"El Rancho Gumbo"

“El Rancho Gumbo: Five Thousand Days in Montana’s Piegan Country” by Abner M. Wagner. Copyright 1983. ISBN 0-930704-15-0. Only 750 copies designed and printed by the Sagebrush Press, Morongo Valley, CA.

El Rancho Gumbo was a couple dozen miles north of here and a few miles south of the little ranch Bob and I had on the Two Medicine River, but not long enough to give the place a name. The gumbo, which is a very fine sticky clay (Bentonite, some call it) descended on the wind from prehistoric volcanic dust. It’s good for some industrial uses if you can find it in a pure enough state in a place where you can get it out. Our "rancho" was two miles from the highway, but the little van regularly got stuck, usually at night on the way home. I’d take my shoes off, so I could tell whether I was on the road, and leave the van behind until morning. By then, usually a neighbor, like Bob Wellman, had roped it and dragged it to a grassy place. As soon as the road was dry again, it was passable. Now it's paved.

But Wagner’s family was there much earlier, arriving in 1921, the era of irrigation ditches being dug with fresnoes and patrolled daily on horseback. Wagner’s dad, Watermaster on the
Badger-Fisher Division of the Blackfeet Project, bought the 320 acres from No Bear’s estate. It cost $1600 and the patent deed was signed by President Calvin Coolidge. There was nothing but buffalo grass until the family pitched a tent, then upgraded to a 12X16 shack, and finally built a proper log house with logs from the west side. The well had clear, cold water but was so loaded with Epsom and Glauber’s salts that the effects of it on people were -- salutory. The house was wired, but electricity never came. Neither did plumbing, so they used that room as a closet. About the time it was finished, the author’s mother died, his brother married and left the state, and his father was transferred. When he got lonesome enough, Abner, too, went on his way.

Much of what he tells about concerns horses, which were everywhere in wandering bands. The BIA had brought in huge Percheron and Devon “cold-blooded” horses which were set loose on the prairie and soon became snaky pashas intent on preserving their harems, even if it meant snapping the necks of colts that got in the way. Many horses were rounded up and sold to the east and much time was devoted to keeping them from breaking through the three strand wires that protected wheat fields.

The shopping towns were Valier (18 miles away) and Cut Bank (20 miles). If rancho denizens stayed the night, their greatest pleasure was a real soak in the bathtub at the Valier Hotel. There was only one. Wagner figures probably everyone in the west end of Montana had been in it at one time or another. The Cut Bank livery was run by two “austere” old ladies, the Miller sisters, who lit the way to the proper stalls by carrying an elegant kerosene parlor lamp with painted flowers on it. When they had a horse in residence, one sister would take a wheelbarrow up to the grain elevator to buy a bale of hay for it -- they never had enough ahead to lay in a stockpile of hay.

The wind blew so hard that he was literally blown off his horse once and his mother, after the house had been lifted and dropped back on the foundation, insisted that a system of props and cables be installed to keep it down on the ground.

Here’s what he says about his horse, Zambeezie: “Zam was a ridgeling, which means that he came into this world with a birth defect a little hard to explain to an urban society sprinkled with fair young ladies. The truth was that he adored the fillies but he could never be a papa. And for that reason he was so ornery that we never could get together without first having a tall argument about who was going to be the boss that day. It usually took about 45 miles to get his steam gauge down from the red mark and if he ever got a little bit of oats stuck betweeen his ribs it would take another 10 or 15 to do the trick.”

This talk is illustrated by the author with art work that is certainly vigorous, but probably more impressive when seen in color. There are photos, including photos of old Piegans themselves. He says, “They were men of high moral character who lived by a strict code of ethics,” and he mentions by name Eli Guardipee, Heavy Breast, Ironeater, Running Crane, Two Guns Whitecalf, Grandma Eagle Calf, Wades in the Water, and Chases after Buffalo. Wagner’s father had lost a hand on the railroad and used a hook, so he was Ironhand, “Muckskimyucksi.” Often he would mediate Indian family quarrels since he wasn’t related to anyone, and even became an honorary Crazy Dog, the Indian order-keeping group.

The author says, “My first winter at El Rancho Gumbo was punctuated by a stay at Mrs. Angel’s rooming house in Valier. Here at the Montana House I batched in a back room, near the sink in the hallway. The room had a two-burner kerosene cook stove and a single cot. This arrangement was so I could attend high school. However, it was interrupted at Christmas time because there had been insufficient income from the ranch the first summer, and Dad’s wages which were staking the operation did not stretch far enough to maintain my residency away from home. Therefore I became a jerkout...”

But he was always a good steady reader of practical magazines and high-falutin’ books. Nearly self-educated, he “landed a job with the Seattle District Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There was no way I was going to be incarcerated in a gas filled office or caught tossing cans of beans over a counter after all of the cool air I had enjoyed on Fisher Flats.” He stayed in that job for thirty-one years and found what he’d really wanted all along: a wife. Not that different from the big stud horses or even Tarzan, the blue tomcat, who sharpened his claws on the hairy ankles of his favorite Shire and spent cold days asleep on its back.