Trinity Vandenacre

When you see old homesteads around the west, they look lonely and forlorn. Most people don’t think much about them, but to me they are monuments to what the life in the west was really like. They are usually very small and very short, crudely built and way too simple to be comfortable.

There are many of them standing empty and neglected out on the prairie or on the edge of some mountainous country. A standing reminder of all the untold stories that are still there to tell. Many of these tales will not be yielded and will remain a mystery forever. Because of this, they grasp my imagination and leave me with many questions. Who was it that lived here? What did they do for a living? Farm, raise cattle, or maybe horses? What happened to them and where are their families now?

Not all of these questions can be answered. Those that can often leaving one feeling that what happened to the owners was not fair. Then again life is not fair.

Walking around some homesteads, you can almost feel the stress of trying to make enough money on the few cattle they had to cover your expenses and feed your family. The endless hard work that they did every day, knowing at the same time, that everything you did today could be undone by one bad storm tomorrow. Drought could come and the grass not grow for the cattle to eat. Then there were the concerns about the large cattle companies trying to push you off the land, especially if you have access to a good water source on your property, which the larger rancher may need for his cattle.

The stress and hardships that we experience today would be trivial to those who experienced the real life in the west. The old home with the falling down covered porch at the top of this article is a homesteader cabin in the Elkhorn Mountains of Montana. It is said that it was a doctor or dentist that had settled there. What things in his life possessed him to try his hand out on the rough prairie I don’t know.

It was a well built place, as far as homesteader cabins go, and there was even a handmade plank counter with built in sink on one wall. It is separated into 3 rooms, which was extravagant at that time.

In front of this home is the area that was evidently a large set of corals where horses and cattle were kept. This area is larger than many I have seen, which indicates that at the time they owners lived there, it was a rather active ranch.

I can just imagine this family with their dreams of ranching and raising their children out west. I am sure they worked hard to make their life in the west what they dreamed. Digging fence post holes in the rocky ground, developing the water from the spring out behind the cabin so that the cattle could get better access to the water down in the draw below, and working the cattle would have more than occupied all of their time. On top of that, however, the man of the house, and perhaps his sons, would need to lay in a store of hay and firewood for the 9 months of bitter cold storms and snow that would always come on them before they were fully ready for it.

After working hard from the first light of dawn until late in the afternoon, I imagine the man would come back to the little house and walk in through the creaky wooden door, tired and hungry. A blast of hominess, caused by his loving wife bustling about in the home, cooking cornbread and beef stew in the stone fireplace, would hit him in the face. Aah, the feeling of easing his tired bones into a wooden chair while the smells of food swirled around the house.

The fact that the money that he had saved in the coffee can under the bed was almost gone now and the knowledge that they had lost more cattle that he had expected during an especially harsh winter are obliterated from his troubled mind. Right now all that mattered was the love of his wife and the taste of the food being set before him.

Sitting on the porch as the sun dies slowly behind him, covering the huge expanse of the river valley with darkness, the thoughts of how they were going to make it all work start to creep back into his mind. Shaking his head, he decides to let tomorrow bring what it will. There was nothing that he could do about it that night.

When you look back a hundred years or so, what happened then seems like it had to have happened in a different world. The stories that we hear or read about life in the west, feel remote, and somehow don’t seem to be real. They are like shadows in the past that sometimes intrigue us enough to look at them and try to figure out what they are. We may peer at them for a while trying to discern their features so that we can understand more about what it was like in their time. But mostly they are just shadows that will never reveal their true secrets.

There are, however, some abandoned structures that still stand to remind us that something happened there. One such standing reminder is a homestead cabin that was built near highway 141 in Montana. A marker toshow that someone had been there and staked a claim to the land on which it sits. Green cow pastures surround it now, with cattle grazing right up to the doorstep. It looks out on a most beautiful set of rolling green foothills that lose themselves in the great high mountains of the Rockies.

29 years before the logs of the little cabin were ever chipped at with an axe or cut with a saw, a man named Sterling J. Ball was born. The year was 1889 and he grew up in the Deer Lodge and Helena, MT areas. Little did the cabin know that Sterling would be it’s bulder and yet only stay on the place for a couple of years.

In 1920, when the temperatures were moderate for Montana and rain was plentiful, Sterling established a homestead on a little 160 piece of land in the area that was then known as the Ophir District. There is no doubt that he and his young wife, Marie, had big plans for the place. They cut the logs and stacked them in place, one by one, making the structure sturdy and homey. There were two rooms and good solid wood roof. They took the time to build a little home there in the valley, probably dreaming about their future life in the west.

The climate in the area around the place is rather harsh, and the summers are very short for farming because of the altitude. Snow comes early in the fall and doesn’t leave till late in the spring. You have to be hardy people to live there and take the conditions.

For a few years the family lived on their little set up and hopefully they were able to enjoy the place while they worked and farmed the land.

All of it was short lived however, for by the time of the US Census in 1930, the family was living on the other side of the mountains in a place called Medicine Lake, Montana. The cabin was abandoned. Something happened to make that young family move less than ten years after setting up the little place.

After the homesteading years of plenty between about 1915 to 1925, the weather changed for the next ten years or so, leaving the land parched and dry in the summer and it stayed dry and cold in the winter. Life in the west became much harder under those extreme conditions. Maybe that is what caused this pretty little cabin to be left behind. Maybe they just wanted to find land that had a little longer summer for growing crops. I hope that the reason has not become totally lost in time, but one thing remains clear.

The little abandoned cabin still stands there today as a placeholder to a very short story that most have forgotten about. Until the ground eventually swallows up the timbers that make up its walls, it will remain a stalwart figure, proudly displaying its history for all to see. “Here I am ”, it says, “ and I remember!.”