Daddy peeked in the door of every shop as we walked down the street. He stopped in front of the Senior Center, peered through the window, and opened the door. A big grin filled his face. He was sure to find some old friends there! Wrinkled faces turned his direction, eyes shining as they met each other’s gaze. He talked with them as if he had known them all of his life, though some were newcomers to the area by forty-plus years. Many he knew when he went in, others he knew by the time he walked out.
Our next stop was the nursing facility. I walked beside him down the long hallways as he looked through every opened doorway and spoke or waved to those inside the rooms. Immediately he went into “preacher mode”. We stopped in front of a closed door and he rapped on the door with one of his preacher’s knocks that I had seen many times. A man opened the door, looked straight at me, and said, “You must be a Brannin.” I was the one who grinned then. Soon the two were trading stories from another era with wild tales of ranch life in Melville and the Crazy Mountains. We said our goodbyes and continued our search down the corridor.
Looking through one doorway, Daddy suddenly stopped. There he was – one of Daddy’s old school buddies – Paul Westervelt! What a reunion! They talked of school days, friends and family. It seemed as if the scales of time fell and transformed to two old friends into teenagers. I felt privileged to have been allowed to slip into their world.
There was one more stop to make. Though Daddy had been able to visit a few of his schoolmates and acquaintances, there were others he wanted to see. That led us to Mountain View Cemetery where most of his old buddies were to be found. Daddy pointed out various tombstones, explaining who lay in the ground. He brought them to life as he shared fond memories and humorous stories and exploits of their youth. Each time we made the visit to town, more and more of his friends and family had made the move to the same hallowed ground.
As the years progressed, I knew Daddy’s time was getting shorter and there really would be “one last time” to make the trip home. It became more evident as his body faded. His last few months were filled with stories and remembrances as he reminisced about days gone by. He also had a few “visitations” from visitors who came in the night. Some folks who had been gone for years looked in his room and said, “Come on,” and motioned from the doorway. A few were bold enough to enter the room and stand by his bed as if to urge him to follow. One of his friends to visit was Paul Westervelt. No, he really wasn’t there physically, but Daddy saw him and heard his voice, “Are you about ready to go?” The morning after the “visitation”, Daddy told me, “I had a visitor last night,” and he told me of his vision.
Earlier this year, my daughter, grandson and I were able to attend a family funeral at Melville. After the service, an elderly gentleman came up to me and said he had known my Daddy. I said, “What’s your name?” He said, “I am Paul Westervelt. I’m the last one of my graduating class.” My whole face lit up. I said, “I have to tell you a story. You visited my dad shortly before he died.” And then, his face lit up. Somehow, I felt we had come full circle and I was the link, the old friend. There was great satisfaction in that brief moment.
I found out today that daddy’s old buddy left this world just a few days ago. That news made me even more thankful that we had a chance to visit in Melville.
I guess the two schoolmates are really visiting now!
The air felt heavy. A light drizzle spotted the windshield but billowing gray clouds looked like they would burst open at any moment and release a deluge. I turned into the cemetery to visit my parents’ grave and made sure all the date plates were still in place and the flowers unfaded. I ran my hand over the edge of the tombstone engraved with stalks of wheat. Sheaves of wheat denote someone has lived a long fruitful life. It is also representative of the “first fruits”, with the promise of more to come. That was a message of hope, a hope of seeing them again on the day we will be reunited. Somehow, I always felt shortchanged, thinking they both died prematurely. I turned to go and said my goodbyes for another time.
As I drove away, I told Daddy (who wasn’t beside me), “But, you were supposed to move to Montana with me.” A wave of loneliness washed over me. Well, it was not so much loneliness as it was a missing-my-daddy moment. At one time, I thought he was invincible. For twelve years after the passing of my mother, Daddy was my sidekick. He occupied the passenger seat of the car. We took many day trips and visited all kinds of places. We still had many miles to travel and many things to enjoy, but I am so thankful for the years I had a companion to share the scenic drives and visit with people we didn’t know and some that we did.
