I loved books for Christmas

I may have been one of the few children that always asked for books for Christmas and it was well known if you didn't know what to get me as a gift, a book would always be appreciated. I loved books, cared for them, re-read them often, even books I'd received as a child were often re-read when I was in my teens.

Crazy Quilt, by Paul Brown was the first book I remember very clearly because it contained two of my favorite things. It was a book about a pony and it was profusely illustrated by a wonderful horse artist. The local library had it and I checked it out repeatedly, from the time I was 5 years old. My mother decided that I wasn't going to get tired of it, so it was a Christmas gift when I was in the 2nd grade. I read it over and over and when I was tired of reading it, I would use it as an "artists guide" and try to draw the pictures myself.

It was well worn and well loved and one of many things lost in the ranch house fire the day after I graduated from high school.

Thanks to the Internet, used book websites and the assistance of a very helpful librarian, I located an affordable copy of this book (the first ones I found were $400!) and it arrived in yesterday's mail. My Christmas present to myself! Not just a book, but memories.


I didn't remember, however, that the pony was a circus pony. I do remember writing a story about a circus pony when I was in the 3rd grade and since I had not been to a circus, this was probably where I got the idea.


What I do remember very clearly after seeing the book again, is where I got the idea to get my dog up behind me when I was riding. My "pony" was not a pony, but a small horse and too tall for my dog to jump up on so my solution was to back the horse up to the tailgate of our pickup. My dog then jumped into the bed of the pickup and from there onto the horse's rump. She never particularly liked the ride and the horse was not impressed, but I did have the satisfaction of getting the job done. I also remember very clearly, my disappointment that we had nowhere with water deep enough to be belly deep on a horse or deep enough for me to dive off the horse and swim. Not that I could swim, you understand, but it looked like so much fun I don't think it ever occurred to me that I would have to learn to swim first.


This is, of course, a used copy, well used, as the cover is a bit frayed at the corners and the pages are soft from much handling. I'm sure it looks very much like my copy did and I can only imagine that this book once belonged to a little girl much like I was, who read and re-read and looked at the pictures and dreamed.

Ranch critters

I grew up with animals around me all my life. I don't remember not realizing that the animals were there on the ranch for a purpose, they were raised to sell, they were raised to eat or they were there to do a job. A few were treated more like pets but we did not have any full time house cats or house dogs that did not have a useful purpose.

Like any child, I wanted to do what my parents and grandparents were doing. Raising livestock.

It started early. We had chickens, of course, a small ongoing flock for eggs plus chicks my grandparents bought in the spring and were raised to sell as well as to eat. They were Buff Orpingtons, big hardy chickens that free ranged during the day and when a hen went "broody" they were inclined to hide their nests out. One hen hit hers in the hayfield, hatched the chicks and then managed to get herself killed when my grandfather started mowing. I was given the six surviving chicks to raise.

I sold my six chicks that fall, with the ones that my grandparents sold to the local butcher shop and put the money in the bank. The next spring I bought 25 chicks from the hatchery when my grandmother ordered hers.

The second year I could afford 50 chicks and learned the harsh realities of livestock production. A skunk got into the chicken shed and killed a number of chickens, including some of mine. That taught me something about anticipating income before I saw it in my hand. However, the survivors brought me enough money to buy a sow piglet from one of my grandfather's litters and the following year I had a litter of butcher pigs to sell. It was difficult for me to sell "Spot" but by selling that litter and the sow herself gave me enough money to buy my first heifer calf, from my father, the following spring.

She was the calf out of a 2 year old heifer who was clueless and left her out in the corral instead of taking her under the shed, so she chilled and we had the calf in the house, in a pen made of kitchen chairs, for two days. When she started jumping over the chairs, my mother insisted she was well enough to go back out to the barn, but she remained a "pet" all her life.

I was now in the third grade ... and a real rancher ... I owned cattle!

