When my family moved from the town of Lander to Winkleman Dome carpenters were busy trying to finish the houses so the oil field workers could move their families into them. There were six houses in all, four of them on one side of a single graveled street and two on the other, along with an office building, a garage, and a storage building for fuel and lubricants for the company vehicles. Three of the houses were for the families of office workers and three for the families of men who actually worked out in the field. Four of these families had school age children living at home and two were older with no children remaining in the nest.
For a few years the camp was a bustling place with children playing on the green lawns and learning to ride bikes in the street. Women visited across driveways while they watered their yards with water pumped to the camp from Sage Creek about five miles to the southwest. After work men often sat on someone's porch and visited before going into the house for supper.
There was an attempt to make living at home in that isolated camp as much like living in town as possible. Oil field roustabouts hauled manure from the ranches on the Big Wind River to fertilize the lawns and trees, and kept the street oiled and in good repair. Everything was kept painted: house trim, office and garages, and even the steel fence posts surrounding the camp with barbed wire to keep range horses and cattle out of gardens and off lawns. The camp was a little bit of civilization in a sea of sage brush and cactus.
However, there were periodic reminders that we were not living in a completely domesticated society. Well do I remember walking out on the back porch shortly after moving to Winkleman Dome to find a five foot Bull Snake slithering across the boards and down the steps. I hollered for someone to come and see this huge reptile while I cautiously peered over the edge of the steps to see where the snake had gone. It was just disappearing under the porch. My mother and sister came out to see what I was yelling so excitedly about. Our little dog, Mike, went under the porch and started barking, which made the Bull Snake curl up in the corner and begin hissing. It sounded frightful.
"What shall we do?" I asked my mother. She suggested that we leave the snake alone, after all, it wasn't poisonous, and Bull Snakes ate mice-and it would probably leave and go back out into the sage brush after awhile.
Our dog did not like it, but that Bull Snake hung around the house for two or three days. It must have found good hunting under the porch and in the flower beds along the sides of the house. Finally, the snake left, and we were somewhat sorry when it did not come back. I suspect that our dog may have had something to do with it, because he eventually became a skilled snake killer.
Rattlesnakes were as common as Bull Snakes at Winkleman Dome. The men working on the oil field often would kill one while they were cutting weeds around the tank batteries, and we kids were always delighted when one of them would give us the rattles they cut off their tails after they dispatched them.
I killed them too. It was the thing to do; no one wanted to get bitten while walking through the sage brush or working in the flower bed or garden, and the latter places seemed to be especially appealing to Rattle Snakes. One afternoon, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother suspected that the dog had one cornered in the flower bed, so she got her favorite weapon, a hoe, and pulled it out on the grass and chopped its head off. She would execute rattlers in similar fashion many times during the years we lived on the Dome.
I usually ran across rattlers while I was out hunting with the dog, for I was seldom to be found in a flower bed, and when I was, only under coercion. Shooting a rattler with a .22 was a simple thing, as the snake aligns its head with the gun barrel, thus aiming itself at the rifle. I had a matchbox containing quite a few rattles I or my father had collected from rattlers we had killed.
We never ate the snakes as some people did. Those who did eat them considered them a delicacy, better than chicken. I heard one man tell a story about an uncle of his who ate rattlers. He and one of his cousins who was a "boozer" were living together in an old shack, getting on as best they could. One evening the uncle killed a rattler in the yard. It was just about dark and he had already eaten supper, so he decided to cook the rattler up and leave it for breakfast when he could eat it with biscuits.
After he had filleted, breaded, and fried up the snake, the uncle left it in a skillet on the stove, and went to bed. Around 3 a.m. the next morning, while he was still asleep, the cousin, "three sheets under the wind," came home and found the snake cooked up in the skillet. Thinking it was chicken the uncle had left for him, he ate the entire contents of the frying pan and went to bed. About four hours later the uncle got up to fix his breakfast and found the skillet empty. "What dirty, blankity blank ate my snake?" he yelled. The cousin, roused from his dim minded slumber came into the kitchen to see what all the hollering was about. "Did you eat that Rattle Snake I fried up last night?" the uncle hissed. The cousin ran straight for the door, put his fingers down his throat and tried his best to throw up the snake--but to no avail. With a defeated look, one that betrayed that he had at last ingested something which was equivalent to committing one of the seven deadly sins, he whined pitifully to the uncle, "I'm sorry, I tried to get it up, but I guess it was just too far down."
The Gallingers had a cousin my age named Corrine Eden. Once while she was visiting the camp I found a rattler in a stand of hollyhocks at the edge of our yard. I wanted to show off in front of Corrine, so I dragged the snake out with a rake and threw it in the driveway. The rattler coiled and rattled as I poked at it with the rake. Then I got bolder. "Watch this," I said to Corrine. I ran straight at the coiled snake and leaped high in the air and over the snake. The rattler struck out, but I was out of reach at all times. Some of the other kids, including Corrine tried jumping it too, but they jumped to one side of the snake, not directly over it.
After we had jumped over the snake several times the snake tried to slither off, but I caught it in the rake and put it in an old oil drum that had it top cut out of it--Rattlesnakes definitely sound louder in an oil drum. We were having fun now. When the amusement wore off, I tipped the barrel over, pulled out the rattler and disposed of it, giving Corrine the rattles. She remembered the incident thirty years later when we met again at our high school reunion.
My mother did not like snakes, but she loved blue birds. Actually my father was the one who taught the rest of the family to love birds. As a boy in Scotland, he and his brother George studied birds, and collected the eggs, blowing them, and cataloguing them according to specie. If my father was the one in the family most interested in birds, George was the one who instilled a love for them in my father. Family tradition has it that George's collection was one of the largest private collections in Scotland, and that he sold it to another collector for a considerable amount of money.
Blue birds were one of the more common kinds around Winkleman Dome in Summer. They sat on the fences, on the power lines, on the clothes line and serenaded us with their song. The flash of blue the males displayed when the sun caught their feathers just the right way was a glorious thing to behold.
Somehow my father knew that they would nest in bird houses, built, and located one on the front porch of our house. He also placed one on the side of the garage. The birds moved in within days and built their nests.
One summer, when the eggs had hatched, and the birds had gotten to the feathered stage, but yet unable to leave the nest, a large Bull Snake managed to locate the nest in the bird house on the front porch. Unseen, it stretched out from the porch railing and managed to get a coil on the brace of the porch roof, then reached the bird house. My mother was just coming around the side of the house, hoe in hand from weeding the flower bed when she saw the Bull Snake coming down, lumpy with nestlings in its stomach.
She was horrified. One of the high points of the summer was watching the fledgling blue bird leave the nest and fly to the fence next to the house, where they sat while the parent birds fed them. In my mind, I can still see them sitting on the barbed wire fluttering their little wings while a parent shoved food down their gullets.
The very thought of that snake coming up on the porch and swallowing those little Blue Birds infuriated my mother. She charged with her hoe, dragged the big Bull Snake down onto the lawn and hacked it in pieces. She tried to see if any of the bird might still be alive, but alas they were all suffocated. My mother had never disposed of a Bull Snake before, but all Bull Snakes got a bad name from that one, and she never tolerated another one around the yard. If they did not leave after she threw them over the fence with her hoe, they got beheaded. If she had to choose between Bull Snakes and Blue Birds, the Blue Birds were the clear winners.
