After my father had begun to work at Winkleman Dome, but before the family moved there, we went on a family outing to the town of Dubois, principally a lumberjack town at that time, and on up to Togwotee Pass on the Continental Divide.

The highway, after leaving Lander, climbs up to the Big Horn Flats, then descends into the valley of the Big Wind River, winding its way alongside the south side of the river until one approaches the town of Dubois, where it crosses and proceeds up the north side.

It was a beautiful drive to Dubois: sage covered prairie, the Wind River Range running beside us on the left, cattle ranches on the river bottom, Crowheart Butte, Black Mountain, the Red Rocks, and even badlands. Moving on from Dubois, the Wind River Range on the left merges with the Absaroka Range on the right, dominated by a sentinel peak called the Ram's Horn.

On the way to Togwotee Pass we took a side trip up a muddy, rutted dirt road to Brooks Lake. A cow moose and her half grown calf thrilled us as they ran across the road soon after we turned off on the highway, and at the lake we were exhilarated by the sheer cliffs rising to the west of the lake. After that we drove to Wind River Lake with a magnificent snow flaked peak rising behind it, then proceeded on up the highway to the pass.

It was superb sight-seeing trip, made possible by enough money in my father's pocket to fill the gas tank of our old 1935 Dodge. Togwotee Pass was about a hundred miles from Lander, so because of the time we had spent on the side trips, evening had begun creeping up on us before we got back to Dubois.

It was late in the Fall, and the air had a cold bite to it against which the body of that old Dodge provided a pitiful barrier. Even the heater running on high couldn't keep the chill of the high-country air out of the car. As we drove down the main street of Dubois, my mother suggested that we stop at a restaurant to warm up. The warmth of being in the café and the smell of frying hamburger made me hungry. I asked if we could have burgers, so my mother ordered burgers for me and my sister, but our parents ordered only coffee for themselves.

After ordering they noticed a man with a rugged appearance, a face weathered by sun and wind, sitting at the counter eating a big plate of ham and eggs. He was dressed in blue denim Levi's and wore a blue Levi shirt. His boots were black with a buckled strap over the arch, and he wore a black broad-brimmed, Stetson hat pushed back to reveal his forehead. He was just finishing up his first plate of ham and eggs when we noticed him and was ordering his second. He made me hungry just watching him eat. My mother recognized him as someone she knew. "That sure looks like Albert Winchester," she said to my father. At that time my mother was the only one in our family who knew Albert, but her remark did not go unprocessed by my father, because he had already noticed the man sitting at the counter being of the type he identified as an authentic Wyoming man.

While my father was acquainted with many stockmen in Fremont County, he had not met Albert because Dad had come to America from Scotland primarily to work for the big sheep outfits, many of which were operated by Scottish immigrants. Albert was the son of a cattle rancher on the Big Wind River. Their paths had not crossed because they were dependent on different watersheds and sought different pastures. My mother knew Albert because his high school years in Lander overlapped with hers.

My mother went up to Albert at the counter and said hello, then introduced Albert to my father. The two men were soon talking like they had always been friends. Albert was amused by my father's broad Scottish brogue. After the cook brought him his second plate of ham and eggs, he recommended them to us, thinking that my mother and father were going to eat, but they explained that they had just stopped to warm up with coffee and feed the kids. In reality, I don't think they had enough money with them to buy food for all of us for I had seen my mother counting out the change in her purse before we stopped.

When Albert learned that we would soon be living at Winkleman Dome, he informed us it was only about eight miles from his ranch and invited us to stop in the first chance we got to pay a visit. That invitation was the beginning of a long lasting friendship between the Winchesters and us. Over the years, Albert and my father would go on many elk hunts in the mountains above Dubois. On evenings when we happened to be visiting, they'd share stories about these hunts in front of a crackling fire in the fireplace. Albert and my father remained the best of friends even after my father's retirement from the oil company and his move back to Lander many years later.

With a view to their eventual retirement, my folks bought property in Lander on which sat an old house, and my father set himself to the task of fixing it up on his days off. Albert had already invited my father to move onto the old Nations place across the Wind River, which the Winchesters had purchased several years earlier. Albert wanted someone to live there just to look after the place. Indeed, my father was looking forward to that, but my mother favored moving into town, and her view prevailed.

When Albert learned that they had decided to retire in Lander, he offered to help remodel the house and use his truck to haul rock and gravel for the concrete foundation they would have to put under it, as the house had been built only on rocks to keep it off of the ground.

Albert was a strong man. I was amazed at how easily he shoveled gravel and rock up into the truck bed. Years of hard work had given him muscular arms and a powerful chest. One seldom saw him with his shirt off, and the first time I saw him bare chested I was struck by the milky white skin covering a defined muscular frame, on which it seemed the sun had never shone. He looked like a marble sculpture, except for his sun leathered face, neck and hands, which seemed carved from reddish-brown stone.

Albert spent many a long night with my father building an addition for the kitchen. As the "gofer" I would be so tired by the time they quit, I looked forward to the project being completed, so I could get some rest.

Albert also used his truck to haul supplies from the saw mill in Dubois to Lander, a distance of about eighty miles, so that we could save money on the construction. He and my father worked well as a team, and seemed to know instinctively what to do when they ran into problems presented by an old house, originally built by "eyeballing," and especially when the distance between rafters were not measured carefully enough to accommodate sheet rock without "scabbing on" with other 2x4's.

Some twelve years later, after my father had retired and moved away, their contact with each other became more limited, but they still managed to maintain occasional social contact. As an adult, when I visited my folks, I always took my father to the ranch to visit Albert and Hazel. It just seemed the thing to do.

Though ten years younger, Albert died before my father. When my father was in his eighties, an invalid on his bed from a stroke, he used to look up at a painting of two cowboys my sister had bought and hung on the wall of his bedroom. The cowboys were horseback, packing a bull elk out of the mountains. "I sure like that picture," he would say, "it reminds me of Albert Winchester; we had some good times together." Such was the nature of their friendship.

But I've ended the story before I've begun.

When we met Albert Winchester sitting in that café he was in his early thirties, and his life pretty much ahead of him. At the time, he was the father of three children whom I eventually met when they came to the Winkleman Dome school. He and his wife, Hazel, would eventually add five more children and another five hundred head of cattle to his herd to feed and clothe them.

The first time we visited the Winchesters, it was unannounced. In those days only businesses along the highway had telephones, so there was no way for us to call ahead. Anyway, it didn't matter. Back then, nearly everyone dropped in unexpected or unannounced. The Winchesters' table was always large enough and food plentiful enough to offer hospitality to all who stopped in, be they someone known or just a "drifter." They all got fed before they headed up or down the road. Occasionally a drifter would decide to stay and work on the ranch. I got to know several drifters whom I learned to like a lot and felt a sense of loss when they decided to move on.

The Winchester men were generally tallish and slender blonds. Hazel was more standard in size and brunette, but while her daughters took after her in height, they were all blond. Albert's face usually had a couple of days beard growth, but for rural folk that was the norm. We are not talking penthouse living here, but about life which had to do without the conveniences so often taken for granted in today's world; an ample supply of hot water for shaving, for instance.

The Winchesters lived in Old Jack Winchester's house. Jack was Albert's father, and after Albert's mother, Goldie, developed acute arthritis and had to be moved into the town of Riverton where she could be cared for, Albert and Hazel moved from their picturesque little cabin nearer the river to live with Old Jack.

To the traveler who drops off the Big Horn Flats onto the river bottom of the Big Wind, the ranch "suddenly"appears. One minute one is looking at sage brush, cactus and sandstone strata, the next at green fields and cottonwoods that timber the river bottom. Across the river rise the high bluffs defining the north side of the Wind River valley, and these seduce the eye to the higher majesty of the Owl Creek Range with the towering Washakie Needle dominating the skyline.

About two miles up the river one comes to the entrance of the Winchester Ranch. A dirt road leading one north another quarter of a mile brings the traveler to the old ranch house. From the front door, looking south, the bluffs defining the south side of the valley rise and after crossing numerous breaks merge with the Big Horn Flats, which eventually butt up against the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains.

To the west, the ranch land abruptly ends at the foot of a glacial moraine formed during the Bull Lake period of glaciation. Huge glacial boulders once stuck out of the pasture ground, or lay buried just blow the surface, but Albert and a hired hand named Bob Westman blew them out of the ground with dynamite and dragged them off with a tractor, depositing them along the northern edge of the field, or rolling them down onto the river bottom.

The highway climbs to the top of the moraine, and from there one can look back through the thin clean air in an easternly direction nearly forty miles down the valley. A couple of miles further west, the ranch property runs along the east side of Bull Lake Creek, its swift clear current meeting the countless boulders in its bed, behind which lie a variety of trout species. The creek then sweeps on to feed the Big Wind which has been pinned in by the moraine on the south and the bluffs it formed by cutting its channel through the sediments brought down from the Owl Creeks and the Absorokas on the north.

The Winchesters added to the size of their ranch by incorporating the old Schmoyer place and, above it, the Nations place. The Schmoyers sold out long before I became acquainted with the Winchesters, but Loren Nations, his wife Beryl, and their son Harlan, were still living on their property when I was a child. The name Nations was not a proper family name, but came from Loren's father, "Six-shooter Bill," who was of unknown extraction. Some remembered him as an orphan, some an immigrant, but he adopted or was given the name "Nations" as a reflection of his multi-national heritage.

The charm of the valley below the moraine is complemented by reflection and contemplation on the bold seasonal characteristics. In winter the fields are most often snow covered, and the wind blows cold. In spring there is a warming, a waiting and a witnessing of life awakening. In summer the fields are green one day and the next covered with newly mown hay. In July and August the sun can heat the air temperature up to 100 degrees or more, but by most mid- afternoons in August, the weather patterns are already changing on the high mountains, and thunderstorms surge down from the high country to stir the dust, then dampen it with a brief shower of rain. After the storm the air smells fresh and changed, the birds serenade the listener with their songs, and red tailed hawks mount the up-drafts and soar high across the sky. This late in the summer the young sage chickens are sufficiently grown to become more adventurous, following their mother into a sea of alfalfa fields where they find nutritious green leaves to supplement their normal diet of sage.

Before Rural Electrification

Life was just slightly removed from that of the pioneers in the mid to late forty's. The ranch had not been electrified yet, so there were no lights to turn on after dark, except on occasions, two dimly burning bulbs powered by a "Wincharger" mounted on the ice house which stood near the ranch house. The wind charger was a small generator powered by the wind which charged a six volt lead acid battery. If the wind was not blowing to keep the batteries charged, the light kept getting dimmer and dimmer until one was literally left in the dark. Thus, the bulbs were seldom turned on, and when they were, they gave only slightly more light than a coal oil lamp and for a shorter period of time, because they required the wind to keep the batteries charged. So the more dependable coal oil lamps were the principle source of light.

One evening, Loretta and Victor Frank, one of Old Jack's daughters and her husband, along with their two sons, John L. and Booge, dropped in for a visit. As the daylight faded and darkness descended on the Winchester household, Old Jack got up from his seat and turned on the light bulb. It burned with a little-more-than-dim light for a while, but there was no wind to keep the batteries charged, so as time went on the light began to get dimmer and dimmer until the house was completely dark.

John L., the oldest Frank boy said, "Grandpa Jack kept right on talking in the dark as if nothing had happened." Finally, someone got a match and lit a coal oil lamp, bringing everyone's faces back into view.

No electricity on the ranch meant no electric pump for the well Old Jack and Albert had dug. It had to be pumped by hand. In summer when I was visiting, Jackie, Albert's eldest son, my age, and I, carried water in buckets to the house from the well or the irrigation ditch, the latter source being much faster. Water in the creeks and ditches was clean enough to drink in those days. I never remember anyone getting sick from drinking it. On the way to the house Jackie taught me to use my shoulder as a pivot to swing a water-filled bucket in a circle, around and around, vertical to my body, explaining how centrifugal force kept the water from spilling out while the bucket was upside down. Farm boys learn such things from experience long before their urban counterparts learn it in school.

The Winchesters always kept a couple of milk cows. They had to be milked morning and evening, and the older kids, sometimes including me, were usually the ones who did it. Sometimes a hired hand who liked the job would do it. Milking a cow by hand provides time for contemplation-until she swipes you in the face with her dirty tail or puts her foot in the milk bucket. But mostly, hearing the swish, swish, swish of the milk forcefully ejected into the bucket until a head of foam forms on top puts one in a contemplative mood.

After the milking was finished the buckets of milk were taken into the house and poured into a separator. Before electrification the separator had to be turned by hand. I enjoyed listening to the separator wind up as the handle was turned faster and faster. The tachometer was a sliding weight on the handle which would stop sliding and clicking when the proper speed was reached for the cream to separate from the milk by centrifugal force. Once the milk began running down its channel, the Winchester kids got a cup and caught some of the fresh milk, the milk building a head on each cup, and drank it warm and frothy. When they were finished they always had a white mustache from the foam.

Then came the dismantling of the separator, taking all the stainless steel parts out to wash, then reassembling it for the next milking. I hated washing dishes and so wondered how Hazel managed that chore twice a day, every day, on top of washing the rest of the dishes, pots and pans. Even when the ranch was electrified, and the Winchesters purchased an electric separator, the job of dismantling and reassembling still had to be done regularly.

A milk cow can provide a lot of milk, so milk and cream were used in a lot of cooking, but even then, after the excess cream was churned into butter, and pancakes and bread were made with milk, there was often such a surplus that it had to be fed to the chickens and hogs. When the milk went to the hogs, it was mixed with the contents of the slop bucket, usually full of potato peelings and food scrapped from plates after meal times. Once smelled, the odor of a slop bucket, once never really leaves one's olfactory memory.

Because there was no electricity, there was no refrigeration except an old kerosene powered refrigerator, originally Goldies', I was told, but I cannot remember it or vouch for its dependability. Besides that refrigerator, there was the icebox. Perishable food had to be preserved by canning, stored in iceboxes, or kept in the icehouse. The icehouse was a building where block ice cut during the winter was stored in straw and sawdust to prevent it from melting.

