Parents: William Henry Brown and Emma D. Brown, 4 brothers: William E. "Bill", Henry "Hank", George E. "Sonny", and Harry R. Brown; h-Homer Barry, children: Wayne Homer Barry
1930 US Federal Census, District 22, Rosebud, Grant, Oregon:
Henry Brown, Lodger, age 22, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, occupation: laborer on a stock ranch.
Emma D. Brown, Head, age 56, married, born in California, father born in Kentucky, mother born in Oregon, occupation: none;
William E. Brown, Son, age 26, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, farmer on a horse ranch;
George E. Brown, Son, age 19, single, born in California, occupation: laborer on a horse ranch;
Harry R. Brown, Son, age 17, single, born in Oregon, occupation: none;
Julia C. Brown, Daughter, age 14, born in Oregon, occupation: none.
Izee rodeo queen chases wild horses
by Jack Southworth
Eagle Writer
Blue Mountain Eagle, John Day, Grant, Oregon
August 30, 2006
Chris Brown Barry remembers family life and a stud named Snow Mountain Frenchy.
There's open range and then there's the way the Browns rode it: Wide-open range. Chris Brown and her brothers - Bill, Harry, Hank and Sonny - ran wild horses throughout Izee and Murderer's Creek in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The Brown's place on Corral Creek was never big enough to support the family on its own. To make their way, the boys - and Chris at times - had to work for other ranches. They would build fence, put up hay, break horses, buckaroo, herd sheep, whatever was available. In the summer the boys would often go to ranches around Burns and Diamond and help put up hay and then come back to Izee in the late summer and fall and help put up hay there. Late fall and winter would have them chasing wild horses - sometimes on a Forest Service contract and other times to catch and sell on their own, usually at the shipping yards at the railroad in Burns.
Chris would stay in the Izee country. She and her mother, Emma, would raise a crop of rye that the boys would help harvest when they got home from the Diamond area. When she wasn't working at her family's place, she was working for the other ranches in the area.
"I started working in the hayfields when I was nine-years-old," Chris said. "Worked for Harrisons, Borg, Officers, and Keerins. I had my own team so I got paid $3 per day. Usually pulled a rake. One month I earned $60 from Joe Officer and I couldn't imagine what I'd do with that much money. My brothers usually stacked hay and they also got $3 per day. Other men who operated the ranch's team and equipment just got a $1.50 per day.
"Running wild horses was our primary income. The first year I was in school the boys got a 100 head of slick ears (unbranded horses) out of Murderer's Creek. They caught them in a corral on Trail Ridge. We would run the horses in the late fall, winter and spring. We would round up the horses we had caught in the spring and take them to Burns to sell.
"One spring we were taking the horses out past Whiskey Mountain and through the hills to Burns. On one side of Whiskey Mountain there was a flat with service berry bushes. There was a bear in the bushes and we ran the horse right past him and it never scared him. My brothers roped the bear and carried him on the saddle on Brownie. We were going to take the bear - it was just a cub - to Burns and turn him loose in the downtown but he died before we got there.
"Brownie was one of Carson's old horses that Chris Borg had bought and hired my brothers to gather. If Brownie got lazy all you'd have to do is break off a stick from a willow or a pine and then he'd be a whole different horse. You could ride him with a halter, hackamore or bridle; it didn't make any difference.
"When I helped my brothers run wild horses one of my jobs was to wait near the trap and when the horse went in the corral I was supposed to ride up, jump off my horse and close the gate. I was usually riding Brownie and I had to sit on him all day long. If I got off of him the moment I started to get back on him he knew something was up and he'd start fussing around and I wouldn't be able to get my foot in the stirrup.
"Other times they had me out in front on Dixie. God that horse could run. I couldn't slow her down. She'd take the bit in her mouth and go.
"One time my mom's gentle black mare, Sally, got loose and started running with a band of wild horses so Sonny and I decided to go catch her. I was on Dixie and Sonny was riding a twelve-year-old full sister of Dixie's he was trying to break. Sonny's horse would never stop bucking. He'd get her halfway up a hillside and she'd buck all the way back down to the creek. We spotted the band so Sonny sent me up on Burnt Mountain to hold them. Sonny caught up with me there and then the band took off and I followed them over Burnt Mountain and across the side of Donivan Mountain. The horses ran across rock slides on a steep slope and Dixie would just jump them. The horses ran through Mountain Mahogany patches and Dixie ran right through them without slowing down. I followed the horses across Donivan Mountain and then brought them back across it to Delles Creek and got them headed down Delles Creek and into our corral at our place. My shirt was in strings, my pants torn. My mom got her horse back and I got some new clothes. Sonny never helped at all.
"My kids took me out to Murderer's Creek a few years ago and asked me what the country looked like back then. I told them I couldn't remember: I never looked at the country because we were always going too fast. It was all open range back then and now there's all kinds of roads and fences. Besides, it was when I was sixteen - that was 70 years ago.
"Snow Mountain Frenchy was the name we gave to a stud on Snow Mountain. We named him that because he had a dished face like a breed of horses called French Cooks and he stayed on Snow Mountain. We had a hard time catching him because in dry weather whenever we chased him he'd go across rocky areas and we'd lose his tracks. One winter when there was snow on the ground we cut his tracks and followed him down to the South Fork. Snow Mountain Frenchy headed back up the South Fork with us behind him and he went past Trowbridges old place and along between there and Fat Belshaw's place (now the IZ ranch) he jumped a four-wire fence from the road into the hay meadows. I think that stud must have thought he'd lost us but he didn't know my brothers: They gave their own horses the spurs and went right over that barbed wire fence behind him and I followed them on my horse.
