ANIMAL FRIENDS
It wouldn't be quite right to write about my early life on the homestead without giving some space to the various animals that were such an important part of our lives. Although I am a long, long way away from the farm, there is still something of the farm in me! That old saying "you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy" is surely true in my case. A good share of the "country" in me has to do with animals, and my continuing interest in and liking for them.
Dad's farming operation was what you might call true diversified farming. Of course, that was the pattern on nearly all the homesteads around our area. Money was so scarce, each family simply had to raise as much of their food as possible, and that meant having lots of animals and chickens around the place--they constituted the grocery market for us! So we had chickens, turkeys, cows and their calves, horses, cats and dogs--plus some others I'll mention later. We always had our own eggs, butter, milk, and meat, and sometimes had surpluses to sell. Everything was used in some way or another; very little was ever wasted.
I may have mentioned in an earlier chapter my recollection of a huge old red steer, with long horns, which I saw from my Dad's arms, when I was about three. Of course, he was no pet so far as I was concerned, but Dad and Mom liked him, and hated the day he had to be butchered to provide meat for the family. In general, though, we didn't make particular pets of any of the cattle. We had to deal pretty closely with the milk cows, so they were all named. Some of them even knew their names, I'm sure, especially Old Vollie, the cow the folks bought when the Voliekinovitches left their homestead. She (the cow) was the matriarch of our whole herd, and was kept almost until the end of our days on the homestead.
There were some rather special cows. One I remember was part Jersey, a little black cow with wicked horns. I don't think we kept her very long. The chief thing I remember about her was her aggressiveness when she had a new calf one spring day. She had dropped her calf in a coulee about a half mile from the house, and Dad, Robert and I went out to bring her and the calf in. Robert and I were quite small, and were tagging along just to see the calf. We made the mistake of assuming that she would behave like the other cows did, with some blustering when anyone got too close to the calf, but no real objection to our handling or picking up the little one.
But not that Jersey beast! Before we got really near her and the calf she began to paw the dirt like a bull, and act pretty nasty, tossing her horns, and bellowing. She made a dash for the dog, and he quickly retreated. Then she chased Robert and me up a hill for a ways! We had been warned that when a cow or bull chased you, to always run up a hill (if one were handy!) and that the animal wouldn't chase you very far. I still don't know whether that is completely true or not, but she didn't follow us any great distance. After that, Dad decided that discretion was better than valor! The upshot of it was that we all left her and the calf, to let her bring it home when she was good and ready.
We raised turkeys in small numbers for several years. Beside the noble experiment Robert and I conducted once to see how long young turkeys could swim (see the chapter on fun and games, yet to come), turkeys meant a lot to us. We ate some, we even ate some of their beautiful big mottled eggs at times. They were especially important to us because we realized some cash money from them, by butchering and selling them.
The hen turkeys pretty well took care of themselves when it came to accumulating a clutch of eggs and hatching out the little turkeys. As soon as the little turkeys were large enough to learn to find food for themselves, a new task was created, one just suited to a small boy like me. That was sort of herding or watching them as they wandered around the place, feeding on grasshoppers or other tidbits they liked. They had to be protected from themselves, seeing to it that they didn't wander too far away, and get lost, and also from coyotes, which apparently like young turkeys. We didn't lose many to coyotes, but they did get one once in a while, when there was no one around the birds while they were out away from the buildings. Actually, I never saw a coyote while watching them, but I was sure there were some around, somewhere. I was mortally afraid of coyotes, and made a rather dubious guardian for the flock!
The turkey that gave me trouble was our big old gobbler. We had him for two or three years, maybe more. He was a huge old bird, and very jealous of his flock of hens. When I would be alone, without the dog to protect me, he took it upon himself to keep me away from the flock! (Did he think I was an odd rival gobbler?) First he would strut around for a while, gobbling at intervals. Then he would put his head down and charge straight at me, and, of course, I would turn and run like crazy! But like the cow I mentioned above, he didn't follow very far. He didn't really want to catch me, I suspect. One time I was armed with a sort of walking stick, or maybe it was one of my stick horses, when he came at me. I waited until he was within range, and swung hard with that stick, catching him right on the neck. To my horror, he dropped in the dirt, fluttering his wings a little, and appeared to be dying! I thought I would surely be in big trouble if he did die, though inwardly I felt quite triumphant in having done battle with him, and having won! However, like the famous Scots, "after lying in the dust to bleed a while" he slowly recovered, and walked off, pretty wobbily, back to the other birds. That didn't fully convince him not to bother me. It was probably that November, when we were preparing to butcher the whole lot of the turkeys--twenty or so, I remember--that we had the turkeys penned in the chicken house, feeding them to get as much weight on them as possible. I had gone into the chicken house for some reason--no doubt to feed the silly things--when that gobbler came after me again! This time there was no place to run, and I had nothing to defend myself with. He literally ran right up the front of me, and beat me about the head and face with his big wings. I was the one who retreated that time; I got out of there as quickly as I could, shaken but not really damaged very much. How glad I was when that old bird hung cold and limp along with the others! He was by far the largest of our turkeys, dressing out at nearly twenty pounds!
Butchering turkeys was a messy business, at least the way we did it. Turkeys had to have their heads and feet on when sold, so you couldn't simply kill the turkey by beheading it, as we did with chickens. Also, the killing had to be done in just the right way, or the feathers would be almost impossible to pull out, especially the big wing feathers.
The technique our Dad used was to first hang the turkey by its legs up to one of the rafters in the barn. Then he took a long, thin-bladed knife, very sharp, opened the turkey's mouth, and with the knife cut the big blood vessels at the back of the throat. The bird then was simply allowed to bleed to death, which really took only a short time. In that short time, though, there was lots of blood flying every which way from the wild flopping of the turkey's wings.
Then came the difficult job of picking off the feathers, without benefit of scalding as was done with chickens. After most of the feathers were gone, there usually was a need for a long session of pulling pinfeathers--little feathers which had not yet had a chance to emerge fully from the skin. We used tweezers to pull the pinfeathers. Sometimes the big wing feathers gave us a lot of trouble, because they wouldn't come out easily at all. We used a pair of pliers on them, to get a good grip. I think it took us most of two days to butcher that whole flock of turkeys and get them ready to take to Glasgow to market. I think this is quite enough for a blog. Another chapter will reveal more of my nature, I suppose, by telling of other animals in those homestead years.

CHORE BOY
One of the advantages of growing up on a farm is that there is practically never a time when there isn't something to do. As a boy it seemed to me that most of the time there was too much to do--that is, too much of things I didn't really want to do. Those activities were called "chores." We kids were all started on chores when very young, first being assigned the easier things that we could handle, and then growing into more difficult jobs. Just for fun, let me tell you of some of the chores I had to do, when about ten years old.
At this time I had a lot of chores to do, especially during the school term, because my father was a country school teacher. He taught in small rural schools, often located several miles away from home. Even in good weather he sometimes could get home only on week-ends, and often during severe winter weather, he would be away for several weeks at a time. My brother, Robert, had started high school, boarding (doing chores for his room and board) at a farm also miles away. Thus I got the full load, though my Mom was awfully good to help me.