A 70’s mellow tune came over the radio. The artist sang words of the death of his father, and later his mother, “I cried and cried all day, alone again, naturally.” The tears were not the kind that people cry in their beer to drown their sorrows but the kind that comes from a heart of loneliness and loss of someone dear.
Whenever Daddy and I went on an outing, or a doctor’s visit, his favorite place to eat was Steak & Shake. Don’t ask me why – I don’t know. Sometimes I didn’t even ask him where he wanted to go, I just went someplace else. But, today, I drove into Steak & Shake and got a Daddy sized snack. When I pulled around the building, I saw the most beautiful roses – variegated peach and creamy yellow. Daddy would have liked them. I couldn’t help but smile. I told the girl who waited on me how gorgeous the flowers were and said, “They have brightened my day!” As I ate my snack of salty fries, I thought of the many hours spent with my sidekick. A salty tear escaped, and I wondered if it had fallen on my fries and added some extra flavor.
My destination was the quilt shop. I browsed a bit longer than usual, running my hand along many of the bolts of fabric, pausing to consider the textures and vivid colors. I thought of my mother who could piece a quilt together in her mind, each color complementing the other to complete her masterpiece.
The ride home was bittersweet. Mama would have asked if I knew where I was, but would have enjoyed the outing, and Daddy would have loved the back roads through the pastoral scenes on the countryside. What a blessing to have been granted many years to share those mountain trails, back roads and bolts of color.
Blue sky pushed its way through the masses of gray. The sun shone on the bright yellow field, making the flowers neon bright. I gathered the sheaves of memories, held them close and made my way home.
jit·ney /ˈjitnē/. noun. 1. a bus or other vehicle carrying passengers for a low fare.
Jitney was a buckskin mare, sired by a Mustang, small, tough, and fast. She was acquired in a trade with Stampede Hoyem for two of Ward and Parker’s cows. I’d say that was a good trade. Stampede’s given name was Otto, the brother of the future second husband of Babe.
Babe’s brother, Sid, and Otto “Stampede”
As can be inferred by his name, Stampede rode the buckskin at full speed. Jitney was trained to go fast and run against the best. She was also gentle with the kids and tolerated a load being placed on her back. It wasn’t unusual for her to carry a few grown ladies and several kids hanging off her back from mane to tail, all at the same time. To the little kids, Jitney was more than part of the family, they considered her as a grandmother, protector and best friend.
One day when little Buck was about five years old, he followed his dad up a hill to a meadow where the horses grazed. There was a young stallion that had made its way into the pasture. Jitney looked up, and saw the little boy coming toward the horses. The boy walked her way to hug her leg and rub her head. That set the stallion off. He glared at little Buck and charged. Jitney was close by and nickered. I guess he was sending a warning that there was trouble. The boy’s father came to the rescue. Both Jitney and Poppy were heroes that day.
One day Jitney could carry her cargo of kids and the next she could win a race against real rodeo horses. On the Fourth of July celebration at Two Dot, Jitney was entered into the Ladies’ horse race. She took the prize. The buckskin was then entered in two more races, one with Buddy Brannin and the other with Jim Brannin as jockeys. Both won. When the cowboy race was announced, the judges wouldn’t allow Jitney to race because she had won too many races already.
Buck’s brother, sister, and dog
Jitney and Babe were praised for their famous ride the day of the Sweet Grass Canyon fire in June of 1919. The buckskin mare flew like the wind at a nudge from Babe. Jitney could run in fierce competition or haul a load of kids. If Jitney wasn’t available to ride, the little kids found substitutes. Cousin Kitty served as little Buck’s bucking bronc. For a short period of time Jimmy Hicks filled that role as well.
Jitney stood still while kids piled on her back for a ride. She certainly lived up to the meaning of her name: “a bus or other vehicle carrying passengers for a low fare.”