Nevertheless, meat had to be used quickly in the warmer months, and butchering was frequent. In the winter months a large carcass could be stored for some time because it would freeze solid, and even a brief spell of warmer days would fail to thaw it out. Carcasses were usually quartered and hung along the beams of the icehouse, which also served as a coal shed. Then, when Hazel wanted meat for cooking, she would send someone out to cut off a chunk and bring it to the house.

One time Hazel couldn't find an adult to go get a piece of meat for supper, so she sent Jackie and me out to cut off a chunk from the hind quarter of a big bull elk. We were only eight or nine years old, and it took both of us to lift the quarter off the hook it was hanging on. It was quite a ways above our heads, but by getting under it we managed to lift it off the meat hook. When the quarter came down it tipped to one side; we couldn't balance or hold it, and it fell to the floor. There we took a knife and skinned the quarter back a ways and cut off a large chunk we thought would be enough to feed the family and hired help.

Then came the task of lifting the quarter back up onto the meat hook on the rafters. We heaved and strained to get the quarter up, but it was too heavy and we were too short. We couldn't get the job done. The last couple of inches to the beam seemed impossible. We had to find something to stand on. A wheelbarrow provided the solution. We wrestled the quarter into the wheelbarrow, Jackie got into it, and with both of us lifting, Jackie doing most of it, we managed to get the quarter back onto the meat hook.

Hazel washed the chunk we had cut off as best she could, but I can testify the meat had grit in it that evening.

While during the summer months supper could be eaten during daylight hours, in winter coal oil lamps were lit, the meal was eaten, and there was an hour or so of visiting, or instructions given to the hired hands for the next day's work-then everyone went to bed.

Eating at a large table with only a coal oil lamp burning in the center for light offered a privilege of fellowship quite unmatched in a brightly lit room. One might not always know where a certain dish was located on the table. It could have been nearby or clear at the other end of the table where the light barely reached. So there was a lot of searching and asking for this or that dish: potatoes, bread, meat, beans-and also a lot of passing of food along the table. At times, this seemed a bit slow to Old Jack, and he had his method for speeding things up. If he wanted biscuits, but didn't quite know where they were, he would say, "Would someone throw me a biscuit?" Sometimes one of the kids would actually throw him a biscuit, but Hazel usually put a stop to it after the first one flew across the table.

Moonlit nights during spring, summer, and early fall were fun nights for us kids at the Winchesters' ranch. As in the days before cars with headlights when, so you could find your way, parties or meetings were scheduled during the full moon, we children always made the most of moonlit nights, playing games outside while inside our parents visited.

By moonlight, details of the rocks and ledges on the hills to the south and north were clearly visible, and in the light-colored sandy yard around the ranch house we could run and play without any danger of running into hidden objects.

The air was so clean, the atmosphere was so clear in Wyoming, that on moonless nights the stars seemed twice the size they appear today, and one could see twice as many. Of course, there was little or no artificial light pollution.

One of our favorite games at night was playing tag. Someone was "it," and ran after another person and tagged them, then they were "it,"and so on. There was a "safe area" near the irrigation ditch where a large cedar log lay. The Winchester children called it the "mama log" because Albert had brought it down from the hills because of its size and given it to Hazel as a present. Hazel liked that kind of a present.

Years later when she was well up in years, a highway crew had to get access rights across a piece of Winchester property. Part of the deal they made with Hazel was that they would bring one of the big glacial boulders from Bull Lake Creek and deposit it in front of the house. Hazel was gone when the crew brought the boulder in a big Euclid truck and dumped it in the yard. When she returned, she found a rock the size of an automobile sitting in her front yard; at first she was shocked at its size, but she loved it, nevertheless.

At times in our play we would grab someone by the arm and swing them in a circle until they would lose their balance and fall on the ground. Sometimes we made pile-ups, where two or three of us were hurled on top of each other. We also played a form of hide-and-seek, which was not difficult to do in the dark, but we didn't stay hidden long, as the object was to run out into the yard and holler something critical of the "seeker's" ability to search in the right places. When the "seeker" was observed going in the wrong direction we would shout something like, "Hey, blindman, you're looking in the wrong place; ha, ha!"

Another nighttime adventure was to cross the ditch at the culvert and walk up the road toward the highway. In daylight, the road lacked an aura of mystery, but at night it could be an eerie journey, especially if a great horned owl flew across our path.

Once when I stayed overnight with Jackie, we slept in a sheep wagon parked in the yard. But we stayed up until after mid-night, and during the high-full moon we walked and ran down to what Winchesters called the "twenty-acre pasture," where the milk cows were kept. We howled like coyotes and listened to the coyotes answer from the high ridges above the valley of the Wind River. It was a happy, mysterious time of life.

Electricity and the light bulb brought many changes to the Winchester Ranch, as with many other ranches and farms about the same time. Older people followed a clock determined by light and darkness. "Be sure you are up at daylight, so we can get started at sun up" were words of counsel I heard into my teenage years. To those who uttered them then, those words were as virtue-filled as they are devoid of significance today. When one was said to be up at daylight, no lazy laggard was the subject of such a statement. When the presence of daylight determined the length of the working day, it was important to make the most of it. Artificial light changed all that.

The presence of light had determined the length of the working day: they were long in the summer, shorter in the fall, and even shorter in winter. Darkness was the "Closed For Business" sign, printed on the blind pulled down on the window of a celestial store front. Those hearty souls who grew up regulated by the natural rhythm of day and night grew accustomed to it and preferred it, but those whose lives bridged both eras eventually surrendered to the electric light bulb and the mechanical clock, and the idea that there was any virtue in being up at daylight faded with the passing of the generation which lived before rural electrification.

"Up before daylight," has become a linguistic artifact, purely descriptive; the positive intent has faded and gone. Any day of the week, including weekends, once one gets beyond the yawning days of summer, the highways are glutted with commuters up long before daylight, and they will not return until after darkness has settled in over their places of residence. A one hundred mile, two hour, commute from rural bedroom communities is not at all uncommon at present. And all this is made possible by the electric light bulb.

The coal oil lamp may have extended the light, but it was more of a reminder that it was time to prepare for sleep. With a continuously bright burning incandescent light bulb, one vanquished the darkness and reshaped the order of the world and society.

With a determined will, accessing a source of artificial light would not make any difference in the way work and leisure were regulated, but in human life the tendency seems to be that work expands to fill available time, and leisure shrinks. Thus, the light bulb extended light time which was then filled with work.

And so, when a tractor with headlights was bought for the ranch, Albert, hard worker that he was, could often be found plowing until midnight. He said that the tractor ran better in the cool of the night, and no doubt it did.

Clock time and artificial light also tended to promote individualism. In an earlier day, the fading of the light into darkness brought people together, however briefly, to form community. With the advent of the light bulb, anyone could go pretty much anywhere and do a variety of things dictated by individual taste. While moonlight allowed kids to go outside and play in summer, not every night is moonlit. Darkness shepherded children into the presence of their parents. With the light bulb they could get away from adults by going to another room to do their own thing.

A person who lived in both eras tends to have nostalgia for the old days, but appreciation for the new. But some of the tradeoffs for the new brought questionable results.

When we pause to reflect on the long road of endless headlights, moving zombi-like toward the million points of light, the city that does not sleep, a feeling of loss intrudes into my consciousness. I am transported back to the time of that light bulb in the old Winchester ranch house which was powered by "Wincharger" generated electricity. As the evening progressed, the light became dimmed, then dimmer, and dimmer, until it went out, left the room in darkness, and the coal oil lamp had to be lit once again.

Learning to Drive

When I was about nine or ten, and my sister was thirteen or fourteen and learning how to drive our old 35 Dodge, I got a little out of joint that my father was not teaching me how to drive as well. During one of our visits to the Winchesters, we saw a new green International truck sitting in the yard. Albert had just bought it, and talk about driving it and all its modern features were the subjects of conversation at the supper table. Old Jack, who preferred horses to machines, remarked that Albert had been trying to explain the meaning of some gadget on the gear shift to him, and that he got the impression that if you pulled the lever down something surprising would happen-like the jocky-box would open and a new pair of gloves would pop out. But it turned out the gadget did something Albert called "putting the truck in low range, or compound," so it would have more power. Jack recounted the incident with humorous wit.

The subject of driving turned to the "adventures in driving" my father was having with my sister, and as he gave an account of how she was progressing, I interjected that I wished I could learn to drive as well, but my father had not given me the same training he was giving my sister. I pointed out to my father that Jackie Winchester had been driving tractors and cars since he was in the first grade. Hazel interjected that the first time Jackie drove a tractor unattended was when Albert put him on a big W-30 McCormick-Deering and sent him from the field to the house. When he got there he discovered that he couldn't shut it off, and so kept on driving it in a circle in the yard, hoping it would run out of gas. When Hazel saw what was happening she ran out into the yard, jumped on the draw bar, and shut the tractor off. However, now at nine, he drove all the farm machinery.

That information gave me more courage, and I pointed out that I was totally unable to drive anything.

Albert was sympathetic to my complaint, and, after a few quiet words with my father, asked me to come outside with him. He told me to get into the driver's seat of our battle-ship gray, '35 Dodge and start it up. I didn't know how to start it and flooded it out. The engine turned over, but nothing happened. "You're not holding your mouth right," Albert said. "You've got to hold your mouth right to get it to start. Push the accelerator clear to the floor and twist your mouth like you mean business," he said.

I followed his instructions, and the car started. He showed me how to push in the clutch, put it in gear with its "on-the-floor stick shift," and get it to move; only at first it didn't move, because I let the clutch out too fast and killed the engine. Again, Albert attributed my failure to not holding my mouth right; so with a little more attention to his holistic approach to driving, I was soon going a few feet forward and then putting the car in reverse and backing up a few feet. "See, nothing to it," Albert said.

I thought it fun and felt quite adult after that. My father even let me drive down the road to the oil field a few times. But I have to admit, my sister was much better at driving than I was. I was just getting the hang of driving that '35 Dodge when my father traded it in for a tan colored '42 Dodge with a gear shift on the steering column. I found that very confusing at first, and nearly ran off the road a couple of times trying to shift the gears, because I had to look in a new place for the gear shift while I was driving. A couple of years later, he bought a cream colored '48 Mercury, and by the time I was thirteen he let me drive on a snow covered highway. Mistake! I put the car in the ditch, and he had to get a truck and pull it out. However, by the time I started to high school I was driving with experience.

Some Ranchers Keep Hogs

Somewhere I heard of an old cowboy saying exclaiming that some ranchers raise hogs and some will even admit it. Whichever it is, they still have hogs. For many years, Winchesters kept hogs.

While cattle ranchers depended almost entirely on cattle for their livelihood, many of them also raised other types of livestock. It was a form of diversification of their portfolio.

One of my favorite things to do when I went down to the Winchesters' was to go over and look at the hogs in the hog pen. A hog pen has a special farm ambiance of its own. One has to become accustomed to the smells and ignore the manners of the hogs, not imposing one's own moral code on them. Hogs love to eat things that some people find sickening. They enjoy mud and don't mind looking filthy.

Albert kept several brood sows and a boar, and there were usually twenty or more barrows and gilts in the pen being fed for slaughter. I liked to throw rocks at them and make them run around the pen squealing. One time I grabbed an old heavy wrench used on old tractor wheel lug nuts and threw that at them from the top of the fence. I really intended no harm to the hogs, only a bit of pain so they would squeal. But the wrench had a sharp point on one end, and it stuck one of the hogs in the back just like a spear. The pig began squealing so loud it frightened me, and I ran back to the house. Everyone could hear that pig squeal. My father asked me why that pig was squealing, but I was in such a state of shock I couldn't answer. Albert must have known something was seriously wrong with that pig, but didn't let on like he cared enough to bring the guilty to judgment.

I got away with one that day, and it cured me from wanting to throw things at the hogs again. Jackie told me a couple of days later at school that the pig had died of his wound, and that he had pulled it out of the pen and down to the far edge of the corral.

I wasn't the only one who got a laugh at the expense of the hogs. Once Jackie and a couple of the hired hands found quite a quantity of lemon extract. which Hazel had bought from a traveling salesman some years before but had not been able to invent enough recipes to use up, so eventually she threw it out. Lemon extract being highly alcoholic, hogs not being very tolerant of alcohol, and the hired hands having done this mischief before, the stage was set for a comedy such as few have witnessed.

Along with the contents of the slop bucket a good quantity of lemon extract was mixed in and poured into the hog trough. Not all the hogs got a sufficient quantity of the slop, but for those that did, it didn't take long for the brew to hit home. Soon the tipsy hogs were staggering around the pen just like human drunks, bumping into the wall and even losing their balance and falling into a sitting position.

The hands also gave the turkey gobbler a spoonful and got him drunk. He was always strutting around the yard, his tail feathers fanned out, wing tips dragging the ground, and his head cocked back making threatening noises.

A couple of spoons full of lemon extract completely changed the old gobbler's behavior. It was a great show, certainly not commendable from today's moral attitudes toward the treatment of animals. As far as I remember it was only done once, initiated by one particular hired hand. But with all the criticisms leveled against it, it was a long way from the viciousness of cockfighting, dogfighting, bull baiting, and the seventeenth century practice of blinding mice before putting them into a maze. It was incongruous behavior, like that of any drunk, and we laughed at it, like we laughed at any uncoordinated action of an inebriated individual, the void in whose life, filled by the alcohol, we did not understand.

One day Jackie and I got a good laugh from the "Yuk" of feeding the hogs a couple of dozen rotten eggs. The Winchester chickens were free range chickens. They built their nests wherever they could find a suitable place, and it was up to the kids to locate the nesting sites and gather the eggs. Sometimes a hen hid her nest so well it could not be found until the hen or hens laid quite a few eggs in it. Some of these eggs would get rotten before they were found. Jackie and I found a large quantity of rotten eggs one day while we were gathering eggs.

What else to do but throw the foul smelling things to the hogs. I was always amused at just what hogs would eat. I smashed one egg right on a hogs snout, only to discover that the hog loved it. Soon we were feeding the eggs to them and being grossed out by the fact that they found the stinking things appetizing. One hog would break an egg, and while the yellow stench ran out of their mouth, other hogs would be trying to eat some off its chin. Hogs are scavengers, and while they mainly were fed grain, ground alfalfa, and slop, they were not adverse to eating anything else that had food value.

