Summer on a Sheep Ranch

By Marilyn Jaeger

Sheep.  It’s always about sheep; it’s ALL about sheep.  No, wait a minute.  Psalm 23 begins and ends with God.  “The Lord” is my shepherd….house of “the Lord, forever”.   Without Lord God, nothing.  With the Lord, satisfaction, leading, restoring, presence, comfort, food, anointing, goodness, mercy, eternity.

But let’s get back to sheep.  For being such a blah, docile, timid, follow-the-leader animal, it sure does get a prominent place in the zoological hierarchy of Scripture.  What saved Abraham from killing his son Isaac?  A sheep.  For that matter, what do we call it all the way through to Revelation?  A sacrificial lamb – which becomes the Lamb upon the Throne!  What did Jacob use to clever his way out of servitude to his father-in-law Laban?  Sheep.  What was David doing while writing his psalms?  Tending sheep.  What seems to be Jesus’ favorite name for his followers?  “My sheep hear my voice.”  “I know my sheep.”  “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?”

We write for a blog called “Stillwater Symposium”.  Probably the major source for that “stillwater” part is the Twenty-Third Psalm: “He leads me beside the stillwaters.”  Would that all our writing be lifted up in glory to the Shepherd of our souls who leads us to serenity!

I was twenty-one, not at an especially serene time of my life.  Graduation from Concordia College held a little extra excitement – well , I was magna cum laude, after all (woo woo!) – because the following day the Concert Band, in which I played alto clarinet, embarked on a first-ever summer tour into western Canada, hitting major new coliseums in Calgary and Edmonton.  To complicate this personally, I had committed to a job for two weeks leading a Vacation Bible School in Chester, Montana.  That meant breaking from  the tour early.  I’m not sure of the logistics.  Somehow I recall being dropped at the border at night and a person from Chester – who had driven seventy miles – picking me up.  I stayed with the Wigen family, Bob, Ella, son Clint and daughter Bodeil (I remember her very Norwegian name!)  Bob had employed Joe Vold on his ranch forty-five miles south of Chester for several summers, and Joe was again coming to work for him.  Does it look like there is a plan here?  Joe and I had been dating for about six months on campus, and he encouraged me to apply for the VBS job in Chester, with a second stint west on Highway 2 a ways.  It was up my alley, as my formal training at school was to become a parish worker, and I trained to be a teacher.

So that was all well and good.  But a long summer stretched out past the Bible school weeks.  And I would not start my parish work job at St. Philips Lutheran Church in Fridley, Minnesota until September 1.  That’s when Donna Madison Jacobson would be leaving, to go with her husband Don on Luther Seminary internship.  Donna was the sister of Carol, who had started dating Joe’s best friend John Haakenson.  The Madisons were from Big Sandy, Montana, not far from Chester.  While at Concordia they were, of course, members of the “Montana Club”, and while they may not have used it as their club cheer, they surely got razed by the rest of the campus as belonging to the “Monta-a-a-a-a-a-a-na (sheep) Ella had heard of a woman up in the Sweetwater Hills, forty-five miles north of the “HiLine” near the Canadian border, who was dying of cancer and needed a housegirl for the summer.  Margie and Bob Sutton and four of their five children lived on – you guessed it! – a sheep ranch.  I got the job and was installed and in training by late June.

These were not ordinary sheep.  The Suttons ran Targhees.   According to Wikipedia:

            The Targhee is a breed of domestic sheep developed in early 20th century by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.^[1] Targhee sheep are a dual–purpose breed, with heavy, medium quality wool and good meat production characteristics. They are hardy, and are especially suited to the ranges of the West where they were developed.^[2]Targhee are especially popular in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, where their ¾ fine wool and ¼ long wool breeding is favored by western ranchers.^[3] This breed is raised primarily for wool.^[4]

Lest you surmise that I became an expert on Targhees and spent all my time snuggling with these woolly critters – no.  I had plenty to do in the house.  It was called cooking, cleaning, laundry.  The first task Margie set me to, however, was dusting the extensive bookcases in the living room.  She was not feeling good, but sat there as I went through the shelves, and said, “The girls that have helped me always seemed to enjoy dusting these shelves – and looking over the books.”  It was also a way to become acquainted that first day.  Margie, as well as all the family, lived out her Christian faith and endured her suffering with hope.  She generally had a patient, sunny disposition.

Since it was an authentic ranch house and had only two bedrooms, I was assigned to sleep in the double bed with the youngest son and daughter.  Next to us in the rather cramped room were the older boys.  Wish I could remember their names.  The setup worked out pretty well.  We could tell stories to each other and play games, making a tent of the sheets.  The older boys were usually out by sunup to do chores.