At that point things were put on a business basis. My father got half the "profit" for running my cow on shares. If I had a steer calf to sell, we either divided the sale money, or he got the steer calf to sell and I kept a heifer calf. By the time I was in high school I had four cows and my "cow money" paid most of my expenses. It bought another horse and paid for my school clothes as well as school activities and entertainment.

I've never really gotten away from that mindset. As an adult I've had cattle at different times in my life. I raised Rottweilers for 20 years as well, breeding, showing, training and working them. When I sold a Rottweiler puppy for $1000 several years into my breeding program, the first thing my mother said was that she wished "Papa" was still here so she could tell him I bred and sold a dog for more money than he'd ever paid for a cow!

I've bred and shown horses several times and am still raising sportponies with a breeding program that I spent 20 years establishing. And so many times I've wished that my parents were still here so I could tell them I sold a weanling foal for more than they paid for the first house they owned.

Grandpa was a cowboy

Albert Ezekiel Young was born April 16, 1877 and died January 2, 1964 in Sheridan, Wyoming. I can remember him getting irritated when he had to sign "official" papers as Albert rather than Bert, which is the name everyone knew him by. Until I started some genealogy research very recently, I did not realize he had a middle name as I recall once asking and he said he did not.

He left home at 11 years of age, working as a rider on trail herds being moved from Nebraska into the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. He was an adult, holding down a full time job from then on. I regret now that I didn't ask more questions as a child, but my interest was in horses and cowboys and the "old west" so those were the questions I asked and I can remember being disappointed that he was never in a stampede and he didn't carry a pistol.

The one pistol story he did tell was not what I wanted to hear. "The only time I tried carrying one, I tried to shoot a jackrabbit for supper. Emptied the gun at him and missed every time so I took the cylinder out of the gun, throwed it at him, hit him in the head and killed him. Figured after that I'd be just as well off finding a rock to throw if I needed to." Looking back now, I question this story a bit but at the time I accepted it as told but thought it was pretty tame stuff.

Even with no stampedes or gunfights to savor, I still saw Grandpa as the typical cowboy. He looked like the cowboys described in the books, tall and lean, with a moustash and pale gray eyes, serious and with a preference for solitude. He was a silent man as well, not given to carrying on a conversation while he was working and then more often talking to his horses or cattle than anyone working with him.

Even though he only went through the third grade in school, he was the reader in the family. He was the one that got books for Christmas and his birthday. There was a floor to ceiling bookcase in the living room at the old ranch house that were full of books, Zane Grey and Max Brand were there, as well as a number of others. During long winter afternoons, I often joined him on the couch behind the potbellied stove, both of us engrossed in our books. The book I remember best was a copy of "Trails Plowed Under" by Charles Russell and of course the original attraction was the reproductions of the paintings, but at 6 or 7 I remember starting to read some of the stories as well.

His first trip to the area where he and Grandma homesteaded took 3 weeks by horseback and they started homesteading the original 640 acres in 1915. He worked as a cowboy for various ranches in the area while they "proved up" on the homestead, with one weekend off a month. With title to the homestead, they added what became the "home place" at the forks of Rosebud Creek and lived there until they retired and moved to Sheridan, Wyoming.

Many of my visual memories of him are with horses, harnessing the draft team to hay in the summer and feed cattle in the winter, saddling his big gray gelding, Bingo, to ride and check cattle. I remember him chopping wood down by the corrals and bringing up an armload of firewood up to the house for the kitchen and he was always sharpening an axe, or the sickle bar on the mower or repairing harness, even shoes. Except for reading during the harsh Montana winters, I don't have many memories of him in the house.

When I first started reading the Louis L'Amour westerns, one of my first thoughts was that this would have been an author Grandpa would have liked and I'd have loved to talk to him about the places and times written about. If I closed my eyes while reading about the Sacketts, the person I saw was tall, rawboned, with gray eyes under a battered black hat, in a blue chambray shirt ... except for the revolver strapped to the him, he looked like Grandpa.

Grandma's Cookbook

In the winter, especially around the holidays, most of my memories of my Grandmother are of her in the big ranch house kitchen. The big, black "Home Comfort" range was kept stoked with coal, while I *helped*, mostly by tasting!

