FUN AND GAMES
You might get the idea from what I've written so far that we kids on the homestead never had any fun. I've told of chores--those disliked things that had to be done day after day--and going to school, and a little about hunting and trapping. Those latter things were fun, for me. But we really had lots of time for play and doing other things that were fun.
One of the best things about growing up without a lot of the modern conveniences--and money--was that we learned early on to have fun with very simple things. For example, while I was very small, I had a whole stable of horses--stick horses. They didn't have any heads, so didn't need bridles or saddles, but I rode them a lot around the yard, down to the chicken house and barn, and to the gardens. These horses were nothing more than slender willow sticks which I took out of the pile of firewood our Dad brought home for use in the stoves. If I found one that suited my fancy, I would add it to the herd. They weren't very large--maybe an inch in diameter at the head end, and about five or six feet long. I can remember that for a while I seldom went anywhere around the yard without first straddling one of those stick horses. In a way it was better than riding a real horse, because my legs got lots of exercise, and those horses never bucked, except maybe in my imagination.
One of our favorite toys, with which we three older kids played, was the old baby buggy. Our parents had used it as a proper baby buggy for all us kids, and it was kept intact until after my younger sister, Mary, outgrew it. But after that it was just a toy, and we all pushed the thing around, sometimes coasted down mild slopes in it, used it for a doll buggy, and so on.
Then when the body of the thing was in rags and tatters, we took off the wheels and used them for "T and wheels." I'll bet you never heard of that, did you? Our folks must have played with those things when they were small. Our Dad made the "T's" for us, out of lathe (thin, long boards about four feet long, a quarter inch thick, and about an inch and a quarter wide). A piece of the lathe about a foot long was sawed off one end, and nailed firmly at right angles to the longer piece. He used two or three small nails, to make sure the cross-piece would stay attached, and not twist.
With the "T" we would push one of those buggy wheels, sometimes running, and sometimes, when we had become more skilled, just walking. You twisted, or angled the "T" in your hand to make the wheel turn to the right or left. When we had learned how to use them, Robert and I could make those buggy wheels go just about anywhere. I gave up my stick horses then, and nearly always could be seen pushing a baby-buggy wheel ahead of me wherever I was going. I remember sometimes even taking the "T and wheel" when going after the cows, out on the prairie, or keeping the wheel going when bringing a pail of water from the well. We put endless miles on those wheels. At first the wheels had solid rubber tires, but those finally wore off, so that we were "running on the rim" I guess you'ld say. Of course, the soft wood "T's" wore out, too, and we would have to make new ones periodically. We stopped playing with "T and wheels" only when at last all the wheels were worn out or lost.
Then we had spears, made out of willow sticks (yes, taken from the firewood pile again) that Robert and I carried along, throwing at different things, sage brush, thistles, whatever we thought would make a good target. Too often I used to throw my spear at a cow or calf which got out of line when I was herding the bunch. I'm afraid that I was often pretty rough on the livestock, not thinking that I was hurting them.
As I carried my spear, and threw it, I was "Ab the Caveman" all over again, hunting or defending the tribe. It was all quite vivid to me, in my imagination. We had a few old traces of Indians on our land--old tepee rings up in the horse pasture--and a number of Indian stone hammers which Dad had picked up on the land and brought home. Some of those hammers were used for door stops. Then Dad had found a few, a very few, arrow heads, too. All these served to stir my imagination, so that sometimes I was an Indian boy, hunting buffalo or wolves,with my trusty spear.
In the summer of 1923, when I was four years old, our mother's father, Grandpa Marsh, came out for a visit. He was great fun, and seemed to really enjoy our place and being with us. We kids went out on the prairie east of our place with him, gathering buffalo horns, which could be still be found quite easily in the l920's. I remember that he took a bunch of them back to Wisconsin with him when he went home. He planned to scrape them down and polish them, to make souvenirs. I don't know that he ever finished any of them, but that was his plan. The search for them was fun.
On a later visit, about 1925, he also helped us trap prairie dogs in the big "dog town" just south of our place. There were hundreds of these prairie dogs, and we had not had good luck trapping them until Grandpa Marsh came. We had used the little gopher traps, and the prairie dogs were strong enough to pull their legs out of those. Grandpa Marsh, I think, bought us some slightly larger traps which would hold them, and we captured and killed quite a few.
You know, I expect, that prairie dogs were not really dogs. They are large rodents, which live in huge colonies, called prairie dog towns. They were about twice as large as the gophers which were so common. Prairie dogs ate lots of good pasture grass, and sometimes a cow or horse would step in one of their large holes, and break a leg. Nearly everyone having prairie dogs on their land, or nearby, waged war on the little critters, to keep them from spreading out any further. We kids surely hated to see Grandpa Marsh leave to go back to Wisconsin. He died a few years later, and we never saw him again.
