The Perseverance of the Ranch Wife

RUSSELL ROWLAND FEB 8, 2024 || SUBSTACK

My mother reminded me this morning that it was on this date, probably in 1977, when my grandparents were driving from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, where they did their shopping, back to the ranch in southeastern Montana. It was a dark night, so my grandfather probably didn’t see the vehicle directly in front of them until they barreled into it, but it happened to be an old farmer pulling a hay stacker behind his truck. Like most farmers during that time, he probably wasn’t going far, so he didn’t want to bother with putting any safety lights on the machine.

My grandmother, Mary Lee Richardson Anderson Arbuckle, was seventy-five at the time. She had already been widowed twice, and Grandpa Arbuckle would be gone about five years later.

She was told she would probably never walk again, but she proved that prediction to be completely wrong. We can’t remember how long her recovery took, but it was probably less than six months before she was up walking, dancing and doing what ranch wives do.

There were two types of ranch wives at that time, and there probably still are. There are ranch wives who get out into the field and help with the manual labor, and there are ranch wives who put all of their time into doing what needs to be done around the house. My grandmother was the second kind. I don’t know whether she ever rode a horse. She didn’t even have a driver’s license. For many years, I never saw her in anything but a dress. But she was just as tough as any of the women who got out into the fields and rode horses and drove the heavy machinery.

I never heard her talk about any of the losses in her life, and there were a lot of them. I never heard her complain about any pain in that leg, or when she had a mastectomy a few years later. She grew up knowing that those complaints would be seen as weakness. As a cry for attention. That was frowned upon in the ranch culture, and probably still is. And I still struggle with that’s a good or a bad thing. In many ways, my grandparents were role models for me as people who persevered and went about their day without ever finding any reason to focus on setbacks and obstacles in their lives. But we will never know the emotional toll that took on them. Because, of course, that was never on the table. It wasn’t up for discussion. But they never seemed unhappy or depressed. They were seldom short with us as kids. They were curious, optimistic people, and I often wonder where that came from.