Soapweed
Well-known member
COW CAKE CAPERS by Steve Moreland
September 18, 2015
The Sandhills of Nebraska is an area with great grass and an abundance of water. It is one of the premier livestock raising regions of the world, and is especially known for producing high quality cattle. Cherry County is the biggest county in the Sandhills, comprising 5,960 square miles or just over 3,814,000 acres. It has been dubbed "God's Own Cow Country," and with over 160,000 cows has by far the most cows of any county in the nation.
There is an ample supply of grass all across the Sandhills, and for a lot of the year during the growing season cattle do very well on grass, water, salt, and mineral. During the non-growing season, the left over grass has matured and isn't as nutritious. Cattle are inclined to more fully utilize this dryer, ranker grass if protein supplements are also provided. Usually these protein supplements come in pelleted cube form, approximately two inches long and 7/8 of an inch in diameter. These pellets have long been called "cake" in cattle country. Generally a pound or two pounds per head per day is fed during most of the winter. A problem all through the years has been how to get this cake hauled in to the ranches, and then fed in efficient fashion daily or every other day to the cattle.
In the early days, cake was freighted in on the railroad and then hauled to ranch locations with teams and wagons. My grandmother's brother, Joy J. Fairhead, had this to tell about hauling cake during the winter of 1919-1920:
"There was a young cowboy by the name of Tom Finny who was breaking broncs for Tom Coffey south of Merriman on Leander Creek. He took a contract to haul cottonseed cake from the railroad to various locations. He broke these broncs to drive in teams tandem fashion. He procured five big wagons hooked one behind the other. He put the gentlest team on the lead wagon tongue. Then hitching ten teams in tandem, he drove these with a jerk line, riding a saddle horse and using a blacksnake whip to dress these broncs down when they needed it. The lead team broke the trail, the others followed and dragged those five loaded wagons. It was a slow process, but he did get some cake hauled with those half broken horses.
"It was a sight to see that red-headed cowboy drive that string of broncs with one jerk line making a U-turn on Merriman's main street. I had four good horses, and was freighting also. My horses were big and heavy and good pullers. I probably hauled more cake than Finny, but sure didn't make the show that he did."
Roads were getting a little better through the years. Small trucks were starting to get used more and more. Trucks would haul cattle to Sioux City or Omaha and then return to the Sandhills loaded with cake. Frank Buckles was one of the earlier truckers in the Merriman area. He lived about a mile northeast of town, just north of the railroad tracks. I was born in late 1951, and as a kid would ride with my dad to Buckles' place to get a pickup load of cake. We would back up to the loading dock of Frank's shop, and he would push a cart out to the edge that carried a few sacks of feed. In those days it all came in 100 pound burlap bags, and was all handled by hand.
My dad didn't own a four-wheel-drive pickup until the fall of 1961. When it came time to feed cake to his cows, he would put two or three 100# sacks into the trunk of our car. For some reason, the car could get through the sandy hills easier than a two-wheel drive pickup. Dad could pretty much wear out a car in a year's time. Each fall, after the calves were sold, he would trade for a new Chevy Biscayne (the cheapest car Chevrolet made). Another method of hauling out cake was to put a few sacks on the hay sled when going to feed the cows.
As I got older, bigger, and stronger it became my lot in life to handle many of these hundred pound burlap sacks. Right from the start, a person learned to wear a long sleeved shirt and gloves. The burlap had a way of burning your arms and hands if you didn't. Quite often neighbors would trade help when it came to unloading trucks loaded with cake.
One fall, my dad and Emil Wickman contracted a semi load of cake together, with each getting half the load. Emil lived close to the highway, where Tom and Karen Schlack now live. The plan was to unload the back half of the truck at Wickmans, and then with quite a bit of weight off, hopefully the remaining cake could be hauled to our place over a rough sandy two-track trail road. Emil called Dad on the telephone and said that the truck was just leaving Valentine. Dad and I went to help them unload, and they in turn would come to our place to do the same.
