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Show 40 The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey West. Stock trucks are either one-ton trucks with a stock rack or four-wheel-drive pickups pulling horse trailers. Trucks now transport cowboys and their horses to the work site; there is no longer the need to ride long hours to the job or to camp on the range. Since the horses arrive fresh, endurance is less a factor in selecting a mount, and ranchers do not have to own as many horses. Trucks have not shortened the working days, but they have made it possible for the ranchers and cowboys to be at home at night with their families, an important consideration in Mormon Grouse Creek. During the summer, riding is confined to periodic trips to the mountains to push the cattle into higher range and distribute salt. The season's primary activity is putting up hay for winter feed. On the Nevada ranches haying is often contracted out to crews from nearby towns or farms. Many Grouse Creek residents have worked on the haying crews, and in the 1920s and 1930s the work was an important source of income. Today, the ranchers concern themselves with their own hayfields, usually harvesting two cuttings of alfalfa and one of field grass. Formerly horse-powered mowing machines cut the hay, which then was loaded onto wagons with buck rakes, and finally hoisted by derricks onto stacks behind the corrals. Now the process is mechanized, and a single man using a mower, baler, and stacker can do the work of a whole haying crew. According to Doug Tanner, the change has made each step of the work easier, but the total effort is unchanged "because you just try to do more." Grouse Creek ranchers share every buckaroo's pleasure in horseback work and negative feelings about haying. The most traditional aspect of hay production is flood irrigation. In the region's semiarid climate the melting snowpack provides the ranchers with most of their water. In Grouse Creek the system for bringing the water from the spring runoff to the fields has remained viritually unchanged since the days of first settlement. Oren Kimber, current secretary of the community water company, pointed out that "our irrigation system hasn't changed that much from the very beginning of the irrigation company. There is a little side issue on it. There's a few wells that've been dug, and in the lower country [Etna], quite a few wells, and there's a sprinkling system on them, but the old irrigation system and the water that's used from it is used about the same today as it was when I first remember." The East Grouse Creek Water Company was organized in the 1890s. Settlers received shares in the company based on the size of their land holdings. Shares are measured in acre-feet of water and are tied by deed to the land itself. The water from East Grouse, Pine, Kimball, Middle, and Joe Dahar (Darrah) Creeks is channeled into ditches on the east and west sides of the valley. These ditches run along the edge of the foothills to keep the water as high as possible as it moves down the valley, thus ensuring a good flow onto the fields. Irrigation consists of "flooding" the land; the entire stream is diverted from the irrigation ditch onto the field. Each rancher who owns shares has a right to the stream for a certain amount of time. No precise method of measurement is used. When one's turn is over, it is the responsibility of the next rancher to make sure |