One of our fun activities was digging! Now I am thinking of these things, I am sure it was my brother Robert who came up with many of the ideas to try different things. The hill right in front of our house had a few rocks on it, a sort of crust, but the hill itself was mostly just hard yellow sand. It was Robert's idea that we could dig ourselves some holes in that hill. We used shovels and trowels, and each of us, Robert,Jean, and I, staked out our claim, all in a row.
Robert was the fastest digger, by far. He dug a hole about three or four feet square, and went down almost nine feet! That took a lot of digging, and used up quite a bit of our spare time that one summer. My hole was not nearly so deep, but of course I was much smaller than Robert. Jean's and my holes might have been about three or four feet deep. What did we do with them? We simply dug them and left them. I've wondered sometimes what ever happened to those holes, as so far as I know we never filled them in or covered them. Robert's hole would have been a real hazard to cattle!
After Robert started high school, he had other new ideas. On a hill up in the horse pasture north and west of our house, was an outcropping of gypsum, a glassy, nearly transparent stuff which would peel off in thin flakes, something like mica. Robert learned in high school that gypsum (which is, technically, hydrous calcium sulphate) could be heated in the oven until it turned chalky white. Then it could be easily reduced to powder, and that powder, mixed with water, formed plaster of Paris!
So we went into the production of plaster of Paris, and had some fun with that, making casts of different objects, tracks, etc. I wish now we had done more of that, but our interest must have soon died out. The gypsum shelf is still there--I saw it in 1976--and I know cows won't eat it. (Note: David, my son, and I went back there in the summer of 1989, and picked up quite a bit of that gypsum. David took it home with him to show to Danny, his son.)
We didn't get much rain, but when we would get a good shower in the summer time, we kids had fun taking our shoes off and running around bare foot in the sticky mud. We had to be careful, of course, as there were many prickly-pear cactus plants, and sometimes other things which could really hurt. In my chapter on prairie medicine I told of how Robert once stepped on a board with a nail in it, while going barefoot. But that painful experience didn't stop us.
In the springtime, when the snow began to melt, the water would flow down the hill toward the house from the west, and form a little stream which ran along the west side of the house, down in front of the kitchen, and out into the front yard. For a few yards, with the help of a lively imagination, it became a real white water river. I used to spend hours out there, on thawing days, sending a little whittled-out boat two or three inches long down that river, thrilling when it made it around a particularly bad bend, setting it right when it turned turtle, and at the end of the run carefully taking it out and putting it in again at the upper end of the rivulet, to make another run. I have no doubt that this play was instrumental in making me an avid white water canoeist in more recent years. As I've grown older, though, I've sort of lost interest in putting myself in such suspenseful situations, and mostly keep my feet dry. I could enjoy a bank of thawing snow and a little stream again today!
During the winter months we all enjoyed sledding or 'coasting,' as we called it. Our Dad made a little wooden sled, with solid wooden runners with nailed-on steel strips to make it slide easier on the snow. I think he made it chiefly to have a way of carrying his books, food, and other supplies when he went to his rural schools. Often he stayed away from home for a full week, or sometimes two weeks when the weather was bad, batching at the school or in some nearby shack. Whatever, when that sled was at home, we kids used it for coasting. No matter how cold it might be, if there was good snow on the ground, you could find us out coasting part of the day.
The runners slid best on the snow when covered with a thin layer of ice. I can remember taking a can of water outside to where the sled was leaning against the house, and pouring the water down over the bottom edge of the sled runners. With the weather very cold, the water froze instantly into a coating of ice. Of course it wore off rather quickly, and had to be replaced often.
That sled and the many hills around our place gave us hours of fun. Then Robert and I found that the wooden sled wouldn't nearly keep up with the fancy boughten sleds most of the other kids had. The sled the Richter children had was especially beautiful--a Flexible Flyer, about four feet long, with concave steel runners which never needed icing, and a good steering mechanism so one could make it go where he wanted it to.
I suppose we begged a lot for a new sled, and the folks were able to get one. It was recognized as Robert's right from the start. Though it was much smaller than the Richter sled, it could be steered, and we had tremendous times with it. Then when I was about in the fourth grade, the folks gave me a sled of my own, which I kept and used clear up into my high school years! It was not only for coasting, but I used it to carry jack rabbits I shot or snared, and for carrying the mail from the mail box (a mile from our house) home. We used our sleds at school, during recesses and noon hours, then brought them home each night in case we might need them there.
