Cactus's Place

Laura, Jimmy McDade, Mallory Smyth, Dad (Bud Smyth)

Blayde, Drake and Valin with a horny toad.

Looking out from Cactus's grave site, at the valley below. His homestead was just this side of the group of trees on the right side. A fire had come through a few years back, and all that remains are burned remnants of what once was.

Jimmy McDade, Tamer, Blayde, Dad, Drake, Mallory & Valin

We came out to see Cactus’s old home where he was working horses when I met him twenty-five years ago. Of course, the house is gone, and Cactus has moved on to the great range beyond age, but it was a completing experience nonetheless. While we were there, Blayde found an old soda bottle capper buried in the dirt. He placed it on Cactus’s grave , so that he would always have a root beer handy.

You see, Blayde had heard the stories of how Dad and co. would go down to the bottling works as boys and drink the bottles that did not cap right. Sometimes, they would “fix” the cappers so that they would work less often than otherwise, thereby assuring an ample supply of free soda! This particular capper had been “fixed” as well, it looked like it would probably unseal many bottles when the lever was released. How it got here, to Cactus’s ranch, remains a mystery, but now it has found its purpose. When we had visited the relatives in Burns, it was explained to me like this.... Cactus's brother and sister (Bobby & Carol) told me that their (Cactus's) parents had at one point owned a bottling company in Burns where these events transpired.

We went to Andrews (Johnnie a.k.a. Cactus lived in Andrews) with Jimmy, our oldest living relative (born 1907) and got to hear many old stories from the past century. He spoke of the good old days, and I picked his brain a bit on ranching. Thank you, Jimmy!

I also had the occasion to meet a most interesting fellow, with the distinction of having flown the most combat missions in B-29's in WWII, and being the only person to have been court marshalled for flying a B29 in inverted flight. It was later found that since the G-forces remained positive throughout the loop that the aircraft was not, in fact, flown in inverted flight, so he was not too harshly penalized. He was notorious throughout the command, however, and was a peer and friend of Doolittle and many of the other famous flyers of WWII. He relates a story about the Enola Gay, and has serious doubts based on his own witness regarding whether the Enola Gay left from the base that it is said to have left in the historical record, or from another base entirely. Hmm....

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