[Contributed by Eileen Harbert-Convery of Aurora, Colorado
One look at the Harbert children, in their ragamuffin clothes and bare feet and you could tell that they weren’t wealthy - what would you expect from a tribe of kids who grew up in a town called Last Chance? But my father, aunts, and uncles were rich in family. Last Chance, where my father and his brothers and sisters grew up, was little more than a cross roads on the barren plains of Eastern Colorado. Local lore claimed the town got its name after Indians burned down the original settlement. Homesteaders supposedly swore that this was their “Last Chance” to build a town. But old timers knew better. The name really came from Cousin Charlie Harbert’s pitch to passing motorists that his service station was the “last chance for gas” before Kansas.
Last Chance nurtured my father, Jim and his nine siblings. My grandparents, Davy and Zora Harbert, moved there from Putnam County, Missouri, in 1915. The land was completely unlike the eastern farmland they left behind. Flat and featureless, it held the kind of barren beauty that only a dedicated plainsman such as my grandfather could enjoy. He recollected that the grass grew as high as a man’s waist when he first arrived, while the lack of stubborn rocks and tree stumps to clear away made this a cattleman’s paradise. Davy arrived first, homesteading Washington County ranchland near the adjacent claims of his siblings, John Issachar, Orpha Dove, and Lily Ethel. John Issachar, or “Essa,” owned the local general store and served as Last Chance’s first citizen. My grandmother Zora joined Davy the following year, bringing their infant daughter, Margaret, by train to the depot in Genoa. Davy picked them up and carted them across the plains in a buckboard to the earthen dugout cave that would serve as their home for the next few years.
Even when the Harberts moved aboveground, they never strayed far from the soil. With no convenient timber, they constructed their ranch house from the topsoil they broke to make way for new crops. Warm in winter, cool in summer, “soddies,” provided shelter, if not privacy. Homesteaders routinely shared their sod dwellings with a variety of rodents, insects, snakes, and other “varmints,” which, according to homesteader and newspaperman Harold Hamil, precipitated “frequent little crises” for both the human and animal inhabitants. Crowded as it was with the residents of the zero-, two-, and four-legged variety, the Harbert home grew as Davy and Zora added to their family. By the time they built the brown frame ranch house that I remember, the Harberts had ten children-Margaret Floy, Don William, Forest Keith, Fern Maxine, Carl Merlyn, James Warner (my father), Robert Lowell, Opal Celema, Richard David, and Joyce Avonel.
Growing up near Last Chance meant a lot of hard work, occasional danger, and more than a little adventure. My father never cottoned to ranching, but his reminiscences about the old days were full of excitement. The boys made the most of their leisure time by swimming in the stock pond, surfing their buckboard down steep hills, trick riding and roping, “gentling” horses, and putting together scrub teams for “cow pie” baseball (with a saddled pony handy to chase foul balls down nearby gullies). The Harberts shared with their mother, Zora, a celebrated “horse whisperer,” an affinity for animals. In addition to the standard menagerie of mangy dogs and barn cats, they kept bull snakes (one which shared a bed with Uncle Dick for warmth and to keep out rattlers) and a semi-tame prairie dog. Uncle Carl excelled in horse wrangling, both as a competitor in the Deer Trail rodeo and by dazzling us kids with his death-defying equestrian acrobatics. In winter, Uncle Keith collected frost-stunned rattlesnakes to sell for belts and wallets - at least until Grandmother Zora happened across his improvised snake pen in the wood box.
Because of their great disparity in age (Margaret, the oldest, was born in 1915, while Joyce came along in 1938) and because most began work at the ripe old age of thirteen, few of the Harbert clan lived together at any given time. The great age difference meant that some of my older cousins are near in age to my youngest aunt and uncle. Zora and Davy’s youngest, Aunt Joyce, was just six years old when I was born in 1944.
My mother, Myrlyn, tells about my earliest experiences at the ranch, when I was a newborn and my dad had to go away to fight in World War II. My parents parked a small, bullet-shaped trailer in my grandparent’s yard, which served as our home until my father could return. Dad and three of his brothers fought in different theaters of the war. Grandma kept track of them by pinning the location of each on a world map, which hung on her kitchen wall. Keith returned first, keeping my mother up at night talking of his wonderful bride in Australia and his little son, Roger. Carl came home next and won my heart by taking me out for ice cream sundaes, with a “sherry” on top. Then, the event mom was waiting for happened. Dad hopped off of the bus at the highway, strode across the gullies and pastures, and hid in the workshop. He waited there until the family gathered for dinner, then surprised everyone by sweeping into Grandma’s kitchen - everyone, that is, except my mom, who said that she had a premonition that he would return that day.
