The most interesting individuals I’ve met have to be those in the hinterlands of cow-calf ranch country. The Bell Brand Ranch had places in southwest Idaho and the main ranch south and west of Jackpot, Nevada – either in the O’Neil Basin or over a ridge from it.
Our introduction to the ranch was when we were approached about hauling hay from the Owyhee County, Idaho, property to the main ranch. This turned into an experience taking up most of a summer. A loose band of about four truckers, each with their own rigs, started on this haul. Plan was to work it in while keeping our dairy farmer customers also supplied in hay.
I was lucky enough to have my younger brother, Lyle, as my bale-throwing helper for most of the time I hauled hay. For the others, it was an issue to keep help. It wasn’t the pay, as these guys could make about twice what any other manual labor-intensive job was paying.
One of the group was approached at a truck stop by an energetic fellow who needed work. When the pay scale was mentioned, he was all in to become a real hay buck. He was showing promise after the usual brutal first couple or three loads. Then we hauled a few loads into the Bell Brand. It worked better to not try to run together. This avoided traffic jams at stackyards. At about the second load to the Bell Brand, this fellow was so smitten with the cowboy lifestyle he saw at the ranch that he just had to be a cowboy!
Most of the wranglers were just barely out of high school, with a few seasoned cow punchers in the mix. I thought it was comical to watch the wranglers take off on horseback toward whatever group of cattle needed attention … the seasoned wranglers seemingly glued to their saddles and the kids bouncing so high with each step of their horses that you could pass a basketball between them and their saddles.
We met Norm coming back empty as we were headed in loaded. He was moaning about having to choke up a new helper. Seems his fresh help had sweet-talked Quentin, the ranch boss, into a job as a genuine, real live cowboy. Then, keeping our other customers in hay, Norm didn’t return to the Bell Brand for a few weeks.
We never saw the newest cowboy, but after a handful of loads, the ranch staff was inquiring as to when Norm would return to haul off that (expletive deleted) kid he’d “dumped” on them.
The housing was bunkhouse style, with a number of fellows bunking in the same bunkhouse, with a shared restroom, bunkrooms and living room areas. There was a cookhouse where everyone was fed or where they picked up lunch to go when they wouldn’t be back before supper. The ironclad rule was that one did not touch the property of another wrangler.
One of the fellows had killed a good-sized rattlesnake and was in the process of tanning its hide so he could mount it in a poised-to-strike posture.
“The rest of the crew had to pull the owner of the snake skin off of the kid before some serious damage was done,” related the fellow complaining to us. He went on to say that even that experience didn’t teach him that if it wasn’t something he owned, he was not to touch it! Feelings were running so high that I think Norm was afraid to return.
A couple of trips later, the kid was gone. Nobody said where he went or how but growled at us about bringing anyone else like that to their ranch.
Another Nevada ranch in the Golconda region had a fellow hiding from an ex-wife and the child support he’d been declining to pay. After a couple of episodes of the deputy sheriff visiting and taking him to town in steel bracelets, to sit in the pokey for a few days … he told the sheriff to not bother sending his guys after him. Just send a message, and he’d come to town under his own steam and sit out the usual three to five days.
He was a good enough hand that his boss put up with the absences since the fellow claimed, “I’m sure those kids aren’t mine, anyway!”
A friend owned a Steffen baled-hay loader. One of his daughters took to running it and, in addition to loading and unloading her dad’s trucks, was doing a fair amount of custom loading. She got older and went off to college but was always back each summer to amass her funds for the next school year by loading and unloading hay trucks.
She finally graduated and secured employment in her chosen field. A couple of years later, her father, Dean Ashcroft, told me she came to him and asked, “How much college do I need to make as much money as I used to make loading hay trucks?”
