Legacy Journal: Haying in the upper John Day River Valley
“Hay is the foundation of civilization in the northern climes"---- futurist, physicist, and Templeton Award winner Freeman Dyson. Chandler Hereford’s of Baker, Oregon agrees.
Going Green at Sixteen by Doug Fisk, May 2008
For the Fisks and the Forrests mid-July in the fifies was a time for three generations to gather and Go Green.
On working cattle ranches in the upper John Day Valley of eastern Oregon, haying season was and is serious business and a heck of a lot of fun.
The Forrest ranch is 4,000 acre spread located just up river to the east of the pioneer village of Prairie City. In its “hayday” “the ranch” was a cow and calf operation that shipped 1200 lb, lean and meaty 2year old grass fat steers to the Portland market or to a buyer from Safeway markets. The deal was usually make on a handshake,
One square mile of the ranch was green irrigated wild natural meadow grass that was mowed, sun dryed, winnow raked into rows, bucked up in bunches, and piled into loose two story high mounds using an overshot stacker. It was kind of a 2 weeks blitzkrieg that was hopefully free of thundershowers. The harvest result became winter fodder and the only feed for the herd of carefully bred Herefords. Home grown, individually selected, broad beamed cows, their gestating calves to be, range bulls imported from Red Bluff, CA, this year’s weaners, and last year’s yearlings were all the beneficiaries of open field winter feedings that were hand pitched daily from a low-rider hay wagon. It was a cycle that was self sustaining, season driven and largely powered by machines that had replaced the preWWII one, two, and four horse powered teams hitched to primitive iron wheeled implements.
Now, rubber shod Ford tractors were fitted with mowing machines and blades that were carefully sharped daily, a canvas canopied WWII jeep pulled the winnow rack, and the power hay bucks, pickup victims of road kill that were rescued, repaired and given new life in the winter shop. darted about the field like hounds fetching rabbits. A big green stationary John Deere diesel was outfitted with a long ponderosa pine fork received the catch for overshot loose hay stacking in the field
The machine operators were mostly family high schoolers who gathered from around the state to bunk out at Uncle Orrin’s ranch, help in the kitchen, feast and put on weight around Auntie Christina’s huge table, man the equipment, and shoot some spirited pool in the basement after the evening chores were finished. My red haired teen age cousin John was an only child, so he particularly benefited from the youthful annual gathering of the youthful hay crew.
One memorable summer, Jimmy Howard , a Prairie City townie, and I were the designated power hay buck jockeys. We had a spirited racing competition. Our cockpit perches were open air, the wind was in our unprotected faces, the bugs between out teeth , and our saddle-like seats were unbelted. The game was to see who could deliver the most hay to the stacker from soggy and slippery ditch banks and from the far fences bordering the fields. The hazards included the ignomy of getting stuck in the mud or running a fork down a gopher hole. The competition continued after dinner around the green felt pool table in ranch house basement with Uncle Orrin quietly and approvingly looking on.
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His ancient fiddle and his player piano was by that time mute and unused upstairs in the parlor where Strawberry Mountain to the south was framed in a picture window.
The times, they do change. The ranch was a major part of my uncle’s life. He had passed on college to inherit the property from Grandpa Clyde. That was the verbal bargain they made made many years prior and he had no regrets. However, were he alive today, he would be saddened, if not despirited, by recent news. The ranch has been sold by the third generation to the Consolidated Indian Tribes of the Warms Springs out of Madris on the Deschutes River near Billy Chinook Resevoir. The tribe is now the largest private land owners in the state.
