With James E. Kerns, interviewer.

1 November 1983

James:  Tell me about the twins' birth.  What were the stories that led up to that?

Peggy:  Well, I can tell you the after stories.  I think we were born in the afternoon, and there wasn't a doctor present.

James:  Where were you born?

Peggy:  At the Gay Creek ranch out of Parkman, Wyoming, about 15 miles.  In those days it was by horseback or buggy, and Mrs. Collins (was that her name?) came and stayed with Mother, so she was the midwife, so to speak.  Anyway when the kids all came home from school, here were two little babies, a boy baby and a girl baby.  The kids all knew that their mother was expecting.  Mother was really expecting twins, and she'd made clothes for twins.

James:  She knew she was going to have twins?

Peggy:  Yes, she was thinking that she was going to have twins.  Course, they didn't have examinations in those days before hand.

James:  But nobody else but her was really expecting twins?

Peggy:  Well, I'm sure she hadn't communicated this to the older children, anyway.  So after we were born Jo went all around the neighborhood (that's my older sister), and said that Mother only had clothes for one, so they had a big shower for her.  But anyway when the kids got home from school it was really exciting, and the question of names came up.  What were they going to name them?  Well, John, my oldest brother, had a crush on a girl named Flossie (Florence), so he thought the girl should be named Flossie.  He didn't care what the boy was named just so the girl was named Flossie.  And both Kate and Jo had very exotic names, I can't remember what they were, very fancy names that they were going to give the kids.  Nobody could agree on the names, so Dad said, "We'll just call them Tom and Peg."  So my name officially was Margaret Olive Florence Kerns, for the Flossie.  That got tagged on there.  And Tom was Tom Lorance named for his mother, his middle name, but I don't know where the Tom came from.  Mother's name was Lora,

L-O-R-A, and her middle name was Olive, so my middle name was Olive, Margaret Olive.  Or Peggy Olive, or whatever.  Anyway that's the way the twins were named.  And that was the birth of the twins.

James:  Who was born first?

Peggy:  I was born first.

Tom:  I was the youngest.

James:  By how long?

Peggy:  By 15 minutes.  I always reminded Tom that I was the oldest, so I felt I had certain prerogatives.  I don't know what they were.

James:  It seems there were a lot of stories about the Indians in relation to the twins.  What about the Indians?

Peggy:  Well, twins are a rarity, apparently, among the Indians, and so they were intrigued with the birth of the twins.  So all the Crow Indians, I think from the whole reservation, had to come up and see the twins.

James:  How far away did they live?

Peggy:  Well, our ranch bordered on the Crow Indian Reservation, and Wyola would have been the nearest place—about 15 miles; so the nearest habitation was mostly over wild hills 'til you got down to Wyola, so it was about 15 miles that they would have to come.  And they gave each of us a pair of moccasins.  Those moccasins hung by the fireplace for years and years, and then they disappeared.  Nobody knows what's happened to them.  And I always regretted it, because they were darling little Indian moccasins.  Nobody knows where they went to.

James:  Did the twins ever wear them?

Peggy:  No, they were too little, really, 'cause Indians have smaller feet than white men's feet, and I don't know why; but anyway they were quite tiny, and they were too small for us, I think.

Peggy:  Old Knows His Coups?  Who used to come up to the ranch?

Tom:  Wasn't he going to trade for me, or something?

Peggy:  Uh, huh.

Tom:  I don't remember it.  You can tell it, 'cause I can't remember it.

Peggy:  Well, he wasn't really a chief, Old Knows His Coups.  "Coups" means "scalps."  Heads, I guess, "Knows His Head," or "Knows His Hair," or "Knows His Something," you know—"Knows His Business," so forth.  Anyway, he would come up to the ranch and he was quite taken with Tom, when we were about five or six years old.  He'd always pretend like he wanted to trade for Tom, and Dad was a great teaser, so he'd always go along with him, but we weren't always quite sure whether he was serious or not.  And Dad would say, oh, how many horses would he trade for Tom, you know, and this sort of thing, and they'd bicker back and forth in just fun ways, but we weren't sure but what they were serious.  So it got so I was so upset with Knows His Coups coming up to trade for Tom that whenever I saw him coming I'd get Tom, and we'd go hide in the cave, and the cave was our root cellar.  I stayed down there until I thought he'd gone.

James:  Was that a real cave, or something they dug?

Peggy:  No, they dug it.  It was a root cellar, and it was right close to the house.  How close was it?

Tom:  It wasn't any farther than the shop out there.  (About 50 feet).

Peggy:  But anyway it was where we kept our potatoes, and our onions, and our cabbages, and all those goodies.

James:  Then you'd hide in there until Knows His Coups left?

Peggy:  Yes.  Then we had lots of the Indians would come and stay for dinner.  Old Knows His Coups was a frequent visitor.  And I remember once he was at the dinner table, and Mother had wilted lettuce.  And we passed him the wilted lettuce, and he said, "No likeum horse feed!"  And we kids had been coached by Dad that we were never to laugh at the Indians and never make fun of them, and we'd have to be very serious.  Well, when that happened we all just burst into laughter, and so we all had to leave the table, I remember.  But we frequently had the Indians that came and stayed for meals.  And one of my stories about Indians is at service berry time.  They were usually ripe in August, and usually several wagonloads of Indians would go by the ranch to go up about three miles up closer to the mountains where there was a huge service berry patch.  And they would stay sometimes a whole week picking service berries before they'd go back down to the reservation again.  Well, this particular time they went up, there were two wagons that went up, I think, with old men, women and children, and they came back then that afternoon hurrying their horses along.  And Mother was curious about why they'd come back so soon.  Well, it happened that a mother bear and her two cubs were also on that patch, but neither one was aware of the other.  They were on the north end, and the Indians were on the south end.  It was a huge patch.  I don't know how many acres were in it.  But anyway they gradually met.  The Indians went one direction, and the bears went the other.  Because the Indians have a healthy respect for bears, and particularly a mother bear with cubs.  They know that they can be dangerous.  So they packed up in a hurry and came down the mountain, and went back home, and they didn't come back for several years after that.

Tom:  That service berry patch was right near the old school house.

James:  Tell me about the school house.  How far away was that?  Did you have to walk all that way?

Tom:  Oh, no, we rode horses.

James:  How far?

Tom:  Oh, it was two miles, at least.  And they had a horse barn to put our horses in, but it was just a little, old schoolhouse, kind of like these old ones around here.

James:  Who were your teachers?

Peggy:  Remember the first teacher?

Tom:  No, I don't.

Peggy:  The first grade?

Tom:  Alzoa Park?

Peggy:  Yes!

Tom:  And then we had our sister for a teacher a couple of times.

James:  Which one?

Tom:  Kate and Jo.

Peggy:  See, we were in the first and second grade with Alzoa.  And in the third grade for Jo.  Then we went to Spokane and got put back a grade.  So we were in Spokane two years for the third and fourth grades.  In the fifth grade we went over to Miller's.

Tom:  Oh, yeah.

James:  The Miller's home?

Peggy:  Well, they had a kind of …uh…

Tom:  We went to school in one of the upper rooms in Miller's house, and Miller's hired man was a college fellow, so they hired him for the teacher.  He did a pretty good job.  Wasn't excellent, but I think he was…what was he, an agricultural student somewhere, or something?  I can't remember.

Peggy:  I don't know.

James:  How long was your school year?

Tom:  September to the first of May.  Mother's birthday was the first of May, and I think we were still going to school then, weren't we?

Peggy:  Yeah, we went to school the regular nine months.  Every year.

James:  Where did that one famous teacher fit in?  Tell me that story.  What was her name?

Tom:  Peggy can tell that better.

Peggy:  That was the sixth grade, and that was in the old schoolhouse.  Virgie Shores!

Tom:  She was so terrible she couldn't even get to school until about ten o'clock.  She rode an old horse and just come a pokin' in.  We had to have the fire started and everything, and sit around waitin' for the teacher to arrive.  She had time enough for about one subject a day.  She didn't do a very good job with that subject.  I don't know what the subject was.  She didn't like math, I don't think.

Peggy:  We never had arithmetic.  She never had time for arithmetic.

James:  Is she the one that you tripped?

Tom:  Yeah, I think so.  Peggy will have to tell that story.  I can't remember it at all.

Peggy:  Don't you remember it?  Well, we had those little folding seats, and then the desk ahead, and Tom was a pretty big kid in the sixth grade then.  And he never had enough room for his legs underneath the seat, underneath the desk.  So he put his feet out in the aisles.  And Virgie kept telling him to put his feet back under his desk.  Well, he'd put them back for awhile, and then he'd stick them out again.  So then one day she came over and stood on top of both his feet, so he pulled them back real fast.  And Virgie went down on the floor!  And she got up crying.  She was mad.  She went out and got a willow switch, about 10 inches long, and very thin, and so she switched Tom, and she was crying all the while she was switching him, and Tom was laughing, and the rest of us were laughing.  It was funny.  But Virgie taught us that you put horse hairs in water, and they would turn to snakes.  Now Virgie was hired by the president of our school board, Mr. Hoagland, who was our neighbor.  And he was fascinated with her long, black, flossy hair.  And in those days teachers could teach right out of high school.  And she was just right out of high school without any special training whatsoever.  Our dad began to suspect we weren't getting an education, so he used to ask me almost every day what we had in arithmetic, and I'd make up things because I was feeling a little sorry for Virgie, and then I'd think he wasn't really believing me, so he got where he was a frequent visitor to the school.

