i Oral History Program Calvin Grant Interviewed by Jennifer Tietz 9 April 2015 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Calvin Grant Interviewed by Jennifer Tietz 9 April 2015 Copyright © 2015 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 Ogden Union Stockyard was a key fixture in the largest livestock market west of Denver during its heyday from 1916 to 1971. The activities at the yard brought Ogden national attention as a livestock center; the rise of the livestock shows, auctions, etc. at the site spurred the local and regional livestock industry, physically shaping the development of the agricultural landscape both near and far. This project documents some of the stories of the stockyard workers and visitors. ____________________________________ 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: Grant, Calvin, an oral history by Jennifer Tietz, 9 April 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Calvin Grant April 9, 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Calvin Grant, conducted on April 9, 2015 at his ranch in Brigham City, Utah by Jennifer Tietz. Grant discusses his knowledge and experiences with the historic Ogden Union Stockyards. Also present are Preston Fowers, Mario “Mutt” Ropelato, Doug Grant, and Cameron Jones, the videographer. JT: Calvin, can you tell me a little bit about your background, growing up, and where you are from? CG: I don’t know what’s interesting to you, but I was born in Honeyville, and then in about 1934, my dad was in the cattle business and he did a lot of business at the Ogden stockyards. So, in 1934, it was quite a chore to get from home to the stockyards, so then we moved to Ogden. And that’s where I grew up, in Ogden. JT: Were you in close vicinity to the stockyards? CG: No, not real close, but spent a lot of time there. JT: How did you get to and from your home? Did you have a trailer that you took or did you rely on a truck? CG: Just an old car. We didn’t have a truck at that time. Then about 1950, I bought an army surplus truck for $212. Then I bought this cattle body for $135 and put that on the truck and for $350 I was in business in 1950. JT: Good deal, wow. So, you grew up being active in the stockyards, right? CG: Yeah. JT: As a kid? When did you start being active for your own sake rather than with your family? 2 CG: Oh, about 1950, I was 20 years old and I bought and sold my first range bull, and I bought the bull in Peterson, Utah, and took it to La Barge, Wyoming, and sold it and made a few dollars, not very many. Then there was another fellow that I observed that was in the bull business. And he seemed to be doing pretty good. So I thought well, I think I would try that. JT: Has ranching always been in your family? CG: Well yeah. My grandfather had a ranch over at Blue Creek along the Promontory Mountains, he raised mainly horses and my father was a cattle buyer, a cattle trader, bought and sold cattle. And he would ship them on the railroad into the stockyards, he’d buy a lot of cattle in Wyoming and Idaho and would ship them into the stockyards by train. And then the diesel trucks started to come along in the early forties, and they could pick up the cattle at the ranch and take them to wherever they wanted to go. With the railroad, the rancher had to get the cattle to the railroad and they shipped them to Ogden and then the buyers had to take them from there to their different places. JT: I never knew how that worked, that’s interesting. DG: Trucks to get them from one place to right where they were going. They didn’t have to go to be handled and unloaded and stuff, it was more direct. JT: Do you think that’s the main reason why the stockyards declined? CG: Well, one reason. And then the cattle would go directly from the rancher or the feedlot, they could go directly to the buyer whether it was a packing house or a feeder. But the railroads had a limit on the time that the cattle could be on the railroad car. It was either 30 hours or 36 hours and they couldn’t stay on the 3 railroad car after that. And so they had to unload them and feed, water, and rest them. That’s where the stockyards played a big part in that. PF: They had to be off the car for 8 hours to feed and water them. JT: So, the Ogden stockyards was like the in between, or rest stop. CG: Kind of. And it was so big it could handle just about any amount of cattle and sheep and hogs. And a lot of the cattle would go from this area to California, where they would be harvested. And Ogden was the largest stockyard between Denver and the Pacific Coast. It was a very prominent stockyard. JT: That’s pretty impressive for being such a small city. When it started to decline in the sixties, I’m sure that it had a huge impact on the businesses and the area around Ogden. CG: Oh yeah, in that exchange building they had, well on the main floor, they had a nice, big lobby and then they had a railroad office, Union Pacific Railroad office, and the Government Department of Agriculture had an office there where they would do the market reporting, they would take the statistics. And they had a couple of federal veterinarians that kept an eye on the cattle to make sure they were healthy. And then they had a state veterinarian, Doc Eric Isaacson, he had an office there, and they had a state brand inspector and they had a Wyoming brand inspector and an Idaho brand inspector. Because there was so much business up from those states that they had a full-time resident brand inspector, to keep everybody on the straight and narrow. JT: Do you remember your first experience with the stockyards? 