Grandmother returned home on schedule and lived two more busy and cheerful years. She celebrated her eighty-fourth birthday. One morning she called Mettie to her bed and complained, "The old engine isn't hitting on all four right now; so I better rest in bed a while.

She lingered some weeks until many of her children gathered at her bedside. At intervals, she recognized all of them. Then her old heart decided it was time to call it a day. Mrs. JAB went peacefully to sleep.

ADDENDUM

In Chapter twenty, where Mrs. JAB states that her daughter Mettie was a widow.

In 1922 New Mexico had a drought. Jim Lafferty along with others had a government contract to take cattle to Mexico and leased land and increased the herds for two years. Jim saw a way of supporting his family down there.

In the summer 1924 Jamettie and the children went to Mexico. They took the train to Hachita, New Mexico, where Jim met them with an open touring car and drove them to Casa De Piedras 80 miles south of Hachita, New Mexico. It is a very isolated place.

In the summer on 1924 it was just a large well fortified house, in a very large valley, a long way from anything. Jim had a cook and a housekeeper and promised to provide a teacher for the children. Jamettie was probably seeing a lot of disadvantages. No schools, no doctors, no stores, no one to visit with, no church and a language problem. Whatever may have been going on in the battle of keeping the family together in Mexico, Jamettie had a reason to leave and did. In August Edwin had an attack of appendicitis, so after three months in Mexico. Jamettie and the children returned to Alamogordo. Edwin received medical care he so badly needed. Mettie called herself a widow or told mother that she was a widow.

In fact Jim Lafferty chose to stay in Mexico where he felt he could make a better living. Because Mettie, his wife, did not return to Mexico to be with him. Years later Jim got a Mexican divorce and met someone else and had a daughter. Then in 1935 he married yet another young Mexican girl and had four more children, two died as infants. In 1942 when Jim's 3rd wife died after childbirth. He brought their two surviving children, Juan Jim 5 1/2 and Maria Josefina 3 months out of Mexico to San Diego. There the children were under the care of his sister-in-law and his last mother-in-law.

In 1942 when Mettie found out Jim had returned to the United States she wrote to Jim asking him to return to her side in New Mexico. He chose to stay near his orphaned children in San Diego, California. Jim died in San Diego in 1955 he was 80. Mettie knew about his death from her children. Mettie died in El Paso, Texas in 1971, she was 89. She never knew he had another family. At the time only two of her children knew. Ed found out in 1945 and Walter in 1954.

In 1979 I tracked down the surviving four children of Mettie and Jim.

When I attended Marley Lafferty 50 Anniversary, he made multiple copies of the MRS JAB Biography for all to have. He was told by Wanda he could do with it what he wanted and he told those he gave copies to that they could do with it what they wanted. The story is one that needs to be shared. To me "MRS JAB" is the image of a frontier woman who went with her man where few white men had gone before. She went from having a good home back to starting all over again. She was truly the "Pioneering Woman."

Transcribed by Jim Lafferty's youngest child born in Mexico when Jim Lafferty was 67, her birth name is Maria Josefina Lafferty Lujan. Now known as Mary Lafferty Wilson