Howdy Y’All !!!
My thoughts as I imagine me sitting on the grass, leaning against an old fence post:
Seems there are two sides to every story. Information isn’t always black and white, neither is it necessarily right nor wrong but tends to come in various shades of gray (with flashes of color to boot, like a duck’s vision). Research has a way of adding to the truth of a matter which was the case with Dale Rose’s story (and some who knew him may question the ‘truth’). Is there a right and wrong with the maternal and non-maternal actions of the duck hens? When gathering information about fence phones, I discovered ways some people used their party line; I thought I knew all about multi-person phones. In talking to a neighbor who just celebrated his 99th birthday, another of my assumptions needed to be adjusted when I found out our North Forres telephone line was never the barbed wire kind. We know how each person has his or her own perception, but the purpose of revisiting the past is to acknowledge and appreciate the struggles and accomplishments of those who came before us. It’s also a means by which to realize how much change has occurred.
It’s that time of the year, time to trade-in that felt hat for your western straw. It’s also when initial plans are being made for the Western Music and Cowboy Poetry event. My personal thanks to the incredible MHCP Board members that will soon be putting up posters and getting ads out for our upcoming event on Friday and Saturday, September 26th and 27th, 2025.
Enjoy the summer!!
Western Music and Cowboy Poetry Event — You Don’t Want to Miss it!
The Western Spirit Band with Hugh McClennan
& Charlie Ewing and Lonnie to start the program
- on Friday afternoon at Meadowlark Village (15 western entertainers)
- on Friday evening at the Moose, Open Mic
- on Saturday afternoon at MH College (15 western entertainers)
- on Saturday, September 27th at 7:00 at Medicine Hat College
Cowboy Poetry on Rogers TV
To celebrate poetry month, Rogers TV Community Conversations offered to interview two members of the MHCP, Jen Zollner and Noel Burles to talk about Cowboy Poetry. On the video Noel did an excellent job of reciting two of his poems, one that paints pictures with rhyming words and one that has a surprising ‘hook’ at the end. They graciously advertised our upcoming event on September 26th and 27th, the Friday and Saturday. Thank you, Ian Parkinson and Rogers TV!
Preparations Underway for the Event
Performers are looking forward to being on stage for two afternoon shows, 15 of them, coming from Saskatchewan (Meadow Lake and Hazlet) and Alberta (Claresholm, Coalhurst, Lethbridge and Bindloss), as well as our own Medicine Hat. Hugh McClennan’s Western Spirit Band is the highlight of the Saturday evening show.
As well, Josie is the seamstress putting ruffles on our jean tablecloths. And Betsy, our mascot doll, has her wedding dress now. She borrowed it from Hannah, the neighbor’s 6-year old daughter. Bob, her fiance and the prospective groom, still needs to find something to wear.
Seventy-Fifth Wedding Anniversary
You read it right! Edgar and Florence Boschee celebrated 75 years of marriage. We interviewed Edgar telling the story of a heifer that fell down the well. The video “Stressful
Rescue” is posted on our website under “Stories From Seniors” video series.
Barbed Wire Fences into Telephone Lines
Miles and miles of barbed wire fences were built on the prairies as a means of keeping cattle confined as well as keeping intruders out. Some farmers and ranchers rigged the existing fences to be able to talk to neighbors a distance away. In those areas, fence phones changed isolated homesteads into connected neighborhoods and communities.
Transforming the barbed wire fences into telephone lines was a simple procedure: hook a
store-bought telephone to the fence. Phones were readily available in Sears and Eaton’s catalogs since Alexander Graham Bell’s patent expired in 1890. A smooth wire (ideally copper) was strung from a telephone in the house to the top wire of the fence. The telephone signal would follow the length of the wire to a second telephone that was connected to the barbed wire down the line.
Sometimes as many as 20 telephones at various rural homes were connected onto a single barbed-wire system. The wire was either buried (in some kind of pipe) or strung overhead where roads and ditches formed gaps in the fencing. The pictured telephone is much like the one we had, a wooden box attached to the wall powered by its own batteries. When the hand-crank was turned, the magneto generated a ring-voltage to every house phone that was connected in that line. To begin talking, you needed to lift the receiver which would open the circuit.
Instead of phone numbers every household had their own ring, a kind of Morse Code; ours was two longs and a short. Other agreed upon rings were variations of long and short rings so folks would know if the call was for them e.g. four shorts, one long and three shorts, two longs, etc. A long and continuous ring signalled an emergency (or general message) for everyone to pick up and hear the important news. That was a party line.