Blackened skeletons with scraggly outstretched arms stood in eerie silence, the dull smoky gray sky gasping for a breath of fresh air. Instead of the wildflowers of June dotting the meadows and mountainside, white ashes lay at the feet of the burned trees amid toppled charred trunks, branches, and smoldering stumps. There was no sign of life, no animals foraged in the scorched undergrowth. The fire that left a path of destruction was put to death before it consumed everything.
Two kids, Loyd Rein and Benny Green, had spotted the column of smoke while riding in the Olson field. Fire! They galloped to tell Indian Charlie and Gordon Langston who were working on the fence line. By the time they got to the Brannin Ranch, Babe had already pulled the saddle off Jitney and was riding bareback over the hills to the nearest phone, eight miles over land, thirteen by road. Jitney flew like the wind, her black mane and tail blowing in the breeze as Babe urged the buckskin mare on. Neither let up until they reached their destination and made the call for help. Word spread like wildfire and neighbors, firefighters, and family came.
The endurance and speed of Jitney was a perfect match with the true grit and sheer determination of bareback Babe. They were a team. Babe’s quick thinking and action saved the day. The fire was put to death before it consumed everything, but not before leaving a path of destruction on the landscape evidenced for years to come. Not only did the land look bleak and desolate but also their livelihood as Ward and Parker returned from the battlefields of World War I to a fire ravaged land.
Babe, third from left
The fire brought destruction to the land, but the families and their homes were safe. Not only was the property of those who lived in Sweet Grass Canyon affected, but also that of the Forest Service. There was a glimmer of hope as new life emerged from the floor of the forest. Virgin growth rose from the ashes. Seeds burst open from the heat and brought forth flowers, trees and various grasses.
You might think the burned forest was not good for the sawmill business at Ward and Parker, but the trees that survived the extreme heat and did not turn to ashes were salvaged. The Forest Service allowed the sawmillers to harvest the trees on National Forest property. Fire killed timber was well cured. The heat from the fire hardened the sap within the trees. They would not twist or bow. Ward & Parker had their work cut out for them. The same fire that destroyed some of the trees made others stronger. The dried cured logs were sold and used for ranch houses, barns and outbuildings. Some of those logs still stand within a few buildings in Sweet Grass County.
I have come to the conclusion that this is a great life lesson. Often, we are not much different than the forest. We sometimes face fire in our lives. Those times of trial can either consume us or they can make us stronger. Our world may seem bleak as we stand in the ashes, not realizing that instead of being devoured, we have been made stronger.
May the heat from the fire on your mountain bring new growth, endurance and strength. You never know what beauty will emerge.
The little man of the mountains, my daddy, continues his tale of the houses and buildings in the canyon. His story today is of the chicken house and buildings beside the hill
When the family lived under the burned-out mountain on the other side of the S. weet Grass, they had some shelters for chickens and rabbits.
The report was that weasels and mink killed some of the rabbits. My father did too. His were dressed out and sent to the kitchen. When they moved to the new location in 1925 the rabbits were turned loose. For several years traces of Belgian Hares could be seen in the wild rabbits. I don’t know what kind of shelters they had for the livestock. But they kept chickens there and Mother and Laddie, the Great Dane-Grey Hound, tried to keep the hawks under control. When the dog was in the yard, he protected the hen flock.
the youngest child of the family with “under the hill” behind
Very early on, maybe by moving day in 1925, a log chicken house was built for the new site. This was kept in service until well into the end of 1940 when a new building was erected, and the old building was torn down. Both of these faced the main yard and were under the hill side. The newest one was made of logs sawed on three sides. It sat about 75 feet from the boundary fence. There were two more structures along the underside of the hill. The one closest to the road running up the hill was a cellar. A cellar was an important part of almost every farm or ranch. I think that its mark still remains. In town most houses had a basement. Out in the country root cellars were necessities. They were dug in the ground below the freezing line. Ours was dug into the hillside. The back of it was well underground. The entrance to the cellar was made of two rooms about six feet square with connecting doorways. A mound of dirt covered these two entrance rooms. These helped keep the frost out of the back part of the cellar which had bins for potatoes, carrots, beets, and some years a few cabbage heads. When the outside temperature was twenty or thirty below zero, a kerosene lantern was set up in the produce room. By the time spring weather came potatoes and beets tasted musty and the carrots took a long, long time to cook.
