Rusty Reminders of the Farm

From the ranch house, you can look toward Cedar Mountain, and the furthest fields were those we plowed and began to till in the early 80's. 

At that time, dad had a plan to do things like he and his dad had done before him. The old rake below is something that rested in a rusty heap for a long time. I had never see it hooked to any tractor. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no one used it since my grandfather stopped using draft horses for the farm work.

The plan was going to go like this. Dad had gone over the land with a brush beater, leaving pieces of wood and branches of sage brush strewn across the new fields. Dad planed to hook this old piece of equipment behind a tractor. I would sit on the old seat on the chair, using the rake to gather a larger pile of brush. As soon as the bunch was large enough, I would use a lever to raise the teeth of the rake up, letting the pile pass behind the equipment.  A week was dad's guess at how long it would take to finish.

It was a job that would be dusty, so much so, that it would be difficult for me to see the tractor ahead of me. There was no moisture in the new ground, parched by the hot summer sun and the heavy stands of brush and native grasses, that sapped the water from the soil. The dust automatically made me not want to do the job, but I would have done it. 

The ground was very rough, so sitting on the rust-covered seat was not going to be an easy job, but the worst part was this: snakes. We lived in snake country, and dad told me that the piles of brush would most likely gather some rattlesnakes too, and that I would have to watch closely.

That's when I decided this job was something I wouldn't do. That didn't happen very often, and it wasn't as if I hadn't had close calls with rattlesnakes before that moment, but with the noise of the tractor and the rake dragging brush and with the dust, there was no way I thought I would be able to watch for snakes.

With our newest tractor called a Steiger, there was a large disk plow. We used it once, and as heavy as it was, it broke up the branches into smaller sections. We didn't have to gather anything. We didn't have to use the old rake.

At one time, there was an old thrashing machine that my grandfather and his brothers used in the very early years of farming on our family's properties. This wagon would have been something they used. They collected the grain in sacks, and then they transported those sacks back to grain sheds, where they emptied them into the granary. 

They then emptied the sacks, returned to the harvesting field and filled the wagon again.

My Great-Grandfather had mules, and one story I remember having heard from my Uncle Merle is how he motivated a mule.

Uncle Merle was in Malad, and they rode in a wagon to Crowther's Mill to empty the grain. The mule stopped in the road and refused to go forward. Uncle Merle jumped on the back of the animal, climbed forward, took a long ear into his mouth and bit down hard. It was a motivational tool. 

I remember my dad and uncle laughing about the story.

The old equipment still rests in heaps in the yard. They are only memories now, and even then, most have disappeared. I worked hard, but it was nothing like what my grandfather and his brothers did every day.

Above the discarded pieces of metal and wooden wheel rims lies the Big Pasture. In the bottom of the small valley was the family spring. The water was sweet and always cold. I still miss its taste, its refreshment. Indians once camped in that area. Until a large storm sent piles of rocks down the mountain, we found arrowheads often on the ranch, especially near the spring.

I remember meeting a government trapper, who once spent time on the ranch killing coyotes. He told me how he too craved that water.

From that spot in this picture, my grandfather and his brothers dammed the water. They would let it run down the hill in a ditch, and after it soaked the ground, they would use shovels and picks. They dug a trench that stretched two to three miles to a spot our family called the Water Lane, where the cattle watered every day.

Dad and I replaced that line with plastic pipe in the late 70's and throughout the early 80's. It was a job, a difficult job. But we had a backhoe dig the trench. We only had to glue the pipe together.

The two old mowers also lay near the fence. At one time, there was hay in the piece of ground called the bottoms. Water often gathered there, so it makes sense to me, that my family planted the spot in hay.

First gathering the piles of alfalfa into large piles, they used machinery to stack it in a "loose stack," which means it didn't use bales. I remember seeing a large hay knife. It's something family members would have used to cut sections of the stack before pitching the layers of alfalfa onto a hay wagon during winter. 

The fact that lucern was in the bottom near The Water Lane is another story. Dad told me how Grandpa Cles would call his brothers after deer grazed some time on the family field of alfalfa. They would tell the uncles that "the wild horses were in."

This meant it was time to meet that night with rifles. The family arrived and everyone went deer hunting. They stood in the back of a grain truck and used the lights to see their prey. It's the type of pasture and the right season to get meat, that you could actually put on a table.

Other than that, deer meat on our farm was so "gamey," a person couldn't eat it. At least I couldn't have, and I like venison. However, it has to be good meat, and most importantly, the animal has to have been taken care of properly--dressed, skinned and aged.