Late one afternoon, Mr. Lee called me from Iraan and said that the cowboys had brought the best stud he ever owned into the ranch headquarters, and he was bad sick and had been down on the ground and there were patches of hide gone from various parts of his body where he had rolled against rock and he had beat his head against the ground until his eyes were swollen too, and he asked how soon I could get there. The ranch was seventy-five miles away, and I told him I would be there as soon as I could drive it.
I drove into the ranch just at sundown. The stallion was about fifteen hands high with good conformation, and it was easy to see why Mr. Lee was uneasy about him. I didn’t have to examine him very much before I knew that he had a mesquite-bean impaction that would be extremely hard to remove.
Mesquite trees make a long pod that is filled with a sweet sorghum-like-tasting pulp and little oblong hard beans that are high in food value. In the late summer and early fall when mesquite beans begin to ripen, cattle and horses and sheep all will eat them. Sheep have to wait for them to fall on the ground, and at this stage the beans are fairly mature and if they are not eaten will lay on the ground all winter without rotting and are good for feed anytime livestock find them.
Horses and cattle, but especially horses, will pick the beans off the trees after they begin to turn sweet, and as long as there is grass to be eaten along with them, the beans will cause no serious problems and are ideal feed for horses to fatten on. In time of drouth when there is no other green vegeation to be mixed with mesquite beans, horses will eat such enormous quantities of them that they will form an impaction, and a mesquite-bean impaction is real trouble.
As the horse develops fever from this digestive-tract impaction, the fever tends to dry the moisture out of the impaction even more; and as this occurs, the fiber begins to swell, and if some form of treatment isn’t given, a mesquite-bean impaction is usually fatal. There are other cases where mesquite beans when eaten, especially by the small pony breed of horses, will cause founder and leave crippling effects after recovery in the feet of the ponies. Flocks of sheep will stiffen from the protein saturation in the tissue around the joints from a solid diet of mesquite beans. All ranchers look forward to a good fall mesquite-bean crop to put the final hardening fat on large livestock before winter.
Mesquite-bean impactions do not respond to the therapeutic action of internal purgative medication, and if over-stimulation of the spasmodic muscles of the intestinal tract is induced by medication, many times the large intestine and colon will rupture and hasten death. The only right way to relieve a mesquite-bean impaction is the hard way, and I mean by that you go into the rectum of a horse with a rubber hose and a pump and a tubful of water and moisten and water the impaction, and after you have stripped off to your waist, reach into the rectum of the horse and actually dig the mesquite bean impaction out with the aid of the water that you are pumping in.
We put this stud in a chute where he couldn’t lay down and put bars behind him where he couldn’t back up on me and bars in front of him so that he couldn’t move about, and by about ten thirty that night I had removed more than a tubful of the bean impaction and had gone far past the colon. Then I started medical treatment.
We saved the stud, and for the next five or six weeks, I had from one to as many calls as I could answer through the day and night for horses that were valuable and could be treated because they were gentle. There were lots of unbroke range horses that could not be treated and many of them died.
There was very little treatment that we could give sheep except to move them to pastures where there were no mesquite trees. Cattle belong to the ruminant family and have more than one stomach, and impactions are rarely if ever a problem. There may be an occasional case of bloat in cattle, but the losses from mesquite beans are minor.
I had just gotten in from one of these mesquite-bean cases and it was late afternoon and I was cleaning up a little in my laboratory when the phone rang. It was a fellow at the Walker oil field about forty miles east of Fort Stockton. He was callin’ me about his family milk cow that had calved in the early part of the day, and he said that she was awful sick and thought she had milk fever. This was another one of those hurry-up-type calls because the condition becomes critical so fast that time is important.
In an oil field that is already developed and has settled down to production, there is a class of employees that live in those camps after the boomers have passed on—pretty stable citizens. One or maybe two families keep a good milk cow and furnish fresh milk to the rest of the people in the camp, and these pet milk cows become pretty important.
