The mechanical age finally reached the wilds of N.W. Colorado following World War ll. Tractors replaced horses, and fossil fuels became important for ranch work producing hay for livestock during the long winter months.
My father, and his four brothers, were raised in a log cabin. The family brand was called a “Wellsweep,” a long handle with a hook at the end that was used to hoist water pails with handles from a water well in the cabin front yard. This brand image was placed on their horses and cattle. The brothers took turns going to school four miles from the ranch. They excelled in math, learning fractions.
Cattle feeding chores were left to father Patrick and sons. Patrick was an Irish immigrant, who skipped school, arriving in New York Harbor in 1865. He won five pounds in a County Cork contest for the straightest furrow plowed. He left his family and four brothers, arriving in New York at age19, never to return to the old sod.
Patrick immigrated west, working on building new railroad lines using his skills with teams of horses; finally ending up at Ft. Steele, Wyoming where he became a teamster, driving a freight wagon from the southern Wyoming spur line down through Baggs, Wyoming to a rail line at Rifle on the Colorado river. He would ford the Snake, Yampa and White rivers with his team of horses with wagon loads of supplies for early day Hugus stores located along the river settlements.. During spring months, the rivers were impassable, and towns were established at Baggs, Craig, and Meeker. He made these trips with other freighters shortly after the Meeker Massacre that occurred on September 29, 1875. The Ute Indian uprising took place at an Indian agency on the White River near Meeker. The uprising was quelled by U.S. troops from Ft. Laramie as the last Indian war in Colorado history.
While stopping his freight wagon in Meeker, he met his future wife Mary Frawley from County Mayo and proposED to her. The couple were married in Meeker in 1885 with the wedding announcement printed in The Meeker Herald. I have a clipping with a photo of my grandmother. Shortly after their wedding they homesteaded in the Axial Basin, 25 miles North of Meeker.
After proving up on their 160 acres, they were able to move 15 miles further North and purchased a ranch on the Yampa river. They had five boys who all became successful ranchers. My grandparents, Patrick and Mary, both passed away in Craig in the 1930s. Patrick lived to be 100 years old with Mary close behind.
The boys chased wild horses, rode bucking horses, and skated on the river, seeing how close they could come to the swift running water’s icy edge. A tale goes that they attached a wild horse to a sled, climbed on board, and turned the wild horse loose. That must have been a wild ride and there were no doctors or hospitals nearby in those pioneer days.
Patrick and Mary were Irish Catholics but married in the only church… the Meeker Methodist Church. The first Catholic church was built in Craig in1917. Religion was shared by a traveling priest on horseback who visited the ranch annually with the boys hiding out, fearful of the priest.
The young men loved to dance and in their youthful years would ride horseback to Maybell, 15 miles from the ranch, to dance all night and then ride back home for another day’s work. Life on a ranch meant doing chores every day, along with milking cows, morning and night.
My father Henry, and his brother Frank, the two oldest boys, were drafted into the war and shipped to California to an infantry post. I have some photos of my father in a military uniform on horseback ending up in the cavalry. The war ended before he and Frank were sent overseas.
Older, and wiser, they returned to ranch life and my father was wise enough to marry the new Maybell schoolteacher coming from Greeley Teachers College to the second largest town in Moffat County.
It turned out to be a one-room school with fifteen ornery kids of all ages. My mother prevailed was a popular teacher, and ultimately years later became the Moffat County Superintendent of Schools.
I followed my five-year older brother, Henry Gilbert, being born in Craig in a midwife home Feb. 13, 1938. Gilbert ultimately attended MIT in Boston. While my brother became an engineer, it was my extreme pleasure to spend several decades of my early life growing up four miles from the original Patrick Sweeney ranch along the banks of the Yampa River.
It was there that I saw the end of the horse era and the beginning of the mechanical age. Life was different without TV, drinking fresh river water from a bucket, using an outdoor toilet, kerosene lamps for light, and a wooden frame house heated from a kitchen stove stoked with coal to keep the three-room house warmer at night. In the early years my brother and I slept in the one-room bedroom with mother and dad.
We had warm quilts sent to us by my Buena Vista/Leadville grandmother, Margaret (Patterson) Nicholson, an immigrant arriving in Leadville from Scotland in 1895 with her mining engineer father and mother to mine silver in Leadville. She eventually knew Baby Doe Tabor, famed ex-wife of Horace Tabor of mining fame and fortune. TO BE CONTINUED: