Feminine Frontier

When Rittie McNary stepped off the train at Prescott in the summer of 1899, she stepped into another world that of a ranch wife. But it is doubtful she gave it much thought at the time. The 29-year-old "mail-order bride" from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, was about to meet her fiance.

In later years, she would recall James Cameron, a lean, mustachioed cowboy 12 years her senior, as "the handsomest man I ever saw." Rittie herself was a fetching mix of Osage Indian and Scottish heritage, with high cheekbones, long black hair and a slim waist. A relationship begun gingerly through correspondence had ripened into romance.

Over the next 40 years, Rittie and James needed all the togetherness they could muster as they eked out a living along the Hassayampa River while rearing three children under conditions that, today, would be considered primitive. Like their rancher neighbors, the Camerons took the conditions in stride. They were part of the deal.

In Rittie's day, ranch wives toiled from dawn to dark with few breaks and no conveniences. They crafted clothes, quilts and In the 1880s and '90s, George and Angie Brown lived on a ranch (left) along the Agua Fria River near Mayer. George served as a Republican legislative representative and as a deputy sheriff under Yavapai County Sheriff Bucky O'Neill. In between ranch duties, Angie acted as the enrolling-engraving clerk of the House for the 11th Territorial Legislature. Found in the Sharlot Hall Museum archives, the caption on this log cabin photograph (above right) reads: "A Western Bachelor's Home. Wife Wanted."

Diapers out of feed sacks and scrubbed them clean on washboards. They cooked rib-sticking meals from scratch on woodburning stoves and mended by the light of kerosene lamps. They canned (or dried) vegetables from the garden and gave birth in tin-roofed shacks without electricity, indoor plumbing-or doctors.

Doctors were sparse and stretched as thin as circuit-riding preachers, leaving ranch families to rely heavily on midwives. In her memoirs, Ranch Trail and Short Tales, Claire ChampieCordes recalled the time a midwife was late in getting to her family's ranch. "When the baby came, Father passed out by the bedside and Mother had to rise up, tie the cord and revive Father. All survived the ordeal, but Mother hoped it would not happen again."

Elladean Bittner, who hails from a pioneering ranch family in Peeples Valley, put it this way: "Arizona was hard on horses and women. The women stuck with it because they had no place else to go.

Feminine F

Bittner, a feisty octogenarian, is one of nearly 30 ranchers who contributed oral and written memories, as well as photographs and artifacts, to "Out on the Ranch," a permanent exhibition at Wickenburg's Desert Caballeros Western Museum illustrating ranch life from 1900 to 1910 through a replicated Arizona ranch house stocked with tools, furniture, appliances and clothing.

If Rittie visited the exhibition today, she would feel right at home under the "sleeping porch" or amid the dry sink, burlapdraped desert cooler and flat iron. She might even recognize a vintage butter mold donated by her great-granddaughter Lynn Layton and rancher husband, Scott.

Rittie and her ranching sisters had little time to ponder selffulfillment. Rather, they were earthbound, strong-minded individuals who often wielded branding irons and deer rifles as efficiently as butter churns.

Take Nellie Moore, who, with husband Kearny, operated a ranch north of Aguila during the Great Depression. She and her husband had no electricity and drew water from a well. A superb cook who could crank out a steak-and-egg breakfast for a dozen hired hands, Nellie also could rope and shoot. "Mother didn't like to ride horses," says Roy Moore. "She left that to Dad. But she could rope on the ground and handle a good-sized yearling." A resourceful backyard hunter, Nellie kept the desert cooler sup-plied with jackrabbit meat, which she converted into hamburger. Roy fondly remembers it as "dark and stringy but with a real good taste."

During the 1920s, famed explorers Martin and Osa Johnson hired Nellie to guide their hunting expedition for mule deer in the Harcuvar Mountains northwest of Aguila. She so impressed them with her marksmanship that they invited her to join their upcoming African safari as a "backup gun." Unfortunately, she had to skip the safari to care for her ailing parents.

At 5-feet-8 and a muscled 150 pounds, Nellie could shoulder a creosote-soaked railroad tie and pack her own deer out of the wilds. In fact, she packed them out until the age of 73. Assisted by her brother and sister, Nellie once dug a 200-foot-long goldmine shaft, using a sledgehammer, drills and dynamite. "She sharpened her own drills, put on the primers and lit the fuses herself," Roy says. Today, the shaft is part of Robson's Mining World, a tourist attraction 5 miles north of Aguila.