Emil had told the trucker that he would meet him at the highway, and guide the truck to his ranch. Dad and I arrived at Emil's turn-off, and we waited, waited, and waited some more for the truck to arrive. Finally Stan Boltz drove up in his pickup, with a passenger, who turned out to be the trucker. A sad story started to unfold. The trucker was coming down off the Eli hill from the east, and saw a pickup that was momentarily stopped at that turn-off. The pickup started south, and the trucker assumed it was Emil Wickman, so he followed with his big rig. The pickup driver at the Eli turn-off happened to be Harry Leeper, who worked for Stan Boltz. Harry had gone to Eli after the mail and groceries, and had driven the two miles back to Highway 20. He had paused for a moment to straighten a sack of groceries, just as the trucker topped the hill. The trucker followed Harry straight south, and right down the sandy river hill where no truck had gone before or since.
It turned into quite a project, as we had to use every available neighbor and pickup to get the sacks of cake off the truck and hauled to the two ranches. Then it became necessary to have a man from the county road department bring a big four-wheel-drive pay loader tractor down to pull the truck up out of the river canyon.
Our road from the ranch to Highway 20 was just a two-track sandy trail until 1966. That fall, Bruce Weber and my dad, Bob Moreland, went together to put in two miles of oil strip. Cost was $6000 per mile for the oil, and the county would contribute the labor and use of equipment. Stan Boltz and his father-in-law, Jay Cole, paid $600 for the two tenths of a mile between the highway and railroad track. With this new oil strip going to the fork in the road where Webers went north and we went east, semis could finally come all the way to our ranch without too much trouble.
With cake, there was usually a financial incentive for booking and taking early delivery. One hot September day, a semi load of cake was on the way to our ranch. The trucker had called from town that he was on his way, and when he didn't arrive in timely fashion, we went to look. The trucker had followed the oil strip, but was afraid there would be too much weight to cross that cattle guard. He detoured through a sandy gate, and promptly got very, very stuck. We drove on into Merriman and had a local man bring his wrecker out. This turned into an all afternoon project. We ended up taking quite a bit of weight off by taking a few loads with the pickup on to the ranch. Even with the powerful winch on the wrecker, the tractor of the semi had to be unhooked from the trailer. The trailer ended up straddling the oil strip, and as it was pulled across, the dolly wheels drug two sets of ditches cross-ways through the oil strip. It was a hot day, and hadn't rained for a week, but I recall that the driver of the wrecker was wearing rubber overshoes that day. Why? I do not know.
This man made a lucrative business deal from this experience. He became friendly with the trucker, and followed up by contacting the Sweetwater cake company out of Lubbock, Texas. He became their sales agent in this area. He was always quite proficient at whatever he did, and managed to sell three or four semi-loads of cake to some local ranchers. The ranchers paid him the money; the ranchers got the cake; but, alas, the cake company never received any money. I don't think they ever did.
Many times through the years I helped other ranchers unload cake. Ronald Snyder had a big round grain bin in his corral. After his semi was backed up to the small narrow door, we would start packing cake. The first layer covered the ground. We made stair steps out of hundred pound full sacks of cake. When the truck was finally unloaded, this grain bin would be stacked clear to the cone on the very top. Those last few sacks were always quite tricky to get into place.
It has been said that "glamour tends to dissolve in sweat." The glamour of hauling cake by hand was starting to wear thin. Dad became innovative, and had the Butler grain bin people design for him a tall narrow steel bin. The idea was to put cake in this bin, and then load it directly into a pickup-mounted caker. Now, in 2015, almost every ranch has at least one or more Welker made cake bins. This was not the case in the early 1970's, and Dad's idea was cutting edge technology whose time had not yet quite arrived.
Augers are notoriously hard on cake pellets, because they grind them up too badly causing excessive fines and dust. For this reason, Dad purchased a 70' PTO driven corn elevator to transfer cake from a truck into the tall new bin. Any tractor could be used to run the PTO.
Ironically, when cake came in sacks, it would come on very hot muggy days. When our first load came in bulk, it was a bitter cold January day when a young lad would have welcomed physical exertion just to stay warm. We got the truck jockeyed into place, and the tractor was turning the elevator. The pitch was too steep, and the cake was coming down the slope, under the paddles of the elevator, faster than it was going up. We tried hard, but it just wasn't going to work. Stan Boltz had a small gas-powered "belt-evator," so we called and asked to borrow it. We ended up putting this 25-ton load of cake into a building, where it all eventually had to be bucketed and sacked by hand to get fed.
I am old enough and experienced enough to fully appreciate these Welker overhead bins, which fill cakers on pickups using only gravity. Ranching has become so much easier now than it was during my younger days. I rather enjoy many of these newer easier methods which allow a person to work smart instead of so doggoned hard.
