Or, Down Memory Lane of South Dakota
My youngest cousin. Age 63. Wife, kids and grandkids. Heart attack. No warning. Montana. February. I don=t know for sure if he was really my youngest cousin, but he is 10 years younger than me and was born in the last batch of us cousins. There three or four others also vying for the Youngest@ spot in the pantheon of my generation.
It appears his wife and his kids have decided to delay funeral or memorial plans for better weather, and more sunshiny, I hope. My oldest cousin, Tom called to suggest he and I and another, younger but much larger cousin Dick, join at Chadron or some other midway stop. Tom would like to trace the routes to some of his childhood memories of the Black Hills and badlands and Cuny Table.
When he called, his appellation for me was rather unusual, I thought. He called me, Owen Wister.@ I had never heard of Owen Wister. Tom informed me that Tom had read at least one of my stories of the Witte Family history in South Dakota. He was pleased with the one that ended with the phrase, and then the fun began. He searched for and demanded to know where he could find the sequel. After reading that story, he thought of Owen Wister, the author of the novel, The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains. That 1904 novel was the foundation for many modern western novelists such as Zane Gray and others, and the inspiration for the long-running TV show. Tom said I was the Owen Wister of the Witte Family. Of course, it was Tom’s suggestion that we all should write down our historical stories of the family history. was Tom’s suggestion that someone write down the family history. Tom is a great storyteller, but he is terrible about writing them down.
Tom later texted a map to me of the Badlands. He wanted to revisit the sites of his summer of breaking colts to the saddle with Tom Witte, the second oldest of our generation. He said, Draw in the Slide, Chimney Butte, Stones Crossing. His map lacked a lot of detail, which was natural considering the distance between interesting spots, and too close together for the typical highway map. I couldn’t see any detail to identify anything any better than putting an X on Shannon County. But he already knew that. I failed to get a decent printable picture from Google maps and Google Earth was just short of impossible. So, I sent him what I could and figured we would have to make do when we got there in person.
But what he really wants, what we all want, is the story. A picture of the bare rock or of a tall mountain is nothing without the story to go with it. So, please read, with me, the following ATrip Down Memory Lane of ‘South Dakota.
Modern Conveyances, Or How to survive the Noise of Trains
Grandmother complained about train whistles. Or, at least one train whistle. Strange. She never has any hate. Why train whistles? There are train whistles in Chadron. Chadron, the Nebraska home of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad and where I lived with her and Grandad during high school and college. “Not all of them,” she said. “Just one.” The offending whistle lived at Smithwick. Smithwick, SD (SoDak back then.) Grandad and his two eldest sons had graduated up to raising cattle. Farming wheat didn’t pay very well, although the Department of Interior was set on teaching the recently tamed Native Americans (they called themselves Indians, back then) how to farm. Grandad got into the teaching business, instructing, more or less, by example. But making dry badland dirt produce a crop every year was no easy feat. Machinery and gas-powered tractors took out some of the back breaking tasks. Tractors were a fairly advanced technology in that place at that time. And, it still took some science and some innate sense of the needs of a wheat plant to make it grow in badland dust.
The grass, on the other hand, buffalo grass in particular, made great grazing for cattle and for sheep. Every fall, the half grown calves were weaned from their mothers and sent to market to grow for another six months and then for a very lush diet of ground corn and alfalfa hay in a feedlot in Iowa or Illinois, the grain belt of the U.S.
Getting 400 head of newly weaned calves to Iowa involved some mechanical means of transport. Railroads were the most reliable method at the time. The C&NW ran south from Rapid City, through Hermosa, Buffalo Gap, Oral, Oelrichs, Smithwick, and through Chadron to Sioux City on the way to Chicago, the commodities trading mecca.
The cowboys merely had to get the calves to the train stop. Calves, without the benefit of experienced mothers at their side, do not trail well. Scattering, running like rabbits and shying at butterflies are the more normal behavior of calves. Cowboys, with a lot of whooping and hollering and a good horse, can generally get the calves to run away in the right direction. But where to take the calves? Especially if the herd starts someplace in the middle of South Dakota=s badlands? Grandma said that Smithwick was the closest place.
