Sunday, July 26, 2009

In Farrier Coulee...

The home place of Tree Heart Ranch Ltd. is located in Farrier Coulee which runs through the middle of the farm. We don't know if the man who bred and raised horses up by the big springs was named Farrier or if that was his occupation. There are still remnants of the stone corrals where he kept horses. Forry says that he turned his domestic stallion loose with the wild horses, then caught and trained the ensuing colts. All of the many springs that used to line the coulee are long gone, victims of the dropping water table due to the deep wells used for irrigation. When we were first married, we got our domestic water from a now-defunct spring across the coulee that was piped into a cistern in the house yard.


When Forry was a boy, he found lots of arrowheads along the creek (which has long since been dry except for spring run-off) and his older brother talked about finding an area where it looked like the Indians had chipped rock for arrowheads.



There are about four hundred acres of unfarmable land in the coulee. We used to raise about twenty head of cattle here. Along with the farmland that is in the Conservation Reserve Program, Forry spends a great deal of his time in the spring spraying out the noxious weeds in the coulee.

It's been interesting to see all the varities of wild flowers that bloom in the coulee. There are lots of yarrow plants that bloom in amongst the sagebrush:


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