Our usual coasting hill at home was the high one just west of the house. It gave us a nice long run when the snow was good, down through the front gates (barbed wire affairs which could really give a boy a lot of trouble if you didn't duck your head at the right time), and down the road toward the creek. Often the snow would have drifted deep enough that we would slide right between the wires of the fence! I also used to coast on the hill between the house and the barn, and sometimes on the hill in front of the house, where we dug those holes I mentioned earlier. Once when sliding down the hill by the chicken house, which required threading my way under or between the wires of two fences, I didn't manage to duck at quite the right moment, and got a nice long scratch from one of the barbs on the fence. It ran across my forehead, above my right eye, and immediately I began to bleed, with the blood flowing down into my eyes. I thought I was about killed, and I guess when Mom saw the blood she thought so, too. But it was soon mopped up, and I have only a slight scar to show for it today.
Our rural mail carrier, Frank Stack, used a toboggan, pulling it behind his saddle horse in the winter time, to carry the mail sacks. I think our Mom had had some experience with a toboggan when she was a girl, because she often said she wished we had one. I don't know where the money came from, but when I was in the sixth grade, we got one, about six feet long. That opened up a whole new experience in coasting. Three or four could ride the thing at once, and it could be steered a little bit, though not precisely, by pulling on the ropes on either side. Dad also used it sometimes for his treks to his schools, pulling it behind him as he walked cross-country to his school on the South Bench, south of Milk River.
We had a lot of fun with that toboggan, at neighborhood coasting parties, at home, and at school. But along in the winter, about February, I think it was, we had a serious accident with it. We had taken it to school to play with during recess. The snow had drifted into a big high bank in the coulee just west of the school house, with a sharp drop-off which provided a "jump" of maybe four feet. Well, a load of kids, girls, got on the toboggan, with our little sister, Mary, up in front. She sat with her legs hanging out over the front end of the toboggan. Down the hill they went, over the jump, and crashed into the snow bank below, catching one of Mary's legs. Although we didn't realize it for a few minutes, her leg was broken badly, both bones below the knee, and one bone had two breaks. She was crying, of course, but we tried to get her to walk on it, never thinking it might be broken.
Somehow we got her into the school house. Dad was away teaching out south of the river, and Robert was away in high school. Someone got a neighbor, Mr. Carter, to come with a sleigh and team, and he took Mom, Mary, and Jean to Vandalia, where they caught the local passenger train to go to Hinsdale to the doctor. They were gone three days, and during that time I was left alone with the livestock, school, and so on. I was only eleven, and those were lonely days! I never quite trusted the toboggan after that, though we kept it for several years. I liked the sled better, because I could steer it.
We had many other activities on the homestead that were "for fun." I'll try to tell about them in a later posting.

SCHOOL DAYS
As I begin writing on this chapter of my early days, I am reminded again of my first grade teacher, Viola Woodard, later Mrs. Viola James. (She had a long list of names: Viola Verona Hermina Otalia Ratche Woodard, and later, through marriage, she added Richter and then James!) Viola James returned to Richter School when I was in the 7th grade, and continued through the next year also. She was a great teacher! I just learned today (Fall, 1987) that she has passed on, several months ago, of cancer. She was in her eighties. I had last seen her at the graveside service for my younger sister, Mary, who died in l983. Viola James was there, as keen of mind as she was so many years ago.
Unless you, too, were one of those children who were anxious to get started in school, you can hardly imagine how eager I was to begin school. Robert and Jean were in school ahead of me, and that left me more or less alone at home. My little sister, Mary, who was four years younger than I, was too small to be much fun playing with. Each morning, when Mom would allow it, I would walk up the hill in front of our house, and watch Robert and Jean trudge off to school. Again in the afternoon, I would keep close tab on the time, and go to meet them, if the weather was good.
I learned all I could from them at home, and with their help, and my mother's, I learned the alphabet and how to count up to 100 long before I started to school. Mother had taught in high school in Wisconsin, before her marriage, and was fluent in German. So she taught all of us children how to count in German, how to recite the German alphabet, and a few German sayings and expressions when we were very small.
So when the year 1925 finally came around, and I was old enough to begin school, I already knew some of the basics. There were just two of us first graders that year--Vernon Richter and I--so our teacher, Viola Woodard, had a nice small class to work with. I can recall how proud she was of our fast progress in learning to read. We practiced our writing on the blackboard when it was our turn to use the board. And we played a lot outside, too; I think we had more time for play than the other children.
At some point in the year, I think it was the following spring, the County Superintendent of Schools came to visit our school, and I can remember showing off plenty--reading, writing, and rattling off the German stuff I knew. I'm sure she thought we were quite remarkable first graders!
Maybe a few things about the school would be helpful here, in understanding just how important the school was in all our lives. In the chapter on the homestead I have told of the location of the school, a mile and a half by road from our house, or about a mile and a quarter across lots--which was the way we nearly always went when walking.