Once we also fed a lot of young sparrows to the hogs. Sparrows were a real nuisance on the ranch. They nested in the walls of the bunk house, between the board walls and the sheet steel covering them-and in any and every opening of every outbuilding. They were especially troublesome in the granaries. They created a mess with their droppings, fouling up water buckets, and anything else with an edge they could sit on. No sympathy for sparrows!

Jackie and I were cleaning the sparrow nests out of the walls of the bunkhouse one day, all of them filled with naked young, their stomachs bulging and their eyes bugged out. I thought it would be fun to fool an old setting hen into thinking some of these sparrow babies were her own chicks. We lifted the hen up and placed the sparrow chicks under her. For a minute or two she didn't notice anything, then feeling the motion under her she stood up to have a look. It took her no more than two or three seconds to figure out that these sparrows were not her chicks but food instead, and with four or five quick stabs she swallowed them all. The rest of the sparrows went to the hogs. We were good kids!

Hogs get eaten as well, and that means butchering. Butchering was a social occasion, because all the men worked together for most of the morning. We kids lined the fence of the hog pen to watch what was going on. No one was laughing or carrying on. This was serious business, the way people put food on the table. Still, spirits were high. There was no squeamishness, nor did any expressions of sorrow or feelings of guilt for what was happening to the hogs come to the surface.

Butchering hogs involved considerable preparation. The scraping table had to be set up, a fifty-five gallon oil drum filled two-thirds full with water, and a wood fire built around it. Then a couple of old rubber tires were usually thrown on the fire to make it burn hotter and heat the water in the barrel faster. When the water was hot enough, which was near the boiling point, the slaughtering began. Rather than sticking the pig with a knife, Albert shot the pigs with a .22 rifle. The bullet had to be placed right between the eyes to drop the pig. Then he would stick the knife into the throat and cut the carotid artery. The blood would spurt more than a foot after he withdrew the knife. When the hog was bled and dead, two men would carry the hog out of the pen, and by tying the back legs to a pole, immerse it in the scalding water. After the scalding loosened the hair, the hog was placed on the table and scraped with a long bladed knife that allowed both hands to draw the knife toward the person holding it. The process sure left a clean hog. The carcass was then hung up and gutted.

Once my father asked Albert to let him shoot one of the hogs. Albert obliged, but the pig turned its head ever so slightly just as he pulled the trigger and the bullet did not hit dead center between the eyes. The pig did not go down, so Albert had to jump in the pen and finish it off by sticking it. My father never asked to shoot a hog again.

There were times when the Winchesters let the hogs have the run of the fields and woodlands. The hogs fended for themselves by rooting for worms and roots during the summer months, but during the winter they pretty much hung around the straw stacks salvaging what grain they could find. They also became scavengers of anything that died, and would quickly take advantage of a dead sheep or cow.

One sow discovered that if she entered the flock of sheep during lambing season she could clean up on "after birth," and even have fresh lamb right as it was being born, or soon thereafter. She even got to the place that a ewe, ailing from a hard birth, was fair game for her.

It didn't take long for the Albert to see what was going on in the lambing flock and capture the renegade sow, but she turned out to be really mean and attacked the hands that went out to pen her up. After she was put in the hog pen she managed to do something pigs don't do very often, she jumped the low wall of the hog pen and ran free again. Again, she was captured and put in a barn where she couldn't get out. Jackie fed her grain every day to fatten her up for butchering, and every time he opened the barn door to feed her she was always on the fight.

Carol, or Teeny as we called the youngest Winchester girl at the time, managed to climb up on the roof of the barn to take a look at the pig, which was getting quite a reputation by this time. Teeny was only about five years old, but she could climb just about anything she put her mind to. In the roof of the barn there was an opening for throwing hay down into the manger, and Teeny knelt down to have a look through the hole at the infamous sow. In the bright light of day the interior of the barn was very dark, and she couldn't see very well. So she leaned down into the hole to get her head a bit further into the barn and out of the light.

Suddenly, her hand gripping the edge of the opening in the roof slipped, and she found herself hurtling down into the manger. She landed on some old hay still in the manger from when a cow had last been penned up there, so was not hurt by the fall. But the sow was an even greater threat. Fortunately, the sudden motion and the shriek of a child plunging into the manger startled and frightened the sow, and she ran over to the opposite wall of the barn before she turned around to see what had happened. That gave Teeny just enough time to scramble back up the poles of the manger and back out through the hole in the roof. As on other occasions, Teeny had tempted fate and lived to tempt it again.

Some Ranchers Keep Sheep

Everyone has heard of the cattleman's disdain for sheep. While for some the contempt for sheep persisted, it didn't for the Winchesters. At one time, the Winchesters kept several hundred head of sheep. My father appreciated the fact that they had sheep. He had immigrated from Scotland to work in the sheep industry, largely operated in Fremont County, Wyoming, by Scottish immigrants.

By 1920, when my father immigrated, the old animosity between sheep ranchers and cattle ranchers that boiled over into armed conflict nearly a hundred years earlier was actually over, and many cattle ranchers found it profitable to put sheep on land where cattle did not do so well, especially ground that was dry and brush covered.

Over the years, my father and I contributed to the Winchester flock ourselves. Winkleman Dome was situated right along a major stock trail, and when herds of sheep were being driven west from ranches around the towns of Riverton and Hudson to mountain pastures on the reservation we could watch them pass from our living room window. If one happened to be looking down into Big Horn Draw when several thousand head of sheep were being driven across its sage covered spaciousness, a cloud of light brownish dust could be seen rising in the air for a couple of hours before the herd arrived at the head of the draw.

For days after the major part of the herds had past, stragglers, lost in moving so many animals at the same time in the same direction, would wander around the oil field trying to find the herds they had gotten separated from, now miles up into the mountains. These sheep were anyone's to catch-if you could get to them before the coyotes did.

We caught a half dozen or so of those lost ewes and took them down to the Winchesters to put in their flock, and from time to time Albert would tell us that we were getting a small flock going from the lambs they were having. Such assurance was just the talk of good friends, because those ewes could never be identified again once they were mixed with several hundred head of other sheep that looked just like them.

My father was not interested in claiming any of those sheep as his own, although it was customary for ranch hands who wanted to get into the ranching business themselves to begin building their herds in that very way. For my father it was just a way of interacting with Albert, and Albert would often tell my father that if he wanted to find a good dry ewe to butcher "go ahead and do it," then add jokingly, " it might be one of your own."

Everyone has heard the expression, "you act just like a sheep." That means a person does what someone else does without thinking. To put it simply, sheep are thought of as being dumb. Booge Frank's expression of someone or something being "really" dumb was, "dumber'n a hun'ert head of sheep."

Sheep tend to act en masse; whatever one sheep does, generally the rest of them will do the same. I once found five dead sheep on a narrow ledge from which they could not escape. One had jumped down, followed by the other four without any thought that the way back up was too high a jump for any of them to make it. They literally starved to death on that ledge. To jump off of it meant a fifty foot fall to the ground and just another way to die.

I found out about sheep group behavior one fall when the lambs were being separated from the ewes for shipment to market. I was barely a teenager, if that, and had been given the job of tending a gate in the corral, opening it to allow ewes to be put through, and closing it so none of the lambs would follow. There must have been a couple of hundred lambs behind that gate, and as soon as the old ewes were separated and run into a different part of the corral, I opened the gate to let the lambs out to graze in one of the pastures.

As I opened the gate walking backwards, I stumbled on a rock and fell flat on my back. Those lambs poured out through that gate in a virtual stampede. The first lamb jumped three feet high over my prone body. Then, all I could see were wooly bellies as almost every lamb jumped over me just because the lamb in front had jumped. When the gate finally swung open wide enough to let them out over a broader area they began going around me. But some still kept jumping even though there was nothing there to jump over.

Albert had an old Mexican sheepherder, Martinez, who could speak very little English and referred to Hazel Winchester as "Mrs. Mr. Albert." He would be out with the sheep on their summer range for months with nothing but his dog and horse for company. At regular intervals Albert would take him groceries, tobacco, and a bottle of whiskey. Albert would stay and visit for awhile, then leave him in his solitude until the next visit.

One time, Jackie and I went with Albert when he took supplies to Martinez. Martinez was on a high hill overlooking the sheep when he saw us coming in the truck. He galloped to the wagon ahead of us, so he could greet us at the door. While we were unloading his groceries he carefully went through them looking for the whiskey. It wasn't there. Had Albert forgotten the whiskey? No whiskey! Martinez was so disappointed he could hardly speak.

Unknown to Martinez, Albert had hidden the whiskey in his shirt. He intended to give it to him after he had gotten a reaction from him. Martinez looked up and down in the truck for the whiskey and couldn't find it. Finally, Albert revealed the whiskey in his shirt and gave it to Martinez, and what a change came over Martinez. His face beamed like the sun. He opened the bottle and offered Albert a drink. The boss had come through after all.

The Attraction of Old Jack

I sometimes refer to Jack Winchester as Old Jack, because my father referred to anyone older who had a son or grandson with the same name as "Old," as opposed to "Young," thus, Old Bill, Young Bill, Old Jack, Young Jack. The Winchester children called Old Jack, Grandpa Jack. Old Jack Winchester had all the qualifications to be a featured character in any narrative that touched him. Jack never would mention his past, except an occasional mention, with a southern drawl, of coming from "Kalina.," and rather than saying anything about his birth, claimed that he came from an egg laid by a buzzard and hatched by the sun. It took other family members, after Jack's death, with an interest in family genealogy to dig out the facts of Jack's earlier life. Jack was born sometime during the 1870's in or near Pickens, South Carolina. When he was nineteen he left home with an older brother, Ben, and went to Texas. Apparently Texas did not appeal to them, so Ben went to Oklahoma and became a farmer, while Jack headed for Wyoming. Just why Wyoming appealed to him may only be surmised from being acquainted with Old Jack. Personally, I believe it offered him more freedom. Jack needed space.

He landed a job as body guard for a tycoon, J.B. Okie, from Lost Cabin, on the south side of the Big Horn Mountains, and when that relationship became disagreeable, he moved further west to the Wind River and hired on with the Stagners (a family of breed Shoshones, who ranched on the north side of the Wind River). Later, he bought and cleared land on the south side for his own ranch. Jack was a slow talking man, very deliberate, never lost his southern drawl.

By the time I got to know him, he was too old to do the really hard ranch work and had become principally an irrigator, although he still could round up cattle and fork hay. But Albert had taken up the heavier work load.

When Old Jack went out into the fields to irrigate he rode a horse which, because of the horse's girth, he named "Double Guts." Double Guts was usually very gentle, and when Jack would drop the reins Double Guts would normally stay right where Jack dismounted, or move slightly to browse on willows or a patch of grass nearby.

Not every adult could get close to Old Jack, but he liked my father. What measure Jack used to tell who he liked or didn't like was not consistently explainable. But he did have a pretty definite view of what a "real" man was. A man had to have proven himself in some way, had to be a survivor. When in conversation at the Winchester dinner table, my father recounted his many years working with livestock, in mines, and in the oil fields, his six week illness with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever shortly after he arrived in America from Scotland, his subsequent bout with Tularemia, and his near death from being gored by a large buck deer, Jack applied his measure of a man. When my father showed the scars on his left arm where a tine of the buck's antlers went through his arm and the scar on his rib cage where another tine nearly got one of his lungs, anyone listening had to be impressed, although my mother always responded, "Oh, there he goes, rolling up that sleeve again."

This "measure" was honored one day when Jack got a tractor stuck in the mud. My father happened to be on the ranch at the time and was within sight of Jack. When he saw Jack stuck, he walked over to see if he could help. Old Jack didn't say much, just acknowledged the offer and went about the business of looking for bits of brush and boards to put under the rear tires for traction. It was a slow process as there wasn't that much brush and other debris near the tractor. Each search took Jack farther from the tractor, and when he thought he had enough brush to get out of the mud he started the tractor and let out the clutch only to see the wheels bury the brush, while the tractor scarcely moved.

Finally, my father offered to go back to the ranch yard and get another tractor with a chain to pull him out of the mud. Old Jack didn't even answer him, he just went out for another bit of brush. As Jack made that last trip back to the tractor with not much more than a stick, he said in his slow drawl that maybe it would be quicker to get another tractor. Dad read the meaning of the words and got the second tractor and pulled him out. Jack never said anything! My father thought that he had offended Old Jack, but such was not the case. As my father related the incident to Einar Anderson, a friend who had known Jack for many years, Einar said, "Alex, there are very few men Jack would accept help from, let alone take their advice. Jack took your advice and let you pull him out of the mud; nobody is going to get any more from Jack than that."

Old Jack seemed to like all kids. He was especially fond of his youngest granddaughter, Donna. When she was very small he used to lie on his back and let Donna (who he nicknamed "Boogie") play on his chest. One afternoon he was lying on the bed with Donna on top of him when he had to clear his throat. He opened his mouth and gave forth with a gurgling, erupting sound as he tried to clear the phlegm. Donna looked down into the chasm and shouted gleefully, "Do it again, Grandpa; do it again." When the fifth child, Carol, was born, she was very small and got the name "Teeny," and Jack's quip, that she was the runt of the litter.

Boys who did something Jack disapproved of were chastised by Jack's observation, "I see women do that."

Old Jack had dentures. When he went to bed at night, he took them out and set them on a night stand near his bed. When he got up in the morning, he put them back in his mouth and went on his way. The room Jack slept in was also the room Jackie and the oldest set of twins slept in, the younger set not yet born. Jack slept on the north-west side of the room, Jackie on the east side, on the south side of the door, and the twins slept on the south-west side of the room.

When as a third grader, I stayed overnight with Jackie I had a clear view of Old Jack lying on his bed. One morning I awoke and was looking at Old Jack, listening to him snore. That was an entertaining experience in its own right. While I was gazing across the room at him, a mouse climbed up on the night stand and went right for Jack's false teeth. I shouted at the mouse, and it ran right across Jack's dentures and disappeared behind the night stand. Old Jack woke up in a daze, looking around for what it was that woke him up. I lay my head back down pretending I was asleep, but Jackie and I were having a hard time keeping from laughing and snorting at what I had done.

