Grandma and Grampa Moody exerpt

           Grandma and Grampa Moody left Maine and rode the railroad to San Francisco.

            The City of San Francisco had placed a bounty on rats, so Howard Moody hunted rats, shooting them and turning in the tails for the bounty while they waited a few days for their steamship to Eureka.

    I got the idea of paying for gophers at San Lucas School when I   was superintendent of the district after talking to Grandma Moody on one of our earlier trips from Sacramento back to Eureka.  So when we had a gopher problem I remembered Grandpa Moody hunting rats, and  I put a bounty on the gophers. Gooby (Stan) was one of the best hunters. I bought traps, and he and a few other boys placed and checked the traps. I asked the school board if we could pay the boys. I believe one of the checks to Gooby, who trapped gophers in the 7th and 8th grades, was around $60. I think the bounty was 50 cents for each gopher tail. I kept the tails because often the governing board looked carefully over the payments and questioned me on some of them, especially payments to any family members. I was ready when the question came and showed them the envelope with hundreds of gopher tails. They didn’t ask me about gopher payments again, though I always had the envelope of last month’s tails on the table at    the board meeting.

Grandma Moody told me that Howard got paid 5 cents for each rat tail he took in. I don't  know what San Francisco did with their rat tails, but I kept the gopher tails in my office until after the board meeting and then took them to the garbage secretly, sealed in an envelope so the boys wouldn’t find them and try to turn them in again.  

Grandma Moody didn’t say how long they had to wait for the steamer, but I got the impression that it was more than a few days. While waiting they also helped clean up rubble.