A small red sided board building stood between the root cellar and the chicken house. This was a granary. A sizeable bin across one end held a pile of wheat for the chickens. Sometimes a sack of oyster shell and Purina mash for baby chickens sat on the floor. One year a lumber customer from Two Dot left a heap of potatoes there. The ones that lasted until cold weather were moved to the cellar. Once, when a band of sheep was being taken out of the mountains, Kenneth Fallang left a fat lamb in the granary for Mother.
A brooder house about twelve feet square was put up between Ernest’s Bunk house (George’s) and the incoming road.
My Guest Author, my dad, continues his project as he talks about the houses in which the family lived in the canyon. It wasn’t just people who needed housing, the animals did too, and Uncle Dick said some of the animals were people, too.
Now, that puts the family indoors, makes a bunk house for the work crew, and facilities for school. However, folks needed the help from the horses, milk from the cows, meat from a fatted calf, eggs from chickens. All of this protected by a dog. This meant housing for the horses, the cows, the hound dog, and the poultry. I’m not sure which shelter came first, likely a chicken coup and then shelter for the work horses or Suzie the black Jersey cow with horns. Sometime in Suzie’s life she was given housing privileges in that small log building that was moved and recycled to make the schoolhouse for Sister Ellen, Brother Jack, Cousin Billy, and Buster Woods. A cow shed and barn was built between the house and the property line. The front corner of the barn was about where the power pole now stands.
When I hit remembering age, we had Jitney and two teams of horses. Jitney was a buckskin mare mother got in a trade for two of Daddy and Ernest’s cows. Nina and Dolly were Daddy’s team. They were named after Nina Bea and Dolly Grey who were schoolteachers. Ernest’s team was named Punch and Schraeder. They would have been named Punch and Judy, but Judy died and was replaced by Schraeder – a half-eunuch horse named after Aunt Luella’s husband. The back corner of the barn housed two red milk cows that followed Suzie. They spent their energy fighting with each other. Their fights may have caused Delight to have a crippled calf.
The work horses had rooming rights on the front side of the barn. There were two or three two-horse sized stalls, a grain bin and room for hay, harness and horse-riding tack. One time Father went to a farm auction sale and bought what he thought was oyster shell for the chickens. When he got home, he opened the sack and found that it had rolled oats instead of oyster shell. He emptied it in the grain bin not knowing that they were poisoned oats[1]. The next evening Ernest fed his work team a scoop of grain. We were eating supper when there was a bang and crash sounding from the barn. One horse had fallen to the barn floor, the other horse was weak and trembling. The next several hours were spent doctoring poisoned horses.
A big barn was built in the early mid-thirties. That barn is still standing. A sizeable hay mow ran down the center of the barn. The north side was for horses and the south side was for two to four milk cows. They had their heads fastened in stanchions. A sizable calf pen and a maternity ward were on the cow side. There was also a walk-in bin for ground grain.
One day Baby Mary Jane tagged along with me when I put the feed out for the cows. A ruckus came from the bin. A weasel and a large rat were in a battle on top of the mound of grain. While I was filling mangers with hay, Little Sister Mary picked up a kitten and threw him in the bin with the rat and the weasel. I said, “Oh no!” and dropped the hay fork and ran down to rescue kitty Alexander.
When I got there the kitten was standing on the heap of grain trembling over a dead rat and a dead weasel. Baby sister thought she had a super kitten.