Tom:  He never got rid of her.

Peggy:  No, but she had a boyfriend, Byron.

Tom:  Yeah, she married him, and had 10 children, or something like that.

Peggy:  10 or 12 children, uh huh.

James:  She only taught the one year?

Peggy:  Yeah, but she stayed with the Holly family, and they had a little girl, and the little girl always got to school ahead of her, 'cause Virgie, to ride her horse to school, wore those black bloomers they wore in the old days with a white midi blouse and an old hat that came down so she had to kind of look up to see.  We could always see her on that old horse plugging down the hill.  Of course as Tom said, we'd gotten in the wood and we had gotten the water in—we had to carry the water from the creek for the school, and we were sitting there waiting for Virgie to get there.  And here was her old horse plugging down the hill, one, old, slow step at a time.

James:  How many kids attended the school?

Tom:  Well, I think there were Peggy and I and Carl Hogan…

Peggy:  And Stella Holly.

Tom:  And Stella Holly.  I think there were four of us.

Peggy:  For that particular school.

James:  What kind of recess activities did you indulge in at school?  What did you play when you went out to recess?

Peggy:  Well, for one thing we got our horses up, and we wouldn't put saddles on them, and we'd ride up close to each other and then change horses real fast.

James:  Without touching the ground?

Peggy:  Yes.  Remember that, Tom?

Tom:  No.

Peggy:  Well, once I fell off when I was trying to change over.

James:  Were the horses running?

Peggy:  Yes!  They had to be running.  You couldn't have a horse standing still, and change horses!

James:  And you fell off?

Peggy:  Fell off, and I remember I hurt my hip quite badly.

Tom:  You have a lot better memory than I have.  I just don't remember things like that.

James:  Well, didn't you go out and play mumbley peg or something?

Tom:  Oh yeah, we played mumbley peg, and fox and goose when it snowed…I can't remember.

Peggy:  Well, when it was real cold, we didn't go out for recess.

James:  How cold did it get in Wyoming?

Tom:  It would seldom get down to 40 below.  Then you would have Chinooks, and it would be real nice.  The snow would go off.  It would just have spells like here, only it was probably 10 degrees colder when it got cold.

James:  Did you go to school in spite of the real cold weather?

Tom:  Most of the time.

Peggy:  Well, remember when we stayed at the schoolhouse for a week?  That's when Kate was teaching.  And we stayed over there at the school and she cooked for us, a whole bunch of us. 'Cause…uh…

Tom:  It was too cold?

Peggy:  Uh-huh.

Tom:  What did she do about…there wasn't a phone or anything.  Well…

Peggy:  Well…so?

Tom:  So the folks would know.

Peggy:  Know what?

Tom:  Whether we were staying there or not?

Peggy:  Oh, this was planned in advance. I remember when Kate was teaching we were in the seventh and eighth grade then together.  And we took two grades in one when Kate was teaching.  But we went over and stayed for a week, and this was prepared in advance because we had to bring all of our food and everything ahead of time.  We didn’t have any food at the school.

James:  How did you sleep?

Peggy:  We had some cots and rolled up bedding, I think.

Tom:  Humm.  I don't remember.

James:  How deep did the snow get?

Tom:  Oh, there were some winters it got a foot and a half.  Never got real deep.

Peggy:  I always rode Ned, and I can remember Tom, Jack and Bert would ride ahead on the bigger horses. And poor little Ned had kind of short legs, and he tried to get in the same footsteps as the other horses, and he didn't always make it.  Ha…Ha…

Tom:  You had to break a new trail, huh?

James:  Now didn't you do some trapping on the way to school, too?

Tom:  Oh that's what I can remember best of all.  I loved to trap…loved to go out and find where a skunk denned, and set traps in front of the skunk dens.  And then I trapped for muskrats.  There's lots of ponds there, and they were just full of muskrats.  And I trapped them.  A good muskrat skin would bring about a dollar.  A skunk skin would bring a couple dollars.

James:  What would they do with skunk skins?

Peggy:  They make coats out of them.

James:  Did you ever get skunked?

Tom:  Oh, yeah, I probably smelled like skunk sometimes.  I'd even skin 'em.  You have to be careful skinning 'em.  Skinning around the skunk glands.  It was fun.

James:  What about coyotes, didn't you trap them too?

Tom:  Oh, yeah, I trapped coyotes.  I didn't catch too many, but whenever there was a cow died or anything, I'd drag it up into a brush patch up on the hill, and then set the traps around it.

Peggy:  Bert was always a good coyote tracker.

Tom:  He was a pretty good coyote tracker.

James:  What was a coyote pelt worth?

Tom:  About five dollars.

James:  Well, let's back up to your early childhood.  You need to tell the story about the snake under the wheelbarrow, and the beehives.

Peggy:  I don't know about the snake under the wheelbarrow.

Tom:  Oh, there was this story that we were told about us.  I was playing on the wheelbarrow and mother come a running out 'cause there was a rattlesnake right underneath the wheelbarrow.  I think she killed that rattlesnake herself.

James:  Well, didn't you tell a story about a rattlesnake?  Maybe it was…

Peggy:  This was, yes, this was when I was older.  In the summer we had an old hen that nested in a shed near the house, and it was very dark in there.  And I was out gathering the eggs, and I used to just reach in there when the old hen was there, sometimes she was still sitting on the nest.  And something made me think, it looked darker than usual because I couldn't see the white of the eggs.  So I pulled my hand back and looked down the nest.  And here was a rattlesnake, coiled around, looking at me, just waiting...

James:  Oh my!

Peggy:  …until I got close enough.  Ha…Ha… Well mother and I were alone at the ranch, so I yelled for her, and she brought out all the shovels and the hoes and everything she could find, and we chopped that snake's head off.  He didn't leave.  He stayed right there in that nest. And we chopped his head off.  Then when the boys came home they skinned him, and…how long is that?

James:  Almost three feet.  That's three feet.

Peggy:  Well, that was what was left, 'cause I had that skin for years.  Then some gal in college wanted it and I gave it to her quite gratefully.  I was glad to get rid of it frankly.

James:  Wow! Well, what about the beehives?

Peggy:  You tell him.

Tom:  I can't remember it.

Peggy:  Well, I don't remember it either, just what was told to us.

Tom:  Well, they had some beehives down what they called a slue, right there near the house.  We'd go down there and play, and we went down there and beat on these beehives 'cause they made a nice sound, and the bees came a swarming out.  We'd get stung as we were lying there.  You have to finish that.  I can't remember anything at all.

Peggy:  Well, the story was they found us unconscious, and mother pulled out a hundred, at least a hundred, stings out of each one of us.  And we'd gone to sleep with all of those stings in us.  And when we woke up we were just as good as new.  But, though, I can still remember the sound when we'd drum on those beehives with sticks, and they made a nice drumming, resounding sound, I remember.  I can remember that part of it.

Tom:  Must of scared our mother and folks to death, didn't it?

James:  Well, how about the story of Dad hammering the nails in the ends of the boards?

Peggy:  Oh, yes.  This was told to me by George Brown. He was the carpenter that built the "new ranch house," if you can call it that.  I think this must have been about 1915, so we must've been about five years old.  Anyway, there were always these big piles of lumber.  I can remember the piles of lumber.  Do you remember them?  Anyway, George Brown told me the story. He said all the two-by-fours had nails in the ends of them where Tom had pounded the nails in.  George Brown built an addition to our house in Hardin (Montana), so he told me this story many years later.

James:  Was he adding on to the existing house?

Peggy:  At the ranch house, you mean?

James:  What was he building?

Tom:  He was adding on.  They built almost a main addition onto it.

Peggy:  Well, there were two log cabins originally, and the new addition was an upstairs and a downstairs, a great, big living room with a fireplace, and three bedrooms upstairs, and the kitchen was part of the new building, and a basement.  In the old building was the back porch, the dining room, and what we used to call our sitting room, and then that bedroom…on the back they were originally logs…And Jo's story about the old house was that they used to hear these whirring sounds in one of the old rooms.  They'd go in there and there was an old baby buggy in there, and they didn't see anything.  This would only happen at night.  They'd hear some whirring sounds in this room.  So, of course, the girls decided this was a haunted room.  Then finally they went in there, and here was a little mouse, and he would go 'round and 'round and 'round on the wheel, and make this whirring sound, and when they'd bring the lamp in there and look around, of course, he'd stop.  So they solved the question of the haunted house.  He was running around on the wheel, just having a ball.  That was Jo's story.  It's a little hard for me to believe, but that was her story.

Tom:  Well, you see in circuses animals doing that.

Peggy:  But not mice, do they?

Tom:  Not mice, but squirrels!

James:  Well, I seem to remember something about Dad getting upset and going out and lying on a horse's back and going to sleep or something.  What was that all about?

Tom:  Oh, I was ornery at school or something.  I don't know what Jo did, but anyway I walked home…

James:  Jo was your teacher?

Tom:  Jo was the teacher.  I was afraid I'd catch it from Dad, so I just went down and laid on the back of old Topsy, an old gray mare.  I stayed there until they came and got me.

James:  But you were actually asleep on the horse's back?

