Where do I start?

I would like to write a few things about my dad's life. The sad thing about doing that is that I really do not know that much about him. He never sat down and told me about his life. As I go through the material that I have on him, I am beginning to see why he did not want  it known. It was traumatic. All mixed up. Demanding. His roots are almost untraceable. Dad was shuffled from one person to another. He was not wanted by his step-mother and was eventually adopted. He was a young lad growing up in an environment where hard work was all he would ever know. In his day and time no one wanted others to know about their past. It was no one else’s business. So from the small slivers of information that I have been able to glean through the years I set aside this time to put down what I have. He was born dirt poor and he died helping his neighbor.

It started June 30, 1899. That was when my dad, James Dussart, was born in Aguilar, Colorado to Modest (Mike) & Celia (Phiefer) Dussart. In those days Aguilar was a small coal mining town located in the south-eastern part of the state. Mike was born to Louis and Katherine Dussart, and Celia was born to John Phiefer and Amelia Delores Montoya (a Toas Indian).

Louis and Katherine were born in Camier, Belgium. John Phiefer, whose real name was Henry Knerr, was born in Prussia, and Amelia was born near Trinidad, Colorado. John was a tall blond haired individual with a big mustache and clear blue eyes. He had been in the Prussia/Crimea War and had deserted and come to America. He changed his name from Knerr to his uncle’s name Phiefer. One of his Knerr nephews drew the ‘Cats & Jammers’ Sunday paper comic strip for a couple of decades. Amelia was an Indian whose parents were from the Toas Indian Reservation in New Mexico. (I have an affidavit documenting that she was a Chiefs daughter, an Indian Princess even though they don't recognize them as Princesses)

Amelia’s parents had chosen a man for her to marry that she did not like. She and John met and they fell in love. I was told by my cousin Rose that he kidnapped her and they got married.

Baby James Dussart came into this world with all of this heritage piled upon him. The first picture I have of my dad he was two or three years old and was standing beside his mother next to a slab board house. An old wood/coal cook stove can be seen inside the house.

As I recall my dad sitting in the doorway of the house where I was born in 1928 there was not much difference. We, too, had a wood/coal stove just inside the back door of our house. The picture is deceiving because it looks like not much had changed in his life, but it had. With this in mind I will try to fill in some of the blanks.

James Dussart was born six months before the marvelous twentieth century began (06-30-99). Born in the small coal mine camp of Aguilar, Colorado there should have been no way but up for him, but instead of up there were a lot of large pot holes on his road through life. Some would call very large craters.

His dad, Mike, was a coal miner and his mother was a housewife. Times were hard and work was seasonal. Coal was a necessity for almost everyone during the winter months in Colorado. The summer months were looked forward to by some because the coal mines would shut down, usually from May until September. This could vary due to how cold it was.

During the summer months there was very little to do in the coal mining camps. Most of the men would go looking for work either on the farms in the area, or in the large cities. This was not what Mike would do. He would take long walks around the beautiful area looking for outcroppings of coal. The small coal mining town of Aguilar was at the foot hills of the Santa de Cristo Mountain Range of the Rocky Mountains.

When Mike would find an outcropping of coal, he would stake out the place, then place a piece of paper with his name on it under one of four piles of rocks. The next day he would return with pick and shovel and begin digging. Most of the time the outcropping was shallow and soon ran out, but on a few occasions he found a good vein of coal. A good vein meant there was money to be made. Of course, a lot of hard work went into every penny that was made.

The first thing he had to do was dig a sloping area out from the coal as the coal was removed. After much hard work his small coal pile began to grow. Then gunny sacks had to be purchased and the coal placed in the sacks. The sacks were then hauled back to the coal camps and sold. Selling coal in a coal mining camp is like selling ice to people in an ice house, you do not get much for it.

If you lived in a company house on coal mine property you had to buy your coal from the company. Even if you lived off the company property you were expected to buy from them. Only a skeleton crew would work on the summer maintenance crew. Coal was the cheapest then but they’d usually buy from their friends when they could.

Mike would slowly sell his coal. He didn’t make much, but it was better than nothing. The reason for doing it was that he liked having his own business. In those days lots of big coal mines were slope mines. His plans were to file on the land if he ever found a good vein, but it was not to be for him. All of the veins he found ran out but not before he had dug some fairly large holes.

Mike would have probably kept it up and may have found his bonanza coal mine but an accident caused him to be a little leery of working by himself. I have written a short story, which starts on page 103, that I call The Porches. It goes into greater detail about what happened to my grandpa, grandma and my dad. I would say it was the most traumatic time in my dad’s life.

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