{"id":13569,"date":"2016-08-08T11:51:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T17:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13569"},"modified":"2016-08-08T11:51:57","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T17:51:57","slug":"montana-viewpoint-memories-of-jessie-ocallaghan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/08\/montana-viewpoint-memories-of-jessie-ocallaghan\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: Memories of Jessie O\u2019Callaghan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jim\"<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

Jessie O\u2019Callaghan looked rougher than a cob when I first met her in 1976. It was at her house on\u00a0Swamp Creek, near Trout Creek, Mont.<\/p>\n

She was about 70 years old, short and very heavy with\u00a0unkempt grey hair, and dressed in what could have once passed as a flower print dress. She was sitting\u00a0in her kitchen shelling peas. Her eyes were small and blue, encased in folds of skin, and their\u00a0expression seemed to alternate between skepticism and joy. Her voice was almost a screech, but\u00a0somehow pleasant.<\/p>\n

She kept goats, and it was because of that that several young newcomers went out of their way to make\u00a0her acquaintance so they could learn the ways of goats, which she gladly shared with them. They were\u00a0back-to-the-land folks in their early 20s who had moved to Montana to seek a simpler, calmer\u00a0life and Jessie was drafted as their teacher.<\/p>\n

So they came to her to learn about goats and they stayed for\u00a0her wisdom.<\/p>\n

Jessie was born in White Pine, Mont., around 1910. She went to the White Pine school through third\u00a0grade and that was the end of her formal education. But her informal education was considerable; she\u00a0loved reading Jack London, and Robert Service was her favorite poet, especially the \u201cCremation of Sam\u00a0Magee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once I heard her recite a poem called \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard,\u201d which was\u00a0written in 1750.There was a lot more to Jessie than met the eye.<\/p>\n

Her life had been rough, but there was no complaining about it. She had spent a lot of time in eastern\u00a0Oregon cooking at hay camps and ranches. Along the way she married and had two sons who didn\u2019t\u00a0have a lot to do with her. Her second husband was Bat O\u2019Callaghan, from Ireland, and it was Bat she had the\u00a0fondest memories of.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>She had compassion, and once said about a person widely regarded as a fool,\u00a0\u201cShe\u2019s more to be pitied than despised.\u201d<\/p>\n

As coarse as Jessie looked, you would think she could cuss a blue streak, but I never once heard her\u00a0swear. For that matter, I never heard her complain, either. She did drink, though, and she could hold her\u00a0liquor better than I could, for sure. And when she drank she sang and reminisced and that made my\u00a0hangover worth it. In her late 70s, she had a hard time getting around, but she almost always had\u00a0a young woman friend to help her, and later, to care for her.<\/p>\n

As it got more difficult for her to fend for herself, her sons reluctantly moved her closer\u2014but not too\u00a0close\u2014to them in central Oregon, near John Day. But it was still her friends from Montana who lived\u00a0with her and cared for her.<\/p>\n

I visited her there a couple of times a year and always brought a bottle. We\u00a0would sit at her kitchen table drinking into the evening and let it grow dark without lighting the lamp.<\/p>\n

Jessie died, pretty much alone, and years later another friend of hers and I went to visit her grave in\u00a0Prineville, Ore. We stopped by the sexton\u2019s office to get help locating her grave.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would never\u00a0have found it,\u201d he said, \u201cThere\u2019s no stone.\u201d<\/p>\n

So we went into town and bought a bouquet of flowers and a mickey of whiskey, and while we were at\u00a0it, ordered a stone. Then we went back to her grave and sat in the sunshine, sharing the whiskey and\u00a0memories. When we left we put the flowers and a good drink of whiskey on her grave.<\/p>\n

These days, if\u00a0you go there, you can find her grave by looking for a stone with a carving of a goat.<\/p>\n

Jim Elliott is a former chairman of the Montana Democratic Party and a former state senator from Trout Creek.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessie O\u2019Callaghan looked rougher than a cob when I first met her in 1976. It was at her house on\u00a0Swamp Creek, near Trout Creek, Mont. She was about 70 years old, short and very heavy with\u00a0unkempt grey hair, and dressed in what could have once passed as a flower print dress. She was sitting\u00a0in her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":13570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[4804,4803,4805],"class_list":["post-13569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-jack-london","tag-jessie-ocallaghan","tag-white-pine","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}