Tip’s Story

The Recollections of Sidney “Tip” Melby — A Life on the Northern Plains

As told to John Ashford

Tip Melby was born in 1915 in a sod house on the line between North and South Dakota, the son of Christopher Cranston and Elizabeth Lillian Campbell. He was raised on horse and sheep ranches in the Badlands of Harding County, in a world that has since disappeared entirely — one-room schools, immigrant homesteaders, working horses, and winters that closed the roads from January to March.

Most of what follows he spoke aloud, chiefly to John Ashford in 2003, and it reads the way a good storyteller talks. He tells how a sod brick was cut and how a wild horse was taught to lead. He tells about the cowboy who gave him his name, the stepfather who raised him, the father he barely knew and met only once as a grown man, and Ruth, whom he loved for a lifetime. He tells about teaching history to American citizens held behind barbed wire in a wartime internment camp, and what they taught him about democracy. He tells about coyotes, sheep, and a famous wolf called Three Toes. One chapter is not his — a story about him, written down by his nephew Bob Painter in 2016.

The words have been left as he told them. Click the link below and take your time with it.

Click on the link below to access the stories.

_Tips_Story_COMPLETE

Chapters
1. Childhood – Lessons of Early Life
2. Ole, My Stepfather
3. Horses & Riders
4. Winter on the Ranch
5. 1933, The Willett Place
6. The Saga of Johny Jergeson Meets Uncle Tip
7. Meeting My Father, 1941
8. Ruth
9. The Sheep Ranch – Herders, Coyotes
10. Farming with Horse Power
11. 1945, Selling Livestock
12. 1948, Life in Missoula
13. Old Timers
14. Grasslands
15. Visiting the Shaw Horse Ranch