The Race Against Summer – Haying Season

By Bennett Owen

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

“No matter what happens anywhere else the hay gets put up in the summer and fed out in the winter.”   

- R.D. Marchesseault                   

I grew up in southwest Montana, in the land of 10-thousand haystacks. OK, we weren’t actually in the Big Hole valley but my Grandfather’s ranch was so picturesque that it was featured on the post card anyway.

Beaverslide. Credit: Tripping with MikenJudy

Look at those mighty haystacks, spreading down the valley … 30 to 60 tons per stack … Grandma said they looked like fresh-baked loaves of bread, an unforgettable image…

Credit: Altameadow

Fleeting monuments, so vital in the yearly circle of ranch life… things of beauty and yet the production was anything but…an orchestrated mayhem of grease and grief and men and machinery, locked in an eight-week race against summer. 

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

A grueling, back-breaking struggle against time, the elements and the fickleness of lady luck. And yet, as a young boy, my loftiest goal in life was to be a hay digger, there simply was no alternative. Forget the rodeo riding, the only bull I wanted to be on the back of was a monster bullrake, pushing hay by the ton to the beaverslide, on and on through endless meadows. 

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

When I was a kid the bullrake was the equivalent of flying fighter jets off aircraft carriers…the ultimate achievement, a dream that many had but few would attain. 

Credit: My-West ©

There was a certain cocky glamour to it, the way my uncles did it … a brash and showman-like quality to their expertise for they were very good at what they did.  And watching them, riding with them, all the young lads dreamed of someday guiding the monster through fields of green.

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

Yes, there was a pecking order in the hayfield, an unwritten code of rank and privilege. So we started out…with a pitchfork, cleaning hay around the stack. But that didn’t even merit a seat at the dinner table with the hay hands.

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

Eventually we graduated to the scatter rake, servants of a sort, cleaning up the leftovers the God-like bull rakers carelessly left behind.

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

After a small eternity, the promotion to the side delivery rake or the hoist…and perhaps the mowing team, also a rare honor.  Stacking was by far the worst chore, a summer sentence of sweat and swirling hay dust and the sense of constantly climbing up out of quicksand.  The one reward at season’s end was a slightly heavier paycheck and a body that was way beyond buff.

Credit: My-West, Gordon Berry Archive ©

I started out in the hayfield with a pitchfork at age eight. I was 17 when I first mounted a bull rake.  And a lot of strange and humorous things happened in that span of time. But that is the stuff of tomorrow’s post.  In the meantime, here’s a primer on haying in the land of 10,000 haystacks.

Josh, thanks so much for submitting this painting to My-West - it really captures haying time in Montana:

Hay Season, by Josh Elliot © - near the Little Blackfoot River, near Avon, Montana

Thanks to Jim Brown for submitting these great photos of haying in Beaverhead County, Montana: