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.