Oral History Program Gary Blackburn Sr. Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 July 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gary Blackburn Sr. Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 July 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Blackburn Sr., Gary, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 3 July 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Nola Blackburn (left), Tim Blackburn (center), and Gary Blackburn Jr. (right). 3 July 2018 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gary Blackburn Jr., Nola Blackburn, and Tim Blackburn conducted on July 3, 2018, at the Union Station in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Gary Jr., Nola, and Tim, discuss their father Gary Blackburn Sr.’s life and his involvement in the rodeo community. Alyssa Chaffee, the video technician, and Lennie Blackburn are also present during this interview. LR: Today is July 3, 2018, and we are at the Union Station in Ogden, talking about Gary Blackburn for the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. We are interviewing Nola Blackburn, Tim Blackburn, and Gary Blackburn, who were the children of Gary Blackburn and also present is Lennie Blackburn, and Alyssa Chaffee. I want to thank you guys for letting us sit down and talk to you about your dad, so I’m just going to start with when and where was he born? NB: He was born in MacClean, Utah, also known as Little Standard, on August 2, 1928. LR: And where is that at? TB: Emery County, Utah. LR: Okay. Is that by the Spanish Fork area? Am I close? GB: Over the hill, kinda. More towards Price, that area. LR: Okay, so this is where he grew up, in this little tiny town? NB: No, they moved when he was younger to Carbon County. His Dad was a coal miner, so they moved to Sunnyside, Utah in Carbon County, Dad was small when they moved back to that area. LR: His dad being a coal miner, did he grow up on a farm? 2 TB: His mother died when he was six years old, and he spent a lot of time living with his uncles, his uncles were ranch and cowboy type people. LR: Oh, is that more ranch country down in that part of Utah? TB: In Emery County Utah, there are a lot of ranch-type people. With his mother dying, the uncles took him under their wing, he spent a lot of time living and working with them. Much of that time was spent dealing with and chasing cattle. LR: How many siblings did your dad have? GB: Dad had one sister that was his full sister. How much younger was she? NB: Two years younger. GB: Then his father remarried, and he had another brother and another sister, Kimball and Nan. There was a little bit of an age gap between the two sets of kids, and even after his father remarried, he still spent quite a bit of time with his Uncle Bly and Uncle Merrill, who were his mother’s brothers. LR: Would that be where he spent his summers and then come home and go to school in the winter? How did that work? NB: He actually lived with those aunts and uncles for significant amounts of time, because Grandpa was mining and widowed. He lived with them and went to school, so it was more than just summers. He and his sister, Gay. LR: So he went to school when he lived with them. NB: Right. LR Do you know where he went to school at? NB: I believe it was in Castledale, Emery County, and then Sunnyside in Carbon County. 3 LR: So I’m assuming that he graduated from high school? NB: He actually did not. He quit school in the tenth grade, but later got his GED. After his mother’s death, he didn’t want to go to school. He talked about hating school, and he would skip school and go watch them slaughter pigs and be around the horses and cattle. He was a very creative and intelligent young boy, but he didn’t like school that much. I think he had a hard time after he lost Grandma. LR: You mentioned that he fell in love and he just started working, learning the cowboy way on the ranch. TB: Working with his uncles, and these two probably know more of the history than I do, but they were old school type cowboys, but he was breaking colts when he was twelve years old, going with them, herding cows in that country up there. It was maybe a rougher and tougher kind of culture than it is nowadays, especially for young kids. GB: Probably when he was eight or nine, he would stay up in the mountains with a cousin of his by the name of Ward Jensen, and he was taking care of a herd of sheep. I don’t know if Dad would really want to mention this, but he was a sheepherder/camp-tender for several summers. While they was up there, they would take some of the thoroughbred horses that their uncles had raised, and they would train them up in the mountain at 6,500 feet or whatever, and then bring them back down for the county fairs and race them. Dad was racing horses, riding jockey, for these “ranch-raised” thoroughbred horses that they had got from the remount studs at the Army or Cavalry. They used to lease them out or let ranchers take them and breed them. Here’s this little sixty-pound eight year 4 old kid racing horses, and he’d ride them bareback. That’s probably where his love of horses and all that came. LR: So did his uncles train him, or was it just something that he picked up naturally? NB: Well, I guess you could call it training. Just sit him on the horse and tell him to do it and when he was doing something that wasn’t correct or dangerous they’d tell him not to do it. He would have learned by being with them, and doing the work. He was talking one time about being very sick on the trail, he had a high fever, and Uncle Merrill held and patted