By some miracle, one of the very few keepsakes that survived the second fire in my life was Grandma's cookbook. I remember her telling me that she received it as a wedding gift when she married Grandpa, when she was just 16 years old.

The book itself is worn to the point where there is no title visible on the cover. Recipes that she cut out of magazines and newspapers over the years have been pasted on all of the non-recipe pages, most dating back to the early 1900s.


I am entertained by the recipes, which start with the basics. "To Roast A Goose". Having drawn and singed the goose ... can you imagine what the average housewife of today would do faced with a just-plucked goose? Further on, the cook is instructed to "tie the goose securely round with a greased string and paper the breast to prevent scorching" and adding that the fire must be brisk and well kept up.

The final note to the cook is a warning that "if a goose is old it is useless to cook it, as when hard and tough it cannot be eaten."

Even more precious to me are several recipes that were particular favorites, written down in her own handwriting, faded now as well as spotted and blotched from years of use.









One unexpected find as I paged through was a small lock of light brown hair, tied with a piece of string. It has to be a lock of my mother's hair when she was a child. Another amazing keepsake, preserved all these years.



The recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies I particularly recall, a favorite I often asked for and one of the first I *helped* Grandma make. She was so familiar with the recipe some of the ingredients don't show amounts, but some experimentation on my part has produced cookies "just like Grandma used to make".

Grandma's oatmeal and raisin cookies

1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 cups milk
2 cups oatmeal (do not use the quick-cook oatmeal)

Mix the above ingredients well.

1 to 2 cups raisins depending on how many raisins you like in your cookies and let stand for 15 minutes. Then add:

3 cups regular flour (plus, see below)
1 tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3 to 5 tsp cinnamon (depending on how "cinnamon-y" you like them)

Stir until dry ingredients are well mixed, then continue adding flour by the 1/2 cup until you have a moderately stiff dough. Place bowl in refrigerator to chill 30 to 60 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Drop dough onto cookie sheet in rounded spoonfuls. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until top of cookie is firm to touch and leaves no indentation.

I eat far too many of "Grandma's cookies" when I make them and they always take me back to the winter days when I sat at the kitchen table, waiting impatiently for the first cookie warm out of the oven.

Grandma: Memories of a pioneer lady

Elsie Lois Litchfield was born in 1892. She graduated from what we would now call high school in Chadron, Nebraska at 16, one of the very few young women of that era that finished school at that level. One of my treasures is a copy of the portrait photo that was taken of her then.

She was married later that year, to Bert Young, a dashing cowboy that started his riding career at 11 years of age, riding with trail herds driven from Missouri up into Kansas and Nebraska. They moved to Montana in 1915, where they homesteaded on 640 acres, with my grandmother and the two girls staying on the homestead while my grandfather worked for an established ranch some 40 miles away.

In 1927 they moved to the "home ranch" at the forks of Rosebud Creek, where General Crook and his cavalry spent several days trying unsuccessfully to win through the Cheyenne warriors to join General Custer on the Little Big Horn.

They lived there at the ranch until 1952, when they retired and moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, some 60 miles from the ranch. My mother, their youngest daughter, and my father and I continued to live at the ranch, with the ranch in a partnership until my grandfather's death when he was in his late 80s.

Most of my memories of her are of her in the kitchen at the home ranch, cooking on the big, black "Home Comfort" range, helping to make cookies, or waiting for the cinnamon roll to cool enough to eat. Evenings were often spent sitting in her rocker, but her hands were never still, crocheting or quilting, teaching me how to embroider pillowcases and hand towels.

I wish now I had listened more carefully to her stories, for I now suspect I saw just the surface and accepted that as "grandmother". But she spent weeks alone with two small girls at the homestead, with the nearest neighbors two miles or more away. A town trip was a 2-day trip in a wagon with a team, possible only in good weather, spring and fall and very few things were "store bought".

