Bio: Dude, Chore Girl and Wrangler, 1946-1950’s. Descriptor: Milking cows, harvesting hay, lighting the furnace in the bathhouse and lots of other daily ranch chores.
Annie’s Story: 1946 was my first year on the White Grass. My parents, sister and I had driven for 6 days from Florida to get there. We all took to it like fish to water and spent over a decade of summers there from June to the middle of September. Ollie Vanwinkle was the winter caretaker and his wife, Twilla worked as a cabin girl in the summers while Ollie worked the big team, Molly and Queenie for haying after tending to the irrigating of the “White Grass” fields in front of the ranch’s cabins. It was those early years that I loved best. We kids could ride our horses bareback when ever we wanted. Cows were milked mostly twice a day and the milk was separated in a contraption with a zillion pieces which I eventually learned to put together after they had been washed after use. The milk was put in a larger milk can and place in the cold water of a ditch that ran through a small wooden building known as the milk house. I remember one day finding a drowned mouse in the milk which I has to pick up by the tail before lugging the milk into the kitchen. There were lots of chores in those day since the ranch tried to produce some of its own food. I was a chore girl one year before I became the first female wrangler when the ranch couldn’t seem to keep the chore boy for more than a week or two at a time. There was hitching up the small team, Snip and Bess, to a wagon to haul wood and “pep” a mixture of saw dust and kerosene which had to be delivered to every dude cabin after you had skidded the logs with a single horse down to the rusty, old saw to be cut into fire wood. Lighting the furnace for the bath house was another chore that had to be done every morning. One morning there was no pep to start the fire, but I found some gasoline and was ultimately blown out of the furnace room along with about a dozen bats. I have to go now and at age 75 try to ride one of my daughter’s horses which has only bucked me off once so far. I’ll continue the chores later. Annie Messler Cuddy.