During the month of May the sagebrush was alive with Meadow Larks. The males, with their yellow, V-checked breasts sat on the top most piece of sage and entertained us with their songs. During the height of the nesting season we would open our windows to let the sound of the songs permeate our human centered world.
A small grey bird we called sage wrens were also to be found in large numbers in the sage. While they did not have the spectacular color of the Meadow Lark they were more numerous and gave us much pleasure watching the flit about, and when they sang their songs we sometimes had to search the sage with eyes open to the slightest movement just to see them.
Hawks, Golden eagles, and ravens, made up the rest of the bird life we witnessed daily at Winkleman Dome. The hawks, mostly Red Tailed Hawks, and eagles soared high above our heads, while the ravens flapped their way across our work-day-world, and would sit on the fence to look into our lives.
The wind blew at Winkleman Dome. My father nicknamed it Windy Dome. Trees planted in front of the oil field houses had to be tied to steel stakes to keep them from breaking off during sudden gusts. In summer, the wind piled tumbleweeds against the camp fence, and would whip sheets on the clothes lines into shreds if the women of the camp did not pay attention; in winter it blew snow into drifts and then cut them away with its abrasive and evaporative action We lived both in, and between, the winds.
Electricity was supplied to the camp, but the oil field itself was not fully electrified for several years after the oil field was developed. The pumping units were powered by gasolines engines that had been modified to run on natural gas discovered in the process of drilling for oil. Electrification brought many changes to the field. It reduced the need for so many workers, and brought transfers and lay-offs. Eventually, all but one house was sold and moved away. Even the office building was not spared.
Before the camp was electrified, and everyone but my family moved away leaving the camp almost deserted, I spent a lot of time with the Irvine boys. I was the oldest school age boy at Winkleman Dome, and the Irvine boys were one and two years younger, Duane being the oldest and Dudley the younger.
There was a certain amount of danger going beyond the camp fence to play in the sage brush, but we did it anyway. Down below the hill, north of where the school would soon stand, we found an old coyote den dug into the side of the hill. Of course, it might have been a badger that originally dug the den, but it had been enlarged by a bigger animal which we all thought must have been a coyote.
We never saw any coyotes around it, but that merely tempted us to see what might be inside at the bottom of the hole. One day while the Irvine boys and I were playing near the coyote den I decided to crawl into it as far as I could. We had all crawled into that hole before, but only a little way as it went down steeply into the ground. This day I decided to go in further. Duane and Dudley watched as I wriggled down into the den until only my feet were visible at the surface. The hole made a slight turn near where my head and shoulders were, and as I tried to inch myself a bit further I found myself stuck, unable to go forward or push myself out with my hands and arms. I felt totally helpless, confined, pressed against, a prisoner in the earth, perhaps in my grave.
I called out to the Irvine boys to grab my feet and pull to help me get out. At first I didn't hear or feel anything. I was glad we were on good terms that day, otherwise they might have left me in that hole. Soon they were tugging on my ankles, and by pushing myself up with my arms I was soon out of my predicament. That experience left a lasting impression on me, and I occasionally had dreams of being buried alive, or stuck in a cave, earth and rock pressing around me, holding me so that I could not move, unable to breathe. Then I would wake up fighting the bed covers off of me.
However, that did not stop us from playing at the coyote hole. It had become sort of a hideout for us; we even took a shovel down there and tried to enlarge it so we could get further in, but it proved to be too hard to dig in the gravel and rock-too much work, so we gave up. The camp dogs did far more to open the den up than we ever did, as their interest was rabbits which used the den too.
I was seven years old the first winter we spent at Winkleman Dome. We had a bad snow storm that made a big drift on the Irvines back lawn and half way across the driveway. After school we would sled down the drift clear to the garage door some fifty feet from the top of the drift.
I don't know why I did it, but I began to talk to the Irvine boys about when we both lived in town, and I had come to visit them, so I spun the tale, and we had built a big mound of gunny sacks, covered them with snow, and then slid down the slope. At first, they couldn't remember it, but with a little persuasion and prodding of their memories we were all talking about those old days when we lived in town and built that big mound of sacks and rode our sleds down the slope.
After the snow melted and the big drift disappeared we sometimes planned to do that incredible feat again, but alas there were no sacks for us to pile up and cover with snow. Eventually, the fallacious nature of the story became too bazar for any of us to really believe anymore and we gave it up as some bit of mythology that existed before we became aware of real time and history.
As we grew older, we played together, riding our bikes on the oil field roads, which in winter served as sledding hills, and shot our .22 rifles down in Big Horn Draw.
One of our favorite activities was riding our bikes down the many horse trails worn through the sage brush growing on the flats and hills around the oil field. Prickly Pear Cactus grew randomly in the sage brush, so riding on the horse trails was the only safe way of riding bikes off the roads. A cactus needle would easily go through a bike tire and tube.
Some of these horse trails went down steep hills, and a biker could get going very fast if the brakes were not applied at appropriate moments. But applying the brakes on those old bikes meant that the peddles had to be stopped and the bikers weight put on one of them in a back peddling position. While this might seem to be a safe thing to do, the sage brush which often grew higher than the peddles would sometimes catch the peddle and throw the bike off the trail, sometimes resulting in serious wrecks.
Such was the case one summer day when I and the Irvine boys were riding our bikes on the oil field roads. We took off through the sage brush on a horse trail which dropped down a steep hill and made a turn about half way down. I coasted pretty fast to the bend in the trail then applied the brakes to my bike so I could make the curve. But a sage brush caught my stationary peddle and threw me off balance. I couldn't recover, and I was thrown off into the sage and cactus. However, my bike landed on the trail, and the Irvine boys, in turn, ran into it and were themselves dumped into the sage brush and cactus. I had several cactus spines sticking in my one of my arms and also some in my behind. These spines are very painful to leave in and even more painful to pull out, but while I was working on my arm, the Irvine boys were trying to pull the spines out of my behind through my blue jeans. Eventually, we got enough of them pulled out for me to move without too much pain, and we pushed our bikes back up the hill to the road.
Incidents such as this one didn't stop us from doing it again and again; the thrill of hurdling down those horse trails while the dust boiled up from the tires, and the wind swept across our faces was too exciting to let a few wrecks and cactus spines interfere with our fun for long.
Several times the Irvine boys and I rode our bikes, much of it through sage brush, to where the flat drops off into a long draw where the federal highway runs. This was about a mile from the camp. There were a couple of interesting rock outcrops there. The sandstone was layered and stuck out from the ground at about a forty-five degree angle. We used to play "blasters" and break these layers apart by dropping rocks on them from above. When we did break something off and it fell to the bottom of the outcropping, it made a lot of noise and dust, making us feel good--for some reason.
One day when were doing our demolition work I thought I heard a baby cry. The Irvine boys heard it too. There! It came again from the bluff above. After the third time we heard it, we went to investigate. After all, what would a baby be doing out in a wild place like this. It must have been abandoned by someone who was driving down the highway. We had climbed just about to the top of the bluff when we heard a horse whinny, then a cow moo. What was going on? We stopped to consider this matter. It seemed too strange to be in the normal course of events.
