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Show 49 mile north of town, just 40 acres, about half of them poor clay and the other half down by the river nothing but marsh grass. They pastured a few runty cows down there and farmed the rest but how they ever got enough to eat off that place I'll never know, let alone something left over to sell for enough to keep them in flour and sugar and maybe now and then a new pair of shoes. But somehow they got along, the seven of them jammed into a three-room house that hadn't been lived in for ten years or painted for twenty. Passing along the highway I'd see the little ones digging in the dirt in the shade of the house and out in the fields Buck and the old man under the sun digging in that adobe clay. We lived two miles further along the highway, then a mile to the west across the Uncompahgre River and below Spring Creek Mesa, a section of land homesteaded by Granddad Brocken, 640 acres with about 400 under irrigation, rich bottom land, and the rest of it meadow and river bottom. My father did all right with it. Most farmers were broke and sold their beans or spuds as soon as they had them out of the ground, usually at losing prices, and stockmen were broke too, selling fall lambs and steers at a loss to make it through the winter at all, and both farmers and ranchers were losing, like Ed Cannon did, their places to the banks. We were raising mostly wheat and corn and alfalfa hay, storing it if the price wasn't right, waiting. We waited through some lean times, but prices did rise now and then. And if they stayed down, Dad would buy feeder steers at a depressed price, feed them the corn and hay, wait for the right time late in winter or early in spring when the market wasn't flooded with beef and the price was up, sell and keep out of the bank's hands. Hell, we not only floated, we swam. We had that new, two-story, four-bedroom white house, which must have cost $3,000 to $4,000, and a used International pickup, and later a new 1939 Chevy sedan, trading in the old 1929 Pontiac and paying cash for the difference. We even had a hired man, Donald |