Tag Archives: Maine

Cowsnatching and other Maine tales

I’ve been looking through the Google News Archive and I’ve found a number of my old stories from my days with United Press International. This is a valuable find for me because these stories illustrate the wire service style of writing — tight, short and bright. I spent a lot of my days with UPI in Maine covering government and politics, but when I wasn’t doing that I was looking for features stories, like this one about cowsnatching.

By ARTHUR FREDERICK

AUGUSTA, Maine – There’s a lady in Levant who won’t let her cows out of the barn. Rustlers got one of her heifers and she  doesn’t want it to happen again.

In Mount Vernon, Milton Hall noticed three heifers missing. After checking his pastures, he called the sheriff. The cows had been rustled.

Rustling isn’t limited to the Western bad guy type.  It’s been reported in the Maine counties of Kennebec, Aroostook, Sagadahoc, York and Penobscot.  The incidents range from the theft of a single grazing cow to daring cowsnatching right from the farmer’s barn.

In Belgrade, someone made off with a single Hereford after cutting a tether rope. But in Albion, one ambitious fellow made off with six milking cows.

“The guy drove a truck right into the barn and drove out with six of them,” said Kennebec County Sheriff Stanley Jordan.

Sheriff Darrell Crandall of Aroostook County said there have been three incidents in recent weeks, but he said he wasn’t sure if two of them were the real thing or not. The third incident was rustling, all right, he said, but the farmer didn’t know whether he lost two cows or four.

“The guy drove right in with a vehicle and took off with the cows,” Crandall said. “But the owner didn’t know whether he got two or maybe four.  Now, just how he came up with those figures I don’t know.”

Most of the cases are one-shot, or one-cow, deals. But a couple of years ago some enterprising rustlers used a bit of local technology in bagging their bovines.

The thieves used a “pulp truck,” a big stake truck with a huge hydraulic claw which is used to pick up logs and place them on the truck bed.

“These guys used to get a cow near the pasture fence, bop it over the head with a hammer, then move the claw over the fence and pick the carcass right over,” said Sheriff Jordan. “We never got ‘em.”

Jordan thinks the increase in rustling is a result of the increase in beef prices. And he thinks it’s going to get worse.

“See, a friend of mine said they’re selling beef cattle for 80 cents a pound on the hoof,” Jordan said. “Now if a guy can go out and knock one off that’s 200 or 300 pounds or so dressed out, he’s got it made.”

And now for something completely different…

My background is primarily in journalism, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time as a copywriter, churning out PR and ad copy on behalf of all kinds of clients. One of the ad agencies I worked for represented a snowshoe manufacturer, SnoCraft Corporation of Norway, Maine, a company that started around the turn of the last century but which now appears to be out of business. The following feature story was part of a press kit we put together for SnoCraft retailers — we hoped they would attach the names of their own businesses to this piece and then distribute it to local news media. This project was a bit out of the ordinary, but I do remember having some fun researching the history of snowshoes and then trying to come up with a snappy lead. I also recall that I carefully left out any reference to what French Canadians refer to as “mal d’raquette” — pain in the legs and ankles that develops from too much snowshoeing.

 

Snowshoes: Their history, uses, and where to buy them

Snowshoes help expand winter horizons 

NORWAY, Maine – If it hadn’t been for the snowshoe, America might never have been discovered.

No, Christopher Columbus didn’t wade ashore in the New World while wearing snowshoes. But  the aboriginal peoples who were the first settlers of North America were probably wearing snowshoes thousands of years ago when they crossed the land bridge over the Bering Strait from Asia.

While many think of snowshoes as something identified with Eskimos, those Artic peoples have actually had little use for snowshoes — most of their travel is over ice and wind-packed snow, making snowshoes unnecessary.

It was the North American Indians of the more temperate climates who really refined the snowshoe from a primitive branch-and-bark device to a sophisticated method of winter transportation.

But the history of the snowshoe goes back far beyond the history of North America.  Snowshoes allowed early man to move northward in Asia and into northern Europe, Scandinavia and Siberia.

Many historians believe that the invention of snowshoes ranks with the wheel in its importance to the development of mankind.

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