D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2008
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Voice of a Ranch Woman Fifth in a Series |
Queen of the Feeds
When it comes to feeding cowboys, you should always have food left over, because that means everybody got all they wanted to eat.
By Linda McDonald, as told to Victoria Tester
This first-person reminiscence is excerpted from recordings of Linda Nielson McDonald at her home on the McDonald Ranch. Established in 1903, the McDonald Ranch is among the five oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. Linda McDonald, born in Moab, Utah, in 1942, is the wife of Jerry McDonald, the son of Jonnie McDonald and Evelyn McCauley. These recordings are a collaboration between McDonald and author Victoria Tester, whose book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the nationally recognized Willa Cather Literary Award. Their efforts mark the beginning of a project by the two women to record and publish a book of oral histories of ranch women in southern New Mexico.
Feeding cowboys is a tradition that started years ago when they had the cattle drives. Jerry's grandfather, Jeremiah McDonald, was on these cattle drives. They were moving these cattle, and they had to make provisions for the cowboys being fed, so they had a chuck wagon. They would keep the food in the chuck wagon, and they usually had a camp cook, and that was a man.
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Cowboys getting tailgate dinner at
Evelyn McDonald's chuck truck, 1965. |
Because women didn't travel on these trail drives. It was all men.
So the cook would be a man. And Grandpa told me, "They talk about having beans on these trail drives. They didn't have that many beans. Because it takes a long time to cook frijole beans."
Mostly what they fed the men was beef, because that's what they had available. Then they might have canned corn and maybe canned tomatoes, and then dessert — maybe they had a sugar pie that they'd make out of leftover biscuit dough. They would have biscuits — biscuits are something they could cook quick. I don't hear about them using cornbread on the trail drives. I think they mostly just did biscuits.
A trail drive is where they want to move a bunch of cattle from one place to another, and usually the only time that they gathered these cattle up was to brand them and to ship them. That's the way we do it now. You work the cattle in the spring and you work them in the fall. The spring is when most of your calves are born, and in the fall you pick up the rest of the little calves that have been born since then, but your main objective in the fall is to ship your cattle.
But in the old days, they'd start these cattle drives way ahead. They'd start in the summer driving these cattle to a location where they could ship them, so that was called a trail drive. And these cowboys wouldn't actually move these cattle fast. They'd move them slowly, so they could graze as they went so they were actually gaining weight and not losing weight. So it wasn't something that went fast. It went over a period of months. They'd start in the summer and when they got to their destination, wherever it might be, wherever they could ship the cattle, it would be cold by then.
There would be a camp cook and I think he would stay with them the whole trail drive. They always said cooks were very cranky, though. If you complained about the food, that didn't make them happy at all. They might get you to be the camp cook.
Usually the cook would take their flour and lard and salt and whatever they needed to make their biscuits with, and then they'd butcher a beef. The men would eat that beef and have their biscuits and I'm sure they had sugar and they probably just all drank coffee back then. Nowadays we serve Kool-aid or something like that, or some people serve tea. I don't know what in the way of sweets they had. Probably sugar on a biscuit.
I don't know why the cook was cranky, but probably because those men were coming in hungry and he had to have the meal ready and they were probably over there gettin' their coffee and gettin' in his way and messin' with his fire. Just stay out of his way and let him cook. Build all those fires and all that. And if you've never cooked a meal on Dutch ovens, let me tell you, you have a lot of Dutch ovens and they're spread out all over. So it takes a lot of good oak wood to cook. They would haul that wood and so it took more than just the cook to get the chuck wagon going.
If I was a cook I'd sure be cranky and say, "Get out of my way so I can get this done."
I'm sure, if anybody complained about the meal, they were in big trouble.
J.R. Williams was an old cartoonist, and he's got the best cartoons about all the ranch life, and about cooking. And of course Ace Reid is a recent one about them makin' comments about what the cook is makin'. They'll make snide remarks about it. But I bet those cowboys didn't really tell that cook that!
Years ago, Grandpa and Grandma McCauley, Jerry's maternal grandparents, had places leased around in the county, and they weren't necessarily going to be back home. Sometimes Grandma Nancy McCauley would go off and stay at Thompson Canyon, when they were working over there, and she would cook for the men. There was a house there that she could stay in, so she didn't necessarily have to camp out, but she'd go off and leave a lot of her family at the home place to go to Thompson Canyon and cook for the men over there.
Nancy's daughter, Granny, Evelyn McDonald, would tell the story about when she was a girl and her Dad took her over to Thompson Canyon. He called her Soxy. He says, "Oh, Soxy, you could boil a pot of beans." He'd take her, and maybe her friend Ruth St. John, over there. Granny and her friend made biscuits and they were so horrible they buried them or something. But I guess she did boil the beans and she eventually became a very excellent biscuit cook. She wasn't very big when he would take her over there, she was maybe 10 or 12, but that was her beginning to learn to cook biscuits and feed cowboys.