"The river had risen earlier in the winter and flooded the meadows and then frozen. It was just a sheet of ice. Snow Mountain Frenchy went out there about thirty yards and his feet just went out from under him. Our horses had corked shoes and before Frenchy even fell my brothers were making loops. They roped him and led him home.
"Up at our place there was an old log barn with no roof on it. We put Frenchy in the barn for the winter and every day my Mom would take feed and water to him and that gentled him. We cut him and Hank broke him the next spring and he turned into a pretty good horse."
Mike Keerins remembers his dad, Bonham, telling about the Browns and the way they rode horses. "You'd be out on some steep, rocky hillside," Bonham told Mike, "steep enough that you'd be leading your own horse and here'd come one of the Brown boys: dead run, slack reins, one hand in the air for balance and spurs to it."
With all of the wild horses that the Brown boys gathered and tried to break they ended up with a string of rough stock that they would provide to rodeos. In 1935 they got the contract to provide the bucking horses for the Prairie City Roundup and the John Day rodeo.
" 'Wild horses' we called them," Chris said. "They were genuine enough - right off of Snow Mountain and Murderer's Creek. We put together a string of 25 horses. It was 75 miles from our house to Prairie City. We'd got over in one day. Leave Corral Creek about five or six in the morning. Harry and me would be out in front, Sonny and Hank on each side and Bill always bringing up the rear. The horses wouldn't try to escape, we had them pretty well gentled down, at least as far as being herded. We would trot, gallop and walk and be in Prairie City by six in the evening.
"They would select the queen of the Prairie City Roundup at the dance the night before the rodeo started. It was just a vote by everyone at the dance. It wasn't fair really. Before the vote my brothers wandered around the room and told the rodeo riders that if they voted for me as queen that there'd be a real good chance they'd get a good, high-scoring horse to ride the next day in the rodeo. When they called out the names of the girls there was a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' when they called my name and none of the other girls even came close.
"As queen I would ride Sonny's palomino - he'd been a wild colt that lost his mom and followed Sonny into camp when they were gathering wild horses - and when I rode past the grandstand I'd rein him up sharp-like, just pulled him up, you know, the way they do, and that palomino would just rear right up on his hind feet a couple of times. Sonny had trained him to do that. It was like Roy Rogers done but of course this was years before Roy Rogers ever did it.
"Most of the time I sat in the grandstand until I rode in the races. In the women's horse race I ran on another of Sonny's horses named 'Dixie'. Almost lapped one of the other girls.
"Each night there'd be a dance. It seemed like we danced from eight in the evening until eight in the morning and then go to the rodeo all the next day.
"One bucking horse we had we'd gotten from Joseph Keerins cause he couldn't ride him. Hank and I could ride him. Heck, I even packed a deer on him. But with anyone else he would buck so we decided to buck him in the John Day rodeo and nobody could ride him. Then Sonny used him in the cow cutting contest and won it on him. Joseph Keerins had called him Unparel but we just called him Old Buck. He was an ugly horse: big old rawboned thing. Never did get fat, pin ears, little beady 'hog' eyes, but he could sure buck when he wanted to.
"The week after we got Old Buck home from the fair we had some hunters up and were guiding them. I was saddling horses in the morning and I had Buck saddled and was saddling the other horses when this hunter comes out and says 'that's the horse for me' and climbs on Old Buck. I turn around and say, 'you know that last week that horse bucked off every cowboy at the John Day rodeo?' You never saw a man get off a horse so fast in your life."
"In the fall of the year my brothers and I would pool together our extra cash that we'd made from haying, rodeos, wild horses and such. We could put together a $100 or so and we'd go to Burns and with that $100 we'd buy all of our groceries for the coming year to last until the next fall. We buy it at Safeway, a Mr. Tiller ran the store, and he'd bring everything out in a van when he came up to go hunting. We lived on beans, potatoes, prunes, raisins, sourdough biscuits, coffee and sugar. We had all the deer and beef we ever needed. Sonny got a barrel of apples one year when he worked at the Oxbow.
"Anyway, we'd buy a year's worth of food with that $100 and have enough left over to buy us each some clothes as well.
"My mother was quite a cook. We always had a few dairy cows and with the staples we bought and the meat we got we always ate well. I loved her cinnamon rolls. She never measured anything and as a result neither do I. Although I've never been able to make good biscuits since I left Izee. My mom always used sourdough and used it for years. Always added warm milk to it in the eve after we'd strained it and she would use her sourdough two or three times a day. When we traveled she would always have a jug of sourdough with her on the wagon."
"My brothers always did things together. They never fought or argued. If you seen one, you seen 'em all. They were all friendly but Harry was the happy-go-luckiest of the four and he loved to tease me.
"After I married Homer in 1937 the boys started to go their separate ways, too. Harry went to war and fought in Italy. Bill married and went to California. Sonny went to work on the dredge down on the John Day River and eventually went back to Izee and took over the payments on the place until he sold it to a man by the name of Bush who owned the IZ ranch. Sonny managed the IZ ranch for a few years and then he moved to Burns.