But mere geographic location can't begin to explain how central the school was in our whole community. The school was quite literally the real center of everything to those who lived for miles around. Not only did we attend classes there during the school year, but there we had our Sunday School, vacation Bible school, and occasional worship services throughout the year, and there we had all sorts of social events. Although I don't recall anything at all about voting, I would guess that voting was done there, too.
There was nothing fancy about the school building itself. It was a wooden frame building with ship-lap exterior walls, and measured about twenty by thirty- four feet, set on a concrete foundation. It had a brick chimney for the big stove which provided heat when we needed it. The building was painted white, with a steep-pitched shingled roof. There were windows on the north, south, and west sides; none on the east. The door faced toward the north, and there was a porch with steps but no railing, perhaps eight feet by six feet, about two feet high.
Immediately behind the school, on the south, was the coal and wood shed. About eighty feet southwest of the building was the barn, which was added when I was in the third grade. It was small, and would house only four horses (or mules). Set out at precise distances, about one hundred feet from the south end of the schoolhouse were the two toilets, one for the girls and the other for boys, separated from each other about eighty feet--a good safe distance. Boys were never allowed to go anywhere near the girl's toilet, under threat of severe penalty. Even when playing ball at recess, if a ball should fall or roll near the girl's toilet, one of the girls had to be asked to bring it back.
The school buildings just described were situated on a fairly level area, with strong barbed wire fences and a lane running east and west in front of the school. The fence closest to the school belonged to the Richter family, on whose land the school was located. That is probably why it was named the Richter School from its beginning. The Roy Richter homestead buildings were about a mile and a quarter southeast of the school. The Richters were very good to all of us, allowing use of the grounds for our school games and other activities. I believe the school building was erected in 1922. My father was the first teacher to conduct school there, and was my brother Robert's first grade teacher in 1922-23.
About one hundred feet to the west of the school buildings there was a fairly steep hill, dropping down about seventy-five yards to a small creek which ran only during the wettest seasons of the year, mainly in the spring. That hill provided us a wonderful slope for coasting in the winter months, as well as a sort of break in the rather flat scenery to the north and east. Inside, coming in the door, one entered what we called the entry way. There were cupboards here for storage of books and materials of various kinds. On either side of the entry room were the cloak rooms, again separated for boys and girls. The communal water pail and dipper were located in the boys room; we all drank out of the same dipper, as was done in those days. On the walls of the cloak rooms were rows of hooks for our wraps, and benches where we sat to put on or take off our overshoes. Also these small rooms, which were only about eight feet long by maybe six feet wide, were sometimes used for classrooms for the older students, and were put to good use for Sunday School classes on Sundays.
Our lunch pails were always stored in the cloak rooms, and lunches would get mighty cold during winter weather, because there was no heat in either of those rooms. Sometimes the teachers would let us bring our lunches in before noon, and put them near the stove to thaw out before lunch time. If we had brought cocoa, as we Cumming kids often did, we could put our pail of cocoa on the top of the stove about fifteen minutes before noon, to heat it. Occasionally when someone (like me, for instance!) forgot to open the lid of the cocoa pail, we would have an explosion, and cocoa spilled over the top of the stove as the heat caused the lid to pop open.
Stepping from the cloak rooms into the main school room, one came first to the teacher's desk, which was centered at the front of the room. All the seats for the children faced toward the teacher's desk. There were blackboards covering the north wall (right behind the teacher's desk) and on the east wall. The big clock hung high on the east wall, to the teacher's left. That old clock had to be wound each week, and this was usually taken care of by the teacher. As I recall, only one teacher allowed one of us boys to wind the clock; that was a choice responsibility which had to be earned by good behavior and reliability. I don't recall ever winding the clock myself, though of course I was a model student!
The huge heating stove was located in the southeast corner of the room. The chimney took quite a bit of space in the center of the south wall. Just to the right of the chimney was the single bookcase, which had four or five shelves, and glass doors, holding the entire school library. The bottom shelf was occupied almost entirely by the set of World Book encyclopedias. Then there was a table for the big unabridged Webster's dictionary, too. Windows on the south and west sides took up most of the wall space. The windows were high, with hooks in the top sash so they could be opened for ventilation. We decorated the lower part of the windows in many different ways according to the different special occasions of the year. The floor was of curly maple, a fine, solid, and smooth floor. The seats, typical school furniture, were not anchored to the floor, but could be moved about according to need. Across the front of the room, in front of the teacher'sdesk, were low benches used for reciting.
