“Sheep Camp,” answers a soft voice on the other end of the line. I have called to see if Jim Ross is up for an interview. He graciously agrees and reminds me to bring my grandmother (Nana). We have come to see him before. It is awe-inspiring to be in the presence of two native Montanans in their nineties discussing the Montana of their youth; this time our conversation is also peppered by the intermittent interjections of my six-year-old daughter.
Driving under a sign that reads “Sheep Camp”, our three generational pack heads toward Jim Ross’ house. We can see the 14X16’ bunkhouse he built down in the draw when he was pushing eighty. Last time we were here he gave us the bunkhouse tour. It comes complete with a saggy brass bed and homemade quilt, a small writing desk with kerosene lamp, and one teeny tiny wood burning cook stove. Cowboy charming. Simple. Functional. Sweet. The type of place you might want to be lonely in for a while.
Jim’s spread is a delightful step into the Montana of yesteryear: a pile of neatly arranged horse drawn plows, two sheep wagons, a doubletree for six abreast, a glass topped gasoline pump, foundry tools, butter churns, antique dolls, a player piano. He has collected over six hundred harness bits, some of which look more like torture devices with sharp barbs and angular chunks of metal. Everything is in its place, neat as a pin. Jim’s love for antiques surely began with a copper, open-hearth cooking kettle that belonged to his great, great, great grandfather on his mother’s side. “His name was Simon Snyder. He was the Governor of Pennsylvania from 1807 to 1817,” Jim reports at the dinner table.
After we have eaten, Jim brings a steady stream of items for us to finger. “Mom,” my daughter says in her best stage whisper, “look at that spoon.” It’s a lovely child’s spoon depicting the cow going over the moon. Her attention to this item sparks Jim to rise and bring over his spoon collection--he has one from every place he has ever lived. “And that’s quite a few since we moved ‘bout every five years,” Jim chuckles adorably. He retreats for another show and tell piece. It’s a thin glass frame protecting a cloth ticket that reads: “The Grand Annual Masquerade Ball in Handel’s New Hall, Musselshell, Montana, February 15, 1904, No. 49.” He cracked the glass taking it off the wall to show us. Three photo albums follow, chock full of Jim’s family history. He turns the pages lovingly as we ask questions. “Mom, what is that,” Lily stabs her pointer at a black and white image. Jim answers, “Honey, that’s the bear I shot in my pig house.” We are all ears as Jim paints the picture of how he was able to kill the large black bear, in this very picture, on a moonless night “by holding the flashlight and the ought six together.” But before that happened, “the bear slapped one of my two pigs and broke its shoulder.” That slap was loud enough to hear across the barnyard. “I missed the Stockman’s meeting because I had to stay home and butcher out that pig.” This happened when he and his family “lived three miles this side of Darby”, not too long before they went broke. Jim has vivid memories of watching his ranch parceled out by auction on April 1, 1957, after the bottom dropped out of the cow market. He wrote a heart-wrenching poem about it including this stanza:
I even sold my J Cross brand.
Or most gave it away;
That wounded me about as deep
As when they led away my bay.
Jim Ross collects stories and spins them into rhyming couplets. He first tried his hand at poetry in a writing class at Montana State College in the late 1930’s, though he claims English was never his favorite subject. It wasn’t until Jim had retired from fifteen years with the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service that he took up poetry in earnest. He knows his poems by heart and has performed them for crowds in “Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and North and South Dakota.” I ask him how he is able to remember them so perfectly, and he states, “It’s really not so hard.” It wasn’t until 1985 that Jim’s first book of cowboy poetry, “Get Down and Come In,” was published. Stan Lynde illustrated the cover which shows two cowboys greeting each other outside of a sod-roofed cabin, one on foot, and the other on horseback. The horse bears Jim Ross’Lazy J Bar brand. Inside, over seventy poems are accompanied by photos and sketches. Mary Jane Ross, one of Jim’s five children, illustrated all three of his cowboy poetry collections. “Pull Up a Chair” was published in 1987 and “Saddle Up and Ride” came out in 1990. Jim was inducted into the Montana Poet’s Hall of Fame in 1991. Sadly, Jim’s books are all out of print.