1930 US Federal Census, District 22, Rosebud, Grant, Oregon:
Henry Brown, Lodger, age 22, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, occupation: laborer on a stock ranch.
Emma D. Brown, Head, age 56, married, born in California, father born in Kentucky, mother born in Oregon, occupation: none;
William E. Brown, Son, age 26, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, farmer on a horse ranch;
George E. Brown, Son, age 19, single, born in California, occupation: laborer on a horse ranch;
Harry R. Brown, Son, age 17, single, born in Oregon, occupation: none;
Julia C. Brown, Daughter, age 14, born in Oregon, occupation: none.
Izee rodeo queen chases wild horses
by Jack Southworth
Eagle Writer
Blue Mountain Eagle, John Day, Grant, Oregon
August 30, 2006
Chris Brown Barry remembers family life and a stud named Snow Mountain Frenchy.
There's open range and then there's the way the Browns rode it: Wide-open range. Chris Brown and her brothers - Bill, Harry, Hank and Sonny - ran wild horses throughout Izee and Murderer's Creek in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The Brown's place on Corral Creek was never big enough to support the family on its own. To make their way, the boys - and Chris at times - had to work for other ranches. They would build fence, put up hay, break horses, buckaroo, herd sheep, whatever was available. In the summer the boys would often go to ranches around Burns and Diamond and help put up hay and then come back to Izee in the late summer and fall and help put up hay there. Late fall and winter would have them chasing wild horses - sometimes on a Forest Service contract and other times to catch and sell on their own, usually at the shipping yards at the railroad in Burns.
Chris would stay in the Izee country. She and her mother, Emma, would raise a crop of rye that the boys would help harvest when they got home from the Diamond area. When she wasn't working at her family's place, she was working for the other ranches in the area.
"I started working in the hayfields when I was nine-years-old," Chris said. "Worked for Harrisons, Borg, Officers, and Keerins. I had my own team so I got paid $3 per day. Usually pulled a rake. One month I earned $60 from Joe Officer and I couldn't imagine what I'd do with that much money. My brothers usually stacked hay and they also got $3 per day. Other men who operated the ranch's team and equipment just got a $1.50 per day.
"Running wild horses was our primary income. The first year I was in school the boys got a 100 head of slick ears (unbranded horses) out of Murderer's Creek. They caught them in a corral on Trail Ridge. We would run the horses in the late fall, winter and spring. We would round up the horses we had caught in the spring and take them to Burns to sell.
"One spring we were taking the horses out past Whiskey Mountain and through the hills to Burns. On one side of Whiskey Mountain there was a flat with service berry bushes. There was a bear in the bushes and we ran the horse right past him and it never scared him. My brothers roped the bear and carried him on the saddle on Brownie. We were going to take the bear - it was just a cub - to Burns and turn him loose in the downtown but he died before we got there.
"Brownie was one of Carson's old horses that Chris Borg had bought and hired my brothers to gather. If Brownie got lazy all you'd have to do is break off a stick from a willow or a pine and then he'd be a whole different horse. You could ride him with a halter, hackamore or bridle; it didn't make any difference.
"When I helped my brothers run wild horses one of my jobs was to wait near the trap and when the horse went in the corral I was supposed to ride up, jump off my horse and close the gate. I was usually riding Brownie and I had to sit on him all day long. If I got off of him the moment I started to get back on him he knew something was up and he'd start fussing around and I wouldn't be able to get my foot in the stirrup.
"Other times they had me out in front on Dixie. God that horse could run. I couldn't slow her down. She'd take the bit in her mouth and go.
"One time my mom's gentle black mare, Sally, got loose and started running with a band of wild horses so Sonny and I decided to go catch her. I was on Dixie and Sonny was riding a twelve-year-old full sister of Dixie's he was trying to break. Sonny's horse would never stop bucking. He'd get her halfway up a hillside and she'd buck all the way back down to the creek. We spotted the band so Sonny sent me up on Burnt Mountain to hold them. Sonny caught up with me there and then the band took off and I followed them over Burnt Mountain and across the side of Donivan Mountain. The horses ran across rock slides on a steep slope and Dixie would just jump them. The horses ran through Mountain Mahogany patches and Dixie ran right through them without slowing down. I followed the horses across Donivan Mountain and then brought them back across it to Delles Creek and got them headed down Delles Creek and into our corral at our place. My shirt was in strings, my pants torn. My mom got her horse back and I got some new clothes. Sonny never helped at all.
"My kids took me out to Murderer's Creek a few years ago and asked me what the country looked like back then. I told them I couldn't remember: I never looked at the country because we were always going too fast. It was all open range back then and now there's all kinds of roads and fences. Besides, it was when I was sixteen - that was 70 years ago.
"Snow Mountain Frenchy was the name we gave to a stud on Snow Mountain. We named him that because he had a dished face like a breed of horses called French Cooks and he stayed on Snow Mountain. We had a hard time catching him because in dry weather whenever we chased him he'd go across rocky areas and we'd lose his tracks. One winter when there was snow on the ground we cut his tracks and followed him down to the South Fork. Snow Mountain Frenchy headed back up the South Fork with us behind him and he went past Trowbridges old place and along between there and Fat Belshaw's place (now the IZ ranch) he jumped a four-wire fence from the road into the hay meadows. I think that stud must have thought he'd lost us but he didn't know my brothers: They gave their own horses the spurs and went right over that barbed wire fence behind him and I followed them on my horse.
