Monday…
and I got the day “off” to do laundry and dishes…
and find my floor under the mud and dog hair…
yecccch!
The guys drained the water tanks on the Mesa, gathered up salt feeders, and captured 3 heifers we’d missed on our gather the other day…
but they didn’t need my help.
Usually I’m cramming to get things done since I teach my Korean students Monday and Wednesday nights…
but class was cancelled…
probably another test!
But that just gave me this evening off, so I’m not complaining!
Let me introduce you to our Ritchie pasture…
You regularly see our Mesa pasture, Mountain pasture, the Mills place, and around home…
But Ritchie’s falls into the “badlands” category…
Surrounded by BLM lands…
many people don’t realize it is privately owned.
But Samuel Ritchie homesteaded it, then sold it to the Greet Brothers…
The cows are trailing towards Ritchie’s cabin…
With no live water on the place…
you wonder what he was thinking…
Water from spring runoff and a reservoir or two isn’t much water in Wyoming…
Ritchie did set his cabin on a nice little rise, though…
Dally is pulling off cockleburs, in case you were wondering about her strange posture…
When I first married Vernon…
I’d stop out here and look around…
the historian/archaeologist in me couldn’t resist.
Inside hung a buffalo hide coat…
long black winter hair…
full-length…
in amazingly good shape.
I asked about it…
drooling at the thought of it on display on my living room wall…
but I was told it belonged to Ritchie and should stay in his cabin.
Sure enough…
a few years later…
some hunter helped himself to Ritchie’s buffalo coat…
I wonder where it ended up…
The front of the cabin…
with the Big Horn Mountains in the distance…
What a lonely…
quiet…
hard life it must have been.
I’m not sure if Ritchie built the little pond above his cabin…
if this old culvert was his and was replaced by the Greet Brothers at some point…
But I do know Panama didn’t like the black mouth of it as we rode by.
The marvel of the wooden planks wrapped by wire is great engineering…
though dried up and shriveled, it doesn’t look like it’d hold water…
The reservoir is still in use…
and is a great place to catch tadpoles and keep them for a bit…
to watch them become frogs…
just in case you have two young boys and an adventurous girl…
like I did!
Thank you, Mr. Ritchie, it was a nice homestead…
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PUPPY PHOTO OF THE DAY
Elsa strikes a pose…
We have to give Momma some credit!