She was the only one of my family who was comfortable with me riding when I was pregnant with my first child, saying that she rode out to get the milk cow in until she couldn't fit in the saddle any longer and it certainly hadn't caused any problems. She was also one of the "hay hands" on the ranch, the one who drove the team to the buckrake, sweeping up hay windrows to take to the overshot stacker, not an easy job of driving with the team separated instead of side by side.

This later photo of my grandmother was taken on a visit to the ranch when she was in her late 70s and spending most summers at the ranch with my parents, though she continued to spend the winter months in Sheridan. During the last few months of her life, in her late 80s, no longer able to live alone, she lived with me at my home in Big Horn, Wyoming.
Looking back, I regret so much not asking more about her life and listening more carefully to those stories she told. It saddens me that so much has been lost now forever.

Grandfather clock

I don't remember when I first heard the old song about "grandfather's clock" but I was still a child and I've never forgotten it. I can remember my grandmother singing it to me as she worked.

"My grandfather's clock was too tall for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor."

I always thought it would have been fun to have a "real" grandfather's clock, one of the tall ones, but his was a shelf clock. I don't ever remember it not being there, on a shelf my grandfather had made himself, first at the ranch and then at their house in town after they retired. It struck the hour and half hour with a pleasant chime that I always associated with "home".

It was always my grandfather that wound it, it wasn't something that grandmother ever did as far as I can recall. When I was little, I loved to sit at the kitchen chair and watch as he carefully stopped the pendulum, lifted it down from the shelf and then sat down, with the key, to wind it. The last few turns were always done with extra care, then the key would go back in the case, the clock would be replaced on the shelf and the pendulum restarted.

The clock went with them when they retired and I have a very clear memory of the first Christmas at their house in town. My parents and I came the night before because the weather was bad and the roads difficult. I slept on the couch in the living room and although I was 12 I was still enough of a child to be anxious for Christmas morning. I remember listening to the tick-tock of the clock and listening as it chimed off the night hours, wondering just how early I could get up.

The last stanza ends: "But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died."

I can remember being uncomfortable with this, though death to me at 6 or 8 years of age was something I didn't really understand. In my teens I was more aware but busy with my own concerns and my own life.

My grandfather died of a heart attack when he was in his late 80s, when I was in my early 20s, married and living in Las Vegas, with two small children. When I returned to live there again, after 12 years away, my grandmother was no longer living alone in the house, but had moved to a smaller apartment.

The clock was still on the shelf grandfather had made for it, in the small sitting room, and I can remember grandmother carefully dusting it as she dusted the other shelves. But the clock was no longer working and I can remember her saying "I just don't know what's wrong with it. Bert was always the one that took care of it and I just don't seem to be able to."

It ran through my mind, instantly, along with quick tears that I had not shed years earlier, at his death. "But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died."

Horse accidents

Fortunately for me, Dad was fairly mellow about the possibility of horse accidents. Being raised on a cattle ranch, he grew up riding and driving horses and had his share of the usual accidents. He knew they could happen but my only restriction after I was 10 or 12 years old was that I had to tell someone which direction I was riding and I had to be back before sundown.

Dad's worst accident happened when he was in his teens and driving the Hambletonian stallion the ranch had from the government Remount Service. He was hitched to a buggy, going back to the ranch from town. The stallion was not particularly reliable, spooked and ran, dumping the buggy, and my father, into a barbed wire fence. My father had the scar across the bridge of his nose, under both eyes, where one of the barbed wire strands cut him.

The only real issue he had with horses was the possibility of being dragged by a horse. I wasn't allowed to ride with a saddle until I was about 10 years old, and had grown enough to fit one of the saddles. Even then, he took that saddle and had covered stirrups made so my foot could not go all the way through the stirrup. He told me many times about hearing stories of people getting hung up in a stirrup and killed.

He had also seen one man killed when he was working with the road crew before he married my mother. Road work was still being done with horse teams at the time, in the mid to late 30s, heavy equipment pulled by teams of 12 to 16 head of draft horses. One of the drovers was unhooking a team. The horses spooked and the trace chain whipped and caught him around the legs. Open country at the time, nobody there with a saddle horse to catch them and he was killed.

