Wickahoney

Wickahoney in it's heyday.

My great grandma Rosella Tindall Chambers was raised on a cattle ranch that doubled as a stage stop in southern Idaho.  She was married when she was 19, had my grandma when she was 20, and was divorced by the time she was 22.  She watched her older brother die from a bleeding ulcer one day while trailing their cattle to the rail station in Elko.  Not long after, her father hung himself when the bank turned him down for a loan to buy hay for his cattle at the start of a hard winter.  Her mother having nothing to live for without her son or husband took rat poison.

This all happened in the Early 1930's.  My great grandma found herself divorced and alone with a baby girl, and a cattle ranch to run in the great depression.  A very unheard of situation for a woman at that time.  Her cowboys wouldn't take orders from a woman, so she found a foreman who would.  She would give him her orders and he made sure they got done they way she wanted.  The bank wouldn't give her a loan, so she found someone who would.  She was out of underwear for her daughter, so she would take the cowboy's old, worn out clothes and made her some of whatever she needed out of that.  She worked all day doing cowboy stuff, then came home to take care of her baby and make a home.  She made do, she got by.

Wickahoney today.

From the time she could stand on a box, she was expected to work.  My great grandma could work just as hard as any cowboy, but at the end of the day she was always a lady.  After a hard days work, she came in and cooked dinner.  If she was going to town she wore her best clothes and did her hair.  My grandma and great aunt (her daughters) never learned to cowboy.  Grandma said that "If you can't milk a cow and you can't ride, you don't have to.  If you can, you do.  You have to do your work and real man's work too."