Most years we bought a couple of weaner pigs. We kept them in a pen near the door to the cow barn. They were fed a slop of separated milk and cooking scraps followed up with some ground grain. One autumn when the pigs were getting fat and lazy, the grain was poured out before they got the slop bucket full of milk. I was about four years old and was walking by the pig pen when one of the pigs choked to death. He took a jump at the fence, squealed, and fell over. I squealed and ran to the house for pig help. The hired man cut the pigs throat and we had fresh pork two months early. The schoolteacher, Mrs. Tippit, wouldn’t eat the pork. She went back to town a few weeks later, and that was the good news for the school year.
[1] Oats treated with strychnine were used to poison gophers, woodchucks, rats and mice.
I’m of the opinion that birthday presents should be given to the mother instead of the one having a birthday. Don’t you think your mom deserves a gift? After all, what did you do besides be born? You were given a gift at birth – the gift of life.
With the coming of a new baby not only does the baby receive the gift of life, but that baby is a gift to the family, the community, and even the world.
Six years ago, an eighty-nine-year-old man received a present – a newborn baby girl. Little did the baby girl know that she received a great present, too – an eighty-nine-year-old man. They were kind of one in the same – two peas in a pod.
Three years ago, a ninety-two-year-old man promised a two-year-old girl that he would stick around for her third birthday party. He did, but then he left this world that same day. Even though the little man no longer lives on this earth, his gift of life continues to live in many of us. He left behind great treasures for us to find and nuggets of gold to mine.
We have the reminder in a little girl who exudes life that the gift keeps giving.
(And you pass by this way, you might see a little girl driving her electric tiny four-wheeler, standing behind the steering wheel, squealing, “Yee haw,” as she bounces through the yard.
Yep – a birthday present. Apparently someone didn’t get the memo about the mom getting a present, though mom did look kind of cute behind the wheel!)
To continue the history of Ward houses in the canyon, my Guest Author, my dad, was the first new addition to the new house, house #3.
The sawmill was set up on a hill and a flume was built to carry water from the spring to the sawmill. Then they built the house. It was their third and final house, one that would last more than eighty years. They moved into it in 1925. It would be the first house I lived in. Sister Ellen had lived nearly two years on the wrong side of the creek. Fortunately, she moved with them.
This was the house when it got fitted with a front yard. The structure to the right may have been a woodshed. The bunkhouse was set up on the right side of the yard. Of immediate importance was the bunkhouse, a chicken house, the mill building, a barn and a shelter for the automobile. I’ll tend to those later, but, first, I’ll give description of the house pictured above and its updating by additions and improvements.
The new 32′ by 24′ house was built on the sunny side of the valley where even the shortest winter day was six hours long. Logs were laid up. Each log reached full length of the wall. When the builders got to the right height for the door and window frames they sawed in door and window openings with a two-man crosscut saw. The house faced east. There was a door in front, about midways, and a door on the north side. The two front windows were about four feet from the floor. They were two feet high and four sashes long. A brace across the room held the Coleman gas lamp. The building was partitioned into three rooms and a pantry. The pantry was about eight-foot square. Its walls were ten and twelve inch boards standing on end like a palisade. Two rooms on the south end of the house ‑ each about twelve-foot square ‑ were used for bedrooms. The walls on the bedrooms were beaded tongue and groove. Above them was a ceiling of inch boards which made an attic storage area. The boards had been put up green. When they dried, they left wide cracks and the dust and debris fell into the bedrooms below. There was no ceiling over the great room. This made it a rustic A‑frame showing the rafters and the roof boards. It was supposed that the house would be used for four or five years depending on how much timber could be bought on the railroad section. When the railroad sold Ward and Parker the square mile of land and two more sections with it, the house took on a more permanent aspect.
