Inflation Idyl: A Family Farm in Huntsville

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 40, 1972, No. 2

Inflation Idyl: A Family Farm in Huntsville

BY FAWN M. BRODIE

MY MOTHER WOULD NEVER have written five letters in a single day, one to each of her scattered children, had she not had news as unexpected as it was memorable. With a caution born of long experience with my father's romantic business habits, she waited until the papers were signed, the deeds transferred, and the check for the first payment deposited in the bank. Then, with what must have been an unutterable feeling of release, she sat down with her pen.

"You will be happy to learn," she wrote, "that after all these years we are out of debt. The sheep range has been sold for a good price, more than enough to pay off the mortgage on the rest of the farm. After twenty-eight years it is hard to believe it true."

Not even the end of the war caused such a flurry of letter writing in our family. Letters crisscrossed the country in five directions.

"Do you remember our family prayers?" my older sister wrote. "And how comic we thought it, secretly, whenever Tommy would say, 'Please, God, bless Daddy that he'll get out of debt.' Oh, we of little faith!"

That was precisely what made the news so unexpected, our little faith. To us the debt had been immutable, fixed as the polestar, the absolute around which the family revolved. My father had borne the burden, like Atlas, without hope and without lament. He had shouldered it before most of us were born, back in the days, so fresh to him, when he was newly married. My grandfather then was still alive, a gentle, white-bearded old Mormon patriarch who in a way was responsible for everything.

It had all begun when my grandfather, contrary to the usual custom in the valley, divided his land among his sons before his death. Perhaps he had seen bickerings and jealousies follow too soon upon the funerals of his friends and hoped to miss such indignities at his own burial. Perhaps, since he was an indulgent and kindly man, he decided out of the pure generousness of his nature to give his four sons their patrimony when they needed it most, for they were all recently married and busily begetting children.

To one who did not know this Utah valley, grandfather's land seemed a hodgepodge — fine green squares of irrigated truck farm on the valley floor, pastures crisscrossed with swamps, undulating acres of dryland grain in the foothills, and a wide swath of rangeland sweeping up to the top of the mountain that rimmed the valley to the east. But in the primitive pioneer economy it had been an almost self-sufficient unit, with each part contributing uniquely to the security of the family. Hay and grain fed the range stock in the winter; the lower pastures kept the milk cows fat; and the irrigated acres filled the cellar with vegetables and fruit.

The quartering of the farm brought hopeless disorder, as everyone had expected in advance. The death of any farmer wrought this same havoc, for in those valleys where the Mormon farmers were generally more fertile than the soil, every family had three to six sons. The four sons of my grandfather, with the grandiose optimism of the young, saw in the farm's dismemberment not tragedy but a challenge. All were agreed that the farm could ill provide for more than one man and his children and that the farm's unity must speedily be restored. They cast lots to see which of the four should buy out the others, and the choice, happily or unhappily, fell upon my father. He paid them a stiff price for their shares and mortgaged the whole of my grandfather's acreage to settle the debts. But there was no resentment in him, though he liked farming no better than the others and would have been happier to try his luck in city politics. It was agreed among the brothers that the money borrowed on the land should be invested to make a fortune for them all. The mortgage would be quickly liquidated, the family inheritance kept intact, and all four sons started down the green road to opulence.

In any year this scheme would have been romantic enough, for these sons were neither crafty nor careful, but in the frenetic inflation of 1919 it could have only one issue. Somehow — the exact fashion of which was never made clear to me by the meager allusions in later years to "Arizona cotton" and "Canadian wheat" — they invested the money and lost it all.

It took me a long time to understand why a single year's abandon could create a burden on my father that would last almost thirty years. Under my grandfather the farm had spelled shelter, security, and the goodness of life. With the flick of a pen these were signed away in the marbled city bank in the lower valley. The alfalfa grew green as ever and flowered purple before the cutting, the cows calved faithfully, and the potato harvests were better than before. But the farm now was in perpetual need of rescue.

All through our childhood my sisters and I took the insecurity so much for granted that it never occurred to us that God had intended the good land of the valley to mean sustenance as well as sacrifice. We raised an astonishing variety of domestic animals in successive, desperate attempts to lessen the mortgage load. From cattle to pigs, from pigs to dairy cows, from dairy cows to chickens, from chickens to turkeys, from turkeys to sheep — the list encompassed all the livestock of the West.

Of the pigs episode I remember nothing, though the family album has a faded snapshot of my father sitting on the trough, handsome and almost debonair, with twenty sows snuffling at his feet. Mother told us once, when we were laughing at the picture, that one time in the early spring my father had brought the pigs into the back yard. "They'll root up the garden," he had said, "and rid us of the old cabbage stocks." There was no more patient woman in the valley than my mother, but this was too much for her city breeding. She stood their grunting and squealing and lively stench for a whole day and then said smiling: "I had a suitor once, long before I met you, whom my father permitted rather often in the parlor. Then one day he said to me, Tf you marry that young man, you'll have pigs in your back yard.' So I never saw him after."

