Grandpa was a cowboy

I've always enjoyed reading westerns all my life but anytime I think "cowboy" it is always my grandfather that I see in my mind's eye. He was tall and rawboned, with white hair and a moustache even in my earliest memories and sat a horse as if he'd been born there. He was a self-contained man, quiet voiced and not given to conversation. Looking back, it seems he was not just comfortable being alone but that he may have preferred it.

With no siblings or neighbor children for playmates, my companions were mostly four-footed, so I growing up in a somewhat reserved adult household I was not inclined to chatter. I did, of course, go through the usual "many questions" stage and I still remember his response when "why" and "what for" got wearing and repetitive. He did, still, have a bit of the "south" with certain words, and "for" was "fur".

"What for, Grandpa?"

"What fur?"

"Yes. What for?"

He'd snort, which he did very well, through a rather Roman nose. "Cat fur, to make kitten britches."

Grandpa was born toward the end of the "trail herd" times and left home permanently at the age of 11, starting his working life riding with the trail herds driven from Missouri up into Kansas and Nebraska in the late 1800s.

He taught me much of what I know of horses and cattle and although ranch life was hard on both men and animals, something of compassion as well. He rarely said anything derogatory about neighbors the rare times I remember him doing so involved them not caring for their animals well. His livestock never went without adequate pasture, or hay or water even during the worst of the Montana snowstorms with temperatures well below zero.

I never remember hearing him raise his voice to man or beast and although it was uncommon for a ranch to have a "house pet" he had a big, black tomcat that spent much of his time in the house when I was a child. The preferred place for both Grandpa and Old Tom on cold winter afternoons was on the couch directly across from the potbellied stove. When Grandpa would come in from feeding cattle, he would pour a cup of coffee from the battered blue granitewear pot that sat at the back of the kitchen range and head for the potbellied stove.

Old Tom was always curled up in there and would grumble as he was pushed over. Once Grandpa got settled, with his long legs propped up on the rim of the stove, he would open the book he was currently reading and settle in. I would be reading too, at the other end of the couch, but I was always watching for the next scene I knew was coming.

Old Tom knew something of patience and would appear to be comfortably asleep until Grandpa was definitely engrossed in the book. Then, one paw would very carefully be stretched out and then "whack!" on the back of Grandpa's levi-covered leg and a black streak would be off the couch and halfway to the kitchen before the book, escaping the swat aimed at him.

Although he was only able to complete the third grade before he went to work at a man's job, he enjoyed reading. He had a floor to ceiling bookcase filled with books, was the one of our family that read for enjoyment. Although my grandmother had graduated from high school, something almost unheard of in that time, and my mother was herself a schoolteacher, he was the person that received books as gifts at Christmas. The first book I can actually remember truly "reading" was one from his bookshelf, Trails Plowed Under, by Charles Russell. Although one of the attractions for me were the wonderful paintings and drawings in the book, I remember several of the stories still.

He was not a demonstrative man. I don't remember him ever hugging or kissing me but I never doubted that he loved me. I remember him lifting me up on his cowhorse and letting me ride while he led him through the corral to the pasture. I remember him spending hours showing me how to milk a cow and how to squirt milk in the barn cat's mouth. I remember him showing me how to warm a bit with a bare hand and my breath so it wouldn't stick to a horse's tongue when they were bridled in the winter.

I got to "drive" the work team on the feedground while the cattle were fed. I got to hold the reins and I listened for his every word, which of course the horses were responding to rather than to my efforts at "driving". But I can still remember how important I felt I was to be helping while Dad and Grandpa pitched hay off the bobsled and the team plodded around the field with traces jingling and harness leather creaking in the cold.

He certainly did not have an easy life. He was holding an adult's job when he was eleven. When he and my grandmother filed for a homestead, he worked for a "neighboring" ranch, 40 miles away, for cash. He was paid $40 a month, with one weekend off a month. We moved to our own small farm and he and my grandmother ran the ranch alone for several years after that, finally retiring at the age of 77.

Even after he retired and moved to town and my parents took over the ranch, my grandparents had most of a big backyard in garden and raised and canned enough for both families. We ran some cattle for him on shares and he would be at the ranch in the fall when we weaned calves, borrowing my horse to ride into the corral and separate which heifers he wanted to keep as replacements.

I was close to my parents and both grandparents, but although I lost my grandfather only 3 years after I was grown and gone from home, many of my most vivid childhood memories are of him. So many things I've used ... and needed ... throughout my life are things I learned from him. Many of his "lessons" I have used all my life with horses, but not only horsemanship, but a love for books and perhaps something self-sufficiency and how to be stubborn and endure hardships and setbacks without complaint.