"The river had risen earlier in the winter and flooded the meadows and then frozen. It was just a sheet of ice. Snow Mountain Frenchy went out there about thirty yards and his feet just went out from under him. Our horses had corked shoes and before Frenchy even fell my brothers were making loops. They roped him and led him home.
"Up at our place there was an old log barn with no roof on it. We put Frenchy in the barn for the winter and every day my Mom would take feed and water to him and that gentled him. We cut him and Hank broke him the next spring and he turned into a pretty good horse."
Mike Keerins remembers his dad, Bonham, telling about the Browns and the way they rode horses. "You'd be out on some steep, rocky hillside," Bonham told Mike, "steep enough that you'd be leading your own horse and here'd come one of the Brown boys: dead run, slack reins, one hand in the air for balance and spurs to it."
With all of the wild horses that the Brown boys gathered and tried to break they ended up with a string of rough stock that they would provide to rodeos. In 1935 they got the contract to provide the bucking horses for the Prairie City Roundup and the John Day rodeo.
" 'Wild horses' we called them," Chris said. "They were genuine enough - right off of Snow Mountain and Murderer's Creek. We put together a string of 25 horses. It was 75 miles from our house to Prairie City. We'd got over in one day. Leave Corral Creek about five or six in the morning. Harry and me would be out in front, Sonny and Hank on each side and Bill always bringing up the rear. The horses wouldn't try to escape, we had them pretty well gentled down, at least as far as being herded. We would trot, gallop and walk and be in Prairie City by six in the evening.
"They would select the queen of the Prairie City Roundup at the dance the night before the rodeo started. It was just a vote by everyone at the dance. It wasn't fair really. Before the vote my brothers wandered around the room and told the rodeo riders that if they voted for me as queen that there'd be a real good chance they'd get a good, high-scoring horse to ride the next day in the rodeo. When they called out the names of the girls there was a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' when they called my name and none of the other girls even came close.
"As queen I would ride Sonny's palomino - he'd been a wild colt that lost his mom and followed Sonny into camp when they were gathering wild horses - and when I rode past the grandstand I'd rein him up sharp-like, just pulled him up, you know, the way they do, and that palomino would just rear right up on his hind feet a couple of times. Sonny had trained him to do that. It was like Roy Rogers done but of course this was years before Roy Rogers ever did it.
"Most of the time I sat in the grandstand until I rode in the races. In the women's horse race I ran on another of Sonny's horses named 'Dixie'. Almost lapped one of the other girls.
"Each night there'd be a dance. It seemed like we danced from eight in the evening until eight in the morning and then go to the rodeo all the next day.
"One bucking horse we had we'd gotten from Joseph Keerins cause he couldn't ride him. Hank and I could ride him. Heck, I even packed a deer on him. But with anyone else he would buck so we decided to buck him in the John Day rodeo and nobody could ride him. Then Sonny used him in the cow cutting contest and won it on him. Joseph Keerins had called him Unparel but we just called him Old Buck. He was an ugly horse: big old rawboned thing. Never did get fat, pin ears, little beady 'hog' eyes, but he could sure buck when he wanted to.
"The week after we got Old Buck home from the fair we had some hunters up and were guiding them. I was saddling horses in the morning and I had Buck saddled and was saddling the other horses when this hunter comes out and says 'that's the horse for me' and climbs on Old Buck. I turn around and say, 'you know that last week that horse bucked off every cowboy at the John Day rodeo?' You never saw a man get off a horse so fast in your life."
"In the fall of the year my brothers and I would pool together our extra cash that we'd made from haying, rodeos, wild horses and such. We could put together a $100 or so and we'd go to Burns and with that $100 we'd buy all of our groceries for the coming year to last until the next fall. We buy it at Safeway, a Mr. Tiller ran the store, and he'd bring everything out in a van when he came up to go hunting. We lived on beans, potatoes, prunes, raisins, sourdough biscuits, coffee and sugar. We had all the deer and beef we ever needed. Sonny got a barrel of apples one year when he worked at the Oxbow.
"Anyway, we'd buy a year's worth of food with that $100 and have enough left over to buy us each some clothes as well.
"My mother was quite a cook. We always had a few dairy cows and with the staples we bought and the meat we got we always ate well. I loved her cinnamon rolls. She never measured anything and as a result neither do I. Although I've never been able to make good biscuits since I left Izee. My mom always used sourdough and used it for years. Always added warm milk to it in the eve after we'd strained it and she would use her sourdough two or three times a day. When we traveled she would always have a jug of sourdough with her on the wagon."
"My brothers always did things together. They never fought or argued. If you seen one, you seen 'em all. They were all friendly but Harry was the happy-go-luckiest of the four and he loved to tease me.
"After I married Homer in 1937 the boys started to go their separate ways, too. Harry went to war and fought in Italy. Bill married and went to California. Sonny went to work on the dredge down on the John Day River and eventually went back to Izee and took over the payments on the place until he sold it to a man by the name of Bush who owned the IZ ranch. Sonny managed the IZ ranch for a few years and then he moved to Burns.