him, covered him up with a blanket, and nurtured him. Dad remembered that, so it impacted him. He was a very tough kid. He had to get up and ride every day for long hours. GB: They used to run their livestock up on, well in Sinbad it’s a mountain. They go from desert country up to the higher elevations, and he talked about bringing their brood mare bands home. To keep them from running off, he’d talk about how they’d hobble the foot with just about a two-foot length of chain, which would keep them horses from going. It would make them stay on a trot, because if they started to run that chain would start to whip around their legs. One of the ranges they ran on, Dad was always going to take us down there and go reride this country, and we never did do it. But he talked about the switchback trail what went up, and all they had to do was pull a fence across the road, and they couldn’t get off that thing until it was on a big table plateau type thing. Sides was evidently really steep and stuff wouldn’t come down. Just kind of interesting. Back in them days there were no horse trailers, and everywhere you went, you just had them all on trot, and you got there, and you went until you did. 5 LR: When did he start getting involved in the circuit? GB: I think probably as a teenager or a young man. He used to ride some broncs and bulls occasionally, and back in those days, it was usually somebody’s herd bulls that they brought to town for the rodeo, or somebody’s broodmare band or horses that they just gathered up for the deals. He probably was in his twenties or so when his dad and a cousin of his, George Ferguson, built the first Sunnyside rodeo arena. I’m thinking this is sometime in the mid-forties or maybe even the early-forties, I’m not sure. They formed a riding club and they’d go around and do things, and Dad never talked much about ever doing them, the potato race and the barrels and stuff that some of the other guys did. But I know he’d always roped calves, and he probably did some of the other stuff too. He kind of kept that under wraps I think. LR: So did he help start the rodeo down in that region? GB: You know, I wouldn’t say he was a go down the road kind of rodeo guy, but he hit all the local rodeos in Emery, Carbon, and maybe even further South. They’d go somewhere every weekend for, I don’t know, how many years. Probably until he started having us kids. He, he still rodeoed, but then work and family and all of that, he kind of quit rodeoing. He’d still rope calves occasionally, when we were growing up, but he quit riding the rough stock. I can remember watching him rope calves. NB: Yes, he was good. He raced horses at twelve years old at races in Emery County. LR: Were they just normal races, or did he do chariots? 6 NB: Just bareback. LR: Not even with a saddle, okay. So he’s doing this in his twenties, did he also have a career? I know a lot of those who rodeoed on the weekend had a career, had something that they do. TB: He actually did work in the coal mine quite a bit in his younger years. GB: Also the coke ovens. LR: What are the coke ovens? GB: Well, back in the day, they’d take the coal and they’d put it in the ovens and burn it down, very high temperatures, until it became what they called coke. Coke was what they used to use to make steel. They had these pretty good sized ovens, they were probably ten by ten feet, and they looked like a beehive. They had a little oven door on them, and they’d just get these fires in there, and you had to pull it by hand with a long hook. They’d give these guys like seven or ten ovens, and at that time, they were working under contract, so when you got your ovens pulled, you was done for the day. He was always wanting to get away from work and go ride colts. He always had stuff like that going on. We got pictures of him when he was doing that, and he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was buff and slim and trim, and he was in very good physical shape because it was very hard physical work. So he’d hurry and get his ovens pulled so he could get out of there, and go up Sunnyside Canyon or wherever, and ride this string of colts he had going for people around the neighborhood. Of course, every chance he got, he would go to his uncles. When Nola was a baby, he wasn’t working in the mines or 7 anywhere, and he went to work for Preston Nutter. I think Preston was one of your inductees. They lived in a little old log cabin out there with a sod roof on it, and there’s story of my sister in her high chair, with baby mice falling out of the ceiling and landing on her little high stool tray. There’s stories about fights over irrigation water, and my mother tells a time when the neighbor rode in with a shotgun across his lap, and he got on his holster and all that, scared her to death. Dad wasn’t there, and we’re little, and he’s like, “I need to talk to him about this water.” Anyway, kind of interesting. NB: The road getting in there was extremely hazardous, really bad mud, and I was just little. They had this car that had a light, I still can remember, it was an old Hudson, and I called it the Christmas tree lights. When we’d get into that car I’d say, “Oh, don’t get stuck in the mud!” because we got stuck so often. My mom lived out there for quite a while, and then she told my dad, “I think I need to spend some time with my Mom in town.” LR: Speaking of your Mom, when did they meet? NB: Actually Dad tells a story of when he was racing, when he was twelve, riding by the grand stand and seeing this cotton, blonde-haired little girl sitting there. She caught his eye, and he said that the image stayed in his mind for years. He saw her later at dances and asked her to dance, and they started dating. She was young; Dad was five years older than her. They got married when she was fifteen, and he was twenty. He said he fell in love with her when she was that little girl on the grandstand. They were an amazing couple. LR: So what year did they get married? 