There were very few dairy farms in Montana in the early 1900s and those few were close to town, supplying that town. Ranchers like my grandparents weren't close enough to be able to take advantage of a "town market" on a regular basis. Sixty miles from town, in Montana, meant a trip to town maybe once a month in the summer, when the roads were passable and not at all in winter.
Farmers and ranchers didn't have much cash money then but everyone would take what they had to sell when they went to town. The local town merchants bought those items, the local creamery buying milk from anyone that brought it to them and grocery stores buying eggs and produce brought in.
My grandparents did not have dairy cattle, they raised beef cattle, Herefords mostly. Several of the cows had a strain of Shorthorn and gave more milk than usual, so they were the ranch "milk cows" and provided family milk with "extra" to sell occasionally.
The cows calved in the early spring and 3 or 4 days after the calves were born, they were separated from the cows. The calves went out to a small pasture, the cows were turned into another pasture. and came in morning and night to be milked. Each calf was let in with its mother to nurse one side while the person milking got the other side. You got fast at this, as it was much easier when the calf was busy on one side and not trying to steal milk from your side. If you were too slow, you ended up finishing the milking one-handed, using the other to fend off the calf who was trying to steal from your side while slimeing you with milk slobber.
We used most of the milk ourselves. Without refrigeration, it went off quickly, so you needed it fresh almost daily. I envied the neighbors, who had a "spring house" where they kept their milk which kept their milk much colder than ours was in the cellar. The cream was skimmed off to make butter, extra milk was sometimes made into cottage cheese. The barn cats got their share of fresh milk, lining up for their share "direct from the faucet". Anything sour got fed to the pigs and chickens. Nothing was wasted.
When a town trip was planned, the milk was saved and put into one or two of the big metal milk cans, to be delivered to the local creamery in town. They paid cash and I can remember the cans being brought back up empty and someone handing over a ticket and money.
It was one of the highlights of the town trips for me, as the creamery made ice cream, one of the few places in town that you could get an ice cream cone. If we had milk to sell, I always got to choose what flavor of ice cream I wanted, the one "treat" that I counted on.
After my grandparents retired, we only kept one milk cow. She provided all the milk needed for my parents and I after we had refrigerators, but the milk cans stayed on as a reminder of the earlier days. They accompanied my parents to their home in town after their retirement and to my home after that. Unfortunately, like nearly everything else, they did not survive the storage unit fire that occurred while I was moving from Montana to Kentucky ten years ago.
However, just last week, my town trip provided an unexpected bonus. At the gas station on the corner, where we stopped to gas up, a small pickup sitting at the pumps, with what was obviously a load going to the dump ... and lashed at the very back ... two old milk cans!
I bailed out of the pickup as fast as a little old lady can, these days, and grabbed this "kid" ... okay, probably late 20s, but anyone under 40 is a kid to me anymore ... and asked him if he was headed for the dump and was he taking the milk cans with him.
He looked a little startled to acosted by a total stranger in a parking lot but I went on to tell him I used to have two milk cans that my grandparents had on the ranch in Montana. I explained they'd been lost, along with everything else that was in storage during my move from Montana to Kentucky and I'd been hoping to find one.
At this point, he realized that I wasn't a tourist, even though I talked "funny" and I'd definitely got out of a farm truck. He kind of shuffled his feet a bit and said "Well, I'd planned to take them home and put them on my front porch, but I guess my wife won't know if there were one or two. Which one would you like?"
I explained to him I was also an artist, so really did like the one with the most "artistic" rust patterns on it and I'd be more than happy to pay him whatever he wanted for it, I was just delighted to have found one. Believe me, I couldn't get the $10 bill out of my purse fast enough.
Lots of happy memories I haven't recalled for many years, as well as lots of planning for a series of "country still life" arrangements centered around the milk can. Let's see ... milk can with old fence, with weather-beaten "farm for sale" sign, at the corner of the old stone barn at the ranch ...
Yesterday morning I lit the wood stove for the first time this year, one of the things I look forward to here in Kentucky. Having grown up where winter was a fact of life for many months out of the year, I miss the feeling of comfort I got coming in from outside chores and being able to sit in front of the potbellied stove, luxuriating in the heat and a hot cup of chocolate.
I chuckle listening to the winter weather report here in Kentucky with local weather reporters cautioning about the "bitter cold" coming. I've been in Kentucky now for 10 years and my goosedown chore coat is still in the trunk where I packed it the last spring I was in Montana.
Most of my winter memories are a series of images in my mind, vignettes from all of the Montana ranch winters in my life, from going with my father and grandfather as they were feeding cattle with a team and bobsled when I was 5 and 6 to the last winter before I moved to Kentucky, chaining up the Dodge 4 x 4 to get in to the back pastures to take hay to the mares.
I remember my grandfather coming in from chores, stomping his feet, wiping tiny icicles from his moustash and hanging the workhorse bridles beside his coat so that the bits would be warm and not stick to the horses' tongues when they were harnessed the next day.
I remember my father saddling a horse and riding 3 miles to the mailbox at the county road and back during the winter when the snow was too deep to get out with a car. We didn't have 4-wheel drives then, winter travel was restricted to where you could go with chains on your car, or horseback.