Later that morning, I thought I ought to warn Old Jack about that mouse getting germs on his dentures. I was awful nice about the way I told him, but was amused and entertained when he looked at me and asked, "Did my teeth chaw it up? Sometimes I wake up in the morning and find a mouse in my teeth all chawed up. I never have to set any traps."

One evening during my ninth or tenth year Jackie, the twins, and I were in the house by ourselves. I don't remember where Hazel was, but she was off someplace and hadn't made it home to get supper ready. I don't remember any hired hands being present at the time, so it must have been a time when things around the ranch had slowed down. Anyway, Jack came in and, seeing that there was no one getting supper, asked where Hazel was. When we said she was gone, Jack suggested that someone get something to eat; Albert would surely be in soon and he would need supper too. What a responsibility! We got out bread and butter, found some leftover meat in the icebox; then, of course, there was milk to drink.

Sometime during the rummaging around looking for food, I found a silver plated electric coffee pot. I thought we could heat up some milk and make cocoa. The only outlet was the electric light, but there was a plug-in at the side of the socket so I plugged the coffee pot into that socket. There was a flash of light and smoke came out of the pot's heating element. I quickly pulled the plug, and submerged the coffee pot in the water bucket. I was really frightened, not only because of the electric fire, but because I knew I had ruined something valuable. Hazel eventually arrived after we had set a pretty poor table, and I immediately confessed that I had burned out her coffee pot. She had never used it as the house was only wired for electricity from the Wincharger which stored it in batteries, thus the current was most likely incompatible with the coffee pot.

I don't know what happened to the coffee pot, but later learned that it was one of Hazel's wedding presents, but having no electricity for years after she and Albert were married, she had never used it. Because of me she never did get to use it.

When Albert and Hazel's family began getting too big for Jack's house to accommodate them all, Albert began talking of building a new one. Jack, having always been in control, didn't think a new house was necessary but never talked much about it after he first expressed his opinion. Maybe he thought he would be left alone in his old house after Albert and Hazel moved out. Building the new house began in l948 and was finished sometime in l949. Nearly every able bodied person on the ranch had a part in building it, including me, a ten year old. I could pound nails in the sub-flooring and carry bits of sawed off lumber to the burn pile.

When the house was finished, Hazel knew she had some work to do on Jack, had to handle the situation right; so she took him to one of the several bedrooms and showed it to him. "This is your room, Jack, and that's your bed." That was all Hazel said. Agreeably, old Jack responded, "Well, I think I'll just lay down and take a snooze." "I'll call you for dinner," said Hazel. "You will be eating here with us." That is how Jack was assured of belonging and adopted into the new house. It was not the one he had built with his own hands, but it was just as certainly his home now.

When Jack was quite old, he still went on the cattle round-ups in the high country above Horse Creek, north of Dubois. One fall while rounding up cattle his horse got stuck in a bog, and Jack got off to help it get out of the mud. Jack was standing in front of the horse in deep mud himself when the horse panicked and lunged forward. The horse struck out with its front feet, hitting Old Jack in the chest. His ribs and sternum were broken, his heart and lungs injured. Albert and the rest of the wranglers packed him out of the mountains on horse back, put him in the truck, and rushed him to the medical center in Dubois. From there he was taken to the hospital in Riverton, more than a hundred miles away. But Old Jack was too badly injured to survive. He hung on for a day or two, but the trauma was too much for him. He died from the blows dealt by his horse. Thus, he died as he lived, working cattle. His obituary read: "born, circa 1872-78, died, 1951."

Steady Hands And Drifters

As might be expected, over the years I was on the ranch many people worked for the Winchesters. I have already referred to Martinez, but the group also included my sister and mother, both of whom helped Hazel with cooking and house work.

As the Winchester family increased in size, so did the domestic work that Hazel had to do. When the children were eight in number and summers arrived, the burden or work grew as there was the need for more ranch hands. Hazel, like most ranch women of her era, found it necessary to take responsibilities she had not anticipated. Early on in her married life she found thrust upon her responsibilities not only of her own family, but of her mother-in-law, Goldie, who became so incapacitated with arthritis that she could no longer work. Hazel was obliged to take her responsibilities on top of her own.

So the story of the traveling salesman who came to sell brushes and household cleansers to her, while humorous, is quite understandable. Hazel was doing dinner dishes one afternoon, after having cooked a huge meal for the family and hay crew, when there was a knock at the door. She answered it and found a traveling salesman loaded down with his wares. Like all callers at the ranch he was welcomed, and soon he had Hazel sitting on a chair looking at a wide array of brushes and chemical cleansers.

Hazel, overworked and tired, began to relax as the canvass proceeded and soon fell fast asleep. She slept in her chair for a couple of hours before she woke up, startled to find the salesman and his wares gone, and precious little time to get the evening meal prepared for a hungry hay crew. She often wondered what the traveling salesman thought of her falling asleep.

Hazel, like Albert, would always find a job for someone willing to work. Some of these workers figure in other contexts of the story I tell, so are not mentioned here. These hired laborers worked as irrigators and hay hands, wranglers, and cooks. Some of them were known to the Winchesters, were even relatives, but some simply drifted in and asked if there was work. Most were willing to tell you what their names were, but some were unwilling to give that information, choosing to work for cash and be on their way when the job was finished, or when they felt they had worked enough to get farther up the road.

There was a young woman, named Veneeta, who helped Hazel with housework for awhile. She wore black leather pants and jacket and rode a Harley-Davidson motor cycle with a side car on it. When she was with her husband, he drove the motor cycle and she rode in the side car. I'm not sure where she lived, but she drove the motorcycle to Winchesters' ranch to work and back home at night.

She didn't stay at Winchesters long-maybe the motorcycle ride was too taxing every day, but I used to see her and her husband blitzing down the highway on their Harley, passing all the cars ahead of them, long scarves around their necks flying in the wind behind them. Veneeta always waved to everyone she knew as they zipped past.

Gussy and Einar Anderson were hardly your regular hired help, but they did work for Jack and Albert for several years. They once owned a ranch above Dubois west of Horse Creek, but sold to the Winchesters and stayed on to work for them. Gussy and Einar lived in the ranch house, the kind one could imagine on a post card, and looked after the cattle during the summer after they were moved from lower pastures to the mountains.

However, occasionally they did come down to the lower ranch on Big Wind River to help with haying when needed. It was in the hayfield that my father first met Gussy.

Gussy (her real name was Augusta) adopted a man's look. She cut her hair short, dressed in blue jeans, and wore men's high topped shoes. She had a deeper than usual voice for a woman, smoked, and also swore like a man. In those days few women smoked or used profanity, at least in public. She also worked like a man: branding and castrating calves, working in the fields, wrangling, and feeding cattle. Because of her life out of doors, the sun burned her brown as leather. She was also flat chested and few people would have suspected she was a woman. In fact, Gussy seemed to enjoy being mistaken for a man. Strangers who had heard her last name mentioned, sometimes referred to her as, "Mr. Andersen."

My father, on his days off from the oil field would sometimes do various jobs for Albert on the ranch. The first time he met Gussy, he was "pulling the stacker," and Gussy was driving one of the buck rakes. The stacker was a wooden frame affair that the buck-rakers brought hay to, and with a pickup, tractor, and sometimes, a horse, the person who "pulled stacker," would elevate the stacker head with the vehicle or horse, by means of a cable which turned a wheel and raised the levers to which the stacker head was attached. By this means the hay was dumped on the stack.

During a break in the action Gussy came over to the pickup to talk to the stranger pulling stacker. My father suspected he was encountering someone out of the ordinary, but life is full of stranger things, so he didn't give the diminutive size and slightly different sounding voice of this hay hand a second thought.

After they had talked awhile my father said he had to get out of the pickup to take a pee, still no idea that he was in the presence of a woman-and Gussy moved around to the other side of the truck.

As the afternoon wore on, the details of that hay hand he had been talking to began to calculate in his mind, so after the crew quit to go to the ranch house for dinner, my father asked Albert about that person driving buck-rake. "Oh," Albert said, "that's Gussy Anderson. The fellow you met at the house this morning is her husband."

My father was deeply embarrassed as he told Albert of his encounter with Gussy earlier in the hay field. Albert just laughed. "Don't worry, she thought nothing of it. You're not the first man who has peed in front of Gussy."

After Gussy and Einar sold their homestead to the Winchesters, they had enough money to enjoy some leisure time. Around 1948 they decided they would like to drive south to Mexico, just to see what it was like "down" there. They brought a brand new green Chevy car for the trip. When they drove it into the yard at Winchesters, we all went out to look at it, and "oohed, and aahed" over it. Of course, someone asked how much he had paid for it, and Einar told us $1500.00.

Gussy and Einar set out for Mexico late in the fall. Gussy wasn't too happy with me, because the evening before they were to leave she came into the house, took off her coat and put in on the floor in front of the fire place where Albert, myself and Jackie were sitting roasting pecans. She had a brand new pair of dark glasses she had bought for the trip in the pocket, and when I got up off the floor to retrieve a pan of pecans I was roasting in the coals, I put my hand down on Gussy's coat. I heard the glass crack as I put my weight down on the coat. So did Gussy. She fussed a bit, but said she guessed that anyone who put their coat on the floor should expect it to be stepped on.

We all waited for Gussy and Einar to get back from their trip and tell us about what they had seen and done. It was a high occasion for us. We looked at the souvenirs they had brought back and listened to them tell about driving down one highway after another, going through one town after another, until they had gotten to Mexico.

Loretta, Albert's older sister, joked that during their stay in Mexico Gussy had been seen wearing a two piece bathing suit with the top on backwards.

In Mexico Gussy and Einar went to a bull fight, and such a disappointment it was for them. They had gone to see a man with a sword jump into an arena and kill a charging bull. But it didn't happen that way, explained Einar. First they let the bull loose in the arena, and then some guy on a horse came out and stuck little spears into it. The bull kept charging and chasing that horse until it was nearly tuckered out; then another fellow dressed in fancy pants came out and stuck more of those little spears into the bull-Einar couldn't remember what they called those little spears.

After the bull was totally confused and tuckered out, the bull fighter came out with his cape and sword hidden in the cape, like the bull was going to know what it was if he saw it! The bull wouldn't even charge at first, but the bull fighter stamped his feet and shook his cape until the bull charged. He did this several times until the bull just kept his head down, then the guy stuck his sword down between the bull's shoulders into his heart, and killed him. Einar figured that if a fellow was to watch enough bull fights the bull might be able to get a horn into the bull fighter, but they didn't see any of it, and as far as he was concerned it was a disappointing experience. They ought to give the bull a better chance by putting the bull fighter into the arena when the bull was fresh.

When I was thirteen and always wanting to go fishing in an out of the way place where fishing was "really good," Einar suggested that we let him take us back into the high country above Dubois, to the upper reaches of Wiggins Fork. The Wiggins Fork forms the headwater for the East Fork of the Big Wind River. It all seemed like a great idea to me. The headwaters of Wiggins Fork were a good thirty mile ride on horseback from the end of the road.

Gussy took along her grandchild Teddy, who only eight or nine years old, was already a good horseman. We took five saddle horses and two big work horses to pack our supplies, gear, and tepees.

We had plenty of time. My father was on vacation from his job, and the hay was not ready for the second cutting yet. We would have seven or eight days in the high country "catching fish like we might never do again," Einar said.

And good fishing it was. The farther up the creek we went the bigger the cutthroat trout seemed to get. Gussy cooked good breakfasts of pancakes and fish, and dinners of biscuits and fish, she brought a few spuds along, and some onions, so we had a slightly different menu each day, but, I have to admit, I was wanting more variety after the third day.

In the evening we sat around the fire and told stories, true stories, stories stranger than fiction. Gussy told us about how she was wrangling dudes for the Rocking Chair Ranch one summer, and she took a party out fishing which had a woman along who was particularly aggravating. She complained about everything: she was always too cold, the food wasn't what she had expected, and it had too much grit in it. She couldn't sleep on the ground; she couldn't

go to the bathroom in the brush; she didn't like baiting the hook, and on and on, like that.

But Gussy became especially vexed about the complaints the woman made about the meals she was cooking for the "guests." One morning, after the "guests" had all left for the creek to fish, a coyote pup trotted by the camp where Gussy was cleaning up, washing dishes and such. Gussy, who always packed a rifle in a saddle scabbard, whipped her rifle out and shot the coyote.

Fresh meat, for "Madame Guest!"

Gussy dressed out the coyote, cut the hind quarters up, dredged the pieces in flour, and cooked them in a Dutch oven with onion and potatoes and a few carrots. When the fishing party came back to camp for dinner, Gussy told them that she had a special treat for them and served up the coyote stew. "Madame Guest" ate it like it was something she had ordered at the Waldorf. At last Gussy had fixed something that deserved a compliment. "What is it?" the woman asked. "Coyote," Gussy replied. Everyone, including Gussy, roared with laughter. They all thought she was joking. Surely such a thing was unthinkable! Gussy was just humoring a disagreeable woman! After all, they had paid well to be pampered in that wilderness. Gussy never said anything further about the stew, just that it was a dish she was noted for-she didn't want to share the recipe.

However, she did cut up the coyote's tongue, and without telling the woman (now much more friendly), what it was, gave some to her with the assurance that once a piece of that special but secret bait was on her hook the fish would have a hard time getting it off, so she wouldn't have to touch that other nasty bait so often.

On our fishing trip with Gussy and Einar I got my variety in meals after about three days into the outing when a large cloud of smoke appeared over the mountain to the west. Gussy and Einar knew what it was in an instant. "There's a fire over on Frontier Creek," said Einar, "the fishing's over. We'll have to go over there and help put it out."

We broke camp and headed out back the way we had come and thence over to the next drainage. The sky was black with smoke, and the fire swept from tree top to tree top in a flash of orange. By the time we got to the base of the mountain where the fire had started, riders from Dubois were already setting up a fire camp. Hundreds of fire fighters would soon be arriving in jeeps which would also mean a primitive road into the area would have to be built.

