Yuman shares stories of life in Early Yuma

Betsy Gottsponer's great-grandmother arrived in Yuma 20 years before statehood. Why she decided to get off the train in Yuma is still a mystery.

“We have no idea why she came to Arizona,” Gottsponer said.

As a member of the Genealogical Society of Yuma, Gottsponer, 68, has dug deep into her family's roots. Her family stories reveal a picture of life in Yuma before and after Arizona became a state in 1912.

Her great-grandmother, Rose Graham, was born in 1868 in Indiana. A widow, she arrived in Yuma with a 2-year-old son in 1892.

That same year, she married W.T. Alderson, whom a newspaper described as the “town drunk” when hit by a train in 1898, making Rose a widow for the second time.

From that marriage, she had two daughters, Ruby, born in 1893, and Aleine, Gottsponer's grandmother, born in 1897.

When Rose first came to Yuma she lived in an adobe house with no windows, just holes to let the breeze in.

“She would sweep the dirt floor and the front yard so no one would track in dirt,” Gottsponer said.

In that time mostly everybody lived in adobe homes so when the river overflowed and the town flooded, “houses would melt and they would have to start over.”

In 1896 Rose and her husband moved into a house with real floors. It was located in the area of Orange Avenue and 3rd Street.

In the summer time, because it got very hot, Rose cooked the main meal in the morning when it was cooler. They ate it at noon and had a light dinner.

“It was too hot to prepare a meal in the afternoon,” Gottsponer noted.

Rose married Gus Livingston in 1901, a week after he was elected sheriff. Born in 1861 in Texas, Livingston arrived in the Arizona Territory in 1890. He had been a merchant in Ehrenberg and came by team and wagon to Yuma to buy supplies.

“It took him five days to get here, and he would stay a week. When reading this, we all wondered why he was coming so often,” Gottsponer said.

As it turned out, supplies were just the excuse.

Sheriff Livingston adopted Rose's children. Together they had a son, Jack, in 1905.

In the summer, they slept on cots in the front yard, with the legs in tubs of water so bugs wouldn't crawl up. They covered themselves with wet sheets to keep cool.

“If they fell asleep while the sheets were still wet, they slept all night. If they were still awake when the sheets dried, they had to get up and wet them again,” Gottsponder said.

They also opened all doors and windows so the breeze would go through the house.

“They called them shotgun houses. They opened the front door and the back door and you could shoot a gun and the bullet would go straight through without hitting anything,” Gottsponer explained.

In the winter, they set the wood stove in the middle of the house to keep it warm.

“Rose and Gus had a deal. She cooked the meals and he washed the dishes,” her great-granddaughter said.

He did the dishes with a gun on his hip. “He always took off his hat in the house, but he wore his gun. Rose wouldn't allow hats in the house.”

His weapon of choice, a shotgun, is now displayed at the Sanguinetti House Museum.

Since a lot of people raised cattle, their main source of food was beef and fresh vegetables. An ice box kept food cold.

“The ice man delivered the ice. I imagine he would come along every other day. There was not a lot in (the ice box),” Gottsponer said, adding that the family also got milk from someone who had dairy cows.

When Aleine grew up, she married a man from England. The marriage ended in divorce, and Aleine lived with her parents until she married Voyle Smith in 1920.

They had two daughters, Gottsponer's mother, Jean, in 1915, and Marjorie, in 1921.

Jean used to tell about the times she wandered the streets in Yuma as a kid visiting relatives. She would then call her mother to say where she was at.

“Surprisingly enough for that time period, they did have a telephone, they had been invented decades earlier. They didn't do much calling because it was a luxury and it was a shared party line so everyone knew what everyone else was doing,” Gottsponer said.

When Jean was about 5 years old, sometime around 1920, she would go “shopping for dinner.” She would have a salad with one relative and an entree with another.

“Rose was a fantastic cook, so she spent a lot of time there,” Gottsponer said.

Jean married Robert Frith, and they had Betsy in 1943.

Sheriff Livingston died in 1930. Betsy's great-grandmother Rose lived until 1955. Her grandmother Aleine died in 1971, and Aleine's sister Ruby died in 1986.

Betsy's mother Jean died in 2008, and her sister Marjorie died in 2005.

They are all buried in Yuma.

Mara Knaub can be reached at mknaub@yumasun.com or (928) 539-6856. Find her on Facebook at Facebook.com/YSMaraKnaub or on Twitter at @YSMaraKnaub.