Square Butte taken from Leistiko Road
I was born September 26, 1910, at Great Falls, Montana. My earliest recollection is about at the age of four and involved mostly, the life we lived at the boarding house. I remember the great kitchen in which my mother slaved, feeding some 40 to 50 men. There was that great big kitchen range which swallowed coal by the buckets full. There was a huge pantry off the kitchen where I spent many hours looking for the coconut or raisin box, which my Mother very deftly was able to hide from me. There was a favorite little corner where I could stand out of the way and yet gaze into the dining room and watch to see if those hungry boarders would leave a few wieners or pieces of hamburger for us kids. I would stand and glare at them and try to cause then to have pity and go easy on the wieners, but to no avail.
We were not allowed to eat until the boarders were all through and had left the dining room, and then we rushed in like a bunch of scavengers to see what was left. The dining room was 30 feet wide and about 50 feet long and had three long tables. We would go from place to place trying to get enough to eat. Of course, there was always plenty of bread and milk left.
I remember washing clothes on weekends. My mother usually washed the clothes for all the boarders, too. We had one of the very modern hand-turning washing machines and from the age of 5, I got my turn at it.
When I was six my father went out to homestead north of Vaughn on one hundred sixty acres. The Homestead laws required that you live on the land for two years constantly, so from the fall of 1916 on there was no daddy around the house and this meant Buster (which I was known as in those day) had to tend the furnace and carry out the ashes from both the furnace and the big kitchen stove. This was my job from then on until the boarding house was lost through a foreclosure, when I was age fourteen.
There were two cellars under the big house. At the rear of the house was the coal and furnace cellar, which was where the steam boiler was situated. There was a tunnel about 30 or 40 feet long, through which the steam pipes passed, and which, on many occasions; my friends and I passed on our bellies. We had to get an apple somehow. It was real spooky down there and we spent many good times playing games and having ghost parties. This is the way I got my friends to help me carry up the ashes. There were at least two large wash tubs of heavy ashes every night and two kids could haul these up and carry them out to the alley, otherwise it meant a lot of trips with a bucket up to the wheelbarrow, which I was hardly big enough to handle.
I had all the making of a second-class steam engineer since I had to bank the fire and shake down the grates and watch the steam pressure and the water gauge. It had to be just right. At these times we played like firemen and someone else was the engineer, especially the guy that ran the wheelbarrow. You can imagine how black and dirty we looked all the time.
I remember the day the Armistice was signed. I was 8 years old. I remember running down town with three of my buddies, who were older than I and knew more of what was going on. All I could think of, and all I kept saying, as I merrily slapped them on the back, was "Boy! Shows will come back down to 5 cents. War inflation had brought them up to 10 cents.
1919 was a drought year. We had about 20 head of cattle and 12 head of horses. By the first of June the only thing growing in the field was Russian thistle and they were even small. The cattle and horses were thin from trying to live on this grazing because the thistles acted just like castor oil. We had water for the cattle but the neighbors had to start hauling water in May from Muddy Creek, which was 6 miles away. They would harness and hook up a four-horse team to the water wagon and proceed down to Muddy Creek for a tank of water. One tank lasted one day so this meant a daily trip. This went on until August, and then our well and spring went dry, and we had to start hauling water too. We hauled in barrels because we didn't have a tank. To us kids, we were not aware of the impending disaster, or how to feed the livestock through the winter.
There wasn't any hay in the country. My Dad went down to my uncle's place in North Dakota to buy hay, but the only hay in North Dakota was slough grass, which was sticking up above the ice. At a great cost to themselves, they bought a baler, and cut and baled this grass and shipped it home for hay. By the time it arrived at Vaughn, our horses were so weak they could hardly pull an empty wagon, let alone a load of hay. The slough grass was moldy and the horses got sick on it. Every morning they would hook up four head of horses to go down and haul hay from Vaughn. Many times they would have to help the horses to their feet they were so weak.
Luckily we took five of our milk cows to town that fall. We had a big barn at the back of the lot and we kept the cows inside all winter. The milk was valuable, and what we didn't use in the boarding house was sold. Can you imagine, in addition to all her other work, my mother milked these cows night and morning, and after it was bottled up, it was my job to deliver it. On the way to school I would deliver six quarts and on the way home, I would pick up the empty bottles.
After cleaning out the barn, stoking the furnace, carrying out the ashes and having supper, I would get to deliver the rest of it. It would be dark by this time; nevertheless I had to carry eight bottles of milk down to Ninth Avenue South. It was always dark. There were no streetlights and I slinked by every alley with fear in my heart. It was torture for me, but there was no way I could get out of it. Whether it was five or forty below, this nine- year-old boy delivered that milk. Yes sir, no bike—just plain walking all the way.
When I was older, I worked with my Dad in the field. I started in 1919, when I was 9 years old. My Dad was plowing with the six-horse team, three up and three back, on a two-bottom gang plow, and he put me up to follow him with four horses on a one- bottom sulk plow. I really felt like I was a grownup man by now. Before the summer was out, he let me drive the six-horse team and from then on, that was my outfit.
It seemed like we plowed all that summer because it went so slowly. But eventually it was harvest time, and in the fall of 1920, when I was ten, my Dad and two neighbors bought a header to cut their grain bundles. We used this method of harvesting until 1926 when combines came in. By this time I was doing all the fieldwork. We got our first combine in 1930.
I must tell you about the time we got our first tractor. It was the spring of 1924. I had started my freshman year of high school and was living with my sister Kathryn. In February of that year, my Dad came to town and I told him I needed another place to stay. He begged me to help him farm and promised me he would buy a new tractor if I would come home. So, I quit school and shortly thereafter he bought a new 10-20 McCormick Deering tractor. He never learned how to run it, but I learned how from our neighbor and from then on, did all the tractor work. This was the last time my Dad ever worked in the field.
