D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
June 2008
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Voice of a Ranch Woman Seventh in a Series |
Roots That Grow Deep
Sometimes a gardener just knows that this is the place for her.
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.
When I was a young girl living on my Granddad's ranch up in Colorado, my Grandma Dee, the one that twisted that famous old Chief Posey's braids up into her wringer washer long, long before I was born, had a garden. Grandma Dee was a Burdich, and her ancestors came across the plains with the Mormon pioneers. One of her ancestors is buried in Nauvoo, Ill. They converted to the church back there and came across the plains with the Saints that were coming to the Salt Lake Valley. My mom had a big garden, too, that was planted down on the Dolores River. So I was acquainted with gardens all my life, and then I married Jerry and moved down to New Mexico. Everybody in this community grew a garden — Jerry's mom grew a garden, and our neighbors grew gardens — so I decided I should grow a garden, too. There was a nice garden spot at the Cienega where we lived, and there was quite a bit of water down there. But I had to learn about the water.
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Harvest from Granny Evelyn McDonald's
garden |
One of the first things I learned when I moved to the Cienega is that you were very careful with water. I think my experience at the Cienega, under the training of my mother-in-law Evelyn McDonald, goes back even further to her own mother, and what she learned growing up as a girl at the A-Bar Ranch at White Signal. Her mother was Nancy Morton McCauley, who was born in 1893 and lived in Arkansas, and they came out to this country because of their health. And so they bought the A-Bar Ranch, and when you move into a place, you move into the circumstance.
Evidently the A-Bar Ranch didn't have as much water as some places did, and being as their occupation was raising cattle, they had to worry about the cattle getting water before there could be water for anything else. I didn't know Grandma Nancy McCauley — she died before I came — but they started having a family and they had nine children, and so she tried her best to grow a garden. But there were many times, I'm told, that she would plant her garden and it would die because of lack of water. Because the cattle had to have the water first.
The McCauleys were good friends with the McDonalds, who lived four miles south of there, and the McDonalds had more water than Nancy did. I don't know how many times this happened, but Grandma Mitchel McDonald, born in 1876, had a big garden as well. Mitchel was a lot older than Nancy, so I guess in a way she was kind of a mentor. But Mitchel would load up her cart with vegetables and things because she knew Nancy didn't have as good a garden that year, and she'd take some of her vegetables up to Nancy so she'd have some for her family. There had been no intermarriage between the McCauleys and the McDonalds at that point. Nancy's daughter, Granny Evelyn McCauley, and Mitchel's son, Grandpa Jonnie McDonald, would later be the first ones to marry in the community.
I was in Wal-Mart the other day and I saw an elderly lady and I began to talk to her and found out she was Alice Taylor Cain and that she knew Grandma Nancy McCauley. She took her cane and rapped it on the floor and said, "I've got to tell you this story about Nancy McCauley! I was up there visiting one time and we were out in her garden, and all of a sudden Nancy said, 'We've got to run fast. Here comes Fate, and I'm stealing water!'" That would be her husband, James LaFayette McCauley, Grandpa Fate. "'He's going to be mad at me because we won't have water for the cattle, and we've got to run!' And we started running out of that garden so he wouldn't see her taking water for her garden that should go to the cattle! And then I thought, why am I running? I'm not afraid of him!"
Nancy McCauley was taking water to water her garden and she knew she'd get in trouble if Grandpa Fate saw her stealing that water.
Mitchel Gordon McDonald was Jerry's grandmother, and when his Dad Jonnie McDonald was growing up and was just a young boy, they had living with them Grandma Jones. Grandma Jones was Mitchel's mother, Mary Jane Dillingham, born 1847 in South Carolina. The Gordons were the ones who had to leave there after they joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints because of the persecution from the Ku Klux Klan.
Grandma Jones' job was to work in the huge garden. So every day she'd go down and hoe in it. Grandpa Jonnie was just a little boy, and he'd get his hoe and he'd go down to the garden. She'd hoe three rows. She'd be standing in a row and hoeing the row on each side of her, and then he'd be hoeing in a row. He said she was the best person at workin' kids he ever saw. It was a race. She'd say, "You're going to beat Grandma." Because every so often she'd reach over with her hoe into his row, and catch him up to where she was with her three rows. That would get him all pumped up and he'd keep hoeing in that one row while she hoed the three rows. And you know it was hot. And she had, I'm sure, her big bonnet on, out there hoeing in that heat. You had to hoe because when you hoe dirt it absorbs the water a lot better, when the dirt's been turned under. It gets the weeds out, too. But we don't work that hard in our gardens nowadays.
So when I moved into the Cienega and was going to have a garden, Granny in her gentle way set the example for me. If she was going to grow tomatoes, I'd grow tomatoes, or chiles, or whatever it was. Granny would plant all the plants from seed and had them ready to plant in the spring. Then it was a big competition, when you'd go to the 4th of July rodeo, and you talked to people at the rodeo: "Well, I've already got a tomato off mine." So you wanted to get your garden in as early as you could so that you got tomatoes before anybody else.
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