Tom:  Oh, she was easy to sleep on. You could just lay there on top of her, a great, big, old Percheron.

James:  A big, old work horse, huh?

Tom:  Uh, huh.  A nice, old mare.

James:  You rode a work horse to school?

Tom:  No!  No!  She was one of the feed horses, for feeding the cattle.

James:  You went home from school, then, and climbed up on her back.

Tom:  Old Topsy was our stacker horse, too.  We always had a horse to pull the load up to run the stacker with.  That's what we started out doing as kids.  I led her, and then Peggy led her when I graduated to a buck rake.  I think buck raking was about as far as we'd go.

Peggy:  What about the stacker?

Tom:  Up on top of the stack?  Well, an older brother always did that.

James:  Didn't they get snakes dumped on them sometimes?

Tom:  Well, sometimes there'd be a snake in the dump.  They'd say, "I think there's a snake in this load!"

Peggy:  John was scared to death of snakes.  If you said there's a snake, he'd say, "Goodbye, I've had it for today," and get off the stack and go to the house.

Tom:  It was a way to get to quit early, just say there's a snake in this buck load.

Peggy:  I think we ought to tell about old Spot.  Spot was kind of our wrangle horse.  We kept him in the yard, and he only had one eye.  He was very ancient when we were young.  He was very stiff, but he would not move if the kids were playing around him.  And Tom and I used to climb up his tail.  When he'd put his head down to eat, we'd climb up on his neck, then he'd lift his head slowly up, and we'd get on his back that way.  We'd climb around his legs, and Spot would not move a muscle while we were playing around him, even when we were tiny, little kids.  Then Mother would put a saddle on him.  She'd have two jugs, one of lemonade and one of water, one on each side hanging on the saddle horn, and Tom would be riding in front, of course, and I'd be riding in back, so we had to go out first to Dad, who was on the mower, and then to all the other men that were working in the hay, to give them some fresh water and lemonade to drink.  And old Spot must have been past 20 then.  He was an old horse, 'cause we used to have to beat his sides, and we'd have to take turns with our little heels, 'cause he wouldn't move unless we did; so we beat and beat on his sides with our legs going as hard as they could to get old Spot to move, and he'd never get to a trot, just a slow, old walk.

James:  If you quit kicking him he'd stop.

Peggy:  He'd stop, yes!

James:  You must have been exhausted!

Tom:  I think the story about his one eye…He was awfully hard to catch.  You'd have to corner him, and he'd just know how to whirl and take off.  Somebody threw a rock, and hit him in the eye.

3 November 1983

James:  Why don't you tell us about Ned, Peggy?

Peggy:  Well, Ned was given to Jack by our grandfather Cooley at the same time Pinto was given to Bert.  This was probably when we were one or two years old, and Jack was about five.  Both of them were pinto horses, and Ned, I think, was part Shetland.  He may have been a little bit Arabian because he had this convex nose like Arabian horses have.  Anyway he was short-legged and round, and he was the favorite of Mother, Jo, and Kate.  He was Jack's horse, and I guess he was your horse, wasn't he, Tom, at one point?

Tom:  Well, I rode him for a while.

Peggy:  And he was my horse.  He was very gentle in many ways, but he was a typical kids' horse.  He was gentle in that he would stand very quietly while you got on him, until he felt your weight on the stirrup, then he would turn gently to the left to help you get in the saddle.  He'd never move out fast until he knew that you were settled.  But he loved to run—oh, how he loved to run, and he would win in races, not because he was fast, but just because of sheer grit.  He just wanted to win.  He was always the lead horse on a trail because he could never bear to be in the back.  He was not afraid of anything.  Jack used to shoot his rifle over his ears, and Ned would stand very quietly and let him do that, and he would go any place.  I think he would have walked on a log if you'd have asked him to.  Very sure footed, he never fell.  But he was ornery with new people—with all the people who came out from town who didn't know how to ride.  They always wanted to ride Ned because he seemed like such a beautifully disciplined horse.  As soon as anybody got on him who didn't know how to ride, or didn't know about horses, he would pull his stunts.  Like he'd get to a little, tiny ditch and he'd pretend like it was a great, grand canyon, and he'd LEAP over it, or a little pebble, oh, he'd be scared to death of it, and he'd snort and shy.

James:  He wouldn't do that with the family?

Peggy:  Oh, no, not with the family.  And a bridge!  Oh, he wouldn't think of crossing a bridge.  He'd stop real short at the bridge, and rear back and look at that bridge like he didn't want to cross it.  Then he would race across it like mad.  I remember there were some women out from Sheridan that came to visit us.  We took them for a ride.  This one girl had never ridden before, and she wanted to ride Ned.  She had a rough time that whole trip.  He was as ornery as can be.  The grand finale was that we had these little ponds on the place, and Ned loved to eat the grass at the bottom of the ponds.  He'd pretend that he was awful thirsty.  He'd put his head down clear up to his eyes, and eat the grass, while he was holding his breath, off the bottom of the pond.  Well, she was in the pond with Ned, and he was pretending like he was thirsty and was eating the grass.  She got so mad at him that she started to whip him.  So he just lay right down in the pond with her!

We all had our favorite Ned stories.  Mother's favorite was when she got older, she always rode Ned.  We'd gone fishing.  We had to come up a very steep mountain beyond the schoolhouse.  It had a very steep canyon, and his saddle kept slipping back, so Mother got off and started to walk up.  She was leading Ned, and she wasn't going fast enough for him, so he put his nose right under her shoulder blade—under her arm—and pushed her up the hill.  She almost fell down, he pushed so hard.

And Jack's favorite story was that Ned loved to take off his bridle.  He could do it, but he'd never run away, so you always had to have a throat latch on him, because he'd take off his bridles and stand quietly, wherever he was.  Jack came out once and Ned did not have on his bridle, did not have on his saddle—and the saddle was over here.  The cinch was still intact, and how Ned got out of his saddle… I never quite believed that story, but Jack always told it for gospel truth.  Ned could also open up wire gates with his ears.  He'd work them with his ears until he could get the gate open.  Then he would step gingerly over the gate to the other side, just to let you know he could do it.  And he would never run away.  You could always catch him, but he'd let you know that he could always open a gate and get through.

So Ned was one of the favorite horses of the whole family, really.  We all claimed him, except John never claimed him, and Bert never claimed him, and Dad never claimed him.

James:  Do you have any Ned stories, Dad?

Tom:  Oh, I can remember we used him as a pack horse once.  He'd go between trees just to rub that pack saddle off.  He'd pick two narrow trees, go right between them, and just figured that out.  He was smarter than the average horse.

James:  How about Spud?  Who was Spud?

Peggy:  Well, Spud was the son of Topsy, and she was our main work horse.  He was thoroughly spoiled, and ornery, and mean.  He would run away.  He was a big horse, so he could control the team.  I guess he ran away with Dad once on the mowing machine, or was it Jack, I don't remember; anyway the other horse always got chopped up, but Spud was never hurt.  Spud's final moment was when my oldest brother, John, took him up to the mountains.  He was hauling logs to build a log cabin.  It was quite a narrow road, more like a trail.  I think he had a four-horse team carrying these logs up the mountain to build this log cabin.  Spud got where he didn't want to pull, so he didn't sit down, but he just didn't do anything, and the other horses got frantic and the whole wagon went over the mountain.  All three horses were killed—except Spud—didn't have a scratch.  John was so mad at him, he shot him.  He'd had it with Spud.

Tom:  Well, Spud was spoiled when he was young.  I remember we used to put things on him when his mother was a stacker horse.  We just spoiled him.

Peggy:  You let him take your hats off, and nibble on your straw hats.

Tom:  Uh, huh, we played with him and everything.

James:  He was just kind of a pet?

Tom:  Yeah, he was just a pet.

James:  Tell me about the Indian and the firewater, Dad.

Tom:  It was a story of Mother's.  The Indians came one time while she was alone.  I guess she was in the cellar—the cave, we called it.  The Indian wanted firewater.  The Indian said, "If you don't give me firewater, you know what we do to women!"  So she pointed to the vinegar jug.  The Indian went over there and took a swig of it and just tore out of there.

Peggy:  He didn't like the Kerns firewater.

James:  Didn't Mom used to tell about hired men and vanilla, or something?

Peggy:  Oh, that was Jack Dellhart, our neighbor.  He was an alcoholic.  He lived about a mile and a half from our ranch.  Every now and then when he was desperate for a drink, he would go around the neighborhood and ask for vanilla.  His wife wanted to bake a cake, and she didn't have any.  Well, he came over to our place once and asked Mother for some vanilla so his wife could bake a cake, and Mother only had a little bit left in the bottle, so she was putting it in another bottle by teaspoonfuls, and he looked very concerned and said:  "Oh, she wants to bake all sorts of cakes!

James:  What about Tom and his .22 shells?

Peggy:  Well, Tom had his little .22 rifle.  He doesn't like this story.  He had very few shells, and so he was very conservative with his shells.  He would only use not more than two at the most.  If he couldn't get something in two shots, he wouldn't try any more.  It used to be the joke, any hunters that would come out to the ranch would bring their game up to the porch to show off, and Tom would always ask them how many shots they used.  That used to be the joke:  How many shots did you use?  Well, one Christmas Dad got not only one small box of .22 shells, he got a whole carton.  We always had these itinerant cowboys and single men that lived around the neighborhood, and they always spent Christmas with us. Before they came in the house, Dad gave them each a box of shells and told them to present it to Tom.  On the Christmas tree there was just one box of .22 shells, and Tom was so thrilled just to get one box.  And then Dad quietly gave all the rest of us a box, and suggested we give Tom shells throughout the day.  Well, you never saw a kid whose eyes got bigger and bigger, and he just couldn't believe all those .22 shells that he received.  That was the Christmas of Christmases for Tom.