September 18, 2015
The Sandhills of Nebraska is an area with great grass and an abundance of water. It is one of the premier livestock raising regions of the world, and is especially known for producing high quality cattle. Cherry County is the biggest county in the Sandhills, comprising 5,960 square miles or just over 3,814,000 acres. It has been dubbed "God's Own Cow Country," and with over 160,000 cows has by far the most cows of any county in the nation.
There is an ample supply of grass all across the Sandhills, and for a lot of the year during the growing season cattle do very well on grass, water, salt, and mineral. During the non-growing season, the left over grass has matured and isn't as nutritious. Cattle are inclined to more fully utilize this dryer, ranker grass if protein supplements are also provided. Usually these protein supplements come in pelleted cube form, approximately two inches long and 7/8 of an inch in diameter. These pellets have long been called "cake" in cattle country. Generally a pound or two pounds per head per day is fed during most of the winter. A problem all through the years has been how to get this cake hauled in to the ranches, and then fed in efficient fashion daily or every other day to the cattle.
In the early days, cake was freighted in on the railroad and then hauled to ranch locations with teams and wagons. My grandmother's brother, Joy J. Fairhead, had this to tell about hauling cake during the winter of 1919-1920:
"There was a young cowboy by the name of Tom Finny who was breaking broncs for Tom Coffey south of Merriman on Leander Creek. He took a contract to haul cottonseed cake from the railroad to various locations. He broke these broncs to drive in teams tandem fashion. He procured five big wagons hooked one behind the other. He put the gentlest team on the lead wagon tongue. Then hitching ten teams in tandem, he drove these with a jerk line, riding a saddle horse and using a blacksnake whip to dress these broncs down when they needed it. The lead team broke the trail, the others followed and dragged those five loaded wagons. It was a slow process, but he did get some cake hauled with those half broken horses.
"It was a sight to see that red-headed cowboy drive that string of broncs with one jerk line making a U-turn on Merriman's main street. I had four good horses, and was freighting also. My horses were big and heavy and good pullers. I probably hauled more cake than Finny, but sure didn't make the show that he did."
Roads were getting a little better through the years. Small trucks were starting to get used more and more. Trucks would haul cattle to Sioux City or Omaha and then return to the Sandhills loaded with cake. Frank Buckles was one of the earlier truckers in the Merriman area. He lived about a mile northeast of town, just north of the railroad tracks. I was born in late 1951, and as a kid would ride with my dad to Buckles' place to get a pickup load of cake. We would back up to the loading dock of Frank's shop, and he would push a cart out to the edge that carried a few sacks of feed. In those days it all came in 100 pound burlap bags, and was all handled by hand.
My dad didn't own a four-wheel-drive pickup until the fall of 1961. When it came time to feed cake to his cows, he would put two or three 100# sacks into the trunk of our car. For some reason, the car could get through the sandy hills easier than a two-wheel drive pickup. Dad could pretty much wear out a car in a year's time. Each fall, after the calves were sold, he would trade for a new Chevy Biscayne (the cheapest car Chevrolet made). Another method of hauling out cake was to put a few sacks on the hay sled when going to feed the cows.
As I got older, bigger, and stronger it became my lot in life to handle many of these hundred pound burlap sacks. Right from the start, a person learned to wear a long sleeved shirt and gloves. The burlap had a way of burning your arms and hands if you didn't. Quite often neighbors would trade help when it came to unloading trucks loaded with cake.
One fall, my dad and Emil Wickman contracted a semi load of cake together, with each getting half the load. Emil lived close to the highway, where Tom and Karen Schlack now live. The plan was to unload the back half of the truck at Wickmans, and then with quite a bit of weight off, hopefully the remaining cake could be hauled to our place over a rough sandy two-track trail road. Emil called Dad on the telephone and said that the truck was just leaving Valentine. Dad and I went to help them unload, and they in turn would come to our place to do the same.
Emil had told the trucker that he would meet him at the highway, and guide the truck to his ranch. Dad and I arrived at Emil's turn-off, and we waited, waited, and waited some more for the truck to arrive. Finally Stan Boltz drove up in his pickup, with a passenger, who turned out to be the trucker. A sad story started to unfold. The trucker was coming down off the Eli hill from the east, and saw a pickup that was momentarily stopped at that turn-off. The pickup started south, and the trucker assumed it was Emil Wickman, so he followed with his big rig. The pickup driver at the Eli turn-off happened to be Harry Leeper, who worked for Stan Boltz. Harry had gone to Eli after the mail and groceries, and had driven the two miles back to Highway 20. He had paused for a moment to straighten a sack of groceries, just as the trucker topped the hill. The trucker followed Harry straight south, and right down the sandy river hill where no truck had gone before or since.
