Idaman

[1914 Hereford]

Yes, that is an ad for the bull test the Franklin Nash and Tom Hook started in Canon City. The ad pretty much explains the test. Daddy (Franklin) always wanted to test bulls on a, limited ration, instead of letting them run at a full bunk of feed all day, and eat all that they could. He felt their test would be a more meaningful test to find the bulls that could convert on the least amount of feed. The added goal was to keep the bulls more sound and functional for their buyers. I was always interested in the fact that the pens were dusty and they had some eye problems. Dad always said that he found that they had just as much trouble with the bulls with a lot of eye pigment as they did with those that didn't have any pigment.
]

 

[Idaman]

Idaman, I came across this ad while going through some of my old magazines. It's from the June 1973 Western Livestock Journal. Does it mean anything to you?

Thanks so much for posting that. I can almost see where the flea episode happened. We ran that test for I believe 3 years and then discontinued it for lack if consignments. That association provided me with probably my best lifelong friend.

 

[Idaman]

NEDJR We need to get together and not only look at you cattle but go over old times and old publications.

 

[Ned Jr.]

NEDJR We need to get together and not only look at you cattle but go over old times and old publications.

Sounds good. I got a lot of Hereford journals from a man from Nebraska years ago. When they were on there way here I was watching the news and seen a UPS truck was in a wreck in Denver. I said "I hope my magazines weren't on that truck", they were. I got most of them in good shape but a few got mangled. Some I never did get. Most end in the late 40's early 50's but I got a few older ones from a neighbor. Here's the oldest I have.

I thought this was an interesting article.

Here's a couple old ads.

 

[Idaman]

You're making my mouth water.

 

[Idaman]

Anytime you change ranches you have to do some changes in management. This is true whether you move next door or to another country. You have to add up the special features of your new ranch and quickly figure out what class of cattle will work best on that particular operation.

Whwb we moved to Empire we faced these decisions in spades. We have always relied heavily on the advice of neighbors of the new ranch to help with the decision of what has worked on that ranch in the past and will it work again now.

In the first year or two we were not trying to utilize the back country as much as the great distances and possible employees that made the long trail drives and then stayed with the cattle in a cabin in the remote wilderness dictated. One old saying in the southern Chilcotin was to hire every morning everbody that wanted to work that day no matter what. That way if there were lots of willing workers one day that was good because the next day there might be nobody and nothing would get done you couldn't do yourself. Such as, moving 20 wheellines alone or feeding 2000 head at 40 below when nothing starts.

The first thing we tried was the purchase of light yearling steers to over winter on our winter range and then fatten the next spring and summer. This worked really well as the light yearlings were old enough and tough enough to survive the winter and then explode in the spring. Calves just simply weren't tough enough to make it through the winter on dry grass. Cows did fairly well but they would lose condition from the cold and lack of water. Amazingly they seemed to bounce right back after they had a day or two on decent water.

After the yearling steers we tried light, open, yearling heifers with the idea of breeding them in the spring after they wintered out and then selling them as bred coming three year olds in the fall. They were fairly fleshy and commanded a good premium since they were coming threes. We were able to buy several hundred from a neighbor across the river and trail them home. They did and bred very well and we sold them the next fall.

