DROUTH

It hadn’t rained in almost a year and a few of the less hardy, who were mostly newcomers, had begun to talk about drouth. It was the custom of the natives to ignore dry weather as long as they possibly could. The old-timers hesitated to start using the word “drouth.” They seemed to have some superstitious feelings about admitting that a drouth was in progress, because they seemed to think that when they admitted it, it might make it get worse.

My practice had fallen off a whole lot during this time for many reasons. The first one was that the ranch country still had some old dead grass and other favorable forage that stock were living on and there hadn’t been enough rain to cause the poisonous weeds to be in abundance. However, there had begun to be some cases of sheep and cattle eating desert plants that were never intended for animal consumption.

When a flock of ewes are all bred, it is the custom among sheep ranchers to keep the bucks in a pasture to themselves most of the year. The reason for this is so that all the lambs will be the same size and age when they are weighed and shipped in the fall.

Ranchers had begun to ask me in casual conversation about their bucks getting poor. Eventually they would begin to die without any apparent disease, even though they were being fed at least enough feed to live on. However, the condition had developed so slowly that I had not had any calls to treat bucks that were so affected.

Dow Puckett came in one day and said he believed that all his bucks in the Red House trap were affected by something. Every few days he would find one dead, and he wished I would go out and see what could be done.

The Red House trap was at the edge of town just beyond the stock pens. It was a small pasture of one or two sections, and it was no trouble to drive along the pasture roads until I found the bucks. Then I got out and watched them graze. There was little or no grass or weeds on the ground and the common expression was that everything was grazin’ with its “head up,” which meant that the only feed stuff left was the leaves of low-growing brush. I walked through these bucks and followed them and watched them go from bush to bush and they were gathering little gummy balls of seed from black brush. This was about the only thing they were eating except for the feed they were being given in troughs near the windmill.

I stripped off some of these pods of gummy seed by hand, and, in fact, ate a little of the stuff to see if I could tell why a sheep liked it. By now I had eaten so many desert plants that appealed to sheep that I nearly knew a buck sheep’s taste. This stuff had a sweet astringent taste and I really didn’t see how it would be detrimental for a sheep to eat it.

When I got through working this waxy seed in my laboratory, I had extracted a substance that was coating the inside of the intestinal tract and shrinking the mucous membranes that absorb the digested nutriments of the sheep’s diet. Actually what the sheep were gathering to eat from the black brush was starving them to death.

This was valuable information that I spread among the ranchers without charge so that they would take their bucks off of black brush pastures. I didn’t mind passing out the advice because I had no medical treatment for the condition.

Bill McKenzie came by the office early in the morning and said his only milk cow at his ranch near Bakersfield had been sick for several days and had fallen off in her milk production, and they had quit saving the milk until they found what was the matter with her. He wanted me to come on out that day to see the cow, and I told him I had a call at McCamey and I would drop back by his place at Bakersfield a little after noon.

When I drove up to the ranch, Bill had a good Jersey cow in the corral that had a blistered nose from fever. Cows have no sweat glands in the skin covering their body and the only place that a cow does sweat is on the bare skin on her nose and mouth. When one is blistered, it is a symptom that she has had high fever.

I examined this cow thoroughly and listened to a high ratio in her heartbeat. I told Bill that she had some kind of serious internal trouble that I could not positively diagnose and I would treat her for fever; however I was unable to find the real cause of trouble. We discussed the possibility of some foreign object in her stomach, which would be impossible to operate for successfully. Bill wasn’t dissatisfied with my diagnosis and understood that it was a case that we just didn’t know about and promised to let me know when the cow died. I told him I would come out and cut her open without charge in order to satisfy myself about her trouble for my future use.

In a few days, Bill called me late one afternoon and told me the cow had died an hour or so before. I hurried out to the ranch which was thirty-five miles away, and before any decomposition or swelling set in, we did a thorough post-mortem on the cow. I found a crooked piece of baling wire jabbed through the intestinal tract and penetrating into one lobe of her lung, and from the presence of pus and blood, it could have been there for several weeks; this was the cause of death.

