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Growing Up One Mile at a Time

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Contributed by: Dave Hughes on 2/17/2008

I grew up a mile at a time. I still remember that first mile. That was the distance between our house on the Colorado Prairie and the closest county road to Kiowa, where our rural mailbox was. I remember that mile because, somehow I grew up a little bit from just being a young boy hanging out on the ranch, never far from the protection and gaze of my aunt and uncle, to being asked by my aunt one day to travel alone over that mile to fetch the mail.

What made it special was not the prairie mile through the soapweeds and prickly pear cactus, which I could travel on foot handily. It was that my aunt told me to get in their Model A Ford I had never driven before, and drive that mile alone in that car and get back in one piece.

Me? 9 years old, who had never even sat behind the wheel of a car, much less started one up, used the clutch, put it in gear, and driven, even 100 feet?

But my Aunt Leila, who never had children of her own, knew when it was time to give a very young boy responsibility, to help him grow up, learning useful things. It was a big step up from doing the chores on our ranch, milking the cows after herding them into the barn, collecting eggs, to helping my uncle from horseback find strays from our herd of cattle out on the 3,000 acres between Comanche and Bijou creeks.

My father having just died a year before, my mother being obliged to move to Denver with my sisters to try a make a living during the depths of the Depression, andI was on the Hughes Comanche ranch which my family had homesteaded near Kiowa Colorado in 1898, to both get over my father's death and to grow up a little in ways only ranching and farming boys could.

The mile drive across the prairie was, of course, a trivial task for an adult. But to young me, that was an important challenge. My aunt got me to sit in the driver's seat, and she showed me how to work the clutch, and showed me the 'H' pattern of the gear shift, from low, to second, to high, to reverse. Then with no more than that, pointed the car down the two-rutted track toward Kiowa and let me be.

She knew, even if I didn't, I really couldn't get into much trouble for if I went off the track it was just one flat prairie with no fence closer than a mile away. And I couldn't bump into anything but a fence post at the far end when I would have to drive over the cattle guard - those rows of pipes laid next to each other to deter our cows from getting out onto the roadway. I just had to worry about the cranky car running away from me. And trying to coordinate my feet on those strange pedals - gas, break, and clutch.

So I drove that first mile very slowly trying to keep the front wheels on the tracks - wrestling the very heavy and stiff steering wheel - no power steering in those days. I remember glancing over to the forlorn Cottonwood Tree just off to the right where I knew my father had been born in a soddy 34 years before- a sunken sod house with a dirt floor, while my grandparents were first trying to finish building the ranch house.

As I drove I watched the jumping mice leap out of the sandy track where they were sunning themselves. I saw a rattlesnake slither off to the side just before my wheels got to where he had been. I determined to run over one of those pesky critters someday. I had had to jump out of their way more than once after hearing their deadly rattle on our ranch.

I got to the mailbox, rattling over the cattle guard, turned off the engine, got out and pulled out a Sears and Roebuck catalog, the only mail that day. Then I started the engine up again, and very carefully backed and filled until I was turned around, and pointed back toward the ranch, out of sight over the hill. Exactly a mile away. My uncle had shown me the odometer's marking one one of his trips to town.

On the way back I dared to look around - and saw the line of trees that marked Comanche Creek off to the west while yet still on our property. The flat sandy creekbed I remembered crossing with my father at night when I was only about 4, water running across the front of us after a cloudburst, like we were on top of a very wide lake, while I stood on the seat and watched, scared to death we would sink out of sight. And only seeing the dim yellow headlight glow on that fast running creek and the far, far dark bank.

And I was looking at the same creek down which, only 30 years before Henrietta Dietman ran, with her five-year-old boy trying to get away from the Arapahoe Indians chasing them from their cabin. She was run down, killed, scalped, mutilated as herfive-year-old son was killed and mutilated also. The massacre that made men spring to arms in Colorado City and try to track down the marauding Indians. We had bought that section of land from the Dietman survivors years later. It became part of our large and growing ranch. But filled with memories from the old days.

And I remembered sleeping in the upstair's bedroom of our ranch house, after we had put out the Coleman lantern light - there was no electricity there then. And listening to the coyotes mournfully howling in the moonlight after I had trudged out to the outhouse and back - no indoor plumbing there.

And then, only two years ago I remembered all these things again when I took my two grandsons out to the Hughes ranch for the last time I or they would be able to see the original ranch house before it was torn down from creaky old age.

And I showed them the marking's on the barn wood that was from the Hughes cattle brand - the Lazy T/0 - which is still in use by the owners of that cattle ranch today.

And remembered when I began to be a man that day 70 years ago, one mile at a time.

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Dave Hughes

Colorado Springs , CO

Dave Hughes has posted 91 stories and 89 comments since joining on 3/1/2007. Dave Hughes 's average story rating is 4.9.

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