I sold them to an order buyer that I had dealt with in the past and we delivered the heifers to a holding lot in Kamloops. I went home and the next week expected a check but nothing came. I called the buyer and he said it would be coming for sure next week. Next week same thing, no check. I called and got the same run around as before. This time I packed, told the family that I would return when I had collected the money, and headed to town. Ther was a lot of money involved so I needed a resolution to the matter. I called the buyer aftr I got into Kamloops and he persisted with the same old story. I found his home address and bright and early the next morning I was parked in front of his house. He came out and headed to a restaurant where he met for coffee and made deals with many of his customers. After he had was seated at a booth I sat down in the next booth. He came over and asked what I wanted and I told him that I wanted the money and that until he paid me he could expect to see me in his rear view mirror and everywhere he went until payment. He didn't say much and had to leave to meet with another customer.
He seemed kind of nervous. After the restaurant meetings he had we headed out for his days travels. Everywhere he went I followed until late in the afternoon he came over to me and said that he would take me to where the money was. I followed him into a main hotel downtown and he introduced me to two men that he said he worked for. He told them what I wanted and they told him to let me have my money. He said that he didn't have it and that it was being held by a auction yard in Alberta. We called the yard right then and the auction owner said that he was holding the money pending more cattle coming from me. I said that he already had them all and he said he would sent the money, In the end I went to my banks' manager had him contact the bank of the auction and they worked out an immediate transfer. Pheew.

After a few weeks I learned that the reason the two men were in Kamloops was to try and figure out what this buyer was doing with their money as he worked for them. He had been selling cattle for them and then not paying them and just saying that they had more cattle in the holding lot which than what they had. He had been gambling and was covering his losses. Later I had a bunch of cows on feed in a feedlot in Kamloops waiting for the new years jump in the old cow market but when I went to get them out of the lot the RCMP had everythin on the lot locked up and guarded. They were inventorying the entire lot to figure out the discrepancies in the buyers' count. The only bad thing was that the cows were locked up for a whole month and the feed costs kept rolling.

We had visited several cow packers and asked them when each year they would pay a premium for old cows that had been culled in the late fall. The answer was always that between Christmas and New Years they would definitely pay a good premium. They said that they had to kill every day but there were no auctions selling during that period and they really needed the cows. This worked so well that we did that for years and years. Several of these packers stockpiled cows in feedlots just to have them when they needed them so we found the ones that weren't doing the stockpiling.

 

[Idaman]

We all have memories that stick in our minds. Some of those memories are either bad or good but usually there are a few that really stick in your mind.One of those memories from Empire was of the bad kind.

We were calving heifers and that was back before we were using low calving weight bulls. We had quite a number of heifers and almost lived with them. One evening there was a heifer that was having difficulties and we put her in a small pen to check out the situation. I felt inside the heifer and encountered something I had never felt before in all the years. At the front of the pelvis there was just a flat wall that you couldn't get around and it angled slightly toward the front of the cow on the right side but still not allowing for any further entry. I could tell that what I was feeling was not going to be dealt without surgery. I had learned to do surgeries some time before and had done several since. Maybe the reason I didn't feel too confident was that the first one I did I learned over the phone by talking to a dog and cat vet. It was on a Saturday and he was the only one that answered his phone so we did the best we could but neither of us was too confident. That surgery was successful as both animals lived and the heifer bred back very quickly.

I felt this case was more ominous and that I had better take her to Williams Lake. It was a two and a half hour drive over some really bad gravel roads so I got ready, loaded the heifer and headed out as it was just turning dark. I was driving a one ton flatbed truck with a stockrack and duals on the rear. I made sure to have at least two spares in addition to the six tires on the truck. I had driven about an hour when one tire blew out and I immediately thought no problem I've got lots of spares. I changed the blown out one and then started on again. Fifteen minutes later the second one blew and I repeated the procedure. This was a twenty mile an hour road so heat wasn't the problem just sharp rocks. On again thinking how good it was to have brought two spares. During this thought process the third one blew and I really scratched my head to try and figure out the best possible positioning for the five tires I now had left. I made the change and went on but somewhat in a more serious mood this time. Sure enough another fifteen miles and a fourth one blew. Now it was really serious but I only had twenty more miles to go. I was down to four tires left and only one on each corner. The rest of the very nervous trip went ok and at the edge of town I called the vet and he met me at the clinic at three A.M. He operated and found out that the calf had started out naturally but when the front feet hit the front of the pelvis they were deflected down instead of into the pelvis. They punctured the wall of the uterus right at the pelvis and then the heifer had shoved the calf partially through the puncture and down into the stomach cavity. The calf was half in the uterus and half hanging down toward the stomach. The flat wall that I had felt from the rear was the side of the ribs as the heifer had shoved the calf up sideways against the front of the pelvis.

