by Denis Boyles
10. To ride a cutting horse without “pulling leather” after the rider has indicatet to the horse which animal is to be cut from the herd.
—ROWLAND RIDER Arizona Strip 1909
AB BLOCKER’S COWBOY CATECHISM
Can you ride a pitching bronc?
Can you rope a horse out of the remuda without throwing the loop around your own head?
Are you good-natured?
In case of a stampede at night, would you drift along in front or circle the cattle to a mill?
Can you sing?
—Trail boss AB BLOCKER’s questions put to a prospective rider San Antonio, Texas c. 1880
[To move a herd] the leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
—TEDDY ROOSEVELT 1898
The only comparison I can make between moving a bunch of cows across the range and moving a bill through Congress is that if you’re behind a bunch of cows you can give them direction, but behind a piece of legislation, it’s a free-for-all.
So I’m leaving politics. I’m getting the hell out of Washington and going back to my ranch in Oregon, where there’s some stability and judgment left in the world.
—CONGRESSMAN ROBERT SMITH Washington, D.C. 1994
In the summer of 1869, I sold a bunch of grown steers in Palo Pinto County, Texas, to Dr. D.B. Warren of Missouri, and we trailed them to Baxter Springs, Kansas. We swam Red River at the old Preston ferry. We camped near the river the night before and tried to cross early in the morning. The river was very full of muddy water, and the cattle refused to take to the water. After all hands had about exhausted themselves, Dr. Warren, who was his own [trail] boss, said to me, “William, what will we do about it?” I answered him that we had better back out and graze the cattle until the sun got up so they could see the other bank, and they would want water and go across. “You should know that you can’t swim cattle across as big a stream as this going east in the morning or going west late of an evening with the sun in their faces.” About one P.M. we put them back on the trail and by the time the drags got near the river, the leaders were climbing the east bank. The doctor looked at me and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Every man to his profession.”
—W. E. CURETON Meridian, Texas 1891
[On the Chisholm Trail] it kept raining and storming. Good horses were ruined for life. All the horses were ridden down. There was no such thing as lying down in a dry bed for a few hours of unbroken sleep. The cow chips, our principal fuel, were all wet and half the time we could not get enough hot food and coffee. In such times a cowboy swore that he’d never go up the trail again.…
So, if when he got to town, after long months out in the brush, on the lone prairie, or on the long, long trail, the cowboy “cut loose” and had “a little fun,” he can hardly be blamed.
—JOHN YOUNG Alpine, Texas 1929
I never forgot that no matter how wet I was, no matter how sick I got, or how long I went between baths and shaves, no matter how much my horse said I stunk, I always remembered that, thank God, I still had my good looks.
—CALE WILKINS Winslow, Arizona 1975
Keep your end up or turn in your string of horses. On the roundup, no soldiering goes; sick or well, it’s hit yourself in the flank with your hat and keep up with the bunch or be set afoot to pack your saddle; there’s no room in the chuck wagon for a quitter’s blankets, and no time to close herd sick ones. So for heaven’s sake don’t start out unless you have the guts to stand it.
—N. R. DAVIS Cheyenne, Wyoming c. 1870
I have been on cow hunts when there were as many as one hundred men working together from different counties. Stockmen of today do not know anything about the hard work and strenuous times we encountered in those days. Sometimes we would be out for weeks at a time, starting every morning at daylight, and probably not getting in before dark, tired and hungry, and having to do without dinner all day. Our fare consisted of cornbread, black coffee, and plenty of good beef.
—WILLIAM J. BENNETT Pearsall, Texas 1920
Of all places in the world, traviling in the mountains is the most apt to breed contentions and quarrils. The only way to keep out of it is to say but little, and mind your own business exclusively.
—ANONYMOUS Colorado c. 1870
All range is not the same, nutrients and conditions vary greatly; and all country is not of equal value. Where a cowboy in eastern Montana may be able to run a cow per acre, it might take twenty acres to run a cow in Western Colorado, and fifty acres more to run a single bovine in the deserts of the Great Basin.