As I cut into the different parts of the paunch, we began to remove various objects commonly referred to in practice as “hardware.” The term “hardware” is applied to cases where, for the lack of minerals and from pure hunger and starvation, a cow will chew on any piece of old metal that she can get in her mouth. There were nine empty rifle cartridge shells, a pocketknife with the blades broken out, half of a three-inch strap hinge, a piece of small chain nine inches long, and a metal tag off of a buggy dated 1891, Troy, Ohio.

There were hundreds of such cases developing over the drouth area. As long as these various objects did not puncture some of the internal organs or did not build up to cause an obstruction, an animal might live out a normal lifetime unless he died from some other cause.

A few days after this, Herman Chandler drove up in front of my office with a real good bay roping horse in his trailer. He told me he had come through Fort Stockton the day before and I was gone. He was so anxious to get something done for this horse that he had hauled him to Midland to a doctor and to Pecos and back by Monahans, and none of them had been able to diagnose the horse’s trouble.

I said, “Herman, unload him to where I can see him on the ground.”

While he was unloading the horse, he said he hadn’t eaten and had drunk very little for about five days, and he was givin’ me a speech about him being the best ropin’ horse he ever had and he sure hated to lose him. He was a good horse and was drawn as bad as a wolf that had been in a three-day chase in a snow storm.

After looking at him carefully, I tried to open his mouth and he began to fight his head and run backward. I asked if anybody in examining the horse had ever looked in his mouth.

He said, “Hell, no, and I hadn’t thought of that either.”

We let him out in a vacant lot in front of my office and got some soft rope to use to pull his hind legs under him and and then tied all four legs together as gently as we could. We took the halter off and fitted a speculum in his mouth and buckled the straps to hold it in place up around the top of his head like the headstall of a bridle.

A horse mouth speculum has ratchets on the side and as it is worked open, it holds the horse’s jaws apart to keep him from being able to bite when you go inside of his mouth. His mouth was dry with a thick heavy slime instead of saliva and his breath had an extremely bad odor as he struggled to get up or close his mouth.

Chandler got down on the ground and cradled the horse’s head up in his lap and held his nose high for me to put my hand and arm down in his mouth and into his throat. I felt the stub end of something and when I touched it, the horse went into a struggle and moaned like he was in great pain. I came back out of his mouth and got a long pair of heavy-duty forceps and went back and got a hold of this strange object. It took all of Chandler’s strength to hold his head as I pulled. When I jerked it out as fast as possible, I had about a five-foot length of sotol blade with little sharp daggers that grew out on each side about a half inch apart and were turned pointed down, which caused them to be imbedded in the horse’s throat about the length of the entire blade.

We got the riggin’ off his head and untied his feet and let him up. By this time we had a small gathering of ranch people that had noticed the commotion and had walked down to see what was going on. We led the horse back to the office, and I carried water out of the office in a two-gallon bucket until he had drunk about two tubs full. I told Chandler I was afraid to give the horse any more water now and told him to load the animal and take him home; no further treatment would be necessary.

This horse was another case of trying to survive in a drouth by eating desert plants.

I was sittin’ on my porch at Stud Flat (this was the name the natives had given my office when I moved out on Spring Drive on the edge of town) watchin’ the heat waves in the middle of the afternoon irradiate from the pebble-rock-covered desert when Abe Mitchell drove up, got out and came in. I said, “Abe, drag up a chair and be slow to bring up your troubles ’cause it’s awful damn hot, and I don’t much want to make a call until the cool of the evenin’.”

We sat there awhile and wiped sweat, and I finally got up and went to the icebox and got us some cold drinks. Soon he began to unload a small amount of his troubles. He said he had a hundred and eighty white-faced cattle, that some of them were about to go blind and all of their eyes were runnin’ and looked irritated and sore.

I said, “Abe, I imagine it’s the pinkeye.”

