IT IS STRANGE TO be here so early. Strange, and a little lonely. The spring has been early, in spite of the snow above, and already the wild flowers are out in the mountain meadows. Lupine is already blooming; flat pink and white flowering mosses, violets and bluebells. There are dandelions on the lawn over at the main house, and early larkspur and star of Bethlehem along the creek. Already the calves have mostly been branded.
Up behind the corral a great prize bull surveys the world haughtily. But the big herd has been sold. There is still no money in cattle. All the mountain meadows and the lower ones, too, are filled with rich young grass, but there are few cows to eat it. A small herd, less than three hundred, is all that is left of the mighty horde which once went up the cattle trail in the summer to be turned loose in the mountain meadows. There is something wrong somewhere. The packers claim it is high wages, and shipping rates have been high also. But nothing has been done to encourage the cattleman. In spite of the Farm Loan Act, his banks still charge him as high as twelve percent for short-time money, and have hardly managed to keep going at that.
The Government will let them have money at half that rate, but so full of red tape is the procedure that the man who needs money in a hurry prefers to pay the higher rate. By the time his stock has been appraised and the necessary formalities gone through, it is often too late in a business that is filled with emergencies.
The fact is that the cattle business as conducted by the cowmen for so many years was based on conditions that could not last, on free grass and the open range. The great herds were left to shift for themselves in the long hard winters, and that so many survived was due only to the grace of Providence and the winds which swept the ridges bare of snow. There the cattle fed, slowly drifting to the southward all the time, and in the spring came the round-ups and the branding of the calves.
When the winter losses were sufficiently offset by the number of calves, the cowmen prospered and the herds grew.
But with the first wire fences the open range ceased. Now the cowmen must lay up hay for the wintering of their stock, and a steer will eat two tons. So the cattleman today must raise hay in quantities and stack it in his meadows; and when the spring is very late and the haystacks are gone, he is fortunate indeed if he can get wagons through the snow with a reserve supply of fodder. Only too often he has to stand by and let them die, or later on take a revolver, poor chap, and put it to the heads of his dying cattle.
Small wonder he is selling his one and two year olds, and that a long winter may turn his herd from an asset into a liability.
Another situation has arisen also. Not only is the demand for young beef. Range cattle are grass-fed cattle, and an increasing discrimination in beef now demands that prime beef be fattened before marketing. For the old method of shipping straight to Chicago, there has had to be substituted a stop in the Corn Belt somewhere, a complicated and expensive business. Or the packers buy them at a lower rate and themselves send them to the feeders.
Small wonder, too, then, that the old cowman, whose expenses a few years ago consisted only of the initial purchase of some cows and a handful of men to punch them, is unable to meet the new conditions. When to these are added high shipping rates and the increase of wages and all expenses at the Chicago abattoirs, so that mature beef on the hoof is now bringing only nine or ten cents a pound, his problem becomes acute.
As a matter of fact, he has only met the fate of almost all the single-crop raisers of the country, and he is turning, as they all must turn, to a diversity of crops for his salvation. The once-despised sheep—so detested that even to wear a black Stetson, the sheepman’s hat, was to mark yourself of a hated and lower caste—the sheep have come into their own.
Sheep and dudes.
“Of course,” says Alden resignedly, “a sheep has two crops, lambs and wool, and—well, it is understandable.” But he looks away. There are no sheep on this ranch, and there will not be. They have taken to dudes instead. And maybe the dudes will have a double crop; health and a better Americanism. Who can tell?
There are, however, no dudes as yet. True, a half dozen old habitués of the ranch are already here, but they are not dudes. They are not greenhorns or tenderfeet anyhow. They saddle and unsaddle their own horses; they occasionally rise early and help to wrangle in the horses; their big Stetsons and high-heeled boots show the marks of long wear. Perhaps their bridles are a bit too ornate; they rather run to silver mountings.
But they do not attempt familiarities with the autocrats of the corral, as do the newcomers. Mostly they sit quietly on the bench in front of the barn in the sun and speak when speech seems to be required. This is the essence of corral usage, and marks them of the elect.