—C. J. HADLEY Publisher-Editor, Range Magazine Carson City, Nevada 1994
A typical cowboy direction: “Head out to that juniper, turn left, go west to the Rocky Mountains and may the Good Lord bless your skies.”
—ROBERT REDFORD Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming 1975
You get yourself lost and you’re playing with trouble. No matter whether you’re out on a high plain or down in some forest, you got to find water to find your way home. What I do is I scout out a trail broke by any grazing animal—don’t matter whether it’s deer or cattle or what—and follow that trail, because it eventually leads to water. Then, when you find a little stream or creek or whatever it is, you follow it down a valley, and not up. Going up a valley takes you nowhere but nearer to God, and that’s what you want to avoid, frankly. But if you follow water downstream far enough, you’ll come to people, guaranteed. Of course, they may be lost, too. In fact, most people are lost most of the time, so if you’re one of ’em, don’t feel too bad.
—F. M. MEAGHER Virginia City, Montana 1921
[Before bedding down for the night] find out what relief you are to go on, who to call and where they will sleep, so you won’t be waking up everybody in camp to find the right man. It makes a cowpuncher fighting mad to wake him up from his needed sleep when not wanted.
Sleep with pants on and stuffed in your socks. Never take the spurs off your boots. Put your boots down first, your chaps on top of them, and your jacket over all for a pillow. It’s nice to leave your boots outside in the weather and find when you try to pull them on in a hurry that they are either froze stiff as dry rawhide or full of rainwater.
Have everything ready to rise up, fling on, and skin out like a flash of lightening if there is a stampede, or to get out on time when you are called to go on guard. Remember that the safety of the herd depends on good ponies and good men ready to roll the instant they are needed. If the cattle are restless and there is liability of a stampede, you’d better go to bed just as you are—hat, jacket, pants, boots, spurs, chaps; and if snowing, or raining, your slicker, too—all on. A cowpuncher can sleep anyhow.
—Trinidad Weekly News Trinidad, Colorado July 20, 1882
You have to be careful how you wake a cowboy. Some men will kill you if you touch ’em while they’re sleeping, kill you before they even open their eyes to see who’s there. Most times, somebody’d just yell loud, and that was safer. My favorite jump-up holler was, “Wake up, snakes, and bite the biscuit!” That got me up right quick.
—LADDY NEWMAN Aurora, Colorado 1911
To understand ranch lingo all yuh have to do is know in advance what the other feller means an’ then pay no attention to what he says.
—PHILIP ASHTON ROLLINS Cheyenne, Wyoming 1922
TRAIL REMEDIES
Rheumatism: Take an empty whiskey bottle about half full of vinegar; put in a handful of large red ants. Shake well and apply internally and externally.
—MRS. GEO. R. GILLETTE San Antonio, Texas 1890
Whooping cough: Drink liberal quantities of mare’s milk.
—MARVIN HUNTER Bandera, Texasc. 1900
Foot rot in goats: Make a mixture of the following in an old wooden bucket: Two teaspoonfuls of alum, two and one-half teaspoonfuls of turpentine and one and a half gallons of water. Wash the goat’s feet in this. It is enough for one hundred goats.
—ANONYMOUS PAMPHLET c. 1890
Horse tetanus: Founder and lockjaw caused by overheating can be cured by driving eighteen or twenty nails—make three rows of them—in a board so that the sharp points stick out from a quarter to half an inch. Then lay the board on the horse’s forehead and hit the board with a hammer. I have seen my father cure more than a hundred horses which had lockjaw by hitting this board a wallop.
—JOHN GRISSOM San Antonio, Texas 1888
Blisters from hot grease, or for frostbitten feet, fingers, or ears: Scrape a raw Irish potato and apply to the parts affected.
—ALBERT WEST Uvalde, Texas c. 1890
Toothache:A chaw of tobacco’s good.