James:  Tell me about your Christmases.  How did your family spend Christmas?  What was your best Christmas, Dad?

Tom:  I remember we always hung our stockings up on the fireplace mantel.  One Christmas I remember Bert had got a puppy somewhere.  He put that puppy in a stocking.  The puppy had its head sticking up out of there.  Remember that?  That dog turned out to be an egg suckin' dog!  It was an old hound dog.

Peggy:  Bert always got the Christmas trees when we were young.  We always did that Christmas Eve—put up the Christmas tree.  Remember those old fashioned decorations we had up in the attic?  And we'd string popcorn.  We didn't have expensive things like cranberries.  We had these old fashioned Christmas tree decorations that would probably be worth a fortune today, if we still had them, that we'd hang up on the tree.  We always did our shopping at Sears and Roebuck.  Of course we lived 15 miles from Parkman, the nearest town, and three or four days before Christmas (Dad) would take a pack horse, and go to town to get all the presents we'd ordered through Sears and Roebuck.  He was like Santa Claus coming back when we'd see him, but of course we couldn't open anything.  We got mostly books.

Tom:  I can remember, there used to be a page in Sears and Roebuck or Monkey Ward (Montgomery Ward) that was a "penny page!"  Can you remember that?  You could buy things for a penny?!!

Peggy:  I remember the big decision was that we had 25 cents to spend for Christmas, and we had to decide whether to get two yellow pencils for Dad or two red pencils.  Oh, that was a big decision—a very grave decision.

James:  You mentioned the egg suckin' hound.  What special measures did your mother have to go through to take care of the egg suckin' hound?

Tom:  Well, she used to take an egg (or maybe it was Bert) and blow all the stuff out of it, and mix red pepper with it, and then put it back in the egg, and that dog would eat that red pepper!

James:  It didn't cure him?

Tom:  No, it didn't cure him.  Can you remember that?

Peggy:  Yeah, we even tried horse radish, too.

Tom:  We'd put a hole in each end, and blow it out.  I don't remember how we got it back in there.  She used to stand outdoors drooling—whenever you opened the door, she wanted something to eat.  We never had dog food.  We just fed her extra pancakes and things.  One time we went down to the barn, and she had 13 little puppies.  I don't know what we did with all those 13 little puppies.

Peggy:  Our mother never liked dogs around the place.

Tom:  Well, I don't blame her.  She was useless.  Absolutely useless.

James:  Did the family ever have any special dog that occupies a place in your hearts?

Peggy:  Well, little Tippi.  Let's see, he was killed by a rattlesnake.  All us kids—Jack and Tom and Peggy and Bert were going down this trail.  Jack was in the lead, and Tippy was ahead of him—no Tippy was following, and a rattlesnake was on the path and Tippy jumped out ahead and got the bite that would have been for my brother Jack.  And he died from that rattlesnake bite.  We carried him up to the house.  He lived for a couple of days, and that was all.

Tom:  There were Bert, Jack, you and I—was Kate along?  I don't know what we were doing walking down the creek—I remember that path, going through the brush.  We'd wandered down through the brush.

James:  Well, what about your mother's meals?  How'd she go shopping?  What about her cooking?

Peggy:  Well, we did most of our shopping, as you can call it, from Montgomery Ward.  They had a large food (selection) of canned stuff, and dried codfish.  Remember the dried codfish?  And prunes.  So we didn't have grocery shopping.

Tom:  Dad would go to town in the fall with his wagon and get a load of flour and sugar and all that stuff, and we'd live on it in the wintertime.

James:  That would last all winter?

Tom:  Oh, yeah, they'd butcher a cow.

Peggy:  We had very little meat in the summer because we didn't have refrigeration.  So we ate mostly chicken and canned salmon, and that sort of thing.  Salmon was cheap in those days.  And in the winter we had the fresh beef.

James:  How did you keep the meat in the wintertime?  Hang it up out in the shed?

Peggy:  Yes.  We hung it up out on the back porch mostly.  Our typical washday meal was creamed codfish and boiled potatoes.  We had to soak the codfish.  It was very salty.  It came in little boxes.  Remember those codfish boxes—made out of wood?  Heidi and Amy would love those boxes.  They were beautifully made.  Then we put down pork.

Tom:  Yeah, they had lots of pork.

Peggy:  We put it down in a brine.

James:  You raised your own pigs?

Peggy:  We never had very many pigs, but we must have had some.

Tom:  I think we got a couple every year just for that purpose.

Peggy:  Dad would always have to go down near Wyola to get his coal.  We had to lay in a supply of coal for the winter.  That was a chore.

James:  Did you burn any wood, or just coal?

Peggy:  In summer we burned wood.

James:  Because your mother had to cook.

Peggy:  Uh, huh, but in the wintertime it was mostly wood and coal for the cookstove.  Mother never asked the boys to get in any wood, so it was always up to me to rustle up the wood wherever I could.  We did have a woodpile.  Do you remember chopping wood?

Tom:  I remember the woodpile.  Seems like we always got willow wood.  We'd go down and cut the dead willow wood out and cut it up in stovewood lengths with an ax.

James:  Did you have any forests nearby?  How far away were the mountains?

Tom:  About three miles.  The Pine Hills were right on the place.  It just had some scrub pine on it.

James:  What mountains were they?

Tom:  The Bighorn Mountains.

James:  Did you run cattle in the Bighorn Mountains?

Tom:  Oh, yes, that was one of the joys of life to go up there to look at the cattle in the Bighorns.

Peggy:  Well, every spring… when did we send them up—was it the first part of June, or was it May?  I think school was usually out.

Tom:  It was about June 15th, I think, when the mountain permit started.

Peggy:  And we'd be up by 4 o'clock in the morning.  This was one of Ned and My's chores.  I don't know why they bothered with me, because Ned could have done it himself.  We had to get the cows out of the brush.  These were these hawthorn bushes that had stickers on them, and the cows loved to get in there in the early evening, so in the early morning we had to get them out for the roundup.  Ned and my chore was to get the cows out of the brush, and I remember I'd get as flat as I could on his back before we got into the brush, and he'd get all the cows out.  I don't know why they bothered with me.  It would take all day, until about 2 o'clock in the afternoon to get the cows up on the mountain.

Tom:  It was always a big source of worry, getting them up there early because larkspur came on.  They'd always lose some cattle to larkspur.

James:  Was it the short type, or tall?

Tom:  It was the short type.  Some meadows would be just purple with larkspur.  After about the first of July or later, the larkspur wouldn't be so bad then.  It was just when it was in bloom was the worst time.

James:  Could they wait until after the bloom?

Tom:  Well, I don't know.  The cows loved to go to the mountains.  About the first hot day they wanted to take off and go to the mountains.

James:  When did you bring them back?

Tom:  They generally came back on their own with the first snow.  Sometimes they'd have to go up to gather them, but they'd come down on their own.

James:  How big an area did they cover in the mountains?

Tom:  Oh, it was a range about five miles long and a mile wide.

James:  Fenced?

Tom:  Well, it had some natural boundaries.  It had a fence on the upper end and another one on the lower end.

Peggy:  This was Forest Service land.

James:  How many cattle did you run?

Tom:  Dad had a permit for about 210 head of cows.

James:  They were Herefords, I suppose?

Tom:  Uh, huh, they were all Herefords.  Everybody liked Herefords and Shorthorns then.  There weren't any Angus at all.

James:  Were they good calves?  How did they compare with today's cattle?

Tom:  I think a 350-pound calf was a big calf then.  They're twice as big now.  A yearling steer was about 650.  I remember Dad kept steers until they were two-year-olds.  He did that quite a number of times to get them up around 900 pounds.  He thought he was doing real well if he could get about 10 cents a pound for them.

Peggy:  Tell about shipping to Chicago.

Tom:  Well, that was always a big event—to ship to Chicago.  They would load up at Parkman.

Peggy:  We had to trail them to Parkman, 15 miles.

Tom:  They had to ship two carloads, and you'd get a free trip then, there and back.  One carload would just get you there and wouldn't get you back, and you'd have to pay your own way back.  I don't know the purpose of going, particularly, but you always had to go and see your cattle sold.  You always signed them to a commission company, and they would sell them.

James:  Did you ever go to Chicago?

Tom:  Oh, yes, a couple of times.  After I came back and ran the ranch a year or two, I shipped that way.

James:  How long did that trip take?

Tom:  It took about three days, I think, to get to Chicago with the cattle, and about a day and a half or two days to come back again.

James:  Would they stop along the way and let the cattle get water?

Tom:  Yes, I think the law was a day and a half or something like that, that they could be on the road without feed or water, then they had to stop and be fed and watered.

James:  I think you told me once about the train going up a switchback or something, and one of your brothers jumping off and running to catch the train at the next switchback?