Here's how a typical winter school day would go. Mom would get me out of bed about six o'clock-"time to go out and milk, John." She would help with the milking if we had more than two cows to milk. So I would get up, put on heavy overcoat and overshoes, take the milk pails with some warm water in one, the kerosene lattern in my other hand, and trudge down to the barn. Still dark out, the fifty or sixty yards to the barn seemed like a long way, especially if there were new snow drifts to tramp through. The lantern would throw long shadows--something which always made me feel slightly (or more!) scary.
We kept the milk cows in the barn winter nights. The first thing to do would be to clean the stable out, throwing the manure and soiled bedding straw out the wide door of the barn onto the manure pile. A messy job, believe me! Then fresh straw had to be brought in, and thrown under the cows, and some hay given them in the manger, so they would have something to chew on while we milked. Usually by the time I had this done Mom would have come down to the barn.
We next washed the udders of the cows (that's what the warm water was for), and began milking. We had to hurry, and often the old cows would give us a love switch across the face with their wet, dirty tails. Sometimes their teats would be sore and cracked from the cold weather, and a cow would kick--hard--upsetting me and making me spill all the milk. Usually one or two cats would be sitting around, begging for milk, and I might squirt a shot of milk at them. Some of them became pretty skilled at drinking milk "on the fly."
The milking finished, Mom would take the milk back to the house, and begin fixing breakfast. I next turned the cows out of the barn, threw a lot of hay over the fence for them and the other livestock in the barnyard, and then went to the well to begin pumping water for all of them. If you have never seen a big old milk cow drink, you can have no idea how much water each of them could put away. Pumping by hand, from a deep well, was a slow, cold business, and there were always ten or twelve head of cattle, and maybe two or three horses there to be watered. My body would be plenty warm, with the work of pumping, but my hands and feet would get awfully cold. But when all had been watered, and the wooden barrel (used as a water tank) left full, I would fill a bucket with clean fresh water, and head for the house.
Done with chores? Oh, no; after breakfast the chickens had to be fed and watered. Only then could I stop and get ready for school. Sometimes I would be so late I'd have to run or walk really fast to get to school by nine o'clock. We had about a mile and a quarter to walk to school.
In the evening it was pretty much the same routine, in reverse. The cows had to be brought in, watered, fed, the milk cows put in the barn, and milked again. Mom usually had fed and watered the chickens, and gathered the eggs before I got home from school, but if she hadn't, it was a chore for me to do. And, in addition, there was wood to chop and bring in, filling the wood box, and the slop bucket to be emptied. Only when all that was done, and the dishes washed and put away (we kids all took our turn at washing and drying dishes), would I feel my day's chores were done. And then sometimes I would have a weasel which I had trapped, or a jack-rabbit, to skin before going to bed.
Did I feel put upon, and sorry for myself? Of course I did at times. But I knew that all my friends in school had the same sort of round of chores to do, and that the tasks simply had to be done. I learned a lot from being a chore boy--particularly that when something has to be done, the best plan is to get right at it and do it. No use complaining, or feeling sorry for yourself. That lesson has helped me all my life. Now I can say that I'm truly glad that I had that background as a chore boy!

PRAIRIE MEDICINE
Some of the clearest memories I have of my boyhood out on the homestead are of illnesses and minor accidents, and the treatment we had available to us. Our nearest doctor was in Hinsdale, about fifteen miles away. While he would make house calls, even that far out in the country, we would only call on him for major things, such as the birth of a child. To travel fifteen miles to see a doctor, when your choice of transportation was team and wagon, or riding horseback, or walking--well, that was a long way! A trip to Hinsdale, with horses, took two hours or so each way. The result was that with only rare exceptions, when we we were sick or injured, home remedies were applied.
What sort of illnesses did we have? All sorts of things. I'll tell you of a few of them. Probably most frequent ailment at our house was "stomach ache." Our Dad had real trouble with his stomach being upset. Not having such things as Tums or anything like that on hand (I'm not sure they had been invented as yet), his remedy was simple and good. He would place a couple drops of peppermint extract on a teaspoon of sugar, and take that. Sometimes he stirred the mixture into a cup of hot water to make a fragrent tea.
That ailment was awfully contagious! We kids would almost simultaneously come down with the same problem, while the peppermint bottle was still out. We had to have the same treatment right now! I know we didn't fool anyone, but we often complained of stomach ache so that we could the have sugar and peppermint treatment.
We did have to be a little careful, though, because if we complained just a bit too earnestly (or sometimes couldn't help complaining over a really bad stomach ache) we got the next standard treatment. I don't think it is available nowadays-- Castoria, the children's laxative. I think it was an extract of the castor bean, or maybe of prunes. Whatever, it was highly flavored to cover its true origin, and colored dark brown, about like vanilla extract. I do know that it worked just as promised! But if it didn't, the bottle of real castor oil was right at hand. Oh, how I remember taking that horrid stuff, holding my nose with one hand, opening my mouth, gulping it down, and then quickly trying to rinse the bad taste from my mouth with water. We all hated castor oil.
Like most youngsters, even today, we had sore throats quite frequently. I, especially, suffered from bad tonsils, and often suffered from a very bad sore throat. Treatment for this began with gargle, a homemade concoction sometimes made of vinegar, hot water and salt, or of just plain hot water and lots of salt. Our parents did keep a large bottle of Listerine on hand, and sometimes that was used, straight from the bottle, as a gargle. Naturally, we kids preferred the homemade gargles over Listerine. I really don't recall that any of the gargles were very effective.
Then, if the sore throat became really painful, and the tonsils became enlarged as mine were a lot of the time, we faced "swabbing." That was dreadful! A wad of cotton on the end of a little stick was dipped in iodine, and our throats liberally swabbed with the powerful antiseptic. It made one gag, and we kids always were worried that we might swallow some of the iodine, for it was reported to be poison! When we were a little older, mercurochrome became popular as an antiseptic, and it displaced iodine for swabbing throats and for minor cuts and scratches. We kids liked it much better than iodine.
Despite the preventive efforts, we often came down with severe colds, in both heads and chests. We doped our poor stuffed-up noses with either Mentholatum or Vaporub, both fairly strong and aromatic mixtures of menthol and vaseline. Then when we went to bed at night, we had Vaporub vigorously rubbed on our necks and chests, and the areas were covered with flannel cloth to "keep the heat in." We had never heard of taking vitamin C, or nose drops, or even using aspirin to relieve the symptoms. Antihistimines hadn't been invented yet.
When we developed really serious chest colds, with deep coughs and croup, there was a further step to be taken. When we went to bed, Mom rubbed us thoroughly with Musterole, a vicious smelly grease made of essence of mustard and some kind of vaseline. It was really strong, made to take the place of mustard plaster, I guess. It not only carried a real stink, but it burned one's skin, and was truly awful if some got in your eyes! It had the power, though, and it seemed to help break up a cough, and we used a lot of it.
Once my little sister, Mary, when just a little girl, had such a bad cold on her chest the folks thought she was going to have pneumonia. An elderly neighbor lady, an old timer on the prairie, happened to come by, and suggested a radical treatment. We gathered most of the onions we had in the garden, and she made a crushed onion plaster. She covered poor little Mary's back and chest with the onions, and covered it all with flannel. It was indeed strong medicine, but it worked, and Mary recovered quickly. If I remember right, Mary was never very fond of onions after that.
