frank and grampa

i'm not sure when grampas' younger brother frank came to canada; late 20s i think. grampa came over in 1923. about 1930 or 31 frank was in southern alberta working as a cowboy near the town of hanna. by this time grampa and his pal sandy were on thier homestead near valleyview in northern alberta in the peace river country. frank heard that there was a bad fever that had gone through the peace region that had killed hundreds of horses. back then almost everyone needed horses. frank and another cowboy decided to partner up, gather a herd of saddle horses and drive them up to peace river. they hoped to sell them at a good profet. i'm not sure the distance but it must be 500 miles! just making that trip accross rugged untamed county by horse would be rough, but for just two men to drive a herd of 40 horses would be an epic trip. one would need to be with the heard all night, so they would have slept in shifts; until the herd was well trail broke there was likely no sleep at all! lukily the horses would have been well broke to trail by the time they reached the rough bush country north of edmonton. the trip took over a month and they were able to sell thier horses in peace river and make some money, which was very scarce during the great depression. after selling the herd franks partner headed home and frank rode down to valleyview to see his brother( grampa ). it must have been a great reunion as they had not seen each other since grampa left ireland. grampa said he was lucky that he and sandy had just buthered a moose because "frank was so skinny he could have washed his ass in an egg cup" and all he did was eat frying pan after frying pan of moose steaks as fast as grampa could cook them! frank stayed on the homestead with grampa for a couple of weeks then headed back to his cowboy life; frank ended up working for cn in ontario.

fire it up

at leahs' request ,insistance i am firing up this blog to record some stories of grampa orrs' life. i am not a techie, and even to get this far i have gone through a near meltdown! mullertown was the name of the farm grampa grew up on in county down n. ireland; i think naming farms is common all over the uk. here, i'm going to call dad, jack just grampa. if anyone can correct, edit or add thier own memories or thoughts to what i write, that would be great; i would like this to be a family/friend kind of place. i am a one finger wonder on the keyboard, and spend most of my time in the bush working, so i may not be prolific. one good thing, amoung many, about growing up on a farm is that you get to work with your dad. grampa wasn't a big talker or a verbal teacher, but, when guys work together they tend to talk....so i heard many stories about ireland, his family, the great war, mining, logging, the depression, courting grama and his war. i will be bouncing around as far as order of events goes but, i'm getting to be an old guy, so i can do what i want! grampa and i had to dig a drainage ditch once; where our artisian well overfowed was getting boggy; hiring a backhoe was never consitered. we had to dig south about 50 feet then west to the ditch about 100 feet. grampa worked up top cutting the sod and i was in the hole digging the dirt. it was 2 feet wide 4 ft deep. after a couple of hours digging grampa leaned on his shovel and said " gime a tailer made"; thankfully time for a rest and a smoke break. he said "ya know this is just like a slit trench........ya always had to have a good hole to get into!......i always made mine a little bigger because when gerry started to shell us sure as hell there'd be two or three of them young fellas that would wanna be in the hole with me....they called me pops ya know". then he looked at me like i was maybe a clueless new soldier and said " you know, gerry could drop a morter in your hip pocket!" what could i say... i just listened and dug the slit trench!