Humble Beginnings

My sister and I are the youngest of six children. There is a 14-23 year age gap between the four eldest and myself, then my younger sister came along five years later. For the two of us, life began humbly on a ranch in the country near a small town in East Texas.

When I say I grew up on a ranch, in no way does that mean that I was a cowgirl with a show horse and fancy western boots. Occasionally, we had horses, but they were for rounding up cattle, not barrel racing. I also had boots, but they were suited more for working in the pens when the East Texas weather turned the soft ground in to rancid muck and greatly resembled galoshes. I would liken myself more to a glorified ranch hand.  Normally, ranch hands are boys, but since my brothers were grown, I guess my dad decided girls were just as able if trained early enough.

A little background information on our operation....
Our dad runs a cattle preconditioning operation where he buys heifers, and stocker and feeder cattle when they are old enough to be away from their mother.  Often these cattle are not even his.  Other, less inclined, cattlemen pay him to precondition their cattle before they turn them out.  He facilitates the transition from being with the mother to being independent and eating grain and grazing.  This is not as simple as it sounds.  It involves carefully screening and immunizing the groups as they come in based on their appearance and their geographic origin, as some locations are more prone to certain health issues than others.  It usually entails de-horning and branding each calf - a stinky process that can be smelled for a mile when the wind is blowing.  It also involves castrating the bulls, which not only changes their anatomy, but their name as well.  A castrated bull is called a steer.  Unless they are going to be bred, it is more desirable to have steers in a herd.

The whole process takes place in a cattle working chute with an array of tools including enormous needles, a somewhat clean, but far from sterile scalpel, a pair of pliers that my dad always wears in a holster on his belt, an ear tagger, a branding iron and a dirty Styrofoam ice chest full of medicine with used needles embedded around the top.  All of these things are set up on the back of a flat bed farm truck. 

I officially became a farmer/rancher at the tender age of 10.  Our dad traveled three to four days a week buying cattle and during those days, I was officially responsible for feeding all of the cattle on our property at that time.  He would leave a note on the back of a sale barn card telling me what to feed in which pen and just before twilight, I would head to the barn to ready my steed.

My trusty steed was an old beat up riding lawn mower fitted with a small wooden flat bed trailer.  I would load it up with 30 lb. buckets of corn and "cake" feed that I would catch from the grain room in our barn.  I would drive down the half mile of pens that lined our "driveway" and carry the buckets in and distribute them among the four troughs in each pen.  In the pens with bigger cattle, I could only carry one bucket at a time because I had to carry a whip in the other to ward off the more agitated ones.  There were quite a few times that I abandoned my buckets and jumped up on the metal fencing,  very similar to the way rodeo clowns do, to avoid being charged.  At that point, I would scale the fence back to my "steed" and dump the remaining feed over the fence into the dirt.  Hey - it beat letting them starve for the night and they always ate it all anyway.  I'm sure it was just a little grittier going down.

Inviting friends to stay the night was always interesting.  I'm not sure if riding along with me to feed was mystifying or traumatizing to them.  In any event, I eventually stopped inviting guests when I knew my dad was going to be out of town.  It was way to much to explain, and honestly, I was annoyed when having to do so.  This was literally a way of life for us and I felt judged and misunderstood when having to answer a million ridiculous questions from ignorant "city girls" about my very grown up ranch duties.  I also found the endless stream of "yuck" and "ewww" and "gross" that inevitably ensued completely annoying as well.

I picture my inner monologue as sounding somewhat like Hank The Cow Dog for those of you who are familiar with him.  If you're not, you should be.  It's a book series - Google it!

When I was 13, the dairy market crashed and our operation essentially went under.  My dad still had a house and acreage near the Oklahoma panhandle where he was born and raised.  So we packed up and headed west.  Our operation in Oklahoma eventually grew and although my sister and I have fancy college degrees and numerous professional accolades, when we come home, we're still R.C.'s girls, those Phillips gals and often, the farmer's daughters.  Enjoy.

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