RANCH WIFE

CH WIFE

Back in my Minnesota childhood, when I ate Ralston every morning because Tom Mix sponsored it, I wanted nothing as much as to live on a ranch and be a cowboy. The only time I wavered from this burning desire was when I thought that, after all, I would rather be an Indian. Later on, when it became apparent to me that I was a girl and, therefore, unlikely to become either a cowboy or an Indian, I settled on a more vicarious course and decided to marry a cattleman, instead. That, in part, explains what I am doing in the middle of a cattle ranch in Northern Arizona married to a man named Cooney Jeffers. What has this lifelong single-minded determination earned for me? For one thing, hangnails, a squint, a remarkable set of muscles and skin that feels like an orange somebody left in the sun too long. For another, a richer, fuller, more meaningful life than I had ever imagined back in my Ralston days.

Born in the German community of New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1931, Jo (Johnson) Jeffers has always wanted to 1) live in the country, 2) write stories. Since coming to Arizona in 1949, both dreams have materialized. She studied English literature at Stanford and the University of Notting ham, England, which, she argues, gave her an excellent background for ranch life her extraordinarily strong biceps came from lugging around the Complete Works of Shakespeare, The English countryside still runs a close second to Arizona in her affections, but the lonely, wind swept beauty of northern Arizona has caught her restless and inde pendent nature and held it fast. After graduation, she spent some time doing research on local his tory for Arizona Highways articles. Following an urge to "do something practical," she spent a "brief and highly unsuccessful" period working for the Palo Alto Times. ("More unsuccessful for them than me.") In 1936 she came back to the country she loves and married "Cooney" Jeffers, a rancher. "Ranching," she says, "is a way of life that a man and woman can share completely. It is good to work with your husband and feel needed. We really have only three things in common we love animals, people and each other." It occurred to her last year that there have been multitudes of books, articles and movies about cowboys and horses, but the poor ranch women have been left out in the cold. This article tells their side of the story.

Ranch life?” The sad fact is, I can't remember ever having adjusted to anything. I must have been adjusted to start with. Oh, there were a few trivial little incidents to be expected in the first year of marriage, like the time I showed Cooney a large egg and he said, “Oh THAT. That's just a rooster egg,” and I believed him. Or the first time I baked a cake and iced it and had left the removable bottom of the cake pan berween the two layers. And the day I bought some beets which I peeled because, for some inexplicable reason, I thought they were red turnips. Cooney came in, saw them cooking, and said, “That's the first time I ever saw anybody get blood out of a turnip.” Or the first time I saddled my own horse and rode out to meet the men coming in with some cattle. When we got home, Cooney told me I had the saddle blanket on backwards. And the time, gathering eggs, I got stuck in the haystack and Cooney had to pull me out. Or-worst of all-the day I overzealously cleaned house and burned up a lot of insignificant-looking papers which turned out to be Cooney's certificates for the government emergency drouth feed program. Those were the days when I thought perhaps I should have been an English teacher or anthropologist instead of a rancher's wife. As for background and education, I have known ranch women from every imaginable place: from the English Midlands to the Pacific Coast, from Canada to Latin America. Whether they have studied at the Sorbonne (one of my neighbors has) or have no formal education at all, they seem, of necessity, to have more than their share of plain common sense. There are, I think, two popular misconceptions about Ranch women. One, TV inspired, would have them silky ladies who sit in the parlor fretting about the mortgage while the faithful Indian servant brings them tea. The part about the mortgage is all right, but I've waited on a lot of Indians and I can't remember one ever having waited on me. The other is that they are all married to rich Texas oil men and spend their time driving around in Cadillacs shopping for mink coats. The truth is, no matter how wealthy a rancher is, his money is usually tied up in land and cattle, or put away for the year it doesn't rain or a blizzard hits or the bottom drops out of the cattle market. If I were asked to list some characteristics I think are typical of ranch women I would say that they, like their husbands, tend to be self-reliant, fiercely independent and stubborn as mules. They have an amazing capacity for hard work, a life-saving sense of humor and a down-toearth set of values which result in a complete lack of pretentiousness. Although they are rugged individualists, their common denominator is a deep interest in the cattle industry and this highly specialized way of life called ranching. When ranch women meet at the post office or on a country road, they will probably ask the ever-present, all-important question, “Have you had any rain?” then go on to the relatively minor business of home, school and community. They are more likely to talk about a bull sale than a dress sale, a horse show than a fashion show, the cattle market than the super market. When my mother-in-law was seriously ill in the hosWell, Granny would have understood. At eighty-one, with one artificial arm, she still brings dinner to us when we are driving cattle or branding. Last summer, while we were sitting around the fire, she leaped (quite literally) onto a horse, disappeared over a ridge and came back in an hour or so with two unbranded calves we had missed. Raised in a log cabin in the mountains of New Mexico, she married a cattleman whose father rode the Chisholm Trail. Together they built up a herd that ranged from Chihuahua to Texas. She has driven cattle, flanked calves, run horse races, repaired windmills, pieced dozens of quilts, washed and cooked for a bunch of cowboys, raised four children and was never too tired to dance all night to fiddle music. Compared with the women of that generation, I hardly feel worthy of being called a ranch wife. There is still the work to be done, but we have so much moreto do it with. My household duties are not very different from anyone else's except for taking care of the milk and eggs and cooking three relatively big meals a day for the men. Once a week I take our laundry to town, load the car with groceries and run errands for Cooney. We have a light plant that runs off Butane, so that I cansew, iron and have a vacuum cleaner. Cleaning house in Northern Arizona is somethinglike trying to sweep up the Sahara desert. I thought that Holbrook was the windiest place on earth until I readabout Outer Mongolia, and that consoled me. It is notunusual to confront a cow on the front porch or a horse cheerfully munching rose bushes when the wind has blown the gate open.

