Edwin and Margaret Hughes By David T. Hughes
Note: The following is, by necessity, a portrayal as seen from the perspective of the writer, Edwin's and Margaret's youngest son. Undoubtedly their review, were they still alive, would change it and vastly improve the narrative. For the writer, it is especially hard to portray Margaret's life except as a part, albeit a key part, of the family. I did not know her otherwise.
Edwin's Origin
Edwin Hughes's 1909 birth places him at the end of the first generation born to the earliest settlers of Madison County's Meadow Creek area in south western Montana. Rising in the Tobacco Root Mountains, South and North Meadow Creeks drain into the Madison River. Edwin lived his first five years at his parents' homestead on Dry Leonard Creek, a South Meadow Creek tributary.
This picture of Edwin in his mother's arms was taken at the Dry Leonard Creek homestead, probably a few months after his October 1909 birthday. His birthplace is about 50 miles upriver from where the Lewis and Clark expedition came in 1805 to the junction where the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson rivers unite to form the Missouri River.
Click on Thomas Sievers Hughes (1884-1964) for Edwin's parents' history.
Following a brief period in Washington after selling the homestead in 1914, Edwin's parents and, by then, four siblings moved among a series of homes on the Meadow Creeks, ending in 1919 at what he and his brothers and sister later called the "home ranch." It was (and still is) about a mile south of McAllister on the main road to Ennis.
Growing Up: A Physical Challenge
Edwin's youth on the home ranch coincided with the infancy in rural Montana of the plethora of late 19th and early 20th century technical and industrial advances that shapes our lives today. The availability of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, paved roads, automobiles, and medical care that we take for granted, but were unavailable then in rural Montana, mark a nearly unfathomable chasm between the life that Edwin experienced as a boy and that of youths today. He (and his brothers) slept in an unheated bunkhouse and, in the main house, never had electric lights or running water. The road by the ranch was little more than a wagon track through the sage brush, until paved in the mid-1930s.
With the family's self sufficiency at stake, hard physical work was expected and taken as normal from an early age. Using only hand tools, daily chores year around included sawing, splitting, and carrying wood for heating and cooking, milking cows morning and evening, and tending chickens and hogs. Field work with teams of horses and the first, rough farm tractors as motive power for plowing, haying, and fencing filled days.
In contrast to many families then, Edwin's parents were careful not to let work demands at home interfere with school. His primary education was at one room schools in which a single teacher taught multiple grades, first at Meadow Creek's District 13 and then at McAllister's District 48. He started high school in Ennis and graduated from Whitehall in about 1927. With busing not yet available, transportation to school was by foot or on horseback, and Edwin worked for room and board and spent some time in the National Guard while finishing high school in Whitehall. Ed is standing on the far right in back in this picture.
Getting Started: 1928 Through 1938
Making a Living: Edwin's jobs during the decade following his graduation in 1928 focused on mining and on fish hatchery and ranch work. Ed also talked often in later years of working at the sawmill operated by Paul Schoenek on South Meadow Creek, but that was in the summers of his school years. Ed worked underground in the Butte copper mines in the late 1920s until layoffs dictated by the Depression put him out of a job. He worked during some of the 1930s for what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Department of Interior. He also helped his dad at ranch work, got rehired during some part of the mid-1930s by the Butte copper mines, and worked for a local Meadow Creek rancher named Millard Easter. In 1938 and into 1939, he worked with his cousin, John Hughes, his uncle, Bill Hughes, and his brothers, Bob and Lewis, mining gold from the abandoned "Monitor" gold mine (pictured) located near the Revenue mine in the hills between Norris and the Meadow Creek area.
One could gather from his oral reminisces that the fish hatchery job was the most agreeable. A canvas tent shelter built on a wood platform on Odell Creek near Ennis served as home for part of the time while he tended fish traps, and he spent time working at Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. In contrast, he remembered work in the Butte mines as hard, dirty, and dangerous. Prior to the Depression, nevertheless, mining in Butte must have been relatively lucrative because he was able to buy either new or almost new a 1928 Chevy (pictured) that, if new, would have been priced at about $800. Ranch work for Millard Easter during the Depression paid a dollar a day -- $30 a month -- and some keep. The gold mining effort has been described by his brother, Bob, as a time of going broke.
Starting His Family: Edwin married Margaret Howells on 5 September, 1931. A native of Butte, Margaret probably was still in high school when they met. After graduating from Butte High School in 1930, Margaret worked in the Butte film distribution offices of Metro Golden Mayer until her marriage. She mentioned later in life that she would have liked to go to college, but she said that her father held to conservative beliefs (outdated even for that time) that higher education for women was neither needed nor desirable. These pictures show Margaret in 1930 and with Edwin on their wedding day in September 1931.
