Wild Roses and Prairie Needles

By Ellen Opprecht

True stories of life on a Montana farm in the 1940’s. Ellen Haugen Opprecht brings warmth and drama to remarkable events that were the fabric of her world on the banks of the Milk River with a family of six plus livestock, wildlife, trucks, tractors, fires, floods and the occasional snake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kurt Opprecht
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370047543

Book preview

When I was a boy growing up in the city of Asheville, North Carolina, my parents would periodically take the whole family out West to a magical place with horses you could actually ride and eggs to collect from real live chickens, a working outhouse and bum lambs that needed bottle feeding. This is where my mother grew up, a ranch of more than five hundred acres referred to with irony as The Neversweat.

It was a dangerous place with ornery bulls and abandoned wells, mosquitos thick as rain and a river full of quicksand we were forbidden from going anywhere near. It was perfect for us kids. By that time The Neversweat was already a relic of a time that has been permanently romanticized, but it was still real and alive for me and it always will be.

For my mother it was exponentially more real, and a good deal less romanticized. The Haugen family of six moved into the noble but neglected farmhouse in 1941. During the war years, rural electrification was put on hold, so there were no electric lights at the ranch until mom was eleven and there was no plumbing until she was fourteen. Their only regular media was Readers’ Digest, the farm report, a magazine called Ranch Romances, and a battery-powered radio.

Mom realized early on that her destiny was elsewhere. She worked her way through college with the help of scholarships and married a local guy named Keith who had also set his sights for a future outside of Montana, and gone off to a different college. Soon after college they married and moved away to a life without livestock or cowboy boots.

Mom always has been a creature of the arts. I know few people who delight as much as she does in reciting classic verse from memory or lying on the carpet in front of the stereo to soak in the climax movement of a favorite symphony. She loves to tell about her reading hideaway in the space above the chicken coop, or how she’d get scolded for running down the truck battery listening to broadcasts of the Metropolitan opera. I’m deeply grateful that she has brought that sensibility to bear on this collection of humor, drama, and tragedy that few of us could know firsthand, but all of us can relate to.

– Kurt Opprecht

WILD ROSES and PRAIRIE NEEDLES

by Ellen Haugen Opprecht

This compilation of short stories represents the memories I have of life on the Neversweat, the nickname of the farm/ranch that my mother and father, Harold and Marie Haugen, bought in 1941. It eventually comprised 522 acres and was located in north central Montana, along the south bank of Milk River, about five miles west of the town of Chinook.

The Neversweat in the 1930’s

I was five years old when Mom and Dad and my three siblings moved to the Neversweat in March 1941. Everywhere one looked, there was work to do. Sagebrush had claimed the fields; every window in the big, rambling house had been broken; the wooden walk to the house had several broken steps and the house hadn’t been painted in more than twenty years. Mom and Dad had been through the depression and they had rented for many years. They wanted a place of their own and when Mrs. Alice Baldwin put the Neversweat up for sale, Mom and Dad bought the property with a down payment saved from Dad’s wages working at the U and I Sugar Company in Chinook while at the same time, farming some rented land out of Zurich, Montana. Mrs. Baldwin trusted those two hard-working people to pay her in full and Mom and Dad did not disappoint her.

It was challenging for Mom and Dad, with limited resources, to gamble on that old run-down place, but it was a calculated gamble and it paid off. Through sheer hard work and determination, they became financially independent-not rich, but free of debt and comfortable. They taught all of us kids a valuable lesson; that is, freedom comes at a price. They bought their freedom from landlords, loan sharks and insensitive supervisors and they paid for that freedom with l6-hour workdays, determination and courage, slowing turning that run-down place into an independent, productive farm. We four kids helped, but I realized years later, our hearts weren’t in it the way Mom and Dad’s were.

On the seventh of December the same year that Mom and Dad bought the Neversweat, Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States became engaged in a costly war that didn’t end until 1945. Because copper was scarce and needed for the war effort, electric power didn’t come to the Neversweat until after the war’s end. Consequently, we spent five years out on the farm without electricity. I wasn’t grateful at the time I was experiencing life without the conveniences that electricity brought, but I look back and feel fortunate for the many lessons that I learned while we had to be self-sufficient.