Tom:  That was John.  He bet some of the others that when he was going on a trip that he could go up this switchback and catch the train.  It was going up a hill, and was going slow.  He got off, and ran up there, 'cause it was going real slow, and by the time he got up there he was all played out, and reached to grab the thing, and just missed it.  So he had to have the passenger train pick him up.  He thumbed it down some way or another.

Peggy:  Where would those switchbacks be?

Tom:  In Nebraska somewhere.

James:  Was that on the way to Chicago or back?

Tom:  It was on the way to Chicago.

James:  Tell me about washday, Peggy.  Was that some special day of the week?

Peggy:  Well, it was about once a month.  See our water was very, very hard.  Mother had to break it with lye.  It was usually Bert who brought up water from the creek, and it was not very clear water, so we had to let it settle, and put it on the back of the stove.  Then you had to soak the clothes for hours, and use the old scrub boards, and then hang the clothes on the line.  I remember having to hang the clothes out in the wintertime when the sheets would freeze before you got them on the line.  Your hands would be numb with cold.  We didn't get a so-called automatic washing machine until we were ten or eleven years old.  We had a gasoline pump in the old pump house that ran the washing machine.  That was a pain to run.

James:  Did all of you girls have to help out with the washing?

Peggy:  Well, Kate and Jo were a good 10-12 years older than we were, so they were gone out of the home.  No, I think I helped with the washing, and I think Bert brought the water up.  And I had to hang the clothes out.  I don't think the boys ever had to do that.

Tom:  Well, I think the washhouse was down by the creek.

Peggy:  Yes, but Bert had to bring the water up because we had to wash in the wintertime in the house.

8 November 1983

James:  You didn't have electricity on the ranch when you were children, did you?  When did electricity come?

Peggy:  It never came while we lived there.  Mother always wanted water first, without realizing that if she had electricity, she could have water.  But she always said that she wanted water first 'cause we had to get water from the well.  Now Tom, do you know when REA came?  When you and Janet were there, did you have electricity?

Tom:  No.  But Dad wired the house for electricity when he built the addition on the house.  That's the way it was for a long, long time.

James:  When was that?

Peggy:  1915.  That's when he built the house.

Tom:  In 1915 he wired it.

James:  And how long was it before power came in there?

Peggy:  It must have been in the 30's and after.  When were you there?

Tom:  Well, it was after we were there.  I doubt that power came before the 40's.

Peggy:  The 40's is when Jack was at the ranch, and the first time they had electricity.

Tom:  He had electricity?

Peggy:  Yes, and that's when REA really went to town and got all the lines fixed up for the ranchers and farmers.

James:  What's REA?

Peggy:  Rural Electrification.  It was a federal agency.  They put in lines and poles all over the country.  When I lived in Hardin we were on REA.  It wasn't very reliable because their poles were always breaking and their wires would snap.  They had an awful lot of wires in relation to the number of customers because they went out into rural areas.  I don't know when REA went out, but later I think they decided they were in competition with the private power companies.  The private power companies eventually took over.  It must have been around the 1940's or later after we'd left the ranch, because we never had electricity at the ranch.

James:  Your dad had real foresight, didn't he?  But he never got to enjoy the fruits of his foresight.  Where do you suppose he got the expertise or knowledge to even know how to wire when they didn't have electricity prior to that?

Peggy:  He didn't do the wiring himself.

Tom:  Oh, he didn't?

Peggy:  He was not a builder.

Tom:  Well, somebody wired it.

Peggy:  George Brown, the carpenter probably did it.

Tom:  I remember they had insulators through each stud, and two wires, they weren't together like now.  I imagine Jack had to put in different wiring.

James:  What was your light like?

Tom:  Kerosene lamps and Aladdin lamps.

Peggy:  Well, the Aladdin lamps never worked very well as I recall.  My job on Saturdays was always to clean all the lamps, and they were full of soot, and the millers used to get down (remember how the insects were called millers, I don't know what the technical name for them is) used to get down in…

Tom:  We used to catch the millers and put them in the lamps to get rid of the darn things.  There used to be lots of millers around attracted to the light.

James:  Were they moths?

Tom:  Uh, huh.

Peggy:  My job every Saturday was cleaning all the chimneys, and polishing up the lamps, and filling them up, and trimming the wicks, and that sort of thing.

James:  How did you clean them?  Was that some special process?

Peggy:  Well, cleaning the chimneys was just with good, old soap and water.

James:  Did you have any running water, or gravity flow, or did you have to carry water from the creek?

Peggy:  We carried all of our water from the well, and it was very, very hard water.  You couldn't wash clothes in it, because Mother had to use lye to break it, so to speak.  In the summertime we did bring water from the creek, and we had washhouses down by the creek, but not in the wintertime.  Washday was about once a month, really, because that was a big day, and our washday meal was always boiled potatoes and dried codfish that had been soaked overnight.

James:  How did you handle baths?

Tom:  We had a tub about 3 feet across, and we just got into it and took a bath.

Peggy:  We had it by the kitchen stove.

James:  Did you have a weekly bath night?

Tom:  There wasn't any set time.

Peggy:  We didn't have baths very often.  I think about once a month was bath time.  Bath time was before wash time, so that we could use the water that we'd bathed in to wash the clothes in.

James:  Efficiency.

Tom:  I remember the teakettle.  It had about a quarter inch of lime on it.  It would just fill up with lime, it was such hard water.

James:  Everybody just bathed there in the kitchen.  You didn't have a bathroom in the house, I don't suppose, anyway.

Peggy:  The little, tiny bedroom upstairs was intended for a bath, but never used for one.

We didn't have heat upstairs in the winter, either.  We only had one room that was heated in the winter, and that was the kitchen—and then there was the sitting room across from the dining room.  We had a stove in there, but those were the only two places that had any heat in the wintertime.  So we stayed in the kitchen.  It was a big, long kitchen, about 20 feet long, and rather narrow.

James:  I'll bet it was cold going to bed in the wintertime.

Peggy:  We would take warm rocks to bed with us.  I can remember that, to heat up the beds maybe a little bit.

James:  What were the sleeping arrangements?

Tom:  All the boys slept together.

Peggy:  Tom and I slept together until we were about three or four in that little bedroom upstairs.  And Kate and Jo had their own separate bedrooms that they fixed up.  They were nice bedrooms—nice big closets in each one.  Tom said the boys all slept together, usually downstairs in the old part of the house that was made into a bedroom.

Tom:  I remember Bert used to sleep out in the bunkhouse for quite a while.

James:  Did you have big double beds or individual beds or bunk beds?

Tom:  Double beds.

Peggy:  Well, Mother and Dad slept on a three-quarter bed.  Now Margaret Murphy has their old bed at the ranch.  It was not as big as what we'd call a double bed.

James:  Was it a metal bedstead, or a wooden one?

Peggy:  A metal one.

James:  When did you get your first car?  When did you see your first car?  Do you remember that?

Peggy:  In Sheridan, remember?

Tom:  Was that the old Rio?

Peggy:  No, it was a Ford car—a Model T Ford.  I think we were about five years old—that must have been about 1915.  We were living in Sheridan.  I remember John brought the Ford car home, and then we were all going to go for a ride, and it wouldn't start.  We were so disappointed, because we had the hardest time getting it started.

Tom:  I think I can remember that Ford.  It had a brass radiator.

James:  How long did you have it?

Tom:  I can't remember.  I think they paid $250 for it.

Peggy:  Well, the next car was the Rio, I think, or did we have two Fords before we got the Rio?

Tom:  I can't remember.

Peggy:  The Model T Ford had isinglass curtains.  It just had a folding top, and they had to have these curtains that you put up on the sides.  And a crank, of course.

Tom:  It didn't have any door on the driver's side.  You had to throw your leg up over and climb in that way.  The others had three doors.

James:  Did you use it much?

Tom:  I remember I drove down a corn row once.  I caught heck.  I thought I could drive it.  I think someone let me run it, and I steered right down a corn row in the garden before I got it stopped.

Peggy:  We were about five when we got that Model T 'cause we were in Sheridan.  We weren't going to school then.  Our next car was an 8-passenger Rio.  It seems to me we had two Fords before that.

Tom:  We had a Ford out here in Eugene.

Peggy:  We went to Spokane in the Rio, and we were about nine years old then.  We must have had that first Ford about four years.

James:  Why were you in Sheridan when you were five years old?

Peggy:  We were living in Sheridan for school for the older kids—Bert, Kate, Jo and Jack.  We lived there just one year, as I recall.

James:  Did your dad live in Sheridan, too?

Peggy:  Yes, we rented a house, but he spent part of the time at the ranch, and part of the time at Sheridan.  It was 50 miles.  I should tell the story of when we were in Sheridan, of Tom and I going down Main Street.  Bert had taken Tom down on Main Street, which was about 10 blocks from where we lived to see a…what?

Tom:  Oh, it was a toy car—a beautiful, little red car that you'd sit in and pump.  I just thought that was wonderful.

Peggy:  So the next day, Tom and I without any announcement to the family went down this 10 blocks—we were country kids, and not city kids—and I remember that Kate had some long, white, silk gloves that came clear up to her elbows, so I got dressed up for the occasion to go downtown and put on her long, white, silk gloves.  We went downtown and we saw the car, I think.

Tom:  Did we see it?  I didn't think we found the store.

Peggy:  I don't remember.

