CCW Chapter 1a

Chapter 1

 

I knew nothing about the west when I was 27, but the June following my husband, Tom’s, return from World War II, I found myself on the road from our home in a Chicago suburb to a cattle ranch in western Nebraska that Tom’s grandfather had started in the 1880s. Would I be able to adjust to this new life that was so important to my husband?

Tom had dyslexia, an inherited characteristic that delayed his being able to learn to read at a normal age, though by twelve, most dyslectic children can. When he was old enough for school, educators hadn’t learned about this problem so teachers and all his schoolmates, except his best friend who later graduated from Princeton, thought him dumb. When the other boys picked on him and his friend, if they could get their backs to a wall when the others attacked, they could hold their own until the fracas was stopped. If his family and friend hadn’t been so wonderful, he’d have had a terrible childhood.

When Tom was ten, his father learned he had a slow growing,

fatal kidney disease. A couple of years later, his father decided to take his oldest son to the Nebraska cattle ranch. Tom adored the place. Seeing him so happy, his father arranged with the foreman and his wife so Tom could come out there to stay over summer vacations.

He had his room in his empty grandfather’s house and took his meals with the foreman’s family whose house was just down the hill from his grandfather’s. His father bought him two horses to ride while the cowboys taught this interested boy cattle work and roping, not as a dude but as the other boys out there. Until he was in college, he spent his summers at the ranch.

"The sun is right in my eyes," Tom said, squinting as he drove the Iowa highway. "Let's stop for supper at a Quick and Dirty in the next town." 

"What on earth is a Quick and Dirty?" I asked.

"A rural restaurant," he said.

We had been married five years and had two children but Tom had been home only six months, having served two years in India and Guam during World War II. We had left our children with Tom's mother and were driving to the ranch that Tom's grandfather had started and where Tom had spent every summer from the time he was about twelve until he finished freshman year at college. The ranch meant so much to him that I knew I’d have to like it if we were to have a really happy marriage.

My only trip west had been by train to California where we wintered the year of my fifth birthday. I hadn't remembered the scenery across Illinois and Iowa being endless fields of corn plants. I wondered why they didn't grow anything else.

When Tom returned from World War II, his father's brother, Uncle Preston, had asked him to join in the family businesses, of which the Nebraska ranch was one. We were to visit Uncle Preston and Aunt Lonie at their Nebraska place for a month and I had no idea what to expect. I'd had Sunday dinners with them in their lovely Winnetka, Illinois home. They were like everyone else I knew, not at all like the cowboys Tom talked about.

We stopped at a restaurant in the next town. As we approached the door, the overwhelming odor of fried foods gnawed at our nostrils. Flies, which had settled on the screen door, flew up as we opened it. Inside a farmer in bib overalls was leaving with his wife in a cotton housedress, and a little boy wearing overalls. Conversing over coffee, a couple of men in slacks and shirts with rolled-up sleeves were the only remaining customers. Farmers, I was learning, eat early.

A waitress brought menus. The choices were fried chicken, fried pork chops, or fried beef steak cut thin as a doubled shoe sole. This was served with either french fries or mashed potatoes, gravy, and a spoonful of canned peas. The gravy was more grey than brown, with a hint of purple, so different from the rich brown of ours at home.

  Our teenaged waitress wore a somewhat clean apron over a cotton housedress. Her short sleeves were tight over her muscular, tanned arms. Bobbysocks replaced the stockings worn by the waitresses in the restaurants I was familiar with. She popped her gum from time to time as she waited to take our order. Once we gave it, she poured Tom's coffee immediately, but took a while to locate a tea bag for me. While she searched, I watched Tom slip his tableware, one piece at a time, to his lap before returning it to the table.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Sometimes the dishwasher doesn't use enough soap," he said. "If you wipe your utensils on your napkin, they occasionally become cleaner." He gave me that wonderful jack-o-lantern grin of his. (Dishwashing machines weren’t common in rural areas at that time.) The water in the cup had cooled so much I had trouble making the tea strong enough. The white china cup was heavy in my hand. Its rim felt unpleasantly thick against my lips. I couldn't help contrasting it with my memory of the exquisitely thin, blue and white Japanese tea cups in the shelves over the sideboard in my parents' dining room. The Delft plates in the same rack and the set of blue, Dutch, oversized ginger jars and vases on the dining room mantel were mementos from Mother’s and Granny’s many European trips but the Japanese cups were from their only trip to the orient.