I really enjoy gardening, but for five years, I have fought a continual battle against my game chickens, They have methodically scratched out everything I ever planted except the roses. They fly over the house and crawl under the chicken wire. This year I capitulated and we now have a gravel lawn.

We have no children, but if we did, I would have to drive them to school every day, as my closest neighbor, sixteen miles away, does. Many isolated areas still do not have school bus service, so that some ranch women live in town during the school year. One intrepid friend solved her problems by driving the school bus herself.

My "family" consists of two young Navajos who are fond of eating and leaving without notice for days at a time and are distinctly not fond of washing dishes and sweeping porches. And then there is Ep. At seventy-two, Ep is probably the best shot in all Arizona-with tobacco. He is a real old-time cowboy who is not what you'd call a fanatic about cleanliness and things like that, but I love him because he gets up every morning and makes coffee.

Our Navajos, Jeffrey and Daniel. Yellowhair, ages seventeen and twenty-one, are incredibly adept at sniffing out hidden pots of cookies and equally good at accumulating piles of dirty clothes for me to wash. But whenever I get "snowed under," they pitch in and wash dishes, scrub floors, beat rugs, wash windows and are extremely clean and thorough about everything around The house. The day I arrived home from a recent twoweek trip, they had voluntarily cleaned the house from one end to the other for me. Now I hide the cookie pot a little less carefully than before. Small, strong and agile, they are good cowboys. I have never heard of an Indian being lost, even in the roughest country. If there is one thing in particular I have learned from being around them it is a keen awareness of all the natural world. They see and hear everything. When they are happy, they are singing loud and strong, as they work. When they are unhappy, they sit silently brooding through lusterless dark eyes.

Like most ranch women, I like to cook, probably because it is so closely affiliated with eating. If Cooney didn't raise beef, he couldn't afford to feed me. I am completely undiscriminating about my eating and cooking. One day I venture into the realm of French cuisine, the next it is Mexican food. At branding time or during roundup, I always resort to good hearty cowboy fare like roast beef with onions, potatoes and carrots, pinto beans with salt pork, hot biscuits or corn bread, homemade pies and lots of black coffee.