It turned into quite a project, as we had to use every available neighbor and pickup to get the sacks of cake off the truck and hauled to the two ranches. Then it became necessary to have a man from the county road department bring a big four-wheel-drive pay loader tractor down to pull the truck up out of the river canyon.
Our road from the ranch to Highway 20 was just a two-track sandy trail until 1966. That fall, Bruce Weber and my dad, Bob Moreland, went together to put in two miles of oil strip. Cost was $6000 per mile for the oil, and the county would contribute the labor and use of equipment. Stan Boltz and his father-in-law, Jay Cole, paid $600 for the two tenths of a mile between the highway and railroad track. With this new oil strip going to the fork in the road where Webers went north and we went east, semis could finally come all the way to our ranch without too much trouble.
With cake, there was usually a financial incentive for booking and taking early delivery. One hot September day, a semi load of cake was on the way to our ranch. The trucker had called from town that he was on his way, and when he didn't arrive in timely fashion, we went to look. The trucker had followed the oil strip, but was afraid there would be too much weight to cross that cattle guard. He detoured through a sandy gate, and promptly got very, very stuck. We drove on into Merriman and had a local man bring his wrecker out. This turned into an all afternoon project. We ended up taking quite a bit of weight off by taking a few loads with the pickup on to the ranch. Even with the powerful winch on the wrecker, the tractor of the semi had to be unhooked from the trailer. The trailer ended up straddling the oil strip, and as it was pulled across, the dolly wheels drug two sets of ditches cross-ways through the oil strip. It was a hot day, and hadn't rained for a week, but I recall that the driver of the wrecker was wearing rubber overshoes that day. Why? I do not know.
This man made a lucrative business deal from this experience. He became friendly with the trucker, and followed up by contacting the Sweetwater cake company out of Lubbock, Texas. He became their sales agent in this area. He was always quite proficient at whatever he did, and managed to sell three or four semi-loads of cake to some local ranchers. The ranchers paid him the money; the ranchers got the cake; but, alas, the cake company never received any money. I don't think they ever did.
Many times through the years I helped other ranchers unload cake. Ronald Snyder had a big round grain bin in his corral. After his semi was backed up to the small narrow door, we would start packing cake. The first layer covered the ground. We made stair steps out of hundred pound full sacks of cake. When the truck was finally unloaded, this grain bin would be stacked clear to the cone on the very top. Those last few sacks were always quite tricky to get into place.
It has been said that "glamour tends to dissolve in sweat." The glamour of hauling cake by hand was starting to wear thin. Dad became innovative, and had the Butler grain bin people design for him a tall narrow steel bin. The idea was to put cake in this bin, and then load it directly into a pickup-mounted caker. Now, in 2015, almost every ranch has at least one or more Welker made cake bins. This was not the case in the early 1970's, and Dad's idea was cutting edge technology whose time had not yet quite arrived.
Augers are notoriously hard on cake pellets, because they grind them up too badly causing excessive fines and dust. For this reason, Dad purchased a 70' PTO driven corn elevator to transfer cake from a truck into the tall new bin. Any tractor could be used to run the PTO.
Ironically, when cake came in sacks, it would come on very hot muggy days. When our first load came in bulk, it was a bitter cold January day when a young lad would have welcomed physical exertion just to stay warm. We got the truck jockeyed into place, and the tractor was turning the elevator. The pitch was too steep, and the cake was coming down the slope, under the paddles of the elevator, faster than it was going up. We tried hard, but it just wasn't going to work. Stan Boltz had a small gas-powered "belt-evator," so we called and asked to borrow it. We ended up putting this 25-ton load of cake into a building, where it all eventually had to be bucketed and sacked by hand to get fed.
I am old enough and experienced enough to fully appreciate these Welker overhead bins, which fill cakers on pickups using only gravity. Ranching has become so much easier now than it was during my younger days. I rather enjoy many of these newer easier methods which allow a person to work smart instead of so doggoned hard.