Dad and the cowboys gathered the cow herd from the badlands, generally west and north of White River and in the badlands in the shadows of Coffin Butte and Cedar Butte along Spring Creek below Cuny Table. The old wooden corrals had been built just east edge of Cuny Table’s top. The cattle knew the way. In the spring, they had come from the wintering sections where hay had been stacked the summer before and where men could deliver to the cattle cake and protein blocks by Jeep or horse-drawn- (Horse-drawn?? Grandad had sworn off horse power when his favorite team had died after eating spoiled grain in the winter of 1927. Never again would he rely on horses, he had sworn, according to Grandma.) -tractor drawn hay wagons through the snow. The husky, red white-faced Hereford calves, now in the 350 to 450 pound size, along with their mothers, clambered up grassy slopes too steep for a man on foot, but not too tough for a cow and calf well exercised from daily marches from grassy mesas to watering holes in the crevasses.
At the far west end of the winter feed grounds the cowboys quietly sorted the calves one by one through a gate and into a small pasture. The fence held the mother cows back, until all the calves had been weaned from the herd. Typically, the calves mooed and bawled for their mothers all night the first night.
Next morning, the cowboys gathered up several calves from the cow herd that had managed to slip between the wires and crawled through the fence to get back to mama. The calves were still bunched near the fence and easy enough to find in the early light. The difficult part was to get the calves to walk away from the fence. The cows had lingered, but having seen this operation before, were not so reluctant to amble back toward the spring fed watering hole near the corrals.
Soon the calves realized they had been abandoned, just like orphans. They ran here and there and everywhere. They had no leader, no experience in breaking a new trail, no guidance on peaceful marches through tall grass. (Or short grass, either.) The cowboys raced the horses back and forth whooping and yelling and slapping hats on thighs to convince the calves that running away was the safer of two scary choices.
The horses, after an exhausting morning, had pressed the calves on toward the west, farther west than any of the calves had ever been. And then they came to the end of the world! The greatest, steepest drop-off any of them had ever seen. The west end of Cuny Table. (Ok, ok, the calves that were pushed up the Slide from the Cheyenne River ranch could have seen a similar scary view had they looked back the way they came.)
It was going to be a long, hot day and water was not so plentiful on the Table. The calves could have watered from the wind mill tank at Sidney Cuny’s place where the school house sat, but they were still too skittish to slow down for water. So, on they had to march. They, being quite familiar with badland cliff sides, did not hesitate about the long slippery slope and merely sought relief from the noisy crowd of horsemen prodding them from behind. The horses, being locally bred and raised had only to worry about the unskilled rider, if they were so unlucky as to be saddled by a novice. But none were the novice. Even the 10-year old cowboys were skilled enough to ride the cutting horses that sorted the calves from the herd, the horses who knew before the calf did which way he was going to duck and run.
From the bottom of the Table, the herd angled a little south and mostly west toward Oglala Creek, the next good water. That little valley would be a good place to overnight. By the time the calves had walked that far, they were ready for a rest. If the sun was settling, the cowboys only had to ride another hour or so until it was too dark for the calves to see to run. With a belly full of water and a little time to find comfort food in the sweet short buffalo grass, the calves felt more like bedding down for the lonely night. Unlike the cowboys, the calves did not pack and did not need any bedrolls. The Jeep stuffed with bedrolls and grub was a wonderful oasis in the night for the riders, and the horses too. They could be hobbled or staked out on long ropes for eating and resting during the night. The horses, too.
Next morning, a long time before sunrise, the horses were saddled and the calves rounded up again. The next twenty miles are the longest, boringest stretch of rolling gumbo prairie this old country kid can think of. The prairie rolls along like piles of fluffy blankets. The dips and draws have no water or cool shade. The crests of the waves of ridges hold no character, no distinguishing marks, no scars to serve as landmarks. Even experienced ranchers sometimes feel disoriented if they wake from a dreamlike reverie while driving from one end of the pasture to the other and not know for sure how many of those hills they have crossed.