8 NB: 1948. LR: So was he ever drafted? NB: No. Some of his cousins were, but Dad didn’t get drafted. LR: So he kind of dodged that one. GB: He was probably just a tad young for World War Two. When the Korean Conflict came along, by then he had two kids, so he never did serve in the military. LR: So your parents, I can’t imagine being fifteen and getting married. Did they start having kids right away? NB: Well, he had to get permission to marry her. Her dad said, “Don’t get her pregnant right away,” and he said, “I won’t.” Two years later I was born, Mom was only seventeen. In present time, that would be illegal. Dad raised her in some ways, he taught her how to cook. Mom was a very mature young woman. She had a hard time giving birth to me, she almost lost her life, and me too. Dad talks about leaning on the hospital door and praying that his wife and baby would be okay. We both got through that, but then Mom got a very serious infection after I was born; she really almost didn’t make it. Dad said, “You were a hard looking kid. Your head was shaped like a shoebox and you were purple. You weren’t a very beautiful baby, but I was glad you survived and got you and your mom through it.” Mom had a tough time recovering from the infection, so my grandmother, Dad’s stepmother, took care of me until Mom was to come home. Gary was born two years later, and then Tim is six years younger than I am. LR: So a bit of an age gap. So he worked in the coal mine. When he finished that, what did he start doing professionally? 9 NB: Tim was born in February 1957, and we moved to the Deseret Land and Livestock Ranch at Woodruff, Utah in the spring of 1958. TB: Rich County, Utah. NB: He became the cow boss in a short time, and later became the ranch manager. GB: They hired him just as a cowboy, and he was there about a year and people noticed him. He was very good and very sharp with what he did, and he knew his stock. The current cow boss there was an older gentleman, well he seemed older, but he was probably forty-five or fifty. I don’t know if he was getting ready to move on or how it came about, but they ended up making Dad the cow boss on the Deseret. Of course, the Deseret is a huge, huge ranch. A matter of fact, it’s just over the hill from here, over and around Woodruff in Rich County. At that time, they ran a lot of sheep, but they probably had three or maybe four thousand head of cows. It was all still mostly just one big old chunk of ground, very few fences or pastures. I think for Dad, it was his lifelong dream come true, because this afforded him the opportunity, or the necessity, to be on horseback almost every day working and moving cattle. That’s what he loved, and there again, it was just an opportunity for him to just keep absorbing knowledge and figuring out how stuff worked best. LR: So is that where you guys grew up then, on the ranch? I was reading on his little bio that it was the largest ranch in the United States? TB: One of them, probably not the largest. GB: It was really big, and it still is. It’s the biggest ranch in Utah, I know, well it may not be anymore, but it was one of the biggest contiguous, all in one piece. Well 10 actually, some of it was out on the West Deseret, they had sheep out in Skull Valley and even out around Pilot, Nevada. But the main ranch, or the East Ranch, as they called it, was roughly around two hundred and fifty thousand acres. Thirty some odd miles one way and forty some miles the other. As a kid, I used to get side aches, going and following Dad around, because we didn’t haul horses very often. You just get on your horse and you would jog out there for ten miles, or fifteen miles, gather cattle back or do whatever you needed to do, and then you rode home. Dad’s method of traveling, it wasn’t on a walk, it was just a big old jog. A horse can trot for hours and hours and hours. If they gallop, they need to rest a while to take a blow. But if you jog you can go six or eight miles an hour if you get a good trot going. You’d stand up in your stirrups, stretch around, post. Anyway, he loved it. LR: What were some of his duties as the cow boss? GB: Well, I would say that his duties was just to take care of the livestock, and that is making sure they are on feed, and got access to water, doctoring if they were sick, and feed the cattle in the winter. He oversaw that. Big as that ranch was, he used to say, “Well, we’re a little over cowed and under cowboyed,” because they would never hire very big crews to manage this. It was usually Dad, and maybe two other guys that made up the cowboy crew, plus us kids. Every once in a while, there’d be people that would come up and want to go, but they weren’t always experienced, and he’d tolerate that. He didn’t want to be a baby sitter, and that was one of the stipulations. He’d tell us children, “I don’t want to hear you whine, I don’t want you to say how much further is it.” If you went and tended 11 business, and didn’t slow him down you were welcome to be there. But if you whined or bawled or got caught chasing too many horny toads or frogs. TB: That was me, I was probably ten or twelve years old. I got in trouble because I got off my horse to catch frogs in the creek when I