Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West

5: Miss Lamb

z 99 z • F I V E • Miss Lamb Mr. Elliott, I have come to stay. —Josephine Lamb n The Elliotts’ toddler had become a boy. Ida photographed him in various poses, wearing his cowboy hat, sitting on a pony, working the hay stacker. In one photo, he looks like little Lord Fauntleroy. He is dressed in a suit with knee breeches, worsted jacket, and matching cap, but incongruously stands next to the ranch house, framed by a wild growth of cottonwoods. The outfit is a gauge of Ida’s hope that the ranch boy might someday feel at home in the larger world. But how was Buck to find that world? Rabbit Creek Ranch was far from towns and city life. Where Buck was growing up, there were no people other than his parents and the hired hand. He had no brothers or sisters, and few other children lived in the district. There was no radio. When he was older, he said, “I growed up alone.” The way to bring the world to a mountain ranch child was through schooling. Such a child usually attended school from age six to fourteen. After the “eighth-grade graduation,” they either went into town for high school, went out to work or to learn a trade, or, more rarely, went to Fort Collins for high school. When Buck was six, in the fall of 1917, the superintendent of Larimer County schools sent a teacher up to the Elliott ranch. Miss Ruth Richardson taught Buck at home in the first year and chapter five 100 Buck Elliott in suit at the Rabbit Creek house, circa 1917. Photograph by Ida Elliott. Courtesy of Jim Elliott. Miss Lamb 101 in the second year at a tiny one-room schoolhouse on the North Rabbit with one other pupil, Madeleine Sloan, who was six years ahead of him. Miss Richardson’s photograph has been pasted in Buck’s scrapbook for ninety years. This young woman, however, stayed only two years. Due to low pay and social isolation, a rapid turnover of teachers in the mountain schools was the norm. The children were left in the lurch. So the Elliotts needed a new teacher. Ruth Richardson’s successor was Miss Josephine Lamb—a young woman who grew up in the hills west of Fort Collins. Miss Lamb was qualified: she had two years teaching experience, was a high school graduate, and had taken college classes at Greeley. In an interview at the Livermore Hotel thirty-seven years later, she told in her own words how she first came to Livermore: “our county superintendent needed a teacher up here . . . and so she sent me. . . . I didn’t know anyone. All I knew about the country was what my father had told me . . . he was an early prospector in Manhattan. And I did know a good bit about the topography of the country, but the people I did not know. And when she sent me here, it was right in this room I came first. I came up on the stage and the Elliotts met me and I went to the ranch and taught there.” For Miss Lamb, the Livermore Hotel and its surroundings were new sights, but for the couple from Rabbit Creek it was home territory. Ida had worked in the hotel, and John had regularly stopped there as a freighter. Would Miss Lamb be able to endure the hardships of mountain life? Would she see Buck through his eighth-grade graduation? At their first meeting, John is reported to have said to her, “I guess you’ll leave too.” Miss Lamb replied, “Mr. Elliott, I have come to stay” (BT). She taught the winter term of 1919 at the schoolhouse on the North Rabbit. Buck was eight, and she was twenty-one. The year after her arrival the Sloan girl finished, so John Elliott built a schoolhouse on the ranch. It had a bedroom for the teacher. Not only did Miss Lamb live on the Middle Rabbit and teach Buck, she herself took up ranching. Before the year was out, she filed a claim on 640 acres of rangeland bordering the Elliott spread. “ I was old enough to take up a homestead,” she said, “and at that time the section law had gone through, and so along with all the other boys who were taking up homesteads, I also took up a homestead. It sounds...