<Begin Segment 13>

TI: I looked and did some research on you and you had these vivid descriptions of the animals in Poston, in particular things like scorpions, coyotes, so tell me about some of that.

RO: Rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes were all over the place. In fact I went out one day to get some water at the end of our barrack and as I was leaning over to turn the faucet on there was a rattlesnake there and that just... so in my later drawings, all rattlesnakes, scorpions. Saw a lot of scorpions, you could see the scorpion's trail in the sand. And in fact I was so fascinated with it that I asked my father for a jar and I scooped up a scorpion and my father helped me put some alcohol in it so I put the lid on it and I put that scorpion bottle right next to my cot. That was my pet, we weren't allowed pets in camp.

TI: But what did the alcohol do?

RO: Killed the scorpion.

TI: Okay, so it really wasn't a pet, it was more or a specimen I guess.

RO: Right, I mean it would've eventually died anyway but my father helped. Maybe I kept it alive until it died and my father put... I can't recall the sequence but that scorpion became my pet. That's why it shows up a lot in my drawings.

TI: And you also talk about the howling of coyotes at night.

RO: Oh, at night, yes. And the coyotes used to come, you'd hear clang, clang 'cause they would turn over the garbage cans and salvage what they could. But they were a nuisance. But later in my research, the tribes have this mountain, I mean, they value they respect the coyotes. And there's a myth about the coyotes jumping over this certain hill, I probably have all the facts confused here but they have a story in Poston on the Colorado Indian reservation about coyotes.

TI: But when you were a kid you were either frightened or just thought it was a nuisance.

RO: Yeah, it was scary to hear the howling of the coyotes. And one time, this is one thing I do remember, one day a cattle got loose, the tribe's cattle, one of them roamed into the camp and a Native American, Indian on a horseback without a saddle came riding into the camp. And I thought years later, "Is that my wild imagination that that happened? I mean did I really see a cow and an Indian on a horse?" And that stuck with me and years later I talked to one of the chiefs, a Chemehuevi chief, and I said, I asked him, "Did the tribes ever lose cows? Did a cow ever come into our camp? And he said, "Yes." And I said, "Did the Native Americans, did they come riding into our camp if there was a stray cow?" And he said, "Yes," and I thought, oh thank god, that wasn't just my imagination that I was thinking of but that actually happened.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.