Category: Guest Authors

by my guest author, my dad, with a story from the mountains

 Sister Ellen was born on the Fourth of July. This gave her an identity with American History. In her imagination she took part in such things as the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Boston Tea Party. Oft times she said, “Let’s play the Revolutionary War.” Being born on the Fourth of July also gave Sister an heritage of independence and revolution. Like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, she fought against the British, and a British person lived at our house.

The Britisher was Grandfather Ward. He carried a lot of fire in his youth, but they let him stay in Great Britain until he was nearly sixty years old.  When he was retired, but not burned out, he came to the States to reclaim them for the British Empire. He didn’t make a success of this which made him touchy. This touched off Sister Ellen.

Grandfather and Ellen had a communication problem. My seven-year-old sister didn’t know that “heather” was a bush.  When Grandfather said, “Sookie, do you see the birds flitting in the heather?”  Sister stared at him with her mouth open. Other words caused similar problems.  She thought that “fetch” was a dog’s name.  When Grandfather said, “Sookie, fetch me that magazine,” she looked at him and growled.  If they were on a collision course through the house, he declared right of way. “Mind the way, Sookie, mind the way.” ometimes he looked at her like she was jolly well daft and said, “Mind what you’re doing, Sookie.  Mind what you’re doing.” Sookie found it difficult to mind her mother, let alone to mind her way or mind her chores.

Grandfather had been a prize fighter back in the days when the art was called fisticuffs and the fighters used bare fists and poised for Currier and Ives pictures. Grandfather used to soak his hands in salt brine to make them tough for the art of fisticuffs. In his younger days boxing matches lasted many rounds and a round didn’t end until it had a knockdown. There was none of this nonsense of ringing a bell before someone was hearing bells.  Grandfather wanted to bare‑fist‑box even though he had reformed and moved to the States.  And then he fell down and broke his leg.  Now he was laid up in the bedroom under the attic.

One afternoon, before Mother left for the garden to pick peas, she gave some last minute instructions.  “Robert,” she told me, “I expect you to mind your sister.” Then she turned to my sister.  “Ellen,” she said, “don’t wake Barbara from her nap, and don’t you children bother your grandfather.” “Oh, we won’t,” Ellen promised. This meant that she wouldn’t bother Barbara because our younger sister acted like a cat with his tail caught in the door when she first woke up. Furthermore, Ellen would be cautious about Grandfather.  However, she had a Fourth of July Spirit that kept her looking for British soldiers to battle.

The attic was strategically located above Grandfather’s bedroom. The attic floor had large cracks in it. The largest ones were over the bed. There was a huge knothole in the floor straight above Grandfather’s snoring nose. The elder Ward complained. He complained because we ate hot bread (biscuits). He griped about children knocking dirt down through cracks in the ceiling over his bed ‑ especially when he was laid up with a broken leg. He complained that he didn’t get the respect an elder was due ‑ although he had a box of apples beside the bed because someone wanted him to recover.

When Mother was in the house we couldn’t play in the attic. She didn’t want us to knock dust down on Grandfather.  Mother didn’t like to hear Grandfather scold.  But now she was outside and Sister said, “Let’s go play like the attic is Bunker Hill.”

“We better not,” I suggested.  “We’ll knock dust on Grandfather.” “He’s asleep,” Ellen replied. “We’ll get caught.” “Mother is down in the garden picking peas and changing the water.  And besides, Mama said you were supposed to mind me.  Now climb the ladder into the attic.”

We walked across the attic floor. Suddenly a voice growled from the lower regions. “Hey, you tots, what are you doing up there?” “Nothing,” came Ellen’s sweet reply. “Nothing,” I added.  “Just playing.” “Your mother wont let you do that. You’re knocking trash down on my covers.” “Let’s have a parade,” Sister suggested. We paraded. “I say, you tykes, quit that bloody tramping.” “We’re marching.” “I’ll pitch you down the stairs.  Do you want me to throw you down?” Sister Ellen whispered. “He can’t get up here. He has a broken leg.” “Watch me jump,” I said.

Then we saw the knothole. We peeked through the knothole. A Britisher eyed the little eyes peering from the ceiling. Ellen remembered what the New Englanders did at Bunker Hill. She scooped up a handful of torn paper bits and dust and handed it to me. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of his eyes,” she said. I saw the whites of his eyes.