Except for them, and the family in the main house, the ranch is still empty. Spread out like a small town, its streets of cottages are practically deserted. From one of them now and then comes the squeal of a portable phonograph in the evening, but it has an unearthly sound. Like the preliminary stirring of a sleeper soon to awake, for before long the season will be on; the cottages will open like buds, to change the figure, and from them will emerge girls in riding clothes and sports clothes, and men in shiny new Eastern riding apparel, which they will shamefacedly exchange very shortly for overalls from the store, tucked into high-heeled Western boots.
Even the store is getting ready. Throughout the winter it carries only ranch necessaries, but soon it will become our emporium. For years and years the woman head of a great school in Minneapolis has been Mrs. Levy at the store. Big and strong and humorous, she comes out at the end of her term, gets behind her counter, and sells us our pop and our candy, our creams and toothbrushes and face lotions, our Indian rugs, neckerchiefs and trout flies. And when fall comes and she has to go away she goes through sheer stark tragedy. No one must say good-bye to her. Her farewell to her horse takes place behind the barn; she does not dare to turn and look back as the car carries her to the railroad station, twenty miles distant.
For this is her country. Long ago her father drove his family through the lower part of this ranch, over the old Bozeman Trail into Montana. Drove it through hostile country, for this has been the last stand of the Indian in his fight against the whites, and settled just north of here.
Now and then I have seen her on horseback at sunset, at the gate in the wire where the old trail crosses a small hillock. It is a small tribute she is paying, a sort of sunset prayer.
The ranch house is busy too. Uncle Will is still away in the east, but Domo is coming back from a visit to Kansas, and they are preparing a surprise for her.
All last week they were making curtains of a golden yellow satin, and on Saturday I was privileged to make my small contribution: a set of dishes, bright and sturdy, for her cabin shelves. Dune has been building a tiny footbridge to her cabin, over the irrigating ditch which runs beside it, to replace the uncertain old planks which used to float away after each rain, leaving Domo marooned. Not marooned either. You do not maroon indomitable little women like Domo. Be sure she simply tucked up her skirts and waded across.
They say Domo knows every cowpuncher between the Rosebud and Powder River, and that any stranger from another range who comes riding in this direction just naturally ties his horse to the cottonwood tree beside her cabin and heads in.
And now Domo has found sanctuary after a busy and troubled life. Her little cabin was like nothing on earth when I first saw it, down on the lower ranch. Now a part of the surprise is a new rustic porch in front, and Dune’s bridge to match, and the yellow satin curtains. And you should see what already she had done to the inside of it before she went east to Kansas. The shelves she had put up, and the painting! She had brought a sick daughter here to get well, and Domo has cured her. Wouldn’t you know she would cure her? Now the daughter is off in Montana teaching school, and Domo is coming back.
“What do you suppose she’ll do when she sees it?” I inquired yesterday.
“Do?” they said. “She’s going to laugh and cry and generally have a fit.”
You see, it takes so little to make happiness for some people. And we are so apt to forget that little, back East.
I stopped my horse there a day or so ago to watch Dune at the bridge. And there was Scout, older and grayer than ever. And “deefer,” Dune says.
“Dear old Scout,” I said, “I was afraid he’d be dead by this time.”
“Dead nothing,” said Dune, gazing at the old dog. “He’s got twenty dollars’ worth of chocolate to eat before he dies. He can’t die.”
Which is the case indeed. A guest last year discovered the old dog’s sweet tooth, and left a sum to endow him with chocolate for the rest of his natural life. An understanding person, this, who would have sympathized with Hugh Walpole’s old lady who was secretly greedy for little cakes with icing on them. And one who knows that age cannot live on memories alone. Scout, dreaming of bears—for he has been a famous bear dog in his day—has earned the right to waken to a bit of indulgence.
So inside, the old log house is ready for Domo. Her windows are washed, her walls freshly kalsomined. The little old Confederate flag, full of bullet holes, in its frame on the wall, has had its glass newly polished. For Domo’s father was the first Confederate officer to fall in the Civil War, and Domo’s mother was both a mother and a widow at eighteen. Somehow that flag escaped when the Indians burned Domo’s ranch house to the ground years ago.
All that long and busy life raising a big family, all alone, Indians, widowhood, struggles, and now sanctuary and peace. And even a plank securely fastened so she can dip water out of the creek without wetting her feet. It takes so very little to make happiness.