Pictures? Oh, yes, we had pictures. Strung along above the blackboards were the pictures of all the presidents, and there was a large portrait of George Washington above all, on the north wall. Also, on the south wall, above the bookcase, was a lovely (I thought) picture of a little girl in sunbonnet, carrying a lunch pail, and accompanied by her big Saint Bernard dog, leaving home for school. The printed legend said "To school well fed on Grapenuts." That was my introduction to Grapenuts, though I didn't know until many years later what they were. I only knew peanuts and filberts and walnuts and Brazil nuts (which we ignorantly called "nigger toes") and I often wondered what Grapenuts were. But it was a nice picture!
There was quite an assortment of desks, with extras stored out in the coal shed. At the beginning of each school year, a lot of time was taken on the first day of school, fitting each student with an appropriate desk. Sometimes desks had to be drawn from the shed, and others taken out. Each teacher did her best (we never had any men teachers while I was going to school there) to make us as comfortable as possible.
The desks were of the ordinary sort, with cast iron frames, probably maple wood for seat, back, and writing surface. Some, I remember, were fairly well scarred by boy whittlers of past years. Some, too, had wads of gum, aged, hard stuff, stuck on the underside of the seats or book storage areas. The writing surface was hinged, and lifted up to allow placing books inside. Each desk had an ink well, and we used them regularly, at least in the upper grades, with stiff steel-pointed pens in holders.
There were few text books. They were furnished by the school, and used year after year. Some would get pretty badly battered after two or three years' use, and we all felt pretty sorry for ourselves at times, having to used tattered or back-less books. A big wall map, with maps of the United States, Montana, and the various continents hung on the wall behind the teacher's desk. How I loved those maps! Even when in the lower grades, I could readily draw a recognizable map of any of the continents from memory, and draw in most of the countries. We all used ruled pencil tablets, and had pencils and erasers of our own, and pen holders. Some of us had our own pencil cases, too, of which we were very proud. There was a pencil sharpener fastened on the window sill at the back of the room, next to the stove. That sharpener got a lot of use, especially on cold winter days when it was mighty cold sitting on the far side of the room away from the stove!
The stove itself was what was known as a circulating heater. It consisted of a big pot-bellied inner stove, set up on legs above the floor, with a large cylinder of embossed steel hung around it, with a space of about twelve or fourteen inches between the "jacket" and the stove proper. The theory was that as the fire heated the air around the inner stove, that air would rise, and fresh air be drawn in from under the jacket, thus creating a circular flow of air throughout the room. It worked quite well, if the fire in the stove was hot enough, and the weather not too cold. But often on very cold winter mornings, when it might be thirty--yes, thirty!--below zero outside, it took a long time to heat the whole room to the point where we could take off our wraps. Sometimes our teacher would have us all marching around the room, still in our coats and caps and mittens, while she played the old victrola, turning the record by hand, as the phonograph, too, would be too cold to run well. The tempo changed a lot, but through that practice I became familiar with some of the grand marches, like "The Jolly Coppersmith" and some of Sousa's marches. We all took it in stride, and actually thought it was fun, and not particularly a hardship. The teacher usually came to school early, walking there as most of us did, to build the fire and get the building warmed.
It is difficult for me, writing this more than sixty years later, to remember many of the details of my early school years. I do recall sitting at my desk, and watching the older children, especially my brother, Robert, recite. That was one of the secrets of the little one-room school: the younger children had plenty of opportunity to watch while the older children were at the board, or to listen to them recite. Early on I became skilled enough in arithmetic and spelling to detect errors made by the older ones, and could hardly contain myself, wiggling around in my seat, and hoping the teacher would ask me for the correct answer, which of course she never did. I think that experience had something to do with my undesirable critical nature--I learned too early to spot errors others made, and to let them know it! If one was observant at all--and I think I was--one could learn a great deal through this setup.
There was another factor working for me, in those early school days. From the time we were very small, our parents, who were both teachers and knew how to help us learn, had instructed us in all sorts of different ways. We learned to count eggs when we gathered them, and measurements from helping with the milking, and so on. So when, in school, I sat and watched the older children in their recitation, I was absorbing a lot of it. I practiced the multiplication tables with Robert and Jean, and knew them thoroughly long before I was expected to, at my grade level. In those days, children memorized the multiplication tables up through the 12's.
As I grew older, sometimes Dad would pose an arithmetic problem to be worked out in my head while milking, or hoeing in the garden. Really, I could do long division, quite complicated addition, multiplication, and even square root problems, without paper and pencil. To this day, I find that I can often do calculations (rather simple ones) faster in my head than many people can do them on paper.
Also, for some reason--probably because our parents were surely among the best educated and versatile people in the community--we Cumming kids had the idea that we were really smarter than the others in school. Teachers seemed to expect more of us, and I think that helped, too, because a person responds generally to the expectations of others. Whatever the reason, I had an easy time in school. I don't recall ever having to do homework while in elementary school, and rarely while in high school. Learning was easy and fun.
