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.