Drought Breaking Rain
- May 7, 2025
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- Jan Swan Wood
Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
Several decades ago I was performing at a poetry and music gathering in southeastern Wyoming. A
woman approached me who was probably nearly 70 at the time. She asked me if I had any kinfolk by the
name of Swan from eastern Colorado. I told her that my family was from there and had moved to South
Dakota in 1949. She asked if a man named W.H.C. Swan was a relative and I told her he was my Grandad. She excitedly told me the following story.
In a terrible drought that was plaguing the southwest in the 1940s, her family’s ranch in New Mexico was down to the last of their cattle, as everything had been gradually dispersed as the drought hung on and on for several years. They had burned prickly pear to feed the cattle until even it was gone. Her Dad had put an ad in a Denver livestock paper to sell the last of their cattle, which were the very best of the yearling heifers they’d kept to start again with when it finally rained. They simply had no options left. A
man from Colorado answered the ad and said he’d be through their country buying cattle and after a brief conversation with directions to the remote ranch, they set a date that he’d be there.
When the man, Mr. Swan, got there it was afternoon and she remembered him and her Dad looking at the heifers, then sitting at the table visiting and making a deal on them. Mr. Swan wrote her Dad a check and her Dad folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket. Being it was late in the day and a long drive back to a town with a place to stay, her folks invited him to spend the night and leave in the morning, as was a common custom of the day.
Over supper, arrangements were made for the shipping of the heifers. It was agreed that her Dad would deliver them to the railroad stock pens at the closest railhead and ship them to Colorado. Her folks, though they were making the best of it, were sad to be shipping the last of their cattle and they were all
very discouraged and unsure of the future of the ranch.
In the night she was awakened by thunder and lightning. Then the rain came. The first rain in years. In the morning it was still raining. She remembered looking out through the screen door at her Dad and Mr. Swan standing on the covered porch with the rain running off the roof as they watched the rain coming down. The rain that would make the grass come again and gave hope for the future.
Mr. Swan looked over at her Dad and asked him if he still had that check in his pocket. He did. He asked to look at it. So her Dad got it out of his pocket handed it to him. She remembered clearly seeing it as Mr. Swan tore the check into little pieces and handed it back to her Dad. He said, “You’ll need those
heifers.” Her Dad, she recalled, grinned from ear to ear and shook Mr. Swan’s hand firmly.
Her family never forgot Mr. W.H.C. Swan and always thought with gratitude of what he’d done and how they’d rebuilt on the heifers he’d let them keep. I asked her if her family still ranched there and she
assured me that her nephews were still on the ranch and the cowherd was descended from those last
heifers that were saved by a rain and a cattle buyer with a good heart.
I’ve regretted not getting her name and more information, but in the crowd and with people around, it didn’t happen. That was back in the early 90s, and I hope that her family has hung on and kept going
after all these years.
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Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
About Jan Swan Wood
Jan was raised on a ranch in far western South Dakota. She grew up horseback working all descriptions of cattle, plus sheep and horses. After leaving home she pursued a post-graduate study of cowboying and dayworking in Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota....