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Joyce Kiefer |
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FRONTIER WOMAN
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What did women do on the range? Everything!
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
My husband’s Aunt Margaret squeezes next to me in the back seat, as her son-in-law steers us through Chicago traffic. She wears a flowered polyester tunic over light blue slacks. Her heavy rimmed glasses make an odd contrast with the wisps that remain of her hair.
“I haven’t bought new clothes in years,” she explains. “I even wear my sons’ old shirts.”
It seems strange to sit with her in the back of a cab in the big city where she’d moved, instead of on the steps of her farm house in Colorado where we last met. I wonder how she made the adjustment.
“The sun blinds me when it flashes off the skyscrapers,” she tells me as we drive to visit some cousins.
Later she wonders how the moon seems to follow us as we move along the freeways that knot their way around the city. Nature here is out of joint, as far as she’s concerned. What she was accustomed to for most of her 86 years was this: fiery desert sunsets, the snow-covered Rockies with peaks like waves, and horses, cows, turkeys, and coyotes.
Margaret is a true child of the untamed west where you did whatever was needed to get the work done and you took your solace and your joy from the mountains and the stars that surrounded you and from the company of a good horse. She drove cattle and wrangled turkeys as good as a man. She taught the children of ranch hands in a one-room school. She wrote stories and poems about being an outdoor girl and seeing God in the mountains and stars. And she compiled a memoir complete with drawings of ranch equipment and how to use it, so her grandchildren would know what hard work was like.
Margaret passed away this spring and we are the poorer without her kind. Her strength and close connection with nature is our heritage, both as Kiefers and as women who share the heritage of the West. The life of this talented, tough, difficult woman–sharp-thinking to the last–could have made a good Western movie with Katherine Hepburn as the lead.
In 1921 Margaret was born in Mack, Colorado, in a cabin built by her great grandmother out of aspen logs called “quakies”. Her father’s family – the Kiefers–had pioneered the area. Mack was a small settlement located in an alkaline desert valley rimmed by sandstone cliffs that opened out to the Utah canyonlands. The Colorado or “Grand River”, as it was called then, ran like a muddy road directly beneath a wall of red cliffs streaked with black desert varnish. Her parents, three brothers and two sisters raised farm animals and ran a small dairy.
People often define themselves by those they chose to admire. Margaret described her Chicago-raised mother as “one heck of a pioneer”. Before moving to the two-room quakie cabin, her mother presided over a large new house nearby. Her mother never complained when it foreclosed. She had a powerful voice and used it to win the women’s hog-calling contest every year at the Farmer’s Union picnic.
As the fifth child, Margaret grew up working alongside her father and brothers, stacking hay, turning the milk separator, driving a team.
“I loved to go with papa and the boys to haul hay,” she wrote in her memoir. “It was usually dark long before we got home. We’d make ourselves a little nest and lay there, lulled by the movement of the wagon and creak of the harnesses and wheels and breathing and noises of the horses, while we looked up at the beautiful stars. It was so quiet in those days.” Even the task of cleaning the cistern had its magic. “Being down in there was a kind of special world, silent and mysterious.”
After two brothers left home, and her older sister went to nurses’ training, Margaret did all the outdoor work along with her dad and Leo, the brother who stayed. She was medium-tall, ruddy-faced, with shoulder-length brown hair. Large brown eyes warmed her face. Despite a strong build, she fought backaches and abdominal pain to haul 100-lb sacks of potatoes into the cellar. Sometimes her back was so sore she had to slide to the edge of the bed in the morning, fall off, then turn over on her hands and knees on the floor and push herself up. Then she began her chores.
Margaret at heart was a cowgirl. She rode with her cousin’s husband Johnny, a rancher, cowboy, and former rodeo performer. She helped him move his cattle from their free range in the Bookcliffs, “some of the roughest country there is," and get them across the ridges and desert to the stockyards in Mack. These cattle weren’t used to being driven and were “wilder than the wildest deer.” Once when they were moving cattle, Johnny’s skittish horse wouldn’t stay ground tied when it was feeding. It stepped into a tangle of barbed wire. Johnny talked to it softly while he and Margaret gently moved its legs and pulled the wire away. They worked at least a half hour before the horse was free. Margaret was amazed at Johnny’s skill and how the horse seemed to understand him. Johnny said he’d rather have her handle his horses than any man he’d ever had.
One mid-winter Margaret and Johnny were bringing in a herd of cattle off the highlands near Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The snow at 7,000 feet nearly froze the two of them. Finally they reached the campfire that Johnny’s wife had made. She offered food and “cowman’s coffee” which is boiled until it looks like molasses. As Margaret wrote, “It was strong enough to knock you over, but I never had anything taste so good. That black scalding stuff went clear down to my frozen toes!”
