NOT THAT THEIR NAME is Bones at all. They have a perfectly good Southern name, but they began working with cattle outfits when they were so small that they had to chin themselves onto their horses, and some wag christened them Big and Little Bones. So the Bones brothers they remain today, and their ranch over on Hanging Woman Creek is the Bones Brothers’ Ranch.
It is four years now since they first came over here from Hanging Woman. The cattle business was at its worst then, and so one evening they saddled up and started for this ranch. They rode eighty-five miles that night, each leading an extra horse, and the next morning they arrived at the corral.
A junior Rinehart was on duty there, his first day as corral dog at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month, a horse and saddle and his keep, and he rose from his bench and greeted them with his best Harvard manner.
“May I take your horses?” he said politely.
Nothing of the sort, they say, had ever happened to them before. In a sort of daze they got down—they were perhaps eighteen or twenty then—but they recovered enough to state that they could unsaddle their own animals and that they had come to work.
And work they did and ride too, until, a year or so ago, with the hope that cattle would come into their own again, they went back to Hanging Woman Creek, to Percy and Daisy Bell, his little Southern wife, to Uncle Taylor and Aunt Mamie, and to the herd of cattle in the foothills under Poker Jim Butte.
Back to Southern Montana, where the open range is still the cow range, where some of the long-horned survivors of the old Texas and Mexican herds still roam the hills, where the Indians still slip out from the reservation at night and raid the cattle, and where the winter temperature sometimes falls to fifty below zero. Back, in a word, to the old life and the old game, only now with a handful of dudes in the summer to tide over slim years, and with the railroad only sixty-five miles away at Sheridan, instead of its former hundred to Miles City.
Yes, the nearest town used to be Miles City. And when Domo’s husband was kicked by a horse and fatally hurt, Dad—the boys’ father—rode that hundred miles in one night to Miles City for a doctor. And got one, too, although it was no use after all. The road was “slick” that night, as they say out here, and there wasn’t a house along the way. So for fear the horse would slip and throw him and get away, Dad tied a rope to the horn of his saddle and then around his waist. He was taking no chances that night.
Yes, it is better now. There are doctors at Sheridan, only sixty-five miles away, and a fair-to-middling road, and the mail comes three times a week by stage to Birney, three miles from the ranch. Only don’t be fooled by Birney; it has three or four houses, a store, a school and a church, but there is nobody to serve the church; its wheezy little old parlor organ has long been silent, its pulpit empty. The straggling street is just a dusty road, down which herds of cattle come to drink long thirsty draughts in the Tongue River.
You see, Birney is really the store, kept by the boys’ Aunt Mamie and Uncle Taylor. It has everything, has that store, even to an ancient and unused soda fountain at the rear. Usually there is an Indian pony hitched outside and a buck inside with long braids, buying. They can have credit, too, if they are good Indians, up to ten dollars. But:
“If they get to owing more than that,” says Uncle Taylor, “they go somewhere else.”
But where they are to go in this empty country is beyond my comprehension.
The store is a sort of social center in Birney. On mail days in summer, Aunt Mamie makes a big freezer of ice cream, and all sorts of people with soft Southern voices drop in and sit about and chat. Odd, how many Southerners one finds in this part of the world. Aunt Mamie and Uncle Taylor came out thirty-eight years ago, bringing with them the old silver which had been buried in a pond all through the Civil War and was to be buried over and over again against Indian raids. And the great early herds driven up from Texas and New Mexico brought with them Southern cowboys who have lost nothing in the transplanting. Direct children of the South, hot-tempered, soft-spoken and gallant, they still use the Texas drawl or the comprehensive “You-all” and address a lady as, much to my astonishment, I was requested to address the Queen of England; as “Mam.”
Southerners and English. The early days saw great English cattle companies formed out here and many of the men who represented them still remain. I saw one not long ago at the county fair judging work horses; great animals with marceled manes and feathered locks. Yet he is an earl, although his neighbors call him Oliver. The Earl of Portsmouth. And a fire last spring destroyed a ranch house which contained many gifts from Queen Victoria to the historic Moncrieff family which owned it.
So one perceives that a social hour at Birney may be a great deal more than it appears to be. Here is a tiny Western town, so small that it could be built in the corner of any moving-picture lot; a dirt road without sidewalks, a dance hall over the store, reached by a flight of wooden stairs outside, and a row of horses tied to a hitching rail; within, men in Stetsons, chaps and spurs move about and women meet and talk and, perhaps, drink delicately out of Aunt Mamie’s silver goblets.
Silver goblets? Why, certainly. They were as black as ink, Aunt Mamie says, when they came up out of that pond, but they are bright and shining now.
Maybe we need to revise some more of our ideas about this last pioneer country of ours.
I know of one little white ranch house where the water is brought up in a tin pail on a wire trolley from the creek below, and is served on a table set out with fine old Georgian silver. And there is a genuine Adam sideboard there which Eastern people always want to purchase, and old painted window shades that came over from Holland when the Dutch discovered New York.
Carried in wagons over any sort of road too; sometimes no road at all. They will put anything in a wagon, these people, and cart it along to make a home. And they make homes too.
It is haying time now, and only the other day a man and his family engaged for the haying on the next ranch to this. They had lost their property in Montana in the recent hard times and so they started out as a family to earn.
They drove up in an ancient car with a trailer, the father, the mother and three young sons. And out of that car and trailer they unpacked their household goods: a phonograph, a cat, a dog, a coop full of chickens, a canary bird and a sewing machine. The bunk house was old and dilapidated, but in a few hours it was a home. There were curtains at the windows and rugs on the floor. The cat was on the doorstep, the dog was in the yard and the chickens in a runway. And the canary bird had been loosed for its two hours’ freedom a day and was singing in a Cottonwood overhead!
The cow country still raises something more than wheat and dudes, you see. It raises men and women.
But it also still raises cows.