Pioneer woman couldn't be tamed

PORTALES — Mabel Thomas was a pioneer woman before anybody thought about blogging or cooking on TV.

Oh, she could cook. But she also ran cattle, raised turkeys, broke horses and battled the cussed buffalo that had no respect for her garden fences.

Mabel came to eastern New Mexico about 1904 with her brothers, her mother and her dying father. She was about 12 when the family settled southwest of Portales.

When her dad died soon after they arrived at the homestead called Tinsley Crossing, Mabel’s mother began receiving a Civil War widow’s pension of about $35 a month.

“It might have been closer to $12, but it was enough to buy seed and they managed fine,” said Judy Vance Crume, Mabel’s granddaughter who still lives in Portales.

“Granny, she had a garden, she planted trees. She loved to dig and plant things, so they had an orchard. But her main thing was to raise turkeys. And she was a horse whisperer; they didn’t have a term for it then.”

Mabel’s brothers would round up wild horses, Mabel would make “eye contact,” Crume said, and when she’d finished taming them enough to ride, the family would sell them to the Army.

Mabel stayed on the homestead until she was in her early 20s. That’s when she went to work at a railroad boarding house in Amarillo.

“The way she got the job, the lady that hired her handed her a knife and a potato and said to see how fast and thinly she could peel the potato,” Crume said.

“She did it pretty quick and pretty thin.”

She met railroader William Vance in that Amarillo boarding house. They married and had children.

Crume said Vance was somehow injured and attempted to sue the railroad. “But the railroad was quite a bit bigger,” she said. “He did not succeed. (Soon after), he caught a train and just never came home.”

Mabel returned to Tinsley Crossing, where she caught the eye of her second husband, Benjamin Franklin Freeman.

“The second one she married because his place was adjacent to hers and she needed more graze for her cattle,” Crume said. “He couldn’t tame her, so he moved back to his house and just visited regularly.”

Crume said her granny’s second marriage began breaking up after a disagreement over boarding school for the kids.

“She never lived with him again after that,” Crume said.

Mabel Thomas Vance Freeman took child raising as seriously as she took horse taming and turkey production.

“My dad one time, he said something — I don’t know if it was ‘gosh’ or maybe ‘damn’ — but she had him write 500 times, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’” Crume said.

“Five hundred times. She thought you needed to be articulate enough that you didn’t need to cuss.”

Mabel was 70 when she died in 1962.

This is a good time to tell her story because March is Women’s History Month and Wednesday was International Women’s Day.

And because the pioneer woman didn’t have her own TV show a century ago.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]