From all of this that I’ve jotted down, one might think there was no fun or pleasure in our lives at all. It was quite the opposite. We were young and happy and the things we had to put up with or do without didn’t really seem so bad most of the time. We had home talent rodeos that were a lot of fun, always with “dinner on the ground.” People would come for miles around and visit with people you didn’t very often get to see. Also we would travel long way in a wagon or the Model T if we could afford the gas to spend the day with neighbors, and they in turn would visit us.
There never was a church close enough to go to, but once in a while a visiting preacher would come by and hold meetings. One summer the Arnolds built an arbor to hold a series of meetings under. Mrs. Arnold’s father, Mr. Collins, was a retired Baptist minister. To sort of take the place of going to church we would gather at different places to have a “hymn Singing” in the summer time. And always at any of the entertainment we would have “dinner on the grounds.” We needed very little excuse to have a picnic.
Then there were the dances. They were held in the different homes. If need be, the furniture would be moved out of one room to make room to dance – always on 1 x 12 plank floors. Often these dances lasted all night, especially in the winter – it would be too cold to come home before sun-up. All the women would bring cake, pie, sandwiches, or most anything they had to fix, and at midnight we would eat. We usually came home soon after midnight supper, but those who came a long distance would stay and start home after breakfast. The music was made by the men with fiddles and guitar. Betty Hulse was pretty good on the guitar. Daddy, Jack Hulse and Roy Owens were the main fiddlers from our area. It was a good time to catch up on visiting. Some of the folks, especially those from the Greens Gap country, you only saw maybe three or four times a year.
There was a “traveling movie” that came to Horse Springs and word got around that there would be a “picture show” in the schoolhouse at Old Horse Springs. We took Roland and went. This was a two-room school with one door for an entrance with a room off each side of the entry hallway. The people showing the film set up the screen at the end of one room and set up the projector in the doorway leading into the hall. That made it about the right distance between them, but it did block the doorway. This was in the days when the film very easily caught fire, and that is exactly what happened that night. It made quite a fire too. The people (95% men) in that room really panicked. They went to kicking out the windows, although they could have been opened in less time. Some of those first ones out ran around to the door, blocking it, which kept the show people from throwing the film out the door. People were pushing and shoving. Daddy said they acted like a bunch of sheep. He got Roland up on his arms and had us just stand back and wait. They eventually got the blazing film out into the yard. Only a few weeks earlier Daddy had worked on that school building repairing, painting and getting it up in good shape.
Back then at election time when politicians wanted to get a crowd together out in the country, they would make arrangements to use the schoolhouse or some centrally-located building, rent a film and invite the countryside to a “picture show.” Everyone from miles around would come. They had a captive audience to try to persuade to vote “their way.”
Along about 1932 or ’33 we bought a small grist mill with the idea of grinding cornmeal for other ranchers and farmers. For power to run the mill, Daddy jacked up a rear wheel on the Model T and ran the belt around the wheel to the mill. It worked pretty good and made very good cornmeal, but in time we almost ruined the differential gear on the Ford.
Some folks paid in cash to have their corn ground and some we ground on the share. On e rancher from Greens Gap wanted to trade us some chickens for grinding his corn. We knew he and his wife had a lot of game chickens – a wild, nervous, flighty breed of chicken. We didn’t want any of those to mix with our Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Rock, etc. He promised they wouldn’t bring any game chickens, so we said ok. But then whey came with their corn the chickens they brought were game and part game. We kept them and I must say they laid more eggs than any chickens we ever had. The problem was finding them. The chickens were so wild they wouldn’t go in the hen house to lay, and on the ranch there were so many places for them to hide their nests. That winter during the very cold weather, our heavy hens just about quit laying, but every day we could hear one of the game hens cackling as chickens do when they have laid an egg. We couldn’t find where she was laying, and with eggs so scarce, we were really aggravated with those game chickens. Our barn was a log building and a pole cow corral butted up against the side of the barn with about a two or three inch space between them. That game he had been flying up on the top of the cow corral and laying her eggs down that two or three inch space – a fall of about six or seven feel. Down there between the barn wall and the corral was a little mound of broken, frozen eggs.
This rancher that we got the game chickens from was probably sixty or sixty-five years old. His wife, to whom he had been married for only a short time, was a “Mail Order Bride.” He had advertised for a wife in some paper or magazine. When she came out there she brought a fellow with her. She called him her “brother.” Anyway, they didn’t live together very long.
