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!