Summer Job: Finding Food for the Cattle

Brothers, Ted and Daniel, herd the cows during the Dust Bowl

During the Dust Bowl years the drought dried out the pastures leaving nothing for the cows to eat. When my brother Ted was 12 and I was 10, our summer job was to help the cows find grass to eat.

There was some edible growth along the roadsides. We led our whole herd of cows out along the roadsides so they would have something to eat. Our job was to control the herd so that they wouldn’t sneak into fields along the roadsides of adjoining farmland.

Now, this was no easy task. When a car drove up, we had to move the herd off the road. If the hungry cows spotted something green in the distance they would take off full speed to eat it. It is not easy to stop a determined and hungry cow.

Sometimes the younger boys (Marvin, Maynard, and Eddie), would come along, but they soon became bored and one of us would take them home while the other watched the cows.

At times the job was very tedious. To entertain ourselves we would catch gophers with our fishing line snares. We would take along our slingshots and we tried to shoot birds. Since we never actually hit a bird we spent hours debating who came the closest. If we weren’t so ingenious at making our own toys while on the job, it would have been an even more painful chore. 

Sometimes the field corn was somewhat edible and we would boil some in a tin can. We had never heard of sweet corn being grown for human consumption. For us, field corn was a treat.

Since neither of us owned a watch, we watched the sun to know when we should be herding the cows toward home. When the day was finally nearing an end, we brought the cows into the yard for milking. 

An Odious Job

The most odious part of the job was following barefoot behind cows doing their natural functions. Needless to say, by the end of the day our feet were filthy. When the cattle were finally back home the first thing we would do was wash our feet under the windmill pump. The overflow from the continual running of the windmill made a rather large hog wallow. This reminds me of the verse in the Bible, “The hog that is washed will soon return to its wallow.”

We watched the sky for rain so the grass would come back to the pastures, but with little relief during the Dust Bowl years. Ted and I do not consider these “the good old days.” It was always a long and boring summer. We were always happy when school started again. At last we were free from this monotonous chore.

This experience makes one have empathy for the children of migrant workers working in the fields.

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