—HOPALONG CASSIDY
Worse toothache: Cut the first skin off the “frog” of a horse’s front hoof, and then put the skin over the fire and char it until it crumbles, and put it in the tooth.
—PETE ANDERWALD Bandera, Texas c. 1900
Horse gas: A positively O.K. remedy for colic in a horse is to take a tablespoon full of turpentine—or, if you’d rather, take two tablespoon full of turpentine—and put the turpentine in a shallow saucer, and then hold the saucer to the horse’s navel. The astonishing thing about this remedio is the immediate disappearance of the turpentine. It disappears right while you’re looking at it.
—FROST WOODHULL San Antonio, Texas c. 1930
Baby colic: Take teaspoonful of soot in a cloth, pour over three tablespoonfuls of hot water, let steep a few minutes. Give baby teaspoonful every half hour.
—ANONYMOUS PAMPHLET c. 1890
Hair loss: One of the best hair tonics is to boil and wash the head with sotol (Dasylirion texanum). It will just make hair grow where there ain’t no hair.
—FROST WOODHULL San Antonio, Texas c. 1930
Hay Fever: An absolutely positive cure for hay fever is to smoke coffee grounds in a pipe.
—FROST WOODHULL San Antonio, Texas c. 1930
Pneumonia: Take large cabbage leaves and wilt them over a fire to make them soft, then put the leaves all over the sick person’s chest, sides, and back; wrap a thin cloth around them to hold the leaves on, then pour on vinegar just as hot as the patient can stand it. The patient will begin to sweat right away, and the pneumonia will be broken up.
—ANONYMOUS quoted by Frost Woodhull
Chills: Wear nutmeg on a string around the neck.
—ANONYMOUS PAMPHLET c. 1890
Malaria: The bark of the red-bud or Judas Tree may be used as a substitute for quinine.
—ELLEN SCHULZ in Texas Wild Flowers
Skunk bite: Cauterize the wound with hot iron. I know a Mexican who still lives here that was bitten on the hand while in camp alone one night. In telling us about it, he said that he tied a rope around his wrist and then…to a tree and burned the wound with a red-hot iron. Someone asked, “Why did you tie it to the tree?” And he said, “To keep me from running off.”
—SHERIFF E. E. TOWNSEND Brewster County 1901
Stammering: To cure stammering, get child near an animal that is being butchered—hog, cow, anything—and as soon as the lights are cut out rub them vigorously in child’s face, particularly about the mouth.
—FROST WOODHULL San Antonio, Texas c. 1930
Thirst: A bullet in the mouth helps some, or a dime or quarter. Copper is the best, but the prickly pear is better than any of them; it keeps the mouth moist and agreeable longer than anything else we ever found.
And what to do with the rest of the prickly pear: If water is muddy and you wish to settle it, peel off stickers and [the] outside of the pear, slice, and scatter over the top of the water. They will soon sink to the bottom, carrying the sediment down with them.
—COLONEL CHARLES GOODNIGHT Goodnight, Texas 1930
TRAIL MANNERS
I once heard Harry Halsell ask Roberts why he didn’t stop cussing, and Jimmy explained that before he learned to cuss he had to shoot six or seven men who had cussed him.
—TOM YARBROUGH Fort Worth, Texas c. 1939
Cowboys had ethics and manners which were lived up to, under rules of the range. No cowboy was permitted to ask for food. The custom was to wait till the cook cried, “chuck-away!” Then there was a wild scramble and rattling of spurs as the cowboys rushed toward the end of the chuck wagon. The first cowboy to reach the wagon got the choice spaces between the spokes in the wagon wheel, in which to lay his six-shooter. None was permitted to eat without removing his guns.
No cowboy was permitted to use vile language or tell offensive stories while eating. Violation of this rule meant punishment, termed “putting the leggings on them,” which consisted in placing the offender over the wagon-tongue and whipping him with leggings by the entire gang. If the cowboy resisted, his companions held his feet and hands while the lash was applied. Once punished in this manner, seldom did the cowboy ever violate the rule of the range a second time.