The vet took the calf out but is was dead and then he tried to sew up the tear in the pelvis. The tear was so far up and under the lower lip of the pelvis that he could'nt get a very good repair.

It was now four in the morning and I was punch drunk from being extremely sleepy. I headed to a closeby motel and staggered in and woke the desk man. When he came to the counter he looked at me, raised his hands, and backed against the wall of the office. His eyes were so gigantic that I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the man. I kind of came to a little and looked around to see what had spooked him so bad. I finally noticed a 30/30 rifle that I had laid on the counter and he thought that he was being robbed.
I had been so punchy that I hadn't noticed or thought about the gun. I tried so reassure him that all was well and that I just wanted a room. He finally calmed down and checked me in but kept his free hand on the phone until I headed for my room.

The truck I had driven into town was the one that the cowboys used every day so they always had a rifle in there. I must have thought enough to take the rifle in so it wouldn't get stolen and didn't think of its' effect on the desk man. The man put me in a far back room well away from the office.

In the morning I awoke and found the heifer dead also so the whole episode had only two purposes, a long remembered memory and the determination to find a better way of calving heifers.

A neighbor had some what the same experience with the distances being the determining factor. He had headed for town to get a ceaserean and when he got to the clinic he backed up to the chute abd went into the office. Shortly one of the vets came into the office and said that there was no heifer in the truck. Ge went right out to see and sure enough noe heifer and the tail gate was in place. He hadn't loaded the heifer himself so he called home to find out if the crew had loaded her. They were very sure that they had so no one knew where the heifer was. He headed out back along the route he had come in on and sure enough he found the heifer calmly grazing along the highway but hadn't had her calf yet. He got her into a corral loaded her and headed back to the vet. To this day no one knows how that heifer got out of the truck and left the tailgate undisturbed.

 

[Northern Rancher]

I had a heifer I was calving for an outfit have that happen-got cattywampus inside the cow and stuck a foot through the uterus-we straightened it out and delivered it-dead-then basically had to do a caeserian incision to suture the uterus. The heifer died the next day too so that didn't work out real well.

 

[I luv herfrds]

Had a 3yo that had her calf unassisted. seemed a normal delivery until the next day. She was down and acting sick and doing a vaginal prolapse.
Got the vet out and he found that she had tore through her uterus and delivered the calf through the hole.
Sewed her up and shipped her as a slaughter that fall.

 

[Idaman]

I don't like breaches but these odd ball problems are far worse. At Empire with the travel issues and trauma to the cow we either did our own surgeries or were just better to shoot them. For me that is real hard to do but I have done it.

 

[Idaman]

Before we moved to BC I came up with the "bright idea" (family joke about my numerous and slightly successful bright ideas) that I should get my pilots license. I started with the training in a small mountain town near where we lived in Colorado. The landing strip there was especially tricky as it sloped badly from end to end, was at a very high altitude, and had no crosswind runway. This meant that you had to land and take off in only one direction no matter which way the wind was blowing. This phenomenon caused me to land more times with very white knickles and an elevated heart rate times than I like to remember. After I finished the course we decided that we needed a plane so we purchased a local Skylane 182. Since the pilots license and the plane were acquired for the purpose of spotting cattle we thought we had better try that plane out and we quickly found out that the plane was just too fast to see with any detail the animals below. So we ended up selling that plane and began looking for a more suitable type for our purpose.

A sideline to the speed issue was that a friend of mine who had a commercial charter service that only flew a very fast twin told me that he used to fly the people who started Superior Auction. At first they only traveled long distances with him but one day they got the "bright idea" of having him fly them low over the cattle so that they could film them from the air. With that fast plane the longest film they made was about 3 seconds and very blurry. Needless to say their "bright idea" got scrapped.