The Britisher’s eyes closed. He blew puffs of paper off the end of his nose. “Hey, you scamps!”  he threatened, “I’ll tell your mother, and she’ll bloody well smack your bottoms.” He sounded serious and his face was red ‑ a serious color with Grandfather. Ellen looked at me. Would a Britisher tell on someone who was born on the Fourth of July?  I nodded my head.  I thought he would tell. I looked at Ellen. Would our mother make an appropriate response? “That’s the kind of woman she is,” Sister sighed.

With an ally like that, a Britisher would surely win the Second Battle of Bunker Hill. We crawled out of the attic and made a peace treaty.  When Mother came home we were playing on the front porch.  Grandfather was laying in bed with a smile on his face.  He had fought another round and won the bout.

remembrances by my Guest Author, my Dad

Talk about luck. My friend, Mike, got to stay at Brannins all year.  The Brannins – Grannie and the four bachelor uncles – lived two miles below us. The reason Mike got to live there was because the Uncles were going to make a Dude Ranch!  A Dude Ranch was a place where Easterners paid money to work in a hay field, get thrown from a horse and do things that westerners would pay money to keep from doing.

The Brannins were building a guest lodge. It was a new house as big as two barns. Half a dozen log cabins strung out beside the lodge like chicken biddies beside the mother hen. A community rest room with HIS and HERS sides and shower facilities sat in the midst of the cabins. Running water was piped in from a spring on the side of the mountain. All of this construction required an imported work crew.

Two brothers-in-law, Bill Briner and Dad Schraeder, were a part of the work force. Briner brought Cousin Billy. Dump Woods came also. Minnie, Buster and Mike came with him. Buster went to school with Jack and Billy. Mike was like me – too young for school. He wouldn’t have been a good influence on the teacher anyhow.  He pretend-drove the Model-T truck smuggling beer across the Canadian border. I helped him. Besides this, Mike ate dirt.

Minnie told her youngest son not to eat dirt.  She said that it wasn’t good for him.  But, as Uncle Dick would say, “Telling kids that something isn’t good for them don’t make no difference.”  Leastwise it didn’t with Mike.

The men were laying a pipeline to the guest lodge. My friend motioned for me to follow him. We slid down into the trench and walked to where a streak of clay cut through the diggings. Mike took a handful of dirt, inspected it for wildlife, took off a bite for himself and passed part of it to me. “Try this,” he said.

I touched it with my tongue.

Mike ate his handful and reached for more. “Eat it,” he commanded. “It will make you mean.”

When you are five years old and live in a wilderness surrounded by bears, badgers and a vivid imagination you need all the help you can get.  I swallowed my mouthful of dirt.

Before I could feel the meanness taking hold, Dump Woods came along with a length of pipe. He laid the pipe down and picked up Mike. “By golly darn,” he crooned. “Here’s Daddy’s Little Darling.”

Daddy’s Little Darling fooled that old man, but he didn’t fool me. On the way back to the house we walked across the field. Mike picked up a handful of dirt from a molehill.  “This is the real stuff,” he said. But he didn’t offer me any. Not that it mattered. The Lord helps those who help themselves.  Or as Uncle Dick said, “If you want to get good at something, you gotta practice it.”

My Guest Author is Ed Brannin who tells about a true life incident

In the mid 70’s I was working for the Sweetgrass County Sheriffs Office. There had been a theft of saddles and tack in Fergus County. A suspect in the theft allegedly lived in Sweetgrass County and the investigation lead to a search warrant. When the search warrant was executed none of the stolen saddles were found. This resulted in the Sheriff’s office being accused of fabricating the story about the theft. 

About this time Uncle Sid had been visiting with his sister Anita. During his visit he had picked up an old saddle that he was going to take home to Washington. The night he was leaving I was working patrol. I saw Sid standing outside the bus depot getting ready to leave. He had the old saddle with him. I decided to stop and say goodbye. When I got out of the patrol car, Sid threw his hands in the air and hollered that he gives up. After this the word spread that the investigation into the saddle thefts must have been legit since the Sheriff’s office had spoken to a suspect with a saddle.

