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The pressure in the west to be tough, self-assured and self-sufficient didn’t just infect men. My mother lost her father when she was two. He died of a heart attack loading grain into a wagon. My mom’s mother, born Mary Lee Richardson, had already lost one husband to cancer when she was nineteen, so at the age of thirty-five, she was a widow for the second time, left with four kids under the age of ten. During the Depression. She must have been scared to death. But I never heard her mention that period of her life, much less complain. I didn’t even know about her previous husband until I was well into adulthood.
Fortunately for Mary Lee, her brother Louie had a knack for matchmaking. He had introduced Mary Lee to both of her first two husbands, and he now suggested that she invite his friend Frank Arbuckle, a rancher in Southeastern Montana who had never married, for a visit. A man with a solid work ethic, a wonderful sense of humor, and a strong sense of integrity. His family also happened to own a nice big ranch.
I’ve tried to imagine how they managed the logistics of this courtship in 1941. My grandmother lived in Belle Fourche with her four kids after one of my grandfather’s brothers sold the livestock from their ranch and took all the money. Belle Fourche is sixty miles from the Arbuckle Ranch, and this was before they installed phones in Carter County. So they must have arranged for their first meeting either by mail or through Uncle Louie. When I asked my mother about their courtship, she said “I don’t think they probably ever had an actual date. He would just come and visit.”
I can picture Frank standing on the porch, cowboy hat in hand, sporting the bleached forehead every rancher in Montana has. Frank was not a shy man, but he was not young by the time he met my grandmother, so I don’t know whether he had a lot of experience with courtship. When he was a younger man, a horse had kicked him in the face, flattening the cartilage in his nose, which made him self-conscious.
My grandmother was the epitome of grace and manners, so she would have come to the door in a dress, probably wiping her hands on the front from cleaning up while she anticipated Frank’s arrival. I would hope she found a way to get the kids out of the house for an hour so they could have a private conversation. She probably offered some coffee and cake, or cookies.
Frank was the only member of his family who had a car, which must have seemed very luxurious to my grandmother. I imagine them talking about the weather, about FDR, about the kids, about market prices. They shared a similar sense of humor, so I’m sure there was nervous laughter. But how on earth did they go from this awkward first conversation to deciding to get married? Marriage was much more commonly based on convenience and proximity in those days.
Frank married my grandmother when my mother was six, and my grandmother must have felt as if she had been pulled out of quicksand. In almost every regard, it was a good match for both of them, with Frank being able to offer stability to a young widow, and Mary Lee having lived on a ranch most of her life. I don’t remember when I learned that my grandfather wasn’t a blood relative, but I do know that, with the exception of my mom’s two older brothers, it never mattered to our family. My mother idolized Frank, and for good reason. He was warm, approachable, funny, and kind. He embraced our family as his own. The conflict with my uncles came later, and as with many ranch families, it involved money and property.
Like his new wife, Frank was no stranger to tragedy. When he was fourteen, his oldest brother George drowned in the Little Missouri River, also loading grain, although this time it was onto a raft, leading one to believe that loading grain was much more dangerous than history has indicated.
George’s body wasn’t discovered until months later, but Frank, who was in eighth grade, knew he had to leave school, which he loved. That is a story I never heard from my grandfather, and I also don’t remember the slightest hint of bitterness about the hand fate dealt him. He loved life on the ranch. And although I’ve wondered whether my grandparents ever provided each other comfort over their losses, it’s more likely that they shared a silent understanding that life in this place was brutal and unpredictable. Because this was a time when painful memories were tucked away in a place nobody would touch. Where people went out of their way to avoid mentioning dead relatives. There are still people in our family who live by that code, and the impact can sometimes be devastating. But at that time, it was also rare for a family to have not lost a child. One of my grandmother’s sisters raced home from school to report that her brother had been hit in the head with a rock, and she died a few days later from spinal meningitis. She was ten years old.