This article is found on page 22 in the Summer 2004 issue. It was in the 1920s, and Granddad was a homesteader in Harding County, South Dakota. It is a little ways from the Little Missouri in the northwestern corner of the state, near the Montana line. This country had been the range of the CY and the N3 and several of the big outfits of the open range. About 1900, there was the coming of the wire and the homesteaders, and the big outfits, which ran 50,000 head of Longhorns were no more. Those days were gone forever.
Granddad and my grandmother had homesteaded on two quarter sections with the boundaries running through the middle of the two-room, cottonwood-log cabin. You could kinda call it a "his and hers" operation. When they would get into a dispute, she would go into the bedroom and tell him "Get off'n my land." So he'd go out into the kitchen.
Granddad had a few head of cows but no bull. Times were tough. So he had made a deal with a neighbor to borrow his bull. Granddad had a triple box wagon and a team of sorrels which were both five years old with plenty of snort. He was good with horses. He was getting them broke pretty good as he had broke some ground with them and done some mowing, and he had pulled a bobsled into Camp Crook the last winter for supplies a couple times.
Granddad was also a reckless sort. He went to the neighbor's and looked at the bull, and he seemed gentle enough. The bull was about two years old. They said he was kind of a pet and had been a bottle calf. Granddad figured he could haul him home in the wagon as there was a lot of open country between the places, and he didn't want the bull to get away from us and in with someone else's cattle.
He backed the wagon up to the gate of the corral, and, with some persuading and some planks, got the bull into the wagon. Granddad cross-tied him over the sides of the box with a new rope and an older one he borrowed from the neighbor. The bull's name was George. They didn't know his ancestry, but he had the equipment to build a calf, and that was what was important to Granddad at the moment.
My dad was about twelve years old at the time and was along for the ride. What a ride it was! They started out down the rutted trail with the wagon and the bull securely tied, banging and rattling along. All went well for a ways, and then George started to get a little restless. He might have gotten a little lonesome. Maybe he thought he had a girlfriend that was missing him or maybe he was just having a bad day. He was jerking on the ropes and hitting the spring seat with his head, and his eyes were getting a little red. And he started bellerin' like lonesome bulls do.
It was getting a little hard to sit in the seat and handle the horses as they were getting excited. Grand-dad was standing up trying to hold the horses back. Dad took his coat and tried to put it over the bull's head, the thinking being that he might calm down if he couldn't see. But it just made him madder. George started to beller and paw the floor in the wagon box and toss his head, and he was flippin' a 9 in his tail.
Dad was flying all over the seat and getting banged around trying to keep the bull's head covered with his coat. Then, the older, weaker rope broke and the bull almost tipped the wagon over moving back and forth and bellerin'!
The horses stampeded. This was a ride from hell with the bull as mad as hell, bellerin' and blowin' snot and tryin' to come over the spring seat to get Dad (I don't know if his jacket was red or not). The wagon was rollin' on two wheels on one side for a while and then two wheels on the other side, going at breakneck speed. The only thing that kept the bull from going over the top of Granddad and my father was the bull couldn't keep his balance.
Granddad kept the wagon in a straight line as best he could, but time was running out. And he couldn't turn the wagon in a circle to slow the horses down because of the sagebrush and rocks. They were racing downhill (Dad told me that his new Olds 98 couldn't have kept up with those horses for speed). Granddad was as strong as a cottonwood tree and tougher than the hide on a six-year-old steer. With one mighty swipe of his arm, he grabbed Dad and threw him off the wagon and out into the sagebrush. Dad rolled and skidded over the brush, rocks, and cactus.
Granddad didn't make it out of the wagon. There wasn't time. The wagon hit the bend in the trail and went down into the draw. The horses, running like the devil was on their backs, hit some boulders and scraped the wagon on the side of a cut bank. They busted the front wheels off. The wagon box came off the running gear and went end over end, landing on top of Granddad and the bull in the mud and water. The still running horses pulled the tongue and part of the front of the running gear on across the creek.
Dad said he didn't get hurt too bad. He was just full of cactus spines and had a bloody nose. He ran over to Granddad who was layin' in the creek all beat to hell with two broken legs. The bull ran off toward home, still tied to what was left of the box and scattering pieces of wagon for a quarter of a mile. Dad said he could still hear him bellerin' in a cloud of dust.
Dad said he drug Granddad out of the creek and got him as comfortable as possible and then started running back to the neighbor's house, only about a mile and a half. The bull beat him back to the place, still tied to part of the wagon box which was swinging back and forth in the dirt and dust behind him. The bull's ear was almost torn off, hanging down the side of his head, and there was blood streaming out of his nose and mouth. He had the hide torn off on one side, and he was bellerin' and mad as hell. He was still on the rampage and would charge anything that moved. The neighbor decided he'd have to shoot him to save themselves, and it took five rounds from an old trap-door Springfield .45-70 to bring him down. Some bucket calf!
They got a wagon and took Granddad into Camp Crook and got his legs set. As for the bull, everyone was pretty close back then and they couldn't waste anything, so they butchered the bull and gave Granddad a quarter. Dad said that it was so tough and stringy that the gravy would float a horseshoe.
That winter Dad became a man and saw to it that the firewood was cut and hauled from the river and the cattle were fed and the ice broke in the Little Missouri so the cattle could drink. And he had to try to gentle the team that came back to the ranch with the tongue of the wagon, though they were always a little spooky after that. Granddad came out of it and acquired some more land, and, in time, built up a nice cattle ranch.
The homesteaders are all gone now and are only a memory. The country is all cattle country again, mostly large ranches. The only thing left of the homestead era are rocks where a foundation was or a hole in a side hill where there might have been a dugout. There's still remnants of barbed wire around and maybe an old car fender or a lonely forgotten grave marked with a boulder way out on the prairie.
People came out here and tried to farm in a land with little rain and terrible winters. They lived in tar-paper shacks on 160 acres. Many came out from the East totally unprepared for what awaited them. Most of them just left or sold out to a neighbor for the fare to get back East. The ones who stayed and prospered were a tough and hardy bunch.
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