   My maternal grandfather died when my mother was five. Without a husband to care for, there was nothing to prevent Granny and her only child from traveling. Mother had been in her thirties when she met Cousin Phoebe on the Oriental cruise. While visiting Cousin Phoebe in Chicago, Mother met Daddy.

My parents' multi-windowed dining room was a cheerful place. The sunlight intensified the indigo blues of the china and highlighted the red mahogany of the English and American 18th century furniture handed down in the family. Portraits hung just above the sideboard, on either side of the plate rack where the Japanese tea cups resided. The portrait on the right was of Mother's maternal grandfather.

According to the family story, his forefathers had settled in the middle of Pennsylvania in the first half of the 18th century. Mother's ever-so-many-greats and a grandfather was a friend of Logan, an Indian, who had been named for his father's friend, a major in the British army, who taught Logan’s father and his son to speak English.

Mother's ancestor had to leave his wife and ten-month-old baby to go on his week long, semiannual trip to civilization for supplies. The nearest white couple lived twenty miles away, so before leaving, he told his wife, "The Indians are my friends.

They won't hurt you as long as you do exactly what they say."

At dawn the next morning, Logan appeared. He asked to take the baby with him. Upset by the request but remembering her husband's advice, the mother gave him her child and then spent the entire day worrying about it. Too late to walk to her white neighbors for help, she determined to go the the next day as soon as it was light

At dusk, Logan reappeared at the edge of the clearing. On the baby's feet was a new pair of mocassins. His wife had spent all day making them.

Much later, in 1744, a white mob murdered a group of the Mingo tribe of the Iroquois Indians, including all Logan's family, even the women and children. In retaliation, Chief Logan and the Mingo went to war with the whites, burning and scalping, though the Indian remained friends with my ancestor's family. Mother used to remind us with this story and others from her travels that to get along, we must respect other people's cultures. I tried to remember that as the waitress slammed our desert plates on the table, bringing me back to Iowa.

We drove through the night. Tom didn't want to waste a minute of our month at the ranch. I had no anxieties about going there. I like animals and Tom had told me so much about Rush Creek ranch and what it meant to him that I, too, expected to love it.

Tom had very dark brown hair, bushy black eyebrows that made his eyes look darker than mine, though they really weren't, and a wonderful grin. As my Vassar College roommate said on meeting him, "He's like an old family friend. If you pretend to be anybody but yourself, you'd feel he'd immediately recognize the sham and think less of you for it."

The warm, humid air of Iowa's early June evening soothed me and I relaxed for the first time since taking our German Shepherd to the boarding kennel and our two children to their grandmother's.

I'd been hurt when they barely stopped for a hasty goodbye kiss. As soon as we'd arrived at Tom's mother's, she suggested they check the kittens in the barn and they were off. My mother-in-law loved people and they loved her. Her husband had died after eleven years of kidney disease and accompanying coronaries at the same time her three children were going through adolescence. Perhaps these difficulties made her more sensitive to other people and their troubles. She was a rock of stability to anyone needing help but was also a fun-loving person. Although her home wasn't a farm, it was too large to keep mowed, so she had a flock of six ewes, their lambs and a saddle horse to help with the grass. She also kept a few chickens. When the town of Lake Forest expanded to her property, her livestock was allowed to remain, being grandfathered in. Naturally our children were delighted to be staying with her in such a wonderful place.

