A Rugged History

A Rugged History. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

By now you know that I’m a bit of an Old West buff. I find it very interesting to look at the Old West of the movies and the stark reality of making a living off the land. One can just barely imagine the life of a farm family in the mid to late 1800’s.

BELL: The biggest thing is that they had to carve something out of nothing and today we’d bring in a D9 Cat and a backhoe and other things like that – and these guys – these people were digging up stumps by hand with an axe and you know it would take them a week to get a tree out and just even to clear the land was a humongous effort.

That’s Bob Boze Bell, Executive Editor of True West magazine who says there are a lot of things we just don’t think about.

BELL: We also take for granted when a horse dies; we’ll you just chain it to something, a backhoe and you put it in the back of a pickup and you take it down to the landfill. No, that thing weight 1500 lbs. and it’s laying in the front yard. And there were cases in New Mexico where outlaws came in and killed all the horses and here you’d have 30 or 40 horses laying out by your house and you couldn’t get rid of them you know. 

Today when we think of farms, we see row upon row of crops covering acres and acres. Bell says even a few acres were tough to work. 

BELL: They had to slowly reclaim the land and then down in my area which is central Arizona, even when they did get the water the dirt had so much caliche in it and stuff that it’s amazing that they could even dig a well. It’s really exceptional what they were able to do. 

In our house it becomes an event when a critter gets in. Spiders, crickets or God forbid a mouse. 

BELL: The houses that they built they were not insulated very well and scorpions and centipedes and rattlesnakes would seek out the cool and easy to get into the house so you’d have a lot of stings, a lot of bites, a lot of people being bitten by rattlesnakes. And so just the little things that it took to survive just amaze me. 

Indeed I have heard many stories of people sitting down to dinner only to have some extra guests drop in, literally, from the rafters overhead. More tomorrow on the farming life of the Old West with Bob Boze Bell from True West magazine. You can find out more at www.twmag.com.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.