The right back corner of the main room had a palisade – like partition (boards set up on end) to make a pantry cut off from the kitchen, table, and cook stove. An important inside job ‑ one for stormy days ‑ was improvement in the kitchen. The twelve-inch shelves didn’t make good storage space even if there was a walk-in pantry. “Niter” was needing some cupboards. Ward and Parker hand planed the boards and built a cupboard. A confrontation with a rat contributed to this project.
Pack rats thought frontier cabins were built for them. They considered pantries and cupboards their shopping malls. The new log house at Ward and Parker’s sawmill didn’t have a cupboard. Instead, the northwest corner of the main room in Ward and Parker’s log house was the pantry area. In the back of the pantry twelve-inch boards served as open shelves for plates, saucers, cups, pots and pans. This made an open market for rats.
Not only did the rats collect a share of the groceries, they also collected shiny buttons, silver spoons, spools of thread, ladies’ stockings and what not. Often, they would leave one of their treasures in exchange. For this reason, they were known as “Trade Rats.” However, the Trade Rats weren’t trading even, and Mrs. Ward was out to settle their hash. She set some traps. The rats stole them, but they made so much noise at their night games that it kept Mr. Ward awake. He leaned the twenty‑two Winchester against the wall and kept a light handy. He’d not only settle the rats’ hash, he’d make hash out of them.
One night a fuss arose in the pantry. It came from the top shelf behind the rows of sticky fly paper which hung down from the rafters like long sticky finger curls. Bud Ward grabbed the rifle. Babe took the kerosene lamp. When they pulled the pantry door open, the rat jumped off the shelf and hit the roll of fly ribbon which swung against another. Then the whole outfit flew through the air and crashed to the floor. The rifle went off at a flying object. It shot a hole in the roof. The rat, disguised with the fly ribbon, made for the door and got the right‑of‑way as the hunters didn’t know what they were up against. Soon after that the pantry had to go. The building, which was partitioned into three rooms and a pantry, would soon be trimmed back to just three rooms.
Bud Ward and Ernest Parker hand planed some pine boards and built a cupboard. After seventy years the trade rats succumbed to Deacon’s rat poison, the house slowly disintegrated, but cupboard was still in good shape. Babe Ward could rejoice. She got the best of the last trade.
The stovepipe you see in the above picture was connected to a black cook stove which had an oven regulated by a stove damper that directed the smoke to circle around the oven or go immediately up the chimney. The stove had a hot water reservoir at its right end and a warming oven on top which held a frying pan and various cooking pans. The pancake griddle hung on the wall. A square eight-foot palisade made a pantry for dish shelves, storage for sugar and flour cans, lard pail, und so viter.
A handmade table was in front of the pantry and cook stove. A bench bordered the sides of the table and a chair sat at each end. Our main lighting system was a Coleman gas lamp that hung from a rafter near the table. Sister Barbara was born in 1927. The prospects of a family increase were celebrated with a slab-sided addition to the original building. The addition was used as a storage area. It also housed a washing machine with a wooden tub. The dasher was driven by a cogged lever which pumped back and forth. A Sears, one-cylinder gas motor furnished the power for the machine. The exhaust pipe ran out through the side wall. The engine made a loud pop, pop, pop when it was running. When it got up the right speed it would take several rests between the pops. Baby sister, Barbara, learned to talk in the washhouse. Her first words were spoken to the popping engine. “Shut up. Shut up.”
In my remembering age (a few years after the cabin was built) there was a partition back to the left of the front door and between the door and the window. A chimney had been cut midway of the house beside the partition. A fifty-gallon barrel was modified into a heating stove. It did a great job in the wintertime. Frost would coat the windows, fingers of ice would run across water in a bucket alongside the east wall, but the stove would glow red. We would sit and watch it and feel secure through the winter nights.
The partition behind the heating stove was divided into two bedrooms. Mama and Daddy had the room on the left (East) and the children had the room on the right. The partition walls were painted an icky pea green. An attic was made over these two bedrooms. The stair ladder to the attic was next to the bed in the children’s room.