We thought that the sounds were coming from a small draw to the left of where we were climbing to the top, so we cautiously walked over to it to have a look. Nothing!
Then out of the sage brush a man jumped up and rushed toward us. He tried to conceal his face with his hands and arms so as to scare us, but we weren't fooled at all. It was Tex, the Irvine boys dad. We had been playing so long down on that rock outcropping that our parents got worried, and so Tex had come looking for us.
Tex teased us about our gullibility that summer by making those same noises when he thought we were acting too smart for our own good.
One summer, Duane was given a bow with a couple of arrows, probably for his birthday, and he and Dudley were having a good time shooting it at a target they had set up. I saw them playing and went over to try a few shots myself. After awhile we started shooting to see how far we could make an arrow fly. The problem was that the arrow would skip on the hard ground and it was difficult to see how far the arrow actually traveled before it hit the ground. When one of my turns to shoot the bow came I suggested to Duane that to find out just how far my arrow traveled, he should stand down range so that when the arrow came down, he could see exactly where it landed. He was agreeable, and trotted out about fifty yards, turned around and said, "let fly." I pulled back on the bow string and shot the arrow. I watched it climb into the sky then head--nose down--to the earth. Suddenly, I realized that Duane was standing right in the path of the descending arrow and probably had lost sight of it during its ascent. I shouted for him to get out of the way, but it was too late for him to react. The arrow hit him just above the knee cap. He grabbed his leg, limping around, howling in pain. Dudley picked up a rock prepared to hurl it at me (not an unusual thing for him to do). "You did that on purpose," he shouted. No! It was an accident I quavered; let's help Duane.
Duane couldn't walk on the leg I had hit with the arrow, so Dudley having put away his desire for revenge, and I wanting to explain all this to Duane's parents, we got on either side of Duane and helped him to their house. Jean, their mother, came out of the house, and after apologizing, I began explaining what had happened. The wound, I pointed out, didn't seem be all that bad, the point of the arrow not being very sharp, and his Levi's having taken most of the force of the arrow. All the while, Dudley, reviving his suspicion that I had arrowed Duane on purpose, kept interrupting my explanation. Jean, was not amused, and lectured us about responsible archery, noting that the arrow might just have well hit him in the eye. "I got away with one," that day. . .a big one.
When we got old enough for our parents to let us have .22 rifles, both the Irvine boys and I got new repeating Mossbergs.. I already had a Remington .22 single shot rifle. My uncle gave it to me when I was ten, but later my parents gave me a Mossberg repeating rifle for Christmas.
My father told me I would never be as good a shot with a repeating rifle as I was with a single shot. I would always think that I really did not have to make that first shot count when I knew I could put another cartridge in the chamber and fire again. He was probably right. I didn't think much about it at the time, but he had lots of experience with guns-and hunters. He taught me lots of things about guns and hunting, especially firearm safety. I certainly never had someone stand down range to see how far I could shoot!
The next summer the Irvine boys were given their new rifles. Duane and Dudley joined a marksman class in town, and did a lot of shooting there, while I usually just went out and shot at spots on the rock ledges down in Big Horn Draw. Sometimes the Irvine boys would go with me to target practice, sometimes we even shot a rabbit or two.
One day we were walking in the draw, planning to go to a long, exposed rock outcropping where a lot of rabbits could be found. A large herd of range horses were grazing about three quarters of a mile away, which was no cause for concern; we walked on the prairie among the range horses frequently, and had never been threatened by any of them. But this day it would be different.
The stallion noticed us. He left the herd, whinnied loudly, almost like a scream, and started for us at a full gallop. The dust rose from his hooves as he swept across the prairie. Instinctively, we started to run at full speed toward a steep hill nearby with loose shale sticking through the surface, and some sandstone projecting at the top. I yelled at the Irvine boys to follow me up the side of that hill and get among the rocks. The stallion probably would not be able to catch us up there.
We made it to the hill and began the ascent, but were so tired we had to stop before we reached the top. I turned around, and was horrified to see the stallion had reached the bottom of the hill and was now no more than a hundred and fifty feet from us. The stallion, black and shiny and wild looking, stopped, reared up on his hind legs and screamed at us again. I told the Irvine boys to put their gun sights right on his head, and that if he started up that hill, all three of us would pull the trigger at the same time, and let him have it right between the eyes. We gave little thought to the fact that this was an Indian horse, and that if we killed it we would be in big trouble with the Tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs located at Fort Washakie, the hub of the Shoshone and Arapahoe Tribes.
For a moment that seemed like several minutes the stallion just stood there looking at us, then wheeled around and galloped back to his mares. We breathed a sign of relief as we watched him go. Then our energy spent, and our desire for the hunt failing, we hiked back to the camp to tell our story to grown men who chuckled at our fear, but who were obviously relieved that we had not shot an Indian horse on the reservation.
Polly, the Irvine boys younger sister liked to tag around with her brothers and often became a source of annoyance to us when we played. It would be a misconception to suggest we didn't like Polly; she was one of the camp kids, and the Irvine boys usually defended her when she was vulnerable. But interfering with bigger boy's play was another matter. It seemed that the only way we could get rid of her was to get her to do something which displeased her mother enough so that Polly would have to go in the house as discipline. Believe me, we tried ignoring her, telling her to go away, and even running away from her to some other part of the camp, but she was hard to shake.
Polly liked to throw rocks, and that offered more than one opportunity to get her in hot water. The Irvine boys and I were playing out behind the garage one day, when Polly intruded into our games. The garage was built for two cars; the Irvines used one side of it, and we the other side. The Irvine boys and I happened to be playing behind our side of the garage that day. We told Polly to go away, but she persisted in pestering us. Finally, she became such a vexation that we had to find a sure-fire way to make Polly leave us alone.
"Why don't you see if you can throw a rock as high as that garage window," I suggested. "No," Polly said. "Ha! It's just because you know you can't throw a rock that high that you won't do it." I taunted. Polly picked up a small rock and hurled it at the window. It smacked the glass, but it did not break. "Even a baby could throw a rock that small up to the window," I retorted, " bet ya can't throw that bigger rock up there." Polly grabbed the bigger rock and chucked it up toward the window. She had the elevation right, but she hit the wall with that one. "Try again," I encouraged her, "you almost made it."
Polly, picked up the rock to give it another try. The rock was so heavy, and she had bent back so far to get maximum velocity on it, that with her arm extended behind her shoulder she almost fell over backwards. Regaining her composure, she flung the rock up at the window. Almost! She hit one of the compressed asbestos shingles. It sounded like she had broken it, but it was too strong. Again, she hurled the rock up toward the window. Crack! That time she hit it hard enough for it to break, and the rock and most of the glass disappeared inside the garage.
"Polly," I said accusingly, " you broke our garage window; I going to tell your mother." The Irvine boys watched while I ran to their house and reported the facts--just the facts. Polly had thrown a rock through our garage window. Polly looked proud of her accomplishment. She didn't even defend herself against the charge. I had built her up too much; she had accomplished something beyond her years. She seemed mystified that we were now making a criminal out of her. We were creating a confused sense of conscience and guilt in Polly, and like all such processes only hard logic could sort out the wheat from the chaff and prevent the conclusion in the mind of a preschooler that retaliation was the only acceptable way to deal us boys.
