At Coker Station: Twice-Told Essays

By Dennis Beeson and Jessie Salbato

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984530073

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Copyright © 2018 by Dennis Beeson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018906145

ISBN:      Hardcover        978-1-9845-3003-5

                Softcover          978-1-9845-3002-8

                eBook               978-1-9845-3007-3

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Rev. date: 05/29/2018

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Contents

At Coker Station

The Banker and the Plan

The Thomas Agency

Arnold Rexall Drug Store

Mrs. Kallhoff’s Grace

Acknowledgments

Map

To

The Village of S.

and

Zel

image1.jpg

Jessie Salbato

At Coker Station

A Twice-Told Essay

… The Union Pacific Railroad built the stockyards on their branch line one mile north of S. in1930, for the ranchers from the north to load and ship their cattle to market. Thousands of cattle were shipped in and out of these yards. Union Pacific named it ‘Coker Station’ after our family. I always considered that an honor. My father, William Coker, and I shipped the first two loads of cattle out of the Coker Stockyards on July 4, 1930…

Stew Coker, Village of S. Annals, 1991

It’s odd. Coker Station is gone.

The Cokers are gone, too.

Once there were Cokers everywhere, in and around the village. Today you can look in every direction and not see a Coker. Not a single one.

The old Coker place out on the north river road at the foot of the Sandhills is still there. The metal gate still says Coker. But whoever lives there now is not a Coker.

Of course, Stew is gone. So are his sons. And his birds, and his coyote dogs, and his haying hands, and his Sandhills friends. All gone.

As might be expected, the village has largely forgotten the Cokers. Yet, at one time, such was the Coker presence that village newcomers were admonished not to speak ill of them, since everyone in the village was either a Coker or related to a Coker.

According to Stew’s book and village annals, much of which regarding the Cokers also hints of Stew’s authorship, it all started with Stew’s grandfather, John Coker. Around 1885 he came west from Wisconsin in an ‘immigrant car’, a train boxcar, with his wife and four of their nearly-adult sons. The fifth son soon followed.

A year or so before, John had made a brief trip to scout the area and apparently was enamored of the North Platte River valley, the inhabitable and occasionally hospitable southern perimeter of the seemingly uninhabitable and inhospitable Sandhills, a treeless grassland that undulates northward to the Niobrara River at the border of South Dakota.

Within a mile of the river and within sight of the Sandhills, he built a sod house and entered a homestead claim for the surrounding land. The homestead, located a few miles north of what was, or soon would be, the village of S., became the Coker homeplace. It would pass to John’s son William and then to William’s son, William Stewart, or Stew.

Initially, most of the Coker sons, like many of the itinerant young men of the time whose descendants still populate the Sandhills, found employment with the free-range cattle baron, John Bratt. In the years before the government got around to surveying and enforcing its various land entitlement laws, Bratt claimed the Sandhills range ‘from here to there’ simply by occupying it.

His cowhands, including the Coker sons, eventually would see the wisdom of filing the land claims offered by the government. It was their hope that they and their descendants would own the land in perpetuity.

These claims were combined with land leased or purchased from the Union Pacific railroad to which the government had given every other section of land twenty miles on either side of the main rail line which runs thru the village of S. Taken altogether, John Coker and his sons created a ranching empire of sorts. It was a fragile empire, typical of Sandhills endeavors.

Whether they recognized the precarious nature of Sandhills living or whether they possessed a natural preference for village living, from the beginning the Cokers engaged themselves in village activities. And all of them, except Stew, sooner or later became permanent village residents.

John himself started one of the first hotels. And the village post office. His son Henry became the first village postmaster and then undertook the first contract mail route into the Sandhills to whose residents he brought, more awaited and welcomed than the mail, thick-glassed jars of Old Greenriver and similar ‘coffin varnish’ distillations.

Over time, John’s sons, either individually or as partners, operated the livery, a tourist camp, a hospital, and a filling station.

They also ran a dairy with milk delivery to village residents, a general store with an embalming business out back, and an insane asylum where inmates chained to the wall shared a one-room shack. There was also a painting and interior decorating business which hung the era’s wallpaper, brightening homes while disguising their minor disappointments.

Yes, the Cokers were everywhere. They would be there forever. They would be remembered long after the rest of us were gone. Who would have thought otherwise?

* * * * *

I never met Stew Coker. Never knew him personally. However, you might say I did know about Stew. Or knew him from a distance. First of all, I knew him from Coker Station.

I also saw him occasionally in the village. Such was the infrequency of these sightings that it took me some time to realize that the person I saw at Coker Station was the same person I saw in the village.

Of course, I did know that Stew was a country person. Not only a country person, but a Sandhills person, a ranch person from some remote place beyond the North Platte River. A place he called cow country in the title of the book he wrote.