“I know it is, but how are you goin’ to unpink a white-faced cow’s eyes and skin?”

We talked on and discussed the various unsuccessful ways that had been tried since the dust had gotten so bad during the drouth. One of the drouth-type conditions that developed first in range cattle was what’s commonly referred to as pinkeye. This is a common name for keratitis. There are three types of pinkeye. One is caused by a lack of green feed that occurs in livestock that are kept in barns in northern climates. Another type is actually a bloodstream infection. But the one occurring in the Trans-Pecos Region in my practice was caused by dust, wind, and hot sunshine that irritated the eyes of all breeds of animals. However, pinkeye was not considered common to anything but sheep and cattle.

I told Abe that being a smart doctor, I knew how to unpink the skin and eyes of a white-faced cow and, at the same time, treat the infection.

He said, “I’ll have the cattle in the corral early in the morning and I’ve got a good chute and plenty of help, and if you would get up and tend to business as early in the morning as I’m goin’ to, we’ll get through treating the cattle before the heat of the day.”

Later in the afternoon, I compounded five gallons of saline sulfa solution and added enough methylene blue medical dye to make a real dark-blue solution.

I was at the corral early the next morning as Abe and his cowboys brought the cattle into the corral. The working chute was long enough to hold about twenty-five or thirty head at a time, and the chute had a head squeeze on the gate. We would let a cow stick her head up into the gate and drop a lever down that would catch her head so she couldn’t get out but would be able to turn it from one side to the other so that we could treat each eye.

I had a six-ounce drench gun that I filled. As I squirted this solution into the cow’s eye with one hand, and as it gushed out, I would catch it with my other hand and smear it all over the white hair and the pink skin of the white-faced cow, which would dye the whole area a dark blue that would stay a week or ten days under range conditions and during that time deflect the sunrays that were causing the irritation of the eye socket itself.

Some of these cows’ eyes were so bad that there was already a white scum growth over the eyeball and a few were blind in one eye and one or two were blind in both eyes and followed the rest of the herd around by sound and smell. There was one cow that you could tell was pretty old by the wrinkles on her horns and around her eyes and she had already lost one eye. I gave her a very thorough treatment and when we let her head loose and let her come out of the chute, she turned and refused to leave. When I slapped her on the shoulder and hollered at her, she turned her good eye back up to me for more treatment.

This ten or fifteen days’ relief at the most for pinkeye at normal range conditions would have remedied the problem. However, in a drouth that hung on, this was only temporary relief and treatment had to be repeated regularly.

After we turned the cattle out, we watched them stand around in the shade at the water trough, and Abe said, “To see them not rubbin’ their heads against one another and to notice the flies gone from around their faces is satisfaction enough for me for the trouble.”

With all this evidence of drouth developing in my practice by the middle of 1947, it was hardly possible to continue to ignore dry weather. The small irrigation valley north of Fort Stockton that got its water from the historical Comanche Springs was such a small body of land that it did not begin to produce a fraction of the amount of feed necessary for the great drouth-stricken ranching area. The few pump farms that were being irrigated by wells were of no particular importance in the supply of feed and the depth of water in these wells was dropping by the day.

Dry feed that was being hauled and shipped in for hundreds of miles was a poor substitute for the lush growth of spring and summer weeds or cured mesquite and grama grass for fall and winter grazing. By now, nearly all the ranchers for about a year had been feeding hay as well as some stronger supplementary feed, and as these small ranchers used up their borrowing power, they began to go out of business. Some of the larger ranchers had begun to lease ranches in other parts of the country that were not affected by the drouth.

It was during the following year that many West Texans transplanted themselves to the Arkansas-Missouri grass country to the east and north and the hardier and larger operators moved into Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Those that went to Colorado bettered themselves only for a short season or so because the drouth was spreading that direction.

I still had a practice that afforded some relief from the drouth and I even began to hate cats and dogs and the people that owned them a little less. When Mrs. John Lancaster called me in the middle of a hot day in July to deliver some pigs, I almost welcomed the change.

