The train arrived, 7 days a week, at 2pm, weather permitting. Tony handled 3 or 4 partially filled cars, delivering by sleigh or wagon. “It was a lot easier to deliver with the sled…the bed was lower and more convenient. You could haul a bigger load.”
The first trip was the mail run. The contract required it.
The second was what they called the Express. That was the perishables. “Chickens used to come in crates and alive. They weren’t all plucked and ready to put in the oven. The Women would be waiting for me so they could pick the good ones. These old timers would reach in and feel ’em I don’t know how they knew…maybe they’d see if there was an egg or something. They’d be waiting for the turkeys on Thanksgiving or Christmas. That’s the only time we’d have ’em.”
The third load was freight from the box cars. “Canned goods, sugar and flour. It was all in 100 pound sacks. The ladies baked their own bread and everything back then. They’d pick that up at the store. The only thing we delivered direct to the house was cabbage in the fall. Each house would get 4 or 5 sacks at about 75 pounds each. They’d cut it up and put it in a barrel that’d turn sour for kraut.”
Tony started delivering freight in 1917, when he was 14 years old. “I was on that job for 13 or 14 years. The freight company didn’t have a name…Joe Pecharich owned it, but he had a timber contract with the Big Mine, so I did it by myself.”
“We used the ‘broader’ sled for bigger loads, to not make so many trips to The Depot and back. It had front ‘bobs’ that turned with the horses and the runner followed straight. “When you had a good road you could haul quite a bit of tonnage on them sleds. I mostly used the big horses unless it was snowin’. They was sorrels and their names was ‘Dick’ and ‘Tom’. We had a smaller pair of what they called snow horses. We’d put them in the lead when we had four. They’d buck the trail. They was good snow horses. They was plumb black, but I can’t remember their names. We used the same horses in the summer with the wagon.”
“We pulled a 3/8″ chain behind the sled in a loop to keep the road. In the springtime the roads Would get sideways, you know, and I’d tip over and have to reload the sleigh. Quite a few times I done that. Lot’s of times the kids would grab the back of the sled, with their feet on the chain, and ride up and down the street.”
Source: Tony Mihelich
He was feeling poorly when I stopped by just before Christmas Eve 1996, He passed Christmas morning. I was looking for a Christmas story. His health was weak. First time the store had been closed since I got here. When we got to talking about his days on the freight sleigh, his eyes lit up, his breathing steady’d and I wished I’d had a recorder. I think every man has a ‘favorite’ time in his life. This may have been Tony’s.
Rob Quint