Memoirs of a Worker

Cheyenne

I hope this chapter is a fun read into my past.

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For the most part, working in construction is how I’ve earned my living and provided for my family. A few times when work was slow I had to revert to other means and methods, (all legal by the way) for the bill paying and the providing thing.

In our household, work seemed to be feast or famine. Sometimes I would have so much work that we would actually get some money stocked up in the bank. Then we would enter the famine stage, and live off the money I had saved up before I could land another house to build. It was like being on a continual rollercoaster.

During this time of our lives, we had a bunch of small kids and my wife was a stay at home mom. Oh man, did she work hard. She kept a clean home and clean kids, raised a big garden, cooked all the meals from scratch and canned our excess fruits and vegetables. We didn’t have much in the way of material things, but still we were happy.

(So enough of the side note, I need to get back to the story) Things were tight, again, and I couldn’t seem to land a bid. It was at this financial crisis when one of my neighbors approached me with a job proposition.

“Lloyd, it looks to me like you need some work and I need some help. So how about it . . . you want to be a cowboy?” Claude asked.

I wasn’t in a position to say “no,” so I gratefully accepted the low paying offer. Wow, his ranch was big, and beautiful! It was about 2 miles wide and 6 miles long and in it were 520 mother cows and their calves, about a thousand yearlings, and of course countless deer, elk, moose and coyotes. Some of the property boundary wasn’t fenced, so it was my job to make sure the cattle all stayed inside the ranch and didn’t stray over to the neighbors.

Claude drove me along one side of the ranch and pointed out landmarks that I should be aware of. After we surveyed the summer range we made a stop at a small one room cabin nestled at the base of a mountain, surrounded by patches of aspen and fir trees, mixed in with open range areas. Claude showed me the fresh water spring that I would use to haul my cooking and drinking water, it was about a 100 feet down the hill from the cabin. The outhouse was on the opposite side of the cabin, over by the corral.

Inside the cabin was an old Monarch wood cook stove that I would use for cooking and for heat. There was a double bed, a small table with a kerosene lamp on it, 2 or 3 chairs, and a mouse-proof cabinet where I could store my food. My bath would be in Hell Creek about a quarter of a mile away. It was like I had been deported back to 1870!

We walked to the corral and Claude introduced me to Cheyenne, a big chestnut colored Appaloosa gelding, then Claude dropped off the saddle and bridle and left. I would be a cowboy from early Monday mornings until Saturday evenings when I would drive back home to be with my wife and kids. Early the following Monday I’d head back to being a cowboy.

I took building plans with me each week and would work on bids at nights and turn them in the following Saturday, hopeful that I would land a construction job. This routine lasted for several weeks before I got lucky and found a home to build.

One week I took the family with me and it was nice to have some company. It gets mighty quiet and lonesome up in the mountains all by yourself. Besides, the vast amounts of solitude can make a person’s mind wander and start thinking about things like . . . Bigfoot, aliens, night stalkers and other horrors of the night, so the companionship helped with that, also.

My wife experimented cooking on the old stove and she even got quite proficient at it. The kids played and played. I think they thought they had died and gone to Heaven.