Shortly after we sold the first plane we started into the trade for Empire with Bob Maytag. Bob as a great pilot and rarely went anywhere he didn't fly. We needed to make several trips from Colorado to BC and back to work out the details of the trade. He insisted that we fly together and use his twin engine Baron which was fast and comfortable for the long flights. After we started our travels he took delivery on a new plane that he had ordered before he even thought of selling Empire. This plane was a Heliocourier that he had specifically picked for Empire because of its flying abilities. A Helio can be taken off from a tennis court and can land on one as well.. It could fly as slow as 28 mph and could be nosed up toward the sky and turned around while holding over the same spot on the ground. This last ability was especially useful in the case that you flew into a narrow valley that wouldn't allow a normal plane to turn around in. In the case that that valley came to an end up against a mountain you could turn around in an unbelievably small space and fly back the way you came when any other plane would crash.

After moving to Empire we found a Helio down in Seattle so we went down purchased it and flew it back to Kamloops, BC where we would have to have it reregistered in Canada.. The reregistry meant having indentification numbers and letters sent from Ottawa and then they had to be painted on the plane.


Before the move to BC we were involved in a Bible study that was called "God is my resource". The idea was that since everything came from Him then we should look to Him for all of our wants and needs. During this time the thought was on my mind that the identity signature for the plane would have a very meaningful significance. When the fax came from Ottawa I was very curious to see what the letters were and if there would be any significance to them. When I read the fax Ottawa had assigned C-GIMR for the registry number. I sure didn't immediately see any thing in that but it finally sunk through my thick skull that what Ottawa had assigned was C-GIMR or C- God Is My Resourse. That little thought sure helped me through some harrowing flights back into the mountains in less than ideal conditions.

We always tried to fly at least once a week during the late fall until we felt confident that we had found all the stragglers that had gotten hung up and didn't make it home. The range was so vast that you just couldn't cover all of it so we had to learn just where the cattle could be hung up on their treck home. They seemed to never be found in the trees but in an open meadow along a creek that had frozen over and kept them scared to cross and head on home. Sometimes it would seem that the ice was only a few feet wide but they still refused to cross without some help.

Thes four or five day frigid rides were never much fun. One time our friend Raymond Rosette voluntiered to lead the expedition. As he and I were running around the ranch gathering up the supplies he would need a message came over the radio. The local radio station provided nessages to the isolated people out in the bush twice a day. The message we heard that day was "To Alec Rossette, to Alec Rossette, your brother Raymond has died. Please come in and pick up his body. Father John." Raymond, who was sitting right beside me said "Am I really dead?" and" How are they going to take my body?" He worried about this for quite some time and since the phone had been out for weeks we couldn't find out about the future for his body. We found out later that Raymond had been in town for a little toot and had his wallet stolen by a trooper (street person). The trooper had died under a bridge and all there was for identification was Raymonds stolen wallet.

Another time when we had a Supercub rented (a Super Cub has the seats in tandem) Joe Rosette was in the back seat behind the pilot. Joe just hated to fly but really knew the country so he agreed to go. When they had just gotten off the ground Joe tapped the pilot on the shoulder and said "Sick"! The pilot answered "Overshoes." Joe replied "Both full!" They turned around and landed and someone else made the trip.

 

[Idaman]

When were doing the cattle spotting once we had found the stragglers the next problem was communicating their position sufficiently enough for the riders on the ground to be able to locate them. This problem was exaggerated by the lack of CB radios and the riders inability to read. The best was to drop a message to the riders if they could be found. For this purpose we used a blue Clorox bottle and tied a orange surveying type tape to it. This made it visible in the case that we missed our drop target. The only problem then was the bottle getting hung up in a tree. Another aspect to the communication was that none of the riders could read or write. To get around this we had copies of maps of the area made and then we could pinpoint where the cattle were on the map. I still couldn't write a note telling their whereabouts so I had to draw however many cows there were in little cow drawings on the map. If there were only a few head then the problem was not great but if there were more than 20 the drawings could get pretty complicated.