We all caught the usual childhood diseases, and generally shared them with all the kids in the neighborhood, mostly through our contacts at school. We drank out of a common water dipper, at school, and so all were exposed to any cold or other illness which one person might have. We all caught the German measles, and spent our hours at home in darkness, to protect our eyes. At that time no one knew just how dangerous measles are. Having them as a child may have been the original cause of my sister Mary's multiple sclerosis later. Then we all had mumps, with classic swelling of our jaws. Fortunately, they didn't "go down" with either of us boys, as they sometimes did. And we had chicken pox (which you don't catch from chickens!), and cow pox, which we may have caught from the cows. That cow pox was much more severe than chicken pox, maybe about half-way between chicken and small pox, in severity.
Something which we definitely got from our cows was ringworms. It is caused by a tiny parasite which digs into the skin and causes a raised, very itchy, scaly ring-shaped sore on the skin. I once had a terrible one high up on my left arm, around toward the back of my arm. Mom didn't know just what to put on it, so she swabbed it with good old iodine, out of a bottle that was half dried up. Wow, how that treatment burned! The iodine was too strong, and raised a big blister on my arm. But it cured the ringworm! I still have a faint scar to show for that!
By far the worst illness we kids had was scarlet fever. The Richters got it first; no one knew how or where they caught it. They brought it to the little country school, and I think every youngster in the school got it. My older sister, Jean, came down with it first at our house, and then Mary, who was not yet in school.This was in February, and the weather was nasty cold.
Finally, one day both Robert and I became ill with it, at school! I'll never forget that walk home. It was only a mile and a half, and my head was aching so I could hardly see anything. But somehow we made it home, and were undressed and put right to bed. At that point I went into convulsions, Mom has said, and was desperately ill for many days. We all ran high fevers, and were constantly in need of water to drink, or a pail to vomit in, or whatever. All four of us kids were sick at the same time. And to top it off, our Mom, who never seemed to be sick, came down just then with an attack of appendicitis, and needed lots of care.
All the work fell on poor Dad. Naturally, he was really worried about us all, and did everything he could to help us. The doctor from Hinsdale couldn't come out, for there was a regular epidemic of scarlet fever all over the area. Several children died that winter. But the doctor did send out something--quarantine signs to be put up to warn anyone coming near our place that our house was quarantined and not to be entered!
This made it impossible for Dad to go to town for medicine or groceries, or even to get the mail. Only when neighbors came by (as some of those good folks did) could he order the things we needed. It seemed like forever, but we all were down for about three weeks, and then began to get better. When we were all well enough, Dad took us to Hinsdale in the sleigh to see the doctor. The doctor said it was alright for us to return to school, but we must first fumigate the house! That was quite a process, involving burning some sort of sulphur candles in the house while we all stayed outside for several hours. I don't think that did any real good,except to perhaps thin out the mouse population!
Well, we got back to school, and then I had a relapse! Again I was terribly sick, and it took about six weeks for me to grow strong enough to return to school. During those six weeks I had to take a tablespoon of cod liver oil with every meal. I went through quarts of the smelly stuff! Also, Mom made me lots of homemade cocoa, and I drank that and ate graham crackers when I couldn't keep anything else down. To this day, whenever I get stomach flu or similar illness, I actually taste and smell cod liver oil and cocoa and graham crackers, even though nothing of the sort is around! I really do!
Being sick in bed had some advantages, though. One of the "treats" we enjoyed when sick was having "milk toast." Both Mom and Dad could make that to perfection: homemade white bread (we never had store bread) toasted on top of the old cast iron cooking range, soaked in hot milk, with lots of butter, and seasoned with salt andpepper. Boy, that was good!
When we were a little older, after the scarlet fever epidemic, all we kids at Richter School were taken to Hinsdale one day for small pox vaccinations. Bravely (I never did learn not to volunteer to be first!) I said I would go in to the doctor's office first. There was really nothing to the process; a little scratching on the skin of the upper left arm, then the doctor smearing a little vaccine on the scratches. The nurse covered it with some adhesive tape, and it was all over. I went back outside, and was leaning against the side of the doctor's little office building, talking with some of the other kids. Then all of a sudden I came to-- I had passed out! People who were inside the office said my head made a most interesting sound, bumping down over the shiplap boards, as I collapsed. That fainting (really a matter of going into a form of shock) has plagued me all my life. There is something about my innards that is triggered by an injury, or something like an injection, which causes my blood to gather in the lower abdomen, and I pass out. I've been embarrassed by it time and time again.
But back to the small pox vaccine; it really "took," with all of us. We had big ugly scabs on our arms, where the vaccine had been applied. But eventually all our arms healed up, and none of us got small pox!
Did we go to the dentist? So far as I can recall, none of us Cumming kids went to a dentist until we were well along in our teens, and had long since left the homestead. Yes, we had lots of cavities and toothaches. The only help for that was a sort of medicated wax which was pushed into the cavity of the aching tooth. Sometimes our Dad had to pull a truly bad tooth for us, without anything to ease the pain. I know that I made my first visit to a dentist when I was seventeen or eighteen, and then only because I had an ulcerated tooth. I guess we did have some teeth extracted by Doctor Cockrell, in Hinsdale, but he was not a dentist, and didn't have any regular dental equipment.
I do recall one visit our Dad made to the dentist in Glasgow. He had a very bad tooth, and the nearest dentist was in Glasgow, twenty-five miles away in a straight line, across country. And that's just the way Dad went, walking across farms, coulees, creeks, and all. He preferred walking to riding horseback. The dentist pulled the tooth, and in doing so opened a big hole from the gum up into the nasal passage above. It was a painful mess, so Dad stayed overnight in Glasgow. Then the next morning he walked home, carrying a fifty pound sack of flour! Dad was a great walker; none of us could keep up with him. He had trouble with that "tooth hole"for years after that.
We had lots of minor injuries when we were little--scratches from barbed wire fences, bruised toes (horses loved to stomp on my toes!), and the like. Once Robert, while walking barefoot, stepped on a board with a nail in it. The nail came clear up through the top of his foot. To make matters worse, this board was right out in front of the chicken house, and surely must have been contaminated with chicken droppings.
Go to the doctor? Oh, no. Dad just used the big stock syringe he used to vaccinate cattle, filled it with Lysol solution, and disinfected the nail hole with that. Painful, but effective! Robert had no infection whatever from that bad wound.
The only major injury I can remember was when our little sister, Mary, broke her leg at school. This was in her first year of school, and she broke it in a sledding accident. It was really fortunate that she didn't have both legs broken! Robert was away at high school, and Dad was teaching some thirty miles away, out south of the Milk River. A neighbor took Mom, Mary, and Jean to Vandalia, where they caught the local train to Hinsdale. There Doctor Cockrell set the leg (both bones were broken below the knee) and put on a cast.
That left me home alone, with all the chores to do, and school to attend, too. I was eleven years old, and batched alone for three days, milking the cows, taking care of the chickens, and so on. Boy, was I lonesome! I hated to go home after school to the empty house. But everything went alright, and Mom and the girls were home on the fourth day. By then Dad had gotten word of the trouble, and he came home, too, for the week-end. I remember that while alone there, I broke the standing rule at our house which said that the dog couldn't be in the house! I had Laddie stay inside with me at night, and that helped a lot.
