Christmas Eve, 2015, on the Montana Hi-Line, somewhere near Glasgow, in a one-room school called Willow Bend. Miss Miller had prepared her pupils well, and the local correspondent declared their program “a success.” Then there was the ringer: a quartet of bachelor homesteaders, the Willow Creek Quartette, comprising Will Lloyd, bass; Raymond Sullivan, baritone; James Lloyd, tenor; and L. O. Carter. Lorenzo Otis Carter, that is. The absence of a part-designation with his listing indicates he was the lead singer.
And what did the Willow Creek Quartette sing? Country correspondents in those days gave full coverage to local school events, and so the Glasgow Courier printed full text, but no title.
Oh, the hinges are of leather and the windows have no glass
And the dirt roof lets the howling blizzard in
We can see the hungry bachelor acoming down the trail
For his supper in our cabin on the claim
I know this song, it’s the anthem of the plains, “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” a song that originated in 1881 in Smith County, Kansas. The original text was by a printer, Frank E. Jerome. It circulated, to find new life in many settler localities, especially in the Jim River valley of Dakota Territory. The song returned to Kansas, from which it erupted to anywhere on the plains the settler, sod-house experience transpired.
Including Montana, 1915. And the song underwent localization and imaginative adaptation.In this case, the traditional “hungry coyote” lurking around the shack becomes a “hungry bachelor.” But the ballad tradition on plains goes beyond just tinkering with folk poetry. It also includes bachelor homesteaders able to generate and sing four-part harmony on a song for which no sheet music existed. This is exponential folklife.
The linchpin of the ensemble was Carter, a widower with two boys holding down a claim (which he would prove up in 1916) and earning a press reputation as “one of the most prominent farmers in the Willow Bend district.” He was in the papers a lot: clearing rock from his claim, hiring a steam rig for breaking, stacking hay, hauling wood, taking off heavy crops of wheat and flax. And making himself beloved by good works. For instance, in May 1915 the local physician, Dr. Pease, was in a dither how to replace his barn, which had burned, when there appeared in his farmyard a convoy of eight men and teams assembled from all directions, their wagon-frames burdened with enough logs for a new barn. There was Carter among them.
He was, in popular estimation, something of a ladies man, too. He was mentioned in association with a previous schoolteacher, and at the time of the quartet’s debut, he was known to be chauffeuring Miss Miller to the schoolhouse along with his boys.
Just before Christmas 1915 the Lloyd boys got up a rabbit hunt involving Carter and about forty men, with an oyster feed following. They took home rabbits for home consumption, leading to the opening lines of the quartet’s ballad:
We’re happy as a clam on our claim from Uncle Sam
Though the rabbit is not always fried the best
Well, I reckon not, because you can’t fry whitetail jackrabbit, you better stew it. Thus the men recognized the deficiency of women's skills in their homestead lives.