Parents: William Henry Brown and Emma D. Brown, 4 brothers: William E. "Bill", Henry "Hank", George E. "Sonny", and Harry R. Brown; h-Homer Barry, children: Wayne Homer Barry
1930 US Federal Census, District 22, Rosebud, Grant, Oregon:
Henry Brown, Lodger, age 22, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, occupation: laborer on a stock ranch.
Emma D. Brown, Head, age 56, married, born in California, father born in Kentucky, mother born in Oregon, occupation: none;
William E. Brown, Son, age 26, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, farmer on a horse ranch;
George E. Brown, Son, age 19, single, born in California, occupation: laborer on a horse ranch;
Harry R. Brown, Son, age 17, single, born in Oregon, occupation: none;
Julia C. Brown, Daughter, age 14, born in Oregon, occupation: none.
Izee rodeo queen chases wild horses
by Jack Southworth
Eagle Writer
Blue Mountain Eagle, John Day, Grant, Oregon
August 30, 2006
Chris Brown Barry remembers family life and a stud named Snow Mountain Frenchy.
There's open range and then there's the way the Browns rode it: Wide-open range. Chris Brown and her brothers - Bill, Harry, Hank and Sonny - ran wild horses throughout Izee and Murderer's Creek in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The Brown's place on Corral Creek was never big enough to support the family on its own. To make their way, the boys - and Chris at times - had to work for other ranches. They would build fence, put up hay, break horses, buckaroo, herd sheep, whatever was available. In the summer the boys would often go to ranches around Burns and Diamond and help put up hay and then come back to Izee in the late summer and fall and help put up hay there. Late fall and winter would have them chasing wild horses - sometimes on a Forest Service contract and other times to catch and sell on their own, usually at the shipping yards at the railroad in Burns.
Chris would stay in the Izee country. She and her mother, Emma, would raise a crop of rye that the boys would help harvest when they got home from the Diamond area. When she wasn't working at her family's place, she was working for the other ranches in the area.
"I started working in the hayfields when I was nine-years-old," Chris said. "Worked for Harrisons, Borg, Officers, and Keerins. I had my own team so I got paid $3 per day. Usually pulled a rake. One month I earned $60 from Joe Officer and I couldn't imagine what I'd do with that much money. My brothers usually stacked hay and they also got $3 per day. Other men who operated the ranch's team and equipment just got a $1.50 per day.
"Running wild horses was our primary income. The first year I was in school the boys got a 100 head of slick ears (unbranded horses) out of Murderer's Creek. They caught them in a corral on Trail Ridge. We would run the horses in the late fall, winter and spring. We would round up the horses we had caught in the spring and take them to Burns to sell.
"One spring we were taking the horses out past Whiskey Mountain and through the hills to Burns. On one side of Whiskey Mountain there was a flat with service berry bushes. There was a bear in the bushes and we ran the horse right past him and it never scared him. My brothers roped the bear and carried him on the saddle on Brownie. We were going to take the bear - it was just a cub - to Burns and turn him loose in the downtown but he died before we got there.
"Brownie was one of Carson's old horses that Chris Borg had bought and hired my brothers to gather. If Brownie got lazy all you'd have to do is break off a stick from a willow or a pine and then he'd be a whole different horse. You could ride him with a halter, hackamore or bridle; it didn't make any difference.
"When I helped my brothers run wild horses one of my jobs was to wait near the trap and when the horse went in the corral I was supposed to ride up, jump off my horse and close the gate. I was usually riding Brownie and I had to sit on him all day long. If I got off of him the moment I started to get back on him he knew something was up and he'd start fussing around and I wouldn't be able to get my foot in the stirrup.
"Other times they had me out in front on Dixie. God that horse could run. I couldn't slow her down. She'd take the bit in her mouth and go.
"One time my mom's gentle black mare, Sally, got loose and started running with a band of wild horses so Sonny and I decided to go catch her. I was on Dixie and Sonny was riding a twelve-year-old full sister of Dixie's he was trying to break. Sonny's horse would never stop bucking. He'd get her halfway up a hillside and she'd buck all the way back down to the creek. We spotted the band so Sonny sent me up on Burnt Mountain to hold them. Sonny caught up with me there and then the band took off and I followed them over Burnt Mountain and across the side of Donivan Mountain. The horses ran across rock slides on a steep slope and Dixie would just jump them. The horses ran through Mountain Mahogany patches and Dixie ran right through them without slowing down. I followed the horses across Donivan Mountain and then brought them back across it to Delles Creek and got them headed down Delles Creek and into our corral at our place. My shirt was in strings, my pants torn. My mom got her horse back and I got some new clothes. Sonny never helped at all.
"My kids took me out to Murderer's Creek a few years ago and asked me what the country looked like back then. I told them I couldn't remember: I never looked at the country because we were always going too fast. It was all open range back then and now there's all kinds of roads and fences. Besides, it was when I was sixteen - that was 70 years ago.
"Snow Mountain Frenchy was the name we gave to a stud on Snow Mountain. We named him that because he had a dished face like a breed of horses called French Cooks and he stayed on Snow Mountain. We had a hard time catching him because in dry weather whenever we chased him he'd go across rocky areas and we'd lose his tracks. One winter when there was snow on the ground we cut his tracks and followed him down to the South Fork. Snow Mountain Frenchy headed back up the South Fork with us behind him and he went past Trowbridges old place and along between there and Fat Belshaw's place (now the IZ ranch) he jumped a four-wire fence from the road into the hay meadows. I think that stud must have thought he'd lost us but he didn't know my brothers: They gave their own horses the spurs and went right over that barbed wire fence behind him and I followed them on my horse.
