Passing Through

I've talked about by dad's father but I want to pass on some about my dad's mom and what I know of them. So in this story I will be talking about my Great-Granddad and Great-Grandma whom I don't think were alive when I was born.<br />n<br />nThe beginnings of this story have always intrigued me. The story, as I've been told, goes that Great-Granddad was traveling from his home area, Missouri, to Alaska to take part in the gold rush when he "got hung up in Montana." That is always the it's put. I've always wanted to know what "hung up" meant but nobody either knows or is willing to admit what it was. I assume it's not good but who knows. Somehow he fell in love with Montana while he was "hung up" here and then decided to go back to Missouri, marry his sweetheart and move to Montana. This is exactly what he did.<br />n<br />nThe newlyweds moved to Montana from Missouri in a wagon with all of there belongings and bought some land on the Ceded Strip and moved into the Spring Creek area of Sarpy Creek. This was around 1918 or 1919. The Ceded Strip was an area of land the Crow Tribe ceded the US government which laid from the present northern edge of the Crow Reservation to the Yellowstone River.<br />n<br />nThey lived there for quite a few years, one of the early residents of Sarpy Creek, having kids and then did something that always I wonder about. They sold the place on Spring Creek and moved south, further up Sarpy Creek, onto the Crow Reservation where they bought some land from a Crow Indian and established what they called the Chimney Rock Ranch. This was in about 1925 and this is some of the land that I run on today that has passed down in the family. Here on the land that is the Chimney Rock Ranch, Great-Granddad really started farming in a big way and plowed up hundreds of acres and farmed them. Looking at the land and hearing stories about how he ran cattle, Great-Granddad was a farmer at heart. <br />n<br />nMost of the fields today at the Chimney Rock Ranch location have reverted to grass. I am raising some alfalfa on a little bit of it, but grass is how most of them are now. I asked my Dad one time if he knew how the fields layed in there and he said he had no idea. Later in my life I was riding in a nearby pasture in the fall of the year and there was just a skiff of snow on the ground and I looked over and you could see the outline of the fields as if they were being farmed to this day. The way the snow gathered on the high points and the light from the sun was causing shadows close to the ground you could see the furrows where the fields were last farmed. How Great-Granddad farmed such a large area is beyond me. When I told my dad what I had seen and the country it covered he just shook his head. He had no idea that his Granddad had farmed up so much of that area either. How he did it in his day and age is still a little bit of a mystery to us.<br />n<br />nI was telling my girls a little bit about this while we were riding yesterday. I think they are still to young to appreciate everything i tell them like this but someday they will. There is of course more to the story but I am all typed out for today. More later.<br />n<br />n<br />n<br />n<br />n<br />