Some unimaginative person is always asking me, "Don't you get lonesome out there all by yourself? What on earth do you do all day?" I grit my teeth and mutter, "Oh, I manage to pass the time." How anybody could... get lonesome with four cats, two dogs, seven guineas, two geese, twenty-four ducks, forty chickens, seventeen sheep, a corral full of dogie calves and milk cows, eight saddle horses, three cowboys, one husband, and a startling assortment of people coming in at all hours to visit, is beyond me. But, although we both enjoy company, I think of solitude as something very very precious and feel sorry for people who cannot be alone.

When I'm not eating or thinking about eating, I am working on one of my innumerable projects. Besides sewing, I like to paint, but have no talent. in my more ambitious moments, I may tackle a tough refinishing job, or build something new. I like to work with wood so much that I gave Cooney a Skil Saw for Christmas, so I could use it. We have built a coffee table out of the little pieces of wood left from the parquet floor, and a patio table of Mexican tile and iron. Coo Cooney has designed and made all of our gate latches, built corrals until we look like the Kansas City stockyards, made his own branding chate and installed our cattle scales.

When we were married in July, 1956, home was a dilapidated bunk house which had originally been a saddle shed. For two weeks we slept in the back of the station wagon because two Navajos were already living in the bunk room. Every morning we woke up with two dogs and four cats in bed with us, which was very cozy, for July. There was usually a horse looking in the window and a rooster crowing in the vicinity of the hood ornament.

Onto this imposing bunk house, we built a bedroom out of railroad ties and attached it rather haphazardly to a shed which we made into a bathroom. Two years later, we felt prosperous enough to add a living room, another bedroom and bath. Last winter we remodeled the kitchen, replacing the old stove, with which I had no sentimental ties, with a wall oven, and tearing down the old low ceiling, which, unfortunately, had no money hidden in it. Most of the interior of the house we have finished ourselves, including a lopsided set of cabinets I builtbecause Cooney told me I couldn't.

Our furniture consists of some plastic-covered oak monstrosities and some antiques left over from my greatgrandmother. All in all, our home, like most ranch houses, is something of an architectural marvel. But it is roomy, comfortable and, I hope, inviting. I am still working on it and I suppose I shall go on forever like Penelope weaving the tapestry and ripping it up at night. Forming an "el" with the house is a shop where some of my hens roost on the light plant and singe their feathers. Adjoining that is the barn where the cats live when they are not on the great-grandmother furniture. Next are two bunk rooms tastefully decorated with broken mirrors, five-year-old calendars, horseshoes and wornout hats. A battered chicken house is next to the bachelor quarters and that eliminates the necessity for alarm clocks. Last but not least, picturesquely situated in the midst of the corrals, within sprinting distance of the bunk rooms, is a monument to bygone days-an unsturdy but well-ventilated out-house, which may be viewed in all its past glory from the picture window in the dining room.

Many of our neighbors still have no plumbing because the country is very rocky. We had three small cesspools and I got a new one for Christmas because my kitchen drain hadn't worked for about a year. I do, however, have an automatic garbage disposal-chickens. Unfortunately, we have to carry the kitchen garbage out through the living room, because our house is backwards. The fire wood comes in through a similar process. I have been in attractive ranch houses where the bedroom somehow had slipped in between the kitchen and living room, or you had to go through the bathroom to get to another bedroom. Some friends of ours who had a king-size bed in town moved to a ranch house where the bedroom was so small they now claim to have a wall-to-wall bed.