Mrs. Lancaster lived in the irrigated valley north of town. John was in the oil-field-supply business and was gone from home a lot of the time. They weren’t really stock people to begin with; however, they had bought this farm and were raising, among other things, some hogs. She had called to tell me that one of their big hogs was trying to have some little hogs, and she didn’t think that the old sow was going to be able to have them and could I come right out.

I got there real quick and the sow had just that minute died from being overfat and gettin’ too hot tryin’ to have her pigs. Mrs. Lancaster was just sick about the whole deal, but when I put my hand on the sow, I realized the pigs were still alive.

As I did a Caesarean, I told her we might save the pigs if we didn’t waste any time. She just thought that would be marvelous and had never heard of such a thing; but if we could save them she would raise them on the bottle. By the time I handed her the first one, she had gotten some big beautiful bath towels, any one of which was worth more than the pigs. As I handed her four of them, she wiped the little things off. While they wiggled and squealed, she just beamed; she was tickled pink to be the mother of four little pigs.

Then she asked, “What can I put them in where they will be clean and cool?”

There wasn’t a clean place outdoors nor a cool one, and in a reckless tone of voice I said, “Why don’t you put them in the bathtub”—not thinkin’ that she would put them there. But she did take the pigs into the house and put them in a deep bathtub, where the little things couldn’t crawl out!

She fed them on a bottle, and I think bathed them as often as she did the children and raised four of the cutest squealing little pigs you ever saw. They were pets and were the most spoiled things that were ever in or around a house, but were in the house more than out. Of course, the trouble with pet pigs is that they grow up to be hogs, and the thought of eating one of the little dears was entirely out of the question. She hired a man with a pickup to come and get them when she was gone, so the parting wouldn’t be too painful, and she sent them to a boys’ ranch where she just knew they would have a good home.

A stock farmer from up on Pecos River east of Imperial came into my office one day and described the condition of a small herd of cattle—some were sick and others weren’t doin’ too good.

He was a fellow for whom I had done lots of practice, and without going to look at his cattle, I told him from his description his cattle had been drinking crude oil out of a slush pit that some oil company had failed to fence in. The cattle that had gotten the biggest amount of it would eventually die, I said, and some of the others would recover, but it would be slow and he would have a bunch of poor cattle on hand for a year or so.

I explained to him that if he wanted to have a case against the oil company that I would have to go and do a post-mortem on a cow and firm up the evidence so that I could help him collect damages from the oil company. We discussed this and he said it was a slow process to get damage money out of an oil company that had your land leased and he believed that the short way would be to sell ’em.

I said, “Well, I would send them to San Angelo or Midland to one of the stockyards and get them out of the country.”

He didn’t commit himself as to how he intended to sell them, and I didn’t charge him anything for the advice because I had actually done no real work on the case. At the time I supposed that that would be the end of it.

Several days later Charlie Baker, who was sheriff of Pecos County and bought and sold cattle on the side, came to me and said that he had a bunch of cattle that he had bought so cheap that he felt like he stole them. Being the sheriff he ought to be ashamed of a deal like this, but he said it was a grown man that sold them and took his money, so he guessed it was all right, but the cattle weren’t real good and he thought maybe they needed some mineral supplement or maybe they were wormy. He wanted me to go look at them and see what I thought they ought to have.

I said, “Charlie, I’ll be glad to look at the cattle. Where are they?”

“Well, I bought them from old So-and-so (this happened to be the man I had advised to sell ’em) and he’s lettin’ me keep them in his alfalfa field since he’s already got his last cutting for the year until I find a place to put ’em.”

I was practicing medicine. I wasn’t referee’n cow deals, and I was in no position to divulge what information I already had, so I told Charlie that I would meet him at the field right after noon that day and we would look at the cattle. There were twenty-eight head of these cows and yearlings and they were good-quality Hereford cattle as far as breeding was concerned, and the ages of the cows were good, but every cow and every yearling showed marked signs of having drunk oil.