It was all new to the calves. All they could do was to continue the battle to escape the whoops and yells of the enemy. They did not even care that they had crossed the line into Fall River County. The grass tasted different. Maybe a bit bitter. Not smooth and sweet like back home. And no shade. No trees. What a god-forsaken territory. Yet there was cow sign from time to time. Cattle had been here in the recent past. “So maybe we can survive. If these Fall River cattle can survive, so can we,” they encouraged each other.
Finally, near the end of the day, they walked across and into a nice, cool, spring-fed crystal-clear stream of water lying in a valley between the gumbo and the sand. What a relief! Refreshed and more aware, the calves saw a strange kind of river. It seemed very hard. Harder than any badland rock they ever stumbled over. And long. And straighter. No creek had ever been this straight. Not this long. Well, no matter. It was easy to jump across, heck, even to walk across. Just another little bump in the trail.
The cowboys gathered the now more contented herd into a wire corral near that rail road at Smithwick. Their job nearly done, they thought they could relax. They loosened their saddle cinches, and lolled in the shade of big cottonwood trees. The only job left was to push the calves up the loading chute and into cattle cars, maybe 50 per car. Soon the train would drop off some the cars and would pick up the cars on its return trip in a few hours. The cowboys were really glad to see the smoke puffing from the train=s smokestack just beyond the tree lined bend in the tracks. The calves were frightened by the huffing and puffing of the locomotive and started to mill about in the corral. Grandma started to tense up.
The safety rules required trains to blow their whistles for road crossings. “Don’t blow the whistle,” Grandma murmured. “Please don’t blow. Look both ways. No one is coming for a mile!” Just as the train rounded the bend and came near the station, it blew its whistle. The calves panicked! They crashed and broke through the wire corral fence and ran like jackrabbits in every direction.
It took another whole day of hard riding for the cowboys to round up the herd and convince them it was safe to go into that corral again! Grandmother held a deep antipathy for train whistles ever since.
The Peaceful Cheyenne River Valley, Or how to survive its Power.
A car can easily travel from Smithwick to the badlands, mainly following the railroad north for a way. Staying on the pavement is easier on today=s soft, plush cars. Drive the next train stop at Oral, and go to Buffalo Gap, the cowboy=s favorite night spot. Loud music, seldom a check of ID at the bar, pretty girls, and plenty of room for dancing on the sawdust covered floor. Oh, and there is a church too, for Sunday mornings.
From there, usually late Sunday morning, a cowboy can gather what is left of himself and his crew and head east. Of course the sun in the morning is a problem that time of day, so better rest a while and get home in time for supper. The gravel road seems windy as it follows the section lines but struggles to stay on top of the ridges where the wind blows the snow away, and the rain water runs off faster. Even so the hills come quickly and often. A little faster and every hill make you feel like a roller coaster. Your stomach follows you down, but only after a nauseating delay.
After a long carnival ride trip, you find the calm, peaceful, pretty Cheyenne River valley. Its cool waters always seem so inviting. You wish you could stop for even a moment to wade among the brook trout and catfish. But someone built a bridge so you have no real reason to stop, unless the bridge washed out in the last flood. You look for dents in the railing and wonder if anyone ever drove off the side and into the river. It happens sometimes.
Many years later, Grandad drove down that long hill from the east and somehow ran into the bridge abutment. The collision pretty well messed up the pickup=s front end. But he walked away unblemished. I never learned why the collision occurred. Dad didn=t seem to inquire. (Dad frowned at Grandad=s taste for beer that he had developed in his later years.)
I have personal memories of that long hill out of the Cheyenne River valley headed east. On one trip, I was driving a good ole Allis Chalmers 190, a huge, diesel powered, plow tractor that was also very good for stacking hay. Grandad used it to cultivate corn on the irrigation project and Dad made me use it putting up hay in the Badlands. I was cruising along at a good, strong 12 miles an hour, engine running full bore, and I singing louder than the engine. It easily maintained full speed as we wove our way between the ridges as we climbed from the valley below. I heard a sound. Surprising that I could hear anything over my lusty singing. It grew louder. And swiftly much louder. Was something breaking? Should I stop? Was it a huge truck running over me? The noise rose to a crescendo! Suddenly two military jets swept right over my head, not more than 20 feet about my hat! I almost jumped off the tractor! I seemed one of those jet jockeys rocked his wings a bit and seemed to smile at my surprise! I had to stop and walk around for a minute before I could drive on.