My own memories of the ranch begin when I was about eight years old, when traveling to and from my grandparents’ made for a long, boring journey. The trip out to the ranch may have been tedious, but our visit promised to be an adventure. My grandparent’s house was always full of people and, in my memory, unfolded into room after large, spacious room. Others may remember things differently, recalling the house as rather snug. But things of such great importance seemed to happen there that each room looms distinctly in my mind. For entertainment, family members gathered together in the living room and dining room, amidst piles of my grandfather’s Zane Grey novels and other westerns. Under the approving gaze of ancestors, housed in oval picture frames, family members improvised stories, or my cousin Raymond played his guitar and sang, accompanied by the fiddles and guitars of my grandparents’ neighbors. Other cousins played energetic renditions of “Chopsticks” on the upright piano in the dining room or donned costumes and danced for our amusement. My precocious cousin Sandra presided over endless Pitch games with my aunts and uncles. Sandra may have held court at the card tables, but the undisputed Pitch champion was my Grandpa, who, though virtually blind, could beat the socks off of anyone.
The kitchen, to the left of the living room, was the women’s domain. Aunts sat in the pantry, so they could visit with my plump, white-haired Grandma and nibble at a pan of freshly made farmer’s cheese that usually sat on the old wooden table. I don’t remember what they talked about, only that their voices made a low comforting sound. I remember Aunt Opal’s warm sweet smile, the same one she still gives me whenever we meet. Aunt Fern always amazed me with her unique talent of kicking the top of the doorway with the tips of her saddle shoes. I remember thinking that Fern was amazingly agile for such an old woman - of course, looking back, she was probably only in her late twenties at the time. Strange as it seems, I don’t remember seeing my own parents much while I was there.
Outside there was always something going on. Next to the shop, my cowboy uncles, Don, Harry, Carl, and Bob, twirled ropes and lassoed anything in sight. Carl performed astonishing riding tricks on his bare-backed horse. He executed shoulder stands on his horse’s back as it galloped around the corral. Jumping off, he chased after the horse, grabbed its tail, vaulted into the air, landed on its back, flipped around and rode off backwards, grinning merrily. It was amazing - and still is - when I recall that strong, smiling, handsome man in jeans, with a fancy rodeo belt buckle and no shirt, muscles glistening in the blistering sun. The uncles next retired for games of baseball and horseshoes in the pasture. Shirtless, in jeans and cowboy boots, and using cow pies for bases, they played and laughed, hollered and whistled.
Meanwhile, we cousins played tag, running up, down, and around the dirt potato cellar. We took long walks to the stock pond, where we sometimes swam, accompanied by inquisitive water snakes. Girls spent endless hours passing their infant cousins around - by the age of eight, each of us were experienced baby wranglers. We also took mischievous pleasure in following Dick and Imo around as they pursued their courtship. Grown-ups warned us continually to watch out for rattlesnakes and not fall into the cattle tank. Such warnings were far from frivolous; everyone heard stories about the unfortunate children who had stumbled across rattlers, while my Uncle Carl, aged five at the time, had saved my father from drowning in the cattle tank when he was three years old. The old windmill turned round and round as we raced through the weather worn outbuildings, inspecting the livestock, climbing the fences and generally amusing ourselves.
Sooner or later, every trip to the ranch culminated in a visit to the outhouse set up along the fence near the shop. This building’s most remarkable feature was the Sears catalog we used for toilet paper, a practical accessory that provided diversion while doing business. There must have been a cutout moon, for I remember studying the pictures in the dim privy before putting the pages to use. Say what you will about progress, life was never as colorful after modern bathrooms, with running water, replaced this old relic. Nevertheless, the ranch’s permanent residents considered indoor plumbing a big improvement.
Other, less prosaic, parts of the ranch stand out as well. Grandma’s garden was a lovely oasis full of flowers and life in the desert land. She beamed with pride as we walked among the plants, admiring her beautiful hollyhocks. Uncle Bob’s basement was cool and exciting, a dungeon full of forbidden surprises. We snuck down to take a peek at his Hawaiian girl statuette, who danced the hula at the tap of a finger, and review his naked lady posters and pens. Three bedrooms were on the main floor. We only peeked into Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom. This dark, private retreat, with its heavy furniture, was Grandma’s refuge during the day. The beds in all of the rooms were high and cushy. No one scolded us when we jumped wildly on the bed in the guest room. My cousins, Elsie, Sandra, and I, often lay on our tummies on that bed sharing girlish secrets and inhabiting a quiet world of our own that seemed removed from time.
