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When he was about five years old, he went to Salt Lake City with his father to visit a man named Burbidge, who had lived in Kamas and had a unique system for training horses. These horses were so well trained that all a man did was pull a rope which rang a bell, and all the horses would run under their harness-es. Then all they had to do was to drop the harnesses down on them.
When he was five or six years old, his dad taught him how to milk cows, and about age six he learned how to drive a team of horses. It is little wonder that he became a skilled craftsman with a team of horses. As far as we can determine, no one who knew him ever claimed that another man was a better hand with a team.
When Ralph was ten years of age, his father was killed, leaving his mother with a large family of small children, a considerable number of cattle and a farm to operate. During that same year, his oldest brother, Willie, was drafted into the war, leaving Ralph and his younger brother, Rob, as the oldest children liv-ing on the place to assist their mother with the work. In the wintertime, they used to get out of bed at four o'clock a.m., milk cows, haul two loads of hay, and then go to school. Ralph says that his mother used to take the pitchforks into the house and warm them at night. After they got the cows milked in the morning, they would go out and harness a team. They had some hooks on the back of the barn to hang the harnesses on. He would boost Rob up on the horses and then hand him the collar. Rob would sit on the top of the horse and buckle the collar. Then he would hand him the harness, and he would take the hame down the far side of the horse and pull the harness over with him as he went down. Then they would finish buckling the harness. Quite often it was twenty below zero, and all they had was an old oil lantern which they used for warmth and to see by as they harnessed the horses, hauled the hay and took care of the milking.
After hauling two loads of hay, they would pull the sleigh up against the haystack. While they were gone to school, their mother would fill the hayrack full of hay. When they returned home they would haul a load of hay to the cat-tle on the river bottoms, load another load and unload it, then return home and milk the cows, do their chores and go to bed. They had an old bay mare called Clyde, which they used to drive to school. They would hook her on a cutter and head for school with their heads covered to keep warm. During the winter there would be three or four feet of snow in the fields, and it would be below zero. On Saturdays and Sundays they had to clean the barns. Ralph says he never knew what it was to have a day off. He had to work every day.
Ralph’s mother used to build a fire in the stove in the morning when they would go out to milk. She would put flatirons on the top of them hot. She would wrap them in gunny sacks, and when they went to get the hay they would use that for heat to keep warm.
In 1919, his older brother, Willie, came home from the service and helped them on the farm through 1919, 1920 and 1921. Then he went to work. During one of those years, they had a severe winter. They did not have enough hay to feed the cattle. Ralph remembers his mother putting him on a horse and sending him over to a neighbor's to buy two tons of hay. He said the neighbor would not sell him two tons of hay, even though he had a big stack which was there not only that winter, but all the next summer. During that winter they would go down to the river bottoms, cut down cottonwood trees and bring home large bran-ches and limbs for the cattle to eat. The cattle would stand and eat branches as big as a man's thumb and would eat the bark off the tree limbs. During that winter they lost about 40 head of cattle from starvation.
During the winter of 1923, he remembers their home burning. He said when his mother got up about 5:00 or 5:30 that morning, all of the kitchen was on fire. All of the family was there, and his Uncle Lloyd Coe and his kids were there. Ralph said, "Oh, it was cold, I'll tell you, and the snow was about four feet, three or four feet deep. That's the way the snow was every winter up there. . . They never had time to get on their clothes, and some of them never even had their shoes or socks on. They had their nightgowns on, and that 'S about all. And here the house was on fire. .. Rob and I packed all the furni-ture out of the two bedrooms and the living room. All the pictures off the wall, all the bedding out. We never thought to break a window out. I guess we just didn't want to break the window. So we dragged all of the furniture through the living room and out to the back porch."
About that time the place was rented, and for several years the family lived off the farm. Ralph went with his brother, Clinton, to Mount Pleasant, Utah, where he worked for a dollar and two dollars a day. He said he received two dollars for a week of thinning beets.
After a while the job in Mount Pleasant ended, and they had another job they were waiting to start. While they were waiting, they ran out of money. They did not have enough money to get home, and he remembers going into gardens at night and getting something to eat -- some carrots and radishes, a few tur-nips and a few peas. He says he got pretty hungry. From then on, whenever he had a job and earned a dollar, he saved it, or saved part of it. So when he was out of work, he had some money.