Ironically, as an adult, I saw a girl killed by being dragged, at a riding stable in Spain. An inexperienced rider, she got out of the arena where she had been, the horse started trotting to catch up to some others. She fell off, her foot went through the stirrup and of course the horse spooked and ran back to the stable.

I had accidents, some of which I never told my parents about, but although I can think of half a dozen times I should have been seriously injured, if not killed, I was lucky and never had a broken bone or an injury that required a doctor's attention until I was in my mid-20s. Then it was a badly wrenched ankle caused, embarassingly enough, by the pony I had for the children, although after a number of X-rays the doctor announced that although nothing seemed to be where it should be in my ankle and foot, he couldn't see anything broken.

Broken ribs in my late 30s convinced me maybe I should quit training unbroke horses but I avoided serious injuries until I was in my 60s, when the law of averages did finally catch up to me, although I still have horses.

Mama was a schoolteacher

She told me many times that she knew she wanted to be a teacher from the time she was a child. Once she got her teacher's certificate, which allowed her to teach after two years of college, she was hired to teach at the grade school where she had gone to school, the Squirrel Creek school in Big Horn County, Montana.

Like all of the country schools at the time, it was a one-room school where one teacher taught all eight grades, in that area usually all of the children from somewhere between 4 and 10 families. The children closest to the school usually walked, those with further to go, rode horseback.

Montana could be somewhere between unpleasant and downright dangerous during the winter. Squirrel Creek School was over 4 miles from the ranch, cross country over hills and no roads. With shorter days, she left the ranch before daylight and rode home in the dark, trusting to her horse to carry her safely through snow and over rough country.

There were no "snow days" then and as the teacher, Mother was expected to get to the school early enough to build up the fire before classes started. At night, the fire was "banked" so that it would burn slowly, maintaining a slow fire overnight, allowing for a quick start the following morning.

I remember her telling me once that she got home and at supper worried that she hadn't banked the fire and set the draft before she left. It was mid-winter and cold, starting to snow. She had school papers to correct and about halfway through, realized her father wasn't in the house. Much later, he came back in and when she asked where he'd been, he said "You banked the fire and the draft was fine." He had gone out, not saying anything to anyone, caught up a saddle horse and ridden the 4 1/2 miles to the school in the dark and back to check on the fire.

Later she transferred to Big Bend School, another small country school that was closer to the home ranch It was 3 miles rather than 4 1/2 miles, there was a road as well and almost all flat ground, much easier on both horse and rider.

She taught there for several more years and was engaged to the son of a neighboring rancher, her best friend's brother. I'm not sure what went wrong. She never mentioned what had happened and I was too involved in my own life to ask questions once I was old enough to realize there must have been a "story" but it was after that, I'm sure, that she applied for a teaching job away from her home.

She went from there to Radersburg, a small mining town in western Montana, where she taught just one grade, in a "town" school. It was there she met my father, a miner originally from a South Dakota ranch and they were eventually married there.

After they returned to the ranch, she returned to teaching school. I had to go away to high school and rather than boarding with someone in town, she taught at the school in Lodge Grass, Montana, a small town on the Crow Indian reservation. We stayed in a rented apartment during the school year, returning to the ranch as weather permitted, 40 miles over a "good weather" road over the Wolf Mountains west of the ranch but not so often in bad weather, when the trip was 90 miles around the "long way".

Once I graduated and was gone from the ranch, she returned to teaching at the Big Bend School, where she taught for many more years, finally retiring when she was in her late 50s to be a full time ranch wife.

First childhood memory

Given my lifelong obsession with horses, my first actual childhood memory understandably involved horses. As an adult, I remember asking my mother about it, thinking it might have been a dream of some kind but although she couldn't believe I remembered it, with the detail I remembered, she figured out when and where it happened.