In the kitchen was a huge table, and often there were a dozen around it for every meal.  I really knew very little about cooking, but I guess had learned enough at my mother’s “knee” to manage.  Margie tried to give advice and assistance as often as she felt able, but I was winging it a lot of the time.  I would bake bread every day.  Butter had to be churned regularly.  The garden always needed tending.  They didn’t just have sheep, they had cows and hogs and chickens, all which I helped butcher, all providing for the family’s livelihood.  I tried out many recipes, but I always knew those many serving bowls had to be full to overflowing by mealtime, so there was nothing fancy.  We ate a lot of mutton (certainly not lamb chops – they went to the market!)  The children were in 4H, and the ten-year-old daughter was learning her project for the county fair: how to make sandwiches right, with the filling going all the way to the edges.  She was a pretty good help in the kitchen.

Often we also had to take meals out to the men working in the fields.  I remember one disastrous time, I made coffee.  Started with a large full enamel pot of water – the water was already in the pot, for some reason! – and added the coffee to boil well before toting it off to the truck.  It didn’t take seconds for the men to take a sip of their steaming coffee. . . and sputter it out with a ghastly look on their face.  The coffee water had soap in it!  Someone had made it ready to wash dishes.  So much for shortcuts.

In the evening after supper dishes were done and the oatmeal was set for the next morning, I had time to myself.  The thirteen-year-old boy, a friendly, freckled redhead, would help get me a horse and saddle it up.  After initial rides with the kids into the hills, I sometimes would go alone.  I know at least once that I actually rode into Canada, though there was no indication of a border there.  The Sutton ranch was that close to the boundary.  We were remote!  The Sweetwater Hills, really mountains, flanked their land to the south, and the only way to get there was by a dusty, winding road through the range.  The whole rest of the summer I never got beyond the teeny town of Whitlash, where we bought groceries and went to church, and the nearby farm of a Mennonite family, friends of the Suttons.  But that was enough activity.  Actually, evenings spent in the Mennonite home gave a warm glimpse of simple life where they created their own recreation.  They did have electricity, but were very plain – and happy.

One evening after kitchen work was done, I decided to just go walking in the hills beyond the ranch.  I was lonesome.  Joe and I had been in touch, but barely.  He was busy on the ranch ninety miles away from me by this time.  Sunsets are often glorious in the Big Sky Country.  I was strolling along, watching the interplay of oranges and purples and brights, and suddenly heard a whooping from far away.  Squinting my eyes, I could just make out a gangly figure coming toward me and waving.  Joe!  It was my beloved, Joe!  We ran across the range toward each other and embraced, just like in the movies, just like in a girl’s dreams of loving and being loved!  He had borrowed his boss’ car and driven up, so we spent a lovely evening exploring the hills before he had to head back to his ranch.

Wildfires were a great threat on the range.  Smoke arising into the sky toward the east warned us one August day that nearby neighbors were in trouble.  Everyone put down what they were doing and hustled over with rugs, brooms, rakes and very little water to help extinguish it.  The conflagration covered many acres, and just as we felt we were on top of it, another flame would burst out in the dry grass.  We did an exhausting lot of beating with rugs and sweeping to try to contain the tongues of fire.  Range grass, while spotty and dry, was also precious, a different kind of cash crop.  The sense of neighborliness and community was very strong.  The tired group shared food and drink and thanksgiving after this menace was conquered.

All too quickly my time on the ranch was over, and I hopped a ride with friends Don Nelson and Ruth Langemo back to the Twin Cities.   To join a new group of sheep.  To help tend sheep working with youth and education and visitation.

The summer of 1963 Joe and I were back in Montana.  We had married, Jonathan was a baby, and we moved to Billings where Joe was a district salesman for Dun and Bradstreet.  We took a trip to the east of Flathead Lake, where Suttons had bought a sheep ranch and moved.  Margie had died the year after I worked for them in 1960, but she always dreamed of a place in the Rockies, away from those interminable dry plains where they had been.  Their place only had outdoor plumbing, which I thought was a challenge with a baby in diapers, but we had a nice visit.  The next summer , I think it was, Bob Sutton was president of the Targhee Sheep Association of western Montana.  He learned that Joe was by that time headed for the seminary, and invited us to join him at their banquet in Billings, asking Joe to give the invocation.  Though we kept in touch for a few more years,  that was the last time we saw the Targhee sheep rancher Bob Sutton.  But I’ll never forget my summer on his sheep ranch in the Sweetwater Hills.  Sheep would always have a special place in my heart.