The radio route would have been nice but I just couldn't get anyone to carry one all the time. Back then they were pretty bulky and a nuisance to lug around all the time. One of the men that did a lot of that riding purchased a radio and was continually bragging about its' capabilities to the boredom of the other employees. One day when he was coming home from town one of the native men who also was an employee and had a radio of his own decided to follow the first man just far back enough so that he couldn't be seen. Everyone that had a radio was very curious to see just what their range was. With this in mind the native man called the other man just to make contact. The first man immediately asked where the native was and he answered that he was at home in his house at Empire and not right behind him. They started out about 20 miles from the headquarters and there were several mountains in the way of the broadcasting. The first man just couldn't believe that his high end radio was that good to reach that far and over the mountains. The native guy followed at a safe distance and the other man checked about every quarter mile to see if he could still be heard. Of course he could and he bragged about the capabilities of his radio continually. Every time the native man saw him leave he would follow and play the trick again until he was finally found out.

Even today with the cell phones we have to be very careful about calling a rider on a horse. If the horse is somewhat skittish and the phone rings all hell can break loose. If you are trying for dear life to just stay on you can't answer the phone and each ring just makes the situation worse.

Alec was our most reliable back country rider but he was limited by the reading/writing thing. Whenever he counted cattle he would write that number on his chaps. After some time there would be so many numbers that we would have to spread his chaps out on a table and try to figure which number we wanted. Another time I ran into Alec on the ranch on a very cold day. He had been talking for some time about his new false teeth. I saw that he wasn't wearing his teeth and I asked him about them. He said that on really cold days they just chattered too much so he carried them in his pocket. He said that they chattered in his pocket as well but that they didn't bother him there as much. Later I asked his son how his dad liked his teeth and he said "He likes them just fine but he takes them out to eat."

 

[regenwether]

I've enjoyed your stories. You should write a book. Do you have any pictures to share with us. I'm interested in seeing some pic's of your hydro-electric set up. Cool stuff!

 

[Idaman]

I've enjoyed your stories. You should write a book. Do you have any pictures to share with us. I'm interested in seeing some pic's of your hydro-electric set up. Cool stuff!

Thanks for the interest. I haven't been posting too much as we have been traveliing.

Once we get home I will start looking in our storage unit for the pictures you mention plus others of the Canadian outback.

I may also post some pictures and specifications of cattle handling stuff that we have built and use. The main reason for posting these is that they are very simple, inexpensive, and you can easily build them yourself. These setups commercially, to me,cost a fortune and don't work any better.

Thanks again.

 

[Idaman]

Our Heliocourier on the field at Kamloops BC. Note the huge wings that allow the 28 mph flight and 200 foot landings. Also notice the GIMR call sign under the left(from the pilots view) wing. This was our cattle spotter for many years.

 

[Idaman]

The Farry Carpenter Ranch along the Yampa River east of Hayden, Colorado in mid-May of this year.

 

[Idaman]

To qualify for the breeds board, these are of the sucker breed. They also affected our horned Herefords and our black baldies.

This was taken in late Feb. or early Mar. in a irrigation lake at Empire. Every year these suckers would come up to the springs that fed a fairly large lake to spawn. They would come here out from under three feet of ice to spawn and then die. The bald eagles and coyotes would come here for the feast. The ice near these spring would literally turn red from the fish blood. The eagles and coyotes would be lined up along the edge of the ice much like cattle at a bunk in a feedlot. The eagles and coyotes would be all mixed together and seemed to get along fine.