Today I'm making green chile stew for lunch and that was a favorite dish of Grandma Mitchel McDonald's, and we'll be eating at the table that was Grandma and Grandpa McCauley's, their first table after they got married, and they got married the 6th of January 1912, the day New Mexico became a state. And we're going to be eating on tin plates that are out of Granny's old chuck box.
When did it change to the women becoming the cooks? Jerry says it probably changed when they started fencing this country, which Grandpa told me was about the turn of the century, in the early 1900s. Jerry's dad and uncles, they were all involved in building the fences here, which are all falling down now because they were built with posts and those posts rotted out. Those posts don't last forever.
I also think when the railroads came in that had something to do with women becoming the cooks, too — when there were more railroads. Though we do have an old photograph of Grandpa Jonnie McDonald at the Silver City railroad, and it has a picture of the chuck wagon there, so the men were still the cooks then, at that time.
But when the railroad came into Silver City, then they didn't have to take the cattle so far. They could just drive them to Silver City.
On those long trail drives they'd be gone for months, so it didn't make sense for a woman to go along. But after the country was fenced, it was all closer, the women were available, and they'd take their little kids and go cook.
So when they'd do these trail drives to Lordsburg to the train, they weren't staying as long and it was more feasible for the women to go, and Grandma McCauley took her little children with her, the ones who weren't in school. In her particular situation, her mother-in-law was living with her, and she had two older daughters who could stay there and keep the ranch house going while she was off on these cattle drives.
I think it just mostly boils down to the fact that the women couldn't go on these cattle drives because they stayed home and took care of the children. I don't know if other women went as cooks. Later, on the McDonald ranch, it came down to where you really only take dinner down to the Johnny Bull, our shipping pens. You'd go down and be back in a day.
Grandpa Jonnie McDonald said they'd get Nancy McCauley out in front of the herd with her truck, which wasn't a chuck wagon anymore, it was a truck. They put her out front so she wouldn't come through and scare the cattle. She was driving, and one time, around 1926, it had rained and she had gone out ahead of them, and Grandpa said he was out in front of the herd, too, because he was pointing them where they should go. He could see her tracks, and he could see it was so slick and muddy she just rode that truck down that hill sideways! But when the rest of the cowboys came in with the herd, the cattle covered up all those tracks.
So when they got in to where Nancy McCauley was with her chuck truck, Grandpa went over to her quietly and said, "I see you had a little trouble coming down that hill." And she said, "Yes, and what Fate" — her husband, whose was James LaFayette McCauley — "doesn't know won't hurt him!"
Another funny story about Nancy McCauley, and I don't know if it was this time or another time, but when she got to her destination where she was gonna feed the cowboys, she parked her chuck truck in a prairie dog town, and it had rained so much that her truck sank down.
About that trail drive that it rained so much, around 1926 — the cowboys started over in Thompson Canyon and then they came over and picked up these cattle and they'd pick up cattle as they went along, but it had rained and all the creeks were running. So the cowboys would take their ropes and hook onto that front bumper of Nancy McCauley's chuck truck and pull her across those creeks that were running. And here she had those little babies with her.
Grandpa Jonnie McDonald's favorite song was "When the Work's All Done This Fall." This song talks about men on a trail drive, and the reason it was his favorite song was because he'd listened to so many stories his own dad told about this very incident happening, where the cattle all stampeded and cowboys got killed. They got killed and they were buried out there on the prairie. Grandpa's dad, Jeremiah McDonald, had been on those trail drives when those kinds of things happened.
Jeremiah McDonald told a story, and it showed the reason Jeremiah would never allow face cards in his home. They were on a trail drive and playing poker in the evening and some hard feelings arose because of the game. And then they all went to bed.
The next morning they got up, and the men that had these hard feelings were still mad. There were two brothers on this trail drive, and one of those brothers had gone out to wrangle the horses, and the other brother was there and still mad about that card game, and he shot one of the other cowboys.
Grandpa Jonnie said his father told him the reason that they knew the bullets were hitting him is the dust was flying out of his vest. And that man died right there.
None of the other cowpunchers could eat breakfast that morning because they were just sick at what had happened. But those two brothers both ate breakfast.
I've got to tell another funny story on Grandma Nancy McCauley. This was at her house, this wasn't on a trail drive. But it was in the fall and she was harvesting apples. She was making a lot of apple butter. She had two big ol' dishpans of apple butter that she was cooking. You had to cook and cook it and cook it. They'd have apple butter for breakfast, they'd have it at dinner, and they'd have it at supper. And Grandpa Fate wasn't one to complain about the food. But this one particular time he said, "Couldn't we have something besides apple butter? I'm gettin' pretty tired of apple butter."
And Nancy said, "I'm getting tired of it, too!" and she took those two dishpans of apple butter out and just dumped them on the ground!
I guess she had her limit to what she would take, too. Of course she had nine children, and she was always cooking.