Party Lines
The fact that everyone could listen in on every conversation was considered a good feature for some, a bad feature for some and an ‘interesting’ feature for others. A general ring, one long, indicated things such as a prairie fire, a storm warning or the need for urgent help. It was also an efficient means of announcing things like brandings or other social events. It was a quick way of spreading the word, and it was the one time it was all but expected to listen in on a call. It might even be okay to answer another’s ring if you knew about or were concerned that the party wasn’t answering. It was a means of looking out for each other.
Every party line (and the people on it) seemed to have their own rules of etiquette. Before you rang (turned the crank a certain number of short and/or long times), you lifted the receiver to see if anyone was on the line. Generally you weren’t supposed to eavesdrop on the conversation of your neighbor, but it was a common rural pastime. It was so easy (and tempting) to ‘rubber’ when you just had to pick up the receiver (even though a click could be heard when someone came on the line). For some it was like the newspaper and you didn’t know what was going on in the neighborhood unless you ‘rubbered’. One rancher quipped, “The neighbors always knew my wife was pregnant before she did.” It did serve to curb the loneliness where people lived miles apart. But it was irritating to get on the line to do business when people were ‘hangin” on it. During prohibition, those same guys appreciated being able to give neighbors time to hide their home brew operations by the time the government inspector came to their farm.
Some party lines even developed a rudimentary broadcast system. Those who were financially able to afford a radio were known to put the receiver up to the radio so others could listen to things like the comedy radio shows or the wresting match. Using the shared line they could send word that the train would arrive late, or broadcast the weather report or the weekly livestock prices. In one community five rings meant that someone with a radio had the evening news on. On some lines folks would read the newspaper over the telephone. Other lines would have musical nights where someone would play banjo, some sing along and others listen.
Maintenance
Building and maintaining the lines was a community effort, and though the systems were
workable, they were far from perfect. There were times when the voice quality wasn’t that
good. If the barbed wire was ever grounded, the phones wouldn’t work. Frequent outages
were brought on by cattle breaking through the fence or even an itchy bull rubbing on it. Rain or even wet grass leaning against the wire could stop the current. The insulators (that were used to keep the barbed wire from touching the post) weren’t always effective. Sometimes the lines would get weighted with ice or snow and snap. “During a lightning storm the phones would jingle constantly. The erratic current would render all the phones useless and you definitely did not want to use the phone at such times lest a bolt of lightning ended up between your ears. Everyone had a wild story about lightning coming out of the phone and shooting across the room.”1
Switch Boards
The first rural telephone systems had no central exchange or operators, no monthly bills and they were unregulated. Sometimes it was simply a line to a bachelor neighbor or lines to family members who were part of their neighborhood. Systems got more sophisticated by having a switchboard operating out of someone’s kitchen for a small monthly cash salary. Then telephone pole lines replaced barbwire fence ones. Services expanded to having a more central switchboard, being able to hook to other lines, and to having long distance service (with additional long distance charges, so much a minute).
This was how the manual switchboard worked: “There is a pair of copper wires running from every house to the central office. The switchboard operator sat in front of a board with one jack for every pair of wires that entered the office. Above each jack was a small light. When someone picked up the handset on his or her telephone, the hook switch would complete the circuit and let the current flow through wires between the house and the office. This would light the bulb above that person’s jack on the switchboard. The operator would connect his/her headset into that jack and ask who the person would like to talk to. The operator would then send a ring signal to the receiving party and wait for the party to pick up the phone. Once the receiving party picked up, the operator would connect the two people.”1
North Forres Rural Telephone Co.
My experience with party line phones started in 1964 with the North Forres Rural Telephone Company. The system was started in 1917, not as fence phones but with telephone poles and overhead wires. Over time it expanded to serve some 23 townships in 6 municipalities including the villages of Golden Prairie, Fox Valley and Richmound as well as the hamlets of Hatton, Tunstall, Horsham and Linacre. By about 1967, SaskTel began taking over all long distance service and it was sometime later that the black rotary dial telephone replaced the brown box-looking wall-mounted telephone. It was in 1977 that SaskTel completely took over the phone service. North Forres “was said to be the largest Rural Telephone Company on the North American continent.”2
(Coming soon on our website: the history of the North Forres Telephone Company.)
Conclusion
Two inventions were filed two years apart, barbed wire in 1874 and in 1876 the telephone.1
Who would have believed that together they would change the lives of many rural households! The need for them to be in touch was very real: physically, socially as well as psychologically.