Ed's and Margaret's sons, Lee and David, were born, respectively, in July 1933 and October 1936. Click on Lee and Karen's Home Page and Dave's Home Page for Lee's and Dave's stories.
The Ranch: Early 1939 through mid-1957
Edwin said that his Dad, T.S. Hughes, showed up at the Monitor Mine one day in February or March of 1939 with word of a proposition for Ed and Margaret to live on and operate one of Tom Vincent's ranch properties on shares. Tom Vincent was Edwin's grand uncle (T.S.'s uncle), and a pioneer rancher in Montana's Madison Valley. Tom (known by family as "Uncle Tom") was turning 80 in 1939, and since 1919 had operated on shares with T.S. the "home ranch" on which Edwin had grown up. Edwin and Margaret recognized that the offer represented an opportunity that was golden at the end of the 1930's decade of economic Depression, and they moved in the early months of 1939 onto the ranch that would be their home for the next 18 years. This picture of Uncle Tom and Aunt Lora probably was taken about 1947 when he was 88.
Ed's comments in later years indicated that ranching wouldn't have been his first choice of occupation. He felt that, on the ranch, he lived "in the middle of his work," and his perception that this imposed pressures to work seven days a week, 24 hours a day became, in time, a source of anxiety and stress. Edwin envied the weekend recreational time available to urban job holders. On the ranch, the work was always there and weekends were just more days to work. His comments implied that the few vacations he took over the years were accompanied by feelings of guilt at taking time away from ranch work.
Nevertheless, T.S. and Uncle Tom knew that they could trust Ed to work very hard and do his level best. He may have looked at the chance to ranch more as a lifeboat than a career opportunity, but he knew he was awfully lucky to get it, and he went at it at full throttle.
Edwin and Margaret not only made a living, but also transformed the ranch from little more than a homestead to a thriving, modern home and business during the 18 years that they lived there. The ranch took on Edwin's and Margaret's persona, reflecting at once the results of grueling hard work and the enjoyment and rewards of a real home. In later years as her health declined, Margaret often said that she wanted to go "home," and by that she envisioned the ranch and the feelings of security and sense of "place" engendered by her years there.
Aged 29 when he moved on the ranch, Edwin spent a large part of his most productive years there. Edwin and Margaret are pictured in his chair (which she had re-upholstered) at home in 1949. Click on the Ranch for the story of Edwin's and Margaret's time and achievements there.
On the downside was the ranch environment. He did not mind hard work and did not shirk from it. However, his own iron sense of integrity appeared to get in the way of enjoying any sense of accomplishment and justly reaped rewards from his impressive and manifold achievements on the ranch, and instead seemed to feed an underlying sense of distress and unease. His vision of what could be accomplished if only he worked ever harder overwhelmed any possibility of lying back and appreciating what had been accomplished. Also, he saw the seemingly never ending repetitiveness of the chores, particular of the irrigation in the summer, feeding the cattle in the winter, and the year-around cow milking chore, as onerous and galling.
On the upside, he enjoyed the machinery. He liked operating it. The increase in productivity that it offered, in comparison with what he had known as a youth on the "home ranch," was a source of awe and pride. He enjoyed powered tools and what he could make with them.
He took pleasure from picnics in the mountains during the summer with his family and friends. Perhaps most of all, he relished annual big game hunting trips in the Fall. These were big productions, involving perhaps a dozen men among relatives and friends, packing into the mountains with horses, and camping for several days. Elk hunting involved getting up and getting out on horseback before daybreak during below-freezing mountain mornings to try to catch the elk still bedded down at the first light of dawn. It was great! And it was an extremely rare year that he didn't bring home an elk and/or deer for family food supplies. Elk and deer hunting also provided the grist for many a hunting story, some only embellished a little bit.
Margaret's Crucial Role
To say only that she was a "key part" of the family is to short-change Margaret and her contribution. On the ranch, Margaret provided the intelligence, common sense, moderating influence, and love that made Edwin's earnest and unending efforts a success. She was the inspiration that made it all worth it for Ed, and the anchor around which the family and business were built. In her thoughtful and under-stated way, she provided the strength to bear the day-to-day trials and the vision to go forward on the ranch transformation from near-homestead to modern home.
Especially in the early years into the late 1940s, the "normal" roles of wife and mother included a lot of hard physical labor. It is difficult to over state the savings in time and day-to-day direct hand labor reaped from the installation of just four electric appliances; 1) refrigerator, 2) water pump, 3) cooking range, and (later) 4) the precursor of today's clothes laundering machine. Developments outdoors also reduced Margaret's work load. Ed's joint purchase with a neighbor (Pat Paugh) of a grain combine to harvest grain, for example, ended Margaret's obligation to serve dinner (lunch) a few days a year to the roughly 20 men required to operate the grain threshing machine.
