Churchill Cattle Co World Class Female Sale Manhattan, MT

(continued from page 12) plowing straight through and leaving his calving barn and corrals marooned.

“We didn’t have any warning,” Frank said. “The night before we were cleaning corrals, fixing fence. By morning the water was coming into our horse barn. We got the horses out and then tried to move log jams but by one o’clock we had to quit. We always have high water but no one predicted that it would be a 500 year event.”

Frank and his partner, Josh Shengle, have been selling registered horned and polled Hereford bulls for six years, running 125-150 registered cows plus recip cows for embryo work. They offer yearling bulls for sale in April and host an online female sale in November, and show both bulls and heifers at major shows including the NILE in Billings and the National Western Stock Show in Denver. They enjoy the day to day work behind their seedstock operation, from feeding young bulls by hand to moving cows to new pastures, focus on calving ease, quality, disposition, and structure in their genetic selections, and strive to raise cattle that will work well in any environment.

But they didn’t have an island world in mind.

Their calving barn is on one island and their bull development yard is on a separate island. The cattle are on the other side of the river and though they can see them it would take a 10 mile trek around through various neighbors’ places just to put out mineral. Yet even though he’s not sure where to start picking up the pieces and rebuilding, Frank says that he doesn’t have it as bad as people who lost their homes. He’s thankful that he had moved pairs out the week before and that all his bulls were gone.

“We lost a lot of infrastructure---barns, corrals, calving yards,” he said. “I know we aren’t the only ones; I saw calving sheds and round bale feeders go by in the river. I know there is significant damage to irrigation ditches as well.”

Crystal Anderson was at her cousin’s place riding in his barn when they got called out to help move some pairs that were stranded in a pasture near Worden.

“The cows had gone to a dry spot but the river had moved

Aftermath of the flood at Austin Frank and Josh Shengle’s ranch near Roscoe, MT.

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and was surrounding them,” she said. “We were told that there was two feet of standing water, but when we got there it was definitely not standing and it was more than two feet deep. Those cows acted pretty goofy. They had found a dry spot and didn’t want to leave it, but it was obviously not going to stay dry for long. There were eight of us horseback but the cows ran back on us the first time we tried to get them to cross the water. Some of the cows were trying to take our horses. I have no idea exactly how long we were out there, but it felt like forever, almost like we were in slow motion with the constant moving of the water and the wind whipping.”

The second time they approached the water parallel to the current and managed to get the cows across; then at the bottom of the pasture they had to cross a bar ditch where the water was so deep that when the cows jumped in they went completely under. But the cattle were all accounted for when they were done.

“It was a very humbling experience,” Anderson said.

L Bar W Cattle Company headquarters are on the Stillwater River near Columbus, Montana.

“She showed us what she can do,” Denise Loyning said. “We have chosen to live on the river and we know that comes (continued on page 18)