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The speaker is a 62-year-old White woman with a high school education from Scottsbluff, Nebraska; she was recorded in 1967.


County: Scotts Bluff
State: NE

Located on Nebraska's western border with Wyoming, Scottsbluff has a current population of about 15,000 people. The town is named after a bluff that sits above the North Platte River that once served as a marker for those traveling along the Oregon, Mormon, California, and Pony Express trails. The natural landmark is now a national park called Scotts Bluff National Monument. In this segment the speaker recalls her early life on the family ranch, located in a neighboring county to the south.
Inf: This was not a farm. It was a rather large ranch over in Banner County, and we ran, my father ran about, oh, two thousand head of cattle and had lots of hired men. And we lived in a sod house at that time.

FW: Oh, those are sort of unusual now, aren't they?

Inf: Mm-hmm [FW: Mm]. But at that time they were quite the common thing.

FW: How big were those?

Inf: Oh, this was rather a huge one. It had uh, some frame later had been added to it [FW: Mm-hmm]. But the original house was still there. And that was the living room and the dining room [FW: Oh]. And then in the dining room we had a great huge long table because all the hired men ate their meals in the house with the family [FW: Oh]. And usually the family had to wait, that is the women and the children, until the men were through eating.

FW: Yeah. Regular order.

Inf: And then um, 'course I was kind of a spoiled brat and I always managed to get in to eat with them [FW: Yeah] by sitting on somebody's lap or something since I was a baby. And uh, then later on the house was modernized. That is they put on frame an' built more to it, an' it had [FW:Mm-hmm] an upstairs. And um, so that is where I grew up. That is the early part of my childhood [FW: Mm-hmm]. And then we um, oh had horses an' stock of all kinds, chickens. My mother raised a big garden. And she churned butter, because you didn't run to the supermarket and buy your groceries in those days [FW: Yeah]. You had your own milk that you skimmed the cream off and saved it because they didn't even have separators then.

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