Biography of Art Whitehead
CCC Man, Camp Dalton Wells, Moab, Utah
I am sharing memories of my days in the CCC in southern Utah. A few years back I spent a few hours being interviewed by the University of Utah about my time in the C's. Here is part of that interview.
"I was born in Newark, New Jersey, February 7, 1923. Things were a little rough in the '30s, rough at home and I had two brothers in the CC, two older brothers, one was in Oregon, and one was in Tennessee. My Mother and we were living on the allotment that was coming home which was $21 (each) from my brothers and I figured I wanted to get in on it too. I was only 17 but my Mother consented, she said "O.K.". There wasn't any work around so I joined up and that made three of us and that would be three $21 allotment coming in every month. When you join up you didn't know where you were going to be sent, you had no idea at all. It was kind of an adventure. I joined with my cousin, we were about four days apart in age, both joined the same time and went out to Fort Dix, New Jersey. They checked us all out, physicals and all then we got on a steam train at Newark and headed West and as we are going along we wondered where we were going to end up and the first stop was in Delaware. My cousin got off there, he didn't go very far from New Jersey. We said our goodbyes. Then the train kept on and we traveled day and night for three days and finally we came to a little railroad station in Thompson, Utah. There was a bunch of trucks backed up at the railroad station and I said that this looks like this is where we are getting off. It was, we debarked there and got on a truck and the truck drove us to our camp, which was about ten miles out of Moab. It was out in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing out there outside of the barracks. There was a windmill for water and they just pumped water right out of the desert. We had lawns around the barracks, and a big water hole, it was pretty nice.
I spent six months there, six of the best months of my life. It was a lot of fun, quite a change from Newark, New Jersey. This was before the uranium boom, things were really quiet. Moab was a quiet little sheep town.
Our main job working with the CCs was building check dams in the washes, to slow down the erosion when they would have a flash flood. I have been going back every year since then and the dam is still there, it is still doing its job, most of the them. We piled up rocks, well the rocks that were found in that area, wired together, kind of stagger them in the washes, just to slow down the water which would really come down, like 10 feet high and would just tear everything apart, a flash flood. It would slow it down somewhat.
Our other big project was was poisoning the prairie dogs, which I think probably we over did, they are almost extinct now. At the time they thought that was a good thing to do. The ranchers were complaining that the prairie dogs were building all these tunnels and communities and the horses would be breaking legs, dropping through and breaking legs and the cows would get caught in them. So we would go out, maybe there would be 40 or 50 of us in a line with a sack like the kids use to deliver newspapers from, little cloth bags over our shoulders. We would have them filled with oats and strychnine and we would just sweep the whole desert like that in a big line. We would come to the communities where the prairie dogs lived, to all their homes and we would spread handfuls of the oats right around their homes. Then we would come back the next day and there would be a thousand of these little prairie dogs dead with the oats still in their pouches in their mouths. We would pile all their bodies together in one big pile and put gas on them and burn them. I guess we kind of screwed up the balance of nature because the coyotes eat prairie dogs and they ran out of those so they started chasing sheep and other things. But at the time we thought that was a real important project to be done. Now I just read that the BLM is giving some of the ranchers permission to poison the prairie dogs which is an endangered species. It is going around again.
I thought (Utah) was heaven. I thought it was wonderful. It is amazing, we had a recreation hall in the camp and there were some fellows in there that would do nothing but gripe and bitch, "what a hole", and they couldn't wait until they got out of there and all the time they were shooting pool or griping on their free time. I palled with two other guys (I had many friends, more than I ever had back in Newark) that felt the same way I did and every weekend we would go to the kitchen and the cook would give us a couple cans of beans or whatever he could spare and we would take a couple of blankets, there was no such thing as a sleeping bag, we would roll the blankets up and tie them over our shoulders. We'd look like a couple of Civil War veterans and we would each get about six canteens. We would borrow other canteens from other fellows, then we would head out into the desert. We would spend every weekend just hiking around, exploring, finding arrowheads, it was wonderful. Most of the other guys would be back in that rec hall just singing the blues. I loved it.
After seeing the difference between that and where I came from in Newark, the industrial part of the country, I was determined to come back out to Utah.
When the war broke out, World War II, I joined up in 1942, I enlisted in the Army. I was in for four years and when I got out in '46 i headed right to Utah. I had enough of New Jersey. Knowing what it was like out in the west here, I just couldn't see staying back east."
During the war, the camp was turned into an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, so called trouble makers. Fifty years later the buildings were gone, leaving only "a crumbling windmill, some concrete foundations, and outlines of long-gone gravel roads and pathways,'' according to a newspaper article about the camp.
Later, I joined a CCC Alumni group, and donated my CCC patch and hat and photos to the Moab Museum.
----- Art Whitehead
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