Even before fence phones, neighbors had unique ways of alerting each other when the need was extremely urgent. “Sometimes a mother would be alone when something would happen to a child or there be a fire or a snakebite. Then the ‘distress pole’ was used. A neighbor seeing the white flag would hasten there.” The party line was a godsend for medical emergencies. “People no longer had to ring the bell on top of the barn to summon help.”3 Help could be requested and people passed the message down the line until it reached the
doctor.”1
Fence phones illustrate the ingenuity and cooperation prevalent among rural families in the
early 20th century. Groups of families otherwise isolated, lonely and in need of help worked
together to have low-cost telephone service. Left to telephone companies, farm people
wouldn’t have had telecommunication at all because building lines was expensive and not
worth the effort in sparsely populated areas. At one time farm households had more telephones than did urban homes (where one telephone in town would be used by everyone when needed). Barbed wire phones were early DIY projects, Do It Yourself. It became a social network with group chats and had the semblance of personalized ringtones, chat rooms and on line music. Talk was free, so people would ‘hang out’ on the phone for hours just as they do today on online social networks.
- Ranchers Hacked Barbed Wire Fences to Create Phone Lines by Laurie L Dove.
- Richmound’s Heritage (community history book)
- Echo, Horsham School Yearbook
Duck Story That Quacks Me Up
It’s been ducks galore in the Jamie Straub household. She was set up for success starting with 3 females/hens and 2 males/drakes. When she gathered their eggs this spring, she used an infra-red thermometer to be sure they’re fresh, above 12 degrees. In her self-turner incubator, with the dial turned to ‘Ducks’, she put 18 eggs and maintained the correct humidity by adding water. Twenty-eight days later every one of them hatched into the cutest little furballs.
In the duck-house there was less success. When she candled the 32 eggs, only 5 were good (the weather was cold out there), and only 3 of the 5 hatched under the hens (interesting how the three hens took turns sitting on the clutch of eggs).
For a time the ducklings were in their own space. (Jamie only found a different home for 4 of them.) It was interesting to watch when they were old enough to be put with the adults in the fenced outdoor run. One hen claimed them all, making it obvious with her mothering way that they were hers (the other two moms didn’t bother with them). When the 3 younger ones were introduced to her family of 14, she went after them saying in no uncertain terms, “You’re not mine!” The younger ones are still running with the flock, but it’s clear that they’re not her ‘chosen ones’.
Idioms with a Trail Drive Twist
- dead duck – that’s a cattle rustler caught by a lynch mob.
- lame duck – that was many-a remittance man, ‘ne’er-do-wells’ sent to the frontier with financial backing from their wealthy families in hopes the rugged life would finally make men of them.
- sitting duck – that was a baby calf that happened to be born while on the trail, and was left behind for predators. Keeping them would slow the trail drive too much.
- ugly duckling – the leppy; a small motherless calf in a range herd of cattle either orphaned or abandoned.
Western Wisdom from a duck perspective
“If you keep your feathers well-oiled, the water of criticism will run off us as from a duck’s back.” Ellen Swallow Richards
“Don’t quack like a duck, soar like an eagle.” Ken Blanchard
“Wild ducks and tomorrow both come without calling.” Russian Proverb
“A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water.” Donovan
“Being born in a duck yard doesn’t matter if you’re hatched from a swan’s egg.” Hans Christian Anderson
“Postponing happiness until all your ducks are in a row means never because life is
not clean, fair or predictable.” Laura Schlessinger
“Always behave like a duck -keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the
devil underneath.” Jacob Braude
Duck Vision Compared to Horse Vision
| Ducks | Horses | |
| Colours: | Sees reds, greens, yellows, blues. Sees colours vibrantly Senses ultraviolet rays / radiation | Sees in 2 colours: blues and yellows Red is seen as gray-ish The fear yellow |
| Favourites: | Favours mostly greens and into the blues | Turquoise and light blue |
| Dislike: | White | Bright, neon oranges and yellows |
| Night Vision: | Can’t see in the dark | Not as good as humans at night |
Both ducks and horses can see almost all the way around without turning their head!
Guy Named Dale Rose (The Rest of the Story)
Dale Rose’s bio was in the March newsletter. It is the story most people know or have heard about him. Articles written in the Medicine Hat News about him (when he was with us) tell about another side of him. It seems he not only broke all the rules in the rodeo circles, he also surprises those of us that think we know what bullriders do and don’t do.
Dale grew up near Redcliff with his parents on a ranch that had been his grandfather’s. He
was a “plunky” youngster with a younger brother and a sister. It was in November at the age of 13 that he was stricken with osteomylitis that required him to be in a body cast for four months. He didn’t use it as an excuse to opt out of school though; he took correspondence
lessons and passed into Grade 8. It was during that time with the help of his brother, that they designed and constructed the replica of a Hudson’s Bay Trading Post. It was displayed in the window of the Hutchings and Sharp Store for years (description below). ( He was 14 when he made his first professional bullride at the Medicine Hat Stampede.)
