Excerpt

The Mules and the Haystacker

Told by Charley Tasler, Atkinson. 1920s.

Ornery? I think the word was invented for those two mules. Their names were Punch and Judy, and my brother Tony owned them. I never did like mules, and those two didn't do one thing to change my mind any. Tony defended them, though, and it made me disgusted the way he always babied them. He was the only one that could hook them up. If any of the rest of us tried, their hind feet flew like lightning.

One day Tony was moving the hay stacker, using those two outlaw mules. He was leaning back against the slanted boards. As they were crossing a ditch, one of the runners caught on the bank, making the stacker lurch. Tony was thrown off, and he landed on one side of the "V" chain that was pulling the stacker.

The mules, frightened by the lurch of the stacker, began to run in spite of the fact they were pulling the huge piece of equipment. Tony clung to the chain desperately, but a part of his body slid under the boards of the stacker.

I was operating a four-horse sweep, and I managed to pull in front of the plunging team while a couple other fellows in the crew came running from the sides. Tony's mules stopped when they ran into my sweep. They stood in a tangle around it. Someone grabbed the lines, and I ran to Tony.

We had a difficult time rescuing him from under the stacker boards. He had been dragged in the stubbles and was bleeding from deep scrapes over his entire body. We hauled him to Atkinson, and Doctor Douglas had the tedious job of removing the spears of stubble from his chewed flesh. Tony couldn't do field work for the rest of the summer. During that time, brother Bill worked Tony's mules.

They had discovered that if they pulled to the side in opposite directions, the driver could no longer control them, and they'd run away. So Bill chained them together. Then he made a leather whip, and those two outlaws learned to work.

But still they were ornery. They were the meanest creatures that ever ate hay.

Cattle, Buffalo, and Dances with Wolves

Told by John Ziska III, Atkinson. 1936-37.

The drought ended sooner in northern Nebraska than it did in South Dakota. In 1935 and '36, our area of Nebraska had moisture to spare, bringing bumper hay crops. Since cattle numbers had been severely reduced during the dry years, there was an excess of hay. But the Dakotas continued to be plagued with drought.

In the fall of '36, several desperate ranchers from South Dakota came to Holt County, NE, and rented hay land with the right to winter their cattle on it. Two such families, the Roy Houcks and the Jay Lakes, unable to raise money for trucking, drove their cattle from north central South Dakota to land located about ten miles south of Atkinson, Nebraska. There the two families lived together in a small house on the Matousek place, and their children attended a local rural school, District 77. They had roughly a thousand head of cattle.

They baled some of the hay, trucked it to South Dakota and sold it. These funds then allowed them to send their cattle, along with the newly born calves, back by rail.

Finally, fortune smiled on the Houcks, and with hard work, they rebuilt their herds and prospered. During the Blizzard of '49, Roy was surprised to see that a small herd of buffalo survived the severe storms unaided, even though many of his hand-fed cattle were lost. In addition to his cattle herd, he began raising buffalo.

When Hollywood was looking for a large herd of buffalo in order to film them for the movie, Dances with Wolves, they chose Roy's buffalo herd and also used his ranch lands for the setting of the movie.

The New Yorker and the Cow

Told by Ted Dick, Hastings. 1944.

For security reasons, servicemen were not allowed to have cameras overseas. However, I had purchased one in New York, and had sneaked it to Europe. Since my job was to deliver supplies, I drove a truck. I wrapped the camera in oiled rifle paper and wired it to the under side of the hood of my truck.

I took hundreds of photos, including pictures of D-Day. However the rolls of exposed film lay in a box for about half a century before I had pictures made. By then the film was so crisp it took special handling to develop it. How those pictures did revive my memories of the war!

One picture taken in France shows two men experimenting with milking a cow. Since one fellow was from New York City, the animal was an oddity to him. Bryce Hanna of York, Nebraska, was explaining the process. After snapping the picture, the last on the roll, I went into a nearby barn to get my backpack to reload the camera. The barn was attached to the house, a common arrangement in that area.

While I was in the barn, an explosion rocked the building. I carefully peeked out the door and saw that I had taken the last picture for which those two would ever pose. One of them had stepped on a mine, which had killed both men and the cow. I would have been with them if I hadn't gone to reload my camera.