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Serial #0125

Bear Grass Requiem 

“Even bear grass looked good to us in the ‘30’s,” said my dad, Glenn Ricketts, as he helped me clear clumps of the tenacious yucca from our north pasture. “How so?” I asked. “Cattle will eat it if they are hungry enough, and during the Dust Bowl, sometimes bear grass was the only thing growing,” he explained.

Coming of age in the 1930’s on a farm in the Progressive Community north of Hereford, Texas, my dad, in order to help get enough feed for the cattle, would fill a wagon with grubbed-out bear grass plants. Returning to the corral, he would chop off the spines and then chop up the blades into small pieces. When he had a washtub full he would spread the bear grass out in troughs for the cows. It was quite a sight to see a whole line of cows with suds foaming out of their mouths as they went after the bear grass or “soap weed.”

Serving as a good illustration of the dogged determination and desperate inventiveness of Panhandle folks during the depression, the story of the bear grass cattle feed inspired the Bear Grass Requiem. In the center door section, ribbon or “saber-point” barbed wire (pat. 1881), first used in the Panhandle to fence railroad right-of-ways, is woven with bear grass blades. The red panel and blue-green trim came from a Hutchinson County farmstead, last inhabited in 1949.

Leila Litchfield, the maternal grandmother of my wife, Cathy Ricketts, pieced the top quilt section. She may have had help with the quilting from the Busy Bee Club of Higgins. In all probability the quilt was made after 1947, because Leila lost all of her family possessions in the April 9^th tornado.

The bottom quilt section comes from a quilt made around 1900 by Jimmy Leona Horne (b. 1862), Cathy’s paternal great-grandmother, and brought to the Panhandle in 1915 by her grandmother, Ida Bucher, when she married Anton Bucher.

(Note: these quilts were damaged and sectioned up for other projects long before I had the privilege of using the small portions.)

Salvage parts from the old Hostutler homestead on Willow Creek in Lipscomb County make up the rest of the Requiem cabinet. The case is made from old doorjambs. A closet door, sawn apart and reworked, is now the Requiem door. And old exterior siding, covered for years by stucco, now sides the cabinet.