Of course, many other things happened to us, many scratches and bruises, but I won't bore you with those. Oh, maybe one more! One cold frosty morning I rode old Snip, our saddle horse, out to find the cows which I had been unable to find the evening before. About half a mile from home he decided to buck a little, and easily tossed me off--to sit down firmly on a big prickly pear cactus! Would you call that an injury, or an illness? I tell you it was both; my feelings were hurt plenty, and I was nearly sick at my stomach from those miserable cactus spines. If looks could kill, that horse would have been dead on the spot! As it was, he just kept a little ahead of me, not letting me catch him all the way back home. I couldn't have ridden, anyway, so it was just as well. Dear Mom had a bad task that morning, pulling all those cactus spines from my "derear."
No, we didn't have modern medicine, but we all survived just fine! Prairie medicine was good enough!

This installment of my life story is a continuation of the description of the homestead property, and includes some very candid descriptions of our neighbors. I trust no one will take offense!
There was a path running from the front of the house east toward the barn, around the south side of the hill. Right at the southern-most point of that path, Dad had built the chicken house, dug into the side of the hill. It was fairly large and airy, with a good tight roof of limbs of trees covered with boards and sod. A large window, covered with a special cloth-like material of wire netting embedded in translucent celluloid, provided light and ventilation. There was room for maybe sixty or so hens, lots of nests, and roosts for the chickens to use at night.
On beyond the chicken house, around the hill about forty yards or so, was the barn. It, too, was dug into the side of the hill. It was built of rather wide boards, had a slightly peaked roof, and had a sort of loft where cranky old setting hens nested and made life miserable for me at times. I often had to gather the eggs from the nests there, and the old biddies, brooding hens who wanted to set on the eggs, would peck at my hand as I reached in. They were a troublesome lot! The barn was rather small, with room for only four horses, or cows, to be stabled at one time. It was pretty dark, too, having only a couple of small windows. There was a wide door in the center of the east side. Right out in front of that door was the manure pile; when we cleaned the barn, we simply tossed the manure and straw out the door onto that pile. From time to time, when the pile got pretty large, we would load the wagon with the stuff and take it out to the fields or pasture and scatter it around for fertilizer. We never had a regular manure spreader. Another important use for manure from this pile was to bank the house, in preparation for winter. That stuff helped to keep out the cold, even though it was a bit smelly toward spring.
There was a sort of sump or low place, right in front of and under the barn door. This served to gather the drainage of liquids from the animals inside (you can guess what I mean). It was a hazard when getting in or out of the barn; you had to jump across it, if it was full, or, in cold winter weather, take your chances on the ice formed on it. Periodically we had to scoop up the liquid and toss it on the manure pile, using a big scoop shovel.
Just to the north of the barn was the fenced hay yard, where we stored hay, and straw for bedding. The path from the house ran on around the hill, going by the chicken house, above the barn on the side hill, around the hay yard, and down to the well.
We kids were really proud of that well, as we had the best-tasting water of any of the farms around. Dad had dug that well by hand, down through hard sand and some layers of rock, to a depth of 44 feet. He put in the well casing as he went down. Mom helped sometimes, too, dumping the buckets of dirt Dad hauled up from the bottom by pulley. Dad also made a device to allow him to work alone. Working at the bottom of the well, he could fill a bucket with dirt or rocks, haul it up to the top, and the device would dump the bucket off to one side, and then allow the bucket to be returned to the bottom of the well. Dad often invented tools or devices to make our work easier.
Of course it wasn't quite according to the book to have the well so close to the barnyard, and down hill from it at that, but we never suffered from contaminated water. The sand must have been a very effective filter!
From the southwest corner of the hay-yard, right next to the well, a fence ran south to the south property fence, and then west up past the house. This was the main barn yard fence. We didn't have a corral, branding chute, or other typical ranch paraphernalia. (Inserted here (I hope!) is a photo of a primitive water color painting I did of the barnyard, painted from memory.)
When Mom and Dad first moved onto the homestead, Mom named some of the hills around. A little more than half a mile to the east, just outside our fenced land, was a hill which had two knobs or summits, with a slight dip between them. I guess that reminded the folks of the two houses of our congress, because that hill was named "Government Hill." For some reason, I never dared to climb up that hill until the last year we were on the homestead. I had been told that someone had once killed a rattlesnake there, and that made it "off limits" for me. I didn't have to be warned further. When I did finally climb the hill, I found it wasn't nearly as high as I had imagined it to be, and there were no snakes in sight, just a lot of sandstone ledges. The hill just to the west of our house, in the horse pasture, was the highest point on the west side of the coulee for some distance.
Another distinctive feature of our landscape was the landslide, just outside the northeast corner of our land. To us kids that was a fascinating thing. Sometime in the not too distant past a big section of the hillside had slid down, leaving a big V-shaped gap. The formation was young enough that there was little vegetation growing on the raw soil exposed by the slide. Of course, we had no idea what might have caused the slide, but speculated that there might have been an earthquake sometime when the soil was very wet. It was not the only such scar on the earth in our area. The hills running on north in Black Coulee showed evidence of many such land slides in the long-distant past. The exposed soil in 'our' landslide contained something very strange--many tiny fragile white snail shells about 1/4" long! Apparently at some time in the ancient past the whole area must have been under water. When we lived there it certainly was far too dry to enable snails to live there!
I mentioned earlier that most of the land around us had been homesteaded, but abandoned. When Dad and Mom first came out, they had neighbors to the east of them, about a mile and half away, whose name was Volikeinovitch (my spelling may not be correct). Another family, the Lofovitches, lived near them. Farther east, and maybe half a mile north there was another homestead shack, empty and forelorn. The plot of land my parents claimed for their homestead had also been homesteaded earlier, but relinquished. I don't know the name of the man who tried there first. We only knew that he was a Finnlander, and that Finnlanders didn't give up easily. I think that as the years went by, our Dad figured out why that man left!
It seems that quite a group of Finnish people, who came from an area in Finland near the border with Russia, had come together, and settled in that neighborhood. Most of their names ended in "vitch." But, sturdy and hardworking as they were, one by one they left the area--it was too tough for them. When the Volikeinovitches had been there for some time, they found that people had difficulty spelling their rather long name. So they took legal action to have it changed, to make it easier to spell: Volikeino! My parents used to laugh at that, because they thought the remaining name was the part which was most difficult to spell!
My friend, Earl Britsch, told me recently that Mr. Volikeino was concerned once that his brother-in-law might be trying to take his homestead away from him, and that that concern entered into his desiring to change his name. Also, Earl said that when my Dad was teaching at the Nault-Miller School, northwest of Britsch's, Mr. Volikeino would ride a bicycle all the way to the school (about eight miles), across the rocky prairie, to talk to Dad about his troubles. To make it even more difficult, his bicycle didn't have any tires! It must have been very difficult riding!
When the Volikeino's moved away, they sold Dad a milk cow, which the folks naturally named "Volley." She was a great favorite with us kids, as she could be milked from left, right, or rear, and could even be ridden, if anyone wanted to sit on her extremely sharp old backbone! She was the matriarch of our herd of milk cows, and we all loved her, even though she was bossy, lorded it over the other cows, and could drink an incredible amount of water.
North of our land there was a strip of "open range" about a mile wide, and then one came to the south fence of the Hank Weasa place. I don't know whether they were Finnish or not, but they had chosen a workable place, and their son or grandsons are still living there. We didn't get along well with them--at least Dad didn't--so we had almost nothing to do with them. I was never at their place when we lived on the homestead, though the last two or three years I went to Richter School, the Weasa kids attended there also, as their rural school had been closed. We became good friends, though our parents and the Weasa parents apparently never visited or had any contact with each other.
