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Welcome to the Platt Ranch!

The Platt Ranch Heritage Blog While talking to several people at Mitch and Mary Platt's 80th birthday celebration over the past weekend, I was telling them about my recent foray into publishing a blog for the choir that I sing with in Provo, Utah.  My mind immediately formed a decision to create a blog about the Earl Platt Cattle Ranch in Northeastern Arizona. So this is the beginning post for that blog.  As many of my family members know, I have taken on the role as a family historian about the lives of some of the most influential people in our family.  Many have led incredible lives with some pretty amazing accomplishments.  It is time now to open their lives and histories up to more than just a few in the family.  I hope to introduce more people to the history of a cattle ranch that was started from one cow wandering the ditches of St. Johns, Arizona, and ended up as one of the largest privately-owned cattle ranches in the State of Arizona. I will be making ...
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Playing Plumber!

 

Scattered throughout the ranch, we had large, metal storage tanks for watering our cattle.  They were often 15-20 feet in diameter and stood at least 7 to 8 feet in height.  This amounts to a lot of water. The windmill, or generator-powered submersible pump, would bring water from the underground aquifer, sometimes located up to 900 feet deep, and the water would flow through a pipe into the storage tank.  Attached to the tank, there was often a drinking trough for watering the cattle.  The water level in the trough was controlled by an ingenious float system.  The tanks had a standpipe inside the storage portion that could be raised or lowered to different heights.  Water would flow from the storage tank, through the standpipe, and past the float valve into the drinker.  If the float somehow broke, or got stuck open, the standpipe would not allow all the water in the tank to run out and be wasted.


Over the years, plant life, waterbugs, and even salamanders began living in the tanks; proof that evolution truly happens.  I know that the salamanders did not walk over miles of dry, parched ground, only to climb the 7 feet of metal skin to dive into their new swimming pool.  Somehow, the dirt turned into plants, the plants turned into bugs, the bugs became salamanders, and the salamanders changed into nasty, rotten, dead things that got stuck in the standpipes.  How the plants got started, only God and Darwin know!


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