Our three children, Kurt, Kerrie and Matthew, have fond memories of the Neversweat. On visits we made, Dad would saddle up the pony and let them ride free of restrictions. They would gather the eggs and go wading in the irrigation ditches; they would play hide-and-seek in the old home that contained five bedrooms upstairs and five rooms downstairs plus two porches. They quizzed Dad about the old leather harnesses and bridles, still hanging on the wall of the barn with dust and cobwebs. They would climb on old farm equipment and twist and turn the wheels, apply the brakes and imagine they were farming.

Mom cooked special meals during our visits and somehow she always found time to bake a sour cream raisin pie, my husband’s favorite. I used to chide Mom that she didn’t even know what my favorite dessert was, but she remembered Keith’s! We’d laugh about it and I claimed that she liked Keith better than me; Dad would toss his head back and laugh good-naturedly. We’d visit in the summer time and that was the time when there was so much work to be done. There would be irrigating, milking, feeding, mowing, hauling, repairing; it seemed very demanding and it would flood my mind with memories of the past when there didn’t ever seem to be time to get everything done.

My visits back to the Neversweat were of mixed feelings. I needed time to distance myself from the pressures of growing up in a stressful household where a lot of responsibility had been thrust upon all of us. I needed maturity to appreciate the experiences that were very positive and are an important part of who I am today. I had to sort out my thoughts and view them with more knowledge and wisdom than I was capable of at the time our children were youngsters.

With no sons or daughters anxious to take over the Neversweat, Mom and Dad had to be realistic about their own health and strength and abilities to keep up the Neversweat, which was requiring more work than they could possibly produce. Not wanting to leave the Neversweat, they struck a real estate deal with Gene Monson in 1973 to sell some of the land, but keep 122 acres plus the house and farm buildings.

The Neversweat in 1958

In November, 1988, Mom and Dad asked Keith and me to come home for Thanksgiving; it was on that sojourn that Dad asked me if I felt attached to the Neversweat and if I did, would we be interested in buying it from him and Mom. He then told me that he had such an attachment to the Neversweat but his health was failing and he didn’t want the farm to be sold to strangers who would carve it up and perhaps sell it piecemeal.

Keith and I thought long and hard about it. We wanted to honor Dad’s request, but we wanted to be responsible owners and we didn’t quite know how it would fit into our future plans. We didn’t want any misunderstanding among other family members and relatives. As was our usual custom, we thought about it, prayed about it and then made the decision--we would buy the property but only if it were appraised by a reputable, local appraiser that Dad and Mom would select and we would pay the appraised price-no bartering or disagreement. In July 1989, we bought the property under the agreement that Mom and Dad would remain on the Neversweat and use it until their health was such that they could no longer stay there. After much persuasion, they rented a small apartment in Chinook and stayed there during the winter months. At every opportunity, Dad would drive out in his 1972 bright red Ford pickup to the Neversweat, feed the dog and cats and roam the property.

THE LAST WALTZ

In February 1992, we were visiting in Chinook and it was our custom to have lunch with Keith’s mother and my parents at the Senior Center. On Fridays, a small and talented group of musicians would play Western dance music and the old timers would get out on the dance floor and glide across the floor effortlessly and with enjoyment. Dad enjoyed dancing and he had a sense of rhythm that was innate. He was a self-conscious man and was always concerned about looking good on the dance floor. The musicians started playing the Tennessee Waltz. He slowly pulled himself up, walked over to me and with a sly grin, just held out his hand. I knew that Dad wanted to dance the waltz, his favorite. I immediately arose from my chair; put my left hand on his shoulder and felt his tight and nervous grip of my right hand ... and we danced the waltz. There was no talking when you danced with Dad; you kept track of the music, you followed him and you made no mistakes! That was it.

I looked into Dad’s face which was very wrinkled and worn. From years out in the sun, his face was leathered and parched; he had a look of sadness in his eyes. He had shriveled from the larger-than-life father I had