I had to tell Sheriff Baker that the bargain he got he needn’t feel too guilty about since these cattle would slowly dry up on the bone and a few of them would die and the others would not be thrifty for at least another year.

Charlie turned pale and looked surprised that his good constituent would have sold him these cattle when he surely must have known what was the matter with them. I reminded him when he was tellin’ me about the deal, he said that the fellow sellin’ the cattle was a grown man and he guessed it was all right. I said, “You know, the fellow buyin’ the cattle was a grown man too.” He let out a weak laugh as we walked to the car.

On the way to town he told me that he had sold that fellow some cattle that weren’t “just right” about a year before this. As we drove along, he got reconciled to the deal and said, “I guess he has evened the score and I don’t believe that I’ll be mad at him for it.”

I said, “Charlie, that’s big of you, but you still got the cattle.”

“Oh, I’ll send them to Midland to the auction and get rid of them.”

We stopped at the Stockton Pharmacy and had a drink together and he paid me for my call.

In about ten days I got a call from Monahans, Texas, and the man said on the phone that he wanted me to come look at a bunch of sick cattle. Well, this was a common sort of a comment when somebody called me, so I said, “Sure,” and told him when I would be there.

It was late afternoon when we drove up to his pasture, and sure enough, there was this same bunch of oil-sick cattle. I was still in no position to let on that I had ever seen the cattle before so I explained to him during a careful examination in his presence what had happened to the cattle. By now the mucous membranes from the inside of the mouth and tongue had begun to sluff off and as we looked into some of their mouths, I explained to him that this same condition was present in the stomach and intestinal tract and that some of these cattle would recover, but most of them were slowly going to die off. I couldn’t tell him and wouldn’t ask, but I could see as I looked at the cattle that there were already five missing since I had first seen the cattle three weeks prior to this time.

I told him, as I had told the rest of them, that these cattle ought to be shipped to an auction and announced in the ring that they had drunk oil and let the purchaser be aware and pay what he wanted to for them. He agreed with me that that would be the fair thing to do and he would just take his loss and forget about them.

A few days after this, a man called me from Pecos and said that he had bought a bunch of cattle and before he put them on feed, he would like them vaccinated for shipping fever and do whatever was necessary to them that I would suggest so they would get the most good out of the feed he was going to give ’em.

When I got to Pecos, here was the same bunch of cattle with three more missing. I still had no professional right to divulge the history of the cattle, so I went into detail and we caught some of these cattle and looked into their mouths and I explained to him about oil poisoning. He immediately decided that he had better not put them on feed as that would be an expensive way to watch them die. I told him that they should go to a public market with an explanation at the time they were auctioned and sell them for whatever they would bring.

This fellow was a good operator and willing to take his loss rather than to misrepresent the cattle so he sent them back to the livestock market and had the auctioneer announce from the stand that these cattle had drunk crude oil, and he wanted anybody who bid on them to have full knowledge of their condition.

Three days later, a cow trader that was “a wire cutter and a speculator” called me to come and look at some sick cattle that he had pastured close to the Pyote Air Base. He was a pretty sharp old boy and had lied, stole, and cheated until he was fairly well fixed financially. When we drove out to see the cattle, he had them standing next to an oil well with an open slush pit and he told me, “These cattle been poisoned on drinkin’ that oil and I’ve got to sue the oil company so I’m gonna have to have you to testify.”

I said, “These cattle drank oil at Imperial, were sold to Fort Stockton, were sold to Monahans, were sold to Pecos, and were sold to you, and you’re the only man that has bought them with the understanding that they had previously drunk crude oil, but you are crooked enough to know how to try to make a lot of money out of ’em and when you file your case against the oil company and call me as an expert witness, I’ll be able to tell the court (as I pointed to the slush pit) that it was not this oil that poisoned the cattle—and to further add to your overhead, get your checkbook out and pay me thirty-five dollars for this call.”

Needless to say, I lost the wire cutter and speculator’s practice.