The rest of the story.

 You know the story from last post? About walking around the pool with an dear old man, listening to his stories about his friend Johnny Walker? Well, in thinking about it, I began to wonder how a Scotch distiller wound up in the west in the early 1930s. Did he come here to start up an American branch of the family business? 

Prohibition ended in 1933. The business would have taken a while to build. Scotch whisky is aged, which would take some years. I have no doubt that it would have been a profitable enterprise but it would have taken a while to be generating the money required to run a ranch of the size that Mike so fondly described all those years later (circa early 1990s).

Down a rabbit hole I went.

Johnny Walker whisky is made only in Scotland was the first thing I discovered. 

More reading lead me to learn that there is no records of the distillery decendents trickling in to America. They were doing well in the family business and proud of their heritage. 

I was a bit dumbfounded. Mike was an old man, a stroke patient, and sometimes he could get confused and irrational if he was tired. Those moments were the exception to the rule. Or so I thought. 35 years later, I began to wonder. 

I typed in Walker Ranch, and up popped a pile of entries. There were several huge operations, but I think it is most likely the Walker ranch that is now an historical site. The business started out in lumber. The ranch grew in physical size and added cattle/beef production which allowed James Walker to pay off his debts and grow the ranch even more. Minerals were discovered, to include gold, and an English company came in to handle that part of the family business. 

At that point, I could see how the son of a man who owned a steel mill out east and a ranch owner's son from out west could cross paths in a private boarding school.

But...Mike's comment that 'the boys' would never make fun of how a boy's father made his money was, I guess, a general comment meant to not to say that Johnny (Johnnie) Walker was that Johnnie Walker. More, I guess that those children of privilege did not speak of their fathers' money and where it came from. 

So...that was an interesting detour.

We went up to make sausage with Levi and Mattie. That was great fun. We got there at 9:30. A whole hog, split in two halves lay on two large folding banquet tables. There had been a 2 hour school delay, so they'd already processed (and ground) the first hog. Mattie already had 18 jars of pork going on the biggest canner I have ever seen in my life. 

Levi separated the sides into three portions, front legs, back legs, and rib cage and everyone grabbed a knife and went to work. The meat cut from the bones was collected by Andy, who took it out to the grinder, and returned for more cuttings when he was done. In this way, we were finished with that part of things in no more than an hour. A neighbor had come over to shoot the breeze and it was a happy time.

280 pounds of meat was brought in and turned into sausage. The sausage stuffer was a hand crank, but it was efficient. As quickly as the basin filled with sausage, Reuben and Andy hung the ropes on six sturdy poles for the smokehouse.

It was a nice way to get a lot of work done in such a way that it did not seem like work at all. It was also amazing to watch 8 and 9 year olds wielding very sharp knives with such expertise.

We had a nice lunch of fresh sausage with fried onions and pie for dessert.

I came home and made cheese. It was something called 'Farmer Cheese'. It was not what I wanted. It is more like a cream cheese. I turned it into an herb cheese, and it is delicious on crackers. It was not a failed experiment, to be sure.

I also saved two legs from the bones to make a good broth. It will make a good soup base. I ended up with 7 quarts.

Shel Silverstein is always good for a laugh. 

Live and let live.