It was a “No, No,” to climb up the ladder and jump on the bed. Once when mother was in the garden or at the clothesline, my brother, Jack, swatted my bottom for committing this “No, No.” That was the lightest swat and the most heart-breaking swat I ever received.
Later a parlor and bedroom were added on at a right angle, midway of the cabins back wall. The parlor housed Father’s desk, a cot, and a piano. This had to be about 1929 because Mother had bought the piano from the Melville Hotel and the teacher, Miss Wall, gave Mother piano lessons there. This room was wainscoted with short slabs. Feed sacks covered the wall above the wainscoting. The sacks were sacks sealed with glue sizing and calcimined an off-pink color.
The next addition – two bedrooms, an entrance hall, and a place for a bathroom – really changed a cabin into a house. This was added in 1932 and plastered by Riley Doore. The pea-green partition was torn down.
Running water had been brought into the house. Wisely enough, a septic tank and sewer drainage were put in before the water was turned on. A coil of water pipe placed in the cook stove was connected to a tank in the bathroom. Then we had hot and cold running water – and a lay-down size tub. These replaced the two buckets of cold water, a slop water bucket under the kitchen sink and the round tin tub that had served faithfully on Saturday nights.
During the last half of the ’32-33 school year, the front corner room of the new addition served as a school room. Sydney and Margaret Brannin, and the teacher, Miss Drake, commuted to school horseback the last half of the school year, and old Spider carried Ellen and I to school at the Brannin ranch the first half of the school year. During the following summer the bunkhouse was sacrifice and recycled to make a schoolhouse halfway between the ranch and the sawmill.
Even with improvements some of the house was in trouble. In the original log building the bottom logs were laid on the ground. In time those logs started to rot and the floor joists followed it. Something had to be done. Some of the original floor was taken up and the rotting base logs were replaced with cement. [1]
Later improvements included a rock fireplace which was built around a “Heatilator” which circulated the warm air. We hauled rocks and hauled rocks and hauled rocks. Father fitted them together to form the rock fireplace. His descriptions of this job were apt. “We hauled in three loads of rock and hauled away four loads.”
Somewhere about 1939 a picture window was added on the east side of the house. A smaller picture window was on the west. The spindly Geranium cuttings by the front window took on new life and made blossoms in the wintertime. Shortly thereafter war broke out in Europe. “Battleship Linoleum” covered the floor and, with firearms mounted on the west wall, the house was ready for come what may!
[1] There was a pile of the diggings on the west side of the house. When Uncle Ed gave us a large green Hubbard Squash, I planted the seeds on that mound of dirt and raised a sizeable green squash bigger than most pumpkins.
The Ward family quickly outgrew house #1 which led to house #2. With two kids and a third on the way, along with the parents and Ernest, house #2 was getting crowded. My Guest Author, my dad, talks about the second dwelling of the family.
Here is a picture of house #2. Another old picture shows that the sawmill was set up in the central background. The two green trees beside the house had somehow escaped being burned. The skeletons of the burned-out forest lined the steeper side of the mountain just a few feet to the left of the cabin. When the first sizable rain came, the mountainside had no mulch to absorb the rainwater. A flood, black with soot and floating debris, threatened to wash down the house. For the next four years the burned-out timber colored the logging crew black and gave the laundress a difficult job. To add to this, it was hard to spend winter on the south side of the creek where the sun only came over the mountain four hours a day. By 1925 the twenty-foot log cabin was getting crowded. Weasels and mink ate the pet rabbits, and a bear stole a hundred-pound sack of sugar. Mother was ready to move. When the railroad company offered the chance to buy green living timber on the sunny side of the valley, they moved to what would be the permanent location.
Do you suppose she (“Niter” as Bud called her) got pregnant so they would build her a larger house in which to live?
