One Family's Unique Story of Life in a Cave

One family’s unique story of life in a cave

One family’s unique story of life in a cave

Tue, 07/18/2023 - 4:49pm admin

by Sally Jack

(Editor’s note: Merry Palmer recently wrote about a coal mine in San Juan County and mentioned a family that once lived in a cave. Sally Jack is contributing her family story about the family that lived in a cave in Westwater in the 1940s.)

How does a family come to live in a cave?

Job losses, illness, crippling doctor bills, a large family of eleven children, the death of two children at the tender ages of two and three, and hard times, brought the Stanley T. and Elizabeth Martineau Family to Blanding, where in 1941 my Grandpa Stan traded his father-in-law for his dry farm and decided to try dry farming full time.

At the same time, he made a deal for some property in Westwater Canyon that had a cave on it. They slept out at the farm. Camping all week under the cedar and pinion trees was very peaceful and beautiful. But when winter came, they would need better shelter.

Stan and Bessie decided to clean out the cave and make it into a home, so they went to work.

They used a team of horses and a scraper to take out a lot of the big rocks and dirt. Next they used a horse pulling a “big shovel-like bucket” to get out all of the excess. Then they blasted some of the over-hanging rock by the cave entrance.

Stan made a tractor out of an old Buick, and they used it to build a chicken coop, a corral, and a barn.

They also built a road by hand from the main road that went to the Cottonwood mill and the Elk Mountain. The three mile road started on the east side of Big Canyon near where the city dump used to be. They built a cedar post bridge where the road crossed the wash.

Due to serious injuries, my Grandpa only had one eye and he was legally blind in the other eye. I am amazed at his knowledge and intelligence, and the many things he accomplished in a world he could scarcely see.

Grandma Elizabeth loved flowers, gardens, and pretty things. I often thought that her beauty-loving heart must have quailed at the thought of making a home in a cave. But like many pioneer women before her, she rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

A cement pad was poured in the kitchen area, and she had a wood burning stove to cook on. The kitchen had a washing bench, a wash bowl, and a bucket for used water. A sideboard served as a counter and meal prep area.

Meals were eaten at a wooden table with long benches on either side. A bouquet of wildflowers on the table brought a touch of beauty to the rough home.

The living room included a wood heater, treadle sewing machine, and rocking chair. My father’s cot served as a couch during the day and his bed at night.

The girls in the family felt particularly blessed when their Aunt Ethel loaned them a pump organ which was in the living room.

They said, “We sang a lot at home. Mom had a beautiful, clear soprano voice, and she used to sing to us all the old songs of that day. Dad’s voice was a nice tenor.”

To provide a little privacy, Stan and Bessie’s bedroom was a tent inside the cave, and here there was a freestanding handmade closet to house all the family clothes, as well as a crib for baby Joe, who later died at the tender age of two while his brothers were gone to war.

Two more cots and a bed shared a space where three of the girls and the three-year-old brother slept at night. Two more brothers had a bed in the cave, but they liked sleeping in the barn.

Except for the kitchen, the remainder of the home had a dirt floor. Elizabeth taught the girls how to sprinkle and sweep a dirt floor without raising a lot of dust, which they did faithfully every day.

At night she made sure all the children washed their feet and legs before they went to bed, to keep the bed clean.

One daughter wrote, “Our mother was a good housekeeper no matter the kind of a house she was given to keep. Her gardens and yards were always neat, as were her children when they went to school or anywhere in public.

“I remember her checking behind our ears to make sure it was clean there, washing our hair in a basin at the cave, with water we had to carry from the creek and heat on the stove.

“I remember the washing machine in the front yard at the cave, and helping to carry water for the machine and also the rinse tubs, using little lard buckets filled with water from the canyon creek.”

As soon as he turned 18, Daddy Bud was drafted into the Army and left to serve his country in World War II. As he walked away from his home in Westwater Cave, his mother Elizabeth wrote: “Bud looked so young and slight and skinny as he passed out of sight... that day on his way to the war.

“His parting words were, ‘Don’t cry Mom, I can’t face it if you do. Keep a home for me to come back to, Mom. What will become of us all if there is no home and you to come back to?’

“Thus the nation took my son, my strong right arm, my oldest, my source of comfort and understanding.”

From that humble home in Westwater Canyon, two young men went off to war to fight for our freedom, not knowing if they would ever see their home again.

The family lived at Martineau Cave for less than two years. By the end of World War II, the family had moved on, and the cave was no longer their home.

But of the year and a half that the Martineau Cave was home, Bud’s sister summed it up best when she said, “It was hard living, but we learned many valuable lessons and gained stronger family ties, so it was all worth it.”