Vintage Photo, March 12, 2012

Claire Playing House in the Grasshopper Valley, Montana, 1937. Vernacular photographs of the West from the My-West.com photography collection.

© My-West.com Photography Collection. All rights reserved.

© My-West.com Photography Collection. All rights reserved. See other posts on clotheslines at:

We Open with Clotheslines

Strings Attached

Vintage Photo, January 30, 2012

By Donna Poulton

This vintage photograph of my grandmother is one of the images of which I am most proud.  Wearing a flapper dress in the early 1920s, she is sporting a pistol and sitting sidesaddle.  She was spirited and even though she lived on a Montana ranch 40 miles from the nearest town, she had style.

Credit: My-West.com © All rights reserved

Ten Tips for the Hayfield: The Race Against Summer, Part 2

By Bennett Owen

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Haying hand, Credit: Library of Congress

It’s one of my favorite sayings and comes from football legend Johnny Unitas: “It’s what you learn AFTER you know it all that counts.”  For us kids, a lot of that learning took place in the hayfield.  Good judgment comes from having lots of bad judgment. And I had that in spades:

• We learned quickly that bailing wire and a little ingenuity can fix just about anything. My grandfather once repaired a cracked engine block with a willow twig. It held all summer long.

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Haying hands. Credit: Library of Congress

• We also learned that liberal application of oil and grease keeps machinery running. And that was a good thing because a breakdown usually came with a sentence of cutting willows along the creeks and irrigation ditches – a fate worse than stacking.

• Come quitting time we’d put tin cans on the exhaust pipes of the tractors in case of rain. In the morning, if you fired up the engine without removing it, the can would fly about 20 feet into the air. We “forgot” a lot.

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Credit: Library of Congress

• ‘Weather’ was the only way to get a day off, so after a couple of weeks straight haying, we’d be down in the meadows after work doing our best imitations of Indian medicine men. As the old saying goes, “timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.”

Hot coffee is always on the kitchen stove. Quarter Circle 'U' Ranch, Montana, Credit: Library of Congress

• To relieve the monotony while raking, I would always sing. Loudly. Because nobody could hear me over the roar of the tractor. Could they? 

• One of the proudest achievements of my young life was mowing all season long without a breakdown. That following a year of constant breakdowns because I was too lazy to pick up an oil can.

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Credit: Library of Congress

• The one redeeming value of stacking hay was the view from about 30 feet up but getting there was nothing but tough work.  Once as we were topping out a stack my Uncle Robert looked around and said, “I challenge anyone to come out here and do this 10 hours a day without some beef in their belly.”  For that moment I felt we were masters of all we surveyed. One of us actually was.

Beaverhead County, Montana. Hay meadow in the Big Hole Basin, Credit: Library of Congress

• Never get to the dinner table last.

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Haying hands eating dinner at the C-D ranch, Credit: Library of Congress

• There is no sweeter smell on God’s earth than mowing through a patch of spearmint along Grasshopper Creek.

Big Hole Valley. Beaverhead County, Montana, Credit: Library of Congress

And finally, a maxim to live by -

• Grandma was always right. Her admonition to be careful with the pitchfork fell on the deaf ears of an eight year-old hay digger eager to join the crew and clear hay from the side of the stack. About one minute after said warning, I jabbed a tooth of that pitchfork right through my toe leaving a neat hole in one of my new tennis shoes and turning its canvas color instantly from white to crimson.  I swore she’d never find out but … Grandmas know everything. And they’re always right.

Big Hole Valley, Beaverhead County, Montana. Stacking hay, Credit: Library of Congress

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:

Shadows in the West, Part II

By Donna Poulton

"[For] the painter … color has very few thrills.  Almost anyone can see color.  It is in the bright light or in the deep shadows, and the transitions between these, that the painter finds interest."

-- John Carlson         

Albuquerque, New Mexico, Credit: sburke2478

"Where there is much light, the shadow is deep."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe         

Over the Flathead River, Montana, Credit: Sam Beebe/Ecotrust

"Fear has a large shadow, but he himself is small."

-- Ruth Gendler       

White Sands, New Mexico, Credit: elimnmsu

Bryce National Park, Utah, Credit: wuji9981

Bridges and the Big Sky, Montana, Credit: ggolan

Slants #1, Credit: stillthedudeabides

Shadow of Delicate Arch, Credit: Aquistbe

Taos Church 4, Taos New Mexico, Credit: Vilseskogen

Light & Shadow, Montana, Credit: Roger Lynn

Mittens Shadow, Credit: Rose Robinson

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

-- Crowfoot