It's a sort of long story, about those bad relations, but maybe it will fit in here as well as anywhere. Dad had come out from Wisconsin with a background of dairy farming, and a dream of having a herd of good milk cows. When I was very small, he bought a little Holstein bull calf--Sir Ector Echo DeKalb, I think his name was. He was a registered purebred bull, and cost a lot of money--fifty dollars, if I remember correctly. Well, Sir Ector (we called him "Echo") grew up to became a very nasty, ugly bull. He was the terror of us kids, always bellowing and threatening to get us if we got in any pasture with him. I guess he did help to improve the herd some, but he didn't live very long.
Somehow one time he got out of our pasture, out onto the open range. We knew he was gone, I guess, but not just where. Now it was a known range law, where nearly all the cattle on the open range were beef stock, mostly Herefords, that a dairy bull was not allowed to be on the range. So Hank Weasa, seeing that Holstein bull on the range, simply shot him. He was man enough to come to our house and tell our Dad "I've shot your bull." I don't know what Dad said to him at the moment, but he surely didn't have anything to say to Hank Weasa after that! There was nothing we could do about it--it was range law, and Sir Ector was in the wrong place! We kids surely didn't mourn for him!
Immediately south of us lay the land of John Goodmanson, a Norwegian bachelor farmer. I don't know how he had acquired so much land, but he farmed a full section (640 acres), and owned (or controlled) another section or so. John's house and other buildings were located just a mile south of our place, and half a mile east of Richter School.
A little over a mile east of Goodmanson's was the James place, another Finnish family. Mr. James was quite elderly when I was a boy, and had two sons, Matt and Will, and a grown-up daughter, Inez. I assume Mrs. James had died at some earlier date. The two "boys" (really grown men) sometimes worked in the copper mines at Butte during the winter months. They were good neighbors and hard workers. I think because of our Dad's influence, we evaluated most of our neighbors by the amount of hard work they did. We always appreciated those who had a reputation for being hard workers. We knew that we, the Cummings, certainly were hard workers!
One of the interesting things about the Jameses, was that they had a sweat bath house (an early day sauna!). Some of the neighbors used to go there for a good old fashioned sweat bath in the winter time. A big fire was built in the low dugout building, to heat the rocks in the center of the floor. Then water was sprinkled on the rocks to create steam. The ones taking the sweat bath sat naked on benches around the hot rocks, and were reported (I never was invited to take part, so I am not an eye witness) to switch each other with little willow switches. When they had had enough, they dashed outside and rolled in the snow, regardless of the temperature! Hardy people, the Finns believed it kept them from becoming ill during the winter.
To the northwest of our place, about three miles away, was the homestead of Vic Point, also a Finnlander. His homestead dwelling was near the top of a rise, quite a bit higher in elevation than our place, and visible from miles around. As I recollect, and I certainly don't want to malign the man, he was not a ‘good worker.’ According to what the neighbors told us, he spent his winter months (he was never around during the cold weather) "making hair bridles." That term meant that he was in prison, supposedly for some minor deliberate theft done right under the noses of the keepers of the law. Thus he could get free board and room, and be comfortably warm without effort. I do know that he seldom seemed to work his fields, and we and others suspected him of operating a still and making his living selling moonshine. I have no evidence of this, of course--but, he had no visible means of support. Robert tells me that Vic did grow some potatoes and flax. Once he paid Robert fifty cents to ride behind on Vic's plow, and drop seed potatoes in the furrow.
About a mile and a half west of us, and south a mile, was the homestead of the Lee Ellsworth family. From the times when I remember them, Lee Edward Ellsworth and his wife, Ava, lived there, with a whole brood of youngsters born at short and regular intervals. Each child was named with a first name beginning with "L" and a middle name beginning with "E", so that their initials were all the same--L.E.E. We all loved Ava, his wife, who worked very hard, and bore with her husband with remarkable patience.
The older children went to Richter School while I was there; the younger ones weren't of school age when we left the homestead. I remember how one night when I was very young, Ava and Lee came to our place, with their first child, a "blue baby," as babies with congenital heart problems were called in those days. The baby died, despite all my Mom's best efforts to hold on to it's life.
A mile west of the Ellsworth's was the homestead of the Nurmi's, another Finnish family. Their children also attended Richter School, and we got along fine with all of them. Their oldest son, Harvey, was older than any of us Cumming kids. Their second son, Stanley, was an especially good friend of my brother, Robert. We often were invited to stay over night (one of us at a time) with Stanley, and I, at least, enjoyed the different foods they ate (Mrs. Nurmi made most interesting sour bread) and seeing and sometimes having a ride in their huge Willys Overland touring car, one of the earliest cars in the neighborhood. The Nurmi kids drove a mule to school, I remember, and that was a curiosity to most of us, as there weren't very many mules on the farms in that area.
South of our place two miles was the homestead of Roy Richter, whose children were also our schoolmates at Richter School. I think Roy may have donated the land for the school, as it was named after the Richter family, and was located at the northwest corner of their land. I'll tell more about them later. South of their place a mile was the old Ellsworth place, the original homestead of Lee's parents. Old Grandma Ellsworth was a great friend of my mother's, and often used to visit us. She is the one who taught me to eat, and really like, clobbered milk, the stuff that cottage cheese is made from. She was a midwife, and helped deliver many of the homesteaders' babies in that area. Grandma Ellsworth moved away while I was very young. I don't know where she lived after that.
When I was in the third grade a new family moved onto the old Ellsworth place--the Charlie Carters, who became great friends and good neighbors. They had a band of sheep, and I got my first experience with sheep while visiting with Ralph, their only boy. He had six sisters, who were extremely popular all around the area as they grew up. They were all pretty girls, and lots of fun.
Due west of the Carter's was the original Richter homestead, occupied from very early days by Mr. and Mrs. Emil Richter. Everyone in the area respected the older Richters, I believe; all the kids in the area called them "Grandpa and Grandma Richter." They had a fine old log house and barn, and often entertained the neighbors from all around at sledding parties and the like. They had four sons, Ray, Cliff, Roy, and Floyd, who had their own land and families. It was Ray who loaned Dad and Mom the money to get them started on the homestead.
South of the Carters about two miles, or maybe three, was the John Betz place. Mr. Betz, who was my first Sunday School teacher that I can recall, had settled there about 1890, after coming up from Texas with a trail herd of beef animals. He was a very picturesque man, a great rider, and had many interesting stories to tell. Somehow--I don't know whether there was any truth in the story or not--I always had the idea that he had been one tough hombre when a cowboy, and had gone by the nickname "Blue Betz." I do know that when he first built his ranch house (of cottonwood logs cut on his land) he shot wolves and even a cougar from his front steps; he told us that, himself. He also had an old pistol that had notches on its grips; his son Paul showed it to us once. His ranch was located on the lower reach of Black Creek, the same creek that ran through our homestead. On his extensive land--he had hundreds of acres and big corrals, etc.--Black Creek had become quite a respectable stream, and had lots of trees growing along it, and good swimmingholes, too.