Memories shared by Guest Author, my daddy, as told to him by those who experienced these events.
The promise of wedding bells was in the air. Their first sawmill duties included sawing lumber for the needed housing. The very first house they built was a frame building set up near a year-round spring[1] about three quarters of a mile further down the valley. The frame house huddled beside half a dozen trees across from the split top cliff-rock that borders the little spring creek.
This is the house that is pictured wrapped in snow with a digging crew on its roof. The next day (?) Ernest floundered his way through snow to get a midwife at the Brannin Ranch. My brother, John Carrington Ward, was home delivered here by his sweating, praying father. This was March, 1917.
On April 6th of that year the United States declared war on Germany. Both Ernest Parker and Bud Ward enlisted in the army and were sent overseas with the Army Engineers. Their experience with the sawmill proved beneficial. In France Ernest Parker would work a timbering crew, and Robert Ward would be Master Mechanic and sawyer of railroad ties and road and bridge timbers. Mother and her baby moved back to the Brannin ranch for the duration of the war.
When the next winter came it didn’t snow. The summer that followed had little rain, and a brush fire broke out near the falls of the Sweet Grass. The south side of the valley burst into flame. Two kids, Lloyd Rein and Benny Green, were riding in the Olson meadow. They saw the smoke and galloped up to tell Gordon (Langston) and Bill Briner who were working on the line fence between the Olson field and Brannin’s. Gordon left to collect some firefighting tools. Benny, Loyd, and Briner headed toward Brannin’s. They got there just as Babe Ward jerked the saddle off Dick Brannin’s horse, threw the saddle in the wagon for the Rein crew to deliver, jumped on the horse bareback and streaked over the hills toward Tronrud’s and the nearest phone to report the fire.
Within a few hours the mountains on the south side of the river were burned off from near the falls of the Sweet Grass to the Brannin Beaver ponds. When Ward and Parker came back from the war the mountains were still smoking. The scars of the fire dominated the valley for thirty years. Half of the available timber had burned. Some of the ‘wobbly” fire fighters, imported from the IWW Mine Union at Butte, nursed new blazes to augment their income. Bud Ward’s first civilian job was to dress in his army uniform, carry a rifle and ride shotgun for the lead Forest Ranger when he told the Wobblies they were fired. They looked at the glint in Bud’s eyes and decided to go back to Butte.
Blackened tree skeletons covered the south side of Sweet Grass Canyon. The Forest Service offered a permit to salvage the burned timber. The sawmill was set up on the shady side of the creek and a temporary cabin built on government land in a clearing at the foot of a burnt mountain. This was a place to live, but it wasn’t a house of Mother’s dreams. The next one would be. Soon the Ward and Parker sawmill would be back in business.
Question: how can you run a sawmill when the trees have all been killed by fire?
Answer: You salvaged the trees, turned black, you spit black and made blackened laundry for the laundress.
The mountain land not already settled was divided between the Northern Pacific Railroad and the National Forest. This meant setting up a sawmill on government land on the south side of the mountain about half a mile southwest of the Brannin holdings. They built house #2 near a spring that gushed clean water out from the blackened hillside. This was a log house, the sawmill was set up nearby, and some rabbit pens and chicken coups were built. The mink and weasels killed the rabbits. Hawks raided the chickens, and Mother and the Grey Hound-Great Dane dog battled the hawks. Brannin’s pet bear broke into this house and stole a fifty-pound sack of sugar. The sack tore open and left a trail of sugar across the floor. Later Uncle Gus killed the bear.
[1]The largest spring burst out of the ground at the foot of a meadow. When the sawmill was moved to its more permanent location on the hill above where Gommie’s house would be, a quarter of a mile-long flume was built to carry water from the spring to the sawmill where it would flush out the sawdust from the sawing operation. A smaller spring, coming out of the steep hillside was later boxed in and a pipe laid to carry water to the house (in the 1940s.).