During 1923 and 1924, Ralph worked for the forest service clearing trails, hauling supplies and fighting forest fires. Part of that time his brother, Rob, worked with him. They would go down the trails cutting out the trees and clearing the trail, and camp when night came, and then get up the next morning and continue on. One winter he had to haul a load of supplies up Weber Canyon just above Smith and Morehouse. It took him all day to get over Moffitt Pass. He tells of having two teams, taking one team and going forward and breaking through the snow, and coming back and letting the other bring the wagon forward to the point, and then unhooking the team and going forward again throughout the day. He had this job when he was sixteen and seventeen years old.
In 1926, Ralph told his mother that the family was moving back on the place. On the 26th day of March, 1926, they moved back on the old place. They did not have any cattle left and only two or three horses and three or four milk cows. The home had not been rebuilt on the place, so for that summer they lived in a tent and an old shack that had been built over the top of the cellar. He says, "We made out all right."
In 1927, he bought a new Chevrolet automobile and began making payments of $25 per month. That fall he went to work in the mines at Park City, Utah, where he made sufficient to make his car payments and pay some payments ahead. In 1926, in the fall of the year, they went up to Woodland and bought a house and moved it down to the homestead. There were about thirty teams used to pull the house up the dugway by Rex Gines and down through Ike Fitzgerald's field. According to Ralph, everybody in the valley came out to help move the home, and they were mighty tickled to have it. They moved right into it and thought they were doing all right when they had a house to live in.
Starting in 1921 and for several years thereafter, Ralph and Rob and some of the other members of the family went up into the hills during the winter to log. They would skid the logs out to the road and haul them out. For this they were paid $15 per thousand log feet. He tells of one occasion when he crossed over Wolf Creek Pass during the winter and could touch the telephone wires from his horse. All he had on was a coat, a shirt and a pair of overalls. During the summers of 1927, 1928 and 1929, they did a lot of custom haying. In 1928, they put up hay for Leslie Moon -- about 100 or 150 tons. Ralph and Rob contracted to put up the hay and hired Nile and Oliver Dugdale and Dana Froughten to drive the horses. In 1929, they put up over 1,000 tons of hay at Stewart Ranch, in addition to farming 100 acres of their own.
In 1930, he went to work for Bill Judd, herding sheep. While employed there, he went up the canyon to get a load of poles to build a corral. While coming down the hill, the wagon overturned, pinning him underneath. He was un-derneath the load from about 4:00 in the afternoon until about 11:00 p.m., when George Green, who was working with him, came to free him. George told him he had gone to bed and tried to go to sleep, but he could not. He knew there was something wrong, and finally he saddled his horse and came looking for him. Ralph's legs were swollen so big that he could not walk.
In 1933, Ralph married Agnes Lorna Sessions from Heber City, Utah, and they became the parents of seven children: Ralph Junior, Gerald L. (Jerry), Boyd, Donna Rae, Russell, Karen and Melvin. In 1941, their home in Woodland burned, and their son, Melvin, was killed in the fire. Donna Rae, who was then too young to go to school, saved her brother Russell from the fire. Ralph was away at the time getting a load of hay when he saw the fire. Lorna was out at the chicken coop gathering eggs, and neither of them was able to get to the house in time. Lorna was seriously burned trying to get into the house to save the baby.
In 1942, Ralph bought the farm known as the Richards place up on the hill, and in 1943, quit working at the new Park mine and moved up onto the Richards place. He began buying and selling cattle, and by 1946, from the money he made trading cattle, had the Richards place paid for. He lived on the Richards place until 1951. When he first moved there he was harvesting about 15 tons of hay a year; when he left, over 100 tons. He was a good husbandman, always improving the property; always increasing the yield. His attitude was that if you ever expected to get anything out of a farm or a cow or a horse, you had to put some-thing into it to make it pay for itself. He always worked from before daylight until well after dark.
During these years on the Richard place, and to some extent before then, he had a strong interest in horse-pulling contests. He had a team of horses named Old Bill and Coon, a bay mare and a black horse that he pulled mostly at county fairs. He tells of Old Bill and Coon being the first team of horses in Summit County to pull more than their own weight the full distance on the pulling meter. It was always his feeling that this team was too light, since they only weighed about 1200 pounds apiece.
About 1944 or 1945, he bought a horse from Ralph Prescott, and another from Tom MacNeil. Some time shortly thereafter, a man named Elmer Wilson came out and traded him 27 head of calves and a team named Duke and Dock for these two horses. Duke weighed about 1350 pounds, and Dock about 1500. In 1946, he won the state horse pulling championship. His philosophy on training horses was simple. "I used to take my horses and feed them. I didn't whip them. I didn't train them by pulling them, by pulling their guts out day after day. .I fed them. You can't whip a horse to make him pull."