The forest service personnel immediately sent Gussy and Einar out to fight the fire, because they were already experienced hands at it. My father was assigned to set up the cook tent and other shelters the arriving fire fighters would need. Teddy and I were just in the way, so while Teddy just hung around camp, one of the forest rangers told me to go out and "fish for the table." He said to catch as many fish as I could, as there would be plenty of men to feed. I probably caught a hundred fish in two days for the men, but there were several hundred men to feed before the fire was controlled, and my few fish did not go very far. The field cauldron, in which a quarter of beef along with vegetables could be cooked, did a much more effective job than frying a few fish in a pan while hundreds of men waited to get one. And although the first meal the cooks fixed in that cauldron had a scorched taste, it tasted good after eating so many fish.

By the time the fire was out, my father's vacation time was nearly at an end, so we had to ride out of the high country without Gussy, Einar, and Teddy. We took our saddle horses, the two pack horses, loaded with gear, and headed down the mountain to the ranch on Horse Creek. There we unloaded the supplies, unsaddled the horses and turned them out to pasture. It was a good outing for a 13 year old, I told my father as we got in the car to drive home.

One fellow, who worked for the Winchesters went by the name, "Whitey." He wouldn't give his full name until he had worked for the Winchesters for a considerable length of time. Albert had to pay him in cash as you have to have a name to be paid by check. As can be guessed, Whitey was tow-headed. I'm not sure whether he came to the Winchesters with that name, or whether Albert gave him that name. Many workers picked up a nickname when they worked for the Winchesters, some of the Winchesters had nicknames themselves. Among the hired help there was "Fingers," "Slim," "Sloki," "Teeth," "Harlem-oil," "Swath-board Shorty,"and to top them all, "Conchitas Centavos." Among the Albert Winchester branch of the clan: "Jackson C. Peachtree," or just "Peachtree," sometimes shortened to "Peaches," sometimes, "Giz," (Jackie); "Hezekiah-Jeremiah," sometimes just "Hezekiah," other times shortened to "Hezzy," or extended to "Jeremiah-Kincaid" (Jerry); "Boogie," (Donna); and "Teeny," (Carol). Neither set of twin girls picked up nicknames. The Harold Winchesters all got nicknames. Harold himself was "Rufus," or "Whistling Rufus," or "Oscar. His children: "Delicious," (Dolores), "Pedro," (Pete); "Red," (Clyde); "Gopher Gus," or just plain "Gus," but sometimes, also "Flathead," (Doyle); "Pinky," (Rita Kay); "High Pockets," (Raymond); and "Ripsaw,"(Dale). Their cousin, Marvin Thompson, was, "Bloke," or "Buffalo Bloke." Albert referred to me as "Little Joe" when I was about ten years old, and as a teenager "Uncle Joe." Booge sometimes called me "Sid." Albert called the International implement dealer in Lander, "Jittery Jake," and the two chiropractors, Drs. Furst and Kendall, in Riverton, were nicknamed, "First" and "Second."

I never knew Fingers. He worked on the ranch before my time, but I remember Albert talking about him. He got his name because he lost two of his fingers in an accident. He and another ranch hand had just drawn their pay and were trying to get an old car started so they could drive into town for a little celebrating. They were having a hard time getting the car started, so Fingers lifted the hood to have a look. For some reason he took hold of the fan belt when his partner in crime cranked the engine catching Fingers' fingers between the fan belt and the engine pulley. While the bones were broken, the flesh crushed, and almost completely severed, the tendons were not completely cut through.

When his partner finally got the car started, he drove Fingers into town and Fingers convinced a doctor to sew his dangling fingers back on. The doctor wanted to amputate them, but Fingers would have none of it-they were his fingers. At first Fingers felt sure they would grow back on, but the procedure didn't work. Eventually, the tendons died, the stitches rotted out, and the fingers, dried and black, fell off. It is a wonder he didn't get gangrene.

Fingers felt a terrible sense of loss at having his fingers gone. For some time after that he kept them in a match box in the bunkhouse, or so I was told.

Whitey was a likeable guy. The smaller kids used to jump on his back, and he would run around the yard eventually throwing them off. We kids had only passing interest that it was suspected that he was an ex-con, perhaps an escapee from a prison farm.

After working for Winchesters for a couple of years, gaining their respect and trust, he did tell Albert his real name. Soon thereafter he quit and went to work for an outfitter between Dubois and Jackson Hole. He was guiding some hunters in the Spread Creek area one fall when a hunter's bullet struck him in the head and killed him. He was wearing a red shirt, a red hat, and riding a black horse. We had a hard time believing even a dude could be stupid enough to shoot him for an elk. Whitey probably just won the lottery that day.

Slim was a respectable citizen with a history that included earning the rank of sergeant in the Army. He was related to the Winchesters, and his real name was Doyle. At the time, by the way folks built him up, I thought sergeant was as high as you could go in the military. Someone eventually straightened me out on the meaning of "rank," but one's military rank had to be secondary to a young boy when Slim would demonstrate one insane talent he had. Slim was able to discipline himself enough to overcome the body's natural reaction to electric shock.

One day Slim was talking to Albert and my father about his years in the military. They were standing beside a running "Farmall H" tractor. I heard him say something about being able to stall a Jeep-some way, but I didn't pay much attention beyond that. Then, with his bare hands, he grabbed two spark plugs on that four cylinder tractor and stalled the engine. I had never touched a spark plug on a running engine, but by the way the grown men were awed by what he had done, I figured it must be pretty unusual. When I eventually did touch one, accidentally, Slim had all the respect I could muster.

In time, Slim married and moved away, as did Slokie. Slokie married Lucy King, the daughter of a potato farmer, near Morton, a small town down river, which is now out of existence. It probably wasn't accidental that these two men took a more social view of life rather than the life of a drifter which suited the life styles of most of the summer help. The hands who stayed on for a year or two, sometimes more, usually had some goal in mind. However, some "long-termers" were dedicated ranch workers and never intended to do anything else. They may have worked for one outfit, then for another, but they were always ranch hands.

There were also some cowboys that showed up about the time of the roundups. These men looked for any excuse to get on a horse and work cattle. Jack Gavin had a ranch further up the Wind River, but at roundup time he could always be counted on to help drive the cattle up or down the trail. The same could be said for an older Shoshone Indian, Jake Shongutsie. Jack Gavin considered himself a half-breed and told me when I was a kid that he grew whiskers only on one side of his face, the white side.

Jack was always good for a laugh, and the things he said stuck in a person's mind. One night after the herd had been driven to the lower ranch and the cowboys were sitting around an open fire recalling some of the events of a week on the trail, someone asked Jack about some humorous incident on the trail, and Jack said he hadn't had so much fun "since the hogs ate grandma." I thought that response was shockingly hilarious, and on several occasions have used it to the astonishment, if not horror, of my listeners.

Jack Gavin couldn't resist rodeos, and eventually got so "busted up" that he was only a shell of his former self. I saw him in Lander on The Fourth of July, sometime during the '80's. He had recently gotten out of the hospital in Jackson Hole after a good bucking horse put him on his back and in physical therapy for several months. Jack told me, with the same memorable wit that characterized him as a younger man, that whatever people might say he had or had not done with his life, no one could deny that he had "experience."

Jake Shongutsie was the origin of many stories on the ranch, especially those that centered around his driving. He was a hard working Shoshone Indian, and that was by Albert's testimonial. But his driving was what made him famous. I don't know that Jake had a driver's license, although he drove his pickup truck to Winchesters to work. Jake was a real fireball, sometimes he would get that truck up to thirty miles an hour on a straight stretch of road.

Jake was an intelligent man, but pre-technological. More at home on a horse than in an automobile, in his own way he came to grips with the internal combustion engine. Maybe Jake did his best, maybe not! I guess the final opinion is still out on whether Jake really knew how to drive. But sometimes it was necessary to send Jake with supplies or a truck load of cattle between the upper and lower ranches, so like it or not Jake had to drive the big International truck.

Jake knew how to start the engine, and he knew something about shifting gears, but changing gears did not seem to be very important to him until it was absolutely necessary to keep moving. Jake was oblivious to the speed he was going or the time it took him to get some place. Usually, whatever forward gear Jake could get the truck in when he started out, that would be the gear the truck was in when he reached his destination. Usually this was a lower gear, because he couldn't get the truck to move in the higher gears; the engine would stall, and Jake would have to try another. Thus, by trial and error Jake managed to get the truck started and get it to go up steep inclines.

Stopping was another high adventure. Jake knew how to apply the brakes, often without engaging the clutch, but for him that was only one of several ways of stopping a moving vehicle. Coasting up an incline until the engine stalled and the truck stopped was another, just as satisfactory. Or just turning off the key, killing the engine, and letting the resistance of the transmission and engine do the job, worked fine for Jake.

Nor was it unknown for Jake to slow the truck down when descending a grade to not only apply the brakes, but to keep two wheels in the ditch. Someone even claimed that Jake would occasionally ride the truck up on the embankment. Whether it was to be attributed to luck or skill, Jake never turned the truck over.

Bob Westman and Jack Hornecker were long-termers. They figured into my life as a working ranch hand myself to the point that they play larger roles in this story than most of the hired help.

Bob, a young, blond, muscular, medium framed man, came from Crowheart country. When he hired on at the Winchesters' he brought his horse, Rusty who wore the brand, P Bar W. Rusty wouldn't let anyone but Bob ride him. When Bob first came to the ranch all he had to do was whistle, and Rusty would break from the horses he was grazing with and come to Bob.

Rusty was a sorrel, and as Bob said, "a pretty good hoss." He didn't have papers, but had a classy look that hinted at good breeding sometime in the past. To put it plainly, Rusty was a "throwback."

When Bob was a just a boy his dad, planning on upgrading his own horses, acquired a long legged sorrel mare named Linda, which the Westmans considered the fastest thing on four legs. Her blood line went back four generations to carriage racing Hambletonians stock owned by Dick Dennison of the Bear Creek Ranch. Bear Creek runs into the East Fork, an area settled by Scottish immigrants in the early part of the century, the entire area coming to be known as Little Scotland.

One of the ranchers at Little Scotland was Tom Bain, who raised good horses, but more of the stock working variety. Some of the mares' progeny may have been sired by Bain's stallions. Anyway, after the line departed from Dennison's Hambletonians, the offspring tended to resemble the lines of the more traditional stock working horse; that is, until Linda had her last foal, in 1938, a filly sired by a sorrel quarter horse stallion owned by George Conwell of Dubois. The filly resembled Linda in both color and form. She inherited her mother's long legs and speed, and after being broke to ride soon got the reputation of being able to outrun anything put up against her in the Wind River country.

Bob's dad had died in 1931, and some years thereafter his older brother, John, sold a bunch of horses to Lyle Bessey of Riverton. John pointed out the mare, whose colt, sired by another of Conwell's stallions, had just been weaned, and mentioned what a good runner the mare was, a point Bessey affirmed when he sold her at eight years of age to Frank (Wild horse) Robbins of Glenrock. Robbins always had his eyes open for a good horse for his rodeo, and this mare's speed caught his attention.

John Westmann gave the name Rusty to the colt she had foaled, and the story of Rusty's dam might just have ended there with the mare becoming just another fast horse in Frank Robbins' string. But an even more famous horse entered the story of that illustrious mare.

During the 1940's there was a big wild horse round up in the Red Desert, and a colorful palamino stallion given the name "Desert Dust" by those who tried to catch him captured the imaginations of all of us horse conscious kids. In 1945 a picture of him was circulated all over the state of Wyoming. He stood on a sage covered hillside against a rock ledge backdrop, head held high, before, as I imagined, making his last dash for freedom.

Only there was a cowboy waiting on a horse that was faster than Desert Dust. It was Frank Robbins, and he was riding Rusty's mother. She simply ran Desert Dust down.

So it was "no fluke,"Bob would say, that Rusty had so much ability as a saddle horse. Unfortunately, Desert Dust was later "gunned down" in a pasture near Glenn Rock by vandals who then entered the enclosure and slashed his carcass.

When Bob left doing ranch work, got married, and had to support a family it was difficult to keep Rusty. Bob kept him until 1954. After he left Winchesters' he still found time to take Rusty on cattle drives for various ranchers, but eventually he sold him to the Homecs, who ran a large cow-calf operation near Hudson and had their eye on Rusty as a cowhorse. But Rusty went back to bucking as soon as Bob turned him over. Many cowboy "wannabes" tried to ride Rusty, but he threw most of them off with facility. Even at 14 years he was too much for your average cowboy. But it was also clear that without Bob on his back, he would never make a dependable cow horse. Bob heard that some young cowboys, trying to improve their skills, had used bronc spurs on Rusty, and after that there was no doubt that he would be useless as a cowhorse. So he was sold to Bill Frank, a rodeo contractor, who bought him for his bucking string.

For some time Bob didn't know about Rusty becoming a rodeo bronco, but when he did find out about it, he felt, like any good cowboy, that he had betrayed his horse. Sometimes he wondered if, perchance, Rusty didn't have what it took to make the rodeo circuit, did he end up in a cannery? Bob's only consolation is that he kept his saddle, so it didn't get the same bad treatment his horse had.

I tried to find out how Rusty had fared as a bucking horse. I called Bill Frank, whom I knew well from my earlier years in Wyoming, but Bill had bought so many bucking horses from so many people he couldn't remember anything about Rusty. Anyway, the name meant nothing, because every horse that made it into the rodeo string was given a rodeo name, a bucking horse's name. All Bill could affirm was that if he bought Rusty, he bought him because he was a bucker. With that, Rusty's traceable history ends.

Soon after the Franks bought Rusty as a bucking horse, they sold their entire string of horses to another contractor, Buster Ivory, who took them to Europe to put on rodeos there. Did Rusty go with Buster? We will never know. Bob thinks he would have been too old by that time to have still been that good. But after all, Rusty did hate to have anyone on his back except Bob. I tried to offer Bob some consolation. If Rusty did go to Europe with Buster Ivory, instead of ending up in a cannery, he may have graced the cooler of a French meat market, eventually ending up on a fine dining room table covered by an elegant table cloth, complemented by flowers and served with a hearty Burgundy.

Rusty's picture hangs in the State Museum, the Barrett Building, in Cheyenne. He is standing in front of Mountain Meadows Cabin, saddled with Bob's gear and ready to go. Bob sits in the saddle with the cord that tripped the camera shutter in his hand. The slow camera shutter and the vibration of the line make it look as big as a lariat. It's the way Rusty-and Bob-should be remembered for all time.

