Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

22. Gene Miller, Ranch Wife

✥ 22 ✥ Gene Miller, Ranch Wife For gene miller, the hardest years of her life as a ranch wife were the years she had to live in town. Gene, who is my neighbor in Fort Davis, grew up as a city girl in Vancouver, British Columbia. She met her husband, Fort Davis cowboy Roe Miller, during World War II. He was a US Navy flier, stationed at Whidbey Island, Washington, and Gene was working for the Canadian general in charge of Canada’s Pacific coast war zone. They were married in April 1945, and when Roe got his discharge six months later he brought his Canadian bride home to the transPecos . He took a job as the manager of the Rockpile Division of the Reynolds Cattle Company’s Long X Ranch, and the Millers lived in a camp house near the Rockpile. It was an extremely isolated place. The road to Fort Davis was unpaved and the house had no telephone. In fact, when they first moved in, it had no electricity , and the young couple rose and went to bed by kerosene lamps. Nor did it have indoor plumbing. Gene Miller later wrote about those days that “We started out in a house with a path, but soon graduated to a house with a bath.” Their water came from a cistern in the Rockpile and was piped into the house by gravity. It is hard to imagine a place more different from urban Vancouver. Roe Miller worked for the Long X before the war and loved his work. “He always wanted to be horseback,” Gene told me. “His life was living horseback.” When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he told the Reynolds that he had to join up, but that he would be back when the war was over. His roots were deep in Jeff Davis County. He grew up in his father’s apple orchard in Limpia Canyon, where his great-uncle, Victor Moreau Ward, had planted the first trees in 86 ✥ 1895. Some of his wartime comrades found new lives in exotic places after the war, but Roe Miller headed straight back to the Davis Mountains and the Long X. Gene knew what to expect. After their wedding, her husband was given a honeymoon furlough, and he took her to Fort Davis to meet his parents. Their train stopped in Orogrande, New Mexico, at dawn. Miller raised the shade in their Pullman berth and looked out of the window at an endless landscape of sagebrush, rocks, and prickly pear. “It’s beginning to look like home,” he said. Gene, who grew up among the lush, fog-shrouded forests of British Columbia, cried. But she quickly learned to love her new home. “Rockpile Ranch was the polar opposite of anything I had ever known,” she told me. “Vancouver is not a little town.” From the Rockpile it was forty miles to Fort Davis, which was hardly a town at all. But Gene enjoyed being close to nature, and she and Roe, being young and in love, came to treasure the isolation. They kept a milk cow, and Gene churned butter in a hand-cranked churn. “I made hundreds of pounds of it,” she said. Eventually, after their house was wired for electricity, Roe’s parents gave them an electric churn. She learned to drive a truck and pull a trailer behind it, and she kept chickens, gathered eggs, and fixed windmills. She and Roe had two children—a girl, Sandra, and a boy, Thomas. She thought they lived in paradise. It was the children who ended Gene’s ranch life. Back then, ranch children who were old enough to go to school moved into town. If there was a school bus, it didn’t run by the Rockpile. When Sandra was seven, Gene took her and her little brother and moved into Fort Davis, leaving Roe on the ranch by himself. She rented an apartment behind Rita Sproul’s boarding house on Court Street and lived in town five days a week, going back to the ranch with the children on Friday afternoon and staying there until Sunday afternoon. Other ranch wives did the same thing. Gene said that her tutor in town life was Margie Grubb, who had ✥ 87 four children in school and spent the week at the Grubb family home across the street from the Methodist church. But Gene missed the ranch, and most of...