4 CG: Well, the first one that comes to mind was that they had a horse auction before the auction barn was built. Guys just stood around. The horse sale was right east of the horse barn and north of the auction barn, whatever it is now, it was just in a shed. And that would probably have been in the late thirties sometime. But yeah, I was always around there with my dad, of course, and when you’re a kid the horses were a lot more fun to be around than the cattle. JT: I can imagine. To go along with the last question, do you remember the last time you went to the stockyards? CG: Yeah, it was a couple months ago. I picked up some chairs that were in the auction barn. But when I was still in business, the auction company did most of the business but they also had some livestock commission companies. Where out in the alley, out in the yard, why, there were two or three outfits that I can recall that had a little, bunch of pens that Peck Bros. Producers, and John Clay and others, of course John Clay was more of the sheep guy. Yeah, but when the auction method of selling came in around 1939, it seems like they gradually took most of the business from the commission firms. Because the auction was open and anybody could go there and everybody could see what was going on, where the commission firms were one-on-one. And the auction took over as the main method of selling cattle. PF: Cattle traders mostly go out to the ranchers and try to buy their stock and bring them in. 5 JT: I had one other question, being active with the stockyards for the majority of growing up and your adult life, do you have anything that was your favorite part or you found particularly interesting while being involved with the stockyards? CG: Oh, I liked being around the animals: horses first, then cattle. I could make a few dollars and that’s just the way it was, the harder I worked the more I made. JT: Wow. That’s pretty cool. Do you have anything else that you want to add that we haven’t covered that you want to talk about, that you want to share? CG: Well, downstairs in the exchange building they had a café, and they also had a poker room. JT: Really? Did you participate? CG: Well on Mondays, which was sale day, that’s when they had the big boys. And no I didn’t participate in that, I was just a kid. And that was a pretty high stakes outfit on Mondays. But then, during the week, the peons could play and I participated in that. But there’s one fellow from Cache Valley, gambling poker got in his blood. He’d come down every week, bring a cow or two sell it and then go play poker and he was not a very good poker player and he ended up losing his farm. It took a few years, but he ended up without his farm. JT: Wow, steep price. CG: Nobody’s fault except his. I guess there are gamblers like that today that get it pretty bad. JT: I appreciate you sharing your memories and stories, that’s really cool. We are collecting things to put on display if you have anything you would like us to take 6 and get back to you or if you have photographs we can take and bring back, is there anything you want to share? MR: Take them to the manure pile there and show what comes out of the back end, you won’t even have to bring it back. JT: Cameron has a couple of questions that he would like to ask. CJ: You mentioned that your first Hereford Bull you bought from up in Peterson, was that out of Royal Woolley’s herd? CG: How do you know that? CJ: I interviewed his grandsons. I was actually wondering what other involvement you might have had with them, with the Woolleys. CG: Royal Woolley? Well when I was a kid, about 12 years old, Royal Woolley had a ranch on the Arizona strip, you know where the Arizona strip is? It’s between the Utah state line and the Colorado River. JT: Yes. CG: Ok, House Rock, Arizona, Roy Woolley had a ranch there and my dad bought some cattle from Mr. Woolley and took me down at his ranch when I was about 12, could have been 11, but I think I was 12, and left me there for a couple weeks to help the cowboys round up the cattle. So I knew Roy Woolley quite well. Stayed at his ranch and that was quite an experience. CJ: Would you mind sharing more about what you did at the ranch? CG: Oh, they had a house, no women around. The house was a rock house and they had a man cook. And downstairs in the cellar, there wasn’t room for me and another kid to sleep in the house, so we had to go down in the cellar to sleep and 7 there was a stack of cougar skins. They were about that tall [about one foot], laid on top of one another, and that was our bed. And then in the morning we’d get up and the cook would make these sourdough biscuits and boy I really went for those. Ate all of those I could, then we would go out riding all day. And boy I got dry, thirsty; there’s very little water in that country. They had a water trough at a windmill and when I came to that, I got there before the cattle, I scooped away the scum on the top of the water tank and drank that water. And man, that water tasted about as good as any water I’d ever had. JT: I imagine. It is amazing how good things will taste when you need them that bad. CG: Yeah. Then after we got the cattle rounded up, we took them, the ranch was west of House Rock, and we drove them to House Rock where there was a corral and some scales and it was mine and this other kid’s job to day herd the cattle. There was a little meadow, you might use your imagination to call it a meadow, but we had to hold the cattle there while the trucks came to haul the cattle, because there was no railroad there. Then