biography of Arizona rancher John Lovelace. The author lives in the Southwest with his wife where he is working on other book projects (both fiction and non-fiction), including a Southwestern Field Journal and a history of Camp Date Creek. They have two grown children.