Tom and I drove through the dark. U.S. Highway 30 was the main street in each town. The few street lamps and an occasional stoplight gave us a momentary view of villages before we returned to the dark.

Cedar Rapids was different because it seemed to go on forever after those little towns we had been through. Whenever I saw a child walking with its mother, I realized I wouldn't be seeing our two for a whole month.

"Children two and four years old are much too young for the ranch," Tom had said.

His mother had agreed. "I'll keep them. Next year, after you've been there and learned something about what you'll be doing, you can take them."

I tried to convince myself that she was right but I cried as we crossed Iowa because I'd never been separated from both of them before. I hate crying women as much as Tom does. We both believe one doesn't show emotion in public. It makes people uncomfortable. I'd carefully wipe my eyes before the lights of each town for fear he'd see me.

"Are you coming down with a cold?" he asked as I blew my nose for the umpteenth time.

"Perhaps it's my hay fever acting up," I said. Finally, exhausted, I slept. When I awakened, we were in Nebraska.

"Aren't there any hills?" I asked, looking out at the flat landscape with its corn plants shorter than those of Illinois.

"Yes, but the Platte River valley is so wide here you can't see them," Tom said. "We're following the old river road across Nebraska. The Indians, the trappers, the wagon trains of the Oregon Trail, the Mormans and the first transcontinental railroad went up this valley just as we are doing."

"How long before we get to the ranch?"

"It's about eight hours from the Missouri River, maybe another seven hours to go. Let's stop for breakfast at the next town."

The only difference between the Quick and Dirty in Nebraska and the one in Iowa was the smell. The odor of eggs, bacon and hashed brown potatoes fried in gobs of lard replaced that of fried meat and french fries.

Occasionally, U.S. Route 30 would take us through bigger towns like Columbus, Grand Island, Kearney, and North Platte. Between them, the corn was barely out of the ground and there were large fields of something called alfalfa which looked like clover to me. Occasionally we saw part of a crop standing in water due to the ever present irrigation ditches on the higher ground of the valley.

The town of Ogallala, named for a tribe of Sioux Indians, had the usual succession of gas stations, little motel cabins and private homes, surrounding the stores of the downtown area. A few of these were of the square-fronted variety you see in old western movies. Others, more modern, were built in the >20s of stucco or brick.

"Ogallala was the terminus for the last cattle drives from Texas to the railroad," Tom told me. "It's still a cow town, but after 1885, the settlers wouldn't let them bring Texas Longhorns through. Texas cattle were immune to a disease carried by ticks from the south, but English beef cattle were not, so the Longhorns were supposed to spend the winter sufficiently far north for the freeze to kill off the ticks. Some people cheated and drove them through anyway, causing many northern cattle to die. Grandfather’s cattle were marched from Texas through Ogallala to the ranch so we know it must have been started by 1885.

Ogallala has a Boot Hill cemetery," he continued. AThat’s where they buried some of those cowboys who celebrated the end of their journey with too much liquor and gunfire. You can buy saddles and tack for horses here.@ He parked the car on the main street which was also U.S. Route 30.

"Why are we stopping?" I asked.

"We have to get you boots. I didn't let you bring eastern riding boots because western boots have higher heels."

"I remember your saying that, but why?"

"It's to keep your foot from going through the stirrup if your horse acts up. The stirrups on wetern saddles don’t come off so if your foot gets caught in one of them, you can be dragged to your death while your horse kicks you with every stride.@

As I tried on the various pairs, I thought about Miss. Compton's third grade. She told us the story of the Battle of Troy where the Greek, Achilles, killed the Trojan warrior, Hector. Day after day Achilles dragged Hector's body behind his chariot around the grave of his friend whom Hector had killed. The horror of dragging a body behind a chariot had stayed with me. I couldn't help but think how much worse it would be to be dragged alive, especially by a kicking horse. Clutching my boots, I left the store with Tom. We continued on our way to the ranch.