I spent very few nights at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, going instead to Uncle Don and Aunt Ruth’s to stay with my cousin Elsie. My adventures as a city cousin continued there. We bottle fed lambs, plucked feathers from our dinner after Aunt Ruth had beheaded the poor unsuspecting chicken, and took wild bareback rides on Uncle Carl’s cayuse, Major Corky, hanging onto his mane for dear life as he galloped across the
Prairie. On such adventures, I learned to keep my urban-bred fears to myself, preferring sudden death or dismemberment to being called that most vile of all names, “City Girl.”
In time, Grandma and Grandpa Harbert also moved into the city - not without reservations of their own - once Davy became too sick to continue operating the ranch. But although each of their children followed their own path, my aunts and uncles retained a sense of family unity that brought them back together whenever they got the chance. My parents held frequent reunions at their home, gathering as many of my father’s siblings who could make it and, at times, all ten together along with their extended clans. When my father became ill in 1990, Keith’s son, Roger, and his wife, Joanne, took over at their house in rural Longmont. Margaret’s son, David, and his wife, Bev, hosted a few at their home as well. The winds of change have carried our families farther afield, so that today too many of our get-togethers take place at funerals. Fortunately, the legacy of the Harberts is much more than a memory. As I look at the great-great grandchildren of Zora and Davy, I see talents and characteristics that make me remember the past and the rich experiences we shared together.
When I was little, I used to nap on the back seat of my parents’car as we made our way back to the city after a long, thrilling, exhausting visit to the ranch. In those innocent days before seat belts, I used to lay back to watch the moon follow us across the sky on our way home. Later, I tied these memories to John Denver’s songs about the moon trailing the car and grandma’s feather bed. Listening to these songs brings a lump in my throat as I yearn for those bygone days and the shadow people who so vividly inhabit my memory. On my final visit to Last Chance, I stared down at the vacant plot where the ranch once stood and conjured up the image of the house and shop, the corral, the garden, even the outhouse, and, most of all, the beloved people who lived their lives there with such unlimited joy. I heard the laughter and the magic of what had been - one final time.
Last Chance nurtured my father, Jim and his nine siblings. My grandparents, Davy and Zora Harbert, moved there from Putnam County, Missouri, in 1915. The land was completely unlike the eastern farmland they left behind. Flat and featureless, it held the kind of barren beauty that only a dedicated plainsman such as my grandfather could enjoy. He recollected that the grass grew as high as a man’s waist when he first arrived, while the lack of stubborn rocks and tree stumps to clear away made this a cattleman’s paradise. Davy arrived first, homesteading Washington County ranchland near the adjacent claims of his siblings, John Issachar, Orpha Dove, and Lily Ethel. John Issachar, or “Essa,” owned the local general store and served as Last Chance’s first citizen. My grandmother Zora joined Davy the following year, bringing their infant daughter, Margaret, by train to the depot in Genoa. Davy picked them up and carted them across the plains in a buckboard to the earthen dugout cave that would serve as their home for the next few years.
Even when the Harberts moved aboveground, they never strayed far from the soil. With no convenient timber, they constructed their ranch house from the topsoil they broke to make way for new crops. Warm in winter, cool in summer, “soddies,” provided shelter, if not privacy. Homesteaders routinely shared their sod dwellings with a variety of rodents, insects, snakes, and other “varmints,” which, according to homesteader and newspaperman Harold Hamil, precipitated “frequent little crises” for both the human and animal inhabitants. Crowded as it was with the residents of the zero-, two-, and four-legged variety, the Harbert home grew as Davy and Zora added to their family. By the time they built the brown frame ranch house that I remember, the Harberts had ten children-Margaret Floy, Don William, Forest Keith, Fern Maxine, Carl Merlyn, James Warner (my father), Robert Lowell, Opal Celema, Richard David, and Joyce Avonel.
Growing up near Last Chance meant a lot of hard work, occasional danger, and more than a little adventure. My father never cottoned to ranching, but his reminiscences about the old days were full of excitement. The boys made the most of their leisure time by swimming in the stock pond, surfing their buckboard down steep hills, trick riding and roping, “gentling” horses, and putting together scrub teams for “cow pie” baseball (with a saddled pony handy to chase foul balls down nearby gullies). The Harberts shared with their mother, Zora, a celebrated “horse whisperer,” an affinity for animals. In addition to the standard menagerie of mangy dogs and barn cats, they kept bull snakes (one which shared a bed with Uncle Dick for warmth and to keep out rattlers) and a semi-tame prairie dog. Uncle Carl excelled in horse wrangling, both as a competitor in the Deer Trail rodeo and by dazzling us kids with his death-defying equestrian acrobatics. In winter, Uncle Keith collected frost-stunned rattlesnakes to sell for belts and wallets - at least until Grandmother Zora happened across his improvised snake pen in the wood box.
