Ranching is definitely a family affair for Elgin native Drew Dummermuth and his wife and daughters. Posing last Christmas for their family greeting card are center, Kellie and Drew and their nine girls. Pictured, front row, (l-r) Erica, Clare, Kate, and Laurel, far right; back, (l-r) Alaine, Hallie, Jana, Nora, and Papa holding Ahnalee. (Submitted photo)
Home is where the heart is
By Jack Swanson
jswanson@fayettecountynewspapers.com
Twenty-one years ago Drew Dummermuth began running. He was running to become a cowboy in Montana. He was running away from people and places he knew. He was running from pain and sorrow. He was running to find something; what, he didn’t know. What he would find, would be more than he ever imagined.
A 1996 graduate of Valley High School, Drew, son of Kim and Lois Dummermuth, grew up on the family farm near Elgin. Agriculture was in his blood from the beginning. He loved working with the cattle and all it entailed on his parents’ farm. Other things that he really doesn’t want to talk about in detail now were driving him to another place.
“I thought about going out to Montana and being a cowboy. I had been going to Iowa State University for two years when I saw a flyer on campus about an internship at a cattle ranch out there,” Drew explained.
He took the internship and found himself working on a seed stock ranch and helping to ship cow embryos to South America.
“Now I had a real job. I never returned to school,” he said soberly.
Besides the cattle and the horses he got to work with everyday, he found something else that made him want to stay.
“Everything up to this point put me in the spot where I met my future wife. Kellie was already working out there when I met her. We met in a feedlot,” Drew related.
Kellie was also a Midwesterner. She had come to Montana from Minnesota a few years earlier when her dad took a job on a ranch out there.
A cattle feedlot in the middle of Montana doesn’t sound real romantic to a lot of people, but for Drew and Kellie, it couldn’t have been any better.