About the time the hippies were making their first debut, I was a pig-tailed, sassy little tomboy in a pink dress and cowboy boots in Northern Colorado. My dad raised registered Hereford cattle and farmed.
At that young age, I remember dust blowing off the plowed fields and filling the barrow ditches to a height level with the road. I rode a strawberry roan aptly named, Strawberry.
The few memories I have at that age are spotty and few but include one of our cows having quadruplet bull calves one fall. I will have to post that newspaper article. That is quite an event. Newspapers, photographers and googlygookers all came around to see for themselves. All four bulls lived to maturity and we named them Linus, Snoopy, Pig Pen, and Charlie Brown.
In 1977, the whole family packed up and moved to Shepherd, Montana, which is just north of Billings, where my dad was a ranch manager. I went to school at Pioneer, which is was one-room school house where the fourth and fifth grades were taught in the same room. At its height, my class had six entire students and about three or four at the lowest. We carried square tin lunch pails emblazoned with our favorite cartoon characters until my parents went to a PTA meeting and my dad convincingly stood up and straight faced announced, “Studies show students perform better when fed a hot lunch.” Shortly after we started enjoying beef pinwheels, soup, spaghetti, burritos…. you get the gist.
From there life changed really fast for the next couple of decades. I graduated high school, went to college, and started down the road of life, which lead me to working in the larger towns of Montana as a poker dealer, waitress, secretary, bookkeeper, clerk in a welding supply store, administrative assistant and, eventually, I started my own medical transcription service. Not much of that was agricultural related but I did learn several valuable skills along the way.
My son was born and soon he and I were on a journey of our own. We ended up in Bridger where he finished high school and I met the man who would turn my life upside down in the best sort of way. I moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, where he was starting his own ranching life as well. We had interestingly traveled in the same circles most of our lives, knowing many of the same people, both of our fathers were in the Hereford business, and yet we never had met.
In 2017, we decided to move back to Montana and purchase the land where he actually grew up in Northeastern Montana. Although my learning curve started in Sheridan, it has changed yet again here and we continue to chuckle at our multiple adventures.
From pigtailed tomboy in Northern Colorado to the heart of Montana ranch life, join Tammi on a journey through life’s yin and yang, depicted vividly in stories, photography, and art. Here, we celebrate both the beauty and challenges of the ranching world, bridging the past and present of agricultural adventures.
