Memories and thoughts from the past

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.

Spear Siding

Spear Siding was a railway siding located between Wyola, Montana and Lodge Grass, Montana in the Big Horn valley. Without cattle trucks like there are today, or local livestock auction markets, this was where the cattle ranchers from the area brought their cattle in the fall to be shipped to markets further east..

When I was going to high school in Lodge Grass, mother and I often visited my grandparents, then retired, in Sheridan, Wyoming and we would drive past the corrals at Spear Siding on our way back to Lodge Grass. When she was still a teenager, and later, after she had her teaching certificate but was still living at home and teaching at Big Bend school, she rode with her father from the ranch, driving the cattle they were selling to be shipped out by rail.

It would have been between 30 and 40 miles from the ranch to Spear Siding and driving cattle, would probably have taken two days to get there although I don't recall actually asking how long it took. Once there, the cattle would have been penned, then loaded on cattle cars to be shipped by rail to the markets.

There were no roads across the small mountain range between the ranch and Spear Siding and Mama told me that they would stop and drink from a spring on the way. Grandpa knew where it was from years of riding the area, but they had to get off the horses and walk through the brush along a cow path to get to it. She told of following him once, only to have him stop abruptly, snapping "don't move" ... and looked down to see a rattlesnake between his feet. She said she was absolutely frozen, could hardly breathe, while the snake calmly raised his head, looked her in the eye, then put his head down and slithered off into the brush.

She said she never did walk in to that spring again without watching every single step she took.

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.