Her mother went out to look at the garage window, gave Polly a swat, and sent her into the house. Polly muttered something between sobs about not wanting to do it, but by the time her pitiful voice was silenced by the closing of the rear door on their house, the Irvine boys and I were back playing behind the garage.
As Polly got older her aptitude for aggravation during our games grew; so did her ability to deal with us. Another rock throwing incident occurred a couple of years later right after Jean had persuaded us to form a 4-H club. Jean had gone on some small errand to another house in the camp, and while she was gone we locked Polly out of the house by fastening the latch on the glass storm door. The Irvine boys could probably argue that it was I who locked the door. The door had several rows of small window panes in it, not the large panes that storm doors tended to have some years later.
Polly pounded on the door to be let in, but we refused. She went around to the back, but we locked that door too. When she came to the front door again she had a rock in her hand, and without any hesitation hurled it through one of the small window panes in the storm door. Now, she could reach through the broken window and unlatch the door, but we were so shocked by this act of aggression, we opened the door for her and let Polly in.
We then realized that someone was going to have some explaining to do when Jean returned. I must have remembered the broken garage window at the time, because when Jean walked up the steps to the house and saw the gaping hole in the storm door, I played detective, pointing out that we boys couldn't have done it, because we were on the inside. If we had broken the window from the inside the glass would have been lying outside on the porch. The glass was lying on the living room floor. Polly, was clearly the guilty one as she was outside trying to get in.
"What do you mean, she was trying to get in?" "Well, we locked her out." "Polly lives here, doesn't she?" Jean was directing a lot of attention to me. "Yes, I responded." "Well then, why did you lock her out?" I argued that Polly was not old enough to belong to 4-H, and so we didn't want her at our meeting.
That time the reasoning didn't work, and we got a scolding, while Polly clung to her mother with a defiant, "in your face" look.
We got a new oil field boss once who had a son, Mike, who was the same age as Polly. Polly finally had a playmate in the camp. One day, Polly and Mike were playing in the garage the Irvines and my family shared. As mentioned, it was a two car affair, and there was a gravel floor and no partition between the cars. My father has recently traded in our 1935 Dodge for a 1942 model.. It had been newly painted a kind of tan color before he bought it, and it looked practically new.
On the Irvine's side of the garage there were several cans of green paint along with some paint brushes. Every outside structure that needed painting on the oil field was painted either white, a silver color, or dark green, in fact, the men of the field called the green paint "company green."
So it was that Polly and Mike, hidden from the world in the garage, found themselves before a can of green paint with a loose lid and two brushes soaking in paint thinner. What should they do in such a situation? Obviously, paint. But what? Why, the Greig's new car of course.
They began on the right back fender, and bumper, and the more they painted the more ambitious they became. They had smeared the fender up pretty good, when Jean, who had been looking for her little girl, opened the garage door and found the two partners in crime--paint brushes in hand, smeared with almost as much green paint as they had brushed on our car.
Jean quickly got some old rags, and with the paint thinner began to wipe the green paint off of our car. Company green paint was very slow drying. One had to give it a full day to dry before making any contact with it. So, being that the paint was fresh, Jean managed to get the green paint all cleaned off with the paint thinner without harming the car's finish.
It was some time before we heard about the incident. Jean had done a good job of cleaning the paint off, and since my mother and father hadn't noticed anything wrong with the car's finish, when Jean finally told them about the incident they got a good laugh out of it.
Fights! Left to themselves, all boys fight, no matter how good of friends they are. The Irvine boys and I were no exceptions. We had many fist fights, but I remember only a few. Fighting one at a time, and being older and larger, I had a distinct advantage, but the Irvine boys fought as a team, Dudley, was usually the one who got behind me, and tried to hit me with anything he could pick up, be it a board or a rock. Fortunately, the women of the camp would usually hear the commotion and yell out a window for us to stop before anybody got hurt, but blood did flow at times, and it was mine as frequently as it was the Irvine boy's.
The Irvine boys had another ally, their dog Turk, a huge Australian-Shepherd-like dog that weighed about eighty five pounds. We once weighed him on a bathroom scale. Turk was very protective, and when we started fighting, he would often run in and bite me, usually on the behind, because when I saw him coming I was instantly on the run toward our porch. I surmise that Turk nipped or bit me more than a half-dozen times.
I had a little dog, Mike, who looked like a miniature white Old English Sheep Dog with black ears and a black circle around the base of his short tail. He was a quarter of Turk's size, fearless, and hated Turk. When he would see me being pursued by Turk he would fly into Turk with all the force of a deer fly, and usually end up nearly being killed. However, he did divert Turk's attention from me.
One day the Irvine boys and I had a free for all that would have attracted the attention of the professional wrestling crowd. The Irvines had visitors that day, the Ferry family, who were among their many relatives. The Ferrys had a daughter named Janet and a son, Richard, who were about the same ages as the Irvine boys. There was a younger boy too, but I don't remember his name.
The trouble started during an unregulated game of softball--unregulated, because we were making up the rules as we went. It didn't take long for disagreements to cause tempers to flare, and this turn led to swinging fists. The fighting started when Polly who wasn't being allowed to play with us darted off the front porch and stole the ball. She had turned and was running toward the steps to take the ball in the house to disrupt our game, but I caught her at the top of the steps and grabbed the ball away from her. She began to cry, a screaming distress signal, which the Irvine boys interpreted to mean I had deliberately hurt their little sister.
Duane was the first to throw a punch at me, but I was soon faced with having to defend myself from Dudley who had gotten behind me. During the ruckus, Richard, bat in hand saw an opportunity to step in and give me a lick with the bat. He swung it at me once, but missed, then Turk made a run for me but was immediately attacked by my dog, Mike.
I landed a hard punch on Duane's left cheek bone which sent him running up the steps of their house holding his face. The yelling, crying, and snarling of the dogs were enough to alert the entire camp. Suddenly, we had a small crowd looking at what was going on. The Irvines and Ferrys all came out of the house, just in time to see Richard swing the ball bat at me again, so hard this time he lost his grip on the handle. The bat hurdled through the air and crashed right into the front passenger door of the Ferry's car. It left a dent almost the full width of the door.
Turk was shaking Mike like a rag doll, and Mr. Ferry aghast at the size of the dent in his car's door, offered enough of a break in the action to give me the opportunity to back off the Irvine's yard, across the drive way, and onto my own lawn. My dog Mike somehow managed to survive his fight with Turk and make it home, as he always seemed to do.
Turk and Mike were not the only dogs in camp. Bill Maddox, one of the office workers at the camp had a dog, that looked like a cross between a collie and a sausage. Bill's dog and Turk were pals and they both hated Mike. Mike could whip the Maddox's dog on a one-to-one fight, but Turk seldom let that happen. If he were anywhere near, he would run in and grab Mike and beat him up.
The Gallingers eventually got a dog as well. He was a mature dog when they acquired him, which means someone wanted to give him away. He was a bull dog, although he didn't look like most bull dogs I had seen, and he had an unpredictable temperament. That dog changed the entire character of dogdom at Winkleman Dome. Butch, short for butcher, the name he had already gotten before the Gallengers adopted him, was a relentless fighter. While he was thirty pounds lighter than Turk, the first time he and Turk mixed it up it was difficult to tell which dog had won. Both the Gallingers and the Irvines had to intervene to break up the fight.