Jack Hornecker, young like Bob but less trim and wirery, was from a pioneer family in Fremont County. He was an all around ranch hand, but while he worked for the Winchesters he was primarily an irrigator in spring and summer, and in winter he, along with other hands, loaded the hay wagons from the hay stacks we had made that summer, hauled it to the cows, and pitched it off the wagon to feed them.

I'll never forget Jack's hat. It was sweat stained from many summers of wear and had numerous sweat lines, like the lines left on a wall by rising and falling flood waters. Where the brim joined the crown it was caked by dust, mixed time and again with a new day's sweat, to yield a dark ominous looking ring. My mother once asked him why he didn't throw that hat away and get a new one. Jack said, "This is the new one!" When, after years of working for the Winchesters, Jack left, I felt like a piece of the ranch life I was a part of left with him.

One of my favorite stories about Jack Hornecker was his shooting of A.B. Morris's pet skunk in the hen house. A.B. ran a small store about a mile from the Winchester ranch house, and he had a pet skunk from which he had surgically removed the scent gland. That procedure turned an otherwise objectionable critter into a very desirable pet. The skunk was a playful thing, and when we kids would go to the store we would play with it, sometimes getting it kind of mad, at which times it would stamp its front feet on the ground, then turn its rear to us to squirt us, an exercise in failure which must have been frustrating to the skunk.

Sometimes we would throw one of A.B.'s cats on the skunk just to watch the skunk whip the cat, and it always did, even the tom cat. These were never serious fights, the cats already knew they couldn't whip the skunk, so there were usually short episodes of hissing and spitting with a roll or two on the ground before the cat would break free and run away. I'm sure the PETA people would find that offensive.

The skunk was an independent creature, and would sometimes be gone from the store for a day or two before it could come back home for a good meal of human type food. He was especially fond of scrambled eggs.

Maybe that was why he dug under the wall of the hen house one night and startled the chickens. Jack had just bedded down in the bunk house when he heard the commotion in the chicken house. He grabbed a shot gun and flashlight, and went out to see what the cause of the ruckus was. When the light picked up the shining, beady little eyes of the skunk, Jack simply took aim and fired. After the chickens, all having gone airborne with the discharge of the shotgun, settled down, Jack left the hen house and went back to bed.

He was recounting the incident to us at the breakfast table the next morning, and casually noted he thought it strange that the skunk hadn't made any smell when he shot it. Someone mentioned that it might be A.B.'s pet skunk, and we determined that we would check at the store over the next few days to see if the skunk was there. We were involved in testing a hypothesis, and it proved to be true. A.B.'s pet skunk never returned from its night time adventures. A.B. figured the skunk had been hit crossing the highway, and although we knew better, we never let on that we knew what had happened to his pet skunk.

The Things Some Country Boys Do

Up to the time Slim and Slokie worked for the Winchesters, I was not yet a teenager and did little work on the ranch other than occasionally milking a cow or two, feeding the hogs, cleaning out the chicken house, and weeding the garden. Jackie, who was six months older than I, found time to make play out of things that urbanized boys would not consider within their ideals of games or play.

Most boys raised in the country, I suspect, are closely attached to the wild creatures as well as the domestic ones. Jackie and I used to walk the ditch banks after the water was turned off and hunt for trapped fish. We used to take our .22 rifles and shoot black birds and sparrows, and occasionally a duck, pheasant, or sage chicken. It may seem barbaric to some people, but we fit into the ways of the natural environment pretty well. We were little different than the falcons, hawks, weasels, bobcats and coyotes which kill their prey and even play with it in the process. We were not guilty of bringing any of these life forms to extinction, or of destroying their habitat.

Once when the water had been turned off in the main ditch, Jackie and I went down the length of it to catch the fish that were trapped and starving for oxygen in the shallow water. Because the water had been shut off the day before, some of the fish were alive and some were already dead. We caught one large German Brown trout by stabbing it with a shovel. We figured it weighed at least two pounds, but even along with several other live trout we fished out of the ditch, we knew we would not have enough fish for everyone at the supper table.

We looked at the dead fish, some floating on the water, some lying on the sloping sides of the ditch. We picked up some of them up that felt soft and whose flesh went to mush as we tested their firmness with our fingers. Certainly those would not do. But what about the dead ones with firm flesh; could we take those to the house and have Hazel and my mother cook them up with the others we had caught alive? We looked at the dead ones, even those whose eyes had already turned white. We felt their flesh. If it was firm, we gutted them, cut off their heads, and put them in the bucket with the fresh ones.

That evening at supper, Jackie and I stared at the large platter of fish his mother brought to the table. We had already decided that we would eat only the bigger pieces, because we could be sure they were from that big German Brown. The platter was passed from hand to hand, each taking a piece or two and passing it on. When it got to me the big pieces were all gone. I'd have to chance it. I looked the pieces over to see if I could see any difference in them. I couldn't. I put a piece on my plate and ate it cautiously. It was delicious. I thought of those dead white eyes staring at me from the ditch water. I guessed that I must have picked a piece from one of the live fish. The ranch hands ate every piece of fish off that platter. They thanked us heartily for salvaging the fish from the ditch. Little did they realize that we really had "salvaged" some of those fish. Fortunately, our skills of discrimination were up to the task. Until now, no one has known what we fed them that day. But then, there is old saying that goes, "Whatever you eat that doesn't kill you, fattens you."

One summer around the fourth of July, Jackie and I were celebrating by burning sparklers, which leave you with an eight inch piece of wire when the powder burns off. Also, later that day, we found an unusually large number of mice living under a pile of boards down near the river. We figured that it would be fun to catch a bunch of these mice and brand them like cattle were branded. We would make the branding irons out of the wire left from the sparklers. We shaped the wires into the brands we wished to apply, mine was a JG, for Joe Greig, and I don't remember what Jackie's. intended to burn into their hides.

An old porcelain tea kettle we found served as a receptacle for the mice, and with leather gloves on to keep from getting bitten, we threw the boards aside and caught as many mice as we could and put them in the tea kettle.

When we thought we had enough to start our own "herds," we carried them back to the ranch house, a distance of about three quarters of a mile, and set about making our branding fire. We opened the lid on the tea kettle to look at our catch, and discovered that there had been one "heckova" fight going on in that kettle. Some of our mice were dead, in fact the big ones were eating the little ones. Never mind, we would brand what was left.

We were building a fire in the yard and were beginning to carry out our plans when Hazel came out of the house and asked us what we were up to. We showed her our branding irons and our herd of mice, revealing that we intended to burn our brands into their hides, then turn them loose. Then, when we saw them running around the yard, we would know they were our mice.

Hazel didn't take to the idea at all and suggested that it would be better if we would just kill the rest of the mice in the kettle before they all died from fighting each other-which we did. The tempest in the tea pot didn't exactly fulfill our expectations either. Some might think from some of these stories that Jackie and I were sociopaths-killers and torturers. But we weren't; we were just country boys making do with what was at hand.

Occasionally, when Albert's brother Harold and his family, including his children, Dolores, Pete, Clyde, Ripsaw, and High Pockets, came to the ranch, or when other relatives were there, like Booge and John L, we would throw half dried cow pies at each other, and then dive into the ditch to wash off the manure that stuck. Country kids have to be innovative. However, to be fair, I can remember engaging in this activity only twice.

The Richardson kids should also be mentioned when it comes to talking about play. Their parents, Charley and Helen Richardson, were farmers in the Crowheart area. Mr. Richardson once remarked that they tried to survive on forty acres, taters, and a milk cow. "It takes a ton o' taters to feed these young-uns through the winter," he used to say.

Most of the stories I heard about the Richardsons came from Harold Winchester, so they have been processed through his story telling and my memory. Helen was apparently a sharp shooter with a rifle and kept all of the stray dogs in check around the Crowheart area. Also, she let her husband know when it was time to come to the house from the field by firing a shot near his feet. That is what I heard.

One time, Helen got mad at Harold, who lived on a ranch across the road from them. Perhaps the root of this attitude was her belief that Harold took up Charley's time while he should have been working. One time she went to Harold's house and "cussed" him out for wasting Charley's time. Harold responded by picking up a saw and sawing furiously on a board while whistling a tune as loud as he could, intent to drown her voice out.

Helen told Charley she didn't want to see him talking to Harold anymore, but he didn't obey. One day when she saw them talking together down in the field, she put a bullet in the ditch bank right alongside Harold. Harold told Charley that if he couldn't control his wife, he was going to confiscate that rifle himself. Obviously, as good a shot as she was, she meant no real harm to Harold or Charley, or they would have ended up just like the stray dogs she reportedly picked off.

One evening when my family was at the Winchesters, the Richardsons dropped in on their way back to Crowheart. The new Winchester ranch house had just recently been finished, so that would peg me at about ten or eleven years old.

When the adults began to visit, we kids, who were making a lot of noise, had to go down in the basement to play. Play somehow turned to disagreement, and disagreement between me and Mary Ellen Richardson turned to hostility. She didn't take any sass from anyone. She picked up a twelve inch spike used in the construction of the house and lunged at me. I jumped backward, but stumbled over a tricycle. I never felt the blow, so was never quite sure what hit me, but when I got up off the floor I had a cut above my right eye, just to the right edge of my nose. The bleeding was profuse. A large lump began to appear on my forehead, and I headed for the upstairs.

When my mother saw me she panicked. By the amount of blood on my face and shirt, I might as well have had an artery cut. She pulled my shirt off and pressed the cloth into the wound hard and kept the pressure on until the bleeding stopped. When she got things under control, the Richardsons, glad that I had survived the attack from their Amazon daughter, said good night to all and headed on up to Crowheart.

We stayed at Winchesters' until my mother settled down, and then drove home to Winkleman Dome. But my mother would not let me go to sleep that night for fear that I might not wake up. I don't know where she got that medical opinion, but at about two or three in the morning, she finally gave in and let me go to bed. The next time I saw Mary Ellen she grinned and asked me how I got the scar by my eyebrow. I suspect she would still ask the same question if we should ever meet again.

Earlier I mentioned diving into the ditch after getting hit with a cow pie. One hot day during mid-summer, my mother drove us down to the ranch to visit. Jackie and his twin sisters were away to a 4-H meeting up at Crowheart, so I decided to go swimming in the ditch to cool off. Right below the drop on the ditch where it ran through the corral there was a deep hole, a cooling pond for the cattle. All the Winchester kids swam there. But this time, the water had been turned off in the ditch to divert the irrigation water elsewhere. However, that deep hole was still full. The water was dark and muddy looking, but I didn't give it much thought, I just wanted to cool off.

I took off my shoes and socks, then my clothes, and dived in. What a surprise! I felt like I had dived down the hole of an outhouse. For a couple of weeks the runoff from the corral floor had been draining into that ditch. The water was mixed with cow urine and manure. When the water got into my nostrils it was not unlike getting hit in the face with a cow pie. I surfaced and ran up the ditch until I found fresh water and jumped in again. I washed and washed myself, but I couldn't get the smell to leave. I went back to the corral got my clothes, then went to the house to tell Hazel and my mother what I had done. My mother feared I'd catch some disease, but Hazel just laughed at my sorry tale, gave me a bar of soap and pointed me back to the ditch to wash again.

The deep hole in the ditch where we would swim was just below a head gate, called a "drop," so named because the water below the drop dropped off to a lower level. Wooden panels could be inserted between the piers of the head gate to raise the water above the drop for irrigating purposes. The concrete walls of the drop narrowed the ditch to about three or four feet, and made it easy to cross the ditch by jumping the space between the piers on either side of the ditch.

Winchesters sometimes put late calving cows into the corral through which that ditch ran. Most of the cows calved in February, but occasionally a cow bred late and might have a calf well into late spring.

I was feeding the hogs one day when a bob-tailed heifer dropped her calf about fifty yards on the other side of that ditch. It was such a cute little critter trying to stand up, all toddling, as its mother licked it off. After I got the hogs attended to, I jumped the ditch at the drop and started to go over to the cow and calf. Immediately, the heifer charged me. I jumped back over the ditch and turned around to see her go back to her calf. Hmm! This might be fun. I eyeballed the distance between the cow and the ditch, and the ditch and the low wall of the hog pen. I knew I could jump both the ditch and the wall of the hog pen with no trouble, and I knew I could run pretty fast. The problem was knowing how fast the cow could run.

I felt confident that I could go twenty yards beyond the ditch and still make it over the hog pen wall before the heifer could catch me. In fact, I thought she would never try to cross that ditch.

I jumped the ditch and started for the cow. Once again she charged, but stopped as soon as I ran back and jumped the ditch. I figured these charges were all going to be fake charges, so the next time I went toward the cow I tried to move a little closer to her and raise the risk factor. She charged at about the same distance she had before. I jumped the ditch at the drop and turned around. She was almost to the ditch, and I headed for the wall of the hog pen. I heard her splash as she ran through the ditch just as I started my jump over the hog pen wall. Before I hit the ground I could feel her breath. When I turned around she was right there glaring at me over the low wall of that pen. If she had jumped the wall of that hog pen, I'd have learned another lesson about entertaining myself at the expense of a beast.

Jackie and I learned another method of down-on the farm-entertainment from my father and Jack Hornecker. Hazel had sent Jackie and me out to catch three or four chickens for dinner. It must have been some kind of holiday, because, unlike today, people ate chicken only on Sundays or special occasions. Jackie and I were running around chasing one chicken while holding the one we had just caught. It was a difficult proposition, because chickens, especially a rooster, can run as fast as a human for a short distance, and we were having trouble filling Hazel's grocery list.

Then, along came my father and Jack Hornecker. My father took one of the chickens, put its head under its wing and rocked it up and down a few times, and lay it on the ground. The chicken just stayed there like it was sound asleep. This was the way his mother taught him to catch chickens back in Scotland, he informed us. He took another chicken we had caught up to that point and put it to sleep. "Now, go catch the rest of the chickens Hazel needs. If you hurry, these will still be here when you're ready to pick them up." Jackie and I were amazed.