Ralph says, "In l947 I lost the state championship to a guy from Idaho. It was Old Duke and Dock. They shot firecrackers until they got so nervous that I couldn't even hook them up. ...Then I kept trying to get better teams."
Finally Ralph bought a horse named Pearl, and then a horse named Babe. And, as he stated, "That team was never out-pulled." They won almost every pulling match that they were ever in. The year he got them he won the Spanish Fork show, the Richmond show and the State Fair. Ralph said, "I learned through the years that you can't whip a horse to make him pull. I'd seen some of them take them and beat them for hours at a time. I'd feed them. I fed old Duke and Dock and Babe and Pearl as high as nine gallons of grain apiece per day." Sometimes the grain boxes would never be open. The kids helped drive the horses to train them. They were never allowed to lick them. "In 1951, I was never beaten in the state of Utah. I won every pulling match that I pulled in."
"In 1949, I won the State Fair. In 1950, I won the State Fair. I think it was in 1950 that I won the middle-weight and light-weight with three head of hor-ses. I had old Babe and Pearl and won the light-weight, and the next day I took old Prince of Clinton’s and old Babe back down and won the middle-weight. It was the only time in the state that I ever knew that three head of horses won the light-weight and the middle-weight. One year in Coalville, I won all three weights, the light-weight, the middle-weight and the heavy-weight. They gave me the best skinner's prize for being the best skinner there. When I got up on a team of horses and started to pull them, +hey knew what they were up against."
Ralph pulled several times in the Idaho State Fair, losing the championship on one occasion by a mere three inches That same year he won the Utah State Fair in the light-weight division, and his brother, Nile, took second place in the heavy-weight. He pulled in the State Fair against as many as 27 teams in the light-weight division and came out on top. One time he tells of a friend who was betting twenty dollars against five dollars to anyone who would bet. He had that much confidence in Ralph's teams. One year at the State Fair, only four teams pulled the last weight more than four feet. One pulled it four feet and a few inches, another seven feet four inches. Then Orson Lewis hooked on and pulled it eight feet four inches. On a second try, Ralph pulled it nine feet four inches to win the match. He later stated, "That was the worst pulling match, I believe, that I ever got into in the State of Utah."
All his life, Ralph has been a leader in all the things which he has done. He just seemed to have the ability to figure out what needed to be done and to direct other people in getting the job accomplished. Even though he was not the oldest member of his family, he seemed to be the one looked that all of the brothers to for guidance. He had a knack for farming. He understood animals and could pick the best quality cow or horse from any herd.
In 1951, when he sold his farm, he moved to Provo, Utah, and began working at Geneva Steel Company. After a few years he became dissatisfied and went out on his own and began carpentry work. Even during his period of time on the farm he had built barns for people all over the valley. He built a new milk barn with the elevated style, the first one in the valley. He never used a blue print. He did not need the architect or engineer. He could simply look at what a person wanted, conceive in his mind what it was to look like, and begin building. He obtained his carpenter's license, and at one time a sub-contractor's license. He spent over twenty-five years in the construction business.
On one occasion he was building 8-plexes for a company in Salt Lake City. The company brought a crew of six or eight men from California to show how to frame these 8-plexes together in the shortest time. When they finished, Ralph said be would see what he could do, and took his four-man crew and framed out a unit, in one day and a half less than what the expert crew had done, showing how they did it in California. Ralph worked with his nephew, Harvey, and with his son, Russell, doing framing work. They could frame out a full size house in three and one-half days. On this type of work or any other work that he did, Ralph never wasted a motion. At the same time he would not allow any of those who worked on the job with him to waste their time or cheat their employer. On one occasion his son, Junior, straightened up to reach into a nail apron to pull out a handful of nails, and he said, "What's the matter now?" This was his attitude. When he worked he worked hard. There was no time for looking back, or to stop and think about the problems that one might have.
Ralph has lived in Orem, Utah, since 1955, and even now at the age of 71, he does not like the thought of retirement. He hauls dozens of loads of logs of wood during the summer, saws it up and uses it to heat his place during the winter. He is always building a house for a son or a daughter or a neighbor or a friend, or is adding on a room or is building a garage or is involved in some other project which keeps him busy. Scores and scores of his relatives and friends have used his expert knowledge in building a home or making their present home more comfortable. Many times he has spent days and days and weeks on such a project and refused to accept payment when the job is done. If he thought a person could afford to pay, he was willing to take something for his wages. Otherwise, he was willing to do it just for the asking.
No one ever doubted where he stood. He was rough-spoken and always got right to the point. However, people who knew him never minded this, since they knew that his talents and abilities were a great blessing to all of them.