As a child, I wore a wool snow suit made by my mother from an old winter coat, to go with Grandpa and Dad to feed cattle. I still hear the team snorting and blowing in the frosty air, trace chains jingling, snow crunching under the sled runners, cattle bawling as they jostled for position as hay was pitchforked from the load.
At school, we kept our lunch boxes in the "cloakroom", a separate little room in the one room schoolhouse for our coats and overshoes. Kept closed so the schoolroom would stay warm with the one coal stove, on the coldest days there were ice crystals in our sandwiches. The teacher would make a big pot of cocoa on the top of the coal stove so that each of us could have a warm drink with our lunch. I also remember being dared to put my tongue on the handle of the pump at the well outside the schoolhouse and trying it ... just once.
I remember my father saddling one of the ranch horses and galloping across the hayfield east of the house, as he towed me on my skis. They have a name for it now, skijoring ... and have wintertime races and competitions. Then it was just fun.
Some winters my father would spread grain in the yard during the winter to feed pheasants that came in from the fields where the snow was too deep to find food.
As an adult, I remember all too well getting up every two hours at night and putting on winter gear, to walk down to the calving shed to check 2 year old heifers or foaling mares. It was always a relief when there were no problems because problems mean you have to strip down to your long underwear and work in a shed where the temperature was hovering around zero.
Storms could come up unexpectedly and 3-day blizzards could drift an incredible amount of snow in various places. My Dad's big 4 x 4 pickup was always parked along the fence in front of the house and I can remember one storm that drifted the snow so deep that it not only covered the yard fence, it covered the pickup as well.
Neighbors lost cattle in that blizzard that they had not been able to get down out of the pasture into the valley. The cattle were up on top of a ridge and drifted with the snow and wind to the edge of the sandstone ridge. The pressure of the cattle from the back pushed as many as 20 or 30 head over the rim, the same result as when tribes of Native Americans had used that same sandstone cliff as a buffalo jump centures ago.
When I was in my 50s, definitely old enough to know better, I was back to raising horses. Now, I loaded square bales to feed in the "back pasture" which was three miles from the ranch buildings, cross country. Rear chains were always in place and emergency chains for the front in the cab, not under the baled hay. The trick to winter mobility is to have the 4 wheel drive chained up in the rear, but not the front. If you get stuck with a 4 wheel drive chained in the rear, you get out, dig the snow away from the front tires and put the chains on. This should give you enough extra "pull" to get you unstuck, but you then turn around and go home!
If you get stuck chained up on all four, you walk home to wait for the neighbor with the bulldozer!
In spite of the hard, brutal hours of work, I would never exchange that for the irreplaceable memories that bring a smile even now. I see, again, the mares come charging across the drifted ridge to the pickup at a gallop, the big black herd boss mare in the lead, plowing through the drifts, with snow flying, breath billowing in the frosty air, and powdered snow like sea foam splashing around the legs and chest.
I remember the gleam in my Rottweiler's eyes as she would leap up the hay bale stairsteps to the top of the haystack and launch herself from the top of the stack to the snowdrift beside it, disappearing in a fountain of snow, only to errupt like a black volcano, slide down the drift and back to the haystack to repeat the process.
Priceless memories of a lifestyle that no longer exists.
The older I get and the less I enjoy going into town and shopping, the more I miss the old "Monkey Ward" catalogs, along with the other "mail order" catalogs and even the "order by mail" advertising in the magazines and papers we received.
They served a multitude of purposes for ranch families and for years most of our shopping was done from the catalogs.
Our clothing was ordered from the catalogs, everything from socks and underwear to a Sunday-go-to-meetin' dress. There were extensive fabric pages, where you could buy fabric by the yard, cottons, silks and wools, along with buttons, thread and trims and I remember looking at them with my mother and grandmother, who were ordering yardage to make my school clothes.
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother subscribed to "Grit" ... a newspaper type publication with articles of interest to women about gardening, cooking and family. There was always one full page of patterns that could be ordered, aprons, dresses, shirts and blouses as well as embroidery, knitting and crochet patterns. I learned how to embroidery with patterns ordered from Grit, ironed on white flour sacks.
Then there was the excitement when the Christmas catalogs arrived. I would spend hours paging through the catalogs and making "I want" lists ... although I only remember one Christmas gift that came from the catalog. That was a farm set, with a heavy cardboard barn that was put together with tabs and farm animals of heavy rubber.
I think I was even more interested when they started coming out with the "Farm" catalog, a separate, smaller catalog that was especially for farmers and ranchers. I could not believe that you could actually ORDER A SHETLAND PONY from this catalog. My cousin had a pony that she rode to school and I was incredibly envious. I rode bareback, not having a child-sized saddle, on my mother's retired cowpony and oh, how I wanted a pony and saddle so I could ride to school too!
I may be getting old and crochety now, but I would really like to be able to sit down and page through the catalogs again when I need socks ... or underwear ... or a new flannel work shirt. I don't enjoy going to a store, wandering around trying to find the department I need, or trying to find a clerk to tell me where that department is. I spend too much time dodging other shoppers, their carts and kids careening through the isles, with my temper getting shorter, only to discover IF they have what I am looking for, they don't have it in my size.
With a catalog, an index takes you to that department, you can see what it looks like, the colors and sizes it comes in and you can make your choice in the quiet and comfort of your own home. This does seem, to me, a much more reasonable way to deal with the frustrations of shopping.
