Free This House of Sky by Ivan Doig

growling at—
most of you sonsabitches've worked here so goddamn long all you know any more is how to hide out in the goddamn brush—
and ended up sacking every man on the ranch except Dad and a handful of others. While Jap's new men streamed in past the old crew on the road to town, Dad, at the age of 25, was made sheep boss, in charge of the Dogie's nine bands grazing across two wide ends of the county.
In another six months, I was foreman of the whole damn shebang.
    What one-eyed old Jap Stewart must have seen, watching Dad as he grew up in those ranch jobs which Annie Doig's sons were always pegging away at, was that he would know how to work men. Skill with horses and cattle and sheep were one thing; Dad had those talents, but so did every tenth or twentieth young drifter who came along. The rare thing in the valley was to be able to handle men. Ranch crews were a hard commodity, a gravel mix of drifters, drinkers, gripers, not a few mental cripples, and an occasional steady worker. No two crews were ever much alike, except in one thing: somebody was going to resent the work and any foreman who put him to it, and sooner or later trouble would be made. Anyone who had spent time on a ranch crew knew the stories—of a herder who sneaked the stovepipe off his own sheepwagon while camp was being moved so he would have something to be mad about and could quit, or of a tireless hay stacker who packed up and left on the first rainy day because he couldn't stand the hours of being idle. Darker stories, too, of a herding dog bashed to death with rocks in some silent coulee, a haystack ablaze in the night when there had been no lightning, a man battered in an alley after an argument with a broody crewman.
    It would have been something to mutter about, then, for ranch hands who came onto the Dogie to find this kid foreman barely five and a half feet tall parceling out orders in a soft burred voice. Plainly Dad was too short and green to handle the crew of a 45,000-acre ranch. But there was the surprising square heft across his shoulders and down his arms—more than enough strength to be wicked in a fight, and, remember,
I never saw anybody so big I couldn't take him on.
But along with muscle and feistiness, Dad had a knack of handing tasks around in a crew reasonably, almost gently:
Monte, if you'd ride up to the school section and salt those cows there. Jeff, if you'd work over that fence along the creek. Tony, if you'd
... That soft ¿/of his seemed to deal each man into the deciding, and it was a mark of Dad's crews that they generally went out of the bunkhouse to the school section and the creek fence and a dozen other jobs just as if the work had been their own idea all along.
Oh, he could handle us 'rangutangs, all right
—this from a Dogie man, a half century on—
no ructions on a crew of your daddy's.
    These years when my father began to ramrod crews were amid the era when the homesteaders' valley was dimming away, and the lustrous wealth of big new ranch owners had begun to show itself. President Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law toyed with a section of land on Battle Creek for a while. A family named Manger began to quilt together vast sprawls of valley grassland for its sheep. John Ringling of Wisconsin and New York and Florida put some of his circus fortune into buying 60,000 acres of range, erected a mammoth dairybarn near the White Sulphur Springs stockyards, and financed the twenty-mile rail-line which squibbed down the valley to connect with the main track of the Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad.
John's railroad may be only twenty miles long, but it's just as wide as any man's railroad,
the
other Ringling brothers joshed, but John Ringling was serious as any squire about his sagebrush empire. He held to his investments in the valley for a quarter of a century, and the valley people talked casually about the Ringling family, as if they were neighbors who had happened to come into a bit more flash and fortune than