Bio: Cabin Girl, 1969. Descriptor: Many wonderful western stories and memories, e.g., wrangler tricks, a bear in a sleeping cabin and first day wrangling horses in the mountains.
Nancy’s Story: In 1969, I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania who’d never been east of Albany, NY. One day, Frank Galey’s niece, Beth, came into our dorm suite and said, “Anyone want to work on a dude ranch this summer?” My roommate, Mary Moran and I jumped at the chance. I still have the photos of the wings of our small plane as it landed at Jackson airport surrounded by the most unbelievable mountains I had ever seen. I became a cabin girl and Mary a waitress (Mary went back another summer as an assistant kid wrangler to Beth). The young male wranglers played many tricks on us ‘eastern dudes’ especially in those first few weeks. One night we were entertained in the main cabin as a welcome and told many stories about being careful about bears. The meat storage cabin was across from ours. I remember returning to our cabin and going to sleep in a top bunk only to be awoken by scratching noises on the window. I pulled back the curtain to see a bear’s head in the window and much to the delight of the wranglers, totally freaked out. The bear, of course was a rug, taken from the main cabin. Another time, being a total novice on a horse, Willie, the head wrangler put me on ‘Danny’, supposedly a nice, small horse. And he was… until Willie rode up beside me to “check on how I was doing”….which, since Danny had been a race-horse, meant that he would take off like a shot. Or the time I volunteered to help wrangle the horses in the morning and was allowed to do ‘the meadow’ (assuming it was flat and easy) only to discover the ‘meadow’ was the very steep side of a slope and we had to start at the top, screaming at the top of our lungs and riding down at full gallop trying to get the horses out from the trees at the side. There were so many experiences…when the porcupine ate the floor near the toilet in the cook’s cabin so she got out her shotgun to take care of the problem…being able to ride by horseback into Moose to get the mail…learning to jump the irrigation ditches bareback… watching the elk jump the ranch fence at night…walking the new foals to get them used to halters while they nipped you from behind….walking with Becky, another cabin girl, to clean up one of the ‘tents’ and seeing a bear come out from under the tent flap…collecting the leftover liquor in dudes’ cabins…swimming with horses bareback in the pond down below the barn and of course the times we got revenge on the boys in the BQ. I went back to Moose many years later and thanks to an older ranger, found the ranch property and Frank’s grave. The barn was gone but the main cabin and some of the smaller cabins were still there. I understand that now the ranch is being resurrected as a preservation area. White Grass introduced me to the west and the glory of the Rocky Mountains – I will never forget it. Nancy Zimny.