She'd say, "I think Fate went up on the highway and just brought people in for me to feed!" Because there was always extra people there for her to feed. But she wasn't one to run out of food. She canned. As a matter of fact, the day before Granny, Evelyn McCauley, was born, in 1918, or maybe it was the very day Granny was born, because it was September and that was the canning season, Uncle Bartley had helped Nancy haul in a whole tubful of fruit and she was canning that, and then she went and had that baby. She canned up until the very time.
And I wasn't that bad, I didn't have nine children, only six, but I can remember when Matt was born and I went into the doctor and my hands were still stained from canning peaches. The nurse there said, "What have you been doing?" and I said, "Oh, I've been canning peaches," and she said, "You poor soul."
But my idea was you better get it all done before that baby comes, because after that baby comes you're not going to feel like doing so much.
I had a very wonderful trainer as far as feeding cowboys was concerned. Granny — Evelyn McCauley, who became a McDonald — taught me. She taught me how to feed the cowboys and how to take the dinners out. She liked to do it — she liked to be the Queen of the Feeds. But I learned how to do it by watching her. Granny showed me how to keep the food all covered up so it would stay nice and warm and you'd put it in the back end of your car and take it down there.
Granny wasn't a grumpy cook. She was pretty happy. What I remember about Granny is she always still had her apron on and she had this big funny-looking garden hat that she'd wear out there.
Granny really liked being the Queen of the Feeds, but I sort of insisted that I help her. Being that I was Jerry's wife, I just told her, "I'll bring a dessert" or "I'll bring something," and if you want to make it, too, then go ahead. So I kind of forced myself upon her. But I thought, if I'm Jerry's wife, I'm going to do my part on the ranch to help feed the cowboys.
It got to where — Granny lived up on the upper end of the ranch and we lived at the Cienega — she would let me feed the cowboys when they were down there at the Cienega. She didn't feel like she had to come down to supervise it, that I could handle it okay. It took about three or four years for her to do that, so it wasn't really too long.
I still feed cowboys today. Jerry, bless his heart, that's the most important thing in his life. It tickles him to death to bring in extra men that you haven't planned on.
After our five oldest children were gone, we just had Matt here, and I had it all figured out that I could make so many biscuits for breakfast, it was just the right number in biscuits. And then one day Jerry had just had it with this coming out even! He didn't ever want to come out even. He said, "I don't care if that dog gets a whole 10 biscuits, you should always have food left over. Because that means everybody got all they wanted to eat."
That's one of his philosophies that I found out quite by accident.
But usually he's pretty good about letting me know how many men are going to be there. And it's not that many anymore. Where it used to be, and it wasn't even a big crew compared to the olden days, you might have six men to feed. Now it's maybe four or five, sometimes six.
I don't know that cowboys always says grace, but at our house, that's one of the things we do. We always say the blessing over the food.
It's not the most dangerous occupation, but you are dealing with animals. And Jerry's been hurt several times. You're dealing with animals, and animals aren't always predictable, so I just figure giving thanks to the Lord — not only for the food but for the safety that they've had in working with these cattle — is a good thing. Our kids were never hurt. Jerry was hurt. He got run under by a a one-eyed cow that couldn't see that good. He got run under and knocked out. He's had two or three wrecks here on the place.
Jerry got his teeth knocked out on Sunday, riding a bull at the 4th of July rodeo in Silver City. Grandpa got his eye knocked out on Sunday, Jerry got run under and had that concussion on Sunday, and so we finally got the picture that maybe the Lord wants us to remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.
Jeremiah McDonald never would work on Sunday. The only work on Sunday was when Uncle Bartley and Uncle Taylor had done wrong, then he'd set them out to splittin' wood on Sunday or something. But Jeremiah didn't work on Sunday, either. They really kept the Sabbath Day holy.
What's the food that I feed cowboys? You always fix beans when you're feeding a crew of men because they like beans and it's a very sustaining food. And we always have meat — a big roast. And enchiladas, the cowboys always like a green or a red enchilada. And then I always make fresh bread for 'em. And then men love pies. I've served cowboys a lot of pies.
So them men come in, wearing their spurs — usually they don't come in in their chaps. Jerry doesn't use chaps too much, because we don't have too much brushy country here. So he doesn't wear chaps all that much.
Anyway, they come in and they wash up. And Jerry always has this thing he says: "If you want to wash up, you can. The bathroom's in that direction." Because one time he invited one man, a neighbor, and he said, "If I have to wash up, I'm not going to eat!"
It wasn't time for him to take his weekly bath, I guess.
So anyway, they come in and sit down at the table. When Grandpa was here, he'd sit at one end of the table and Jerry would sit on the other end. They do take their hats off. I don't do this to the cowboys, but if my own kids wear a hat in the house I charge 'em a dime.
Then we say the blessing and they eat their meals and they visit as they're eating.
You always fix dessert. They always want dessert. And after they get through eating, the fun part of it is they sit there and tell old-time stories. Or they'll tell experiences they've had, ropin' that calf, or whatever. And it's really fun to listen to the stories afterwards. They usually always take time for that. They sit and visit for a little while and spin yarns.
That's the cook's reward for fixin' dinner. You get to hear their Wild West stories.