From Gary Tietjen, Ernst Albert Tietjen: Missionary and Colonizer (Bountiful, Utah: Family History Publishers, 1992), 406–13
Al Tietjen was the last of Ernest Tietjen’s nine children by Emma O. Erickson. He was born in Bluewater on June 20, 1896. Being the baby of the family, he was naturally spoiled by doting sisters. As a young man he was dubbed “Shorty”, “Runt”, and “Shrimp” because he did not gain his full height, six feet four inches, until he was 25 years of age. Not as tall as Joe and Alma, he had a heavier build than they, and had such an imposing stature that he was known by everyone as “Big Al”.
Allen Nielson wrote of him:
“It would not be right to forget about Albert Tietjen, ‘Uncle Al.’ He was not uncle to all the kids in town, but every kid thought he was until they learned better. He was like his two older brothers, large in stature. Wherever he was, he appeared to be in command. He loved to play baseball and if the batter hit a fly ball when he was catcher, it seems that no matter how far he was from the ‘fly’, he made the call that he would take it. He didn’t always make it with very amusing results. It was his intention to make a home run everytime he went to bat. When George Rowley threw his ‘crooked ball’, Al would swing with great force and often struck out. Too many people went to see Al’s actions instead of the ball game.”
As a boy, Al worked on the cattle ranch owned by his brother Joe who was twenty one years older than he. Ernest had so many children that he was not around much. Al said that Joe took care of him and looked after him and was more of a father to him than Ernest was. As a fourteen-year-old he learned to ride the hard way: Joe and Alma put him on a bronc in the middle of a large patch of cactus. It was either ride the bronc or spend days picking the cactus spines out of himself. That bronc taught Al respect, but he rode him. A little later Al and Joe were breaking horses and Joe left for a few days. Al got so mad at one horse that he flew into him, beating and kicking him. When Joe returned and found what Al had done to the horse, he gave Al a whipping he never forgot.
With that lesson under his belt, Al learned to break horses with a gentle hand. He broke horses for many people in the country and he and Chalk Lewis became rather widely known for their skill. Al and Rowdy Hakes participated in many rodeos in what was called a wild-horse relay race. Their object was just to get enough money for a new pair of boots or pants. They won their share of the money.
As a youngster, Al went on a cattle drive from Bluewater to Mexico. About 200 head of Joe Tietjen’s cattle were driven down to the Mormon settlers some 75 miles south of the border. Good breeding stock were brought back to improve Joe’s herds. Being too young to take on all the duties of a driver, he had to spend quite a bit of his time with the Mexican cook. From him, Al learned to speak Spanish fairly well, a skill that was to stand him in good stead a few years later when he went to Mexico on a Mission for the Church. Every now and then on the trip he would get lice from sources unknown. To get rid of them, he learned to put all of his clothes on an ant bed for a few hours. Later he worked on several ranches, including the McMillan ranch near San Mateo.
At one time the rattlesnakes around Bluewater and Prewitt were very numerous. They bit so many cattle and horses that something had to be done. The Government stepped in to help. They gave each cowboy some white cotton balls soaked in a chemical of some kind. The cowboys would squeeze the chemical over the snakes and they would go crazy. When they stopped writhing, Al claimed you could hit them with a stick and they would break in two—fall apart as if they were dry and brittle.
One guy came from “back East” to help brand, etc. Al reported that he was smart-mouthed, boastful, and a know-it-all. Alma, as always, took a hand. Running across a large rattlesnake, he killed it and put it in the man’s bedroll, an easy thing to do because he never made his bed. That night everyone stayed up waiting for the guy to go to bed. Al almost went to sleep before the guy quit talking. When he got into bed and discovered the snake, he started screaming and “went crazy.” He dared not go to bed that night and the next day he packed his things and left.
