A Summer to Remember

Change in my family was emphasized by Mary’s decision to marry. She had taught two years, forty miles north of Miles City on the Crow Rock road.  She met a fellow, John Pfaff, who was ranching on his families’ place that had been homesteaded in 1913.  They were married in the spring of 1953.   Mary completed her contract and retired from teaching to become a wife and partner on the Crow Rock Ranch.

John was energetic, not afraid of work.  He leased several sections of land from the Bureau of Land Management. He used part of this acreage to raise grain and hay for the heard of cattle that pastured on the ranch.  John was checking the weight of calves to determine the cows he would keep, and  adopted the practice of artificial insemination to introduce new, desirable characteristics into his herd.  As a result he became known for the excellent quality of cattle he sold.  John’s father had died earlier and his mother still lived on the ranch.

Mary was missed around our ranch that summer.  We knew she had established a home of her own and it would never be the life together we had known.  I guess we should have been conditioned to this inevitable outcome by the past summers of work she did at the junior college and Northern Montana summer school.  She and John came by to visit occasionally and we drove out to their ranch a number of times.

The trip to their ranch was an experience.  Several miles from town Crow Rock road left the main highway.  It was all dirt roads from that point on.  There were stretches of road that went straight as an arrow over hill after hill.  You could see for miles and there was an occasional cluster of ranch buildings off some distances to the side.  Eventually the road crested over a rise and descended into a rolling landscape.  The road had just crossed the continual divide where the water run-off on the west side found its way to the Pacific Ocean and on the east side drainage went back to the Mississippi River.  Sighting of deer or antelope was likely on a trip through this country

I remember a visit when Dorothy and I drove out to attend a dance in Mary’s former school house.  When we arrived Mary and John were there, as well as a crowd of neighbors.  In that huge country, neighbors could mean anyone living within fifty miles of you.  All the people were waiting for the band to arrive.  Soon several pickups rolled up in a cloud of dust.  Guys piled out of the vehicles and carried instruments and equipment into the school.  They set up the band in one corner of the room.  The last thing installed was a heavy power cable that stretched from a generator in the back of one of the pickups to the band equipment.  This was a novel way of solving the power demand out in the country without conventional electricity.

Mary had used a second hand Ford car to travel to and from her teaching job during the past two years.  After she married there no longer was a need for it, so she gave it to grandpa to use at the ranch.  That pleased him greatly.  He liked to sit in it and listen to the radio.  It also made the trip to town easier and comfortable.  The green truck was still used when something needed hauling.  I think back on how embarrassed we were as kids to ride through town in the back of the truck.  If it was cold enough to have blankets, we pulled them over our heads while traveling the city streets.

*Taken from "Which Road Should I Follow?, Volume 1, Growing up in the country", an autobiography by Edwin K. Hill.