Jack Hornecker seemed surprised that we didn't already know this little secret about chicken hypnosis and proceeded to demonstrate another way of doing it. He took one of the sleeping chickens' heads out from under its wing, laid it on its side on the ground circling its beak several times with his index finger, then quickly drew a line on the ground. The chicken acted like it was paralyzed. It lay there staring at that line a good long time before it got its wits back and tried to get up and escape.

Jack, I thought, had no doubt employed this chicken hypnosis with regularity; he loved to eat chicken and was capable of eating a whole one at a single meal. He was baffled by the fact that some people were choosy about what parts of a chicken were the best to eat. "You just take, and you eat a chicken," he would quip.

Jackie and I, after killing, scalding, picking, and drawing the chickens we caught, went back to catching and hypnotizing the rest of them. In a short time we had the chickens lying all over the chicken yard, glassy-eyed, staring at the lines we had drawn in the dirt with our fingers. We were amazed at their stupidity, but even more amazed that we found ourselves in possession of such power. I tried hypnotizing a cat the same day, with no success. It kept batting at my circling finger. Later I even tried hypnotizing some of my friends in town using the same technique. It didn't work on them either. It's a long way from chickens to people.

Jack Hornecker also showed Jackie and me how to witch for water. There were lots of willows growing on the ditch bank, and according to Jack Hornecker, because willows grow around water they have a special ability to find water. Jack cut several willows that forked at just the right place, cut them off at just the right length, then grasping, and bending, the forked ends in his hands palms turned down, he walked around until the willow pointed at the ground. "Now, there is plenty of water here," he said. "I can tell by how hard it pulls; just look at how the willow is twisted by the power of the water to draw it down." We looked, and were amazed to see the willow twisting until the bark became wrinkled from the stress, or so I remember.

Jackie and I tried it and had the same success. We were witchers. We found water everywhere. Of course, we never dug for it; the Winchesters already had a well, but we knew that there was water down there.

That night after supper, when we were all sitting around in the living room visiting for an hour or so before we went to bed or to our own homes, Jackie and I told the folk there about our skills at witching for water. My mother was a complete skeptic. We argued that we knew it was true because we had done it, felt the pull of the water on the willow until we could scarcely keep our grasp on the willow. "Nonsense," was her reply.

Jackie and I ran out and got our witching willows. We came back in the house and began to walk around the living room floor finding just the right spots where, if the house were not sitting there, we could find water. We then tried to turn her skepticism into humor as we held our willows over her knees, finding water on her knees, and over her head, finding water on the brain. We had the whole room laughing at our antics.

These were the simple, inventive ways we entertained ourselves when we were young. Nothing we did was sold to us because we had been suckered by advertisement. Nobody got rich by convincing us that we had to buy this or that game; indeed we were the ones who through our inventive experiences became rich.

There came a time in Jackie's young life when he thought he had to learn to smoke. His cousin, Booge, who sometimes worked on the ranch, was an accomplice in this youthful crime. I had tried it a few years earlier, after being enticed by two aunts who were not all that much older than I was. I was so naive that I came into the house and bragged about what I had done-"smoked the whole thing." My mother heard me, called me over to smell my breath, and well, I always associated smoking with pain after that.

But Jackie and Booge were older and wiser. They had taken their cigarettes and matches down near the river to smoke. They were down in a dry irrigation ditch where they were partially hidden, only their blond heads were sticking up over the edge of the ditch. They didn't want me around while they smoked and tried to run away from me, so I went back to the house while they settled down in the ditch. This was well after supper, quickly getting dark, and I, having returned to the house, was standing looking out of the north window watching the spot where they had crouched in the ditch.

Hazel saw me looking out the window and walked over to see what I was so interested in. Just as she came over Jackie and Booge struck a match to light their cigarettes. In the growing darkness the flash of that match was visible for a long way. "Who's down there,?" she asked me. "I think it's probably Jackie and Booge." I didn't say any more; I didn't need to. When Jackie and Booge came into the house, Hazel asked them where they had been, and asked Jackie to come over so she could smell his breath. Caught red handed!!

Hazel didn't make him associate smoking with pain as my mother had, but he did more or less agree not to smoke until he was older, perhaps when he got into high school. Then he would be an adult and have the right to choose whether to smoke or not. I say, "more or less," because Booge and Jackie had a hideout in the rocks north of the ranch house where they sometimes slipped off to make themselves sick, or at least that's what Jackie's sisters, the twins, Beverly and Barbara, told me.

Winchester cattle were turned into various modes of entertainment. At branding time Jackie and I worked as a team holding the calves down, while they were branded and the bull calves castrated. Together we would throw the calf down, and one of us would put a knee on the calf's neck and bend the top front leg back so the calf couldn't get up; the other would get on the back end, put one foot against the bottom hind quarter just above the hock, and pull back on the top hind leg. That held them secure.

Occasionally, there were large calves, and when the calves were first separated from the cows we would jump on these and get a ride on a bucking calf.

When we were teenagers we tried riding larger cattle. When we were in the eighth grade, Albert had bought a couple of two-year-old black steers to fatten and butcher. They were kind of wild when he first put them in the corral, and the only way we could get on them was for one or two of us to climb up on the rails while the other kids tried to move them close enough for us to jump on the back of which ever one got close enough.

However, after we started feeding them grain they tamed down, and we could jump on them when they had their heads down in the grain buckets. We rode with nothing to hang onto except a bit of hair growing at the base of the back of their neck, so we got bucked off pretty quickly, and occasionally stepped on or kicked in the process. Beverly and Barbara also liked to jump on those steers and ride them, and when Booge happened to be at the ranch, he rode them. With so many of us riding those steers they eventually were "broke"and wouldn't buck anymore. So by the time the first steer got butchered we had pretty much lost interest in furthering our rodeo careers.

But the opportunities for becoming a rodeo rider were there. Beverly and Barbara had a friend, Claudine Stoll, who visited them occasionally. She was from the Crowheart-Burris area. Her parents were also cattle ranchers, but her father, Jim, had constructed a rodeo arena on his property near Dry Creek, and every Sunday in the summertime he held rodeos. Claudine suggested I come up for a rodeo sometime.

About the same time, my sister who was in high school got an invitation from one of the cowboys to come up and see him ride broncs. Cowboys from the Wind River area and beyond would come and show their skill, or try their luck on the bucking broncos Jim kept, or they would participate in calf roping.

For the younger kids there were calves to ride, and for the older ones, a two year old black Angus bull. He wasn't as bad as a Brahma, but he could buck. The first time I got on that bull, the announcer asked me what my name was, and just as they opened the chute, I yelled out Joe Greig, but all he heard was the first name, since by the time I said the last one the bull had already jumped out into the arena. "Ok, folks," said the announcer, "I didn't get the last name, so we'll just call him Joe Blow from Idaho."

I don't recall if I stayed on that bull until the gun sounded signaling a complete ride, but just like those steers I rode down at the Winchester Ranch, by the end of summer, we had "rode" that Angus bull so often he wouldn't buck anymore. All he would do is run down the arena, and when the gun sounded we'd jump off and wave to the crowd.

Working on the Ranch

Children must have time to play, but there comes a time when they must learn that work is a necessary and valuable part of life. Although during my pre-teens I had done small jobs on the ranch, like weeding the garden, feeding the chickens and hogs, and milking the cows, I was not considered to be a fully-fledged ranch hand. But when I was thirteen I overheard my mother remark to Hazel as they washed the dinner dishes that she wished I could get a job somewhere. Hazel immediately replied that Albert was going to begin harvesting the oats that afternoon, so I could work for them shocking grain. I would be paid $5.00 a day with room and board if I wanted to stay at the ranch instead of going home at night with my mother. Five dollars a day was the adult ranch hand wage in those days. I was eager to be given the opportunity to earn a regular wage.

She turned to me and told me to hurry out to where Albert and Jackie were getting the machinery ready to go to the grain field. "Go ask Albert if it's alright for you to follow the binder, and shock," she said.

Jackie had already driven off with the tractor pulling the binder when I got outside, and Albert was just getting into the pickup. I hollered at him to wait for me; I had something to ask him. When I got to the pickup I told him what Hazel had said, and with a smile he told me to jump in the pickup. "Do you have any gloves?" "No," I answered. "Well, you will have to have gloves, but maybe because we will be out only a half day today you can get along without them, but tomorrow bring gloves."

Jackie drove the tractor while Albert sat on the binder seat and pulled the levers to operate the binder. When the first bundle of grain came out of the binder I was there to throw it out of the way during the first round so that the tractor and binder would not run over it on the second pass. The field was large, seventy eight acres, and I fairly ran behind the binder trying to keep up with it during that first round. During the second round, by carrying bundles which were thrown out on the first pass to bundles made on the second pass, I made small piles of bundles that would be easily brought together when more of them were made during the third round. Once I began carrying bundles together to make shocks the tractor and binder got far ahead of me, and I had to begin working singularly and alone at my job.

I was soon joined by Hazel's younger half brother, Bobby. He and his mother were living at the Winchester Ranch that summer, so he was hired to work like I was. During that summer, Hazel's father, Johnny, touched base at the ranch before taking a couple of pack horses back into the Absaroka Mountains to hunt for agates, petrified wood and amethyst. While I would have loved to have gone with him, Bobby preferred to stay on the ranch with his mother, so ended up in the grain field with me.

We shocked for about five hours that afternoon, putting two bundles together to make a center to the shock, then positioning the other bundles around them so that they all supported and held each other from falling to the ground. A feeling of satisfaction came over me when I looked back on the shocks of grain standing like testimonials to our work.

Eventually, my mother would drive into town to get me a pair of leather gloves, but after that first round my hand were getting sore from grasping the twine that tied the bundles. By the end of the day they were raw from broken blisters and punctures from the shafts of oat straw. But bearing the pain that accompanies developing an attitude toward the burden of work was something to be learned along with doing the job itself. If the injury wasn't debilitating, you learned to pay little or no attention to it. Those raw hands were the beginning of callouses which by the end of summer I would be proud to bear along with the hardened muscle in my arms as badges of honor for hard work.

On the way to the grain field after dinner one day, Bobby and I had to cross a barbed wire fence, and I mentioned to him how high I had jumped that spring at the Arapaho track meet. In fact, I had jumped considerably higher than that fence and would prove it by jumping it. I was wearing a brand new pair of Levi's and heavy high topped shoes, and didn't take those factors into sufficient consideration, so when I launched myself from the ground the barbed wire snagged the right knee of my new Levi's, ripped a big triangular tear in it, and pitched me down on the ground on the other side of the fence.

The deep scratch on my knee didn't bother me at all, but the tear in those new Levi's did. My mother sometimes remarked about how quickly I went through Levi's and shoes. She didn't think other boys needed their Levi's to be patched so quickly, and couldn't figure out how I not only wore the soles out on my shoes, but the sides and tops as well-sometimes before the soles wore out. So, I was sensitive to that tear in those new Levi's.

I decided to walk back to the house to see if I could get my pants sewed up, and found Hazel's mother in the house. She listened to my tale of woe and offered to patch my Levi's. "I don't want them patched," I said, "I just want them sewn so that they look like they haven't been torn." "Well," she said, "I could do a better job if I could patch them, but since you have to get back to the field, I'll sew the tear up." So, she sewed up the tear, and I returned to the field.

When Hazel's mother told my mother about the fear I had of telling her I had torn my new Levi's the day I put them on, and that I had believed the tear could be concealed by just sewing it shut, they both got a good laugh out of it. I had judged myself irresponsible and reckless, now I was trying to cover it up as best I could, yet knowing it was impossible.

Nearly all adults in those days had lived through the great depression and patching clothing was the norm, not the exception. The mantra of the Great Depression was, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." The practice of patching everything, even old patches, carried on into the next generation. But the idea that a later generation would actually pay more for worn out jeans than new ones and that manufactures would actually pay people to nearly wear the jeans out before they were marketed to teenagers who wanted to look hip would have seemed strange indeed to those who found value in an old piece of cloth from which a knee patch could be cut.

For some reason, in the midst of shocking that 78 acre field, Bobby dropped out of the picture, and a fellow who had just hired on took his place. He was in his early 20's, his name was Bill, and he had a "rest ethic." He would only work so long, then he would sit down and rest for awhile. For a while I worked on without him, but he kept talking about his philosophy of rest. "Rest is as important as work," he said. Soon I began feeling uncomfortable about continuing to work while he was sitting against a shock resting. Finally, he persuaded me that I should rest too. Rest from work was inseparable from other human rights. So, eventually I sat down beside him while he complained about people who thought work was so important that rest took second seat.

Albert mentioned it at the supper table. "Little Joe, I noticed that for the last two or three days you worked all day long without resting, but today you and Bill sat down several times; I guess you two must be tiring out."

Bill just kept eating like he hadn't heard a thing. "No," I said, "I wasn't tired. Bill wanted to rest so I figured I should join him-I kept going alone for awhile; I didn't need to rest." That was the end of Bill. He didn't get fired; he just left. I'd work again with Bill, four years later, on another ranch, and he was still looking for a way to keep from working. He had it figured that in another four or five years he would be able to retire.

It took several days to shock that big field, and it looked like there was an army of tents on it when I and a couple of other ranch hands, who had joined me shocking, finished the job and climbed the hill above the field to look it over. Little did I realize how I would feel after the grain was dry, and other ranch hands pitched my carefully shocked bundles, fork by fork, onto wagons to haul them to the threshing machine to be threshed. Within a few days the field was empty of everything except a gigantic straw stack-and I began to learn the meaning of transience and the cycle of life expressed in everything natural.

That big field was not the only grainfield where I shocked that late summer. There were three more smaller ones. One was close enough to the ranch house so that the shockers could walk to the field. On the way down to one of them I was pulling on my leather gloves when I noticed an old calico cat with a litter of kittens in a pile of logs. I thought that it would be nice to catch one of those kittens if I could, maybe even take it home for a pet.

The old cat was frequently at the door of the ranch house looking for something to eat, and I knew her to be a gentle cat. But these kittens she had were very wild and most of them slipped under the logs and got out of sight as soon as I started toward the log pile. But one kitten was slow to reach cover, and I managed to catch it. It fussed and yowled as I tried to hold on to it. The old calico cat was tolerant at first, but when the kitten persisted in crying out in distress she came to its aid.

