Homesteaders’ Humor

We went up to the foot of the Nipple Mountains. An old man and his bachelor son had a means of grinding corn into cornmeal. They invited us to stay for dinner. They had a fairly nice place compared to most homesteads.

We got there in the morning and were invited to stay for dinner after we had our corn ground. The son had prepared a roasted chicken. My daddy commented on how good the chicken was.


The man’s son said: “ Yeah, this old hen acted like she was about to die, so we thought we just go ahead and kill her and bake her before she did die.”

The above is an excerpt from Manuel Hastings’s memoirs. His parents homesteaded near Pie Town, New Mexico in the 1930s. His father was James Monroe Hastings (born in 1899). The family received title to the homestead land (640 acres) in May 1946.