Shepard's cabin sitting among tall pines and overlooking the Yampa river valley.

This cabin doesn't have a basement but neither do many houses. In the late 1950s I helped Stan Roberts and his son Stanley dig a basement under a house. I call this story:

Rattling Dishes

Stan Roberts had the job of digging a basement under an existing house owned by Brig & Ruby Nicols. A hole was knocked thru the foundation on the north side of the house with star drills and sledge hammers. Broken concrete, dirt and rock was moved with a pick, shovel and wheelbarrow. After the excavation under the house had gotten large enough a conveyor belt was stuck under the house. Then the dirt was either shoveled directly onto the belt or into a wheelbarrow and then dumped on the conveyor. As the dirt pilled up under the discharge end of the conveyor it would be moved by a D-4 cat pulling a Johnson bar scraper. The cat did not have a blade on the front as it was used primarily for agriculture purposes in the Roberts fruit orchards. Stanley would run the cat and I the Johnson bar scraper. There was a bar attached to the back of the scraper and this is what you used to control whether the scraper cutting edge dug in to fill it or to raise it up to dump the load. It took a bit of learning to hold the bar at the right angle so it dug in and moved a load and then you had to lift up on the bar to allow it to overturn and empty load. If you weren't careful when you lifted the bar to dump it would throw you up over the scraper. So the trick was to lift it far enough to start dumping and then let it go and it would dump itself.
Work was progressing fairly well and a lot of the dirt and rocks were taken out from under house. On the north side, the ground was a little harder and difficult to pick loose. Stan decided that we would shoot the ground. I was a little worried as I had not been around explosives larger than firecrackers and the thought of setting off a charge under a house would be interesting to say the least. We took a crowbar and drove it back in the dirt using a sledge hammer. We would wiggle the bar as we hammered it in to keep it loose enough so we could get out again. Finally the hole was deep enough. Stan took a stick of black powder and inserted a fuse into it. This was pushed back with a wooden stick into the single hole we made. Dirt was packed back into the hole to stem the charge. We got ready to light the fuse and I asked if we were going to have Mrs Nicols get out of the house when we shot the hole. Stan said she would not even know what we had done. I had my doubts. Being I was the low man on the totem pole I shut up. Stan lite the fuse and we all went out from under the house and walked about a 100 yards away. Time passed and it seemed like a long time when there was a thumping sound and you could feel vibrations in the ground. We waited till the powder fumes cleared out to go back and see what happened. I expected Mrs. Nicols to run out of the house and see what had happened. But nobody came out of the house. We went back under the house and there was a loose wall of dirt that could be shoveled easily. Being I was doing a lot of the shoveling I appreciated it. Later they asked Mrs Nicols if progress was going to her satifaction. She was happy with the excavation and said the only thing she had noticed was the dishes rattling in her china cabinet a time or two. Dish rattling I am sure was caused by the blasting under house. Finally the job was done and concrete poured for the cellar under the house. I was not there to help with that part.