"The river had risen earlier in the winter and flooded the meadows and then frozen. It was just a sheet of ice. Snow Mountain Frenchy went out there about thirty yards and his feet just went out from under him. Our horses had corked shoes and before Frenchy even fell my brothers were making loops. They roped him and led him home.
"Up at our place there was an old log barn with no roof on it. We put Frenchy in the barn for the winter and every day my Mom would take feed and water to him and that gentled him. We cut him and Hank broke him the next spring and he turned into a pretty good horse."
Mike Keerins remembers his dad, Bonham, telling about the Browns and the way they rode horses. "You'd be out on some steep, rocky hillside," Bonham told Mike, "steep enough that you'd be leading your own horse and here'd come one of the Brown boys: dead run, slack reins, one hand in the air for balance and spurs to it."
With all of the wild horses that the Brown boys gathered and tried to break they ended up with a string of rough stock that they would provide to rodeos. In 1935 they got the contract to provide the bucking horses for the Prairie City Roundup and the John Day rodeo.
" 'Wild horses' we called them," Chris said. "They were genuine enough - right off of Snow Mountain and Murderer's Creek. We put together a string of 25 horses. It was 75 miles from our house to Prairie City. We'd got over in one day. Leave Corral Creek about five or six in the morning. Harry and me would be out in front, Sonny and Hank on each side and Bill always bringing up the rear. The horses wouldn't try to escape, we had them pretty well gentled down, at least as far as being herded. We would trot, gallop and walk and be in Prairie City by six in the evening.
"They would select the queen of the Prairie City Roundup at the dance the night before the rodeo started. It was just a vote by everyone at the dance. It wasn't fair really. Before the vote my brothers wandered around the room and told the rodeo riders that if they voted for me as queen that there'd be a real good chance they'd get a good, high-scoring horse to ride the next day in the rodeo. When they called out the names of the girls there was a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' when they called my name and none of the other girls even came close.
"As queen I would ride Sonny's palomino - he'd been a wild colt that lost his mom and followed Sonny into camp when they were gathering wild horses - and when I rode past the grandstand I'd rein him up sharp-like, just pulled him up, you know, the way they do, and that palomino would just rear right up on his hind feet a couple of times. Sonny had trained him to do that. It was like Roy Rogers done but of course this was years before Roy Rogers ever did it.
"Most of the time I sat in the grandstand until I rode in the races. In the women's horse race I ran on another of Sonny's horses named 'Dixie'. Almost lapped one of the other girls.
"Each night there'd be a dance. It seemed like we danced from eight in the evening until eight in the morning and then go to the rodeo all the next day.
"One bucking horse we had we'd gotten from Joseph Keerins cause he couldn't ride him. Hank and I could ride him. Heck, I even packed a deer on him. But with anyone else he would buck so we decided to buck him in the John Day rodeo and nobody could ride him. Then Sonny used him in the cow cutting contest and won it on him. Joseph Keerins had called him Unparel but we just called him Old Buck. He was an ugly horse: big old rawboned thing. Never did get fat, pin ears, little beady 'hog' eyes, but he could sure buck when he wanted to.
"The week after we got Old Buck home from the fair we had some hunters up and were guiding them. I was saddling horses in the morning and I had Buck saddled and was saddling the other horses when this hunter comes out and says 'that's the horse for me' and climbs on Old Buck. I turn around and say, 'you know that last week that horse bucked off every cowboy at the John Day rodeo?' You never saw a man get off a horse so fast in your life."
"In the fall of the year my brothers and I would pool together our extra cash that we'd made from haying, rodeos, wild horses and such. We could put together a $100 or so and we'd go to Burns and with that $100 we'd buy all of our groceries for the coming year to last until the next fall. We buy it at Safeway, a Mr. Tiller ran the store, and he'd bring everything out in a van when he came up to go hunting. We lived on beans, potatoes, prunes, raisins, sourdough biscuits, coffee and sugar. We had all the deer and beef we ever needed. Sonny got a barrel of apples one year when he worked at the Oxbow.
"Anyway, we'd buy a year's worth of food with that $100 and have enough left over to buy us each some clothes as well.
"My mother was quite a cook. We always had a few dairy cows and with the staples we bought and the meat we got we always ate well. I loved her cinnamon rolls. She never measured anything and as a result neither do I. Although I've never been able to make good biscuits since I left Izee. My mom always used sourdough and used it for years. Always added warm milk to it in the eve after we'd strained it and she would use her sourdough two or three times a day. When we traveled she would always have a jug of sourdough with her on the wagon."
"My brothers always did things together. They never fought or argued. If you seen one, you seen 'em all. They were all friendly but Harry was the happy-go-luckiest of the four and he loved to tease me.
"After I married Homer in 1937 the boys started to go their separate ways, too. Harry went to war and fought in Italy. Bill married and went to California. Sonny went to work on the dredge down on the John Day River and eventually went back to Izee and took over the payments on the place until he sold it to a man by the name of Bush who owned the IZ ranch. Sonny managed the IZ ranch for a few years and then he moved to Burns.