Ranchers pursued many such sources of extra income. Wickenburg retiree Alicia Quesada recalls that her father, José, managed ranches in the 1930s, sold braided horsehair lariats, rented out a breeding bull and sometimes picked up prize money

Although most Arizona ranching families had little time for socializing, when they did, it was reason to dress up a bit. At the Stephens Ranch in Yavapai County, the young girls show off matching outfits, probably handmade by their mother.

at local rodeos. Her mother, Francisca, sold eggs or ironed for a neighbor. “She would wrap the eggs in paper and put them in a bucket filled with river water to keep them fresh,” Alicia says. Women also took on sewing jobs or sold vegetables and butter.

While ranch wives faced daunting workloads, their typically large families provided a measure of relief. “We had to help my mom by gathering and chopping wood,” says Alicia, one of five siblings. “We learned how to make tortillas every morning—a big stack—and we cleaned house. When we got a little older, we helped with the ironing and washing.” For Francisca, Monday washday featured tubs of boiling water, bars of harsh yellow soap, pounding, scrubbing, rinsing and wringing the clothes out by hand. It was an assembly line for late-in-life arthritis. “Mother would start the wash when we left for school,” Alicia says, “and she would still be at it when we got home.” Where washing took up one day, wood-burning stoves dominated the entire week. They required constant attention, with ranch wives raking out ashes, adjusting dampers, relighting fires and “controlling” the temperature by stoking the blaze or letting it burn down. Old-timers estimate woodstoves consumed, on average, four working hours and 50 pounds of firewood each day. During summers, many wives moved them outside or substituted Dutch ovens and chuck wagons. Those who continued to cook inside rolled out of bed at 3 or 4 A.M. to beat the suffocating heat.

The bill of fare at the Quesada household routinely featured tortillas, pinto beans, potatoes, rice and greens. Although Francisca kept a garden, she occasionally picked wild greens, called verdolagas, and sautéed them with onions and salt pork. Like many Mexican-American ranch wives, she preferred drying, rather than canning, her vegetables. Every so often José “butchered a beef,” kept a small portion and took the rest to the Brayton Commercial Co., a large general store in Wickenburg where a price would be fixed on the meat, and store credit extended.

When José butchered a beef, nothing was wasted. Francisca collected blood in buckets and fried it with onions. The head was skinned, barbecued and eaten, including the eyes. “We ate everything but a few of the entrails,” Alicia says, “and the hide was made into a rug.” Most of the family beef was cut into strips, hung on a clothesline and converted into jerky. Other perishables, such as eggs and butter, were placed in the ubiquitous desert cooler, an open-sided box draped with wet burlap that prevented spoilage for about three days.

Desert coolers were frequently homemade, along with furniture, toys, clothes, quilts and sometimes, even soap. Ranch families bought only what they could not make. Francisca, a skilled seamstress, converted cotton flour sacks into dresses, sheets and crocheted tea towels, as did her neighbors and thousands of other ranch women across the West. Flour manufacturers, catching the drift, began making sacks with colored patterns.

Because the cramped, cobbled-together ranch houses seldom allowed for closets, women stored clothes in trunks or hung them on pegs. Privacy was in short supply. “The boys slept doubled up in the kitchen and the girls in a separate room.” Alicia recalls. “Our parents had their room.” Despite adverse conditions, ranch wives managed to keep their houses relatively tidy and their families healthy. When illnessness struck, they often turned to home remedies such as boiled wild herbs, which Francisca used to treat centipede bites, or, perhaps, a drop of kerosene laced with sugar to suppress coughs. They used sewing needles for stitching up wounds and, in a pinch, rolled-up magazines for splints.

In the sunset of her life, Rittie moved to a small house in Wickenburg where she continued to cook on a woodburning stove, cultivate a garden and keep guinea hens until her death at 92. “She still was tall and slender,” Lynn Layton recalls, “and she had gorgeous snow-white hair in a big roll on top of her head. She was never still. She was doing all the time.” One thing in particular sticks in Lynn's memory. “She had big, strong hands,” Lynn says. “I guess she was one of the lucky ones. She didn't get arthritis.”

when you go

Location: Desert Caballeros Western Museum, 21 N. Frontier St., Wickenburg; 48 miles northwest of Phoenix.

Getting There: From Phoenix, take Interstate 17 north to the Carefree Highway (State Route 74) exit, and drive west to U.S. Route 60. Take U.S. 60 north to Wickenburg.

Hours: Monday through Saturday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sunday, noon to 4 P.M. (except June through August).

Fees: $7.50, adults; $6, seniors; $1, children, 6 to 16; free under 6.

Additional Information: (928) 684-2272; www.westernmuseum.org.