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Starting from Scratch: The Adventures of a Lady Dude Rancher
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| Alice & Ken Gleason at the Circle 8 in 1948 |
In the spring of 1930, newlyweds Alice and Kenneth Gleason arrived at the Gleason family’s abandoned homestead on the South Fork of the Teton River. The Great Depression bearing down, they had only a few hundred dollars in their pockets, but much grit and determination with which to turn a rat-infested hunter’s cabin into a dude ranch.
Over the years, the plucky couple, without aid of plumbing, electricity or much help, created a successful guest ranch operation called the Circle 8, which lured some guests back year after year to the wild country of the Rocky Mountain Front.
Alice Gleason recorded the stories of those years, and the best of them have been published in a book titled Starting from Scratch: The Adventures of a Lady Dude Rancher.
Some of Alice’s stories are "especially significant because they give us an immediate impression of the adventure and hardship of homesteading, something we can’t experience ourselves today," says Genny Barhaugh, who lives at the old Circle 8, and who found Alice’s manuscripts after she died in 1997.
The project was a labor of love for Genny, who, along with Carol Guthrie, a long-time friend of the Gleasons, compiled and edited the book.
"I felt an emotional need to do this, to let people know about the history of this place," says Genny, whose husband Lee manages the former Circle 8, now the Pine Butte Guest Ranch, for The Nature Conservancy.
"I look around as I work through the day at the ranch where Alice and Ken came over 60 years ago . . . . It is a place carved out by their hands and their tenacious and loving spirits," Genny writes in the book preface.
One chapter, called "Fire in the Mountains!" hit home for Genny when she re-read it after summer fires in 2000 that burned about 1,980 acres on the Pine Butte Preserve and surrounding lands.
Just as Alice had guests to worry about when fire threatened the ranch in 1940, so too did ranch staff during the fire of 2000.
In the chapter’s introduction, Genny comments: "Anyone in the West who lives close to mountain wilderness lives with some fear of fire . . . The destructive power of fire is truly horrifying. Those who witness it once are forever humbled."
"Having just gone through a close, personal encounter with the dangers of fire, I felt those words even more strongly than before I wrote them," she says.
Another of Genny’s favorite sections in the book describes the Gleasons’ purchase of a Tennessee Walking Horse stallion in order to breed ideal horses for mountain trail use. In 1938, Alice and Kenneth drove to Lewisberg, Tennessee to purchase "Colonel Allen.
"This was the first Tennessee Walker brought to this part of the country," says Genny, "and it demonstrated their clear vision of what is needed in a good mountain horse."
From mountain trail adventures, to blizzards, to floods that wiped out the Circle 8, a wide range of high adventures challenged the Gleasons during their years at the Circle 8 Ranch.
Starting from Scratch . . . is a must read for anyone who appreciates entertaining stories about life in the Rocky Mountain West. For information about ordering the book, email Pine Butte Guest Ranch or call 406-466-2158.