From Maud Tietjen, Ina Elkins learned that when Al was about sixteen years old, he was working for Joe on the ranch. Al and some other young men found out that there was a gang of outlaws operating nearby and discovered their hideout. They made plans to capture the gang. Joe found out about their plans just in time to intercept them. “Why you danged kid”, he said, “you knew you would have killed them or they would have killed you!” To prevent Al from getting into any more trouble, Joe took him to St. Johns, Arizona, to see President Udall and arrange a call for Al to go on a mission. The call was to Mexico, the country in which Joe had served a few years previously.
In 1911 Pancho Villa began his long struggle for the control of Mexico. The next year the Mormon colonists in Mexico were forced to leave the country, almost at gunpoint. In 1918, when Al went to Mexico as a missionary, the war was still going on. Al and his companion, Bert Whetten, were with the Mission President, Brother Bentley, taking a wagon and mule to meet some missionaries. About eight miles out from El Valle Maruda San Buena Ventura, in the direction of Namaquina, they ran into Villa’s rear guard. They were taken prisoner and held for two days and nights. The next morning they were invited to go through the gates and eat breakfast with Pancho Villa. Villa gave them a salva conducta (safe pass), then had a long talk with them. He gave them the history of his becoming a bandido. Some priests had gotten his sister in a family way and he killed a couple of them, and this put him “on the dodge.” When he gained power, he hanged every priest he could find. Whenever he went to a Catholic convent, he blew it up. Some of the girls in the convent, he claimed, “had not seen the sun in seven years.” He would make his people hear what the girls had been through, and how they had been servants. So vehement was his account that Al never forgot his words and took on some of those same feelings about the Catholic Church.
General Villa then showed them the mare which he had stolen in Texas and described his famous escape when he rode through “a cloud of bullets” at Hacienda Vavicary. Villa told them that when the war was over he wanted to be one with the Mormons. Al said he was never treated better by anyone in his life. Ironically, Villa’s followers did not share his feelings about Mormons, and in one town, two Mexican converts were told to renounce Mormonism or die. They chose to die and were executed by firing squad. Villa’s profession of hope so impressed Bert Whetten that years later, as a temple worker, he dreamed that Villa came to him and asked to have certain ordinances performed for him, and Whetten saw that it was done. Because of the war, Al returned to the U.S. Joe and Alma Tietjen had just died and Al’s help on the ranches was badly needed, so he did not return to his mission.
Joe Tietjen had partly raised a Navajo boy called “Jack’s Kid”, and the boy helped him a lot on the ranch. He was going with the granddaughter of a medicine man, Kitis Jolly. From her he learned that the old man had a map, drawn on sheepskin, of Adam’s Diggings. The boy told Al about it and Al persuaded him to steal it. Written on the map was this inscription:
“In the year 1856 about 40 miles south of Fort Wingate the gold belonging to all of us was hid southwest a short distance from cabin at the foot of a cottonwood tree. Indians have killed all of us but two and have burned everything that would burn but do not believe they found gold. We are leaving here at dark—intentions of reaching Arizona. Have guns and ammunition but no provisions.” (Signed) J.J. Adams.
Al, like most of the men in that country, had been fascinated by this story as he heard it from many who had searched for it. With the aid of the map, he never stopped looking, while he was on his hunting trips, for the lost mine. In this search he was joined by thousands of fortune seekers combing the country. The story is related in Frank Dobie’s book, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, using as sources men who were close friends of Al’s.
Al also earned some money from trapping. Garth Tietjen once went in to sell some furs to R.L. Cox, largest fur dealer in the state. He was asked if he was related to Al Tietjen, then told that Al was the best trapper in the state: he had brought in more coyote furs than any other person Cox had ever dealt with.
Al’s great love in life was hunting, a love he shared with his brother Joe. Their favorite area was on Fox Mountain near Reserve, New Mexico. It would take three weeks to get there and three to return, leaving another two or three for hunting. They would jerky the meat to preserve it for winter use. On their last hunting trip Joe stopped at the point of the mountain, got off his horse and sat down under a big cottonwood tree. He told Al that this was the last time he would be coming there to hunt. He took what shells he had left and cached them under the tree for Al’s use when he returned. Al went back years later with a grandson but could not find them.