The next time, Dad let me use the stock truck to haul that tractor home from the cornfield. My uncle Joe helped me load the tractor. (I think he wanted to borrow it for the summer cultivating he needed to do too.) I had backed the truck up to a steep dirt bank near his house. He threw a few long posts into the gap between the box and the bank to ease the tractor=s transition from land to truck. He drove it into the truck and turned off the engine. He commented that the brakes don=t seem to lock but the stopped engine is supposed to lock the wheels anyway, so why worry? I was not so sure. My recollection was that the brake lock was the only choice. I threw a fatter post into the truck and kicked it snug against the wheels. Joe didn=t waste any time trying to chain or tie the tractor to the stock rack. I supposed he was older and wiser than me, so I didn=t either. When I got to the long hill out of Cheyenne River, I really started to worry. What if the log had rolled out? What if the log was too skinny? What if the hill is too steep? Should I get out and check? But what could I do anyway? I kept going.
After another hour and half of curvy driving I made it to Dad=s place. The tractor was still there. I backed up to Dad=s hill and kicked the log out of the way. The tractor rolled out of the truck by itself. I marveled. How lucky can one teenager be? How stupid can a teenager be? Next time I took along a whole lot of chains.
Life on Cuny Table, Or how to survive the Boredom.
For a year or two in my very early childhood my parents lived in a house on the edge of Cuny Table. At night we could see the flashes of bombs dropped by Air Force pilots practicing ground strafing and low-level bombing. Hay stacks were their fun targets, but they generally stayed to the Army=s own targets. I remember one time Dad and a bunch of neighbor cowboys gathered in jeeps and old trucks all loaded with water barrels and sprayer hoses to fight one of the fires the tracer bullets had caused in the hayfield.
The cattle branding corral was about two miles away. Every year, some of the cousins from the big city would come to watch the festivities. We kids would straddle the wooden gates and the tall rail fences like crows sitting on a telephone line. We were cute! (Someone kept a lot of pictures of us. If I ever find out who it was, well they better watch out!) We watched the horseback ropers catching calves and pulling them to the fire where the standing wrestlers held them still for inoculation and dehorning etc. But the highlight for us was noon and dinner (not supper). Kool-Aid in ice-cold tin glasses put a smile on our faces and we could draw a smile in the dew forming on the glasses. Fried chicken, potato salad, maybe sliced carrots, and pie. Definitely pies. What a life!
Off the North side of Cuny Table a very narrow neck of flat grass connects another small mesa all surrounded by rugged badlands and steep drop-offs. That separated mesa was used as a shelter from the cavalry by a group of Indians hoping to escape the confines of the Pine Ridge Agency area. There was a stand-off for several days. After several days of discussion, the major in charge of the task to bringing the Indians back home was successful in the negotiations and the group returned to the food supplies and winter shelter of the reservation. Ever since, that mesa has been referred to as Stronghold.
My father informed me that there is a way to get off the Table to the north. There is no road. There is no nice easy slope. He said there is a Slide. He sent me to find that Slide by horseback. I rode old Roanie. I followed dad=s directions to go past the auto-gate, to go past the church and the school by Sidney Cuny’s place. Then turn north through the tall mullin weed and get to the edge. You should be able to find it, he said. ‘Just be careful. It is probably pretty rutted and rough now.’ I finally got to the edge. Roanie and I looked both ways. I could see nothing but sheer drops and sudden death. Not even a nice tree at the bottom to break the fall. Which way to turn? I have no clue.
I spurred Roanie to go ahead. He seemed to look back at me and seemed to divine that I was lost. He turned to the right and we walked along the edge. After a time we came to a little slope along the edge of one of the gaps between knife blades slicing down from the table top. Roanie started down that bit of grass. He slipped and slid and rocked and rolled down that steep, crumbly, slippery knife edge. We made it to the bottom! We soon found an animal trail leading further on, mostly in the bed of the drainage ditch between the blades. We followed the ditch. We had no real choice. But it was leading to the north, toward Cheyenne River and the cow camp. I was sure thankful I had a good horse.
