Almost a Cowboy
Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all-around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy.
Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horsedrawn sickleblade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around - I remember a Massey Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes, partly “just to show off,” Stan said, Les would hitch a single horse to an old steelwheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horsedrawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good.
After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again.
Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.
Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.
But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields.
Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dumprake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.
The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbedwire fence when a horsefly - an attack bomber of an insect - spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my frantic whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine.
I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again. Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbedwire fence in front of my nose.
Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”
One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans.
Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.
I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt.
I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose - "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella" - and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it.
All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.
I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner.
He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.
Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage - and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something!
Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.
Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.
It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":
Last time I seen 'er,
ain't seen 'er since,
she was jackin' off a nigger
through a bobwire fence,
gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,
gonna tie my pecker to a tree.
We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.
"Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way.
We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little spending money out of it.