—JOHN “CATCH-’EM-ALIVE JACK” ABERNATHY Austin, Texas c. 1935
Know the rules in a cow camp when they have no regular cook. When anybody complains about the chuck they have to do the cooking. One cowboy broke a biscuit open and says, “They are burnt on the bottom and top and raw in the middle and salty as hell, but shore fine, just the way I like ’em.”
—ANONYMOUS Nebraska panhandle c. 1880
CONTENTS OF A CHUCK WAGON
• In the wagon bed: Bedrolls, slickers, wagon sheet, ½-in. corral rope, guns, ammunition, lantern, kerosene, axle grease, extra wheel, salt pork, raw beef, green coffee beans, flour, pinto beans, sugar, salt, dried apples, onions, potatoes, grain for work team.
• In the tool box: Shovel, ax, branding irons, horseshoeing equipment, hobbles, rods for pot rack, extra skillets.
• In the chuck box and boot: Flour, sugar, dried fruit, roasted coffee beans, pinto beans, plates, cups, cutlery, castor oil, calomel, bandages, thread, needle, razor and strop, salt, lard, baking soda, vinegar, chewing tobacco, rolling tobacco, sourdough keg, matches, molasses, coffeepot, whiskey, skillets, Dutch ovens, pot hooks.
Some chuck wagons also had a small oven, and most had a water barrell.
—WILLIAM H. FORBIS in The Cowboys 1973
DINNER
Sonofabitch Stew
2 pounds lean beef
Half a calf heart
1 ½ pounds of calf liver
1 set sweetbreads
1 set brains
1 set marrow gut
Salt, pepper
Louisiana hot sauce
Kill off a young steer. Cut up beef, liver, and heart into 1-inch cubes; slice the marrow gut into small rings. Place in a Dutch oven or deep casserole. Cover meat with water and simmer for 2 to 3 hours. Add salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste. Take sweetbreads and brains and cut in small pieces. Add to stew. Simmer another hour, never boiling.
Beans
2 pounds pinto beans
2 pounds ham hock (or salt pork)
2 onions, chopped
4 tablespoons sugar
2 green chilies (or to taste)
1 can tomato paste
Wash the beans and soak overnight. Drain, place in a Dutch oven, and cover with water. Add remaining ingredients and simmer until tender. Sample the beans while cooking. Add salt to taste and water as needed.
—adapted from Cowpoke’s Cookbook by ACE REID Draggin’s Ranch, Kerrville, Texas 1969
Prairie Oysters
Get everything off ’em, split ’em open, and fry ’em in hot fat in a skillet until they are done good; then put salt on ’em and serve ’em up hot.
—CHARLES WILLEY Valentine, Nebraska 1877
Red Bean Pie
1 cup cooked, mashed pinto beans
1 cup sugar
3 egg yolks, beaten
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon nutmeg
Combine ingredients and place in uncooked pie crust. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until set. Make meringue with leftover egg whites; spread on pie and brown in oven.
—adapted from Cowpoke�
�s Cookbook by ACE REID Draggin’s Ranch, Kerrville, Texas 1969
Sucamagrowl
This is a good substitute for pudding or pie.
3 cups of water
2 cups of sugar
2 pinches of cinnamon or nutmeg
1 cup of vinegar
2 tablespoons of flour
First, put the water and vinegar together and bring to a boil. Mix the sugar and flour together and stir this mixture into the boiling liquid until it is thoroughly dissolved. Let cook for fifteen minutes and then add the spice. Have a dough ready, like a biscuit dough prepared with baking powder. Break it off by the tablespoonful and drop the pieces in the simmering liquid. When the dumplings are done serve them right off on tin plates while they’re still hot.
—FAY WARD Norfolk, Nebraska 1958
TRAIL GRACES
Eat yer meat and save the skin.
Turn up yer plates, and let’s begin.
Amen.
Look out teeth! Look out gums!
Look out belly! Har she comes!