Because of their great disparity in age (Margaret, the oldest, was born in 1915, while Joyce came along in 1938) and because most began work at the ripe old age of thirteen, few of the Harbert clan lived together at any given time. The great age difference meant that some of my older cousins are near in age to my youngest aunt and uncle. Zora and Davy’s youngest, Aunt Joyce, was just six years old when I was born in 1944.
My mother, Myrlyn, tells about my earliest experiences at the ranch, when I was a newborn and my dad had to go away to fight in World War II. My parents parked a small, bullet-shaped trailer in my grandparent’s yard, which served as our home until my father could return. Dad and three of his brothers fought in different theaters of the war. Grandma kept track of them by pinning the location of each on a world map, which hung on her kitchen wall. Keith returned first, keeping my mother up at night talking of his wonderful bride in Australia and his little son, Roger. Carl came home next and won my heart by taking me out for ice cream sundaes, with a “sherry” on top. Then, the event mom was waiting for happened. Dad hopped off of the bus at the highway, strode across the gullies and pastures, and hid in the workshop. He waited there until the family gathered for dinner, then surprised everyone by sweeping into Grandma’s kitchen - everyone, that is, except my mom, who said that she had a premonition that he would return that day.
My own memories of the ranch begin when I was about eight years old, when traveling to and from my grandparents’ made for a long, boring journey. The trip out to the ranch may have been tedious, but our visit promised to be an adventure. My grandparent’s house was always full of people and, in my memory, unfolded into room after large, spacious room. Others may remember things differently, recalling the house as rather snug. But things of such great importance seemed to happen there that each room looms distinctly in my mind. For entertainment, family members gathered together in the living room and dining room, amidst piles of my grandfather’s Zane Grey novels and other westerns. Under the approving gaze of ancestors, housed in oval picture frames, family members improvised stories, or my cousin Raymond played his guitar and sang, accompanied by the fiddles and guitars of my grandparents’ neighbors. Other cousins played energetic renditions of “Chopsticks” on the upright piano in the dining room or donned costumes and danced for our amusement. My precocious cousin Sandra presided over endless Pitch games with my aunts and uncles. Sandra may have held court at the card tables, but the undisputed Pitch champion was my Grandpa, who, though virtually blind, could beat the socks off of anyone.
The kitchen, to the left of the living room, was the women’s domain. Aunts sat in the pantry, so they could visit with my plump, white-haired Grandma and nibble at a pan of freshly made farmer’s cheese that usually sat on the old wooden table. I don’t remember what they talked about, only that their voices made a low comforting sound. I remember Aunt Opal’s warm sweet smile, the same one she still gives me whenever we meet. Aunt Fern always amazed me with her unique talent of kicking the top of the doorway with the tips of her saddle shoes. I remember thinking that Fern was amazingly agile for such an old woman - of course, looking back, she was probably only in her late twenties at the time. Strange as it seems, I don’t remember seeing my own parents much while I was there.
Outside there was always something going on. Next to the shop, my cowboy uncles, Don, Harry, Carl, and Bob, twirled ropes and lassoed anything in sight. Carl performed astonishing riding tricks on his bare-backed horse. He executed shoulder stands on his horse’s back as it galloped around the corral. Jumping off, he chased after the horse, grabbed its tail, vaulted into the air, landed on its back, flipped around and rode off backwards, grinning merrily. It was amazing - and still is - when I recall that strong, smiling, handsome man in jeans, with a fancy rodeo belt buckle and no shirt, muscles glistening in the blistering sun. The uncles next retired for games of baseball and horseshoes in the pasture. Shirtless, in jeans and cowboy boots, and using cow pies for bases, they played and laughed, hollered and whistled.
Meanwhile, we cousins played tag, running up, down, and around the dirt potato cellar. We took long walks to the stock pond, where we sometimes swam, accompanied by inquisitive water snakes. Girls spent endless hours passing their infant cousins around - by the age of eight, each of us were experienced baby wranglers. We also took mischievous pleasure in following Dick and Imo around as they pursued their courtship. Grown-ups warned us continually to watch out for rattlesnakes and not fall into the cattle tank. Such warnings were far from frivolous; everyone heard stories about the unfortunate children who had stumbled across rattlers, while my Uncle Carl, aged five at the time, had saved my father from drowning in the cattle tank when he was three years old. The old windmill turned round and round as we raced through the weather worn outbuildings, inspecting the livestock, climbing the fences and generally amusing ourselves.
