Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

The family’s main sitting and dining room was a restaurant from Old Muskrat. On the walls were polished buffalo horns mounted on shields. The central piece of furniture was a gambling table from Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon. It was a poker-and-roulette table—round, covered with felt. Still intact were the subtle flanges that had caused the roulette wheel to stop just where the operator wished it to. And if you reached in under the table in the right place you could feel the brass slots where the dealer kept wild cards that he could call upon when the fiscal integrity of the house was threatened. If you put your nose down on the felt, you could almost smell the gunsmoke. At this table David Love received his basic education—his schoolroom a restaurant, his desk a gaming table from a saloon. His mother may have been trying to academize the table when she covered it with a red-and-white India print.

  When other schoolmarms were provided by the district, they came for three months in summer. One came for the better part of a year. By and large, though, the boys were taught by their mother. She had a rolltop desk, and Peggy Dougherty’s glassed-in bookcases. She had the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, the Redpath Library, a hundred volumes of Greek and Roman literature, Shakespeare, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Kipling, Twain. She taught her sons French, Latin, and a bit of Greek. She read to them from books in German, translating as she went along. They read the Iliad and the Odyssey. The room was at the west end of the ranch house and was brightly illuminated by the setting sun. When David as a child saw sunbeams leaping off the books, he thought the contents were escaping.

  In some ways, there was more chaos in this remote academic setting than there could ever be in a grade school in the heart of a city.

  The house might be full of men, waiting out a storm, or riding on a roundup. I was baking, canning, washing clothes, making soap. Allan and David stood by the gasoline washing machine reading history or geography while I put sheets through the wringer. I ironed. They did spelling beside the ironing board, or while I kneaded bread; they gave the tables up to 15 times 15 to the treadle of the sewing machine. Mental problems, printed in figures on large cards, they solved while they raced across the … room to write the answers … and learned to think on their feet. Nine written problems done correctly, without help, meant no tenth problem … . It was surprising in how little time they finished their work—to watch the butchering, to help drive the bawling calves into the weaning pen, or to get to the corral, when they heard the hoofbeats of running horses and the cries of cowboys crossing the creek.

  No amount of intellectual curiosity or academic discipline was ever going to hold a boy’s attention if someone came in saying that the milk cow was mired in a bog hole or that old George was out by the wild-horse corral with the biggest coyote ever killed in the region, or if the door opened and, as David recalls an all too typical event, “they were carrying in a cowboy with guts ripped out by a saddle horn.” The lessons stopped, the treadle stopped, and she sewed up the cowboy.

  Across a short span of time, she had come a long way with these bunkhouse buckaroos. In her early years on the ranch, she had a lesser sense of fitting in than she would have had had she been a mare, a cow, or a ewe. She did not see another woman for as much as six months at a stretch, and if she happened to approach a group of working ranch hands they would loudly call out, “Church time!” She found “the sudden silence … appalling.” Women were so rare in the country that when she lost a glove on the open range, at least twenty miles from home, a stranger who found it learned easily whose it must be and rode to the ranch to return it. Men did the housekeeping and the cooking, and went off to buy provisions at distant markets. Meals prepared in the bunkhouse were carried to a sheep wagon, where she and John lived while the big house was being built and otherwise assembled. The Wyoming sheep wagon was the ancestral Winnebago. It had a spring bed and a kitchenette.

  After her two sons were born and became old enough to coin phrases, they called her Dainty Dish and sometimes Hooty the Owl. They renamed their food, calling it, for example, dog. They called other entrées caterpillar and coyote. The kitchen stool was Sam. They named a Christmas-tree ornament Hopping John. It had a talent for remaining unbroken. They assured each other that the cotton on the branches would not melt. David decided that he was a camel, but later changed his mind and insisted that he was “Mr. and Mrs. Booth.” His mother described him as “a light-footed little elf.” She noted his developing sense of scale when he said to her, “A coyote is the whole world to a flea.”

  One day, he asked her, “How long does a germ live?”

