A Tedious Chore

Until the late 1950s and early 60s, milk cows were an essential part of the operation of most ranches. The large numbers of children in the families of those days demanded a lot of milk, as well as cream, butter, cottage cheese, buttermilk, and other dairy staples.

The milking process was detested by everyone. It was a chore that had to be done twice a day, 365 days a year, in forty below zero or a hundred above temperature, and it was so tedious that many ranchers didn't even ask the hired men to help with the cows. The help stayed happier that way. But the cows had to be milked, no matter what. Once in a while they were left overnight, but that was extremely rare.

The cow barn on our family's ranch is surely one of the first buildings constructed when my great grandfather and his family moved to where the corrals are now. That was before the start of the twentieth century. It's a log structure, so ancient that the old timers who built it chinked between the logs with fresh cow manure and straw.

During haying in the summers, the two men whose turn it was to milk left the field at 5 p.m., instead of 5:30. By the time everything was cleaned up, the whole process took a long hour.

First, the cows had to be driven or called from their pasture and put into the barn. They went willingly and entered, each going to her own stanchion where a gallon of protein pellets was waiting as a reward. Our ranch usually milked four or five cows every day.

For us children, being around the actual milking routine was exciting. Of course we all had to try our hand at it, plus we squirted milk into the barn cats' mouths. We all got kicked at least once, but none of us was ever injured.

One evening when I was seven or eight, I was sitting on one of the little one-legged stools trying to milk a cow, when a dog decided to chase a barn cat down the length of the entire line of stanchions. My cow kicked the stool out from beneath me, and I fell under her, then got kicked into the sloppy gutter.

I got a good cry out of the event, but was actually proud to have been kicked by a real cow. It was something to take to school and share.

After the cows were turned out, the milk was taken to the house to be separated into cream and skim milk. The milk that went to the households on the ranch was merely strained – nothing more.

Not being homogenized, the cream always rose to the top of the milk bottle, and it had to be shaken to remix it. The milk in our house was kept in glass, one-gallon jugs – not something that a six-year-old should try and shake, We all did, of course. The negative result wasn't something a child could deny, but we all tried.

After the milk for human consumption was strained, the rest was separated into cream and skim milk. The milk was fed to the pigs, and the cream was picked up weekly by a creamery in Deer Lodge. It provided butter, cottage cheese, and other products as partial payment for the extra cream. The rest of the purchase came as a check and was given to our father and two uncles who shared the milking chores.

The rural properties quit making their own butter after better transportation, roads, and refrigeration appeared. Creameries could travel further for their product, to the benefit of many ranch families.

Brucellosis testing hastened the end of family milk cows. The government of Montana mandated that all the cows in the state be tested for the disease and the ones that tested positive be sold to slaughter. Brucellosis can be transmitted to humans and years ago was known as undulant fever. I think three of our milk cows tested positive, and it depleted the little dairy herd when they were sold.

It took some time after the testing, but the milk cows eventually disappeared. Over the years I've listened to a lot of people talk about the days when ranches were largely self-sufficient. The comments were all fairly positive – except for the memories of milking. They all disliked it, remembering the times they had to leave a rodeo or a wedding or something because he had to milk the cows. It ranked with butchering chickens.