Published in Intermountain Farm and Ranch November 12, 2010
As I walked in the door of our valley home the other evening, the smell of supper revived my tired bones. We had been at the ranch all day separating the cows and calves. The fact that supper was ready made me stop and think of the people that settled in the area where our ranch is. Back then, as now, the women were out in the fields helping their men along with doing their own household chores. What wonderful conveniences we have today to save us time! What challenges they faced without them.
I use the crockpot often, as I did the day we weaned calves. My early settler grandmother didn’t have electricity to use a crockpot. But she did have a wood cook stove. Many of those stoves had warming ovens that would keep food warm, and if not it would usually have a shelf above the stove that worked the same way. To cook food slowly they could push a pan to the very back or far side of the stove. That is probably the best they could do and the closest to a crockpot they had. Another modern convenience the early settlers didn’t have was a microwave. No eight minute baked potatoes for them!
Refrigerators and freezers provide us the means to preserve fresh and frozen foods. Back then, keeping food cold and from spoiling was not easy. If they had an icebox, it had to be kept full of ice. As the ice melted in the ice box, the water would often run out onto the floor of the kitchen. In order to have ice in the summer, early in the spring they put straw over snow and ice, thus insulating it. Back in the early 1900s, many ranch homes didn’t even have an icebox, and depended on a nearby spring to keep their food cold. They would put a wooden or metal box into the spring and put food items that needed to be kept cold in the box. Or if they had a well and put milk and other foods needing refrigeration down the well. Some had cellars, which remained cool all summer. Potatoes, apples, carrots, and such were stored in these root cellars..
They baked bread in their wood cook stoves. A women I visited with recently told me that she was able to determine if the oven in her wood cook stove was the right temperature by opening the oven door and putting her hand inside. If it was not hot enough, she would put more wood in the stove, if it was too hot, she would leave the oven door open for a few minutes to let it cool off.
To bathe, they had to haul buckets of water from the spring or well. While the water was heating on the cook stove, they would take down the big tub hanging on the outside of the house and set it on the floor in the kitchen. When the water was warm enough, it was transferred into the tub. After a bath, they would have to empty the water out of the tub, a bucket full at a time, then hang the tub back up. Not something you would do every night or morning. Bathing was usually a once-a-week occurrence, and the entire family used the same water, with a bucket of hot water added between each bather. No twenty minute showers for them!
They faced these challenges because they had no other options. This is the way things were done back then. They didn’t have the exposure to more modern conveniences that we have. Sometimes it is good to look back so we can appreciate the things we have and that we take for granted.
That evening’s reflections on the past made my hot bath and crockpot supper even more enjoyable.
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