Chapter Twenty

WHEN THE ZX QUIT USING DRAFT HORSES and went to tractors, they had some fine animals that would have been slated for slaughter had I not bought the lot of them and moved them to Yamsi. There were some spoiled horses in the bunch, but I was determined to break them of their bad habits. I fed cattle with them, logged with them, and hooked them up to wagons to haul fence material. Whenever a team would get to be trustworthy, I would peddle it and start some of the others.

The market for teams wasn’t very good. Since the war, most ranchers and farmers had gone to tractors. The old teamsters by now were a thing of the past, and it was hard to find a man who knew how to harness a team and drive it. But there were still a few ranchers around who were sentimental about old ways, and I sold quite a few good teams through my enthusiasm. One little team of Shires which I unloaded on a stranger ended up being driven by Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty, on the TV series Gunsmoke.

I missed talking rodeo talk, but often some of the old gang would drop by to visit. Every so often, I would be awakened before daylight by shouting in front of the Yamsi house, and there on the lawn I’d see Slim Pickens on his way to some

movie location or another, often long-haired and bearded for a current role. We would spend a few days on the ranch, fishing and driving teams, while he studied lines or rested up from a movie.

One fall, I had caught up a fine young bay team and broke them to lead. We were busy getting a bunch of steers ready to ship to market, but I got up early and harnessed the team for the first time and tied them in the corral to let them get used to the harness. They were wild and woofy; the discipline of being tied to the fence would do them some good.

With my crew of hungover cowboys, I spent the morning gathering yearling cattle in the fields, then held the bunch against a fence while we cut out inferior steers and shaped up the herd for market. The days of shipping cattle by rail were long over. Cattle trucks were due to arrive that night at the ranch corrals, so I was under real pressure to get the work done.

What we didn’t realize was that Slim had arrived at the ranch. Finding the place deserted, he went over to the corrals and spotted that young team tied to the fence. Somehow he managed to get them hitched to a wagon. We had almost finished our day’s work when they came stampeding down through the field, panicking cattle as they ran. Slim had all he could do just to stay on the wagon. “Whoopee!” Slim hollered as the team ran through the bunch we were trying to hold, scattering animals across the meadows.

Everywhere I looked, there were steers running and saddle horses bucking.

“Hey, kid!” Slim shouted as he almost ran me down. “Why didn’t you teach these sons of bitches to whoa?”

I expected the cowboys to get mad and quit, but when Slim finally got the runaway team stopped and the cowboys recognized that great hulking figure as their favorite rodeo and movie star, all was forgiven. Slim had an unusual ability to make instant friends of the strangers around him. His big grin always put everyone at ease. When Slim took a shine to a per- son, he made him feel as though the guy was his best friend in the world.

The big cowboy always arrived at the ranch without warning. He had been making a pilot film on the Oregon coast for The American Sportsman when bad weather canceled the shooting. Slim arrived at the ranch with the crew and commenced shooting where they had left off.

We had spent a week on camera, trout fishing on the river and reminiscing about old rodeo adventures, when Slim began to complain about headaches, and got ready to head back to California to see a doctor. He must have sensed that the diagnosis would be serious. As I drove him in to Klamath Falls to the airport, he opened up to me as he never had be- fore. He had never mentioned my saving his life in the Cow Palace by pulling the Rowell bull Twenty Nine off his body so many years before. Now he thanked me for the extra years I had given him.

He phoned me one evening full of hope. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor but had found a doctor willing to operate. I never heard his voice again. Slim lived his life at the edge of danger. The final irony was that the man who lived with violence in real life and rode the A-bomb in the movie Dr. Strangelove died of something he couldn’t control.

Slim’s memorial was held at his and Margaret’s beautiful home in the Sierras of California. It was an awakening for me. I sat looking about the congregation at rodeo stars I had known for years and was struck by how they had all aged. That night, when most of the folks who came to honor Slim had gone home, a few of us gathered in a small basement room and talked about old times. Rex Allen took out his guitar and sang some of the western songs Slim had loved, while rodeo announcer and master storyteller Mel Lambert told story after story about his long friendship with Slim. The party went on long after midnight, until Margaret heard noises in her basement and, assuming that her guests had long ago departed, came down to investigate.

During Slim’s life, one of his best pals had been Mel Lambert, and after the funeral Mel adopted me. As a story- teller Mel was able to switch from one voice and character to another at will. Not long after I got home from Slim’s funeral, I got a strange telephone call from an Italian truck driver who claimed, in fractured English, that he had a truckload of salmon from the Oregon coast he was supposed to deliver to me as a gift from a friend. He was having trouble finding the ranch, and the fish were beginning to spoil. He had already been kicked out of his motel because of the smell, and was desperate to find me and dump the load. I became just as desperate to head him off and tell him I didn’t need a load of rotting fish. He yelled at me in broken English, and I yelled back.

Finally, I felt so sorry for the poor truck driver that I was working on a solution when I heard a chuckle at the other end of the line. The truck driver was Mel Lambert.

