The home place

My Grandparents, Fred and Lena Coons, homesteaded near Belltower in 1911. Grandpa came out and homesteaded and after some time Grandpa and my Mother joined them. My Mother was born in Malvern, Iowa on January 10, 1910. She was just a little one when she came out to Montana. They built a house, I don't know what year, which I loved and spent a lot of time in. They called this the home place. I was born in this place in 1938, with my Grandma attending Mother.

At the time that I was around there, they had two other places with houses on them, the Briggs place and the Anderson place. Maybe I will write about them later. This story is about the home place.

Grandma had a wonderful garden at the home place. When people came to visit she would show them around the garden. I suppose that I should list all of the plants and trees in her garden but I will name just a few. She had beautiful flowers including tulips. We kids would take the innards out of the tulips and pretend that we were taking dope of some kind. There was a long line of gooseberry bushes; we would see which kids could eat the biggest handful without screwing up their face. Just north of all this they had a wonderful windbreak of trees. I suppose that they got them from the conservation service. This was all watered from a small reservoir just slightly uphill from the garden. We called it the dam. In later years they had another dam uphill about a half mile with a ditch between the two to put more water into the lower dam. As kids we would play in the canal when there was no water in it, get all muddy and then go jump in the dam to clean us off.

Boxelder Creek was just a few hundred yards from their place. We would go there to swim and fish. I once caught a four pound channel cat in Boxelder. Mostly it was just small catfish. Once I was fishing there while there was still ice around the edges. I stuck my pole into the sand and went up on the bank to catch some grasshoppers for bait. The bobber danced and then a fish pulled the pole right out into the middle. It had to be a nice fish to do that. So nothing to do but tell my little sister not to watch, strip down to my shorts and swim out and retrieve it. I pulled it in and there was a catfish about two inches long on the line.

I did learn to swim in Boxelder. There was a nice hole where we could wade around and then go over a little riffle into a slightly deeper pool where you could shoot across the pool and pretend that you were swimming. Suddenly I realized that I was actually swimming. When the Christiansan cousins were there we always wanted to go swimming. One time we asked our parents if we could go swimming and they wouldn't let us because it was close to lunch, we called it dinner then. We said, well can we go wading then. They said yes and we ended up wading right up to our upturned noses. They acted unhappy but I think that they were kind of proud.

One time when we were all there and were scattering around on the ice of the dam. We looked down and saw fish all the way around the edge of the dam under the ice. We called the adults and they decided that the fish were not getting enough oxygen so they broke the ice and netted them, almost two hundred fish as I recall. We kept a few to eat but almost all of them were put into other reservoirs on their ranch. Afterward they decided to feed the fish that were left and Grandpa Coons took a great big tub of chicken guts for them to eat. He walked out to a hole in the ice to put it in and broke through standing up to his chest. Of course, we kids laughed and after a minute he laughed right along with us. Grandpa was a wonderful sport.

The southern end of the home place had a place they called the bayou. It had great big flat rocks. That was where I first learned the term, "Raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock". I know that it isn't original, but I have seen it elsewhere. I personally would get a loose flat rock and try to throw it down on a cow pie to try to trap the hundreds of flies under it. I don't know if it worked or not. I didn't lift it up to find out.

We had such good times at the home place. I could tell you hundreds of stories about it but I am getting kind of long so I better quit.