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.