(I found 5 pages of notes in my 1976 journal taken from an interview with my father.  The following is the narrative I wrote 8 January 2017 from those notes.)

My father, Tom Lorance Kerns, was born 20 September 1910 to James and Lora Kerns on the family ranch on Gay Creek in Wyoming.  Gay Creek was a creek about like Willow Creek at Haines, Oregon.  The community of Slack was four miles away.  It had a small grocery.  The town of Parkman was 12-15 miles away.  The ranch itself consisted of 1100 acres plus a mountain permit for grazing in the nearby Bighorn Mountains.  The ranch’s north border was also the Montana state line.

Tom was the youngest of seven children.  He was born 20 minutes after his sister, Margaret Olive (Peggy).

One day little Tom and Peggy were outside playing on a toy wagon.  Their mother suddenly burst out the door, ran to them, and jerked them out of the wagon.  There was a rattlesnake under it.  Dad always supposed that event was where he acquired his fear of snakes. Rattlesnakes were a real worry.  Another time several of the children were together exploring down along the creek with their dog, Tipperary.  Tipperary ran ahead, and was bitten by a rattler.  He died.  The family was grateful for Tipperary’s presence that day, and felt themselves lucky that he had preceded them.

Dad remembered his mother rushing from the house another time to rescue her children.  On that occasion it was to stop the little twins from beating on the beehives with sticks.  Lora was always catching swarms of bees, and had about 10 colonies.  Dad remembers the wonderful drumming sound that the beehives made.  Lora couldn’t get to her twins in time to keep them from being stung, but probably saved their lives.  Each had been stung so many times (a hundred or more) that they both lost consciousness.  It must have been a terrifying thing for that isolated ranch mother to see her toddlers in that condition with no one to turn to for help, but Dad remembered simply waking up and thinking the episode was no big deal.

Schooling was a challenge for the family.  Dad’s first teachers were his older sisters, Kate and Jo.  Jo taught first, and was his first grade teacher.  She taught the twins at home.  She said that Tom was like a little monkey, in his seat one minute and out the next.

Following that first year of schooling at home, school was held in different places with a variety of teachers.  First the twins had Kate, and then “a terrible teacher” from Sheridan, Miss Virgie Shores.  Miss Shores wore bloomers—long, black bloomers.  She rode a horse named Charlie that went along with his head down.  Virgie and Charlie were in no hurry.  They poked along to school.  Along about 10:00 or 11:00 the waiting children would see Virgie and her horse plodding down the hill.  They finally told her that they weren’t going to come to school if she didn’t get there on time.

Virgie got around to one subject a day, and avoided mathematics altogether.  Dad called it “a wasted year.”

The schoolhouse was 2-3 miles away from the Kerns house.  The children rode horseback.  Dad made use of the trip by setting out a trap line and hunting coyotes.  He carried an old .30-.30 rifle.  Since his horse was gun shy, when he’d see a coyote he’d have to dismount in order to shoot.  He had to keep hold of the horse’s reins while shooting, or the horse would run off.  He kept the reins tied together so that he could quickly dismount, put his arm through the loop made by the reins, and thus have the reins and the stock of his gun bedded on his shoulder.  The horse would know when the shot was about to be fired, and would jerk back.

Nevertheless, Dad would generally get two coyotes per season.  He would also trap 20-30 muskrats, and 4 or 5 skunks.  A coyote pelt was worth $10-$15, and muskrats and skunks brought $2-$3.

At recess the kids played mumbletypeg and built a cabin in the quaking aspen grove out of aspen poles that they cut.  Five children was the most that they ever had in the school.  One boy, Carl Holden, stuttered.  The children would get impatient listening to him, and would finish his sentences for him; but Carl would still have to say it just the same.

Once Carl was told that if you grabbed a skunk by the tail it couldn’t squirt, since it had to brace its legs to do so.  Carl tried it, and got squirted.  He couldn’t go to school for some time.

When Dad was about 10, his sister, Jo, was teaching again.  She got mad at him one day at school, so he simply left and walked home.  He didn’t go into the house.  He climbed up on the back of Topsy, the Percheron work horse, laid down, and went to sleep, which is where he was found.

There just weren’t enough kids around for the area to have a good school.  This worried Dad’s folks, so in the 4th grade the family moved to Spokane, Washington.  They wanted their children to have a better education.  In Spokane it was determined that Tom and Peggy were too young and not sufficiently advanced, so they were put back a grade.

The ranch was leased to Dad’s oldest brother, John.  Their dad dealt in real estate while in Spokane.  The family was there for two years before returning to the ranch.

Once a week someone in the family made the 2- or 3-hour horseback ride to town to get the mail.  Once when Dad was about 13 he went to town to meet his brother, Jack, who was coming in on the train for Christmas.  Dad rode one horse and led another.  It was very cold.  Jack didn’t show up, so Dad spent all night in the depot.  He remembered that there was frost all over the windows.

Only two or three times a year would the wagon be taken to town to get supplies.  The main things that were needed were flour and coal.  Most of the food for the family was raised at home, and was canned in the summer.  The garden supplied corn, beets, peas, string beans, and potatoes.  The potatoes were planted by plowing a furrow, dropping in the seed pieces, and then plowing another furrow to cover them up.

Beef was butchered, and so were chickens.  The chickens hatched out over 100 chicks per year, and also supplied the family with eggs.  Grain was raised to feed the chickens, and milk was given to them as their only supplement.  Refrigeration was had by cutting blocks of ice in the winter, and putting the ice into a refrigerator-like icebox.  The family always had a milk cow, and made lots of cottage cheese.

Cattle were the only income that the family had.  With that income they were able to send Jo and Kate to college.  The ranch supported about 210 Hereford cows.  A 70% calf crop was normal, and the weaned calves weighed about 300 pounds.  Yearling steers brought about $10 per hundredweight.

Two hundred fifty tons of hay, a little over one ton per animal, were necessary to get the cows through the winter.  The ranch had 150 acres of irrigated ground on which the grass hay was raised.

Everyone helped in the hay field, and everything was done by horses.  Jim, (Tom’s father), mowed.  Kate raked.  Jack buck raked.  Bert stacked.  The smallest child led the stacker horse.

Dad’s first job was leading the stacker horse.  The buck rake would bring in a bunch of hay and put it on the overshot stacker.  Dad would lead the horse forward, the load of hay would be raised over the stack, a rope would be pulled  to trip and release the hay onto the pile, and Bert would then spread it around and level out the stack in readiness for the next load.  He had to watch out for rattlesnakes that were sometimes brought in with the hay.

After dumping the load of hay onto the stack, Dad would back the horse up, which lowered the stacker to make ready for the next buck rake load.  While waiting, the stacker horse would stand and eat hay.

Dad eventually graduated to being a buck raker, and Peggy took his place leading the stacker horse.  Two horses were required for each buck rake.  There was one on either side of the load.  The driver sat on a little seat behind.

There were lots of breakdowns.  If the crew put up 10 tons per day, they counted it a productive day.

Dad recalled riding up Dry Fork with his father to look for the last cows that had yet to come in from their summer pasture.  They saw some elk, and his dad let Him shoot a bull.  They later found out that they weren’t supposed to be hunting.

Following college Tom returned with his bride to the ranch.  They had no money, and badly needed meat.  Tom and Janet scraped $5 together with which to buy an elk tag, but the season ended without Tom bagging an elk.  They were both upset about the fruitless expenditure.

“But he got one later,” Janet said.  “We hung it on the cold porch, and whenever we needed meat, we’d go cut some off.”