The Good Old Days

Occasionally I hear someone talk about how they were born a hundred years too late, and how they wish they had lived in the Old West. You may know the personality type: self-described independent, self-sufficient, ideally suited to deal with the challenges imposed by Nature (and occasionally man.)

I used to be that person.

That is, until I got the chance to work on a ranch for a summer during my college years - cutting and hauling hay, riding horseback to move cattle, branding calves, harvesting crops, milking cows, tending hogs, cleaning a large chicken coop.

The work made me think about the way my great-grandfather lived. He was a homesteader in Nebraska in the late 1870s. I often wondered about his life, wishing I could have been around back then. Inevitably I compared my ranch experience to what I imagined life was like on his quarter-section claim(160-acres.) Big reality check: Take away the tractors and most of the implements - no baled hay, no corn sheller, no 40-foot dump rake, no motorized grain auger. No electricity, no indoor plumbing. No air conditioning. No pickup trucks. No cold beer on tap, no steak houses, no movie theaters. No Friday night softball games, no showers. AND VERY LITTLE TIME OFF.

I took a walk through the small rural cemetery where the old man is buried and I looked at the dates on the tombstones. The ground is full of the county's earliest residents, from farmers to lawyers. And their children - a clue about 19th century medicine. When I was young I had pneumonia, chicken pox, measles, the flu, strep throat. In the Old West any one of those illnesses could've been the end of me... not to mention the possibility of catching diseases we rarely hear about in this country today - tuberculosis, cholera, diptheria, dysentery. And how about septicemia from a simple cut? Tetanus?

Average life expectancy: 40+ years. High infant mortality, every pregnancy high risk.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized life back then was not only uncomfortable, it was downright dangerous. Most Old West "wannabes" don't take that into account.

We don't realize how much we take for granted today - especially all the technology that wasn't even imaginable to 19th century Americans. I remember watching some episodes of "Frontier House" on PBS a few years back. It was a reality series in which three families from locations around the country lived for six months as 1880-era homesteaders in the Montana wilderness. An interesting study in adaptation to the rigors of day-to-day frontier life (sans fires, fractious animals, injuries, disease, Native American problems.) As much as the participants suffered from hunger, the lack of useful skills and exposure to the elements, it occurred to me that their toughest hurdle was being aware of how much easier modern life actually is. That's a burden the pioneers didn't have while they chopped wood, built sod houses, plowed, hauled water and prepared their meals from scratch (and I mean from scratch - find it, kill it, clean it, cook it).

My point is, if you want to be the hero of your own imaginary Western, fine. But don't automatically assume that because you've seen John Wayne and Clint Eastwood ride into the sunset you know enough to go back and get it done. What you've seen ain't the half of it. As for me, I'll always be grateful for my experiences working on a ranch. They taught me my great-grandfather must've been one helluva hard-working man, but I no longer want to change places with him. To quote my dad, "Son, don't kid yourself about 'the Good Old Days.' If they'd been all that good, we'd still be there."