"What do you do," I hear a small voice ask, "without television?" In the summer, we go to bed very early because we get up early. Winter evenings, we sit in frontof the fire and read. When we were first married we used to play checkers once in a while. Not only have I never won a game, Cooney usually beats me in five or six moves. Since I am not exactly renowned for my good sportsmanship, we haven't played since. Because we do not have a telephone, we are never sure just who is coming and when, but I try to keep something on hand for unexpected company. About once a month, a pickup load of Navajos descends upon us to visit the boys who work here. I have been accused of racial prejudice-in favor of Indians. I can't help it, I love Navajos. Maybe it's a hang-over from my grandfather's, Jim Bridger, and Chief Rain-in-the-Face stories. Or maybe because they have no sense of responsibility as we know it and I would secretly like to be that way myself. Often I have cooked dinner for thirteen men, women and children. It is like the loaves and the fishesno matter how little I happen to have in the house, somehow it always goes around. We sit and visit about the sheep and grass and rain, understanding and not understanding one another. This summer, two little Navajo girls came to live with me while their mother worked in the cucumber fields in Snowflake. They were the best children I have ever taken care of.We have a lot of non-Reservation company, too. I have coffees, dinner parties, barbeques, Cowbelle meetings, or more spontaneous things. Every year we have had a birthday party for old Ep and a cake with so many candles it looks like a porcupine on fire. Last year we had a wonderful Dickensian Christmas with roast beef, turkey, ham, plum puddings, a roaring fire, everyone feeding the dog under the table and glowing with wine and love and gratitude. As far as other activities are concerned, I can't be running into town every day, and to tell you the truth, I'm not very civic-minded anyway. In my peculiar way, I think people do well to mind their own business, but I sometimes get involved against my better judgment, and then enjoy it in spite of myself. Cowbelles, cattlemen's wives, is wonderful. We meet once a month to eat mouth-watering pot luck dinners and talk about beef promotion as an excuse. After driving over dusty roads, I usually show up at coffees or luncheons looking as if I had just been changing a tire, whether I have or not.

Once a week I try to go to church, but I don't try as hard as I should. We are that rare phenomenon in the Southwest-Episcopalians. As Bishop Kinsolving likes to say, "Drive Carefully-You May Hit an Episcopalian." Each month I look forward to Cowbelles, a national organization founded in Arizona in 1937, consisting of the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of cattlemen. Our local branch is Northern Arizona Cowbelles, a territory which includes thousands of square miles. Occasionally a woman will drive well over a hundred miles to the meetings which are held in one of our homes. There are usually about forty Cowbelles and guests present and we all display our best cookery at the potluck dinners.Cowbelles is a non-profit organization designed to assist the American National Cattlemen's Association whenever possible, promote better understanding of the cattle industry, its products and its people. These meetings afford the only chance many of us have to sit down with our neighbors, talk over individual and collective problems and work them out. Unlikely as it sounds, onehears very little malicious gossip at Cowbelle meetings. We all agree with the old verse which says, "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it hardly behooves any of us to speak ill of the rest of us." The Cowbelles are women who, one feels instinctively, would be there to help, sympathize and understand whenever the need should arise. Like all country people since the beginning of mankind, we live by the seasons. Our prosperity or loss depends almost entirely on the whims of nature. And always -always-we wait and hope and pray for rain.During the long winter months, we have to chop ice at all the watering places so the cattle can drink. Most of Northern Arizona is over a mile high. Although the sun is warm in the daytime, nights are cold. When snow covers the ground, the cattle survive on brush like buckbrush, chamise, Brigham tea or white sage.At the first hint of Spring, the calves start coming. We have to watch the two-year-old heifers carefully when it is time for them to calve. I have held a Coleman lantern at 1:00 A.M. while Cooney pulled a calf on a frosty night. After the cold winter months there are always some old "poor" cows to be picked up and put on feed, or dogies (calves whose mothers have died) to be raised on a milk cow or a bottle.

Some years we have showers in April and May which, with the winter snows, make a little green grass. But Spring in Northern Arizona means wind. Day after day it sweeps across the open country, stirring up great clouds of red dirt. The earth dries up and the winter grass crackles under foot. Day and night the windmill bangs and squeaks until the noise becomes so familiar that we can't sleep on a still night.When the surface tanks dry up in May and June, the cattle must be moved away from them. Occasionally, some old cow will bog in the mud at the edge of a tank which is low. Cows, like all females, are unpredictable creatures. After helping one up, you never know if she will walk away in gratitude or try to hook you.

