Milk cans

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 ...