Marvin Cuny is a son of Sidney Cuny. He was perhaps five years older than me. He was a pretty good cowboy and a heck of horseman. I was riding a sorrel, I don=t recall which one. He was riding a younger horse, short of body, sturdy of leg. His horse seemed a little nervous, always looking to run. Marvin and I were gathering a few cattle out of the badland breaks between Cuny Table and Cedar Butte. The badlands were rugged but had eroded down so that on occasion a rider could see over the top in places. Drainage ditches cut between the former blades, now more like shadows of their former glory.
We found a few head of cattle and were encouraging them to leave their nice peaceful grazing and the cool waters standing in the shadows of steep, deep, little drains. We guided them along a narrow path between the ends of the knife blades and along the edge of a sharply cut bank of a drain.
One cow decided no one was going to push her around. She was just fine right here. No need to tramp all over the world. She found a tiny, narrow little track and she used it to clamber down into the 8 feet deep drain ditch and back up the steep bank on the other side. We looked at her path. That ditch was no wider than 6 feet at the bottom. We could probably follow in her tracks but then we would be following her for a long way back up the trail with no good way to get in front of her to turn her back that I could see.
Marvin must have known something about horses that I didn’t. He didn’t waste time following that wayward cow. Instead, he trotted back up stream along our side of the ditch. When he was a little ahead of the cow, he turned his horse and spurred him. That horse slid and then jumped down into the deep, narrow ditch. The horse landed on his front two feet. Marvin pulled up on the reins. The horse=s head came up. Just as his hind feet landed in the same spot as the front feet, Marvin spurred him again. That horse jumped straight up, as high as his head, and found footing on the top of the other side! Amazing horse! Badland bred and raised! Just like his cowboy!
They turned the cow and brought her back to the bunch. I meekly looked at the ditch and, ah, kept the cattle on my side of the ditch from running back.
Cedar Butte is a remnant of a land bridge between Cuny Table and Stirks Table to the east. Fog
Creek had for eons worked to eat into its footings but it would likely take another eon to make much difference. Cattle did not climb its steep sides. Deer maybe could, but only if harassed by coyotes. Or hunters.
My cousin Harold and I were a little too young to be of much use around the branding fire. The grown men had everything in control and we had a few minutes to consider alternative tasks. Harold had heard somehow that there was a way for a man to climb to the top of Cedar Butte. I doubted the accuracy of that hypothesis. We had no choice but to make a scientific test of the theory.
We surveyed the side of the butte. We could climb a way up, following one of the drainages cut between the typical blades. But about half way up it seemed there was a steep cliff over which flood waters would make a nice waterfall. And a major roadblock for us. We climbed up as far as we could and made another survey. Harold saw what looked to him like a nice little ledge that would let us climb higher, past the water fall. That ledge was slippery, with loose, dry little chunks, almost like roller bearings or marbles, lying on that narrow ledge. They gave us but a moment of pause. Safely between knife blades again, we could climb higher.
After several struggles and clambers and ledges, we reached the grassy top of Cedar Butte! We felt like conquerors! The top seemed to be shaped like an X. Four grassy topped legs radiated from the center. All had steep sides. We thought we could see tire tracks in the tall dried grass. Certainly we saw deer trails in the tall grass, likely used by other animals too. We trotted to the far end of one of the X legs and trotted back.
Harold said, let’s go see if we can see the cowboys below. We walked to the end of the other X leg. We could see the crew! We were proud of our accomplishment and felt certain the crowd would cheer. We waved. We shouted. We jumped around. Finally someone noticed us. The whole crowd finally noticed us! We waited for the cheers to waft up to our ears.
Instead, Harold=s mom let out a shrill scream! She grabbed Joe by the shoulders and shouted something into his ear. His frown made us think maybe we had done something wrong.
The branding and the hard day=s work was about done. Apparently, the whisper was for Joe to rescue us, or maybe push us off the edge. Joe slogged tiredly around the edge of the butte and we lost sight of him. His walk boded ill for our back sides.
Harold and I decided it must be about time to climb back down. We discovered we could not find our little trail! How did we get up here, anyway? We searched and searched. Every choice seemed like certain death.