Mrs. Betz was a wonderful woman. Mr. Betz' first wife had become ill and died when quite young, and he hired a young Norwegian girl to come help take care of Mrs. Betz and the child, John Betz, Junior. After the death of the first Mrs. Betz, the hired lady married Mr.Betz. They had one son, Paul. We loved the second Mrs. Betz, she was so kind and hospitable. The whole community would often gather at their place for picnics or worship services. We boys would tear around over the hills, go swimming when the weather was warm enough, climb trees, and so on. Mrs. Betz used to knit wool caps, and made mittens for all the kids in the area, each Christmas. Those were the most beautiful woolen mittens, thick and warm, and done with lovely patterns. We all looked forward to receiving our mittens each Christmas, usually given to us at Sunday School the last Sunday before Christmas, or at the school Christmas program.
We did have a laugh at Mrs. Betz' expense one time. They were at our house for a meal, and our Mom asked her if she liked pineapple. Mrs. Betz had come over from Norway as a young girl, and apparently had no idea what a pineapple was. But she wasn't going to admit it, and told Mom "No, I don't; we had so many pine trees around our place in the old country, I just got sick of pineapples." That's the way Mom used to tell about it! I think she kept a straight face when Mrs. Betz said that, as there was no offence given!
Another funny thing happened at the Betz's one time. Our Mom liked to make root beer from extract, water, and sugar, following the recipe provided by the Hires Root Beer people. She told Mrs. Betz about it, and one time when we were visiting there, Paul took us boys out to the old bunkhouse, and got out some bottles of root beer which Mrs. Betz had just made. But this was something different from that which our mother made! Paul, their son, opened a bottle and the foam and liquid shot clear to the ceiling! We boys thought it was great; it had a nice bite to it which ours at home never had. Of course, as kids will do, we told our folks, and Mom soon put a stop to our drinking any more of that root beer. It was real beer! Mrs. Betz told us how she had let it stand a few days in a wash tub before she bottled it!
Other neighbors (we thought nothing of ten or twelve miles' distance when counting our neighbors) who meant a lot to us were the Charlie Britsch's, who lived about six miles to the northwest, and south of them, the Jim Sherry's. We first got acquainted with the Britsch's when Dad taught at the Nault-Miller School, in their community. We often would go to their place to visit. They had a good plot of land, part of a relinquished homestead which adjoined the land originally homesteaded by Mrs. Britsch, when she came out west. She was a brave lady! She was only eighteen when she came out as a teacher and homesteaded, all alone.
Her son, Earl, told me that when she was on the train coming out, somewhere in North Dakota the body of a man who had been shot was placed in the railroad car in which she was riding. She almost decided to turn around and go back home right then and there. Earl said that later, when times were pretty bad, she would say that she wished now that she had gone back! Her husband didn't homestead. He was a threshing machine salesman, when he met and married Mrs. Britsch. They had a sizeable sheep operation, maybe two or three hundred head, and I remember visiting there when they were docking the lambs, and later in the summer, shearing.
Somewhat like the practice of travelling threshing rigs, there were travelling crews of sheep shearers, in those days, who would come in and do the shearing for small sheep owners. (Did that word "docking" throw you? It means cutting off the lambs' tails. Many people don't know that lambs are born with long tails, about ten or twelve inches long. These have to be cut off, for sanitary reasons.) I remember that once when we were there during shearing, I had the doubtful privilege of tramping the wool down in the big wool sacks. I didn't stay at that job very long; it was hot and greasy down there in the huge sack with all those big pelts tossed down on me. I didn't like it a bit!
The Jim Sherry's I remember especially because she was a skilled gardener, and we went there sometimes to buy watermelons and citrons. They had a windmill and a plentiful supply of water, which helped greatly with gardening. Mom made great pickles from those two vegetables. Also, Mr. Sherry (Jim), an old time cow man, made the most marvelous "honk" when he blew his nose! Once at their place for supper, he whipped out his big red bandana handkerchief, and blew his nose right there at the table. I was unable to control my laughing. I sort of snorted and blew up, and made a mess of things-- including greatly offending Mr. Sherry. That was really a remembered evening, because later, when I went out to the outdoor toilet, I managed to drop our precious flashlight down the hole! Dad had a miserable time retrieving it, and I was not allowed to forget the whole business for some time.
Two other neighbors: east of the Carter's, I forget just how far, were the farms of the Lempke's and the Wedels, both German families. I don't remember much about the Lempke's, except this. One time at a community social event at the Richter School, the ladies had prepared oyster stew for everyone. Mrs. Lempke, I am told, knew that her husband had a strong dislike for oysters--they actually made him sick. It was simple enough for him to avoid eating the oyster stew, or soup, but what he didn't know, for a while, was that his wife had slipped an oyster into his cup of coffee! According to the story, when he had drunk his coffee down to the level where he found the oyster, he became violently sick, and, I guess, pretty upset with his wife. Because they were of German origin, they weren't very well liked in the neighborhood, and moved away when I was still quite young.
Mrs. Wedel, who lived on a couple of miles east of Lempke's, was a widow when we first knew them, and had three children, Theodore, Peter, and Helen. Mrs. Wedel pronouned their names with a strong German accent-- "Tayodoor,"Payter", and something like "Haylen." She was very proud of her children.
One winter Helen stayed at our house for several weeks, to enable her to attend school at the Richter School. We kids, I'm afraid, gave her a pretty bad time; we just didn't like her at all, because she had strange ways. I remember that she had long blond hair which had to be braided each day. Our Mom had to do that for her.
The Wedels came to our Sunday School off and on-- mostly off, after one of my doings. Mom had invited them to eat Sunday dinner with us one summer day, after Sunday School and church. We were all seated around our big oval table, in the "east" room, and had a scrumptious meal before us. Mom asked Mrs. Wedel to pray, and she did so, at some length, and in German! I had never heard anything like it, and held on as long as I could, then snorted (I had an awful problem with that explosive laugh!) and began to laugh. My laughing set my sisters and Robert off, and I guess we all laughed. Poor Mrs. Wedel was terribly offended, hardly said another word all through the meal (although they managed to eat well enough) and then they didn't come back to Sunday School or community functions for a long time, a year or more. I remember how bad my mother felt about it all, but apologies didn't do any good.
My brother Robert tells me that our Mom may also have offended Mrs. Wedel in another way. Once while Helen was staying at our place, Mrs. Wedel brought over a whole dishpan full of homemade soap. Momma said, "You must think Helen is going to be awfully dirty." She meant it as a joke, but Mrs. Wedel took it as an insult to herchildren! They were still living on their farm some years after we moved away. I know, because I was on a rodent-poisoning crew in l936 and we went over their land. I guess you know I didn't identify myself to any of them, and sort of kept myself in the background!
That's enough for now about our land and neighbors. I'll probably have quite a bit more to tell of some of the people and adventures we had as we kids grew up there on the homestead.

FAMILY HOMESTEAD
Although I know it will be difficult to make it interesting, I'm going to try to describe the homestead where I was born and where we lived until I finished the eighth grade. The looks of the old place, the lay of the land, the location and nature of the buildings, and the adjoining lands are clearly printed in my mind--but are not completely shown in any photographs. I am including a couple photographs showing something about the house and yard.
As I told in another chapter, Dad and Mom came out to Montana in l9l3, and settled on a plot of 320 acres, the maximum amount of land allowed under the Homestead Act, if the homesteader wanted to retain mineral rights. The agreement with the government was that they would build a liveable house, and live on the land at least six months of each year for five years. Then they would be given title to the land.