Up to the time we moved to the ranch I didn’t like cornbread, but I learned to. To make our flour last longer we had biscuits only for breakfast and cornbread the rest of the day.
The danger of fire was always in our mind out there, and while the barns and corrals burned down while the Hobbs had the place leased, and the house burned after we had sold out, we had only one fire scare while we lived there. Daddy had gotten a job oiling on a shovel on a state road job over beyond Old Horse Springs. His work clothes would get so oil-soaked that I had trouble trying to wash them. A fellow on the job told him to soak them in gasoline and then wash them. So we soaked them overnight in gas then squeezed them out as well as we could and put them in a No.2 tub of hot soapy water on the kitchen stove. I was standing there punching on those clothes when the whole tub and clothes was suddenly ablaze. The kitchen had never been sealed, so the 2x4 rafters and ceiling joists were exposed and the floor was made of 1x12 pine boards, which had shrunk to where there were cracks from ½ to ¾ inches wide between the boards. Those flames were reaching close to those rafters and joists immediately . Daddy was working on the Ford (grinding the valves) about 150 feet from the house. I screamed for him to come quick. We didn’t have presence of mind to just throw something over all of it and smother the fire out – instead Daddy said we had to carry it outside. I said I couldn’t. He said we had to. He gave me his gloves and he grabbed one of my embroidered tablecloths off the table and wrapped it around his hand and we lifted that flaming tub of clothes almost to the door when Daddy dropped his side, spilling flaming water all over the floor and down through those cracks in the floor. We were sure then the whold house would catch fire but as the water spread out the gasoline quit burning. We got that tub off the stove just in time. The rafter and joists above the stove were really charred. What kept them from catching fire I don’t know. What little money we had we kept pinned to our mattress rather than carrying it with us. I can remember when I said I couldn’t lift the tub off the stove I wanted to grab that money and run.
That wasn’t the only time I screamed for Daddy to come quick. He has always said he could tell when something was very wrong by my terrible scream. One Saturday afternoon when Roland was just at the crawling state, I was cooking pies for dinner on the ground the next day and Roland was playing on the floor. I had some “dishwater slop” for the pigs and Daddy had started to the pig pens with it. He had gout about halfway there when I screamed at him to come. Roland had picked up a matchstick off the floor and put it in his mouth and was choking. I reached into his mouth and could feel the matchstick. I could tell I was only pushing it farther into his throat when I tried to get it – that’s when I yelled at Daddy. He threw the slop bucket down (and spilled it) and came running. By the time he got there, Roland had coughed up the matchstick.
In those days you always offered to help with the sick or set up with the dead. Back then when a person died, they were kept at home and friends took turns “setting up” with the deceased. If you were sent for, you went regardless of what you were doing. If you weren’t asked, you volunteered. There was one occasion that was especially bad for me. Mary Dumas had miscarried one baby at six months just before we moved out there. The fall that Roland was a year and a half old, she was expecting again. Frank, her husband, was working in the Beaverhead country and Daddy was working someplace too, but I can’t remember where. This particular day she and I worked at our house canning beans and were to can beans at her house the next day. After she left for home that evening – she lived about ¾ of a mile from us, I went out to do the chores at the barn and found a young calf that had come through the fence up on the upper bean field. The calf belonged to one of Frank and Mary’s cows that was running out on the open range. The old cow was really upset and the calf was bawling and I couldn’t do anything about it by myself. I walked to Mary’s and she decided to walk back with me and the two of us could “crowd” the little calf back through the fence. After that she once a gain walked back home and, before she quit for the day, did their evening chores – milking, feeding, etc and then picked beans for us to can the next day. A full day – but then our days were like that then.