The pigs went out of the back yard, and out of our lives apparently, for they were followed immediately in our album by snapshots of our dairy cows. The Holsteins, with their big splotches of white on black, were very photogenic, and mother, who did fine things with an ancient camera, took pictures of them with her practised artist's eye.

Neither pigs nor Holsteins could keep the family solvent, and my father took a job in the city from which he commuted every day through Ogden canyon, at first with the horse and buggy, and then for fourteen years in a Model-T Ford. He held a variety of jobs, each one better than the one before, but the bulk of his earnings continued to pour into the cavernous maw of the city bank.

For a while my father kept cows. He rose at four in the morning to milk all twenty-four of them and then hitched up the buggy to drive the twelve miles to his job. When he returned, it was usually after dark. He would light the lantern and walk down to the pasture gate, calling, "Sic, Boss, sic Boss," in a strong, even voice that never betrayed his increasing weariness. The cows would come running, for they knew his voice, and their milk bags were heavy and painful at that late hour.

His doing the work of two men was no real solution for our financial straits. My father owed thirty thousand dollars. It might as well have been thirty million. Perhaps it was those hours out under the stars, milking the stolid Holsteins when he was tired enough to die, that convinced my father that the farm could never be redeemed in his lifetime. He fell easy prey to the notion that he could save it only with his death. In this the insurance salesmen were only too happy to encourage him. He took out first one policy and then another, and as his city jobs got better his insurance load became heavier. He stopped at the point where his death would have brought my mother thirty thousand dollars.

To her the whole idea was preposterous, but she had no weapons to battle with my father's romanticism. She had been reared in the stern patriarchal tradition of the Mormon pioneer family where submission to the male was the primary feminine virtue. My father was stubborn, but he was also gentle, and she could not have fought him if she would.

The insurance premiums and the interest on the mortgage kept us in a state of genteel poverty. This did not trouble my father, for his wants were simple, and he made his way among his wealthier associates with unfailing, unpretentious dignity. But there were symptoms that betrayed in him a smouldering hope that the farm could somehow be miraculously rescued while he was yet alive. He talked periodically about prospecting on our rangeland for gold. There was an odd-shaped, barren knoll at the foot of the mountain which seemed to him the likeliest spot for digging. He called it, without irreverence, the Hill Cumorah, after the hill where the first Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, had found his legendary golden plates. Our Hill Cumorah was a favorite spot for the rainbows that appeared so often in the valley after summer showers. When we saw the bow's end shining on the hill, we would rush to show it to my father, and he would gravely say, "There's where I'll find my pot of gold." We took it all very seriously.

Meanwhile our experiments in animal husbandry multiplied. The first year we raised turkeys our luck held out until the Twenty-fourth of July. This was the great Mormon holiday, anniversary of the day the first pioneers entered Salt Lake Valley, and it was celebrated in every village with rodeos, parades, and worship. On ordinary days we herded the turkey flock out over the sagebrush foothills and across the alfalfa fields of our neighbors who were eager to have our birds stave off the grasshopper menace which threatened their crops. The big, bronze hens, each followed by twelve to fifteen scrawny, half-grown birds, had been easy to train and knew the route well. Mother was perpetually apprehensive about coyotes and always insisted that one of us be with the flock through the day. But on this morning, to our infinite pleasure, father waved aside her worried protest and insisted that the whole family see the village celebration. "The coyotes have followed the sheep herds into the mountains," he said. "There's none 'round here in July."

When we returned toward sunset, the flock had come back to be fed at the grain troughs, and mother noted instantly that some were missing. Sensing a calamity, we all set out through the sagebrush. The usual route led north until it crossed a pasture where seepage from the big canal made the grass grow thick and heavy. It was here that the coyote, which must have been watching us every day for weeks, had come jauntily down to the kill. The first twenty-five or thirty birds were neatly eviscerated. The rest were merely killed. We could see the thin, short trails in the grass which the younger birds had made in their last, desperate scramble for life. At the end of the longer trails lay the hens, stiff and grotesque.

So overwhelmed were we at this needless, casual slaughter that we scarcely heard mother's bitter voice, saying, "There go all our profits." While she silently counted the dead turkeys, my father drew us toward him, talking in a rapid, even voice. "This would never have happened," he said, "had Uncle John Grow been alive. He stalked coyotes every month in the year, poisoning, trapping, and shooting. We never had coyotes in the valley when he was alive. The state paid him for his work, and he was worth thousands to the sheepmen in the county. But now there's no one who knows how — or cares."

As he went on to describe the planning and delicate trickery of the old hunter, we forgot our own responsibility for the day's tragedy. The fault lay not in ourselves but in our stars. We had been born too late to see the bear and coyote hides drying on Uncle John Grow's barn doors. And the civic conscience which had seen to it that he was paid for his pains seemed gone for good.

My father did not ask my mother the result of her counting, and she did not burden him with it. Only my young brother had the indelicacy to ask the number. Mother replied, "Fifty-seven," and nothing more was ever said on the matter.