Turk had an almost impenetrable coat, often heavily matted around the neck, and Butch found it difficult to get a good hold on Turk. We could see the holes appear in Turk's matted cape as Butch would try to tear through the dense hair and get a grip. Frustrated, Butch changed his strategy, and literally tried to cut the legs out from under Turk. There was no underestimating the power of Turk, though. He was built as solid as most any dog, legs set wider apart, short, low set neck, and powerful head and jaws. In addition, his fangs looked like sabers. Every time he bit, he cut. And Butch got cut that first fight. When the men finally broke up the fight, Turk was badly crippled in one front leg, and Butch was bleeding from around the ears and top of the head. That was not the last fight those two dogs had, but Turk learned that front leg trick quickly, and returned the favor to both Mike and Butch after that.
Like most dogs that fight to draws, Butch and Turk usually tolerated each other, but they were never really comfortable around each other. They were probably more afraid of the men who used quite brutal tactics to break them up when they fought. They pretty well stayed on their own sides of the street.
But poor little Mike! He continued to get beat up. Yet he never showed any signs of submission. He would tackle either Turk or Butch, especially if they came over onto our yard when their owners came over to visit or make a call. He always got beat up--badly. Several time he was almost killed. It became a point of tension between the families that owned the dogs, which was not resolved until Mike died of kidney failure in his twelfth year, the year I was in the eighth grade.
Several times, I thought about killing Butch for what he would do to Mike during those fights. He tore Mike up worse than Turk did. I came closest to at least mutilating him one winter day when the Irvines, the Gallingers and I, and my sister were sledding down one of the steeper hills near the camp. Mike was resting peacefully at the top of the hill watching us go do down on our sleds and then begin the climb to the top.
I sometimes asked the Irvines and Gallingers to keep their dogs home when we went sledding, because there would invariably be a dog fight which would ruin our fun. So Turk and Butch were home, and little Mike had the outdoors all to himself. That is until someone let Butch out of the house and he ran off trying to find Bobby. When he arrived at the top of the hill we were on he immediately jumped on Mike while he lay in the snow. Butch grabbed him by the back of the neck and began savaging him. Mike was helpless against Butch. The snow was soon blotched with blood as Butch tried to get a kill hold on Mike's throat. I pulled out a pocket knife I always carried, and tried to get close enough to stab Butch. But the fight was too furious, and the dogs moving to quickly to single Butch out.
Finally, I picked up a big rock from the edge of the road. It must have weighed ten or fifteen pounds and hurled it down on Butch. I missed Butch, and hit Mike right in the mid-section. That almost finished him, but it also seemed to frighten Butch, because he let go of Mike, and Mike ran off toward the house with Butch in pursuit. Butch caught him again and began his brutal work a second time, but I followed carrying my sled and threw my sled at him. He finally gave up and Mike made it home.
That was the beginning of Butch's demise, because everyone in the camp saw the pitiful, little, blood covered dog lying on our porch, so beat up he couldn't even lick his wounds.
The next summer the Gallingers got rid of Butch; it was the rational thing to do. Butch had been known to bite people before, but it was "who" he bit that finished him that summer. George Wight the boss of the oil field, had four children, the youngest, Stephen, around three years old. His sister, Jane, and brothers, David, and Michael were all present when Butch attacked Mike during our sledding that previous winter. So they knew how savage Butch could be.
We kids were playing on Gallingers porch one day that summer when Stephen accidentally stepped on Butch's foot while he lay on the floor. Butch attacked Stephen and bit him right through the face. Iona, Bobby's mother, grabbed Stephen and ran to the Wight's house, where Mrs. Wight put him in the car and rushed him thirty miles into town to see a doctor.
Yep! that did it for old Butch. The Gallingers loaded him in the car and took him into the vet, who sent him off to Doggie Hell.
It was some years later when I was reading a book on dogs that I found a picture of a bull dog that looked like Butch. It bore the caption: Staffordshire Bull Terrier.
After Mike died I got a Samoyed. By that time Turk was the only dog left in camp. He was more than ten years old, and for a time he would attack Rusky, my new dog, and beat him up, always crippling him in the process. But by the time Rusky had reached maturity, Turk was as much an outmatched victim as little Mike had been all those years before.
One day my dad came home from work to find Rusky dragging Turk down the side of the road near our house. Turk was still alive, and didn't seem to be bleeding much, but he was exhausted and nearly dead. The Irvines were not home at the time, so Dad took Turk home, gave him water and made him comfortable. Turk was back on his feet by the time the Irvines got home, a testimony to that dog's resilience.
As Turk got more feeble the Irvines made the decision to take Turk into town and let the vet euthanize him. Back then, if I had been the judge of dog character, I probably would have sent Turk to be with Butch, so that they could be locked in and futile eternal combat, trying to break each other's legs and tear out each other's throats. But Turk had some good traits, he protected his master's property, and the Irvine children. In addition, he gave the Irvines a good deal of pleasure as a pet. Still, he should have had to answer for the welts he put on my behind.
In the course of time Gallingers got a new dog, a Chesapeak Retriever pup. He grew up with Rusky, my Samoyed, and they were great friends, sometimes running loose on the prairie miles from home.
Eventually, everyone was transferred from Winkleman Dome but my family, and So Rusky grew up a loner, but always waiting for someone to visit the camp with a dog in their car.
Camp life involved two kinds of people: those who lived in the camp, and those who lived elsewhere and drove to work. Among those who lived in the camp were the bosses. They changed frequently. The first one was George Wilson, the next, was George Wight. Then came George Gay, and finally Ted Scoggins. Other families living on the field were the Kemmys, the Gallingers, the Irvines, and the Maddoxes. Tex Irvine worked on the field along with my father; the rest were office workers.
During the time I lived at Winkleman Dome the commuters were Donald McDonald, Merle Glick, and Bob Shipton. These men were pumpers and roustabouts. Over the years a few others came and went, but these three remained employed until the camp was essentially closed down, except that my family continued to live there for many years.
Pumpers, of which my father was one, were responsible for the oil production: making sure the pumping units were maintained, gaging the amount of oil in the tanks in the tank battery, keeping books on the production of each well, as well as the total production. They maintained the oil "treater," a unit which along with the "boiler" were used to evaporated water out of the oil.
When the pumper got these jobs done the way he spent the rest of his time was pretty much up to him. A pumper who got the rhythm down usually had a pretty good piece time during his shift to do things unrelated to pumping oil. In fact, jokes which cannot be printed here, about the "lazy pumper" circulated among the roustabouts who made slightly less money than a pumper did, but in their estimation did a lot more work.
One evening, in the presence of company with which we were having dinner, my father began telling a lazy pumper joke at the supper table. He began: " These roustabouts were working down near the boiler house when they heard this mournful groan coming from the open door. They thought the pumper must have hurt himself and so went to investigate. What they found was that the pumper was sitting on his. . . " At that point my mother entered the room and heard him telling the joke. "Oh, Alex, you're not going to tell that lazy pumper joke at the table are you? Oh, it's awful!" The men at the table were hilariously amused at my mother's objection to the joke. My father, realizing that he was going to have to make a modification to the joke, continued without a hitch: "they found the groaning pumper sitting on his hand, too lazy to get off of it."