They lived in an apartment in Billings, Montana for a short period of time. Dad had been released from the hospital after 18 months of treatment for tuberculosis and was working there as an accountant, having been told he should never do hard physical labor again. I was not quite 3 years old at the time and until then, my mother and I had been at the family ranch, where I had lots of room to play.

Mom walked with me during that summer to keep me occupied and since the apartment was close to the edge of town, we used to walk in the "country" where I could see animals, as I was used to. There was a pasture with two horses where we walked and naturally, I wanted to pet the horses.

Eventually my mother met the owner, an older man who had retired, along with his last two saddle horses. She convinced him that as a ranch girl, she knew what to do around horses, so on many afternoons that summer, I ended up sitting on the back of one of the patient horses.

I very vividly remember the two horses, one bay and one gray and remember being lifted to the back of the bay horse and sitting there in absolute delight. Mother said she remembered I would lean forward and lay my cheek against the mane, putting my hands down and patting the horse's neck, lisping "niiiiice horsie!"

Anderson Michael ... Dad

......... Dad, in his early 60s, with a young ranch horse he was training
Dad was born in 1903 in South Dakota, the youngest of three boys. His father, Daniel Anderson Michael, was a rancher near Phillip, South Dakota. His mother, Emma Reed, died when he was still very young.

From what little I can remember Dad saying about his early years, I have the impression that the three boys were more or less passed around from one or another family, uncles and aunts, for several years. He talked most about living with the uncle who had married a Sioux woman and he spent several years growing up with their boys on their ranch near the Sioux reservation.

When he graduated from high school, he started college on a baseball scholarship, but soon dropped out. He then spent a number of years trying various things, but particularly developing an interest in mining, working in the gold mines in South Dakota.

The depression found him in western Montana, where he and two other young men survived in a small cabin, panning enough gold to buy flour, sugar, coffee and beans ... and enough rifle cartridges to poach deer. Dad was the "sourdough" cook ... he kept them in sourdough pancakes and biscuits and they poached deer to eat with the beans.

He said the game warden would show up off and on and if it was mealtime, they'd offer him stew or beans, whichever they had in the pot on the wood stove. Said the warden always complimented him on his biscuit and never asked what kind of meat he was eating.

As the end of the depression came, he went to work on a road crew, probably funded by one of the government programs. They were still doing the work with teams and Dad was always impressed by the boss's teams, trained to work with voice command, jumping traces to pull at an angle to the heavy equipment they were hooked to. Years later, on a trip to Radersburg, with my Dad, I met his boss from the road crew, "Red" Bruce, and his wife, and got to see some of the photographs from the road work.

He was working in one of the gold mines at Radersburg, Montana when he met my mother and they were married there in 1940 and I was born in the fall of 1941.

The following year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was sent to the state hospital at Galen, Montana. Mother returned to her family ranch with me, as I'd also been diagnosed with tuberculosis, at six months of age.

He was hospitalized for 18 months and for the first year, the doctor would not even tell my mother he believed Dad would survive. Once it was obvious that he would recover, the doctor told both my parents that he could never go back to mining and also that he could never expect to be healthy enough to hold anything but an office job.

Eventually, he went to work as a book keeper at the coal mines near Sheridan, Wyoming but he was not willing to settle in to an office job. In 1946 my parents relocated back to the ranch on Rosebud Creek. In 1952, my parents bought a small farm of their own, east of Billings, Montana and my grandparents retired and leased the ranch. Neither the farm purchase nor the lease worked well and in 1956 we moved back to the ranch on a partnership arrangement.

Dad finally retired when he was in his 70s, after having run the ranch with only summer help for haying all those years. His first purchase after retirement was a travel trailer and for many years Mom and Dad traveled in the southwest desert, where Dad was able to return to his first love ... geology ... rockhounding and looking for the lost gold mines of the southwest.

Fern Young Michael ... Mama

She was born in 1913, in Nebraska, the youngest of two girls. Just 2 years old when they moved to Montana, most of her childhood was spent growing up at the homestead, moving to the home ranch at the forks of Rosebud Creek when she was 14.