By the spring of 1925, just before I was 15, I was making all the decisions regarding the farm work as to when to plow and seed and disk and rod-weed. The only deterrent or control that Dad had over me was to say, "Boy, that costs too much money," and he wouldn't buy any fuel for the tractor. He controlled the purse strings until I was over eighteen.
In the spring of 1928, the Mormons moved into the Valley of Sun River and Vaughn. About July of that year, I met Leo Hansen and his sister, Ordell, and a lot of other Mormon kids. I liked them. They seemed to have fun without drinking and smoking. Ordell's family moved to Montana from Idaho looking for better land to farm. They rented the Adams ranch for several years and also the Sunnyside place. Ordell attended school in Sun River, Ft Shaw and Great Falls. She was the first President of the 4-H club in the Sun River Valley and won many blue ribbons for her sewing skills.
Later in the winter, Ordell and I were married. We lived with my folks until after June was born. This was depression time. The crops were poor and worthless. There was no work to be found. When winter came, I went down to the ice plant at Great Falls and was able to get a little work. I earned seventy-five dollars and came home and bought a little house about three miles from home for forty-five dollars and the boys helped me move it home. All of the inside partitions had been stolen, so I went out to some other little old homestead houses scattered about the flats, and pilfered enough material to put up a ceiling and partitions to make a two-room house, and Ordell and I moved in. Della was born there.
In the spring of 1931, before Della was born, I started to investigate the LDS Church seriously, and on July 12, 1931, I was baptized. My baptism was performed on a cold, cloudy day. It was trying to rain. We drove up Sun River about two miles from the Chapel at Vaughn. I recall thinking the water would be freezing cold and the wind also, but as we came out of the water, such a glow, a sort of warm feeling, came over me. I didn't even think of being cold or shivery. I was so glad to be baptized. What a thrilling experience!
I should go back and tell you about our first crop. In the fall of 1929, Ordell's brother Leo and I threshed all the grain in Sun River Valley from Manchester to Fort Shaw. He used his Dad's tractor, and I used my Dad's threshing machine. Now I had four hundred and seventy-five dollars. I was rich. My second cousin, Alf Leistiko, approached me one day and offered to sell me his lease on one hundred and sixty acres of newly broken sod ground for four-hundred and fifty dollars. I seeded it in the spring of 1930 and had visions of all I was going to do with that crop. In the meantime, the depression hit, and wheat dropped from 96 cents a bushel to 26 cents a bushel. 1930 was a dry year and I harvested about 300 bushel. I didn't even sell it, but put it in a granary to use for seed and flour.
I bid on the school bus route at sixty dollars a month and got it. I bought an old Essex car, at the cost of three hundred dollars, for a bus. Nothing down and twelve dollars a month. I drove about a twenty-two mile round trip each day. From the bus money, twelve dollars went on the car payment, ten dollars on the note for hail insurance, and thirty-eight dollars was left to buy groceries, gas and oil, four tires and the rest of our living expenses. In January the snow got so deep, I had to use a bob sleigh and horses to get the kids to school. I drove the horses for six straight weeks. This was great because they didn't take any gas or tires.
In the spring of 1932, Ordell's folks moved up to Bynum, Montana, and in the fall Ordell went up to stay with them. She was going to live off her folks and I off mine until I could get a job to support us. About a month after she was up there, a big blizzard hit. Charlie, Ordell's father, and her brother Cliff Hansen had pooled their 500 sheep with several other ranchers. A herder was hired to handle the combined 1800 sheep. During the blizzard the herder abandoned the sheep and about 300 head froze.
Charlie volunteered to take the job of herding and he asked Cliff to be the hay hauler, but Cliff refused, so they sent for me. I went up on the train to Bynum. Charlie, my father-law and I started tending those sheep the middle of November and handled them through to the end of March and we took them through five more blizzards when it was at least 35 below zero or colder. We did not lose any more sheep. I vowed I would never be a sheep man. My total wages for the winter was food for my family and myself.
In the spring Leo and I got a chance to rent some irrigated land at Manchester, where we spent two hard years trying to eke out a living. Betty was born during the time we lived there.
Square Butte taken from Leistiko Road
Gayla and Arlene were born while we lived on the Geibel place, which was near the base of Square Butte. It was a dry land wheat farm with a typical primitive house. In 1939, we moved on to the Hockersmith place that had running water and inside plumbing. I got it for a song. Hockersmith would not have sold it to anyone else for that price, but he took an extreme liking to me because I was a good worker and got along without going on relief like so many of the neighbors did. Glenda was born there.
The 'Hockersmith place', which Bill bought and moved his family to in 1939. (Picture
taken in 2013.)
I took an interest in the farmers' problems, which were many at that time. I joined the Farmer Union and after a year was elected President of the Local at Sun River. I was then selected to attend the Agricultural Conservation Association meetings at the courthouse in Great Falls. It was our responsibility to allocate wheat allotment acreage and yields for the farms in our district. I was eventually elected as the County Chairman and during this time World War II started. The County Committee had charge of all the gasoline and farm machinery rationing. I also served as chairman of the Cascade County Agricultural War Board. In this position I had charge of all the drafting of farm boys into the armed services.
The pressures of all this work required full time participation and we received no wages. It was our contribution to the war effort. The strain of doing this, in addition to handling my farm work was a contributing cause of my having a heart problem. It probably also contributed to my personal problems and in 1943 Ordell and I were divorced.