A tale by a frontier gentleman, my granddad
Yep, that’s me all right. Looks just like I did back when I was farming and raising a few head of cattle in Montana. The hat in that picture is a genuine straw hat. Not a dress straw hat, but a real one, the kind a feller could use every day, and, by golly, when it was new you could wear it to town and look just as good as the banker. Of course, a straw hat gets kind of old after a busy summer, and you have to replace them. Luckily, they don’t cost as much as those felt hats like my brother, Buster, wore. Neither can they stand the wear and tear that he gives them when he’s slapping the meanness out of a horse from his rough bunch.
Buster wears those felt hats, Stetsons, that are plum hot in the summertime. One will last him three or four years, by that time he’ll have a hole in the top of his hat right at the front of the crease, and the sweat and grease from his hat band will have leached through to the outside. The top of a light gray Stetson will have a black ring around its bottom, and it won’t do to wear at a community dance. But Buster wears one anyway.
By golly, you notice that hat in my picture? It’s a straw hat. Instead of getting hot and sweat bound, the older it gets the more it lets in a fresh stream of air. That is right nice on the hot days in July and August when a feller is thrashing out his wheat crop.
About 1920, after I came back from the war, John and I put in about thirty acres of wheat. That doesn’t sound like much now-a-days, but we were doing it all with two shifts of horsepower, three or four hitched up together when breaking new ground. More for pulling a binder. Some of our horses was well broke, and when we run short of good ones, we’d round up one from the half wild herd that Buster had roaming those sagebrush hills. Some of Buster’s horses were pretty juicy, but John could ride anything with hair on it, and I was a fair hand with work horses. By the end of a farming season, we’d have a good string of horses and a lot of broken harness.
At first, we did pretty good farming. But then, by golly, we hit a couple of bad years. Two in a row. Glanders was going around the horse herds. My straw hat was in its third year and was in bad shape. If it hadn’t been for the antelope roaming the hills we’d have starved to death..
Come spring, when we got our crop in, John says, “The third time’s a charm.” Sure enough, the rains came, and the grass grew, and the wheat had big, full, heavy heads. When the threshing crew came, we made over forty bushels to the acre. On the last day of threshing, when that threshing rig was kicking out the last of the straw, Old John said that we need something to clean out the rig.
I threw in my old hat. With a bumper crop, I’d get new one. I might even wear it for Phipps harvest party. I’d fiddle for dance. By golly those folks might take up a collection. Any hat that pays a feller back is a good hat.
Loved him too