After a time, we heard footsteps and then saw Joe. He had climbed up our trail and now sat down to rest. He saw us. He didn’t say a word. He started back down and we obediently followed in his footsteps. Back at the work site, we received no accolades. We did receive a pretty impressive tough lashing from Harold=s mom. I guess she had been a little worried about us.
Life in the Pink House, Or, how to live under the Cliff of a Badland Wall
White River was something of a barrier between Cuny Table on the west side and the wheat fields on the east, The fields lay along the knife blade badland ridge on the east that ran rather parallel to the river, perhaps an ancient east bank. (I don=t recall that we had a name for that wall of badlands. I think we just called it the badlands. It was actually a high long ridge of badlands that had been cut off by White River from the Cuny Table-Cedar Butte-Stirks Table part of the 1000 square miles of badlands that at one time had been a lake. Porcupine Creek runs on the east side of the ridge.) Wounded Knee, a nice, clean, clear spring-fed stream on the west side, starting north of Manderson runs into White River at the edge of Dad=s North Field. Across the road, Chimney Butte stood like a lighthouse guiding winds and rains and travelers around the badland wall dividing Porcupine Creek on the east side from Wounded Knee Creek on our west side. A lot of the locals lived along Wounded Knee Creek. Good water, good grazing, good hunting.
When I started first grade, dad and mom had an army barracks building from Igloo moved into a flat place near the steel grain quonset. They had a carpenter come to stay for several weeks. Frank Chastic, mom called him. I wonder if his name was Chasek, like a couple of high school classmates of mine in Chadron. (Mom was not so good at getting people=s last names correctly. Sometimes she Ahelped them pronounce their names more Acorrectly.)
Frank and Dad, when he had a few minutes, rebuilt and remodeled the interior of the house. They installed a furnace, a propane furnace. With ducts carrying heat to every room of the house! The REA had installed tall poles and had strung two wires near the tops. We suddenly had electricity! The power company=s headquarters were in Martin and I supposed that=s where the power came from. A long way away. Dad and mom arranged to have the house exterior covered with stucco. It seems like a combination of plaster and concrete. They could include a dye in the stucco so the house would never need re-painting. They decided, after deliberation, to have the stucco dyed pink. All the neighbors called it the Pink House.
The next summer I was about 8 years old. Dad taught me how to run the rake tractor in the North hay field. Someone mowed the alfalfa and my job was to bunch it up in long, straight windrows so the baler could easily pick it up and make nice round bales. Then men would load the bales into trailers and with a tractor pull the load of bales the million miles back to the corrals at the pink house. Ok, maybe not a million miles, but a very long way from home.
A couple of years later, I graduated, with mom=s misgivings well noted, to the mower tractor. It was dangerous. The mower could cut off your legs. But I was careful and never suffered a leg wound. I did have to pull out the sickle blade every night and sharpen it on the stone grinder in the Quonset for the next day=s work. With great care I managed to keep all my fingers. When I was in high school I matriculated up to the baler. A very complicated machine with many moving parts. A real pain to keep in operation.
That machine was noisy, dusty, heavy, hard to back up, and hard to keep working. It was the machine that convinced me that college seemed like a good idea. I just could not imagine doing that job every year for the rest of my life.
Life got a lot more interesting when my big cousin Tom McDill came to stay for a summer. He was about a foot taller, about 100 pounds heavier, and four years ahead of me in school. He had just graduated from high school, just as I graduated from 8th grade. He dived into the ranching operations just like the rest of us. Soon he was running a mower tractor just like me. I remember we were working in the alfalfa field irrigated with White River water by Stone=s Crossing. The field was big. It was a tedious task to get the hay put up. I was on the far side of the field from Tom. I learned later that he had stopped the tractor and had lifted the mower cutter bar to fold it over the mower getting ready to move to a different patch. Somehow that cutter bar fell and struck Tom in the head. It knocked him out. I guess dad noticed and helped him revive.
Tom and I built some gymnastic equipment in the old barn, an Army cavalry barn moved in from Fort Robinson. We hung baling wire from the rafters and tied it to one inch thick galvanized pipe pieces. Then we could do pull-ups and chin-ups and could swing on the bars.