“Dale Rose had the ability to write and recite poetry from memory … and the ability to tell a
story without resorting to vulgar words … He was very flamboyant and a very articulate speaker. He certainly had the gift of vocabulary and he had quite a high IQ … the cowboy who rarely, if ever cursed, lived hard, loved ranch life. He once wrote a novel that prospective publishers declared too wordy. They did publish his poems that examined the romantic western spirit.”3
Dale Rose loved working with wood and was described as being an “accomplished woodworker”4 Gwen Nelson commented on Facebook that “he was quite a craftsman at making puzzle boxes. Beautiful work!.” He was never afraid to take on big projects. He reported to Medicine Hat News that he was “taking the old Redcliff CPR Station and turning the abandoned structure into his house. He’d be ranching in the morning and home-building in the afternoon. He admitted he didn’t have any housebuilding experience and acknowledges. “my both thumbs will be a lot wider than they were by the end of the winter (of 1987)” “Once the house is complete Dale will set about making all the furniture.”4 It was where Dale lived and when he watched TV in the living room, he sat in a barber’s chair. It was an antique that was recovered with leather and re-chromed with all the hydraulics in working order. Dale Rose “won a fortune over an almost 30-year (bullriding) career and lost another fortune on various misadventures and his strong desire to beat the house at blackjack.”3 “He always thought that the only thing better than a little humor was a ‘lot’ of it.”5 “The guy was crazy and had his own way of doing things.”1
The Model Hudson’s Bay Post
Dale was a thirteen-year-old recuperating in a body cast when he took on this extra-curricular project. “With the help of his young brother Dan, 11, they designed and constructed a masterful replica of an old Hudson Bay Trading Post. Using only sketches from history books, Dale designed the extensive layout which is approximately 50 inches long and 30 inches wide. The brothers used only plywood on the wall of the fort itself with everything else made from burnt match sticks. The fort (and the people and animals inside) is a painstaking accurate reproduction of life in the pioneer days. Guard houses on each corner of the fort assures that no Indians will creep up. On the inside the minister walks to his church while Mrs. Jones hangs up her wash and Mrs Jones and Hank Smith gab a bit. A nifty trading centre, blacksmith shop, meat smoking shop, saddle shop, guard and supply house are all there as well as animals, children and people walking about. A varnish finish completes the job.”3
Sources:
- “Cigar Smoking Rider Will be Inducted in Canadian Hall of Fame” by Collin Gallant,
Medicine Hat News, July 16, 2008 - “Learning the Ropes for the Featured Event” by Sheila Pratt, Medicine Hat News,
July 19 ,1979 - “Plucky Dale Rose and Brother Build Replica Old Fort”, Medicine Hat News, June 10, 1955
4.“The CPR Station Dream Home”, by Christine Diemert, Medicine Hat News, October
19,1987 - Canadian Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame Facebook Page
- Interview with Don Thompson
Dale Rose, More than a Bull Rider by J Zollner, April, 2025
You can't judge a book by its cover, a bull rider's rap can mislead,
They're a breed of their own,
as Hoot, Dale was known,
And his colorful story is wacky indeed.
He fits the profile to the letter when at first you hear all about him,
Of danger no fear,
though the outcome is clear__
That one day his survival would look mighty grim. (he recovered from a broken neck)
It's Hoot against beast as he's spurring, got awards for the highest score,
He's a rodeo addict,
but with rawhide grit___
It's hard to believe that he had a soft core.
He wouldn't resort to offensive language in the stories he loved to tell,
He would never curse,
loved to write in verse,
Was articulate, wrote a novel not a word he'd misspell.
He broke all the rules for bull riders, calf roping considered as wrong___
As his necktie and white shirt,
while riding in the dirt,
He smoked a cigar as his bull bucked along.
Oh, the start that he gave young bull riders with his stock & the training he gave,
Ev'ry Thursday night,
ev'ry young guys delight,
Soon he had started a bull riding wave.
He was an accomplished woodworker, made puzzle boxes, all things small,
Was a house renovator,
and a furniture maker,
But betting in blackjack was one big downfall.
The misadventures he had were varied, won a fortune, and then it was lost,
A fun-loving guy
and we can't deny
There were always those times, when common sense lines, were crossed.
Don't we all have those times, when the danger signs, are tossed.
Whether you’re riding or hiking or driving this summer,
Happy Trails,
Jen
A note from the MHCP Webmaster:
Howdy, folks!
We’ve been burnin’ the midnight oil fixin’ up the MHCP website to make it better than a fresh cup of coffee at sunrise. But, like any good cattle drive, we’ve hit a few bumps along the trail.
If you spot somethin’ that ain’t quite right—maybe a picture’s gone missin’, a link’s as dead as a desert creek, a page loads wonky, or the whole dang site’s gone belly-up (heaven forbid!)—don’t be shy. Holler at us by sendin’ an email to penellazollner@gmail.com or leave us a comment.
Thank ya kindly for ridin’ with us and bearin’ with the dust. We sure do appreciate your patience!
Happy trails,
The MHCP Team
