She Was Hired to Cook for Twenty Hands—When the Wagon Never Came, She Filled the Larder Herself
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Enid Scadding takes a job cooking for twenty hands on a Wyoming cattle ranch on the strength of one promise: a wagon of flour, sugar and bacon due the first of October. The wagon never comes. A washed-out bridge gives the county's only freight hauler an excuse he did not need, and the storeroom she is supposed to feed twenty men from holds barely enough for a week. Before she lifts a hand to fix it, she sets her own terms with the rancher who hired her - a wage, a lock only she holds the key to, and a date by which the flour has to be there or she walks.
What the episode turns on is not whether the wagon eventually comes. It is what a hired cook can build out of hogs, horse corn and a garden nobody thought to dig, once she stops waiting on a stranger's word and starts counting what is actually on the place. The freighter is not short of flour. He is counting on her hunger to run out before his patience does - and he has misjudged which one gives first.
A long frontier story about supply, terms and who gets to hold the key. The Full Larder tells original fiction: the ranch, the county and every person in it are invented, and everyone in the story is a grown adult. If you want to see how an empty storeroom gets filled, subscribe and follow her story to the end.
20 Comments
He reached for that CROCK - probably her jar of sourdough starter.
Underground veggies would be OK underground. Taters out 1st.
She Was Hired to Cook for Twenty Hands—When the Wagon Never Came, She Filled the Larder Herself
Knowledge Explorer
12,763 views
Enid Scadding takes a job cooking for twenty hands on a Wyoming cattle ranch on the strength of one promise: a wagon of flour, sugar and bacon due the first of October. The wagon never comes. A washed-out bridge gives the county's only freight hauler an excuse he did not need, and the storeroom she is supposed to feed twenty men from holds barely enough for a week. Before she lifts a hand to fix it, she sets her own terms with the rancher who hired her - a wage, a lock only she holds the key to, and a date by which the flour has to be there or she walks.
What the episode turns on is not whether the wagon eventually comes. It is what a hired cook can build out of hogs, horse corn and a garden nobody thought to dig, once she stops waiting on a stranger's word and starts counting what is actually on the place. The freighter is not short of flour. He is counting on her hunger to run out before his patience does - and he has misjudged which one gives first.
A long frontier story about supply, terms and who gets to hold the key. The Full Larder tells original fiction: the ranch, the county and every person in it are invented, and everyone in the story is a grown adult. If you want to see how an empty storeroom gets filled, subscribe and follow her story to the end.