This is a picture of the old ranch house in Skull Valley in Tooele County, Utah. Our family spent some great summers there looking after crops and the cattle.
You can see our shower barrel that we took our showers under but that is another story.
This was in the fall of 1965 and Tina was 3 or 4 months old. There was a good alfalfa seed crop at the ranch so we loaded up the swather at Abraham and drove the long way around on the highway (105 miles). The short way was across Desert Mountain on narrow roads and through deep washes (60 miles). That was a fun way because we always saw antelope and they would race us and cut in front of the truck.
This is Sid standing in front of the truck after we loaded the swather back on to go back home. You can see the wheels of the swather hanging over the sides of the truck. Sid cut the seed to early and lost the crop. We should have waited another week and it would have been a great crop. There were other years that we loaded up the swather and went and cut the hay and baled it
for the horses and cattle. I loved that old ranch and hated to see it sold. 
This is a picture of the ranch in the fall with the beautiful vine in the front with Emily (Sid's mom). They were just getting ready to round up cows. Emily was the chief cook, bottle washer and the best cow hand Alva (Sid's dad) ever had. Alva, Sid, and Emily would stay at the ranch from the 1st of October to about the 20th and then drive the cattle home ( a real live cattle drive 79 miles) and be home on the 31st of October every year.
I took a start of this vine home and had it growing on our fence. It was never this pretty.
4 comments:
Made me smile! It's fun to look back at these memories!!
I never knew this about you. That is really neat. What is a swather?
Oh Halley, I just almost hated the swather. I would always break out into hives when I had to cut alfalfa. I would much rather cut oats. But to answer your question, it is a large machine that had teeth that moved together to cut whatever they came into contact with. The product would then go through it and come out the other end into a nice row, or windrow as "we" farmers called it. The bigger the windrow the better the crop. The reason I hated it was because it was a beast to drive, kinda drove opposite of a steering wheel in a car and the teeth would break. What fun it was to replace then, not!
for a second there, I thought you said you drove the swather all the way to the ranch. Man it would take forever if that is what you had to do. Good thing you could load it up.
I had no idea that you had a ranch!
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