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.