Sunday, May 07, 2006
Snakes and Montana in My Family Tree
I sure wish I would have peeked inside the little book my great grandparents wrote about their lives before I left on the road trip with Jim. On the very first page, Grandpa Jack (whose given name was Rex Omega Crowe) tells how his grandfather, father, and uncle briefly settled around Helena in 1864. His father, Patrick, stayed about five years before returning home to Minnesota, which puts him in the same region of Montana at the same time as Henry Larrabee. (The photo above was taken just outside Sioux City, Iowa.)
I also found this story a few pages later, which happened in 1896 on the “Cooper Ranch” near White Sulphur Springs, Montana, when the family was making their way west for the second time:
“The next summer Julia [one of Great Granddad’s older sisters] and I were playing out in a field drowning gophers out of their holes and when their heads came out of the hole one of us would have our hands ready to grab them around their throats. I was all ready to make a grab when a head came up and I grabbed--only it was a rattlesnake instead of a gopher. Julia screamed, ‘Hang onto him. Don’t let him go,’ and kept screaming at the same time as she grabbed a good-sized rock, which she beat the snake’s head with until she killed it. I sure was glad when I could let go of it as it was wrapped around my arm. This stopped the gopher hunting.”
I guess back in those days catching gophers with your bare hands seemed like a safe thing to do? Someone should tell Joe Larrabee about that.