Of course, everyone was able to correct the joke in their mind, especially after my mother's intrusion to protest the "awful joke." The joke turned out to be much funnier; even the kids knew what the pumper was really sitting on. The eruption of laughter did not subside for some time because my mother, now caught up in my father's inventiveness began to laugh herself at how transparent the whole situation turned out to be.
Roustabouts did a lot of things, like maintenance of roads and machinery, moving machinery around, and working at certain construction projects; but mostly I observed them keeping the oil field looking neat and orderly. They painted a lot, including the company houses, and did a lot of work keeping weeds down around the field.
My father did some of these things too during his "spare" time. He was raised in the Church of Scotland, where not only frugality was considered a virtue, but using one's time in productive work. So, the lazy pumper jokes hardly applied to him, especially when he worked the day shift. However, for years he worked the night shift when one cannot be out in the dark cutting weeds around the tank batteries, or painting structural steel, so he had to be inventive to keep from getting bored. Early on he would take me to work with him, and we would listen to the radio together, especially when there were boxing matches broadcast. I listened to all the Joe Louis fights with him down in the "boiler house" where the pumpers stayed during their shifts. Our little dog Mike went to work with my father every night, and crouched down at the opening of a drain pipe in the boiler house to catch mice. Every time he caught one he would take it outside and lay it down on the ground, then come back in and wait for the next one. Some mornings when my father's shift was over there were a half-dozen or more mice lying on the ground outside the boiler house. And this went on night after night!
But my father did take the opportunity to get a few winks now and then. He preferred to call it snoozing, as he refused to admit that he ever really slept on the job. He had a board that he could lay against the boiler house wall from the end of his bench and relax in a semi-reclining position. He had an internal alarm clock that woke him up in plenty of time to avoid oil spills. It never failed him in twenty five years. There were other pumpers at the field who did have spills, large spills, one of them going on all night long and running almost a mile down into Big Horn Draw before it was discovered. But my father was a minimalist in that respect. I heard him say once that all pumpers have at least one spill to his discredit, but some of them were inexcusable. Actually, most oil spills were not the result of the pumper going to sleep on the job, but pure forgetfulness of which tanks were full and which empty when switching the oil coming into the tank battery from one tank to another. The spill that ran down into Big Horn Draw was the result of switching oil into tanks that were already full of oil.
In addition to these local workers there were contract workers such as the Haliburton team what came out to service wells, a specialized process often involving "pulling wells" (pulling the pipe out of the casing, and after servicing replacing it), and "acidizing" wells, a process that increased the flow of oil.
The most exciting part of oil field life was the drilling. Drilling rigs were operative for the first few years we lived at Winkleman Dome. In those days drilling rigs were able to go down only a few thousand feet, so when the oil within that range was tapped the drilling stopped for a while. After we left the field newer technology developments permitted drilling of deeper wells.
My father used to take me to the drilling rigs to watch the work. He had worked as a roughneck on drilling rigs in his younger years, but didn't like the life style, so went to other things. Roughnecks and drillers live incredibly hectic lives, often driving into rugged wilderness areas in the middle of the night, and in winter, in blinding snow storms. They were sometimes, in fact too often, injured or killed during the performance of their jobs. Drill stem and casing is incredibly heavy, and if it rolled onto one's toes or foot, it could be assumed the toes or foot would have to be amputated--if the pipe had not already done that.
Fingers and even arms were not infrequently lost during the course of drilling a well. A man caught between vertical drill stems was a sure goner. A chain used to tighten drill stem, thrown with great skill by a roughneck so that it wrapped around the pipe allowing a machine to pull the chain and tighten the pipe sometimes caught the roughneck off guard and maimed or killed him.
My uncle Willie was a roughneck during his younger years and was severely burned in a rig fire. Many of the roughnecks I knew were frequently in fights that sometimes left them crippled and in the case of one driller, dead.
Anyway, they liked to be watched as they did their dangerous work, and my father used to take me to the rigs and I would stand in a safe place and watch the drilling go on. Today, insurance companies would certainly have rules that would prohibit a child or even an adult from standing on the deck of a drilling rig to watch the action. Then, it was mine to behold. Even my mother and sister got to go up on the deck and watch
Socializing
A description of socializing within the camp is a complicated matter. Some of the residents of Winkleman Dome had family in Lander, there was an age differential between some couples, and there was not much close contact with the bosses, so social occasions often took place with relatives, perhaps even more than with camp neighbors. There were nights when families visited each other, but it was not like we partied frequently with each other or anything like that.
The age of radio dominated private home life during my childhood. Lander and Riverton had established radio stations in the late 40's, and during the night we could tune in to powerful radio stations in Omaha, Nebraska and Juarez, Mexico. My father had an old cathedral radio that we listened to, but on one of his days off, we got in the car and drove clear to Montgomery Wards in Casper, a distance of a hundred and fifty miles to buy a new console model with a phonograph what played the old 78 records. We got a whole pile of records free for buying that console. Peggy Lee was on several of them, and the rest were western music, but also some opera. I used to sing along with whoever sang "Come Back To Sorrento" on one of them, and I liked the song so well that when I was in college and could master the high notes I learned it and sang it in Italian.
The popular evening radio broadcasts were "Amos and Andy," "The Life of Reilly," "My Friend Irma," "Luigi and Pasquale" (although I think the later was titled something like "an immigrant's letter from America)."
Late afternoons offered children an array of programs: "The Green Hornet," " Bobby Benson and the B Bar B," "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon," and the lists could go on.
Sunday afternoon was filled with mystery programs: "The Shadow," "Inner Sanctum," and "The FBI, in Peace and War," to name a few. I realize the passage of time may have contributed to temporal misplacing of some of these programs. But the point is not getting the program and the time of day it was on, but the way we listened to the radio. When these programs came on my sister and I, along with our mother glued our eyes on the radio and sat there for two or more hours listening to what was going one in some studio back east or in California, but creating the characters in our minds along with the physical contexts: cities, oceans, mountains, and deserts.
My father did not take to the radio like we did except for the news and the "Trading Post," a program from Lander devoted to people who had something to sell or wanted something to buy. The program was on KOVE early in the morning, and I think I woke up nearly every morning of my childhood to the sound of "Steel Guitar Rag," which was the theme song of the "Trading Post." I can still hear that song and the announcer's voice coming out of our old table radio.
But my interest in listening to the radio diminished with the passage of time, because within a couple of years I found it more exciting to be out walking the hills, setting traps and hoping to get a shot at a coyote, than listening to radio programs.
Outside of private home life, the Gallingers would sometimes invite other camp residents, including us, over to their house on New Years for eggnog. Iona, like my mother played the piano, and we could always depend on her playing the song "Glow Worm" for us. But most other times when the whole camp came together socially the occasions were school plays and other special programs at the school. Both Iona and Bob belonged to lodges in Lander, so maybe that explains their tendency to be sociable.
