Cattle In The Cold Desert, Expanded Edition

11. Herefords in the Sagebrush

Making Hay in the Great Basin 187 ask for a second cup of coVee; they simply tapped the empty mug with a knife handle. The noon meal was simple but tremendous in bulk: boiled potatoes, fried thinly cut steaks, white or brown gravy, beans and ham hocks, and home-baked bread or biscuits with farm-churned butter. During the summer,lettucewasservedwiltedwithvinegarandbacongreasedressing . A few fresh vegetables went a long way. Dessert was rice or canned peaches. If the cook was feeding a large haying crew, he might serve beef every day. It took a large crew to consume a beef before it spoiled. The steaks hadtobecutthinbeforefrying.Thegrass-fedanimalshadlittlemarbled fat, and the meat was tough. The teeth of older ranch hands were not up to chewing thick hunks of such meat. Facilities for slaughtering beef were primitive at most ranches. Usually a windlass was arranged in the corral between two stout gateposts. The animal selected for slaughter was herded into the corral, shot or knocked in the head with a sledge, then hoisted with the windlass and bled. The oVal was dumped on the ground and left for the pigs. In the early days of ranching, during the 1870s, the oVal often went to Indian families that had become attached to the ranches when cattle outcompeted them for grass seeds. The hide was thrown over the fence, hair side down, to dry for conversion into rawhide. The meat was cut up and hung in a screen cooler. Small ranches often had cooperative exchangesofmeatsoitcouldbeusedbeforeitspoiled .Inthesummer,the only alternative was to put the excess meat in brine as corned beef. Beans were a standard item on cookhouse menus, and cooks who left rocks in the beans were not popular with the crew. The lazy cook’s method of cooking beans was to dump them in the pot without cleaning themandletthechaVXoattothesurfaceandtherockssettletothebottom . Theeveningmealoftenfeaturedalargeroastortwomainmeatdishes like baked ham and roast beef and more boiled potatoes and gravy. The From Dugouts to Cattle Empires 187 188 The Land in Transition heat in the kitchen during the evening meal and through the cleanup afterwardreachedboiler-roomintensity.Duringthelatesummer,door and window screens were black with Xies waiting for an opportunity to pop in. Afterthewreckageoftheeveningmealwasdisposedof,itwastimefor the cook to do the next day’s baking. Besides bread, the crew thrived on huge slices of fruit pie—dried apricot and raisin during the winter, and appleinseason.Ifthecookwasinagoodmood,hemightpreparedonut doughtofryforthenextmorning’sbreakfast.Thekitchenstartedtocool late in the evening, especially if the ranch was situated at the mouth of a canyonwherebreezesrustledthecottonwoodleaves.Thecookhadafew moments to sit on the porch and enjoy the evening before dropping exhausted on a bunk in a hot, stuVy room with mud dauber nests on the peeling wallpaper. At 4 a.m. he was up to light the barely cooled woodstovetostartanotherday.Whowerethesesupermenwhoruledthe cookhouse? Often the cook was a dried-up ninety-pound Chinese displacedfromsomeCentralPaciWcconstructioncrewbywayofaworn -out mining claim. The cookhouse was a signiWcant part of the ranch’s production budget . The cost of boarding labor for growing hay was $0.29 per ton, and the cost of boarding the haying crew was $0.63 per ton. This was in additiontothetotallaborcostof $3.68pertonofgrasshayproduced.8 The cash expenditures for supplies for the cookhouse included Xour at $3.50–4.50 per hundredweight, sugar at $6.00–8.50 per hundredweight , beans at $7.00–9.00 per hundredweight, and coVee beans at $0.33–0.50 per pound. HenryMiller,themasterofnineteenth-centuryranchmanagement, lookedcloselyatthevegetablegardenwhenhevisitedaranch.Hechastisedoneofhismanagerswith ,“Yourvegetablegardenisnotbigenough for the men you have. Good vegetables make the men more content and draw a better class of laborers.” He surprised another of his managers by examining the garbage bucket in the back of the cookhouse. “Those Making Hay in the Great Basin 189 potato peelings are too thick. You can tell a good housekeeper by looking at the potato peelings.”9 The ranch manager had to balance the welfare of the crew with the cost of production. If he had the cook skimp on food, the crew went down the road. Cooks were notoriously touchy. One cook posted a sign in the cookhouse: “If you can’t wash dishes, don’t eat. We use wood in the cookstove cut 16 inches long but no longer. A busy cook loves a full woodbox. A full water bucket makes a happy cook, stray men are not exemptfromhelpingwashdishes —bringwoodorwater.Thewellisjust110 steps from the kitchen, mostly downhill both ways.”10 Settlers’ Wrst reaction to the treeless, semiarid environment of the sagebrush/grasslandswastoplanttreestomodifytheenvironmentinto something that Wt...