The bald eagles are naturally fish eaters so their desire to kill calves was not as strong as the golden eagles who were vicious on calves. We were forced to delay calving until this alternate feed source became available to lure the eagles away from the calves that were being born. They would kill a calf by watching for a cow to start calving and then when the calf was coming out, but the cow couldn't get up yet, the eagle would fly down and peck the eyes out of the calf. They would then return to the top of a nearby tree and wait until the cow gave up and left and then they would proceed to dine.

Around this lake I counted as many as 71 bald eagles at one time.

For the golden eagles we waited for the bighorn sheep to lamb and then they would be gone. Lamb seemed to be their favorite ahead of calves. To kill a lamb the bird would wait until a lamb was crossing a high and treacherous cliff and then would dive bomb the lamb and knock it off the ledge and onto the rocks far below. There was a hill over which the road to Empire traveled that was called "Eagle Tree".
The story went that one spring when the eagles were especially bad the native cowboys killed about 12 and hung them all in a tree right along the road. Of course when a game warden came by he was somewhat concerned. He saw some of the native cowboys along the road and stopped to try and arrest them. They somewhat forcefully told him that if he didn't shut up and leave he would be hanging in that tree in the middle of those eagles. That ended the conversation and he left.

There was also a time at Big Bar along the Frazer that a golden eagle picked up a toddler that was playing in his front yard. What the bird tried to do was to just lift the little boy high enough off of the ground and then fly with him like that for several hundred feet and then drop him over a cliff edge that the house sat on. Luckily a small but older child saw what was happening and grabbed his little brothers pants with one hand and a saw horse sitting in the yard with the other. He screamed for help and hung on for dear life until the mother arrived with a broom and finally the eagle dropped the child and left.

Every year we would get several calves that from the marks on their backs had almost been picked up.
This left quite a hump on their backs and they were easy to spot in the bunch. Cougar wounds and eagle wounds could be doctored with some success but bear wounds would never heal up and the animal would eventually die.

Cougars didn't seem to bother the calves much but colts and young horses were their favorite. We had to foal all the colts in the corrals right by the barn or lose them to the cougars. I had always heard that a couger wouldn't eat anything it hadn't killed but one particularly bad winter a family of cougars moved in to the spot were we put dead animals and did eat already dead horses.

 

[Idaman]

regenwether asked for photos and specifically power plant photos so here goes,

This is the ranch yard at Empire from the top of a nearby mountain called Clyde mountain.

This photo is somewhat self explanatory. There was 450 gallons per minute flowing through that system.

It produced 40 horsepower and drove a 20kw generator that served the whole ranch.

 

[Northern Rancher]

I did an A'I job just west of Kamloops a few years back-when I got to the ranch I noticed they'd had a grassfire along the powerline-I commented on it and the owner had quite a story. It seems a bunch of hang gliders had jumped off some of those big hills like in your picture. One misjudged his landing-tangled up in the highline and shorted it out. You don't need too good of an imagination to figure out the end result for the pilot.

 

[Idaman]

I did an A'I job just west of Kamloops a few years back-when I got to the ranch I noticed they'd had a grassfire along the powerline-I commented on it and the owner had quite a story. It seems a bunch of hang gliders had jumped off some of those big hills like in your picture. One misjudged his landing-tangled up in the highline and shorted it out. You don't need too good of an imagination to figure out the end result for the pilot.

When I lived out there the ultra sound imaging equipment had just come out. A salesman from back east in Canada called the Gang Ranch and wanted to demonstrate it on their 3500 cows. They called me to see if they could also use us for a demonstration for what they hoped would be a sale.

The salesman flew acroos the country and into Williams Lake. Then he drove 2 hours on a nasty dirt road to get to the Gang headquarters. When he arrived they said that they would have to take him back into the mountains where the cows were and that would take another 2 hours in a four wheel drive. They made the trip back there OK and they were ready to start the preg checking with the machine.

The salesman got the machine out and started hooking it up and he discovered that he had brought the pig probe and not the bovine one. He almost cried as he had spent nearly two days getting to the cows and had another two days ahead of him to go home. Four days and not one single test.