We were visiting the Gallinger's one evening, and the discussion of lodges came up. Bob was a Mason and Iona was a Daughter of the Eastern Star. Since there was religious significance in these lodges, and my mother had heard that the Catholics would target the Masons some day, she decided to do a little evangelism. It is a well known fact that Adventists, too, especially in those days, believed the Catholics had it in for them, and near the end of time would victimize and even kill Adventists who refused to give up the seventh-day Sabbath to worship on Sunday.
Coextensive with this persecution would be the last great battle involving the all the nations of the earth; it was called the "Battle of Armageddon." Bob listened with wrapped attention as my mother portrayed the violence to take place at the time of the end; but his face started to crack a smile whenever she used the word "Armageddon;" it rolled off her tongue with the rumble of tanks and the bursting of bombs. Bob had never heard such a word and was clearly amused by my mother's facile use of it. It was like she was a teacher of history yet to happen, and she had offered Bob a vision of the future where he could choose to live or die.
Suddenly, Bob jumped up with a fictional alarmed look on his face and started from the room. "Where are you going," Iona asked. "To get my gun, and see how much ammunition I have," Bob replied, "I've got to be ready for the end of time and the Battle of Armageddon."
As serious as she was about what she was saying, Bob's humorous response broke my mother up along with everyone else, and we laughed until we nearly cried. It was perhaps my first lesson in how seriously one should take oneself in a theological discussion.
Since my attention is on Lodges, one more tale needs to be told. One day Donald MacDonald, a close friend of my father's had stopped by for a visit and had brought his brother-in-law, Harry Garner, also my father's good friend. They were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and shooting the breeze when Harry suggested to Donald that they had better get back to town because he had a lodge meeting that evening. "Lodge?" "What lodge do you belong to Harry?" It was my mother asking the question. "The Knights of Pythius," Harry replied. "Oh, Harry," my mother exclaimed with some alarm, "they're Catholics aren't they? (Actually, my mother was thinking of The Knights of Columbus). "How can you belong to that lodge, you're not a Catholic." Don't you know that the Catholics are going to come after Adventists and persecute them in the last days, and the Knights of Pythius is one of the agencies of the papacy that will be coming after us?
Now, Harry, while sufficiently intelligent to make his way around in the world of that day, was not such a fountain of knowledge that he would normally engage my mother in an argument, especially about religion, books and magazines on the subject were conspicuous in our house, but he snapped back, "Dolly, you don't know what you're talking about; I've never heard that we were Catholics." "We don't care what denomination you belong to; we believe in brotherhood." "And I haven't heard any Catholics say that they are coming after Adventists." "Anyway, we have no intention of doing something like that to Adventists, "Well, that's not what I heard," my mother replied. "How can you be sure, Harry?" "Hell, Dolly," Harry shot back, "I'm the Chancellor."
One time Iona Gallinger thought it would be nice to celebrate the anniversaries of the wives living in the camp. Apparently the husbands did not fit into the plan, because the parties were to be a surprise, and the husbands were supposed to supply the information to Iona about when they had been married, so she could organize the party. It was a good idea but destined to fail. When Iona noticed my mother and sister had gone into town and left my father and me at home, she came over to the garden where we were weeding and asked him when he and my mother were married. I could tell by the blank look on his face that he didn't know, but he told her some date in the month of June. Iona thanked him and went back home, and my father made a remark wondering what all this was going to amount to.
I suspected he was wrong about the date, so when my mother got home I told her about the planned party and when it would take place. I knew it! My father was off by two months. But I had ruined the surprise party, because my mother told Iona that my father was wrong, thus there could be no surprise, and no party.
After George Wilson, the first boss of the camp, was transferred, he was replaced by George Wight, an Oklahoman. They had a phonograph with records of Bozo The Clown, and Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. Mrs. Wight would ask me in sometimes to listen to the records; sometimes alone, because her kids had heard the stories so many times they were tired of them. Eventually, I grew tired of them too.
Because the camp was twenty seven miles from Lander you couldn't drive to town every time you needed something like sugar or flour, so it seemed there was a lot of inter-camp borrowing. I ran over to someone's house many times for a cup of sugar or a quantity of flour. When the woman of the camp came to our door to borrow something there was a short visit, but other than that the women of the camp tended pretty much to their own households.
The pre-eminent social occasions were the yearly company parties or picnics. I always looked forward to them. The only picnic I can remember was held down on the Big Wind River. Earlier in the year the Fremont County Democrats had a picnic in the same place and were poisoned by the potato salad. Some people thought that Republicans had done it, but most people in Fremont County, being Republicans, figured the Democrats were quite capable of poisoning themselves.
Once the oil company had the yearly party right in the equipment garage at the oil field. It was the first time I could remember staying up past mid-night. It was a warm night and after the evening meal, we kids played in the street while the adults visited.
However, most often the company had the party at the El Toro, in Hudson. The El Toro was a fine eatery, especially known for huge steaks and "pigs in a blanket." Adjacent to the eating area there was a dance floor; a slot machine stood in the hallway. My mother taught me the evils of gambling at the El Toro, after I played the slot machine just once and won five or six nickels back. I was hooked, but found myself in a dilemma: I want to play again, but was not about to risk giving up my five nickels either.
This dilemma led to a second incident at the El Toro. I discovered a nickel embedded in the dance hall floor, and I thought I was the solution to my predicament. I had no idea that the nickel had been deliberately put there by the owners for a joke. I spotted the nickel before the dance started, and by the time my mother noticed me, I had my pocket knife out, and was well on the way to digging it out of the floor.
I had not been taught the art of practical jokes yet, and figured that something heavy had been dropped on the nickel to press it into the boards like that. I had no idea I was defacing property or trying to take something that was not the right of the finder to keep. To me it was just like finding a nickel on the street. Well, life is about learning! I chose to keep my five nickels and forget about getting rich from the slot machine. My mother told me I had made the right decision.
The company hired a band-usually the Hudsons, from Lander, and most of the employees and their families danced or just sat and listened to the music. However, some of the men spent most of their time in the bar and got tipsy. People who knew about the embedded nickel got quite a laugh when some unknowing dancer would bend down and try to pick it up.
Most of the people stayed late, but my father and mother went home early. Actually, my mother wanted to leave, because the Adventist religion which she had converted to a few years earlier, and eventually brought my sister and me into, did not approve of dancing or drinking, and plenty of that was going on at the El Toro.
We took Flora MacDonald home with us. Donald and his wife Jessie, along with their son, Donny, and oldest daughter Margaret, decided to stay on and enjoy the party. Her father and my father were the first two men hired on at the oil field. They had been friends since the day they boarded the ship to come to America from Scotland, and had spent years working together at various jobs from working with the sheep outfits to mining gold at South Pass.
We had a hilarious time with Flora during the ride home. She and my sister, Lassie got to talking about birthdays and how old the kids they knew were, then Flora asked my dad how old he was, which I think was forty eight, and she replied that her father was a half-century. It made Donald sound ancient, and we laughed until we were limp.
Later my father and mother got into a heated argument about leaving the party too soon. Obviously, my father had not converted to my mother's point of view. But, for Flora, this argument was pure entertainment. She did not take it a bit seriously, like my sister and I did. She kept butting in, and making things worse, then would laugh when she got a hostile reaction from one or the other of them. My sister and I were horrified, but it made Flora's day.
Hunting
Most of the men in the camp were hunters, but I only remember my dad and Tex Irvine ever coming home with any meat. So I guess the rest were just "hunters."