Sooner or later, every trip to the ranch culminated in a visit to the outhouse set up along the fence near the shop. This building’s most remarkable feature was the Sears catalog we used for toilet paper, a practical accessory that provided diversion while doing business. There must have been a cutout moon, for I remember studying the pictures in the dim privy before putting the pages to use. Say what you will about progress, life was never as colorful after modern bathrooms, with running water, replaced this old relic. Nevertheless, the ranch’s permanent residents considered indoor plumbing a big improvement.
Other, less prosaic, parts of the ranch stand out as well. Grandma’s garden was a lovely oasis full of flowers and life in the desert land. She beamed with pride as we walked among the plants, admiring her beautiful hollyhocks. Uncle Bob’s basement was cool and exciting, a dungeon full of forbidden surprises. We snuck down to take a peek at his Hawaiian girl statuette, who danced the hula at the tap of a finger, and review his naked lady posters and pens. Three bedrooms were on the main floor. We only peeked into Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom. This dark, private retreat, with its heavy furniture, was Grandma’s refuge during the day. The beds in all of the rooms were high and cushy. No one scolded us when we jumped wildly on the bed in the guest room. My cousins, Elsie, Sandra, and I, often lay on our tummies on that bed sharing girlish secrets and inhabiting a quiet world of our own that seemed removed from time.
I spent very few nights at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, going instead to Uncle Don and Aunt Ruth’s to stay with my cousin Elsie. My adventures as a city cousin continued there. We bottle fed lambs, plucked feathers from our dinner after Aunt Ruth had beheaded the poor unsuspecting chicken, and took wild bareback rides on Uncle Carl’s cayuse, Major Corky, hanging onto his mane for dear life as he galloped across the
Prairie. On such adventures, I learned to keep my urban-bred fears to myself, preferring sudden death or dismemberment to being called that most vile of all names, “City Girl.”
In time, Grandma and Grandpa Harbert also moved into the city - not without reservations of their own - once Davy became too sick to continue operating the ranch. But although each of their children followed their own path, my aunts and uncles retained a sense of family unity that brought them back together whenever they got the chance. My parents held frequent reunions at their home, gathering as many of my father’s siblings who could make it and, at times, all ten together along with their extended clans. When my father became ill in 1990, Keith’s son, Roger, and his wife, Joanne, took over at their house in rural Longmont. Margaret’s son, David, and his wife, Bev, hosted a few at their home as well. The winds of change have carried our families farther afield, so that today too many of our get-togethers take place at funerals. Fortunately, the legacy of the Harberts is much more than a memory. As I look at the great-great grandchildren of Zora and Davy, I see talents and characteristics that make me remember the past and the rich experiences we shared together.
When I was little, I used to nap on the back seat of my parents’car as we made our way back to the city after a long, thrilling, exhausting visit to the ranch. In those innocent days before seat belts, I used to lay back to watch the moon follow us across the sky on our way home. Later, I tied these memories to John Denver’s songs about the moon trailing the car and grandma’s feather bed. Listening to these songs brings a lump in my throat as I yearn for those bygone days and the shadow people who so vividly inhabit my memory. On my final visit to Last Chance, I stared down at the vacant plot where the ranch once stood and conjured up the image of the house and shop, the corral, the garden, even the outhouse, and, most of all, the beloved people who lived their lives there with such unlimited joy. I heard the laughter and the magic of what had been - one final time.
____________________________________________________________
Eileen Harbert-Convery's Descendancy from Thomas Harbert (Sr)
- Thomas Harbert (Sr) & Isabelle Wright - of Harrison Co, WV
- Thomas Harbert m. Hannah Jacobs
- Thomas Harbert m. Elizabeth Huston
- Polly Ann Harbert
- Issachar Ichabod Harbert m. Sarah Margaret Calfee
- James W Harbert m. Elma Henrietta Hamlin
- David W Harbert m. Zora Beary
- James Warner Harbert m. Myrlyn Louise Wood
- Eileen Louise Harbert m. William Joseph Convery
Eileen's uncle Carl Harbert - performing his equestrian acrobatics on the ranch at Last Chance, Colorado
Last Chance, Colorado - June 2008