was supposed to be following the cows. Dad was up on a ridge pushing cows down, he was vigorously waving his hat and cussing at me. I could not understand exactly what he was saying, but I knew by his body language that I needed to get my ass back on my horse and get behind the cows! NB: He got in trouble. GB: You might get chewed out. “Get on that damn horse and get back here kid!” TB: There’s a story that Dad tells about cow bossing, or ranch handing. Some cowboys showed up and asked him for a job. This guy said, “I’ve never been bucked off a horse in my life,” and Dad said, “Well, if you’ve never been bucked off you’ve never been on very many horses. I don’t think I need you.” LR: Here he was, thinking it was something to be proud of, and your Dad basically said you’re not good. GB: I think it surprised him. If you ain’t never been bucked off, you ain’t never been on many. NB: Dad had a keen sense of people, not only stock. He had exceptional insight. He could read people really well, and knew what they were made of. Of course he’d work them to see, but he was a perceptive man, and he understood people. He mentored and helped many just by being with them. 12 LR: I’m envisioning this huge ranch, just three cowboys working it. Was that what he did? Was that his career? TB: That was part of it. I mean, it followed from there where he actually became the ranch manager, which expanded not just from taking care of the cows, but the sheep, the property, all of it. GB: Head of operations for it. Of course, a lot of the stuff through his cow foreman deals gave him the insight to what needed to be done for range improvement, and that’s why he probably ended up being the manager, because he was a very visionary person. He could see where a fence needed to go to improve and help, and water, of course on a ranch, water is your lifeblood. He would spend a lot of time thinking of how, and trying to get the owners of the ranch to spend a little more money to put in a pipelines, or something where they could move water from one source to another. I think that was part of his ability to help them improve the range so they could run more livestock, I think that’s why they moved him up to being the ranch manager. NB: Finding the right cattle to breed and have the best beef, Dad was very good at that. In his later years he ran cattle in the Desert, the high mountains on the Desert was the land he had, and his calves were heavier than anybody else’s calves. LR: Yeah I read that. It was a little shocking that his cows, being high in Skull Valley, ended up being better. It’s fascinating. So he starts out cowboying on the Deseret Ranch, and then he becomes cow boss. How long was he cow boss before he became manager of the ranch? 13 GB: Probably seven or eight years. LR: How long did he manage that ranch? TB: Till 1975, right? GB: Well, I’m trying to remember my notes. I think he was made ranch manager in 1970. He was probably the cow boss for eight or nine years, but he was actually the ranch manager for only five or six years, and then the ranch changed hands. There was a little conflict there with the new owners. We’re starting to get into a time period when people might look at your education, as opposed to your experience. Dad didn’t have a degree of any sort, and the new owners, and we might be getting ahead of ourselves maybe here, but they hired a firm out of Denver, Colorado, to be their ranch manager group. They just didn’t see eye to eye, and Dad blew up on them and quit. LR: So he was on this ranch, then, for almost eighteen years? GB: Eighteen years. LR: I forgot he was a cowboy first. I’m forgetting about that. TB: We moved when I was one, and he left in 1975, I would have been eighteen or nineteen years old. LR: What was it like growing up on a ranch? TB: Well, when you was doing it, it was a great place to grow up. GB: Our backyard was huge. TB: Our backyard was huge, and as kids we were always outside playing in the barnyard. Working with Dad was sometimes not a lot of fun. A couple of his sayings when we were moving or working cattle was: “Stay behind them long 14 enough and you’ll get them there,” or “Your horse has not eaten all day so why do you think you need to!” GB: You’d finally come to a place to get a drink of water, he’d say, “Now’s the time to be dry, lad.” He didn’t want to hear you crying about being thirsty. I don’t even remember hearing him ever carrying a darn canteen or anything. I mean, typically there was a spring here, a spring there, where you could get off and stick your face down in there and get a drink. But there were times, especially when the trail was getting long he’d say, “Now’s the time to be dry, lad.” In other words, now’s the time to decide you’re thirsty. NB: He was better with grandkids then he was with us. They got to pack a lunch and canteen. TB: I know looking back, when I was kids, sometimes things weren’t fun, but you say, “What a great place to grow up, what a great childhood.” I left when I was eighteen, worked various jobs, ended up with a career. But looking back, what we learned on that ranch applies to anything else I’ve done in my life. Whether its work ethic, diverse skills, chasing cows, working farm machinery, and welding, all of that was a foundation and when I left that ranch, I took with me and applied to the rest of my life. NB: We had such freedom out there, and it was a large enough ranch that other families lived there. It was almost like a community that watched over us. You couldn’t get away with much, and it was a safe place, just miles and miles of country to ride in