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I’m ten years old, standing in the doorway of a small trailer. It’s just a few months before I watched my father sew the hide onto that calf. Ten wooden desks line the narrow room, in two neat rows, facing a teacher’s desk and a chalkboard. Eight kids circle me, introducing themselves and asking a few tentative questions. I study their feet. All six of the boys are wearing boots. I want to find a way to hide my own feet. I want to go back a couple weeks before, when I talked my mother into buying me a pair of black loafers.
I always had narrow feet, and my mother was a stickler about buying shoes that fit. At Gorem’s Shoes in Sheridan, Wyoming, the only style available in narrow sizes was black oxfords. So for years, aside from tennis shoes, that’s all I wore. When penny loafers became popular in third grade, I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting a pair. But a few weeks before fourth grade started, when we went to Gorem’s for school shoes, Russell Gorem informed us that they had gotten a shipment of black loafers in narrow sizes. I begged my mother for a pair, failing to mention that they slipped in the heel.
Just a couple of weeks later, my father announced that he’d taken the job on a ranch 25 miles north of Sheridan. We were moving. Everyone in the family was stunned, as my father had not mentioned even looking for another job, not even to my mother.
The X Bar X Ranch was owned by Peter Kiewit, a construction magnate whose company built huge jobs like the Bay Area Transit System. Kiewit had hired my father to manage this ranch, which had five other ranch hands.
To this day, one of my biggest regrets is that I never asked my father how he heard about this job and why he applied. By all accounts, my father was an incredible teacher. I still get private messages from people on facebook telling me that he was their favorite teacher. But I’ll get to my own theory about that in a bit.
We moved to the ranch just a few days before school started, and Dad took us to meet Mr. Kiewit. The X Bar X Ranch sat at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, in one of the most glorious valleys I’ve ever seen. Pass Creek Road wound several miles back into the trees from Interstate 90, and about ten miles in was Kiewit’s operation, which like most ranches in the West was made up of several smaller ranches. We moved into a small clapboard house on the Flying H Ranch, which was just down the road from the X Bar X.
The X Bar X was outfitted with a beautiful big log home furnished with heavy leather furniture and beautiful Western art. This was the biggest, most elaborately furnished house I’d ever seen. Kiewit was also an impressive figure, with silver hair and a gold tooth. When he greeted us, he was dressed like Ben Cartwright, with a leather vest and snakeskin boots, as well as a perfectly formed Stetson hat.
“Glad to have you on board, Chuck,” he said to my father. “I think you’ll like it here. And Lorene, Chuck tells me you grew up on a ranch, right?”
My mother nods. “Yes, in the southeast corner of Montana. Near Ekalaka. You know it?”
“Of course!” Kiewit says. “We’ve done a couple of small jobs up in that part of the country. Quite a bit different from this country.”
Mom nodded. “My folks have about 25,000 acres.”
Kiewit’s brow rises. “Impressive! They must run cattle, then?”
“Cattle and sheep both. And they also do some farming.”
Kiewit nods. “Well you’ll be right at home here, then.”
Mom laughs nervously, and Dad looks at his shoes.
Kiewit turns to me and looks at my feet. “I hope you have a pair of boots at home, boy! Those won’t do out here.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just smile at him like a goofball.
“He’ll be fine,” Dad says.
When Dad drives us home, he’s full of enthusiasm. Mom is quiet. ‘You probably should be careful about mentioning how big your folks’ ranch is,” Dad says as we near the house.
“Why?”
“You know how these ranchers are. They get touchy about that stuff.”
“Well that’s their problem,” Mom says.
Dad’s enthusiasm began to wane when he slowly realized that Mr. Kiewit had not informed the other ranch hands that Dad was going to manage the place.
Peter Kiewit lived in Omaha most of the year, only visiting the ranch every few months, so he flew back home the day after we met him, and Dad was left to deal with the tension on his own. My father was not an assertive man even when he was at his best.
We also quickly learned that the community along Pass Creek was very tight-knit. A couple dozen ranches lined that gravel road, which turned off the highway just north of Parkman, Wyoming, and most of these ranches had been in the families for decades. They were not mean or ill-intentioned people, but every one of these families had a certain standing; outsiders were few, and the locals were slow to welcome new folks. And in a country where land is the most significant measure of position, hired help does not rank high in the food chain. This is one of the myths about cowboys that many people do not realize. When the West was ‘settled,’ the cowboy was basically the migrant worker of that time. They were drifters, working for either very low wages, or often just bed and board, with a few dollars tossed in.
When the homestead act kicked in, and the open range ended, landowners became the kings of the West, Knowing what I know now, it’s easy to imagine why my father took this job. Dad’s own father had always dreamed of having a ranch. Earl Rowland was a talented welder, and that’s how he earned his living for most of my father’s childhood. But his true dream was being a rancher. So whether it was conscious or not, I believe my dad was trying to fulfil his own father’s dream. I’m sure he looked at Peter Kiewit as a possible stepping stone to fulfilling his father’s dream. To finally make his father proud. Sadly, his father contracted a brain tumor and died about a year after Dad took the job.
Also, after growing up on a ranch, when my mother married my father, she was thrilled with the prospect of getting away from life in the country. She was happy my father finished his education degree and started teaching. So when he announced that he had a new job, without even mentioning that he’d interviewed, she was pissed.
It’s also not hard to imagine why Dad didn’t mention the job to my mother. He knew she would talk him out of it.
My mother’s way of dealing with being treated like an outsider didn’t help matters. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from mentioning how large her parents’ ranch was, and as anyone who grew up in ranch country knows, this is just not done. But maybe it was intentional.
So that was the setting for this day, where I found myself standing among this circle of children, measuring each other. One of the boys nudged a pointy-eared kid with a cowlick and said “He’s in your grade.” He turned to me. “This is Carl.”. It turned out there were just two of us in fourth grade. And only one fifth grader. The other seven children were all in sixth grade, while thirteen first through third graders, including my sister Collette, were in the main schoolhouse.
And as is often the case, the dynamics among the children reflected those of the parents. It was confusing, because it was clear, especially when we were alone, that these kids liked us. But as a group, they made it clear that we would never belong. It was evident from the first day we arrived, when I looked around the room and saw those boots.
Great read. Interesting about cowboy boots. They're usually not very comfortable, and they're designed for stirrups. These days, especially, most people who wear them wouldn't know the first thing about saddling a horse, I'd bet. But there they are, a very odd part of the mythic West. Sort of like cowboy hats.
I was proud but conflicted about saying yes to those loafers because of the cost. Neither you nor I knew we would be moving to a ranch 😔