Note: I’m sure Uncle Sid got a big kick out of that! He was such a jokester! Come to think of it, he did have a large collection of saddles…….

This is a remembrance of my guest author (my dad) about one of his uncles

Charles Crawford Brannin had many nicknames.  Some of the neighbors called him Crawford.  Dick Brannin called him Diney.  Several nieces and nephews knew him as Sparky. Father and Uncle Ed called him Tommy.  However, to my sisters and me he was Rube.

A load of names was bound to slow anyone down. Fortunately this didn’t go against Rube’s nature.  It wasn’t that he had anything against hurry in principal; if people wanted to do a day’s work in an hour’s time that was their problem.  Anybody with a lick of sense ought to know that rushing about was best reserved for memorable occasions.  The three or four times we saw Rube in a rush were memorable occasions.

The winter of 1942-43 Uncle Ed and Aunt Dora stayed with us. The first week in January, Rube came steaming up the road.  He busted into the shop where the stormy weather had driven us.  He didn’t even bother to brush the snowballs off the bottom of his tattered trousers but went straight over to his older brother.

“Gu-guess wh-what?”  he said, waving a chopper mitt in Ed Brannin’s face.

“What?”

Rube burst into a grin.  His week’s growth of whiskers grinned with him.  “B-B-Barney just married the long legged school marm.”

That was news!  Barney Brannin was fifty four years old and Nella Francis was in her early twenties. “B-b-bet they have some l-l-long legged kids.”

Barney and Nella didn’t produce any children, but the marriage did change things at the Brannin Hunting Lodge. About the end of January, Rube came hobbling up the road with a sack on his back.  He was mumbling to himself all the way.  When he reached the barnyard, he sat the sack on a bare place on the snow spotted ground.  He took a short breather, and then, wagging his finger, he began talking to whatever was in the sack.  “D-don’t worry.  I’ll be back after while.”

“What you got in the sack?”  Dad asked as Rube came into the yard.

“It’s B-B-Bones,” Rube answered.

He untied the gunny sack and dumped a red rooster on the ground.

“Brought him up for vacation,” he explained. Then a scowl crossed his face.  “I-It’s on account of N-Nella,” he said.  “She’s got a h-h-hungry look in her eye.”

Bones was in charge of the Brannin hen house.  Every so often the cook would crave a chicken for dinner and Rube would bring Bones up for a vacation.  The rooster spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us.  Those were critical days.  Luckily Bones was old and tough or he’d have never made it through the Fourth of July.  That’s when the Brannin cook would poach some of the spring hatch for chicken dinner.  But here it was – January.

“Wh-when B-B-Barney gets to town, maybe he’ll buy Nella some w-wieners.”

It was cold weather and Barney didn’t get any wieners until the end of February.  By then things were in a desperate condition.  Rube was getting homesick for his pet rooster and so were the hens.  In fact, Rube’s pullets were on strike.  They hadn’t laid an egg since the end of the year and the first of March is egg laying season.

 “D-danged hens fergot how to lay,” Rube announced when he came after his rooster.  Hopefully old Bones would stir the hens to action. Rube hobbled down the road with a sack of live chicken over his back.  A week later he came back.  This time he was traveling in the express lane, coming in a dead run, which for him was twenty yards without stopping to see how far he had come.

When Rube reached the house he didn’t even go for Dad’s tobacco can.  You could tell there was something important on his mind.  It came pouring out in a conglomeration of words.  It seemed that Bones had gone right to work getting the hen house in order.  Two or three days after the rooster returned, Rube found him scratching the straw in a nest box.  Later that afternoon there was an egg in the box.

“B-B-Bones laid it,” Rube boasted.  “B-b-best rooster I ever had.”  He shook his head in amazement.

“Whoopee” he shouted. “B-b-ones L-l-laid an egg.  Wha-what a r-r-rooster.  Wh-whoopee!”  

He pulled his ragged jacket off, unzipped an empty tobacco pouch and headed into the middle room for Dad’s can of Prince Albert tobacco.  

a mountain tale by my Guest Author, my daddy

It gets dark in the Mountains. Strange things creep around our house. Sister Ellen is afraid to go outside at night. Of course she is a girl. Not me, I’m not afraid of the dark. At night a kid is supposed to stay indoors and hope that coyotes, bears, and haunts will go away before morning.