and be with your horses and the stock. Just nature. You come close to your Creator out there and build a value system that is just absolutely a 15 treasure. I can remember being able to camp in the Upper Willows, we called them, about two miles away from the main ranch. My girlfriend and I went camping with our horses for two nights. We started a fire, cooked our meals and stayed out there two nights by ourselves. Now kids can’t do those things, but we learned to be very independent, self-sufficient, and Dad would just say go get the job done and expected you to do it, and that gave you much confidence. Like Tim says, growing up, you don’t realize all that you’re taking in, and then you get out in the world and it’s like wow! I have a lot of foundation that sometimes other people didn’t have I guess. He never once told me you can’t do something cause you’re a girl. I didn’t know the confidence that gave me as a kid, but I look back on it and it was just priceless. LR: He grew up on a ranch with his uncles, and he learned all the things that basically he taught you; he literally gave you his childhood. TB: Yeah, I think the work ethics, life skills, and all of that, came from what he learned as a young man, and then honestly he improved on a lot of that and passed all of that on. LR: So under his management, did the ranch flourish? Did it thrive? TB: Absolutely. When he left, they were running over 5,000 head of cattle. GB: Well it was actually closer to seven. TB: When he came there, it was three, left it was seven. So there was a huge farming operation, just putting up hay, and in the summers they would hire a lot of young kids or older worn out cowboys to come and work to get the hay up. They learned a lot of the same lessons, and I’m sure if you talked to them, they would 16 say the same things. “It wasn’t much fun and sometimes your Dad chewed our butt, but I learned so much in that short time I was there.” It was accountability, responsibility, working hard, plus technical skills. GB: Dad had the ability with people, even though a lot of people thought he was kind of a hard-ass, but they had a great respect for him. He was the kind of guy, even though he was a boss, that if there was a post-hole to be dug, he wasn’t in the pickup truck telling you to do it, he was out there helping you. Those kids, young men, whatever, they pick up on this stuff, and they were just willing to work hard. It was like he was their big brother or their dad, they just wanted to please him. He sometimes came across as kind of a hard man, but I think people could see in his heart and know that whatever he’s trying to do, he’s actually trying to help you, and people would just gravitate towards him. NB: He had charisma. GB: I mean, they used to call him Black Bart and different things, you know, because he was kind of rough, he had a big old voice, and when he barked an order, he didn’t want to call you over twice, if you were a hundred yards away he’d holler it out, you know. And it would kind of come across like oh! But I don’t know, he was just a very good mentor to young men, and, you know, if you screwed up, you knew it. But, and it would almost strike the fear of God into them. But then, in a few minutes, he might come over and say, well, you know, you’re doing a pretty good job, but if you just paid a little bit more attention to some of the details, or something. And he was the only guy that could chew your butt out and, fifteen 17 minutes, you forgot that he had, other than you were willing to correct whatever you’d been doing wrong. I don’t know. LR: So your mother, in all of this. How did she stack up, sounds like they were really a good team. GB: In my opinion, and I’ve thought about this a lot, Mom was very good at trying to keep things balanced. Dad was a workaholic, and she knew that, and she’d work with that. I never, in all our young days, remember ever going anywhere on a vacation. We might go somewhere for Thanksgiving for two days, and go back, he’s got to get back to the ranch. But my theory was, or one of my things that I’ve always thought is Dad taught us how to work and Mom tried to teach us how to play. TB: Example, I came home from school one afternoon and she says, “Tim, go get the truck, let’s go fishing before your Dad comes home and puts you to work.” NB: Mom socialized us. We went to church with Mom, we drove to Woodruff for church. I don’t think we would have been socialized if Mom didn’t have the connections she did. She was a very intelligent, hardworking woman, and she was excellent with people. Her cooking skills were great, everybody loved Mom’s cooking, she helped people feel warm and welcome, and they loved her. Everybody loved Mom. She was an angel, actually. She loved chocolate, she’d hide it from us kids and eat it, but that was about the only thing she ever did that wasn’t totally giving and generous. She was just a very loving woman to everyone and helped people their whole lives. 