Cochrane had a very famous race track a mile and half west of town. A turn track which means it was grass and easy for the horses to run on. And it was a mile around it, and it was very level. The big ranches all over the country brought their fastest horses to race on it and the big horse ranches brought in horse from all over Canada and England. The Cochrane races would last two or more weeks. Special trains came in loaded with people for the races and the trains parked down near the track.
The Indians camped all around the hills near Cochrane and they had special Indian horse races too. It was all very exciting. They had a big grandstand down there and long fancy barns for the valuable horses. Friends of mine had a home near there and they had a brick yard – a big hole in the ground where you dug out clay and sand and baked in in huge ovens and made bricks to build houses with. Many of the houses in Cochrane today and the Kerfoot and Downs Hardware store is made out of those bricks, they are very strong. But these friends had a lovely little stream of water running through their yard, and it was such fun to play in and catch minnows. And near the stream was a little log building – no windows, dark inside and cool – where they kept their milk and cream and butter. And the roof was made of earth with lots of grass and flowers growing on it. I loved to go in there on a hot day and drink buttermilk.
While I was a small child, one autumn, night when the grass was tall and dry, a man was riding up out of Cochrane where the Catholic is now (*this is now the Anglican Church as the Catholic Church has moved), and he was drunk and he threw his lighted cigar down to the ground. Can you guess what happened? The west wind picked it up and in a flash, all of the hill was a roaring big fire. Everyone was terrified the whole town would be burnt.
Do you know what a gunny sack is? Grain bags. The men raced up the hill with buckets of water and “gunny sacks” which they dipped into their buckets of water and they beat the edge of the fire near town. Our well was one of the few wells that wasn’t pumped dry. The women tried to pump the pumps all night. Everyone was afraid to go to sleep. Little wild rabbits were running down into town, some of them on fire. Next morning the whole big hill was black and dead looking but no one was hurt.
When I was a little older, we moved out to the ranch and I rode horseback to school in Cochrane. It was a lonely ride, there were no other kids with me. I rode down the steep hill into the Big HIll Creek and up into Cochrane. One morning it was so foggy you couldn’t see your way, but my good horse just knew where to go anyway. And I heard a coyote howling out in the fog, and the howl got closer and closer, it was awfully eerie, and suddenly I rode over the hill and there was the coyote sitting with his back to me and lifting his head and letting out that awful long- drawn howl. But suddenly he got a glimpse of me and jumped straight up in the air in the middle of a howl and disappeared into the fog.
Sometimes in the winter when it was very cold I drove my lively horse in a nice little sleigh something like Santa Claus drives. And once a kind neighbour gave me a lovely string of bells to put on the horses. I didn’t have time to put them on in the morning, so strapped them on before I drove home. Well! You should have seen my horse take off. She was just terrified of those bells and after standing idle all day in a cold barn, I just couldn’t hold her. All I could do was hold on and it was lucky for me there were no cops with speeding tickets in those days.
Out on the ranch, my Dad had to dig a new well for more water. There were machines to do the digging. You just got a shovel and dug down until you couldn’t dig any more because it was almost all rocks. Do you know what dynamite is? It’s very, very dangerous. It’s just like a stick about this long and this round but it’s not a stick, it’s a bomb that will blow up everything when it’s lit. It would blow the rocks 20 feet up the well and into the air. Then the men would go down the well and dig up the broken rock and haul it up until they had to put more dynamite down and they did that until suddenly they hit a nice stream of water running along way down deep. Now one of the men who helped dig the well was a man from England who knew all about rocks, he had been trained where to hit the rock with a special start hammer and the rock would split open. The rocks from that well were so interesting beau they were full of seashells, and petrified fish etc. I’m sorry to say that after those rocks were lying around in the air they just crumbled to shale or clay. But I sure wish I could get one of those nice round rocks, we call field rocks, and knew where to hit it and make it split open. I have here two pieces of frock from up in the mountains and just look at how interesting they are inside. I’ll pass them around to you to look at. Be careful they don’t drop on your toe. (I wonder where those rocks are – surely in this house where no one has ever thrown anything away they are here somewhere).
Christmas was lovely as it is now. In our home in Cochrane when I was a small child we had what was called a Winnipeg Couch. It could be folded p and put away, but when unexpected visitors came we would make that into a single bed or a double bed. Try and think what it was like to live with no telephone and no electric light. Our friends 15 of 20.miles out in the country would come to Cochrane for Christmas supplies. My dad always had room in the barn for their horses and plenty of feed for them too. And they would stay a few days and we sure enjoyed having them. Sometimes they would chop down a nice Christmas tree and bring it in for us but often we hitched our team to a big sleigh with hay in it and rugs on top. We would put big rocks in the oven to get them hot and warp them in gunny sacks to keep warm and we would drive out and pick our own Christmas tree. After it was set up in the house, we old pop corn and more corn and decorate the tree with that coloured paper. And Eaton’s catalogue had some fun toys too. We would mail an order away for our warm clothes too. For us girls, the Eaton Beauty Doll was the most marvellous thing. It’s eyes would move and it had beautiful golden curls on it’s head. But the sad part is they broke when dropped.
Killing and plucking the turkey was a chore too. The turkey gobblers were beautiful birds when they strutted. They’d put on quite a colourful show – you caught them with a long wire that had a hook on it, you just hooked that wire around one leg and caught the other leg quick. Then hung them up by the feet on a nail on the barn wall and pierced their head quick with a sharp knife so they would’ve feel any pain. The you started plucking the feathers out by the handful until it looked like the ones you see in the store today. You first carefully cut a big hole in its neck to pull out the crop. The crop is a little leather bag full of grain the turkey has eaten but not digested. Then you cut a hole in the other end below the tail bug enough to get your hand in – all the way to the neck and pull everyone out onto the table. You just pick up the gizzard, cut it free, and cut it open and drop out all the sharp Little Rock’s the turkey had eaten to grind up its food. Many people enjoy eating the heart, liver and gizzard. Then the whole turkey washed and washed and stuffed with good bread stuffing and sewn up ready for the oven. When I was a small child living in Cochrane the Indians used to bring in washtubs full of wild cranberries to sell. They sure go good with turkey.