• 

Sometimes Sister would say to me, “Little brother why don’t you go outside and see if the moon is shining.”

Poor girl, she should know that the moon could shine on its own. Last Halloween time Ellen came back from school telling spooky stories about witches, black cats, ghosts, and goblins. She shook her finger at me and began to sing,

Once there was a little boy,
Who wouldn’t say his prayers,
And when he went to bed one night,
Way, away up stairs,
His mama heard him holler,
And his papa heard him bawl,
And when they turned the kivers down
He wasn’t there at all.

She’d sing about how his parents hunted high and low. 

And all that they could find of him,
Was waist and round-about.
And the Goblins will get you,
If you don’t watch out!

“Why don’t you go outside, brother. Nothing would get a kid like you.”

She didn’t know that I waited for a chance to prove how big and brave I was.  Then, when winter turned into spring, I got the chance I was waiting for.  

Mike came up. We were playing on the hillside back of the chicken house when a “Boom. Boom. Boom,” sounded from the little fir trees at the edge of the forest.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a Hammering Goblin,” my friend said. “If we slip up there real quiet, maybe we can see him.”

“I don’t need to see him.”

Sometimes a Goblin will just get a kid.  It’s best to say your prayers every night. 

“Then we can tell the girls.”

Mike was interested in doing something brave to tell the girls. We crept through the sagebrush on the hillside. Soon the hammering was close to us, right back of the first little fir trees.  

“You go first,” he said.

“No, you.”

“It’s your hill.”

“You’re a special guest.”

“We’ll go together.”

We were about ten steps from the edge of the trees when the hammering stopped and a large Ruffed Grouse flew up from the bushes. The grouse must have warned the Hammering Goblin and sent him running up the hill like we went running down.

My friend was disappointed.

“Shux!” he said, “We are going to Cafilornia next week and I wanted to tell your sisters.”

“Cafilornia? Is that a long way from here?  I’m going to miss you.”

“Yeh, I know.  I’ll miss your little sister.”

• 

by Guest Author, my dad

There was a piece of ground free from rocks just immediately past the long machine shed. It set in the little swale below the barn. This had the best soil around but most of it was on the wrong side of the line fence. And so it came to pass in those days that Ward and Parker put up a deer proof eight foot high woven wire fence around a garden plot that hung into the National Forest like an appendix. There was no gate into the garden. (Perhaps they feared the deer would learn how to open it.) Instead of having a gate, the garden fence had a stile, about five steps up and over it.^[1]

• 

The good soil was amply enriched from the manure piles beside the cow barn. Two Rhubarb plants sat at one corner of the garden, and a cluster of horseradish sat on the other side.  Horseradish would clear your sinuses and bring tears to your eyes when you ground it. The Uncles couldn’t raise horseradish because the goats pawed the roots out of the ground. When they ate it, it curled their hair.

Most years the last spring frost came the first week of June and the first killing freeze came the first week in September. Mother loved green beans, but most years frost got more than she did. Daddy wanted cabbage, cauliflower and tomatoes. He started the plants in a hotbed – which was a covered pit kept warm by decaying horse manure. He could always raise good cabbages and cauliflower. In Melville they could raise good tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, corn and squash. Our tomatoes were still green when the frost came. We pulled up the vines and hung them upside down in the barn or in the root cellar. In October we could go to the barn or cellar and pick red tomatoes that were as good as the wintertime tomatoes we get in the grocery store. Cabbage heads went to the cellar. So did carrots, beets, and potatoes.

In those days all Montana peas were English peas. And we had a bountiful supply of carrots, peas, and head lettuce. 

 I had a 4-H Club garden project. In High School I sold lettuce to Churchill and Amery’s for ten and twelve cents a head.

Down the valley, below the fence, acres and acres of fire burned trees commanded the valley. Their skeletons stood, tree after tree, line after line, east of the fence and across the valley and over the mountains. They left a waste land, a casket for dead trees, and a place where even the slightest wind moaned like the spirit of God trying to breathe life into the stark white forest. But a little patch of ground, with water and care, claimed hope and bounty once again.

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^[1] This was high enough that the pig couldn’t jump over it, but the housewife could climb over and cook supper for the chief gardener.