The next morning we had finished the canning for her and were getting dinner when she got sick. We were pretty scared. We decided she would go to bed and stay quiet and I would go after Betty Hulse, who lived about two miles from there. I had to walk and carry Roland and it was uphill all the way. If Betty had been home, it wouldn’t have been too bad, but she and Jack were working in their fields about a mile and a half to two miles from their house. I finally found them. Betty and I stayed with Mary and Jack went to the Horse Springs post office to phone the Beaverhead Ranger Station to get word to Frank. By the time Frank got home, Mary had been in labor a long time. Frank sent someone to Reserve for Dr. Burch. That was 45 miles away. It was late at night when the doctor got there and after seeing what the situation was like, he gave Mary a sedative – some medicine to stop her labor pains – and said we would wait until daylight to do anything. He had taken care of her other baby and knew he would have to do the same this time and he didn’t want to do it by a kerosene lamp. He went to sleep in a rocking chair. When morning came, he sterilized the forceps in a dish pan on Betty’s kitchen stove and , as soon as they were ready, Betty and I held Mary, one of us on each side, and Frank gave her the ether while Dr. Burch took the baby. A little girl. She was alive but lived only a few hours. Today that baby would have been saved. Frank didn’t have any money to pay the doctor, but did have a young milk cow due to freshen soon. He offered her to the doctor and the doctor accepted the cow for payment. When that cow freshened a short time later she had twin calves. Later Mary went to Reserve on the mail car to see the doctor. You had to lay over in Reserve and come home the next day, so she stayed overnight with the doctor and his wife. They told her how proud they were of their milk cow and calves.
When I was growing up my folks fell back on a homemade medication that I in turn fixed for Daddy and I. Not only did we use it for cuts, sore throats and bites, but also we used it on our animals. It was an equal measure of coal oil (kerosene), turpentine and hog lard. It was very good to draw soreness out. We would put this mixture in a shoe polish bottle, one that it and the dawber had been cleaned, and that way we had a good applicator. We used it on Kitty Bob’s leg when Dady first took her out of the trap. One other tmie when it really came in handy was when Maureen was three or four weeks old. Daddy was working on blacktopping highway in the Cliff area. That left me and Roland and the baby at home. At that time we were milking a cow we called Suzy. She didn’t come in to be milked one evening, so O.J. Wright, a young boy who was doing two or three days plowing for us right then, went to look for her. He found her tangled in a barbed wire fence and over a red ant bed and it looked like she had been there since up in the morning. He had to cut the wire to get her out. She had several pretty bad wire cuts and was stiff and sore from standing there so long. After we got her in the corral I mixed some of our “favorite medicine” and O.J. really dawbed her good. By morning she was all fine – all the soreness was gone. Two or three application of that mixture really works well. Put it on a bad cut finger and it will never get sore. I know. One Christmas eve over fifty years ago I cut my finger to the bone with a newly sharpened paring knife. I still have the scar. I did it splitting little slivers of pine pitch wood for kindling.
We also used this once when we were de-horning a cow. We were milking several cows, and one old cow had never been de-horned. She made life miserable for the other cows so Daddy decided he and I would de-horn her. He was using a meat saw. I was holding the old cow down and Daddy was sawing away – the only thing though: he wasn’t watching the end of his saw and it was sawing on my arm and I couldn’t let go of the old cow!! The old cow and I both survived with the aid of the coal oil, turpentine and hog lard! A funny thing about that was this cow never liked Daddy after that. She blamed him for the whole thing. She didn’t think I had anything to do with it, so from then on she was “my cow.” I milked her. When she was dry and running out on the range, I could walk up to her and pet her – she expected me to.
Being raised in town for my first twelve years and after that in a mining camp didn’t exactly prepare me for ranch life. So when my first setting hen didn’t hatch right on schedule after setting for twenty-one days, I was worried. Daddy didn’t know any more about it than I did. When we could hear little chicks pecking on the inside we decided to “help” them out. Daddy took his picket knife and cracked the shells. We killed them all. We didn’t know that in cold or cool weather it sometimes takes more than twenty-one days to hatch. I always blamed Daddy a little bit for that. I thought he should have known better. He wasn’t “city raised” as I. Most of the eggs would have hatched even though they were eggs bought from the Horse Springs Store and carried horseback to the ranch.
We had good soil out there. There were lots of oak trees along the creek and the oak leaves had been falling and rotting for years. A log dam had been built across the Alamocito Creek before we moved out there, so we had water for irrigation. We had some very good gardens. I always held back $1.00 for the year’s seed, we ordered from the Mile High Seed Company in Denver. At a nickel a package, the dollar bought all the seed we needed. With the order of a dollar’s worth, you always had you choice of several free packages. This year, 1981, I paid 69 cents for a package of seed that had a lot fewer seed to the packages.