Tom:  We were out wandering around, and some woman asked if we were lost, and we said we weren't, but we found our way back.  You remembered an old steel fence around a house.  We knew that was the right street then, and we kept walking up that.

Peggy:  No, Bert found us.  Mother had of course missed us in the meantime.  She got Bert out of school to go find the twins.  We were about two or three blocks from home.  We knew where we were after we saw this fence.

James:  What else do you remember about living in Sheridan?  Did you buy the house?

Peggy:  No, it was rented.  I remember that's where we had our first ice cream cone.  Of course we knew we could eat ice cream, but nobody told us we could eat ice cream cones, the cones themselves.  So we carefully licked out all of the ice cream, and there was an irrigation ditch, and we decided to use the cones as a cup and dip up water, and they disintegrated, and I remember my disappointment.  And then when we found out later that you could eat them, we were very disappointed kids.

James:  How big was Sheridan then?

Tom:  I think it hasn't grown in the least since we were there.

Peggy:  It's gone downhill.

Tom:  About 9000 or something like that.  About like Baker.

James:  What else do you remember about Sheridan?

Peggy:  The zoo.  Remember the zoo and the wild animals?

Tom:  That house was right near what we called the park.  That's where the zoo was.  There was a creek, and Mother was worried about us and the creek.

Peggy:  She never worried about us at the ranch out near the creek.  We had a creek that was as good a size (as the one in Sheridan).

Tom:  That was Tongue River, wasn't it, that went through Sheridan?

Peggy:  No, this was a small creek.  It wasn't Tongue River.

Tom:  We lived right next to the park, and there was a creek there.

Peggy:  But it wasn't Tongue River, was it?

Tom:  I thought it was.

Peggy:   I thought it was a little creek.  It could have been an irrigation ditch that ran close by our house.  It wasn't very big, as I recall.  Do you remember the animals?

Tom:  Oh, yeah.  They had quite a zoo there.  There were deer, monkeys.

Peggy:  A bear.

Tom:  Raccoon, lots of animals.  It was a big zoo for that size town.

Peggy:  And they had a playground—our first experience with a playground, where they had slides, teeter-totters, and swings.

James:  Did you like it in Sheridan, or were you anxious to get back to the ranch?

Tom:  We always wanted to get back to the ranch.

Peggy:  I always wanted to stay in town.

James:  Well tell me, what sort of discipline did your parents use on you?  What's the worst trouble you ever got into?

Peggy:  I don't ever remember being spanked except once.  And that was when you and I got into some axle grease.  It was such fun squeezing it.  It was a mess on the back porch.  Mother had just cleaned up the back porch.  She came out and found all that axle grease.  We both got spanked.  That was my first spanking.  Were you ever spanked?

Tom:  I was spanked in Spokane once, 'cause I wouldn't study, I guess.

James:  Who spanked you?

Tom:  My mother.

James:  Did she use her hand or a willow switch, or what?

Tom:  I can't remember, but it didn't hurt very bad.

James:  It didn't reform you?

Tom:  No, it didn't reform me.

Peggy:  Tom's worst problem in Spokane, as I recall, was his booming voice.  Of course, it made no difference in our big ranch house, and also out in the country, but Mother was always trying to keep his voice down in Spokane.  Do you remember that?  And you used to have fights with the kids on the school ground.  You were the country kid, and had to prove yourself, and you did.  Don't you remember all the fights you had in the third grade?

Tom:  No.

James:  How did he come out with his fights?

Peggy:  Well, he always said he won, so I accepted that.

James:  Did he ever come home with black eyes, or evidence that the fights didn't come out so well?

Peggy:  I don't remember, no.

Tom:  I don't remember the fights.

Peggy:  We only lived about three blocks from the school in Spokane.

James:  Do you remember any other problems you had as little kids?—Things you got in trouble over?

Peggy:  We were pretty much on our own.  We used to make up a little lunch with a hunk of bread.  We'd wander out, and could be gone all day.  I remember once, we were up in the Dana's bull pasture, clear up by the pine hill.  We could see the folks waving at us, so we waved back.  Well, they were very concerned about us being in this bull pasture, and were afraid the bulls would take after us.  But we were careful.  We didn't have any problem.  When we got home we were scolded, I remember, and were told never to get in the bull pasture again.  Do you remember that?

Tom:  No.

James:  You'd just come and go as you pleased, and wander all over the countryside?

Peggy:  Yes, we had these pretend houses, like all kids do.  It was hawthorn bush patches.  We'd clean them out and have the living room here, and the dining room here, and the kitchen here.  And then we might find an old table that we'd take in there, and we'd take a frying pan and build a little fire and fry some bacon.  I remember one of those places we had.  One day when we went down there, there was a skunk sound asleep on one of the tables.  So that fixed that place for us.  We never went back.  Do you remember our building those places?

Tom:  Yeah, we had them all over different places.  I remember up there where we used to make ranches up there along some badland, or something.  There were some real pretty rocks.  We called them "slickies."  We used them for cattle and horses.

Peggy:  Those were horses—yes.  And the petrified wood was cattle.  And the sheep were the little shells we'd find in the creek.

Tom:  Snails.  I remember that.

Peggy:  And Bert would help with the ragweed.  We'd cut it and make logs out of those.

Tom:  Yeah, they'd make wonderful logs.  He'd take an old section out of a mower, and use it to cut them with and make a log building.

Peggy:  And Bert had to always help us with those projects.  He was 8 years older, and had a lot of imagination.  He really directed us younger kids in all of our activities.  It wasn't always as much fun unless he was playing with us, because he had the imagination.  These slickies, incidentally, are what they call now gizzard stones from dinosaurs.  They're really highly polished rocks that you find.  They think they come from dinosaurs originally.

James:  Well, now Jack was closer in age to you than Bert, wasn't he?  Did he ever figure into your excursions?

Peggy:  Oh, yes.  He was always part of them, too.  Now the three of us didn't get along too well.  It was two against one, always, and was generally Tom and Jack against me, as I recall it.  Or it could have been Tom and I against Jack.  But the three of us didn't play well together.

James:  I think that's generally the case.

Tom:  Your kids always pair off.

James:  Yes, I've observed that in my kids.

Peggy:  But, Bert was enough older that he had the imagination and this fun spirit about him.  Everything was fun with him, and he had things he could think up that were fun for us to do.

Tom:  He was quite a leader.  He had great leadership ability.

James:  Did you ever go swimming?

Peggy:  The boys did.

Tom:  Oh, yes.  We were always making dams in the creek.  I can remember three or four different ones.

James:  Was that Pass Creek?

Tom:  No, it was Gay Creek.  Gay Creek was cut down to where it was 5 or 6 feet below the ground level.  We'd put logs across it, and stop the water, and make a swimming hole.  I remember that we'd come in and have to go swimming after haying.

James:  That was a daily affair, almost, in the summer time?

Tom:  Oh, yeah.  You didn't go swimming, Peggy?

Peggy:  No, I had to help with the dishes, and help with the meals.  Remember?  During haying, I was let out about an hour early so I could go in and help Mother get dinner.  I was the stacker girl.  And then I'd go in and help Mamma get the meal.

James:  Was that for both lunch and the evening meal?

Peggy:  Yes, except we called it dinner and supper, and then I also did the dishes.  So I didn't get out in the field as soon as the rest of them did.

Tom:  I can remember the folks saying that we raised ourselves.  The only one they worried about was John.  They raised him right, and after that the rest of us raised ourselves.

Peggy:  Well, John, of course, was born in Iowa, and they had more time.  You worry more about your first-born than you do about the rest.  John was very stubborn as a little boy.  Mother's story about him was that when he was about three or four, they would put him down in the corn crib because he was small enough that he could hand the corn up to the people.  I guess this crib was very tall.  John just loved to do that, but then one day he just decided that he wasn't going to hand up any more corn.  It was really quite convenient to put him in there to hand up the corn, so the folks decided that they'd just leave him in there until he'd hand up the corn.  And he yelled, and cried, and howled, but no corn.  So he won out on that one.  That was Mother's story that she always told about how stubborn John was.  When he made up his mind about something…

James:  So they took him out before he gave in?

Peggy:  Yes.  He never gave in…I think we should tell about Kate's contribution to our education.  Kate, of course, was 10 years older than we were.  She really taught us what beauty was, and to see the beauty in the sunsets, and the clouds, and tell us stories.  Kate had a real talent working with younger children.  She was a natural-born teacher.  Now Jo was our teacher when we were in the third grade.  But Jo was a year-and-a-half—almost two years older than Kate, so she was away from home and married, so we were not so well acquainted with our older sister Josephine as we were with Kate.

James:  What do you remember about your older sisters?

Peggy:  Well, Jo and Kate were both very attractive, and Kate was always stealing Jo's boy friends, I know, and the story that Jo used to tell about growing up was not a very happy one for Jo.  She insisted that she remembered when Kate was born in Iowa.  She would have only been a year-and-a-half old, and that was hard for me to believe that she would have remembered that far back, but she could describe the old Kerns homestead in Osceola, Iowa down to the nth degree, so maybe she did remember.

10 November 1983

James:  Tell me about the socializing that families used to do on the ranches.

