The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West

The McKay Family. Walking Box Ranch

Luke, Joan, Joe, Martin, Anna Rose, Gabe, Joyce, and Clare McKay The McKay Family wa l k i n g b ox r a n c h Joe McKay went to work for Mary Arrien in 1978. She desperately needed help to keep the ranch going. Her husband, Julian, was in a nursing home nearing the end of a long battle with Alzheimer’s, and her daughter Joyce, the only one of her children with an interest in the ranch, was in her final year at Portland Nursing College. Right away, Mary was on the phone to Joyce singing Joe’s praises. The calls continued, more enthusiastic. Joyce was relieved to hear Joe was working out, but she was not surprised. She had known him all her life, at school and 4-h meetings, and every Sunday the McKay family filled several rows of the tiny chapel in Juntura. Joe had been raised on a cattle ranch in Harper, the next town downriver from Juntura, in a house that levitated with the glorious noise of the McKay’s eight children plus an undisclosed number of foster children. The “foster” kids were not bound by formal procedures. Any abandoned kids who needed food and a family found both in the McKay household. To this day, boundaries between children of blood and those of good fortune do not exist. “They’re good people, Mom,” Joyce remembers saying. But when she finished her degree and came home, she also remembers fighting with Joe over every deviation from the way her father managed the ranch. Her head buzzed with Julian’s favorite saying, “Breathe in fresh air that has not yet been touched by the sun and you’ll get more work done.” Julian Arrien was a sheepman at heart. Later, when he changed his operation over to cattle, he worked them as he did sheep, as he learned from his father in the Pyrenees Mountains. He drove the cattle to the corral, tied his t h e m c k ay fa m i l y | 111 horse to the fence, and worked them on foot. Joyce loved being shoulder to shoulder with her father as he proudly watched his cattle string by. But Joe McKay was a horseman, and he worked cattle by staying in the saddle, teaching his horse to help do the work. Disagreements between Joyce and Joe led to loud discussions and long periods of silence that carried over to her mother’s supper table. Mary didn’t like to ride or work cattle; she gladly left all the decisions to Joe. But Joyce wanted Joe to have respect for Julian. Fighting for her father’s ways kept him alive. Relief from their running battle came when the first snow flew. The dry cows bred to calve in spring wintered on the Shumway Ranch, high on the mountaintop twenty miles southeast of Juntura. When Joe told Joyce that he would look for someone to stay up at the Shumway to feed the cows through the winter, she volunteered. She needed to study for her state nursing board exams, and she wanted to be away from him for a while. Most years, fall lingered even in the high country and the cattle grazed until the first snow came sometime around Christmas. But that year, a polar express packed the fury of winter on the wind and dumped a foot of snow on the level. Then the temperature dropped to zero. Joyce tarped boxes of supplies and her books in the back of the truck. With her border collie, Moss, beside her in the cab, she left for the Shumway at first light. The truck crawled up the road that snaked up the ridges and into canyons, the snow axle deep all the way from the valley to the ranch at the top of the mountain. As she packed her bedroll into the old Shumway house, she stopped and tapped the thermometer by the back door. At 10:00 am the mercury seemed frozen at minus thirty-five degrees. She built a fire in the cookstove and went out to load the hay on her truck. The cows smelled the hay when she rolled bales down from the stack, and they waited by the gate. At that elevation the world was white except for the long string of cows on the wavy line of the feed trail. After she...