Poor Dehart was in a bad spot. He had a lot of money in the stud and he was afraid he was going to die and it was either take this bunch of junk or nothing, so we traded. Shortly after I had made the trade Charlie came up from Great Falls to the ranch to see how things were getting along and didn’t know I had made the trade. There was nobody home the day he came. I was out on the range riding after cattle. This big terrible looking animal was standing in the corral. When I got home Charlie asked me where I got that mountain of “beauty.” I told him about the trade. “Well,” said Charlie, “he is sure a good sleeper. I watched him for an hour in the corral; he never moved an ear.” Charlie said Dehart must have got me drunk when I made that trade. I told him if he saw what I had traded for him he would think Dehart was the one that was drunk.
I doctored that horse and brought him out of his sickness and he produced the best colts in that country at that time and I later sold him for $500.00. In another way the trade proved to be very profitable. I wanted to vent the brand on the horses when Dehart took them but Dehart said no, he was going to ship those horses out of the country and didn’t want any more brands on them as it would hurt the sale of the horses. Instead of doing that, he sold them all at the railroad station where he had intended to ship them from. It was about 20 miles from our ranch and in about the middle of our range where our horses run and where I turned loose the rest of our horses, after the trade was made and the people that bought the horses from Dehart turned them loose on the range without either branding them or venting them. Consequently those horses in a few days were back on their range mixed up with our bunch without any way to identify them and all branded with our iron. I told those people about the matter and tried to get them to get their horses but they didn’t give it any attention so in a few months I sold all our horses on the range with the iron. When I sold the horses with the brand they sure put up a howl. They threatened me with court action, said they would have me arrested, but they couldn’t do anything about it as it was their own fault so I figured I got the stallion for nothing.
One time when Charlie Russell and I were in partnership in the cow business, I lost some yearling colts and as the country was all open in those days and no fences, our stock would sometimes stray two or three hundred miles away from home. So, after about three years after I had lost those colts I heard of some horses up in Canada which had my brand on them. I had a neighbor who had lost some colts about the same time as I had, so we decided to go up in that country and try to find them. We each took a couple of good saddle horses and started out. That country was very thinly settled those days, just a little stock ranch here and there, sometimes twenty-five or thirty miles apart. As it was late in the fall and the weather was getting quite cold, we had to make some of those ranches to camp overnight, on account of horse feed and a place to sleep.
One evening we rode into a ranch that a couple of Irish brothers owned and asked them to stay overnight. They said, “Sure, you’re welcome as the flowers in May.” Neither of them had ever been married and did their own housekeeping and cooking. The evening we got there they had just butchered a beef. We helped them hang it up in the barn and went to the house to cook supper. It was sure a dirty looking joint and the brother that cooked supper had his hands all stained with blood and dirt from butchering the beef. He had to make bread for supper and didn’t wash his hands, but mixed up the bread with his hands—blood, dirt and all. But we hadn’t had anything to eat all day and were plenty hungry, so we ate it and thought it was fine. We hunted horses all next day and along in the evening came to what looked like an old deserted ranch where nobody was home. After making a lot of noise and shouting, a man came out of the cabin. He was a Mormon and was living alone on this old ranch. Said he was sick and had been in bed three days and that there was no food on the place and that he couldn’t keep us overnight.
It looked like a bad storm coming up and we didn’t know any place to go. We told the man we were going to stay anyway, and as we both had six-shooters he didn’t argue too much with us. We put our horses in the old barn and went to the house. The Mormon went back to bed. We went to the kitchen to see if we could find anything to eat. It was the dirtiest looking outfit I ever saw in my life. The frying pans and kettles didn’t look like they had been washed for six months. We got a fire started and cleaned up things a little and looked through all the old boxes and found some beans, dried apples and flour. By ten o’clock that night we had what we thought was a pretty good meal. I went to the Mormon’s bedroom and asked him if he wanted anything to eat. He didn’t answer me, but began getting out of his dirty blankets. He hadn’t even taken his clothes off. We got him to sit down at the table and he ate more than both of us. After we got him filled up on food he got to talking quite friendly. He said he had been a Mormon missionary in some jungle country and had spent several years converting natives into the Mormon religion. In listening to his experience as a missionary I couldn’t help wondering what kind of a job he did, because if there is anything in the old saying that cleanliness is next to holiness he was sure a flop.
The next morning was very cold and stormy, but we were anxious to find our horses and our quarters were none too comfortable, so we bade our Mormon friend goodbye and rode away. He was about 40 miles from any town and we didn’t see any means of transportation around there, so we often wondered what ever became of him.
Well, we headed for a big lake about twenty miles from this Mormon’s place. We heard there was a lot of horses ranging in that part of the country and there found our horses, so we drove the whole bunch to an old roundup corral that we had located that day. I had three horses in the bunch and my partner had one. Those horses were three years old and were not halter broke. In fact, they had not had a rope on them since they were yearlings and then were only caught by the front feet and thrown down to brand them. So, we had to catch them that way now. We necked them to the extra saddle horses we had with us and turned them out of the corral and headed them towards Montana. Just before dark we spotted a ranch and some corrals so we headed for there. We found a man there who had come from Michigan and taken up a homestead out on the Canadian Prairie. He evidently was a man of some wealth as he had spent considerable money fixing the place up. He wasn’t very keen about letting us stay overnight. He kept sizing us up and I guess he had heard a good deal about cowboys and rustlers and thought we were a couple of horse thieves. We explained our condition to him and told him the circumstances and that we were a long way from home, so he finally decided to let us stay.
While this fellow looked like he had considerable wealth, he didn’t have very much to eat. As he didn’t make any excuses about it, I think we had his regular bill of fare. He didn’t have any meat, no butter or sugar or coffee. My partner was a coffee fiend, and this fellow gave us cold milk for breakfast. My partner was very blue all that day and said he felt very queer, like the world was coming to an end or something terrible was going to happen. But that was because he missed his coffee.
This man charged us ten dollars for very little to eat and a very poor bed, and as it was not the custom to charge anyone those days for food it made my partner very mad. When we got our horses saddled and ready to go next morning, my partner went to the barn and as he was gone quite a while I asked him what he was looking for. He said he was looking for something he could steal, to get even with that old guy, but he said this fellow was so stingy he didn’t have anything worth taking.
Well, we finally got going back towards home. If the weather had been good it would have been about two day’s ride, but about ten o’clock a bad storm came up and by noon it was a real blizzard and out there on the plains you couldn’t see a thing or know what direction you were going in, but after wandering around for some time we came to a coulee that we recognized (Verta Grease Coulee). It was about 25 miles long and we knew it put into Milk River which was the direction we wanted to go, also we knew there was a ranch on Milk River at the mouth of this coulee. We followed this ravine all day and about night came to the ranch. They welcomed us in and gave us a good supper and a feather bed to sleep in. It was a terrible blizzard and I think we would have lost our lives if we hadn’t found this ranch.