Peggy:  Well, we had several parties a year, as I recall, and all the neighbors came and they practically stayed all night, particularly in the wintertime because it was hard to get back home again.  We had an old phonograph, the windup kind, and some danced and some just sat around and talked.  We'd have maybe 10 or 15 or 20 people.  Dad was quite the clown.  He had an attic that had a lot of old clothes in it, and he would go and dress up in some fancy old clothes, and some of the men would, and pretend like he was a tramp or something else—whatever he could find up in the attic that he could dress up in.  Do you remember any of those parties, Tom?

Tom:  Well, I remember that they always had card parties.  Seemed like they had one or two card parties every winter.

Peggy:  What kind of cards did we play?  I don't remember.

Tom:  500.

Peggy:  That's a little like bridge, only it isn't.  It's the forerunner of bridge, really.

Tom:  Yeah, bridge came after 500.

James:  But you'd have 20 people come and spend the whole night?

Tom:  Oh, they'd stay there until 'way after midnight, and then go back with their horses.

James:  So they didn't actually spend the whole night there, and sleep there?

Peggy:  Well, the little kids did, 'cause they'd just pull them off in the corner on the coats, and the little kids would go to sleep.  The old people would either dance or play cards.

James:  How often did you have such get-togethers?  Was that just certain seasons?

Peggy:  Well, it was mostly just in the wintertime when other things were dull.  It was probably done more than a couple of times a year that we had a party.  Now I don't remember our folks going to parties, or our going to other people's places, except the Davises.  Remember going to the Davises?  We went by sled to get to their place.  The horses were hitched up to the sled with lots of hay in it.  It was cold, cold.  This was in December, I think.

Tom:  Well, neighbors always liked to come to our place, I remember.

Peggy:  Well, we liked to go to other places, too, when we were invited.

James:  Your folks must have been good hosts.

Peggy:  Dad was very amusing.  He had a delightful wit, and he was always the life of the party.  He enjoyed a good party.

James:  I think I remember that he had the ability to make the Indians laugh, too, didn't he?

Peggy:  His name was "Laugh Much."  The Indians gave him that name—Laugh Much.

—He wrote poetry, Dad did, and he had a Walt Whitman kind of humor in his poetry—rather a delightful, gentle humor.  My brother Jack was very much like him, with the same brand of humor.  Mother had no sense of humor whatsoever, I don't think.

Tom:  She didn't?

Peggy:  No, but Dad had a marvelous sense of humor.

James:  Well, what happened to his poetry?  Is that all gone?

Peggy:  Kate might have some of it, I don't know.  Chuck Murphy has written poetry very similar to that—kind of the old, homey type of poetry.  And Kate wrote poetry, and Jo wrote poetry.  I wrote poetry until my twin brother read it aloud to the whole family, and everybody laughed, and that was the end of my poetry.

Tom:  If I did that I'm sorry.

Peggy:  It was silly.  This was a poem that he found when my sister Kate was leaving home.  She was getting married.  "Oh, my sister, come back, come back.

Forever hang your hat on the old hat rack."

How corny can you get?  Everybody laughed.  And Tom found that upstairs in the attic.

I always had it hid away, and he read it out loud to the family, and they all laughed.  It's a good thing he did, because it ended my poetry endeavors.

James:  Tell me some memories about your parents.  Did your Mother do a lot of canning?

Peggy:  Oh, yes, we did lots of canning.  Peas, all the vegetables, beans, corn.

Tom:  She even canned meat, didn't she?

Peggy:  Canned meat, yes.

James:  Beef or game?

Tom:  No, it was beef.

Peggy:  Now we had very little beef to eat during the summer because—we  did have an ice house where we put up ice in the winter, and we could keep some things, but not very well.

James:  Where would you get the ice?

Peggy:  From the reservoir, and this was always a winter chore, wasn't it, Tom?

Tom:  Yeah, we'd go up and cut the ice and bring it down in the wagon and put it into sawdust, and it would keep clear up into August.  You'd get about a foot of sawdust on all sides of it.

James:  Would you have to uncover the ice slowly?

Tom:  Yes, you'd have to dig down and take the sawdust off, get the ice, and put the sawdust back again, and put the ice in the icebox.

James:  You'd put the piece in a box, and when that was gone, you'd go get another piece?

Tom:  Yes.

Peggy:  We never used it for icing drinks, but we made an awful lot of ice cream in the summertime.  We used up our cream that way.  Tom and I would always start the ice cream freezer when it was easy to turn, and Bert always finished it off.—But we had chicken mostly in the summer.  I'll have to tell you about one meal my mother prepared for 26 cowboys with a half-an-hour notice.  These were Dana's cowboys.  They were on a roundup, and their place was up near ours.  Ed Dana called her and asked if she could feed his 26 cowboys.  Well, she had one chicken on, and we didn't have a store we could run to, and no refrigerator or freezers, and one chicken wasn't going to go very far for 26 hungry men.  So we had lots of eggs.  We boiled I don't know how many eggs.  And Mother took the meat off the bones of the chicken, and made a cream sauce, and opened up a couple cans of peas, and we put loads of hard-boiled eggs in it.  She made biscuits and was able to serve 26 cowboys.

James:  She did a lot of canning, you say.  Were there wild fruits she could go pick?

Peggy:  Well, we had wild plum and serviceberries, and choke cherries.  And then we had an old orchard that must have been a hundred years old when we moved there.  Anyway it was a hundred years old when we were kids because it was an old, neglected orchard, and half the trees were no longer bearing.  They were mostly winter apples.

Tom:  There was a Hood River apple.  A Hood River apple is a great big, beautiful apple.  If you bit into it, you were sorry you bit into it.  It was just a beautiful apple, but it was no good.

James:  Sour?

Tom:  It would keep good.

Peggy:  Well, it was a winter apple, that is, an apple that kept all winter nicely.

James:  Was it sour or mealy?

Tom:  Oh, I don't know.  It was just a disappointing apple.

James:  How is it that your dad ended up with that place?

Peggy:  Well, let's see.  He and Uncle Bill, my mother's oldest brother, went out there and, I don't know why they bought this particular place, but they did take homesteads around there of 160 acres under the Homestead Act.  Mother got 160 acres and I think Dad got 160 acres.  It was probably close to the ranch, wasn't it, Tom?

Tom:  That was up on the side of the mountain.  It was about four or five miles away, and they used it for pasture.  They'd take the cattle there in the spring of the year, and then when they'd go on the mountain, they'd take them up there.  That was about the 15th of June.

Peggy:  Now did you hear why they bought this place originally?

Tom:  I don't know why—Dad had itching feet or something, because he'd become dissatisfied with the hardware business, and they went out there to Wyoming…

Peggy:  He went out.  Mother didn't go out with him.

Tom:  I know.  He and Uncle Bill went out there.

James:  Were they in partnership for a while?

Peggy:  Yes, for a couple of years.  Then Uncle Bill must have sold out to Dad, because he went up into what they call the Castle Rock country in Montana, which is a very arid region, mostly grass prairies.  That's where he homesteaded, then.  They had a lot of homesteaded land up there that was available.  He was with our family about two or three years.  Kate was a small youngster, maybe about three or four years old when Uncle Bill moved in.  She was always Uncle Bill's favorite, and she always felt she always was his favorite after that.  She always had to sit beside him at the table, and she says that she didn't like to have to eat her bread crusts, so she'd stick them around his plate, and he'd eat them so that nobody else would see that she'd left her bread crusts.  Uncle Bill farmed for a while up on the bench.

Tom:  I think he was working for Johnny Boos when he did that.

Peggy:  That could be.  Did Johnny Boos own that?  Now this was beyond our school house and it was a flat, high bench just next to the mountains.  How many acres were on it?

Tom:  Oh, there must have been a hundred or one hundred and fifty, something like that.

Peggy:  Mostly gravelly soil.

James:  And plowed using horses…

Peggy:  Yes.  Now our own ranch had excellent soil.  It was a sandy loam, wasn't it?

Tom:  No, it was a clay loam.  You could walk out into it and get a lot of clay on your feet.  It would stick to your shoes.

James:  Did your mother keep a big garden?

Tom:  Oh, yes, they always had a big garden.

Peggy:  They had a huge garden about, oh, a quarter of a mile from the house.

James:  Did everybody have to work in it?

Peggy:  Yes, picking peas, not everybody, but mostly the girls.

Tom:  They had this mare, old Topsy.  She pulled a cultivator.  She'd go right down the row.  We'd get behind and cultivate whatever was in there.

James:  Would she stop and take a nibble every so often?

Tom:  I think sometime one of us had to ride her or lead her.  I think one of us generally rode her.

James:  It must have been a big garden.

Tom:  Oh, it was, yeah.  They had darn near a half-acre garden, quite a lot of corn.

James:  And your mother would can it all?

Peggy:  Yes, I can remember picking peas and shelling peas.  Ha.  I never want to do it again.  All day long!  Bucket fulls and bucket fulls.

Tom:  They used to raise enough that they wouldn't have to go to town but once or twice a year to get anything extra like flour and sugar.  They'd raise the other things.

Peggy:  They learned to be very frugal.  Mother could never throw away string, for example.  We used to have these Balls of string carefully tied together—and ribbons.  Mother could never throw away ribbons—or paper.  And she would carefully save all the Christmas wrappings, and that sort of thing, because you just didn't have any way to get to town and get any more.

James:  I'll bet she had big accumulations of a lot of things, didn't she?

Peggy:  Yes, she did!  And this all carried with her through her whole life even when she got to the point where stores were convenient.  She could never throw away any ribbon or nice paper.