What happened once with the turkeys was repeated every year when we switched to raising sheep, though here the coyotes were not to blame. My father began with a small herd of Hampshire ewes, selected carefully because they produce heavier lambs than other breeds. Since there were too few to be herded on the range, he kept them in the lower pastures, carefully and expensively fenced in so that they required no watching. He planned to sell only the buck lambs and let the flock increase until he had a thousand ewes, when he would put them on the range with a herder.

Every pasture he then owned fronted on a field of alfalfa, which to either cows or sheep happens to be of all edibles the most succulent. It happens also, when eaten green and in large quantities, to be fatal.

What my father was not told when he bought Hampshire sheep was that of all breeds this was the most restless, aggressive, and unconscionably greedy. No wire fence was built that would hold them indefinitely. Soon it became a ritual for mother to stand on our hill with the field glasses, anxiously checking the pastures to make sure that the sheep had not broken into the neighboring fields. Sometimes it was only one or two lambs that had squeezed under a fence through the irrigation ditch; sometimes a fierce young buck had bunted a hole through a weak spot and the whole flock had followed him joyously into the tender young alfalfa. Then one of us rode off frantically on the pony, trying to reach the sheep before they had gorged enough to bloat.

Sometimes we found several already dead, their bodies distended and evil-looking, the deadly green fluid running out between their stiff jaws. More often we routed them all out and then waited fearfully to see which ones would die. Those which had been the greediest would stand swollen and panting in the sun. If one lay down we knew he was done for. A bloated cow could be stuck through the ribs with a knife and sometimes saved, but for some anatomical reason this was impossible with sheep. There was absolutely no remedy but prayer, and this we tried silently and secretly without ever being certain of the results.

We hated telling my father the news of each fresh casualty. He was never angered, but only saddened, and went out patiently to make the fence tight again. What made it easier for him to accept these losses was the simple fact that he never added them at the season's end. When my uncle asked him one afternoon how many sheep had bloated that summer, he answered unashamed that he did not know, and when mother supplied the figure he was visibly shocked.

Nothing was better calculated to lay bare our fantastically uneconomic financial structure than the Great Depression. When my father's salary was abruptly halved, the first casualty was his insurance. As he was forced to give up first one and then another policy, the idea of dying, which until then had been so ingeniously robbed of its sting, now became hateful to him. Confident though he was of immortality in the Mormon "celestial kingdom," he could not stomach the notion that his only earthly legacy would be bankruptcy and foreclosure.

Before long our neighbors in the valley were going into bankruptcy by scores. My father's income, truncated though it was, was still enough to enable him to make token payments which the bankers, faced with the appalling prospect of owning all the farms in the area, were only too glad to accept. Even token payments reduced unbearably the sum upon which the family was expected to live. The two of us in college, who felt the pinch most acutely, for the first time began to question the sanity of our family farm policy. With a relentlessness born of our hunger for pretty clothes we forced my father one day to wrestle with the facts. Out of the chaos of incomplete statistics and hopeful estimates he emerged cheerfully. "Well, girls, if I live long enough the farm'll be out of debt." He would have to live, we figured silently, until he was ninety-five.

We argued futilely for him to sell. No one would pay enough, he knew, to cover even half the mortgage. We argued still more hopelessly for him to give the farm up to the banks, not sensing that he could no more do this than renounce his children, however much they plagued him.

It was ironical that the one instrument which saved the farm in the thirties should have been that which my father most detested, the New Deal. An old guard Republican by habit, conviction, and considerable practice in state politics, he found it difficult to bring himself to take advantage of the New Deal's farm renegotiation policies, despite the fact that by that time he had paid the full sum of his debt in interest alone.

When the federal loan was finally arranged and his debt was halved in the process, he felt a sense of guilt, as if he had betrayed his party. Later, when a local Democrat in charge of the crop reduction program telephoned to remind him of some small benefit for not raising his normal quota of wheat, he salved his conscience by turning it down with dignity. "No one should be paid for not planting wheat," he said.

The federal loan lifted some of the burden the farm imposed upon my father's income; the marriages of his four daughters helped still more, but the farm continued to be a drain. As the war neared he rented all his land, admitting ruefully that with his special talent for losing money it was cheaper to be an absentee landlord. He still drove to the valley on weekends, surveying his land with pretended conscientiousness through the windows of his car and saying jocularly to my mother, "Now this is the way I like to farm!"

We all thought he would go on this way until he died. Mother wrote that he talked occasionally of selling, but we all felt that he would ask a price no one could pay without starving out his days. What we had not reckoned with was the inflation.

The same dizzy postwar spiral which caught up the price of steak and shoes dragged upward with it the market value of our Hill Cumorah and the rocky range towering above it. My father sold this, the most arid and unattractive part of his acreage, at a price that seemed fantastic to his depression-bred children, a price that restored to him the security he had thrown away so blithely almost thirty years before.

Only then did we realize the unfathomable depth of his romanticism. No one of his children would have held on with such faith and tenacity in this particular thirty years of the world's history. Cataclysm and revolution far beyond his quiet valley had flung him back astride the wheel he had so confidently ridden in his youth. He never found his pot of gold, but this was a kindred miracle nonetheless.

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