  She answered, “A germ may become a grandfather in twenty minutes.”

  He said, “That’s a long time to a germ, isn’t it?”

  She also made note that while David was the youngest person on the ranch he was nonetheless the most adroit at spotting arrowheads and chippings.

  When David was five or six we began hunting arrowheads and chippings. While the rest of us labored along scanning gulches and anthills, David rushed by chattering and picking up arrowheads right and left. He told me once, “There’s a god of chippings that sends us anthills. He lives in the sky and tinkers with the clouds.”

  The cowboys competed with Homer in the entertainment of Allan and David. There was one who—as David remembers him—“could do magic tricks with a lariat rope, making it come alive all around his horse, over our heads, under our feet, zipping it back and forth around us as we jumped up and down and squealed with delight.” Somber tableaux, such as butcherings, were played out before them as well. Years later, David would write in a letter:

  We always watched the killing with horror and curiosity, although we were never permitted to participate at that age. It seemed so sad and so irrevocable to see the gushing blood when throats were cut, the desperate gasps for breath through severed windpipes, the struggle for and the rapid ebbing of life, the dimming and glazing of wide terrified eyes. We realized and accepted the fact that this was one of the procedures that were a part of our life on the range and that other lives had to be sacrificed to feed us. Throat-cutting, however, became a symbol of immediate death in our young minds, the ultimate horror, so dreadful that we tried not to use the word “throat.”

  He has written a recollection of the cowboys, no less frank in its bequested fact, and quite evidently the work of the son of his mother.

  The cowboys and horse runners who drifted in to the ranch in ever-increasing numbers as the spring advanced were lean, very strong, hard-muscled, taciturn bachelors, nearly all in their twenties and early thirties. They had been born poor, had only rudimentary education, and accepted their lot without resentment. They worked days that knew no hour limitations but only daylight and dark, and weeks that had no holidays … . Most were homely, with prematurely lined faces but with lively eyes that missed little. None wore glasses; people with glasses went into other kinds of work. Many were already stooped from chronic saddle-weariness, bowlegged, hip-sprung, with unrepaired hernias that required trusses, and spinal injuries that required a “hanging pole” in the bunkhouse. This was a horizontal bar from which the cowboys would hang by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on ruptured spinal disks that came from too much bronc-fighting. Some wore eight-inch-wide heavy leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during prolonged hard rides.

  When in a sense it was truly church time—when cowboys were badly injured and in need of help—they had long since learned where to go. David vividly remembers a moment in his education which was truncated when a cowboy rode up holding a bleeding hand. He had been roping a wild horse, and one of his fingers had become caught between the lariat and the saddle horn. The finger was still a part of his hand but was hanging by two tendons. His mother boiled water, sterilized a pair of surgical scissors, and scrubbed her hands and arms. With magisterial nonchalance, she “snipped the tendons, dropped the finger into the hot coals of the fire box, sewed a flap of skin over the stump, smiled sweetly, and said: ‘Joe, in a month you’ll never know the
difference.’”

  There was a pack of ferocious wolfhounds in the country, kept by another flockmaster for the purpose of killing coyotes. The dogs seemed to relish killing rattlesnakes as well, shaking the life out of them until the festive serpents hung from the hounds’ jaws like fettuccine. The ranch hand in charge of them said, “They ain’t happy in the spring till they’ve been bit. They’re used to it now, and their heads don’t swell up no more.” Human beings (on foot) who happened to encounter these dogs might have preferred to encounter the rattlesnakes instead. One summer afternoon, John Love was working on a woodpile when he saw two of the wolfhounds streaking down the creek in the direction of his sons, whose ages were maybe three and four. “Laddies! Run! Run to the house!” he shouted. “Here come the hounds!” The boys ran, reached the door just ahead of the dogs, and slammed it in their faces. Their mother was in the kitchen:

  The hounds, not to be thwarted so easily, leaped together furiously at the kitchen windows, high above the ground. They shattered the glass of the small panes, and tried to struggle through, their front feet catching over the inside ledge of the window frame, and their heads, with slavering mouths, reaching through the broken glass. I had only time to snatch a heavy iron frying pan from the stove and face them, beating at those clutching feet and snarling heads. The terrified boys cowered behind me. The window sashes held against the onslaught of the hounds, and my blows must have daunted them. They dropped back to the ground and raced away.