it took them maybe two or three days, there were maybe two or three hundred head of steers there. Anyway, there was this other fellow that was with me, this other kid Schopmann. And there is a Schopmann, which isn’t a very common name, that was a sheriff of Las Vegas recently, and I always wanted to contact him to see if that was my buddy. JT: You should have! CG: I should have, but that’s just one of those things you don’t get around to doing, you know? 8 JT: Yeah, gets put on the back burner. [To Cameron] Did you have any other questions? CJ: Yes, so you mentioned going to the horse auctions, were there any other auctions you were involved in? Or did you take any of your cows down there? CG: Well, yeah, we were involved in the cattle auction, because that is where we’d sell. I’d go out in the country and buy cattle and bring them in and sell them at the auction and when we got in the bull business, I’d sell bulls to the different ranchers and take in their old bulls and trade on a new bull, just like a car dealer. And then bring the old bull into the auction and sell them. JT: I know you were involved with auctions, were you ever involved with the livestock shows that they would put on? CG: No, that was a different class. We would buy breeding bulls from some of those guys that raised the purebred cattle. CJ: Any of those bulls stick out in your mind or any fun stories about them? CG: Well there was one I got in Lovelock, Nevada from Bige Duncan, and he was a home-raised, I call him a mustang bull, hadn’t been in captivity and he had horns that went like this [imitates large, pointy horns]. And looking back, when I traded for that bull, if I would have borrowed a rifle from the rancher and shot that bull right there after I owned him, I would have been ahead. But anyway, I took him to the Sandhill feedlot in Winnemucca, Nevada, where we used that for headquarters, and this bull with those horns. I pulled up to the loading chute to unload the cattle through the side gate and the gate is a guillotine gate that just goes up and down. Well this bull stuck his horn in the slats in the gate and raised 9 it up, but then his head went up with the gate, with the next instance he stuck his head in there and flipped the gate up and stuck his head out. And the guy running the feedlot, Rick Marvel, was standing there helping me, and that bull came busting out of that truck. Boy I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen anybody move that fast getting down that chute, he couldn’t climb it because it was slick sided, he outran the bull to the bottom and hopped the fence. If you could have a video of something like that, that was something, but then I thought, ‘Wow, I’m not going to have anything more to do with that bull.’ And I put him in the feedlot at Winnemucca and I thought I’ll just send him to California with the next load of killer bulls we had, but it didn’t work out that way so I had to bring the bull back in my truck and he killed three other bulls in the truck. That’s why, if I would have shot him the first day I’d seen him, I’d have been three bulls ahead, but he killed three other bulls in the truck. JT: What did you do with him? CG: Oh, I’m a good guy, so I didn’t take him to Ogden Stockyards, took him to the Salt Lake Stockyards, and I wasn’t there when they sold him, but they said he cleaned out the arena, the guys, the ring man, they put him outside after they sold him, and he was such a bad ass, probably the worst bull I ever had, but the trucker, the guy that bought the bull, was a packer and he just has a semi. Load up his cattle and take them to the slaughterhouse, but the trucker refused, tried to load this bull and couldn’t get it done, so the trucker refused to haul him. So they called up a local packer, Dale Smith, and had him come up and shoot the bull in the stockyards and dress him out there. 10 JT: That’s what you get for being stubborn and mean. CG: Like I said, he was a mustang bull and he hadn’t ever been around people or in captivity. And he was just clear wild. Anyway, that’s my bull story. JT: Does anybody have anything else that they want to share? PF: Well, one night we were loading cattle on the side of the rail, and we ran them out of the pen and into the alley. They ran as fast as they could run at the end of the alley, bust up on a gate and straightened a hook out, and they all went out and they got clear down on the end of the Rio Grande rail tracks and they followed the track clear out toward 33rd street. The train coming in hit a bunch of them, wiped out about 14 head of them, there’s about 1200 pounds of steer each. And us, as workers there, we tried, in the dark, couldn’t see, it was spooky kind of, trying to round up the remaining cows, there was probably about 28 to 30 head that got loose. JT: What did you do when you worked there? PF: Just load and unload cattle, hogs and sheep and then feed them. JT: You had the dirty job? PF: Dirty job. We would load, in the peak of the fall, we’d load over a 100 carloads of cattle out a day. JT: Wow. How long would that take you? PF: Well, three or four hours. We had to unload them, unload them on one shift, and feed and water. Then on the next shift load them back out and they’d probably go to Nevada or California. CG: One hundred cars is a lot of cattle. 