A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

12: Getting Along with the Neighbors

All the ranchers around there had long since decided this woman at Centerfire was plumb nuts, raising dairy calves and hogs and chickens and goats and turkeys instead of just beef, which they considered was the business of ranchers. But gradually they began to warm to the idea of having pork on their table. They began to trade purebred Herefords for my Duroc hogs. And once they saw I had plenty of milk and butter and cream from our mixed Jerseys and Holsteins and Guernsey cows, they started trading for those, too. One summer I invited all the neighboring ranchers over for a barbeque and rodeo. I dug a pit and roasted a pig, and the women brought salads and breads and covered dishes and desserts. And in the makeshift corral Frank and I had built with a chute for the stock, the cowboys competed in roping and riding contests.I also had a calfroping event for the kids.Everybody seemed to have a real good time. But sometimes on the ranch I had trouble with my neighbors, probably because I was a woman out there ranching. Some of the men didn’t think a woman was up to the job, and that led them to try a few tricks. After I got the contract with the Borden Company, 12 ❙ GETTING ALONG WITH THE NEIGHBORS ❙ 82 ❙ ❙ GETTING ALONG WITH THE NEIGHBORS ❙ occasionally some of the good-grade dairy heifers came up missing. So I made it a habit to round up the Borden stock and get a count on them at least once a week. One time I came up four head short. I couldn’t find them anywhere , and I couldn’t find their bodies, so I knew they weren’t dead. I thought maybe they had gotten in somebody else’s pasture,though that wasn’t likely because they weren’t the kind of stock to break out and stray too far from home. For two weeks I looked everywhere for these heifers.Finally I rode up a narrow little canyon on the side of Spur Ranch with a stream running through it that led over to Luna. I went up there about a quarter of a mile and heard this bellering. I kept going and found the heifers.Somebody had built a pole corral and had them penned. The ground was strewn with hay. Whoever it was had been bringing hay down there and feeding them. I just let them out of the corral and set the corral on fire, just burned the bastard up, and took the heifers back to the ranch. I guess the rustlers thought they’d keep them there till I’d given up on ever finding them, then rebrand them and take them over as theirs. Well, they knew I’d found them whenever they saw the corral burned, but nobody ever said anything about it. Spur Ranch and Centerfire weren’t adjoining.One of my neighbors, a guy by the name of Hulsey, had a forest permit bordering on both ranches.Part of his place ran between them,touching on both.I had trouble with his stock getting in the Spur Ranch fields in the summertime and eating up the crops I was growing there for my winter feed. Two or three times I found Hulsey’s cattle in there and drove them out.And each time, I checked his fence line up a ways from the field and found the wire taken down from the posts, and logs and rocks laid on it to hold it down so the cattle could walk over it into my planted fields. Every time it happened I rode by Hulsey’s house and told him his 83 ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ cattle were getting into Spur Ranch and I wanted him to keep them out. And every time he just told me I had to fix the fence. I said I’d fixed the fence several times, and somebody kept taking it off the posts and putting it on the ground and laying weights on it, and I was fed up with that business.He said he didn’t know who was doing it and he couldn’t do anything about it. The next time my fence was laid down and weighted with rocks and his cows were in my fields, I turned the gate on the irrigation ditch and let...