The land they chose lay in a fairly broad coulee through which ran Black Creek. This stream (a stream only in spring or after a cloudburst!) ran roughly north and south, though it wound around a lot. Ultimately, about six miles directly south of the homestead, it joined another small creek, and together they emptied into Milk River, maybe ten miles (straight miles, as a crow might fly) south of us. North of our place, the creek and its coulee ran another ten miles or so, originating in the Laundry Hills, a range of hills named after a man who had ranched there in very early years.
The creek ran diagonally through our land, entering at a point about three quarters of a mile north of the house, winding around a bit, and then running out at a point about one hundred yards east of the house. The land, which our Dad fenced right away (that was another requirement of homesteading), was in a big rectangle, a mile long north and south, and half a mile wide east and west. Our house and the other buildings were located in the southwest corner of the land. A good share of the land was covered with sagebrush--the little low variety which grows about a foot or two high. The rest of the place originally had buffalo grass or wild bunch grass on it. Along the creek wild rose bushes grew in big thickets. There was only one "tree" on the place--a skinny little diamond willow, maybe eight feet tall, with just a few branches.
Oh, I forgot to mention the rocks! A part of the land was literally covered with a sort of gravel and cobble mixture, although the bottom of the coulee had few rocks, but was covered with a heavy clay gumbo soil. I understand from my scanty knowledge of geology that the land had once been covered by a glacier which had left long ridges of rocks and gravel when it melted. One of those ridges was on our land. Beneath the topsoil and gravel deposits lay hard yellow sand, I don’t know how thick.The hills to the west of our fence line, and one fairly large hill just east of the house, were also glacial deposits of rocks and sand. Some boulders were quite large. We never lacked rocks to throw!
We actually used additional land, whether rented, or just loaned to us, I'm not sure. Just west of our house there was a fenced pasture of about l60 acres which I think belonged to our neighbor to the south, John Goodmanson. We used that pasture for our horses a good share of the time, and sometimes for the milk cows. Then to the north was strip about 2 miles wide, beyond the fenced portions of our land, and running several miles to the east, was what we called ‘open range.’ That is, it was land once farmed by earlier homesteaders, but relinquished for some reason or other. There were no fences remaining, just a few old homesteaders’ shacks here and there. Thus our cows and horses, when not confined to our pasture land, could wander off to their hearts' content, going about 12 miles east and then north clear to Canada, without finding a fence. It offered great possibilities for wandering, but a nice free addition to the needed pasture for the live stock. We were glad to have it available.
Now--the buildings. The original homestead
building was a "shack" about 14'x 16', built to comply with the government ruling that homesteaders must build a dwelling on the land chosen, and live there at least six months of the year for five years, before getting clear title to the land. The building was of very simple frame construction, with absolutely no insulation to keep out the cold. In preparation for winter, an outer covering of tar paper was nailed on, to keep the wind from blowing through. Hence the common name "tar paper shack." Early on Dad added a kitchen, about 10'x 12', in which was located the wood-burning cook stove, table and benches for eating, cupboards, a wash stand, and a trap door giving access to the cellar.
The two rooms had no concrete foundations, but rested on rocks embedded in the soil. The cellar was deep enough that it only rarely allowed frost to get to the canned vegetables, fruit, and raw vegetables stored there. In the spring of the year, Dad also used the cellar as the location for the incubator in which we hatched out dozens of little chicks.
Kitchen added; clothes line, turkeys, sister Mary When I was about three or four years old, Dad bought another homesteader's shack, and with help from neighbors, moved it to our place to attach it to the east side of the house. I can imagine how happy my mother was to have the extra space, as up until then all of us had slept in the original room, which also housed Mother's semi-grand piano, the heating stove, beds and bookcases, etc. The new addition had lots of room, and an attic accessible by stairway. That attic was the bedroom for my brother and me except in the coldest winter weather, when our bed was moved downstairs. More about all this later. The roofs of all three parts of the house were covered with heavy roofing paper over tar paper, and were quite weather proof. Then on the back of the whole structure Dad built a room called the "back room"--small, but helpful, as there was room there for a washing machine, and some storage. This room, which had no heat at all, was also used to store meat, and Mom's great home-made sausage, during the cold winter months. Just outside the "back room" was located a large, round stock tank used for
storing rain water when it was available. Sometimes in the winter it was filled with snow, and provided a deepfreeze for meat.
Directly behind the house, about fifty feet or so, was another very important building--the toilet. Most of our neighbors referred to such buildings as "out-house" or some unprintable title. We were more elegant--it was "toilet" to us. A standard one-holer, with a good tight door, and a few knot holes to give ventilation and some means of seeing what was going on outside, it was a popular place. Discarded mailorder catalogs provided reading material and....(We all hated the "slick" pages! Once in a great while we had the luxury of using apple wrappers from a box of Washington apples.) During warm weather this outdoor facility was no problem, but in the winter time it was a real test of character. Little time was wasted when the frost on the seat might be, and often was, as much as an eighth of an inch thick. Oh, how I hated to have to make that last trip out there before going to bed on a cold night!
Just east of the toilet was our wood pile, which was composed mostly of firewood carefully gathered and hauled home from the woods along Milk River, about ten miles south. But there was also there a modest collection of discards, including, I remember, an old sleigh with fancy curled runners. We never used that sleigh, so far as I know. I don't know how Dad came to have it. Also, of course, we had a chopping block or log, where we chopped up the willow firewood, and a saw horse to hold logs while cutting them with a bucksaw. Dad also had his cold frame right next to the wood pile, at its south edge, used for starting his many tomato, cabbage, and other plants there each spring.
Just a bit east and south of the woodpile was the granary. Compared with granaries on other farms around us, ours was a midget--maybe eight feet square, and only six or eight feet high. It had a good "Dutch" door on its west side, a door which opened in two halves, top and bottom. In the granary were stored such things as oats, shorts and bran (these latter two items were mixed with water to make mash for the chickens), and similar things. There never was very much stored there, as the folks rarely had enough cash to buy very far ahead. Also stored in the granary were old magazines, and sometimes my brother would hide in the granary, to read. He was always a great reader.
On the north side of the granary there was a sort of bench, on which each of us kids had a box for our own collection of "queer stones." We took a lot of interest in watching for special rocks, small pieces of petrified wood, agate, and such. Dad encouraged us to be on the lookout for anything like that. Just to the east of the house, and immediately behind the granary, there rose a fairly sizeable hill--at least it seemed large enough to us kids. It was a glacial deposit, I think, mostly of hard sand with a liberal covering of cobbles and gravel. That hill separated the house from the barn, and was named "Pilot Knob" by my mother, according to my brother, Robert. (My recollection differs here--I thought "Pilot Knob" was the hill to the west of the house. That hill was much higher, and thus better qualified to serve as a landmark.)
Back to the hill between the house and the barn--just behind the granary, and up the hill maybe thirty or forty feet was our smokehouse. This was used for smoking hams and bacon. Dad had built the smokehouse of boards, in a box-like form about three feet square and maybe forty inches high, and covered it with tar paper to keep the smoke in. It had a fairly tight-fitting cover which could be raised to allow us to hang the salted meat on hooks inside, where the smoke would surround it. About twelve feet down the hill from the smoke house was the fire pit. A little trench had been dug from the fire pit to the smoke house, to carry the smoke up to the meat. The trench was covered with slabs of sandstone.
