Postcards: Ranching in the Soda Lake District, Part II

The Kelly Engle family ranched in the Soda Lake District between 1920 and 1926. Engle’s story features many of the elements that run through most of the tales told by Churchill County settlers in the 1920s: bad wells, outdoor plumbing, crops that failed, houses that were cold in the winter and hot in the summer, cars that wouldn’t start, drought. His story also recalls the joys that could be found in rural life: strong family bonds forged by isolation and love, country parties and dances, neighborly acts of kindness, a (sometimes frustrating) sense of connection to a land that could hold back its bounty or overwhelm with its beauty and blessings, and the discovery of innovative ways to find entertainment despite the odds.

Engle: “We answered an advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner for a three-tube battery operated Crosley Radio, with a disc speaker and earphones. I think it cost only $8 or $10 but it was a honey. In our isolated location, 11 miles from town, there were no power lines or other disturbing factors to create static interference. On an evening, we could bring in Clearwater, Florida and other distant stations. In the daytime, we had to use the earphones. On Saturday afternoons, during football season, I would tune in the action. Borchert (Engles’ ranching partner) and I would have to start the milking before the games were over. Ruth (Kelly’s wife) would take over the earphones and from time to time scribble notes of its progress and send them out to the milking shed by Tiny (Kelly and Ruth’s daughter) who felt very important to be acting as messenger. She would make a bee line across the corral, kicking in the ribs of any cow lying in her path, until it struggled to its feet and got out of her way.

“The Fourth of July, probably 1923 or 1924, was a memorable one, made so by two guests, Dutch Masters and Si Krummes, old mates at the University of Nevada. …This was our first get together since college days, and what a reunion it was! We had no guest accommodations in our small ranch home, so we parked them in sleeping bags out near the haystacks. On the morning of the Fourth, Borchert, in a waggish mood, had donned the swallow-tailed coat of his old college days dress suit. I had brought out cakes of ice from town, and we whipped up several freezers of homemade ice cream during the day. This was still in the prohibition era, so I had secured from our favorite bootlegger a supply of ‘white mule.’ We had no fireworks but at intervals during the day, we would detonate half sticks of dynamite tied to the branches of sagebrush bushes. Neighbors from miles away reported that it sounded like another war had broken out. …Ruth baked a large turkey for the occasion.”

Then, as Engle tells it, an agricultural depression developed and the price of hay dropped from $40 to $20 per ton. He and Borchert tried going into the dairy business. “Although our revenues increased, they were still not sufficient to meet our fixed charges and loan obligations so we reluctantly realized were licked and would have to dispose of the ranch…. We found a buyer in a Basque gentleman bootlegger…who planned to turn the ranch production over from alfalfa to “Hearts of Gold” cantaloupe, from which he would make a new type of whiskey. He subsequently built a large underground still. But his clients did not take kindly to the taste and flavor of this new type of whiskey” so, according to Engle, he abandoned the ranch and went back to “his former occupation of running illicit liquor in from Canada.”

Engle’s Soda Lake story has a happier ending than many like his. He was offered a job by the Mexican government as office engineer on the Rio Mante Irrigation Project. So, with the promise of a paycheck, Engle situated his wife and young children in a home in Fallon on Russell Street and set out for Mexico. After a year, he returned to Nevada, where he served four years as Deputy State Engineer. Then, the family moved to California, and he continued to work, as he put it, as “a dam engineer.”

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