Jim’s poems encompass all aspects of life: the loss of his ranch, the death of friends, geography he finds striking, funny things his wife did and said, what he thinks of politicians, dreams he has had, country wit, childhood memories, other people’s adventures and misfortunes, and his own...like the time when he was a sheep herder for his father at age eighteen in the Bull Mountains. He jumped off his horse on the wrong side (which is the right side) and was bitten by a Diamondback rattlesnake. He begins to read this poem to us in his enchanting sing-song cadence, but cuts it short saying apologetically, “This is pretty long.” He shuts the book and prefaces the following details by explaining that his father said “always carry a sharp knife” for a reason. As the story goes, he sliced his leg where the fangs had penetrated and rode the mile and a half home. His parents didn’t have a car so they borrowed a visitor’s Model T to take their son 25 miles to Round Up, Montana, on a wild and bumpy road. While the bite was bad, it was the cure that nearly did him in. A nurse was told to put a hot water bottle on the wound overnight, but the bottle was so hot it caused two blisters that became infected. Jim makes the shape of a quarter with his thumb and forefinger to illustrate their size and says, “I spent three weeks on crutches.”
While the snakebite ended his sheep herding career, it didn’t dampen Jim’s joie du vive. After graduating from Musselshell High School in 1934, Jim moved to Billings to help his kid sister get through a two year degree; he worked, she went to school. With the meager money he had left, he went to Montana State College to study Agronomy. He ran out of money after the first quarter, and while this might have sent some boys home with their tail between their legs, not Jim. He walked into the registrar’s office, whose name he remembers--W.H. McCall, and said he wanted an education but didn’t have enough money. McCall told him, “I’ll let you go to school but you can’t have any recorded grades until you pay up.” Jim labored at the Experiment Station, he was a house boy at Hamilton Hall, he worked nights washing dishes at the Baxter Hotel where he often had his only meal of the day. He did pay up, he did graduate, and he has been an alumni supporter of MSU for seventy plus years. A three-foot-tall wooden bobcat, dressed in Jim’s blue and yellow letterman’s sweater and a yellow and blue cap knitted by one of his six grandkids, guards the front entry.
Nana wants to see a picture of his wife, who passed away, so we make our way into Jim’s room where the family photos abound. Jim met Mary Briggs, the woman he would be with for over sixty years at a masquerade ball in Willow Creek. But before he married Mary, he drove a Model A from Bozeman to San Antonio, Texas, to fulfill his obligation with the United States Army. She joined him in Wichita Falls, Texas, to be married on July 3, 1942. They were newlyweds for six months before Jim shipped out to Australia for training with the 3rd Army division. He followed General Krueger when he moved to the 6th Division and became one of Krueger’s staff as well as achieving the rank of Major. “Krueger served in the Philippines during the first war as an enlisted man,” Jim tells us. Nana recalls all the war footage and “seeing Macarthur.” Jim says flatly, “The only time we ever saw Macarthur was after the battle, walking down the beach.” “Who’s Macarthur?” Lily wants to know. I start to giggle at how this incredible conversation is unfolding but am suddenly afraid they will think I am mocking the gravity of WW II. I give Lily my own stage whisper, “He was a general a long time ago.” Jim tells me later when I ask him how long he served, “I was gone for the biggest share of three years...I was one of the lucky ones to be gone so long and still have a wife to come home to.” He’s a lemons into lemonade kinda guy.
As Jim walks us to the door, among the colorized photos of Montana’s open range days in Musselshell County, I notice a framed poster of Tyler Bradt breaking the world record in his kayak by going over all 186 feet of Palouse Falls and living to tell the tale. The inscription reads,”Grandpa-Saddle up & ride!” -Tyler. “I tell him he has more guts than brains,” Jim shakes his head with obvious admiration. I can’t help but think Jim Ross is a testament to the best balance of both guts and brains but he is far too modest in that cowboy way to take such credit. “All I can say is you do what you have to do when you need to do it.” The End (Jim Ross)
As you’ve traveled o’er these passages
It’s the author’s fervent hope
That your journey was most pleasant
An easy, gentle lope.
Now that you’ve ridden full circle,
Have come to the finis, the end,
May your saddle sores be few enough
To continue to call me your friend.