Mom=s horse, Laddy, was her favorite horse before she got married. But Laddy had gotten old. He had lost his teeth. Normally, such a horse would be put out of his misery and used for coyote bait. Mom just couldn’t bear to take that step. Laddy stood in the corral, bored, hungry, skinny, bony. We boys found we could hop up onto his back. We found we could entice him to walk around the corral with a lump of dry molasses on a fishing pole. We dangled that sweet molasses before his nose and he would walk ahead to nibble. But we did not let him nibble. It was a great way to get a short ride. When we finished, we hid the molasses away. I did not know if the molasses would kill that starved horse and I didn’t want to distress mom. But I felt bad about that horse and my treatment of him. I sometimes still have pangs of guilt. Some time later, maybe that fall, I came home and Laddy was no longer in the corral. I don’t know if he died a natural death or if someone helped him along that path. I never asked and no one said.
We didn’t get telephones until I was in high school. It was a real novelty. Mom just loved it. She called someone as often as she could. A couple of the neighbor ladies got plenty of conversation. But they seemed to enjoy it too, I guess. The ones mom really wanted to talk to lived in town, quite far away. Like Hot Springs, or even Chadron on occasion. But she made few such long-distance calls. There was a significant extra fee for such calls. Even Porcupine was long-distance. When the phone rang, we listened to the number of short rings and long rings. Ours was two shorts and a long. (Am I correct Lill? You got to use the phone there the longest.) They later upgraded the system and so we got our own phone number, 605-825-6768. (Damn, I don=t think that was exactly the number.) We only had to dial the 5-6768 part of the number, for local calls.
My life was pretty routine. About the same things every year. One year, there was a change of pace for me. When I was about 15, at breakfast Dad said, Let’s have you ride to Cheyenne River. Pete might be short handed and there are a lot of calves to be branded. Take a jacket and a couple of extra shirts and underwear. Go help him for a few days. Mom seemed to get a little nervous. She scurried around and helped me gather up some essentials, you know, things you take for granted when you are a kid. Like socks, another pair of Levis, a pair of gloves, a quart of water to roll up in the bundle of clothes to be tied behind the saddle.
I brought Ol’ Roanie to the house, all saddled and watered. He was a good horse but he liked his life around the barn. No work, nice cool spots on the sunny days, good windbreak on the cold days, plenty of hay if he pushed a cow or two out of the way. He resisted the idea of going cross country today.
Mom tied my bundle behind the saddle for me. I pulled my hat down firm and Roanie and I set off on our trek. I thought a good lope would make the million mile trip a little faster. Unless I kept up a steady rhythm of hammering his ribs Roanie slackened the pace to an amble. It is very tiring to carry a horse from the saddle!
We eventually crossed White River at Stones Crossing, ambled past Georgiana Temple=s house, across Fog Creek, past Cedar Butte, up the crooked road to the top of Cuny Table, past the branding corrals, through the gate beside the road and not over the cattle guard that cars could use but cows would not, and through the pasture speckled with tall mullinweed north of Sidney Cuny’s place. I finally got to the north edge of Cuny Table.
Dad said, find the Slide. At one time a dozer had made a trail off the Table. It’s probably pretty eroded and rutted now. So be a little careful.” I had never seen this Slide. I had ridden in Jeeps and Willeys Panels, and even pickups with dad over most of that area. But I didn’t remember anyone ever mentioning something like, (The Slide sure looks muddy today or that Slide really helps when you want to ride north, doesn’t it? Nope. No indication that it actually exists. No sign. No cattle path. Not even a slit cut through the Mullinweeds. Ok, the Mullinweeds weren’t that thick.
The rest of the story is reported above. But after I got to the shack that day, Roanie and I waited there and after a while Pete rode up with a whole entourage of four of his sons, all looking capable and handy in the saddle. He didn’t need me at all!
Looking back, I wonder how Mom dealt with not knowing if I survived or ran away or floated down White River to the Mississippi like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. When we rejoined about 10 days later in Chadron for the fiftieth anniversary of Grandma and Grandpa, she didn’t sweep me up in her arms, or rush to hug me. She seemed pretty busy just talking to other women. I think we would all agree that she would not qualify as a helicopter parent.