I read every book in the school bookcase before I was in the upper grades, and also the small library of books my parents had at home, even books of poetry (my Dad loved the poets). We borrowed books from the neighbors when we could, to supplement what we had at home.
I do recall how our mother used our great interest in reading to get us to read something she thought would be good for us. Whether she bought the books, or they were sent out by well-meaning relatives in Wisconsin, I'm not sure, but she had two volumes--"What a Young Boy Should Know," and "What a Young Girl Should Know." These were the closest we ever came to receiving sex instruction from our parents. Mom had the books, and assigned them to us to read--the boys to read the boy's book, and my sister Jean (our little sister, Mary, was far too young )to read the one for girls. Then Mom said we were not to read the other book--which of course we all did as soon as we could get away with it! It was pretty vague stuff, I remember. We already knew a lot more about sex than Mom ever dreamed we knew. But I'm pretty sure she worked us a little on that, knowing that of course we would read both books!
This blog entry is getting pretty long--I'd better cut it off here and return to this subject (school, not sex) later!

MORE ABOUT LADDIE
While he was still young, Laddie developed a close friendship with Nellie, our sorrel work horse. It was laughable to see those two. When Nellie was not in harness, she and Laddie had wild games of tag, first Laddie chasing and barking at Nellie all the way up into the pasture, with Nellie kicking and snorting and bucking. Then Nellie would turn the tables and chase him for all she was worth, threatening to trample him or bite him. They both loved it, and knew it was all in fun.
When Nellie was in harness, it was a totally different story. Laddie always trotted along on the left, her side of the wagon or hayrach, or sleigh. If the weather was hot, he sometimes trotted in her shade, and lie down almost under her feet when she was standing still. Then she never kicked or stepped on him, but would sometimes reach down and nuzzle him a little with her nose. They were just great pals.
Laddie loved to go out hunting. He finally got to the point where I could just take down the rifle from the wall, or ask him if we should go hunting, and he would get wildly excited. It took a lot of doing, but he also learned not to go off chasing every jackrabbit we saw. He would stand still, and let me get a shot off at the rabbit. Sometimes if the rabbit were a long ways away, I would actually rest my rifle across his back, to steady it, for ONE shot. Laddie didn't believe in second chances--if I missed with that first shot, that rabbit was his to chase. Off he would go, and sometimes he would be able to catch a rabbit which had only been wounded. I know his efforts didn't really help me much in capturing rabbits! When I was really serious about going out to get a jackrabbit or two to skin, or to feed to the chickens, I would leave Laddie at home. How he hated that!
We had Laddie for a long time. In the winter of 1934-35, Dad and I were batching at the Burke place. I was a junior in high school that winter, walking back and forth the two and one-half miles to school morning and night. Mom was working at the postoffice in Hinsdale, and kept a house in town, with our two girls. Robert was at school in Havre, at Northern Montana College that winter, and was only home briefly between quarters at the school.
The old shack at the Burke place was cold, and without Mom there to run the household, Dad and I got in the habit of having Laddie sleep in the house. (Mom had never allowed us to dogs or cats in the house) Laddie really made himself at home. In those days people didn't feed dogs special dog foods, dry or canned. The dog simply ate what was left over when we were through eating, so it was pretty easy, with Laddie in the house, to fall in the habit of letting Laddie lick our plates when we were through eating. Of course, we (usually I) washed those dishes thoroughly afterward, whether they needed it or not. Mom used to get so annoyed with Dad and me when, to tease her, we would tell someone outside the family that Laddie took care of the dishwashing at our place!
That winter was a special one in more than one way. During the cold weather Dad and I slept in the main living room, next to the heating stove. We had a little black female cat, jet black, who regularly slept lying across my neck, and old Laddie would crawl up on the bed in the night and lie on my feet! Between them, they helped a lot to keep me warm! It would get so cold at night, sometimes the water in the pail right beside the stove would freeze solid!
One time when the weather was not so cold, and Robert was home on a break from school, he and Dad took the team and sleigh and went to a place about four miles distant, where lignite coal could be dug out of a shallow vein which was exposed on the side of a hill. I was in school, so couldn't go along to help. They had to remove much soil and rock from the sidehill above the vein of coal, and when that was done, harvest the soft lignite coal, not really very good fuel. But it was free for the asking, and we hauled a lot of coal from that site over the years.
Naturally, Laddie went along with them after the coal, and also, as usual, entertained himself while they worked by looking for rabbits or anything else interesting. When they finally had a few sacks of coal, and were ready to come home, Laddie was nowhere around! They called and called, then decided he must have gone back home by himself. So they came on home--but Laddie was not there, either. We all spent a restless night, wondering about him, and fearing he might have gotten caught in coyote traps, or possibly been poisoned.