18 Mom loved the holidays, but Dad hated putting up the Christmas tree, he was cranky, but she would always make it fun. Dad had a big heart and a sense of humor that was just wonderful, we used to sit around and tell stories at the supper table. If grandparents came we’d sing and tell stories, great family time. Mom, in her little kitchen of our first house, I don’t know how she entertained all the people she did and cooked for so many people. She was the ranch cook in the big ranch house, and there would be three meal settings a day. First the cowboys, second the hay crew and third the dudes, owners of the ranch. We would ring the dinner bell outside so the bunkhouse guys could come and eat. My girlfriend and I were sure glad when she got a dishwasher so we didn’t have to do all the dishes by hand. We learned how to organize, cook, and how to multitask. Mom was an amazing woman. She drove the school bus through blizzards, and we couldn’t talk her into turning back. One bus driver we had we’d get her scared, tell her we can’t make it and she’d go home, but not Mom. She cooked at the elementary in Woodruff and the high school in Randolph. She worked at the Wyoming State Hospital as a psychiatric aide. She was a skilled and industrious woman. LR: So when your Dad quit the ranch, what did he do? GB: When Dad quit the ranch, he actually went to work at the Wyoming State Hospital, for a while. TB: Security. GB: He just left. He didn’t plan, he just left. So they moved to Evanston, Wyoming, and he went to work at the Wyoming State Hospital. Then the very next summer, 19 actually the people that sold the ranch had actually retained part of it, in Echo Canyon out in the West Desert. What was it? The summer after, or maybe two years? TB: I think it might have been longer… NB: A year and a half? GB: Anyway, he started going down and just helping out a little bit, and it wasn’t too long until they said, “Gary, come on back. Manage our holdings here.” So he was out there till he retired from that ranch job in 1993. So he was there for quite a while. LR: So that was his life. GB: Of course, in between the time, he had started his own cow herd, on the side, and he took care of them also. LR: So did he have his own ranch, then? GB: No, he had to lease everything that he used. LR: When he retired in 1993, did he give up his herd or did he continue to work the herd? TB: He retired from working for the folks on the ranch, but he still had his own cattle that he managed for years. GB: I think he was seventy-eight or nine years old when he finally sold his cows. NB: Mom got sick, started getting aged dementia, and things were getting difficult, because she would be unable to be alone. Dad also had a bad winter when many calves died. So Dad stopped cowboying, sold his cows, to take care of Mom. He was a full time caretaker of Mom for over ten years. 20 LR: What was the purpose of having his own cows, his own cattle? GB: Well, I think a lot of it had to do with how he had spent most of his life and talent building ranches for other people. I think he just always wanted some of his own. Course, he was kind of a romantic in that way. He bought some Texas longhorn cows just because he like the horns and the color and the fact when you went to move them they would move and stuff like that. Of course he crossed them, so he could actually raise a little more beef through different bulls, I think he settled on a Saler-Longhorn cross. These cows would run on country where you’re thinking, “Crap, how are they staying alive.” TB: So he ran a breed of cattle that could survive out there in the West Desert, where there isn’t a lot of grass. LR: Would he sell the cattle, then, for beef? I have no idea about any of this, so I’m trying to understand how he would make his money. He would raise them and sell them? GB: Yes, he would sell the calves. I don’t think he ever actually retired. He officially retired when he was sixty-three years old. But he never retired. LR: He just kept working, okay. I can’t remember which one of you mentioned that he was a mentor to many. TB: Yeah. On the Deseret livestock there were hundreds of people that came there to work over the years. A lot were part time, and the post digging is a good example. If you’re a young man, you learned through example. But just through the experience of working with him, these young kids would go away with a 21 whole new perception of the world. Just having that experience, doing that kind of work while under his leadership. NB: Tell her about the hay operation, and the hay wagons, they had so many teams in the winter. Real ranch work, it was the real deal. TB: Well in the early years when he was there they put up hay in big stacks and they wouldn’t bale it like they would now. GB: They would look like big loaves. TB: They would be like twelve tons. In the winter, and this was when I was just a little kid, they had guys that would take a team of horses and a pitchfork, go down and throw the hay on the wagon, go over to the herd and feed it off. Over time they got more machinery and they used it. So that was kind of the evolution of moving from more manual labor to using machinery. But he was progressive with that evolution, he was always thinking forward, looking for ideas. In fact, when he was older, he bought a computer, and taught himself how to use it. So he was not just some rancher, he was very intelligent. GB: Yeah. Going back to how he would mentor people, it’s just something about him, people were just drawn to him and his personality. Even though they might have feared him when they first met him, because he was a John Wayne type, a bit gruff, or whatever. But over the years it was amazing, some years at Christmas time, out of the blue, a card or short letter would come from someone that had worked there ten years ago or fifteen years ago. It would say, “Gary. I just wanted to see how you were doing, blah, blah, blah.” Then there was always this line in there, “Thank you for making a man out of me. Making me responsible, 22 teaching me how I should live my life.” There wasn’t hundreds of them, but there was enough where I’m sure my father would probably go, “Hmmm, maybe I wasn’t such an old fart anyway, maybe