Al did not care whether he got a deer or not; getting out in the country, camping, and telling stories were the things we went for. Even after he could not see well enough to shoot, he went on the trips. On one occasion he shot a big buck. As he approached the deer, it jumped up and charged him; he had hit a horn and it knocked the deer out temporarily. Al was able to grab a horn on each side of the deer’s antlers, but he could not hold the buck, and it pinned him to a tree. All the while he was yelling for help, and one of his party came to his aid. On another occasion he roped a buck. He got off his horse and tried to tie the deer to a tree. The deer charged, pushed him into a ditch and gave him a bad cut on the nose before he got help. After that Al had a saying for his grandsons: “If you ever rope a deer, he will eat your lunch!”
Al married Rebecca Annis Roundy in December, 1927. She came to Bluewater to stay with her brother, Golden, who had married Clarinda Whetten, Alma’s widow. Six years later they were sealed in the St. George Temple. Al took a job as a fireman on the Railroad. During the winter he and two others were riding in an engine when they looked up the track and saw something that would have stopped any man’s heart: here came another engine directly toward them on the same track! A headon collision was certain. There was nothing to do but jump from the train. As agile as Al was at quitting a horse, he hit on some ice and was badly injured while the others were unhurt. The engines crashed into each other a moment later, but were not derailed. Bruised and bloody, Al had both legs broken above the ankle and both ankles broken. He soon lost circulation to his feet and the awful verdict from the doctors was that gangrene was setting in and both feet would have to be amputated.
A higher power moved Dr. McCormick to try one more thing: he had Al put his feet in very hot water, then plunge them into ice water. This was repeated over and over. The trick worked and circulation was restored; the feet were saved. Al had been rounding up wild horses from the Zuni Mountains in the vicinity of McGaffey; a feat that took considerable riding skill. He captured 650 head with the help of a Mr. Brown and a man called Red and sold them at Coal Basin near Gallup. With this money and the compensation from the railroad for his accident, he bought the Indian trading post at Rocky Point, ten miles west of Gallup.
Al knew a lot about Navajos. He made real friends of the Indians. He traded them ewes for lambs so that they could build up their herds. He bought their wool and ran them “on credit” for a year at a time. He got into the business of buying sheep and cattle for the big buyers who came every fall and speculated in stock. He shipped wool to three different wool companies. In a few years Al had acquired the trading posts at Smith’s Lake, the Painted Desert, and Tohachi. The Park Service bought out his interests at Painted Desert, the gateway to the Petrified Forest. In time his worth amounted to half a million. In the Depression days, that was a fortune. He became one of the Directors of the First State Bank in Gallup, a post he held for perhaps 20 years. As much as Al enjoyed making money, gold was not his God. He could lose a lot of money with good grace. He lost a fortune on the wool crash. He had bought an enormous amount of wool for other buyers when the market crashed and the buyers left Al holding the wool. He had to sell all the stores except Rocky Point to pay the debts. He had a saying that when the going got too tough for others it was just right for him.
Although Al took little interest in the Mormon Church, he would do anything for his family. It was difficult to borrow money in the Depression Years, but Al arranged loans at the First State Bank for numerous family members. When Tom Elkins died, the estate taxes on the ranch were so large that Josephine, his niece, might not have survived them had it not been that Al found a lawyer and proved that the ranch had belonged to her before her marriage and was not part of Tom’s estate. When Al’s sister, May Larson, got sick, she had to be hospitalized. She and her husband were practically destitute. Al paid her hospital bill, took her home for three weeks, then sent many boxes of food home with her.
On another occasion Al got a telephone call from a first cousin he had never met, a Bruce Peterson. Peterson was in California and was on his way to Richfield, Utah. He was returning from World War II and had been with the Flying Dutchmen in England. He had lost his wallet or had it stolen. Al wired him the money to get home on, but heard nothing more from him. Two years later Peterson drove up and asked for “Uncle Al.” He said the reason he never sent the money was because he wanted to meet Al and return the money in person and thank him for the help when he needed it so badly. He stayed and talked for four or five hours.