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My Early Life - Page 4
by Bess King

A ranch is truly a lovely place to grow up; especially if you have doting parents, grand parents, aunts and uncles as we did. And we had lots of cousins to play with. Usually the families would all get together for holidays, and in the summers we would get together for picnics along the creek somewhere. These occasions were great fun for the children. At our house during the summer the men played baseball in our front yard whenever there were enough people. In the evenings, after working in the fields all day, they usually had enough energy left for a ball game. We went to ball games quite a lot too, the young men to play, the rest of us to watch.

In the spring, Nina and I (and Mother too, if she had time) went for walks along the hillside back of our house, looking for the first wild flowers. Buttercups and birdbills were the first to appear. Mother would tell us what to do if a snake bit one of us - the other was to take the lace out of her shoe and tie it around the leg above the bite, then hurry home as fast as possible. There were lots of rattle snakes and short of keeping us in the house, that certainly was the only way to deal with it. The snakes would come into our yard looking for water. We found one once curled up on the back porch right in front of the kitchen door. Mother killed it, but I don't remember how. Mother could cope. She was afraid of many things, but she could shoot the 22, which was kept behind the kitchen door, and if a hawk went after the chickens, or any other pest bothered them, she would get the gun and bang away.

One summer we raised a colt, called Mack, in our yard - he must have been an orphan or he would have been with the herd. He provided us children with a lot of entertainment. As soon as he was big enough we rode him around the yard, having a great time. Another summer Dad bought a dozen lambs and we kept them in the yard by the house. That was fun until the rams got to be big enough to be a little mean - then they were moved to another place.

We had no trouble amusing ourselves; we could roam all over the place, on foot or on horseback. We had lots of lovely trees to climb, and on very hot days we could go to the creek to play in the water. Kahler Creek ran through our ranch, it was probably a mile or so from the house.

We always dried the dishes when we were old enough and we helped with the house cleaning - but I don't remember doing anything that was really very useful. We went though a period of helping with the milking, and we used to take turns getting up to help with breakfast, but these weren't duties - we just wanted to do it, and I doubt we were much help.

When poor old Sally gave out, Dad got each of us a pony of our own. Mine was a bay called Babe, and Nina's a brown mare called Brownie. They were about the same size and we certainly enjoyed having them. We were supposed to take care of them, that is curry them after they were ridden, but I think Dad fed them when he fed the other horses. There were always horses in the barn and barn yard. I'm not sure how many, but we had work horses to pull the wagons and machinery, a lighter team for the buggy or hack and always several riding horses. We didn't have a car until we were living on the Hunt place. That must have been 1918.