I did do some good in the world besides whipping these cows.” LB: Can I interject something? LR: Yes. LB: You talked about the hay crew, but you didn’t talk about all the boys you hired in the summer. GB: Every summer, depending on whether they decided to do two acres or three, they’d have anywhere from thirty to forty-five young men working on the hay crew. LB: City kids, a lot of them. GB: Of course, in the summer, if they were running three crews, they had three cooks. LR: Not just your Mom? GB: Not just our Mom. She cooked for the crews, whoever was at the main headquarters, and then they had two hay camps. The hay camp was basically a little shack where they had a long table set up and an old barn where they had bunk beds, and little thing outside with the shower head built underneath it. That was it. The main ranch boys had it a little easier. TB: They had a bunk house. GB: And hot water. The thing that was interesting, that I recall, the kids that came to work there, they didn’t start haying until the first of July. They wanted to try and 23 hurry and get it all out before the kids had to go back to school, so they were hustling to get the hay put in, up and stacked, by the twentieth of August, first part of September. Back in them days, seems like school started after Labor Day, and I think back and they were paying them kids eight bucks a day. Eight bucks a day. LR: A day. GB: Plus meals, and if you were a stacker, you got paid a whole ten bucks a day. They had these old beaver sides, this thing that you’d put the hay on and it would run up and drop off the back, and for a long time you just had two or three guys, stackers, that as the hay came over, you’d put it in the corner, so this thing, as it came up, wouldn’t tip over. The stackers moved that hay by hand to keep this haystack coming up square. Then somebody finally had the bright idea, let’s just build a cage that we can just throw it into and by the time we get it all stacked it will be in there tight. They started doing that, and the stackers lost their jobs. NB: Years later I was going through Evanston to see the parents in Grantsville, I stopped to get a lubrication done on my car, and the guy working there was Gary Harvey. He worked at the ranch with his cousin whose name was Phil Harvey. Gary quit, he couldn’t handle it. He said, “That was the worst mistake I ever made, leaving the ranch. I sissied out, I should have stayed there and worked, I learned so much in that short time, and I really made a mistake by not staying there and doing it.” 24 LR: What a shock, we’ve been talking for over an hour, and I have more questions I want to ask, but before I do, are there any other stories you’d like to share about your Dad? TB: How long do you want to stay here? NB: You need three days. He brought a colt in the house a couple of times, just cause of his sense of humor. She was ten months old and was my horse, and he brought her in the kitchen just to get Mom going. I said, “Dad, she’s getting nervous, she’s going to dump a pile of manure in here.” Sure enough, she did right on the kitchen floor. Mom said, “Oh no! Gary get her out of here!” And he did. He brought one of the little colts in later, so there was just fun things like that. There’s story after story. He had all these sayings. Cowboy wisdom or “Black Bartisms” as we called them, and he’d always have some life lesson for anything, and little tidbits of wisdom. GB: I don’t know if I should say this, but I’m going to. I woke up, every morning, for a long time in the summers, to “Wake up and piss, the world’s on fire.” That was my cue to get up, my turn to go wrangle horses or whatever. Back then, a lot of times this was at four am, cause them horses needed to be gathered and in the corral, and they wanted people saddled up and ready to get going by six. So, because you had fifteen miles to trot out there, or you might jump into that old two-ton truck that they had and run out there and unload and ride back, but your day started earlier back then. The thing about Dad is, if you couldn’t get it done in an eight or ten hour day, well he’d just extend the day. You’d go fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t matter. 25 LR: From, from what I’ve gathered, it sounds like your Dad worked, and when your Mom needed him he took care of her for ten years. But it doesn’t sound like he lived long after she died. NB: He died first, he passed away December 3, 2014, and Mom lived until February 14, 2015. So it was just weeks after that she passed. In fact, it was on Tim’s birthday she died. We said she wanted to be with her Valentine on Valentine’s Day. TB: He was eighty-six, and he was five years older than Mom, but she passed on six weeks later. GB: Well Dad, after he got into his eighties, I heard him say several times, “Damn, if I knew I was gonna live this long, I would have tried to take better care of myself.” NB: He survived several medical issues. He had a bypass surgery in the early seventies, plugged intestines, and ruptured appendix. When the doctor opened his stomach to remove the appendix, it activated an anthrax virus, from which he nearly died. He was very resilient and healed well, he didn’t go to a doctor until he had to go, he was very tough that way. GB: One of his uncles, when he got anthrax, he said “Gary, that would kill a horse in twenty-four hours, just kill them dead,” and he survived it. It never slowed him down. I mean, for the last fifteen years of his life, his heart disease was still a factor, his bypasses had basically plugged up again, and I would watch him. He