  In the boys’ vocabulary, the word “hound” joined the word “throat” in the deep shadows, and to this day when David sees a wolfhound there is a drop in the temperature of the center of his spine.

  The milieu of Love Ranch was not all wind, snow, freezing cattle, and killer dogs. There were quiet, lyrical days on end under blue, unthreatening skies. There were the redwing blackbirds on the corral fence, and the scent of moss flowers in spring. In a light breeze, the windmill turned slowly beside the wide log house, which was edged with flowers in bloom. Sometimes there were teal on the creek—and goldeneyes, pintails, mallards. When the wild hay was ready for cutting, the harvest lasted a week.

  John liked to have me ride with them for the last load. Sometimes I held the reins and called “Whoa, Dan!” while the men pitched up the hay. Then while the wagon swayed slowly back over the uneven road, I lay nestled deeply beside Allan and David in the fragrant hay. The billowy white clouds moving across the wide blue sky were close, so close, it seemed there was nothing else in the universe but clouds and hay.

  When the hay house was not absolutely full, the boys cleared off the dance floor of Joe Lacey’s Muskrat Saloon and strapped on their roller skates. Improbable as it may seem, there was also a Love Ranch croquet ground. And in winter the boys clamped ice skates to their shoes and flew with the wind up the creek. Alternatively, they lay down on their sleds and propelled themselves swiftly over wind-cleared, wind-polished black ice, with an anchor pin from a coyote trap in each hand. Almost every evening, with their parents, they played mah-jongg.

  One fall, their mother went to Riverton, sixty-five miles away, to await the birth of Phoebe. For her sons, eleven and twelve, she left behind a carefully prepared program of study. In the weeks that followed, they were in effect enrolled in a correspondence school run by their mother. They did their French, their spelling, their arithmetic lessons, put them in envelopes, rode fifteen miles to the post office and mailed them to her. She graded the lessons and sent them back—before and after the birth of the baby.

  Her hair was the color of my wedding ring. On her cheek the fingers of one hand were outspread like a small, pink starfish.

  From time to time, dust would appear on the horizon, behind a figure coming toward the ranch. The boys, in their curiosity, would climb a rooftop to watch and wait as the rider covered the intervening miles. Almost everyone who went through the region stopped at Love Ranch. It had not only the sizable bunkhouse and the most capacious horse corrals in a thousand square miles but also a spring of good water. Moreover, it had Scottish hospitality—not to mention the forbidding distance to the nearest alternative cup of coffee. Soon after Mr. Love and Miss Waxham were married, Nathaniel Thomas, the Episcopal Bishop of Wyoming, came through in his Gospel Wagon, accompanied by his colleague the Reverend Theodore Sedgwick. Sedgwick later reported (in a publication called The Spirit of Missions):

  We saw a distant building. It meant water. At this lonely ranch, in the midst of a sandy desert, we found a young woman. Her husband had gone for the day over the range. Around her neck hung a gold chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key. She was a graduate of Wellesley College, and was now a Wyoming bride. She knew her Greek and Latin, and loved her horse on the care-free prairie.

  The bishop said he was searching for “heathen,” and he did not linger.

  Fugitive criminals stopped at the ranch fairly often. They had to—in much the way that fugitive criminals in lonely country today will sooner or later have to stop at a filling station. A lone rider arrived at the ranch one day with a big cloud of dust on the horizon behind him. The dust might as well have formed in the air the letters of the word “posse.” John Love knew the rider, knew that he was wanted for murder, and knew that throughout the country the consensus was that the victim had “needed killing.” The murderer asked John Love to give him five dollars, and said he would leave his pocket watch as collateral. If his offer was refused, the man said, he would find a way to take the money. The watch was as honest as the day is long. When David does his field geology, he has it in his pocket.