I knew, too, there was no reason for me to be concerned with cow country, or ranch, folks and their cows and their horses and their ways. What was there to gain from it? You were either born country or you were not. If not, there was no way, in my view, that you might somehow become a country person.

It was possible for Stew to become a village person, or a city person, or a person of the world. In a way he did become all of those. But for me, or any village person, to become a country or a ranch person was a laughable delusion.

When I did catch a rare glimpse of Stew in the village, slowly motoring in his big car, a Lincoln, or, perhaps, a Cadillac, white western hat firmly in place, it struck me that he shared my opinion of village folk. They would never know about his cow country. That was one of the reasons, although certainly not the primary reason, for his book. To let them know what they missed out on.

There were, however, other things I came to learn about Stew. There was his daughter, Diana, the youngest of his five children, whom I remember as a rather tall and quiet girl and who looked nothing like her father. A year or so older than me, she travelled in a different academic and social circle. At the time, if someone had said to me that’s Stew Coker’s daughter, my reply would have been so?.

Also, my view of, or aversion to, farm or ranch life extended to those, like Stew’s daughter Diana, who lived such a life. I recognized the impossibility of really knowing such a person because they possessed knowledge I would never have and could never hope to obtain. How to stack hay, how to saddle a horse, how to sleep surrounded by total quiet and darkness.

It was best, I was convinced, to shy from such people and patiently await the day, bound to come, when we would each go our separate way.

Then, there was Stew’s son, Bruce, the bullriding rodeo champion, who came to represent, so it seemed, the village’s collective memory of what a cowboy should be like. For some, his shadow still visits the village’s July 3rd and 4th rodeo.

There are other rodeo visitors too: the founders like Arch Combs and the youthful competitors and more modest local heroes like Gary Trego. But only Bruce rode his way far from the village. To the legendary rodeo venues like Cheyenne and Napa and Calgary. And to the new urban venues, the spaceship arenas, from Las Vegas to New York City.

Bruce was shorter, like Stew, and his gait offered the impression that his formative years had been spent on horseback. Although I saw him even less than Stew, Bruce had a natural athletic gracefulness to him, a rare quality I supposed he was born with. He was an athlete first and a cowboy second, something those around him, including Stew, found unusual. They were, and certainly claimed to be, cowboys first.

One evening, a half century later and about a year before he passed away, I saw Bruce at the village’s Longhorn bar. He was purchasing his usual evening libations to share, so I was told, who knows where with his friends. He still carried himself like an athlete.

* * * * *

In retrospect, I attribute it to vanity. When I learned, around 1970 or so, that Stew’s book, It Happened in Cow Country, had been published, I quickly dismissed the thought of purchasing it.

Stew’s west could not compare with the Old West, the books of which filled my library. That was the mythic west of mountain men, Indian wars, and gold rushes. The west of cattle drives and gunmen. And, of course, the west of migrations, the pioneers and their trails, one of which, the Mormon Trail, tracked at the foot of the Sandhills close to Stew’s place.

No, Stew’s west struck me as different. It was the transitional west, with one boot in the past and one boot in the future. There was no romance, I thought, in Stew’s west.

Besides, my library of vanities already included prized editions of regional history, of Sandhills history. Old Jules, for example, the story of Sandhills desperation and rascality. A book which, like many of hers, would have been a classic of western Americana if Mari Sandoz had embraced a decent editor.

Also, Nellie Snyder Yost’s local histories. Pinnacle Jake, a biography of her cowman father Bert Snyder, a Bratt contemporary of Stew’s father. And her mother Grace Snyder’s autobiography, No Time on My Hands, the remembrance of pioneer life along the Platte River and on the Sandhills’ Birdwood Creek.

Finally, the early classic, Trails of Yesterday, by the tireless John Bratt himself, a saga of the Sandhills’ early days of cattle raising for which, I was soon to discover, Stew provided a neatly framed sequel.

With these regarded volumes, most signed first editions, resting comfortably on my library shelves, wouldn’t Stew’s book be out of place? It might even detract from the worth of the others.

Then one day, during February of 2003, I opened the village paper, which for many years has somehow managed to find its way to the city, and prominently displayed on the front page was news of Stew’s funeral.

It had been a funeral to remember. Standing room only. From the north, the Sandhills ranchers. From the south, the dryland farmers. From the village and valley, the Coker kin and villagers who knew him no better than myself.

A west Texas country preacher, an acquaintance, I later learned, from Stew’s cattle broker days, presided. A horse-drawn caisson took him from the village Presbyterian church to Riverview, the village cemetery about a mile away, across the South Platte River, where the assemblage stood respectfully for the benediction and a memorable solo musical tribute.

Then Stew was laid to rest next to his first wife, Delpha, who had spent 60 married years with him and who presumably neither knew nor cared about his incongruous late-life marriages. It was she to whom Stew dedicated his book.

Rereading the paper, I realized that if Stew could arrange such an entertaining going-away