In addition to these "normal" wife and mother roles, Margaret was a flexible and ever competent jack-of-all-trades, ready and able to fill in where needed outdoors in the fields or in taking a turn milking the cows and doing the other chores. In this early 1950s picture, she is tending her turkeys. Having grown up in the city, she was in some ways always a stranger to outdoor ranch work and to the situations encountered in everyday ranch life. The way she operated a tractor or other machine, or approached an animal such as a cow, always seemed a little uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, she was quite effective in her own way. One summer in the 1940s, for example, she operated the tractor with a buck-rake attached to the front of it for the entire two-month haying season, bringing to the stacks all of the ranch hay for that summer. After pushing each load onto the stacking machine (the "stacker") she would back the tractor around, positioning it so that Lee could hook the stacker's cable to the hitch. Then she used the tractor to pull the cable that raised the stacker to lift the hay onto the stack, where Edwin distributed (or "stacked") it. Awkward or not, she effectively got all of the hay into the stacks that summer.
Margaret was ranch business manager. Besides tending the checkbook and the bills, she prepared the ranch financial status and provided critical moral and technical support to Edwin in the annual bout with the bankers. She also calmed Ed's occasional fits of anxiety over whether ranch income could ever be made to keep pace with expenses. (A valid concern, in the judgment of the writer.)
Margaret served as buffer for her kids between the hard, never ending demands of ranch work posed by Edwin, and their regular childhood and adolescent needs. Lee and Dave knew that she was the one to see about any personal needs or wants, and she would carry the ball if Edwin's participation were required.
Margaret played many other roles. She was the family's source of first aid and decisions about health. In the summers, she cultivated an outstanding flower garden around three sides of the yard, and during trips into the mountains demonstrated a deep knowledge about the wide variety of wild flowers there. Her vegetable garden was the family's chief source of both fresh and canned vegetables. Using fabric ordered from Sears, she made virtually all of Lee's and Dave's shirts when they were young, as well as most of her own clothes. She rebuilt and re-covered second-hand chairs that were then used in the living room. In this January 1957 picture, she is sitting sideways in one of her rebuilt chairs with her feet soaking up heat directly from the floor furnace. She taught herself to play the piano, and for years enjoyed practicing daily.
A Second Career: 1957 To Mid-1970s
With Lee and Dave gone first to military service and then to university and their own lives, Edwin and Margaret sold the ranch in 1957 when Ed was 47. Capitalizing on his interests and strengths, he attended a training school on heavy machinery operation and maintenance at Weiser, Idaho. In 1958, he started work in the heavy truck and farm machinery shop of Owenhouse Hardware Company in Bozeman, Montana.
Low pay and unchallenging work, however, induced him in 1961 to apply for and secure a much better job as chief mechanic at a new Permanente concrete plant near Helena. He probably enjoyed this job more than any other he had ever had. It paid well, had good benefits, and most of all gave him the responsibility for what he liked most and was very good at; maintaining the bulldozers, dump trucks, big open pit mining shovels, and the plant itself. He stayed until he retired in the mid-1970s.
These wage jobs gave Edwin and Margaret what they most felt the ranch had taken from them; i.e., weekends free of the obligation to work. They used these mainly for picnics and short camping trips in the mountains, and for other social occasions.
Retirement
Their feeling of having been "tied down" by the never ending work during their years on the ranch left Edwin and Margaret with a desire to see some of the world in their retirement years. Accordingly, they used a recreational vehicle (Winnebago) purchased before Ed retired to visit many places in the western US for the first 10 to 15 years of his retirement. In time, this settled into a pattern of spending winters in Arizona and summers in, at first, Montana and later, the Seattle area of Washington, where son, Lee, and brother, Bob, lived, among other family. These pictures were taken while riding in the Winnebago.
Edwin and Margaret had their share of health problems as they aged. A lifelong struggle with mental disease including, ultimately, Alzheimer's deterioration inflicted more suffering on Margaret than most of us will ever experience. Edwin took a typically hard nosed approach to his health, essentially applying the principals of his trade as a mechanic to his body. Medical operations that included joint replacements to both knees and one hip, lens replacements in both eyes, and a heart bypass kept him mobile and independent until his last couple of years. Margaret and Edwin are interred in the small cemetery at McAllister, Montana, near where he was born and grew up, and near the ranch on which they had pulled themselves over the hump into a life of success and achievement.
Edwin0‚8s sons and his brothers remember him as a strong and reliable person with a powerful sense of duty and responsibility, and a fierce commitment and devotion to family. His brothers say Edwin was the one to whom their mother turned first when she needed help. The years-long, resolute and unselfish care that he gave to Margaret, as she became increasingly handicapped in her later life, demonstrated his unyielding family loyalty and strength. We also remember his determined and gracious good humor, his constant search for the bright side, his toughness, and his adamant refusal to complain about his situation as he neared the end of his life