  People like that came along with such frequency that David’s mother eventually assembled a chronicle called “Murderers I Have Known.” She did not publish the manuscript, or even give it much private circulation, in her regard for the sensitivities of some of the first families of Wyoming. As David would one day comment, “they were nice men, family friends, who had put away people who needed killing, and she did not wish to offend them—so many of them were such decent people.”

  One of these was Bill Grace. Homesteader and cowboy, he was one of the most celebrated murderers in central Wyoming, and he had served time, but people generally disagreed with the judiciary and felt that Bill, in the acts for which he was convicted, had only been “doing his civic duty.” At the height of his fame, he stopped at the ranch one afternoon and stayed for dinner. Although David and Allan were young boys, they knew exactly who he was, and in his presence were struck dumb with awe. As it happened, they had come upon and dispatched a rattlesnake that day—a big one, over five feet long. Their mother decided to serve it creamed on toast for dinner. She and their father sternly instructed David and Allan not to use the word “rattlesnake” at the table. They were to refer to it as chicken, since a possibility existed that Bill Grace might not be an eater of adequate sophistication to enjoy the truth. The excitement was too much for the boys. Despite the parental injunction, gradually their conversation at the table fished its way toward the snake. Casually——while the meal was going down—the boys raised the subject of poisonous vipers, gave their estimates of the contents of local dens, told stories of snake encounters, and so forth. Finally, one of them remarked on how very good rattlers were to eat.

  Bill Grace said, “By God, if anybody ever gave me rattlesnake meat I’d kill them.”

  The boys went into a state of catatonic paralysis. In the pure silence, their mother said, “More chicken, Bill?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Bill Grace.

  Muskrat Creek was the second homestead on which John Love had filed in Wyoming. The first—thirty miles away—was in the Big Sand Draw, where the grass was inadequate, the snows were exceptionally deep, and the water was marginally potable. In 1897, he collapsed his umbrella and moved. At Muskrat Creek, long before he bought the stagecoach towns, he lived in an earth dugout roofed with pine poles and clay. It was warm in winter, cool in summer, and danker than Scotland all year round. He was prepared to run risks. In Lander, sixty miles west,
he made an extraordinary bet with a bank, whose assets included a number of thousands of sheep. John Love bet that he could take them for a summer and return them in the fall, fatter on the average by at least ten pounds. If he succeeded, he would be paid handsomely. If he failed, he would receive a scant wage. He was taking a chance on the weather, because a bad storm could wipe out the flock. By November, the sheep were as round as poker chips, ready to be cashed in. Leaving them in the care of a herder, he rode to Thermopolis, where he made a down payment on a flock of his own. The conditions of the deal were rigid: the rest of the money was to be paid in seven days or the deposit was forfeit and the animals, too. Within the week, he would have to return to his fattened sheep, move them to Lander, collect his money, and return to Thermopolis—a round trip of two hundred and fifty miles. The sky over Thermopolis was dark with snowcloud. In his bearskin cap, his bearskin coat, his fleece-lined leather chaps, he saddled up Big Red—Big Red, whose life had begun somewhere in the Red Desert in 1888, a wild horse. The blizzard began as horse and rider were climbing the Owl Creek Mountains. Through steep terrain that would have been hazardous in warm clear weather, they felt their way in whiteouts and darkness, in wind-chill factors greater than fifty below zero. Covering about six miles an hour, they reached the herd in twenty-one hours, and almost immediately began the gingerly walk to Lander, conserving the animals’ weight. John won his bet, got back on Big Red, and flew across the mountains with the money. He and the horse beat the deadline. He collected his ewes, took them home, and bred them. In seven days, he had, among other things, set himself forward one year. By 1910, when he married Miss Waxham, he owned more than eleven thousand sheep and hundreds of cattle and horses—a fortune in livestock which today would be valued at roughly five million dollars.