1930 US Federal Census, District 22, Rosebud, Grant, Oregon:
Henry Brown, Lodger, age 22, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, occupation: laborer on a stock ranch.
Emma D. Brown, Head, age 56, married, born in California, father born in Kentucky, mother born in Oregon, occupation: none;
William E. Brown, Son, age 26, single, born in California, father born in Tennessee, mother born in California, farmer on a horse ranch;
George E. Brown, Son, age 19, single, born in California, occupation: laborer on a horse ranch;
Harry R. Brown, Son, age 17, single, born in Oregon, occupation: none;
Julia C. Brown, Daughter, age 14, born in Oregon, occupation: none.
Izee rodeo queen chases wild horses
by Jack Southworth
Eagle Writer
Blue Mountain Eagle, John Day, Grant, Oregon
August 30, 2006
Chris Brown Barry remembers family life and a stud named Snow Mountain Frenchy.
There's open range and then there's the way the Browns rode it: Wide-open range. Chris Brown and her brothers - Bill, Harry, Hank and Sonny - ran wild horses throughout Izee and Murderer's Creek in the late 1920s and 1930s.
The Brown's place on Corral Creek was never big enough to support the family on its own. To make their way, the boys - and Chris at times - had to work for other ranches. They would build fence, put up hay, break horses, buckaroo, herd sheep, whatever was available. In the summer the boys would often go to ranches around Burns and Diamond and help put up hay and then come back to Izee in the late summer and fall and help put up hay there. Late fall and winter would have them chasing wild horses - sometimes on a Forest Service contract and other times to catch and sell on their own, usually at the shipping yards at the railroad in Burns.
Chris would stay in the Izee country. She and her mother, Emma, would raise a crop of rye that the boys would help harvest when they got home from the Diamond area. When she wasn't working at her family's place, she was working for the other ranches in the area.
"I started working in the hayfields when I was nine-years-old," Chris said. "Worked for Harrisons, Borg, Officers, and Keerins. I had my own team so I got paid $3 per day. Usually pulled a rake. One month I earned $60 from Joe Officer and I couldn't imagine what I'd do with that much money. My brothers usually stacked hay and they also got $3 per day. Other men who operated the ranch's team and equipment just got a $1.50 per day.
"Running wild horses was our primary income. The first year I was in school the boys got a 100 head of slick ears (unbranded horses) out of Murderer's Creek. They caught them in a corral on Trail Ridge. We would run the horses in the late fall, winter and spring. We would round up the horses we had caught in the spring and take them to Burns to sell.
"One spring we were taking the horses out past Whiskey Mountain and through the hills to Burns. On one side of Whiskey Mountain there was a flat with service berry bushes. There was a bear in the bushes and we ran the horse right past him and it never scared him. My brothers roped the bear and carried him on the saddle on Brownie. We were going to take the bear - it was just a cub - to Burns and turn him loose in the downtown but he died before we got there.
"Brownie was one of Carson's old horses that Chris Borg had bought and hired my brothers to gather. If Brownie got lazy all you'd have to do is break off a stick from a willow or a pine and then he'd be a whole different horse. You could ride him with a halter, hackamore or bridle; it didn't make any difference.
"When I helped my brothers run wild horses one of my jobs was to wait near the trap and when the horse went in the corral I was supposed to ride up, jump off my horse and close the gate. I was usually riding Brownie and I had to sit on him all day long. If I got off of him the moment I started to get back on him he knew something was up and he'd start fussing around and I wouldn't be able to get my foot in the stirrup.
"Other times they had me out in front on Dixie. God that horse could run. I couldn't slow her down. She'd take the bit in her mouth and go.
"One time my mom's gentle black mare, Sally, got loose and started running with a band of wild horses so Sonny and I decided to go catch her. I was on Dixie and Sonny was riding a twelve-year-old full sister of Dixie's he was trying to break. Sonny's horse would never stop bucking. He'd get her halfway up a hillside and she'd buck all the way back down to the creek. We spotted the band so Sonny sent me up on Burnt Mountain to hold them. Sonny caught up with me there and then the band took off and I followed them over Burnt Mountain and across the side of Donivan Mountain. The horses ran across rock slides on a steep slope and Dixie would just jump them. The horses ran through Mountain Mahogany patches and Dixie ran right through them without slowing down. I followed the horses across Donivan Mountain and then brought them back across it to Delles Creek and got them headed down Delles Creek and into our corral at our place. My shirt was in strings, my pants torn. My mom got her horse back and I got some new clothes. Sonny never helped at all.
"My kids took me out to Murderer's Creek a few years ago and asked me what the country looked like back then. I told them I couldn't remember: I never looked at the country because we were always going too fast. It was all open range back then and now there's all kinds of roads and fences. Besides, it was when I was sixteen - that was 70 years ago.
"Snow Mountain Frenchy was the name we gave to a stud on Snow Mountain. We named him that because he had a dished face like a breed of horses called French Cooks and he stayed on Snow Mountain. We had a hard time catching him because in dry weather whenever we chased him he'd go across rocky areas and we'd lose his tracks. One winter when there was snow on the ground we cut his tracks and followed him down to the South Fork. Snow Mountain Frenchy headed back up the South Fork with us behind him and he went past Trowbridges old place and along between there and Fat Belshaw's place (now the IZ ranch) he jumped a four-wire fence from the road into the hay meadows. I think that stud must have thought he'd lost us but he didn't know my brothers: They gave their own horses the spurs and went right over that barbed wire fence behind him and I followed them on my horse.