As in all ranch areas at the time, school was a one-room, one teacher school, 1st through 8th grade. It was 3 miles from the homestead cabin and the girls rode horseback to get there, riding double on the old, reliable mare called Rose. Mom used to tell me how annoyed she would get at her older sister because Millie always got to ride in front, but in the winter it was better because she could duck her head down keep her face warm.

The nearest high school was 60 miles from the ranch, in Sheridan, Wyoming. With horse drawn transportation and little cash money available, most ranch kids boarded full time with families in or near town, most of them working for their board and room. Mama felt she was very fortunate to be able to board with the high school music teacher's family, with only three small children to help care for and modern conveniences like gas stoves to cook on and running water in the house.

Summers were spent back at the ranch, helping with the usual summer work, from gardening and canning food for the winter to haying, working cattle and fencing. Without hired help, both girls helped when they were home and summers were when most of the preparations for winter had to get done. Without livestock trucks, selling cattle meant driving them 40 miles, a 2 or 3 day trip by horseback, to Spear Siding, which was a set of corrals at a railroad stop where they were loaded into cattle cars and transported to sale yards.

Mama never wanted to be anything except a teacher and I remember her telling me that she used to "play school" as a little girl, lining up her dolls and teaching them from her school books. Two years of college was what was necessary then for a "teacher's certificate", which meant you could get a job teaching school. While her parents managed to pay for the school fees, again, Mama had to work for her board and room while going to school. The first year was terrible, the woman she boarded with expected her to do all the housekeeping, washing and ironing as well as much of the cooking. From the few bits I heard, growing up, I think she managed most of the time on about 4 hours sleep, often falling asleep over her homework.

She said very little about that first year and more often mentioned her second year as she became very fond of the woman she boarded with that year. One story she told repeatedly was having to make a bug collection for one of her classes and one day she and this lady were on the street when they spied a bug she didn't have. Mama would still giggle when she described this lady, in her fancy dress and shoes, scrambling down the street gutter trying to catch this big bug for her.

For several years after getting her certificate, she lived at the ranch and taught at the little one room school over on Squirrel Creek where she'd gone to grade school herself. From the home ranch, it was nearly 5 miles cross country horseback, but there were no "snow days" back then. She was expected to get to the school early enough to get the fire going so the schoolroom would be warm for the children and at night, she stoked the fire before she rode home.

A few years later, she went to a small town in western Montana, Radersburg, where she taught until she met ... and married ... my father, who was working in one of the gold mines in the area, though he was from a ranching background as well. They eventually returned to the family ranch on Rosebud Creek, where they lived until their retirement.

They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in May of 1990.

Memories and thoughts from the past

I was raised on the ranch that was, in part, the original homestead proved up by my maternal grandparents. The home ranch, in the photo above, was at the forks of Rosebud Creek, a part of the area where General Crook met the Cheyenne and Sioux in the summer of 1876 and was turned back, rather than being able to continue on to join General Custer. Ranchers along the upper Rosebud Creek found a number of cavalry artifacts over the years and growing up, I often found old rifle cartridges in the hills as well.

Our close family was small. Mother had just one older sister who moved to California and lived there most of her life. We kept in touch, of course, but as adults, the cousins have lost touch. Dad's family was bigger, two brothers, four half sisters, but his mother died when he was very young and his father died when I was still a toddler. Again, though we kept in touch with brothers and sisters, once they were gone the cousins lost touch.

My two children were not raised on the ranch and never knew their great-grandfather, who died when they were too young to remember him. They knew their great-grandmother mostly in her later years and my parents, while they still lived the ranch for a number of years, were no longer actively ranching. While we spent occasional vacations at the ranch but they never truly had the opportunity to live the life I remember and my own grandchildren do not remember the ranch at all.

As an only child myself, once I am gone, the memories will be gone as well. This blog is meant as a tribute to the land I loved, the parents and grandparents I knew and loved and the family, friends and neighbors that contributed to the memories I hold so dear.