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and she could ride as well as any seasoned cowboy. |
At home she rode the farm horses bareback. “Their backs were like beds. I loved to lie back on old Ben’s rump as he was eating." For comfort she put her face against one of the horses and her arms around its neck. She believed horses have a nice smell, even when they’re hot and sweaty, as long as they have room to run when they feel like it and are not confined to small quarters.
Margaret herded turkeys as well as cattle.
She could calm a stampede by singing to them. After finishing
high school she took care of 5,000 turkeys for a local farmer.
In fall she and others herded the turkeys out on the desert to
fatten for Thanksgiving. She stayed with them with a small trailer
for shelter to protect them from predators and from straying
onto the train tracks, watching for “any unforeseen thing
that could happen to a big herd of the stupidest of God’s
creatures.” At dark she built a half dozen large fires
to ward off coyotes and sat nearby with her .22 rifle, a turkey
whip, and Rex, her one-woman dog.
“I was alone in the desert with my dog. I wrote, dreamed,
read, embroidered, and carved sticks.”
One night the turkeys stampeded. A hopping frog could have set them off. They slowed down but Margaret could tell they were still jumpy, so she sat down and sang to them. Softly and evenly. They settled down and closed their eyes. But when she stopped, they became jumpy again. So she sang non-stop until dawn.
When the last of Margaret’s brothers left the family farm, she took their place beside her father to run the place. After WWII, her brother Leo returned to the farm and an uncle advised her to leave home. Leo would never marry as long as she was around to take care of him. Everyone’s destiny was to marry and raise a family. Margaret got an emergency credential–she had never gone beyond high school--and taught the children of migrant workers in a one-room schoolhouse near New Mexico. She left when her Rex, her faithful canine protector, ate coyote poison and died.
When Leo married she sang at his wedding.
At Age 28–at the edge of becoming an old maid–Margaret settled down and married Joe, a farmer who had won a Purple Heart. They raised their five children on a farm in Delta, about 60 miles east of the ranch in Mack where she grew up. They lived in a small stucco house with a crystalline view of the Rockies 40 miles away. Both raised Catholic, Margaret and Joe became deeply conservative, against the grain of most of the Kiefers. When the kids were older, she won a scholarship to join the local Toastmaster’s Club but Joe would not allow her to accept. Not easily squelched, Margaret had a poem published, wrote short stories based on her ranch life, drew horses, and composed well-reasoned letters to the editor. One was published in The Denver Post. She and the local water commissioner exchanged a series of published letters on when the millennium actually began. He publicly gave up.
Tension between her and Joe increased and she attempted to leave a few times, but never went through with her plans. She became more quirky and full of complaints. She talked to her sisters about resigning herself to suffering, knowing that heaven would offer the freedom once offered by the open range. A highlight of her life was the annual Friends of the Library used book sale. She preserved her purchases in 13 old refrigerators bought for storing books and linens. When she moved, she shipped a half-ton of books to her son and his nine kids who live in Virginia.
A few years after Joe passed away, she sold her farm because the loneliness was too much with he and her children gone and she felt she needed looking after because of her arthritis and bad heart. When we visited her in 1999, she told me she could go two weeks without seeing anyone. She mailed her grocery lists to her son, a miner, who lived 50 miles away. He didn’t have a phone.
Her daughter Connie, a nurse, and her husband built a house for Margaret on their farm in Missouri. She lived there for a while, then shocked the family by moving to Chicago to live next door to her daughter Annette, who is a doctor. The third largest city in America offered one more benefit: The cemetery where her namesake grandmother, Margaret Ryan, was buried. She could be buried in the same place. Family history mattered.
When my husband and I visited Margaret last fall in Chicago, I asked how she was doing. She told us she put her name in for subsidized housing back in Delta.
She did make it home to Colorado and died of a heart attack a few months ago.
Her children published the obituary she had written for herself. She described the Kiefer family’s part in the history of the area. She mentioned that she worked alongside her fathers and brothers in the fields and that she herded turkeys in the desert. She said she enjoyed music, hunting arrowheads, gardening, being an amateur local historian. Her greatest love was her family.
I see the spirit of this woman–her legacy–in the poem she wrote long ago, originally called “An Outdoor Girl Talks to God,” Two favorite stanzas:
When I crush a rose petal within my
hand;
When I tread barefoot upon the sand;
When I shiver and tingle on a frosty morn,
When I stroke the nose of a calf new born –
I feel Thee, Lord!
When the air is perfumed by cedar and
sage,
And desert winds moan o’er a changeless stage;
When my spirit soars with the eagle on high,
And clouds frame a sunset against the sky –
Ah-h-h, I love Thee, Lord!
©2008 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are the property of the Kiefer family. All rights reserved. This column first posted July 21, 2008.
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