"The river had risen earlier in the winter and flooded the meadows and then frozen. It was just a sheet of ice. Snow Mountain Frenchy went out there about thirty yards and his feet just went out from under him. Our horses had corked shoes and before Frenchy even fell my brothers were making loops. They roped him and led him home.
"Up at our place there was an old log barn with no roof on it. We put Frenchy in the barn for the winter and every day my Mom would take feed and water to him and that gentled him. We cut him and Hank broke him the next spring and he turned into a pretty good horse."
Mike Keerins remembers his dad, Bonham, telling about the Browns and the way they rode horses. "You'd be out on some steep, rocky hillside," Bonham told Mike, "steep enough that you'd be leading your own horse and here'd come one of the Brown boys: dead run, slack reins, one hand in the air for balance and spurs to it."
With all of the wild horses that the Brown boys gathered and tried to break they ended up with a string of rough stock that they would provide to rodeos. In 1935 they got the contract to provide the bucking horses for the Prairie City Roundup and the John Day rodeo.
" 'Wild horses' we called them," Chris said. "They were genuine enough - right off of Snow Mountain and Murderer's Creek. We put together a string of 25 horses. It was 75 miles from our house to Prairie City. We'd got over in one day. Leave Corral Creek about five or six in the morning. Harry and me would be out in front, Sonny and Hank on each side and Bill always bringing up the rear. The horses wouldn't try to escape, we had them pretty well gentled down, at least as far as being herded. We would trot, gallop and walk and be in Prairie City by six in the evening.
"They would select the queen of the Prairie City Roundup at the dance the night before the rodeo started. It was just a vote by everyone at the dance. It wasn't fair really. Before the vote my brothers wandered around the room and told the rodeo riders that if they voted for me as queen that there'd be a real good chance they'd get a good, high-scoring horse to ride the next day in the rodeo. When they called out the names of the girls there was a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' when they called my name and none of the other girls even came close.
"As queen I would ride Sonny's palomino - he'd been a wild colt that lost his mom and followed Sonny into camp when they were gathering wild horses - and when I rode past the grandstand I'd rein him up sharp-like, just pulled him up, you know, the way they do, and that palomino would just rear right up on his hind feet a couple of times. Sonny had trained him to do that. It was like Roy Rogers done but of course this was years before Roy Rogers ever did it.
"Most of the time I sat in the grandstand until I rode in the races. In the women's horse race I ran on another of Sonny's horses named 'Dixie'. Almost lapped one of the other girls.
"Each night there'd be a dance. It seemed like we danced from eight in the evening until eight in the morning and then go to the rodeo all the next day.
"One bucking horse we had we'd gotten from Joseph Keerins cause he couldn't ride him. Hank and I could ride him. Heck, I even packed a deer on him. But with anyone else he would buck so we decided to buck him in the John Day rodeo and nobody could ride him. Then Sonny used him in the cow cutting contest and won it on him. Joseph Keerins had called him Unparel but we just called him Old Buck. He was an ugly horse: big old rawboned thing. Never did get fat, pin ears, little beady 'hog' eyes, but he could sure buck when he wanted to.
"The week after we got Old Buck home from the fair we had some hunters up and were guiding them. I was saddling horses in the morning and I had Buck saddled and was saddling the other horses when this hunter comes out and says 'that's the horse for me' and climbs on Old Buck. I turn around and say, 'you know that last week that horse bucked off every cowboy at the John Day rodeo?' You never saw a man get off a horse so fast in your life."
"In the fall of the year my brothers and I would pool together our extra cash that we'd made from haying, rodeos, wild horses and such. We could put together a $100 or so and we'd go to Burns and with that $100 we'd buy all of our groceries for the coming year to last until the next fall. We buy it at Safeway, a Mr. Tiller ran the store, and he'd bring everything out in a van when he came up to go hunting. We lived on beans, potatoes, prunes, raisins, sourdough biscuits, coffee and sugar. We had all the deer and beef we ever needed. Sonny got a barrel of apples one year when he worked at the Oxbow.
"Anyway, we'd buy a year's worth of food with that $100 and have enough left over to buy us each some clothes as well.
"My mother was quite a cook. We always had a few dairy cows and with the staples we bought and the meat we got we always ate well. I loved her cinnamon rolls. She never measured anything and as a result neither do I. Although I've never been able to make good biscuits since I left Izee. My mom always used sourdough and used it for years. Always added warm milk to it in the eve after we'd strained it and she would use her sourdough two or three times a day. When we traveled she would always have a jug of sourdough with her on the wagon."
"My brothers always did things together. They never fought or argued. If you seen one, you seen 'em all. They were all friendly but Harry was the happy-go-luckiest of the four and he loved to tease me.
"After I married Homer in 1937 the boys started to go their separate ways, too. Harry went to war and fought in Italy. Bill married and went to California. Sonny went to work on the dredge down on the John Day River and eventually went back to Izee and took over the payments on the place until he sold it to a man by the name of Bush who owned the IZ ranch. Sonny managed the IZ ranch for a few years and then he moved to Burns.
Inscription
"Mother"
Gravesite Details
With her husband, Homer W. Barry
Family Members
Spouse
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