The whole thing worked beautifully--if one of us kept the fire at the right level. We would start a nice little fire in the fire pit, then put on heavy green wood to make a lot of smoke. The fire had to be tended pretty carefully, so that it wouldn't burn too hot, or go out. The meat had to be smoked for quite a few days before it would be completely cured. That smoked ham and bacon was just not to be compared with the hastily cured, unsmoked meats one buys in the stores today. As for the rest of the farm buildings, gardens, and so on, they must wait the next installment.

With what does one start blogging, and why the "odd" title for this blog spot? Perhaps a little explanation is called for. In 1987, while recovering from a nasty heart attack, I used the situation as an excuse to buy a computer so that I could write my life story. I truly surprised myself in what I could remember of my childhood and later years. An expected page or two quickly developed into a sizeable notebook of stories of life on the homestead, of my elementary school years, high school, and on and on. Copies were made for my siblings then living, and my children. In recent months I have dared to allow a few friends to read the homestead stories. Some have strongly encouraged me to have the material published.To get some professional advice about publication, I sent one story to my lovely granddaughter, Ingrid, who had experience a few years ago working as an editor in a publishing company in Boston. She thought the material might be publishable, but said it would be a very expensive process. Instead, she suggested a blog spot on which I could put some of the life stories, thus making them available to others who might be encouraged to look up my blog spot. After talking with her about it, she went ahead and set up my new "cumminglifestory blog spot," and yesterday,on Thanksgiving Day, she introduced me to blogging. Now to begin with a proper entry blog!

Pioneer Material

PIONEER MATERIAL
My birth took place under unusual circumstances! In the evening of June 18th, 1919, a team and wagon, with a man and woman riding in the single spring seat, turned into a fenced yard of a lonely shack in northeastern Montana. They had just returned from the Roy Richter farm, two miles south. There they had left my brother, Robert, and sister, Jean, for the night, as my arrival was expected that night. Word had been sent to the nearest doctor, some fifteen miles away, that his services were needed.
Carefully my father helped my mother down from the high wagon, and then drove the rig down around the hill to the barn. There he unharnessed the team and turned them out to pasture. He hurried back to the house to find a surprise! I was already there! My mother had delivered her third child with no one in attendance! (The doctor, via horse and buggy, arrived about 4AM on the 19th. My father said it was one of the longest nights he could ever recall! Now--what kind of people were these two, who had come out from lush Wisconsin to the prairies of Montana, to start raising a family under these primitive conditions? I'll tell you what I know of them.
Dad was born in July, 1883, and named Ralph Willard Cumming. He had one brother, Archie, who was later to be one of Dad's school teachers. He had two sisters, Mary and Mabel, both of whom became registered nurses. I believe that one or both of them served in France in World War I. Dad's father was John Graham Dawson Cumming, a descendant of a very ancient Scottish clan, the Comyns, mentioned in Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Grandfather Cumming had been a Captain in the Union Army in the Civil War, and later operated a dairy farm with a large herd of Holstein cows. My father grew up on that farm, and learned to love farming there. His mother was an Aplin, from a family which had come to the American colonies before the Revolution.
For some reason, Dad didn't get to go to high school after he finished the first eight grades. He had to wait until he was twenty; then he finished the entire curriculum in two years, and was graduated as head of his class. Sometime after graduating from high school (I'm not sure of the exact years involved) he studied telegraphy, and worked for a year or more as a telegrapher for the Union Pacific Railroad, out in the state of Washington. He was stationed in a little town named Cunningham, in Adams County. That was in 1906. He didn't stay with the railroad very long, but went "exploring" further west. After a short time working in the fruit orchards, he returned to Wisconsin, and went to work in the Hart Parr tractor factory in Waukesha or Milwaukee. That was about 1908. He became so expert that he was given the job of final testing and tuning of the engines before the tractors left the factory. He also was a star pitcher for the factory baseball team. Later he was sent out as field representative of the factory, working on a large wheat farm near Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. That farmer (it seems to me the name was Henley) had a large fleet of Hart Parr tractors. That was a good contact, as after coming to Montana, Dad went back there several summers to help on that big farm, keeping the tractors running--and earning some much-needed cash.
Somewhere in those years in Wisconsin, it must have been about 1907, Dad met my mother, Leola Beth Marsh. She had been born in 1887, in Jamestown, North Dakota. Her father had been a railroad man earlier, but was then living on a farm in Wisconsin. She had one older sister, Ethel, who married a man named Emil Eckert. We always knew her as "Aunt Eckie." Mother also had a brother, Dimmick Waterman Marsh (how we kids loved that solemn sounding name!), known to us as Uncle Dick. Then there was a younger sister, Ora B., who had some sort of birthmark on her right temple. From that she acquired the nickname of Dot, "Aunt Dot" to us children. These aunts and uncles were of extreme importance to us down through the years. The Marsh family was at least comfortably well off. Mom went through high school and teachers college, and became a teacher. She also had extensive training in piano and voice, I believe at the Chicago Conservatory. She was a natural leader, poised, capable, and a thorough lady. Just when Dad and Mom met, I don't know, or the circumstances. I know that they were engaged for about six years, and were well along in their twenties when they married in 1913.
Almost immediately after their wedding, they left home in Wisconsin to become homesteaders in far-off Montana. In those days, particularly from 1910 to 1915, there was a great movement of people from the midwest, and immigrants from the Scandanavian countries of Europe, to the plains of Montana and Wyoming. The government had opened great tracts of land for homesteading. The railroads helped greatly in attracting people to the west, sending fancy railroad cars around, loaded with pictures and actual sheaves of four foot tall wheat, oats, and the like. This sort of crop could be raised on any land, so they said! What they neglected to mention was the need for water in a very dry climate, and that the irrigable lands were already all taken up!
Dad thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime! He knew farming well, and was accustomed to hard work. Mom, despite her more genteel up-bringing, was just as strong and ready for pioneering work. So out they came, by train, stopping at the little town of Glasgow, county seat of Valley County, in northeastern Montana. That county is larger than some of the eastern states! They were quickly taken in hand by some land broker, who took them out on the prairies in a spring wagon, to look for a suitable site to homestead. They finally decided on what looked like a good piece of land, 320 acres, located in Black Coulee, about twenty-five miles from Glasgow as a crow might fly (by road a lot farther!). I can only think that Dad's judgment was colored by the possibility of owning so much land that he didn't see the rocks, the heavy gumbo soil, the dry creek, or the total lack of trees for miles around. Perhaps even more serious, he overlooked the fact that the land had previously been homesteaded, and then abandoned, by a Finnish man. Now the Finns didn't give up easily! All the nearby neighbors to the north and east were also Finnlanders, great neighbors, but nearly all of them were already planning to pull out!
Borrowing a thousand dollars to buy a team, wagon, and essentials, my parents settled down to homesteading. First, they built a shack as required by the homestead law. Then Dad built a dug-out chicken house, and similar barn, also dug into the side of the hill just to the east of the house. The closest available drinkable water was a little over a mile away, so they had to haul all their water in a barrel in the wagon, until Dad could dig a well. There was no electricity, of course, and very little of anything else.
But that is how they started, and that's how I came to be born on that homestead. There never were two more industrious, hard-working, dedicated people than my parents, working in the face of awful hardships and frequent disappointment, to make a home for their family. Truly they were pioneer material!