carried a little liquid nitro, and if he needed to shoe a horse, or thought he was going to be a little physical, he’d take a hit, it wouldn’t even slow him down. Heart 26 pain, just a hit, and go on. Maybe he’d take a five minute breather, and go back to work. I don’t know why he didn’t just tip over dead long before he did. NB: He had prostate cancer, too, and had surgery, and years later it came back. The combination of heart disease and cancer is what caused his death. He was very sick, couldn’t walk, and he called and said, “I can’t walk anymore.” It was very hard for him, his legs just gave out. Since I was retired I lived with my parents for a year. My brothers and their wives relieved me so I could take time out. We took care of the folks before they passed. Those months and weeks spent with them were such a treasure; they were amazing people. It was extremely hard on Dad to not be able to do for himself but he didn’t live long and have to suffer, which was a blessing. He was able to pass away at home, and Mom was only at the rest home for four days and passed, so luckily she didn’t have to be gone from home for long. They were very resilient individuals, and they helped so many people throughout life, often at sacrifice to themselves. Mom and Dad’s door was always open. GB: By take in, I mean literally take in. Bring right into their home. TB: I remember Dad, actually, had to go take out a personal loan to help out some relatives. They lived with us for a while. My folks didn’t have a ton of money either, but he was that kind of guy. “I could get a loan, and you could come hang around and live with us for a while.” AC: I do have a question, going back a little bit. After they moved to Evanston Wyoming, it mentions in the bio that they owned cattle permits on Stansbury Ranch. I was wondering if you could tell me what that exactly entailed. 27 NB: He ran cows up in Stansbury and had the permit to use the land there. LR: So that just gave them permission to use the land, the cattle permits? NB: Yes, they paid. AC: I was just curious, thanks. LR: So, unless there are more stories, and I know you said there’s too many, let me ask you a final question. If you all three want to answer it, that’s fine. What do you hope that your Dad’s legacy is? GB: Take care of business, take care of your family and self-reliance. I would hope that his livestock knowledge would get passed on. It gets harder all the time for that kind of thing to go, cause it’s so hard for people in this day and age to make a living doing what he did. Of the three of us, I’m the only one that stayed in it, as a career. I worked as his cow boss on the West Desert place; we worked together from the time I was five years old, till I was forty-something. It was amazing how much we could do with the big bunch of cows, just because we were so cohesive, and knew before we made the moves, where we needed to be. There was hardly any instruction, there was no plan to be made other than, “We’re going to gather this pasture or go on that.” Since we quit working together I had the opportunity, or misfortune, of having to work with people that were trained differently, or were not trained at all, and with these other folks its, “We’re going to gather this pasture, and if you can ride this piece over there, but please try to bring them over here,” and then you just go ugh. These guys, Tim and Nola, definitely cowboys livestock people at heart, but their life situation wasn’t quite like mine was, but I just hope his legacy, 28 through us our children, and their children, will always be honesty, integrity, forth rightfulness, take care of whoever you need to take care of and whatever you need to take care of. TB: I think his legacy is actually still in action today, with all the people he’s influenced in his life. Not just us, but hundreds of other people. Like we talked about mentorship, but not only these young kids that we talked about, they obviously grew up and had kids, so I think those life lessons will continue to apply to other people, exponentially, for many years. NB: Yeah, I agree with what Tim just said, and also what Gary has said. I think the foundation of what Dad was, the person, the character; he could sing, and paint, he had so many skills, but his character stands out. He was not a perfect man, but he was a very, very good man. His honesty, no BS kind of thing, the integrity, he had character to get through all the politics and challenges. He taught me the moxy of being a country kid and standing your ground, meaning what you say, and doing what you say you’re going to do, that counted, and it helped me in my career. I didn’t go to college, but I had a thirty year corrections career based on a foundation of values that my Mom and Dad gave me, and that’s a legacy. Then you think of the people that’s been impacted, and it’s overwhelming. I think the greatest lesson I have learned from Dad besides the work ethic and all the other is that you are responsible to yourself and your people and to God. He had a great faith, he wasn’t a religious man, but he was spiritual. He was very wise, and he had a great, great faith in how it all worked, because he lived in nature, and he knew there was a God. I think that gave him so much courage in his life. 29 Those were the things that I carried away, and laid a seed that I think lives on in so many people’s lives. LR: Thank you guys. NB: Thank you. LR: I feel I’m a better person getting to know and talk about your dad, so thank you for your time and your willingness to share about him. I appreciate it a lot. TB: Thank you.