Tom:  She was real Scotch.

Peggy:  She had to be in the early days.  She didn't have to be later, but she was.

James:  What kinds of dispositions and temperaments did your folks have?

Tom:  I can never remember my folks fighting.

James:  They never fought!

Tom:  Maybe they did when we weren't around, but…

Peggy:  Dad had a very hot temper, and he and my brother Jack were too much alike.  They didn't get along too well.  But Dad was also a very genial person, and generally happy.  Mother always felt a little bit sorry for herself, with good reason.  She spoiled her sons and expected her daughters to do everything.  She never expected her sons or her husband to ever get any water or wood in.  Then she would complain bitterly about it later, but she'd never do anything about it.

James:  Would you agree with that, Dad?

Tom:  Well, I can't disagree with it.

James:  Do you think you were spoiled?

Tom:  I don't know.  Peggy says yes.

Peggy:  Now Mother adored Bert.  Of all of her children, he was her favorite, with good reason, because Bert was the one that she could always rely on to do the things that had to be done.  He was old enough, and he was older than we were, of course.  Like the trip to Spokane.  A 16-year-old boy driving an old Rio car from the ranch in Wyoming to Spokane over gravelly roads.  He had to be the man of the family very early in life.  I remember when Dad had to go to Minnesota for surgery, and Bert had to stay home from school to feed the cattle in the wintertime.  He was in high school.

James:  Why did your dad have to go to Minnesota for surgery?

Peggy:  Hemorrhoids.  This was that fancy clinic in Minnesota that's still there.

James:  Mayo?

Peggy:  Yes, Mayo.  He thought that was the best place to go, I presume, and it was.  He was gone for a couple of weeks, and Bert took care of the cattle during that period.

Tom:  I think my dad had high blood pressure all his life.  If they had known what they do now, he'd have lived a much longer life.

Peggy:  Well, I think he had rheumatic fever as a child.  He had lumps on both arms, which can be an indicator of rheumatic fever, and of course that led to heart trouble.  I think he had a damaged heart, and a very enlarged heart when he died.

James:  Did that affect his ability to work?

Peggy:  He was never a real active man, and I don't think he felt well most of his life, looking back on it.  Do you think?

Tom:  No, I think that's true.

James:  But yet he was a very cheerful sort of a person apparently.

Tom:  Oh, yes.  He'd go right out and greet people.

Peggy:  He was a great reader, and he read to us.  Do you remember the books he read to us—Lorna Dune, and a few other books?

Tom:  Oh, yes.

Peggy:  Every night was a reading time.  Dad read more often than Mother did to us.  And they claimed that's the reason Tom didn't learn to read, because the folks read to him.  I don't think that was true, necessarily.  But anyway he loved to read.  He constantly read.  We had a big library, if you want to call it that:  The full works of Dickens—I read all the Dickens books—and then all the junk stuff that the cowboys who worked there would leave that Dad called the trash books, but we had quite an extensive library there at the ranch.

James:  He was also a great mathematician, wasn't he?

Tom:  He was always figuring.  We could always find pieces of paper lying around (that he'd been figuring on).  I guess I inherited that from him.  I was always figuring.

James:  Somebody told the story about how your mother used to like to try to figure out what he was thinking by reworking his figures.

Peggy:  Yes.  Mother also liked to figure.  She never trusted adding machines because she'd have to add it up first to see if the adding machine was right.  She worked in the treasurer's office with her father before she was married—she said to keep him honest.  She was good with figures, and she was a good mathematician.

Tom:  Well, Dad made some very good investments.  He bought pieces of Indian land.  He also bought some lots around Sheridan, and I think he gave each of his kids some land.  Did he give you some land?

Peggy:  No.  Where was your land?

Tom:  Mine was Black Canyon land.  I should have kept that.  I sold it to John, or something.  It was about 240 acres.  And he gave John some land over on Little Horn.  He lived over there for awhile.  He built a log cabin.  And he gave Jack some land down near Aberdeen.  He lived there until he moved up on the ranch, I think.  I can't remember what he gave Bert.  He gave Kate…I think he helped them buy that land up at Colstrip.—And Jo…

Peggy:  Well, he helped Pat with the Oldman Place.

Tom:  Yes.

Peggy:  Speaking of buying lots in Sheridan, these were the Downer Addition.  They were lots that had been taken over by the city or county for taxes.  So Dad bought them up, and paid the back taxes.  Then he had to communicate with the former owners to see if they wanted to reclaim these lots.  He was involved in that for three, four or five years.  I don't know whether he ever made money on it.  Now I don't know how or why he ever got started in Spokane.  Do you?

Tom:  No, I don't.  Maybe he had idea there, but he had quite a mind for that.

Peggy:  See, the folks lived in Spokane on two different occasions.  Once before we were born, when Jo was just a small child, and they bought a house then in Spokane, and this house was rented for a long while.  Then when we went to Spokane about 1918 or 1919, we lived in this house that we owned in Spokane on Indiana Avenue.  And I have never known how they got started in Spokane in the first place, because that was a long way from the home ranch.

James:  That didn't have anything to do with education?

Tom:  Oh, yes.

Peggy:  Yes, but why Spokane.  There could have been places much closer.  Sheridan, if they would have bought a house there would have been easier, because Dad had to stay at the ranch all winter by himself during the two years that we lived in Spokane.  I remember his writing to us and telling about the old hen that he put on the back of the stove to cook.  This was in the fall of the year shortly after we'd arrived.  He killed this old hen and put her on the stove to cook.  Then once a week he would write very faithfully and say the old hen wasn't done yet.  Maybe she'd be done next week.  He'd let us know.  So we got real intrigued about when that old hen was ever going to get done.  And in the spring of the year he said he finally got to eat the old hen.

James:  She was a tough one, wasn't she!—You said you were in Spokane in 1918 and 1919.  Do you remember anything about the flu epidemic?

Peggy:  We had a flu epidemic at the ranch.  I remember Bert was very, very ill with the flu for about a month.  He was the only one in our family that got it.  This was at the Gay Creek Ranch.  I don't remember anything about the flu epidemic in Spokane, do you?

Tom:  No.

James:  You must have been back at the ranch by then.  It passed over you, apparently.

Peggy:  Could have been.

James:  Tell me some more memories about your folks.  Did they do any singing?  Did your mother sing as she worked around the house?

Peggy:  She took music when she went to college, so to speak.  And then she changed.  She was not a musician.  But anyway she took singing lessons there.  She used to sing, "Isn't the Duck a Happy Bird" with our begging her to sing it.  She never liked to sing it.  There were all sorts of trills in it.  She was not a musician.  Dad would play on the piano.  He always chorded.

James:  Did you have a piano?

Peggy:  Yes, we had a piano.  Mother never played the piano, but Dad would play with chords whenever we'd have company.  "You Can't Have Any of My Strawberries When Your Strawberries are Gone."  That was one of his songs.  He had the same chord for everything, and he would sing these silly, little songs.

James:  Funny thing.  My dad still sings that!

Peggy:  Does he?  (Tom and Peggy both laugh).  What were some more of his songs, do you remember?

Tom:  No, I can't.

James:  Would he sing as he went about his work?

Peggy:  No.

James:  That was just something that he did at the piano.

Peggy:  Yes.  And he would sing it with great feeling.

James:  Do you remember any major illnesses that anyone had?

Tom:  Oh, I think the mumps.  I kind of remember about that.  Bert had a lot of trouble with mumps, didn't he?

Peggy:  We had our tonsils out in Sheridan.  Do you remember that?

Tom:  Oh, they did that kind of (as a matter of course).  They took the whole bunch of us in and had adenoids and tonsils out.

James:  All of you at once?

Tom:  No, it was Bert, and Jack and Peggy and I.

Peggy:  In those days they took out everybody's tonsils whether they needed them out or not.

James:  Can you remember anything about that experience.

Tom:  I had a sore throat for a while.  We had to go to school about a week afterwards.

Peggy:  I remember that I got a piece of coal in my eye.  I suffered for about two weeks.  I couldn't see out of my eye, and it was just horrible.  Then Dad took me in to an eye doctor, and the doctor saw that piece of coal there and just pulled it right out that easy.  But that was two weeks.  Course it was hard to get in because the nearest doctor was 60 miles away.

James:  And he didn't make house calls.

Peggy:  No, he didn't make house calls.

James:  You must have been pretty healthy then, actually.

Peggy:  Well, now, do you remember having your throat partly cut when you ran into a wire while riding your horse?

Tom:  Yeah, I can remember that.  I was riding the horse and didn't notice the clothesline and went right underneath, and it just took me right off.

James:  Made a big gash on your neck?

Tom:  Oh, I got over it pretty good.

Peggy:  Now, Bert had a broken arm riding old Pinto.  Pinto bucked him off when he got into barbed wire.  They must have had his arm set, but that was before our memories were too good.  Now, Mother had some bad times.  I remember that she stepped on a rusty nail, and got whatever you get when you step on a rusty nail.

Tom:  Blood poisoning.

Peggy:  She was alone at the ranch, and Tom and I were around six years old.  Anyway we had an old billy goat on the ranch.  He got into the yard, and he would butt Tom down.  Well, I ran into the cave real fast, and every time Tom would try to get up…

(the goat would knock him down again).