She cleared the pile of logs with one bound and leaped right at my face. Fortunately, I had my leather gloves on and managed to put one hand out to stop her attack, while still hanging on to the kitten with the other. The first time she attacked, I managed to knock her down to the ground, but she came at me again, right for my face. This time she hung onto my glove with her teeth and claws, and I swung her around trying to knock her off. Unfortunately, the force of the swinging pulled my left glove clear off, and she hit the ground with it still in her mouth. I knew I had better declare a truce if I could, because no way was I going to stick that left hand out again with no glove on it. She came for me again, but that time I threw the kitten right in her face as she leapt. They landed on the ground together, and she was instantly pacified. I picked my clawed and bitten glove up and headed on toward the field praising the quality and thickness of the leather in "Mule Skinner" gloves.

A couple of other hands were put to work shocking along with me in those fields. One was Bob Westmann, the young man from Crowheart. Bobby was back; the rest of the names I can't remember, but they were younger-like me. The first day, some of them wanted to play as much as work, chasing each other around the shocks, and chasing the mice that had found their cover rudely removed by the binder. The mice would run from bundle to bundle trying to find a place to hide, while we did our best to run them down and step on them.

Bob told me to come work with him, but the joy of play was too much for me. I joined in with the rest of the kids. I noticed that Bob seemed to be shocking faster than ever, and getting farther and farther away from us. My conscience began to bother me, and finally I made some excuse for leaving our play and ran up to where Bob was working. I asked if he minded me shocking alongside him. He made a side-ways remark about me missing out on the games, then told me I had done the right thing going back to work, because the afternoon was half over and we kids hadn't done anything but mess around.

Albert had noticed those goings-on from the top of the binder as well, and at the supper table remarked that he had noticed Bob working all by himself, while we kids played the whole afternoon. I agreed that we had and asked him to pay me for only half a day; that was all I deserved. Bob mentioned that I had come to work along side him for a good part of the afternoon and was proving to be a good hand. Albert agreed and said he couldn't think of ever having paid anyone a half-day's pay, so I'd get a day's wage. I was learning a work ethic that summer that would stay with me for life.

Bob Westman's work ethic came to expression in the words of another hand that hired on with the Winchesters. The hand was a Californian named Jimmy Reynolds. Reynolds was not running from the law, but from his war experiences. He was seeking solitude and a chance to be left alone. Nevertheless, he had a sense of humor. One day a surge of water came down the irrigation ditch and washed out several drops. These had to be repaired by shoveling as much dirt, rocks, and sage brush into the washout as possible in the least amount of time possible.

While Bob was shoveling he suddenly noticed Jimmy watching him. "Dig, you badger, dig," Jimmy shouted to Bob, "keep that up and there won't be any dirt left in this field."

Because it was time to quit for supper, the two of them went to the ranch house. During the meal Jimmy mentioned to Albert Winchester that he was going to quit. He said he was doing pretty good that afternoon trying to fill in those washed out drops, but he noticed it starting to get dark. It was much too early for the sun to be down, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Then he noticed Bob Westman's furious shoveling. Bob was throwing dirt, clods, and sagebrush into the air at such a rate it blotted out the sun. It was too much for Jimmy, he wanted to draw his pay.

Many years later after Bob had retired, and I was within ten years of looking forward to my own retirement, Bob and I met at my mother's funeral. I took the opportunity to express my thanks for his contribution to the development of my work ethic when I was a kid. He was surprised and pleased at my remark, but responded: "You must have gotten a lot of it from Albert-and your Dad too, but I've never seen a man who could outwork Albert Winchester."

That first summer I worked for Winchesters, I not only shocked grain but helped put up some of the second cutting of hay. Albert put me on the side-delivery rake behind Jackie who did the mowing. When the hay was dry enough to rustle when I walked through it, I raked in up into windrows. I earned $105.00 that first summer.

There was something enchanting about raking dry alfalfa. Making the first round in the field necessitated driving the tractor and rake over the dry fallen hay, and sensitive ears were soothed by the rustling sound of the implement wheels running across the crisp leaves. Then making the windrows and following back on them the second round until they lay like the bodies of serpents in the fields; each of these actions had a mesmerizing effect on the raker.

For the next three years Jackie and I and the twins, Beverly and Barbara, along with their cousin, John L., were a team in the hayfields: Jackie doing the mowing, Beverly and Barbara running the buck rakes, bucking the hay up from the windrows I made with the rake, then transporting it to the stacker, operated by John L., who lifted the hay to the top of the stack to whoever was stacking at the time.

Working in a hayfield is pretty much a routine job. The objective is to get the hay mown, raked, bucked up, and stacked. About the only interruption of the routine was when the machinery broke down, or a thunderstorm blew up and sent those of us on tractors in the open fields running for the nearest cover. The lightening was especially threatening, because there were no cabs on the tractors in those days, and the driver was the highest point on the landscape. It was always safest to get off the tractor or off the haystack, and get someplace down low until the storm passed.

Jackie, doing the mowing, broke down more often than the rest of us, because he was a real "gouger." That means he drove as fast as conditions allowed and put maximum stress on machinery at all times. Albert kept quite a few replacement parts for the mowing machine, especially one part called a "pitman," which helps transfer the power from the power-take-off of the tractor to the sickle bar on the mowing machine. They were deliberately made of hardwood, so they would break before the stronger metal parts, and Jackie broke a lot of them. Fortunately, they were easy to replace, and he didn't have much down-time as the result of breaking one.

Compared to mowing, raking was a much more subdued job. The rake was much wider than a sickle bar on a mowing machine, and I had to drive in a lower gear, thus go slower, to do my job. About the only thing I broke was a spring steel tooth, now and again, which did not mean any down time at all. I once tore the gear box up raking very heavy wild clover, but that is about as much damage as I ever did in raking hay.

At times, either from Jackie's being broken down, or the wider swath of the rake permitting me to catch up with the mower, I would run out of work for a few hours until the hay ahead of me dried to the proper moisture content.

The first time that happened I walked over to the stack where Albert was stacking and told him I was out of work. He told me there was a pile of rocks on one side of a fence down by the river, and I should go throw them all over to the other side of the fence. Then, if the hay hadn't dried enough to rake it, I should go over the fence and throw the rocks all back again. I asked him if instead of throwing the rocks over the fence, I might not come up on the stack and stack hay with him. Albert saw that as an opportunity to teach me something about hard work, so he accepted my suggestion. The next load of hay that was lifted up on the stack, I was on it and, with pitchfork in hand, helped move the pile of hay evenly over the top of the stack on my side.

After about five or six loads had been sent up to us, I was sweating hard and so thirsty I asked for the water jug to be sent up. "You're thirsty already?" Albert asked. I was not only thirsty, I was nearly exhausted. There is a knack to stacking hay, and if you don't learn it fast, you can wear yourself out in no time at all. The first lesson is, don't try to move hay you are standing on. The second lesson is, don't move any more of it than necessary. The third is, tie the hay together so the stack will stand up, if you forget that step the stack can fall apart.

Albert told me these things, but it was hard keeping up with him. I was sometimes nearly buried in the hay, forking hay madly in an attempt to get it in the right places. Albert just moved a fork full here and there as needed, and sometimes chuckled at my plight.

"Well, I think the hay is dry enough to rake," he told me. "You'd better get down off the stack and go back to raking." Was I ever glad to be relieved of that job. However, in a strange way I liked what I had been doing, and even looked forward to being able to do it again. I got a couple of other tries at stacking when I was in my early teens, but when I was fifteen Albert finally gave me a chance to stay on the stack all day long.

Hay stacks that Albert built were works of art. They stood in the fields like sculptures made of alfalfa and grass, symmetrical and groomed on top. I hadn't read Robert Frost's, "Death of the Hired Man" yet, but in that poem there are the words of Silas the dying hay hand, wishing for the time to teach the farmer's son, who had left the farm to go to college, how to build a load of hay.

But stacking hay was not the only alternative work when I ran out of hay to rake. One day when the raking was caught up, Albert put me on one of the buck rakes. That job belonged to Beverly and Barbara, so at least one of them must have been engaged in another activity that day. I had not worked more than three or four hours when the steering went out on the tractor. I walked over to the hay stack where Albert was working and told him of my predicament. "Do you want me to come up on the stack with you?" "No," Albert said, "it's too close to dinner time. When I come down from the stack I'll go over to see what's wrong."

When he diagnosed the problem, he could see that the long shaft on the steering gear had snapped, and he asked me if I had hit a ditch that morning. I answered strongly in the negative. After dinner, Albert removed the steering gear from the tractor. He didn't say much until he could see that the break in the shaft clearly showed a rust mark nearly half way through it. He quickly put my mind at ease, stating that breaking the shaft wasn't my fault at all; it had been a long time in breaking clear through.

"Well, Joe, I'm going to have to send you to town to get a new steering gear. I sure hope you can find one in Lander. If you can't, drive over to Riverton and see if you can get one there. Have them charge it to my account. Take the pickup. And take your time going, and hurry back."

Did I ever feel important! There I was, fourteen years old, driving thirty-five miles to town to get a part for the tractor. The first thing I did when I hit the city limits was to drive down to my grandmother's house and tell her why I was in town. I stayed just long enough to see the pleased look on her face, then I was off to the implement dealer. Fortunately, I was able to get the part in Lander. When I got back to the ranch and gave the part to Albert, he suggested that because I had watched him take the gear out, I should try and install it myself. I was a bit uncertain about that, but I went to work on it, and within an hour or so I had the steering gear installed. Putting that kind of confidence in me meant a great deal to me and helped me develop a sense of self reliance at an early age.

Being sent to get that steering gear was one time when I was glad Albert didn't put me on the stack with him.

One year after John L. left for college, Albert, being short of help, hired a guy from Missouri named Earl Coffee to do the stacking. Albert drove the stacker. Earl was a short but powerful man, and as good natured as men come. He had been a farmer's son in Missouri and wanted someday to go back to Missouri and buy a farm of his own. He revealed to me that after working for a couple of years for Winchesters he had saved up $1500.00 for a down payment on this farm. Like most of the help, he had just drifted in, liked what he saw, and stayed on.

Earl didn't mind me working on the stack with him at all that first day. He did make a remark about me sweating too much and calling for the water bottle too often when I worked. He thought the mark of a good worker was the ability to endure thirst. Except for a few swallows Earl took out of the water jug, I completely drained the water jug before dinner that day. But Earl did give me credit for working hard, although I didn't build my side of the stack as symmetrical as he had his.

Albert also noticed the lack of uniformity and remarked, "That stack is wedged shaped; never seen one quite like it." I walked around the stack to look it over; sure enough, it was much narrower on my end. I had not pushed the hay out to the edge far enough. Well, it was my first full half day at stacking, and I figured I'd get better in the afternoon.

But things got worse during the time we were gone eating dinner. When Albert drove Earl and me back to the stack about half of my side had slid off and was heaped up at the foot of the stack. It was quite clear that in my attempt to keep up with Earl I had not been able to keep the top of the stack flat, rather I had been sloping the stack all along because I couldn't get all the hay moved to the right places before the next load came up.

However, the stack was not beyond repair, and after Earl and I worked for about two hours on rebuilding it the stack looked like it would stand through the winter, although it was still narrower at one end than the other. By the end of the day I had learned a lot about the technique of building a haystack, but that was my only all day attempt at the job, and I never really learned how to build a stack of loose hay. With more hay to be raked, I was soon back to the job of making windrows.

A few times I pulled another kind of rake called a dump rake or scatter rake. That rake was used in very heavy hay, or to pick up hay from around ditch banks or hay lost to the side delivery rake in the fields. It had a large number of long teeth curved in a semi-circle with could be raised and lowered, or dumped, with a lever operated by someone riding on the rake and sitting in a seat attached to the rake by a spring steel shaft. That shaft acted as a shock absorber and kept the person riding the rake from getting beaten up from the jarring ride.

One day Beverly and I were raking a field east of the ranch house. Along the southern side of the field, on the high sage covered ground side of the irrigation ditch, a bee keeper named Fremont Miller had a bunch of bee hives. The bees made honey from the blossoming sage, clover, and alfalfa. Apparently they had had just about enough interference in their work from machinery and human beings.

I could see the bees flying across the field we were raking to another field which had not yet been mown. They were flying just above the exhaust pipe on the tractor-hundreds of them. Suddenly, they attacked the exhaust pipe. Obviously, they had no success in getting a stinger into that, so they hit the next highest thing on the tractor which was my head. One bee got a stinger into my neck before I could do anything. My hands were busy steering the tractor. By the time the second bee stung me on the side of the head I had thrown the tractor into high gear and opened the throttle. I tried to fight the bees off, but they kept stinging me until I got far enough away from their hives that they gave up the chase.

As the tractor sped along over bumps and ditches, I turned around to see whether I still had Beverly on the rake. She had both hands on the seat holding on for dear life. The bees had left her entirely untouched, but I was a mess of stings.

That was the end of raking for that day. At the supper table that evening, everyone got to make a remark of some kind about the way I looked with my head and ears all swelled up. Fortunately, I didn't get stung on the face or around the eyes. Jackie once got stung around the eyes while he was mowing, and the swelling nearly closed off his vision in one eye.

Booge sometimes helped on the Winchester Ranch, although he mostly stayed and worked on his parents' own ranch at Crowheart. However, one summer he did spend a few days helping out at the Winchesters'. When he arrived at the ranch his hair had grown quite long, and it was becoming a bother to him. He had snipped off bits of it here and there, but he really needed a haircut.

My father was the only person who did any barbering in the area, and he often cut the Winchester men's hair. Booge wasn't in the right place at the right time to get a free haircut by a good barber, so he tried the next best thing. He figured that because my father cut my hair every couple of weeks, I should know how to do it myself. So, one evening after we had come in from the fields he asked me to give him a hair cut. He could barely get his hat on with that heavy head of hair.

I resisted for a time, but his insistence finally paid off. I found a pair of shears and an old comb while Booge was locating a stool to sit on, and after draping a towel around his neck, I commenced to play barber. The hair cut was a complete disaster, and we all laughed so hard during the process it is a wonder I didn't cut off an ear. Nevertheless, I did get his hair cut, and the occasion resulted in a poem.