Mel and I found we had a lot in common. He had grown up in the little town of Chiloquin, the biggest town on the Klamath Indian Reservation. Part Umatilla Indian from northern Oregon, he was a navy pilot during the war and never lost his love of flying. He did voices for the movie industry, and was a superb humorist who was often described as “the funniest man in Hollywood.” One movie part he did was that of the harbormaster in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another was a role in Three Warriors. His career as a rodeo announcer spanned fifty years, and Mel is in the Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, along with Slim Pickens and Montie Montana.

Mel ran a used car and airplane outfit in Salem, Oregon, and was never happier than when he was in the midst of a trade. One of my cherished possessions is a turquoise ring Mel gave me. Well, he didn’t exactly give it to me. I was staying with Mel and his wife, Pauline, in their ridgetop home, when Mel brought out a big tray of rings he had traded for from an Indian he had befriended in Arizona, and told me to pick out a ring as a gift.

I took one look at the tray and knew that, whatever the deal had been, the Indian had come out way ahead. They were the kind of dyed turquoise rings you didn’t want to wear in the bathtub for fear your body would turn blue.

Not wanting to hurt Mel’s feelings, I pretended to agonize over my choice. Right in the middle of the tray of a hundred rings was a gorgeous one of cobwebbed turquoise, a museum specimen. “I’ll take that one,” I said, slipping it quickly on my finger. Moments later I heard him in another part of the house berating Pauline for putting his best ring back in the wrong tray.

Mel, Montie Montana, and I were in the Rapid City, South Dakota, airport one day, waiting together for a plane. Montie had once roped President Eisenhower as part of his famous trick-roping act and had starred in many a western film. As usual, he was immaculately dressed and superbly handsome, while Mel looked as though he had just escaped from the local jail.

It wasn’t long before Montie’s fans discovered him, and he was surrounded by fifty or so strangers asking for autographs. No one cast a glance at poor Mel.

Finally a man came up to Mel and said, “And who are you? Should I be getting your autograph too?”

Screwing up his face and combing his hair sideways, Mel suddenly became the popular comedian Red Skelton, and launched into a Clem Kadiddlehopper skit.

“Oh, my God,” the man shouted. “It’s Red Skelton!” Montie’s fans deserted him and thronged around Mel,

who blithely began signing Red Skelton’s name.

Mel could always be counted on to help other Indians in trouble. In appreciation, the chief of the Klamath tribe made him a present of a huge ceremonial tipi, and sent some of the tribe to set up the structure on Mel’s ranch property overlooking the city of Salem, where it could be seen by everyone traveling the freeway.

The tipi was the apple of Mel’s eye until one day, as he was driving by on his way to his office at the Salem airport, he glanced over just in time to see a dozen big Hereford steers disappearing into the tipi door. Steers being volatile, there was no way he could get the animals back out the entrance. Each of the frightened animals made a different hole getting away, and there wasn’t much left standing.

One of Mel’s pilot friends was Hoyt Culp, warden of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Through the years, Mel worked with Hoyt to get a lot of Indian parolees back on their feet, and he was as revered by Native Americans as he was by rodeo cowboys. His house was often full of Indian children from the Warm Springs Reservation, whose families Mel and his wife had befriended.

One little girl turned out to be a holy terror, and since Christmas was a week away, Mel figured she would want to be back with her family on the reservation. The girl was pretty angry, but Mel bundled her up anyway, and off they went. He had just sold her old man a brand-new Chrysler and figured by delivering the girl, he was doing her father a favor.

He was driving across the reservation when suddenly her father passed him going the other way, driving the new car.

Mel slammed on his brakes. “There goes your dad in his big Chrysler!” he exclaimed.

“That’s not my dad!” the girl snapped. “And that’s not his car.”

Mel did a U-turn and pretty soon caught up with the old man and flagged him down. He got out and walked over to the Chrysler. “I brought your daughter back,” he said.

“Oh,” the man said, not looking too happy. “Couldn’t you have kept her roun’ till after Christmas?”

Mel looked through the windows of the new car. There was blood all over the seats, the headliner was ripped out, and the upholstery was demolished. Several windows were busted out, and the seats were littered with shards of glass.

“What on earth happened to your new Chrysler?” Mel asked.

“Well,” the Indian said, “I was drivin’ down the road, me an’ my frien’, an’ we saw a big buck deer standin’ in a fiel’ an’ I took my rifle an’ shot him. We loaded him in the backseat an’ I was drivin’ back to my place ’bout ninety miles an hour when the goddam ting come to an’ tried to climb in the front seat with us. I couldn’t stop so I just grabbed my rifle, stuck it over my shoulder, an’ started pullin’ the trigger. That deer, he didn’t like to be shot at I guess and tried to kill us with his horns. Finally, my last bullet got ’im right in the throat. Say, my old lady don’t like the color of this car you sold me. Maybe I bring it back an’ you give me ’nother one.”