One summer, Cooney and I found an old cow bogged at the edge of a tank, halfway in the water. Her legs were numb from the cold mud. She had given up the struggle. The bank was too steep for us to pull her out. Getting her into water deep enough for her to swim and get the circulation back in her legs was the only solution.We left our horses on the bank, stripped down to our underwear and hats and got the cow into the water. She was not only ungrateful, but completely apathetic to all our efforts. Cooney got her by the horns and pulled. I got behind and pushed. She grunted. We were maneuvering about 800 pounds of cow in the middle of the tank when I happened to look back.

"The horses!" I said. "They're gone!" Cooney stayed with the cow while I waded to shore. I was chasing horses in my underwear and straw hat, barefoot over hot rocks, wondering if anybody could see me from the road and laughing like a fool all the time. Finally I caught the horses and Cooney got the old cow to shore. She stopped a minute to look at us as if she had been thoroughly humiliated by the whole thing, and walked off on shaky legs, snorting disapproval.

After the tanks go dry, the cattle water at six wells which range in depth from 400 to 700 feet. If the wind doesn't blow enough to turn the windmills, we have to pump water with gasoline engines. The engines must be kept in constant repair and the rods in the wells pulled whenever they stop pumping water. Hunters have been

known to shoot holes in our drinking tubs, causing us to lose most of the water. Also water dogs (salamanders) get into the float valve or pipes and we have to pull them out, slimy piece by piece.

Checking on 150 square miles of range land, the half of Jeffers Cattle Company we take care of, is a continual job. Instead of the large remuda of open range days we have a couple of jeeps which we take over sandy washes, rocky canyons, juniper-covered mesas and alkali flats to look at cattle. Fences must be stapled and wired and new posts set when antelope pull them up or cattle tear them down. Salt and mineral must be kept out at all the watering places. We don't like to hunt, but we often see antelope, coyotes, eagles, swifts, bobcats or a lynx.

July is branding time, an unpleasant but unavoidable part of ranch life. First the cattle are rounded up, then the unbranded calves are cut out of the herd and put into an alley. We use squeeze chutes instead of the old-fashioned method of roping and tying them on the ground. It is faster, cleaner and easier on the calves. One man pushes them into the chute, another man catches them, tilts the chute and brands-"P" on the shoulder, "X" on the hip and slash on the nose. Cooney does the castrating and dehorning, the worst job of all and one you never "get used to." Nowadays, Herefords won't sell unless they are dehorned. With long horns, they are harder to ship and feed. I usually vaccinate them for Blackleg, paint the horns with bone oil to prevent worms, put linseed oil on the brands to make them peel evenly without bleeding, spray their ears for ticks and contributeto the general confusion. Last, the calves are ear-marked with an underslope on the left ear, so that at long dis tances a stray of unbranded calf can be spotted. We brand in four different places and it takes about a month. Toward the end of July the summer rains should start. For the last twenty-five years the southwest has had drought conditions, and the July rains are rare now. If the rainfall were 10-12 inches a year, as it has been in the past, there wouldn't be better grass country any where. We have been getting from 2-4 inches a year, and section by section, the range is drying up.

In a good August, huge billowing thunderheads move slowly in from the southwest, bringing the afternoon showers which we depend upon for our winter feed. That is when the Hopis hold the snake dances, which are a supplication for rain. And for us there is the awful strain of seeing cattle hungry and thirsty, the wind drawing what moisture remains out of the ground, watching the sky constantly and hoping silently. There is the terrible weariness and lump in the throat that, after The first good rain, suddenly disappears.

Later on the Fall reins should come heavy and hard to fill the surface tanks and run the canyons. They are full-fledged storms, wild and raging. We were caught one day in a rain storm while gathering cattle at the west camp. It had been hot, dry and still. The clouds built up all the time we drove the cattle. Just as we got them cat and into the holding pasture, the storm broke. We raced back to the camp, thunder and lightning crashing around us, our horses holding their heads side ways against a driving rain. When we got in, cold and wet, my boots sloshed every time I took a step. We built a big fire in the wood stove and made fried potatoes and salt pork and milk gravy and talked and laughed and shivered while we dried out.

My cousin used to call me an Incurable Romantic. I guess I am. Now I know that I could never take Fall