Next day Dad and Robert went back to the coal mining area, to look for Laddie, and I went back to school. When I got home that night, I learned they had found Laddie alright, with three feet caught in a setting coyote traps. His feet were terribly swollen, and he couldn't do any more than wag his tail faintly. He was fortunate that the night had not been awfully cold, so his feet weren't frozen too badly.
We nursed that old dog like a baby the next few weeks! Gradually he improved enough to get up and hobble around; most of the time he simply lay by the stove, licking and licking his sore feet. He lost a toe or two, but finally his feet were fully healed, and he was his old lively self again.
We had Laddie with us while living in Hinsdale for my final year of high school, and through the following summer. But that fall, when Jean, Mary, Mom and I moved to Havre so Jean and I could start college, the folks arranged to give him to some friends who lived on a farm about a mile west of Hinsdale, right along the highway. It was terribly hard to say goodbye to Laddie, but in the excitement of going to college, I guess I didn't think too much about it.
After that first year while I was in Havre, attending Northern Montana College, our parents and Mary moved to Glasgow, Montana, about 30 miles east of Hinsdale. In Glasgow they lived in town, so thought it best to leave old Laddie with those friends near Hinsdale.
In the spring of 1938, when I was finishing my second year at NMC, I was singing in the men's double quartet. We went on a trip representing the college, trying to interest young people in coming to Havre when they had finished high school. We sang and talked in the various high schools down the line toward Glasgow, and finally came to Hinsdale.
It was about four in the afternoon when we had finished our program at Hinsdale High School, and were standing near our two cars, parked in front of the school. I happened to look down the old familiar main street of the little town, and noticed a dog coming on a dead run right down the middle of the street toward us. When he was less than a block away I recognized Laddie! He was so excited he nearly bowled me over, and I remember getting down on my knees and hugging him hard! He licked my face, and whined and whimpered and all but talked, as he told me how he had missed me, and how glad he was to see me again after almost two years.
But we had to go on, and reluctantly I got into the car, and we drove away, Laddie following us just as fast as he could. He followed for some distance down the highway, then turned back after looking hard down the road as we drove away. I am sure he couldn't understand why I had left him again. I never saw him after that. A year or two later he was killed on the highway, chasing a car--one of his very bad habits.
Since then, though we have had great cats, and a dog or two, but I have never become so attached to any animals as I was to Laddie and Nellie and other animals we had on the homestead. Those experiences gave me a life-long fondness for animals, and I am glad for that!

NIGHT OF STORM
Scary things happened now and then when we were growing up on the homestead. One of the most terrifying experiences I ever had was in mid-summer of 1929, when my sister Jean and I spent a large part of a night out on the prairie, lost in a violent storm.
It had started out as a typical hot summer day, nothing special about it. The weather had been very dry for weeks, so that our well at home could not provide enough water to satisfy our cattle and horses. Nearly every day we pumped the well dry, and then had to wait several hours for it to refill. As a result of that, we had begun to water our milk cows, which we pastured on the open range to the east of our place, at an old abandoned well about a mile and a half from our place. The well had been dug by one of the early homesteaders who had later abandoned his claim. Our Dad had cleaned out the well, put a new platform over it, and installed a common cistern pump, and a trough and a small tank from which the cattle could drink. So each day, as a part of the chore of bringing the milk cows home, we had to take the bunch up to the old well, pump enough water for them to tank up to their heart's content, and then bring them on home in time for milking. Because the pumping of the water was quite a big job for one youngster, usually two of us would go after the cows.
On this particular day, my older sister, Jean, and I were sent after the cows. We started early enough, walking, and accompanied by our dog, Laddie. Everything went quite normally as we went east to the coulee we called Brush Fork. That was about two miles from home. We looked up and down the coulee from a particular hill we used as a sort of lookout point, and spotted the cows grazing about a half mile to the north. It didn't take long for us to get up there, round them up, and start them toward the well.
Only one thing was a bit worrisome--the cows didn't want to be driven, it seemed, and in the west there was a huge dark cloud rising, already covering the sun. We knew enough about weather signs to judge that we might get an electrical storm that night, but didn't particularly worry about that. We had seen lots of "dry storms" that summer, when the lightning and thunder were very close and noisy, but no or little rain had fallen.
The cows were thirsty, and it took a long while to pump enough water for them. Finally they were ready for the walk home. But now the storm cloud was covering nearly all of the sky, and it was getting dark quickly. We could see lightning off to the west, and there was a strange stillness. The air seemed to be standing still, most unusual out there where there was always a breeze.
