CCW Chapter 1r

Carolyn Chapman Wells June 1946

CHAPTER 1

Would I be able to adjust to this new life that was so important to Tom, my husband? That thought kept going through my mind as we drove west from the Chicago area, heading for southwestern Nebraska. It was June 1946, and we were headed for Rush Creek Land and Live Stock Company, a ranch that had been in Tom’s family since 1886.

Tom had been spending summers on the ranch since he was a small boy and I knew he loved it very much. But I was very much a city girl and knew nothing about the West. Although I had a few riding lessons as a child, that was some years ago – and in an English saddle. I was more than a little apprehensive, The ranch meant so much to Tom that I knew I’d have to like it too if we were to have a happy marriage.

When Tom was 12, his father took him to the ranch for the first time. Tom adored the place. Seeing him so happy, his father arranged with the foreman and his wife that the boy could come out there to stay over summer vacations.

He had his room in his grandfather’s empty house just a bit up the hill from the foreman’s house where he took his meals. His father bought him two horses to ride and the cowboys taught this interested boy cattle work and roping – like the other boys there. Tom spent every summer there through his freshman year in college.

"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." (Before the days of fast food restaurants, small cafes existed in the rural towns.)

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

"A rural diner."

I wondered how he knew about diners. My only experience with them consisted of studying Edward Hopper's picture "Nighthawks" in my history of art course at Vassar. I had been told it depicted a diner. It wasn't a pleasant scene. It showed the isolation and loneliness of people in a city. I wondered why Tom wanted to eat in a place like that.

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, Tom Jr. and Carolyn, with Tom's mother.

My only previous trip West had been by train to California where we wintered and where I had my fifth birthday. I hadn't remembered the scenery across Illinois and Iowa being endless fields of corn.

When Tom returned from World War II, his father's brother, Uncle Preston Wells, 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 overwhelmed 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 as 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. Bobby socks replaced the stockings worn by the waitresses in the restaurants I was familiar with. She popped her gum 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." (In the days before rural restaurants had dish washing machines, this was sometimes the case.) He gave me that wonderful jack-o-lantern grin of his.

The water in the cup had cooled so much I had trouble making the tea strong enough to show any color. 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 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 and Granny went to the Far East. They met Daddy's cousin, Phoebe, on that 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. The one on the right was of Mother's maternal grandfather.

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 the Rush Creek ranch and what it meant to him that I, too, expected to love it.

Tom had very dark brown hair and bushy black eyebrows that made his eyes look darker than mine, though they really weren't, and a wonderful grin. As my 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 its 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.

As I remembered the events of the day, 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'd been through. I felt a sharp stab whenever I saw a child walking with its mother as 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. 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 shorter than that in 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 Mormons, 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 Route 30 would take us through bigger towns like Columbus, Grand Island, and Kearney. Here the corn was barely out of the ground and there were large fields of something that Tom called alfalfa but which looked like clover to me. Occasionally we saw part of a crop standing in water from the ever-present irrigation ditches on the higher ground of the valley.

We crossed the Platte River a couple of times before we reached the big town of North Platte. This city differed from the others we'd been through because it had a big roundhouse and repair shops for the powerful Union Pacific steam engines that pulled the long freight and swift passenger trains. Roundhouses are turntables, whose track can turn to line up the engines and their coal cars sitting on them with the different tracks radiating from them.

Everything in the railroad yard seemed big. Huge piles of coal and a gigantic water tower with its moveable pipe for watering the steam engines that moved the freight cars. Red and green signal lights kept changing in response to the switch engines moving the freight cars around. I was relieved to exchange that noisy, sooty city for the quiet farms of the countryside.

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 1920s 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.

Ogallala has a Boot Hill cemetery," Tom continued, "That'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. 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 to keep your foot from slipping through the stirrup if you fall or get bucked off." I've since learned that if the boot is big enough to come off easily, the foot slips out of it so you don't stay hung up on the stirrup. I find the slightly too-big boot is much more comfortable than the high heel

Clutching my boots, I left the store with Tom and we continued on our way.