It seemed like we nearly always had a deer or an elk hanging on the beams of the back porch during hunting season. When I was old enough to do the skinning I got that job, and, how careful I would be to not cut the hide in the process of removing it from the animal! My father would usually tan the elk hides which were cut into quarters. The elk he shot had to be so cut up for him to manage carrying the heavy animals out of the mountains to the car, but deer hides were usually complete because most of the time a whole deer could be carried or dragged. He would sell these complete deer hides to a hide buyer for cash.
It was a traditional practice that if game was bagged at different times of hunting season, we shared the liver and heart with the Irvines, and they with us. I know that in the contemporary world many people wince at the thought of eating liver, but for those who hunt or butcher their own meat it is the best part of the animal. One fall my father who was hunting at a place in the Wind River Mountains, called the Limestones, killed a bull elk with one antler. It was a tagged animal, and the only elk taken from the Limestones that fall. Actually, my father was hunting for deer, but had an elk license as well, so he shot what appeared first.
After he got home and hung the quarters up on the porch he took part of the liver over to the Irvines. The next evening Tex came over for a visit, and dumped something into my father's hand. "Well, I'll be. . ." my father exclaimed! It was the bullet that had killed the elk, coming at last to lodge in the animals liver but with hardly any penetration. He gave the mushroomed bullet to me and I kept it until my father threw it out while cleaning the junk out of my room after I left home many years later.
My father liked to hunt with rifles that had just enough power to do the job and no more. The 25-35 Winchester was his favorite. An animal shot with that gun did not have much waste from blood-shot meat, was light enough to carry all day long, and when he shot it didn't make much noise. He once owned a 30-06, but sold it just because it was so heavy and made so much noise when he fired it.
From the time I was in the second grade I wanted my father to take me hunting with him, but he always refused telling me I was still too young and that I would have to wait a few years. When I was twelve he told me I could go deer hunting with him. I was so thrilled I couldn't sleep all night thinking about it. We were to get up at 3 a.m. so we would be on the mountain by daylight, but by 3 a..m. I was sound asleep, and Mom who went to bed late, told my father that because I hadn't gone to sleep by the time she went to bed, I should be left home to get my sleep. When I awoke and found that he had gone without me I was very disappointed.
He came back that evening with a buck deer. I complained to him, but he said at my age I needed my sleep. Then he took out the casing of the bullet that had killed the animal and pressed it into my hand. That made everything between us right again.
Music
Human beings everywhere make music. Winkleman Dome was no different. There were three homes where music could be heard. As mentioned, my mother and Iona Gallinger played the piano, and each of them had one. When we went to the Gallingers for a visit Iona would ask my mother to play a song or two, then she would play, "Glow Little Glow Worm." I don't remember her playing anything else, although she must have. In my mind I can still see the picture of that lightning bug larvae on the sheet music cover, although at the time I had never seen a lightning bug or knew what a glow worm was.
My mother played by ear, could play almost anything she heard in her own style, and sang songs with a voice of operatic quality although the only music lessons she ever had were voice lessons given her by her music teacher, Cilia Newton, the wife of the editor to the local news paper, "The Wyoming State Journal." In high school she had won the state championship for female vocal, and made sure my sister and I found the plaque hanging on one of the hall walls when we started high school. She was very proud of that time in her early life when she was memorialized by something that would survive other people's forgetfulness.
Our mother sang for us at home, and sometimes would sing for the whole camp just by opening the window and letting the volume roll out across the street and driveway. The opportune time for this seemed to be when there were other people outside weeding their gardens or watering lawns, or when the afternoon shifts would be getting off, and the workers made captive audiences while putting machinery away in the equipment garage across the street from our house.
Tex Irvine was a real cowboy singer. He had a guitar and played the fiddle. He had an impressive repertoire of western songs, and on summer evenings when the windows were open we could hear him play and sing. His children learned the songs, and so did I. We sang them when we played, and today I still sing a few of them.
"She's a Texas tornado, and she comes from Laredo, and I don't know what to do.
She's as sweet and a daisy and she's drivin' me crazy . . . ."
"Rolly, Polly, eatin' corn and taters, hungry every minute of the day . . ."
"What are we goin' to do about the moonlight? You intend to sit around and talk.
What are we goin' to do about the stars bright, such a lovely night to take a walk."
Jean, Tex's wife was usually sitting close beside him when he sang this last song, and after Tex put his guitar away, they would sit on the couch and smooch--with the blinds up. In those days that was a pretty bold thing to do.
By the time I turned fourteen years old camp life was pretty much winding down. Several of the families had left, transferred to other fields, the houses sold and moved away, leaving only the Irvines and us at the camp; within a year even the Irvines had moved back into Lander, and Tex transferred to the Beaver Creek oil field. After that I and my mother and father were alone on the Dome, my sister already having gone off to attend college. With more time to myself after school my father and I spent more of it together, and became more dedicated to hunting and trapping as ways of social bonding.
The Religious Life
Another kind of bonding was in process, the developing sense of place, that settling into the wild, the spacious, as home; into the sage, the hills, rivers and mountains. For my father, "place" meant Muskrat, Indian Grove, Beaver Divide, Tin Cup Mountain, Wind River Peak, and Pinto Park, areas where he had sojourned during his early years in Wyoming. These were the haunts of his spirit, the places of returning. When he spoke of them he spoke of a dying generation of men, indeed many of them were already memorialized by the inscriptions on their tombstones.
But for me "place" was not only "my place," but "God's place." There was no tension about God being the God of the vast universe and being present in that tiny spot on the prairie where I prayed. If his omnipresence may be thought of as a wave present throughout the universe, my prayers collapsed the wave into a particle in Big Horn Draw. Thus, the rock outcropping of the fossil beds became an altar, a place where a god dwelt, just as certainly as Bethel, where Jacob slept and dreamed about the angels descending and ascending a ladder from heaven.
Religion was immediate: there would be signs in the heavens, great storms, and earthquakes before the coming of the Lord. I watched and waited.
One cold winter night I looked out at the full moon. The "lesser light which ruled the night" was at the center of an eerie cross, brighter at the place where it shone from the moon and fading toward its extremities. At the time I did not know about the atmospheric explanation of the phenomenon. I called to my mother to come and look at this mysterious cross; might this not be a sign of the second coming of Christ? She looked and said, "No," she had seen that cross before, it was quite natural to see it radiate from the moon on cold winter nights.
A similar situation arose out of a meteorite shower one summer night when I was sleeping outside looking the heavens. I counted nine shooting stars in a short length of time. Was this one of the signs? I dozed off to sleep, and woke up the next morning with the sun ascending the eastern sky, the earth still in its place, and I, left to ponder the meaning of the end, and how I should know when it would really happen.
But if Christ did not come as I expected him, the enchantment of living on that vast prairie with its wild creatures did call me to live a life within which they played major roles. The call of the Meadow Lark, and the trill of the Blue Bird are the hymns that still haunt the landscape of my mind. And the scent of sage brush ascends as the incense of that holy place.
For others traveling down the highway past Winkleman Dome they see just another oil field, a shell of what it once was. But for me it is still home, a place I return to in my dreams, a place with a voice that calls to me again and again.