We started the cattle toward home, about a mile and a half away, old Laddie helping, and hurried them along, as we hoped to get home before the storm would strike. But it was no use--suddenly the whole bunch of cows hiked their tails up in the air, and began to run back toward Brush Fork. There was nothing we could do to stop them. And then we heard the sound of the wind and rain! It came on us so suddenly, and it became dark so quickly, we had scarcely enough time to grab hold of each other's hand. The rain was icy cold, and dressed as we were in light summer clothing, we soon were shivering. The wind was powerful, blowing right in our faces, from the direction we needed to go to get home.
With the wind, the lightning, and the rain, we were nearly blinded. Our faithful dog had disappeared, whether following the cattle or not, we didn't know. There was absolutely nowhere we could go to get out of the rain.
That must have been about six o'clock in the evening. For the next four hours we wandered around on the treeless, unfenced prairie. In the brief flashes of lightning we could only get a momentary impression of a clump of sagebrush, or a gully. We couldn't see any familiar landmarks. The rain poured down; this was no mere shower; it was a cloudburst! In no time at all the water was standing on the ground, and the gullies and creeks began to flow. Because we knew the storm was coming from the west, we tried to walk south, letting the wind and rain hit the right side of our faces, but even that was difficult and sometimes impossible to do. We just went on and on, not knowing where we were, crossing what by now were sizeable streams running down the little gullies and coulees, sometimes up to our knees in rushing cold water.
I admit that we were frightened, too, by the closeness of the lightning and the loudness of the tremendous thunder claps. Unlike many other storms which we had experienced, it was not over quickly, but continued on and on. At times we would change directions, sure that home lay in this direction, or that. I was only ten years old at that time, and Jean was eleven, but we were equals out there in that stormy night. Though we believed in God, in a general way, I'm sure that we didn't pray. We just kept telling each other that we would get home somehow, and hung on to each other tightly, so we wouldn't get separated. Except for the lightning flashes, it was pitch dark.
After about four hours, and no one knows how many miles we had travelled, a flash of lightning revealed a fence corner, with a pile of rocks, and on the rocks an old abandoned wash tub! Immediately I knew where we were--at the northeast corner of the James place, about a mile and half straight east of our home. I had walked by that corner many times over the years. Now by the light of the lightning flashes, we could follow the James' north fence which ran most of the way toward our home. Unless you have been totally lost at some time, you have no idea what a relief this was to our minds!
But to follow the fence, we had to walk directly into the wind and rain, and that was difficult. Also, that particular stretch of prairie was nearly covered with prickly pear cactus. Not that we hadn't run into any of those earlier, but we surely didn't need any more spines in our poor feet. We were both wearing light shoes, and the cactus spines had easily gone through the sides and soles. We were both literally limping on both feet!
We had gone about a quarter of a mile toward home when we saw a light! It was up on a ridge to the north of us, and we knew it must be our Dad coming out to look for us. We left the fence and turned toward the light, calling at the top of our voices, although there was little chance anyone even a short distance away could have heard us in the wind and rain and thunder. Then the light went out! I remember telling Jean that the wind must have blown out the kerosene lantern Dad had, and that he wouldn't be able to light it again in all that wind.
After calling as loudly as we could several times, and getting no response, we gave up, turned back to the fence, and again worked our way west toward home. About three quarters of a mile from home, we had to go down a steep hill and cross a deep ravine. This ravine drained a large area to the north, and when we got down to the stream we found a real torrent! I was afraid to try to wade across it, but we decided we might get lost again if we tried to work our way up around it. So holding hands tightly, we ventured out. That water was nearly up to my waist! It was very difficult to keep our feet under us, but the stream wasn't wide, and we made it across safely.
Now we had familiar ground ahead of us. We left the fence, walked around the big double-knobbed hill we called Government Hill, and came on down to our east fence. Soon after that, we saw a lantern coming toward us again. Dad had run most of the way home, relit the lantern, and was coming out again to look for us. You can't know how glad we were to see him! He hugged us both so tight, and then led us on to the house. Mom was waiting up for us, dreadfully anxious for fear that we might not be found before morning. She had hot water on the stove, and towels ready to dry us off. Silly, by that time I was thinking I was quite the hero, having found our way home. We told and retold our tale, then finally got to bed about midnight. Laddie, our dog, had come home without us, and that had really worried our parents. As we had guessed, the wind had blown the lantern out on Dad's first try to find us, and though he must have passed within two or three hundred yards of us, he had not been able to hear our shouts.
"All's well that ends well," my Mom used to say. I don't know whether she applied that saying to our experience, but it was true. Neither Jean nor I so much as caught cold from our night out in the storm. The next morning was bright and sunny. The whole earth looked clean and fresh. Dad hitched up the team, and with our milk cans, pails and milking stools in the wagon, we went out to find the cows. We found them alright, about two miles from home, and milked them there on the prairie.