11 PF: It was over one hundred cars some days. CG: Yeah, that’s a lot of cattle. JT: Was there any average amount per car? PF: Twelve-hundred pounds each, was 28 to 30 head. JT: Wow. Do you have any other stories? PF: Well, one of the guys was running up a CAT, loading manure, and somehow the bucket got caught up at the top. And he shut the CAT off and got up on the track to release whatever it was. And the bucket came back down and came across his chest, the CAT was, you had to start it with a pull rope like a lawn mower. And the guy next to him there said that the CAT would never ever start on the first pull, but that time it did. He pulled the rope and it started and he raised the bucket back up and got him out, but he was in the hospital for a couple weeks and then at home recuperating, I guess, for a couple months. JT: Were there a lot of accidents that you remember? PF: No, that is the only one I can remember. JT: Really? So it was fairly safe for what it was. CG: The railroad cars, they had to have sand put in them. And then they’d clean them out every so often, but they would put sand in to take care of the urine and manure, to help, and so the cattle could have a little traction with that sand on the floors. And there was an old feller, maybe you’d remember him [to Preston], he’d have a wagon, and I don’t know if it was a team or just one horse, but he’d go up south of the stockyards up to the sand hill and load that wagon and come down and put that sand in the railroad cars all by hand. 12 PF: They call that a sand track, they back down that sand track and put the sand in and pull back up and then back down in front of the chutes to load the cattle. DG: Yeah, and a siding to put the sand on. CG: Then when the trucks started to come, they had the east end of the stockyards, where the trucks would come in and then they’d unload and then load out of there over by the hog barn. PF: That was for the locals, the people around with small trucks and that, usually. CG: They got so busy that they started to unload the cattle, they built a new set of chutes down on the west side and then they would unload the cattle there and send them out on the east end. PF: That was a story of lost Mitchell, [to Calvin] you remember him? CG: Who? PF: The lost Mitchell, they used to call him Mitch. CG: Oh, Mitch, yeah I remember Mitch. PF: He had a border collie dog, he’d go down in the sheep barn and bring up a few head of sheep, and he’d take eight or ten head cause it was easier to drive just a few up the alley and that dog would wait down in the pen and bring up the last sheep. If the dog didn’t come up, bring the rest of them, he’d know if one got in the manger and couldn’t get out, and the dog would stay in there till he come back down. CG: Then there was the American Packing and Provision that had a large packing house right across the river, east of the stockyards, and they would drive the cattle from the stockyards over to the packing house and they’d take care of 13 them. And they would walk the cattle up the four stories and then as they processed them the cattle would come down hanging up. That was the easiest, simplest way to do it rather than have machinery. JT: That’s interesting. DG: Another thing they had at the stockyards was catwalks: you could climb up the stairs and walk over the whole, not the whole place, but you could get up and you could go, you could see down… PF: You could look down over everything. DG: They were pretty neat. JT: I saw that, they don’t have those up anymore, right? We saw the ports for the trains. Those were cool; I’m impressed they are still standing. CG: Oh, the concrete loading docks? They were over there by the sheep barn. JT: Yeah, there are a lot of them, I‘m impressed. DG: They’d pull a train up there and then there was a dock for every car so they could unload a whole bunch. They wouldn’t have to keep moving it. JT: It blows my mind; you would think they would have been able to modernize it along with the times, if they came up with something like that. But, you know, they lost. PF: They had night watchmen, you had to walk around and punch a clock, all night long and you put a key and twist it, it would ring in Salt Lake. So if you didn’t turn the key, it wouldn’t ring in. Salt Lake would call up here and want to know what was wrong. JT: That’s kind of surprising, that they could communicate that far. 14 PF: A time or two they had me, when the night watcher wasn’t there, they had me doing that. You had several clocks around the stockyard and when you go in the exchange building you had a 20 minute wait in there and I went to sleep, sitting on a bench, I went to sleep and didn’t ring so they called up. The very next hour, same thing happened, 20 minute wait I went to sleep, so they replaced me. JT: So much for a night watcher. PF: There was one thing that happened to one of the night watchman, those pens there by where they run the cattle sheep across over to Swift, the night watchman came around and there was a hobo down in there butchering one of the sheep. And the night watchman asked him what he was doing and he said, “I’m hungry and I’m gonna eat.” The night watchman went over to the office and they called the cops, he was still in there butchering that sheep when they got there. CG: To lead those sheep from the stockyards over the river, across the bridge, they had a goat. PF: They had a goat. CG: They called him a “Judas Goat” and he would lead the sheep over to be slaughtered, and that was the goat’s job. The sheep would follow something like that rather than if there was nothing there. JT: Right. Something to lead them. CG: Would follow the leader. 15 JT: What a goat. Who would have thought? Wow. Well, I don’t want to take up too much more of your time; I’m sure you’re busy, so I will just end it here. Thank you all for these stories.