(From We Went Westward . . . Ho Ho Ho)
We came to Montana in 1933. Not in a covered wagon, although there were times we could have made better headway in one. It was the month of April when we left Kansas City, Mo., heading west in a Ford Coupe pulling what possessions we could get in a two wheel trailer. Our girl was eighteen months old, named Marla, by her grandmother. The baby boy, six months of age, we called Bud, because his sister was asked so many times, “Is that your brother?” that she called him “Buddy.”
The coal soot that blackened the curtains when the windows were open, the heat that made us perspire all night and only cooled a little about the time the milkman’s horse came clopping by, were among the reasons we wanted to move. A man that lived in the city had a vacant homestead and said we could try our luck on it if we wanted to. When word got around that Barney and Esther were going out west, friends and relatives did a lot of protesting. I can still hear a cousin as she said loudly, “But why Montanaaaaa?”
We had both been raised in the country, and city life never got much of a hold on us. Besides that, Barney had an uncle and family out there, so off we went. It was a long way. Man Alive! It was a long way. The first night we stayed in Nebraska City, Nebr., at a motel cabin for a dollar and a half. The next evening we came to Winside, Nebr., where relatives of mine lived. This was as far away from home as I had ever been, having visited them once before, so I thought Montana must be like Nebraska.
The trailer load had shifted, so Barney unloaded and rearranged it. There was a heavy oak dresser that had been in his family a long time, a double bed with a mattress, two baby beds, a high chair, my cedar chest and a large wooden bakery box, both of these filled with clothing and other things. There was a child’s rocker made of willow sticks that I had bought from a door to door salesman for fifty cents. We brought four kitchen chairs, and a coaster wagon was on top of the tarp with chair legs sticking out. The load stayed in place all the rest of the way, and how it could with all the rough roads we went over, I’ll never know.
The next night we stopped at Alpena, S. Dak., where Barney’s relatives lived and where he grew up. Here he met old friends and fellows he went to school with. The houses were large and the barns big and red. “Maybe, ” I thought, “Montana will be more like South Dakota.”
We had a flat tire near Rapid City, S. Dak., and spent another night there. Then the going was slower and rough. Marla was carsick most of the time and threw up a lot. Sometimes it took a while to figure out where the road was, as the frost had gone out of the ground, and there were tracks everywhere.
Before we got to Belle Fourche, there was a low place with water running over (the road.) Our car sank down and stayed there. No farmstead was to be seen or any sign of life anywhere. Another car was stuck there too. Then, two men came from around a hill and told us it was their car and said, “We will all be here for a long time.”
They were mad and had been drinking, and they scared me. I wasn’t about to be there after dark, so I twisted off a lot of sagebrush, and Barney found some rocks. Putting this under the wheels gave some traction, and after a while we got out. Near the city we got quite a jouncing, as the trail went over large, partly exposed tree roots. We left South Dakota behind and went through a stretch of Wyoming, seeing only wide open spaces, following a rutty road.
P. 1 — Copyright Esther Barnhart