Only the best milk cows will have milk fever because they deplete their body supply of calcium during the previous milking period. When a new calf is born, nature is partial to producing milk for that baby calf, so that the purest available calcium in the cow’s body is contained in the white cartilage walls of the milk glands that come out of the body and go into the cow’s bag. When the calcium is robbed from these tubes, they collapse and the disintegration that sets in is referred to as milk fever. It is actually a condition instead of a disease, and the cow is sure to die unless you can hastily replace this calcium.
It was after dark when I got there. This good cow was lying stretched out on the ground almost lifeless and no more than an hour from certain death if she received no treatment. Her breathing and heart ratio were so unstable that I had to spend about fifteen minutes of very precious time with heart stimulants before I dared to slug the jugular vein with calcium gluconate, an excess amount of which would have stopped this cow’s weak heart. She responded to the hypodermic heart stimulant, which, of course, also raised her fever but enabled me to administer calcium gluconate intravenously.
As I worked on this cow, I was aware of a very medicine-like odor that I knew I had nothing to do with, so I asked what it was that I smelled on the cow. It was late October and by this time of night the onlookers had built a fire in the corner of the corral and the neighbor women had gathered to see what was goin’ on and worry about the cow and get in a little gossipin’. When I asked what I smelled on the cow, one of these good neighbor women spoke up and said she bathed the cow’s bag with Watkin’s Liniment.
After a good forty-five minutes of hard medical practice, the cow showed a very favorable reaction and the men and me took her by the legs and rolled her over on the other side to encourage circulation on the side she had been lying on. She got a tremendous reaction from the calcium and started tryin’ to get up.
Well, being a pet cow she was easy to help, and we got her on her feet. She stood there for a few minutes, gained her balance, and walked over to the water trough and drank a lot of water, which was the natural thing for a cow to do that had just started to develop a tremendous flow of milk and had also been dehydrated by temperature.
I leaned back against the fence, and as the cow bawled for her baby calf, I had a real good feeling from saving that fine milk cow. About that time the old lady that had furnished the liniment flipped her apron up and wrapped both hands in it as she passed me goin’ toward the corral gate and in a very firm voice said, “Well, we’ll never know whether it was the liniment or the doctor that done it!”
About daylight one fresh fall morning, I went out to the irrigation valley north of town to see some sheep that had bloated in the night while grazing on some fresh cut-over alfalfa stubble. This was a common occurrence and the treatment was simple, but the cause was interesting in that it was not covered by any source of veterinary literature and was gradually learned by me and the farmers in the irrigated valley.
In the early fall when the days are still warm in the desert and the nights get very cold along after midnight, sheep will graze and fill up and lay down on dark nights and it’s likely that they may not leave their bed until sunrise the next morning. However, when the moon comes up late after the chill of the night, this sudden change from warm days to cold nights causes a chemical reaction in the tender growth of alfalfa and the sugars of the plant turn to acid and are not transposed again until up in the morning hours of warm sunshine.
During this moonlight period of acid vegetation, sheep will come off their bed ground in the moonlight and graze the alfalfa and develop severe cases of bloat within the matter of a few hours. Most of the farmers grazing alfalfa late in the year learned to pen their sheep on dry feed during the moonlight nights and this prevented those early daylight calls for bloat.
I heard a young veterinary doctor had moved in over at Monahans, which was about fifty miles north of me, and I just thought to myself that if he was real good, I would be glad for him to have the north end of my territory up and down the Pecos River, which would better enable me to take care of the rest of my practice.
I had answered a call up to Kermit still further north than Monahans and was on my way home in the late afternoon and dropped by to get acquainted with the young doctor. He was a great big, fat, slick-faced kid fresh out of college who had been raised on pavement and had no livestock or agricultural background. I was as polite to him as I could be and welcomed him into the country and told him I would be glad to help him any way I could and would be sure to send him some practice. As I drove away, I was sure that the only practice I could send him that he would know anything about would be dogs and cats and the women that owned them.
In about three weeks after meeting him, I got a call to come to Monahans to see about a milk cow. I told the people on the phone that they had a young veterinary doctor there and it would be cheaper for them to have him than for me to make the trip. The old man spoke up and said, “We’ve had him five times and don’t think the cow wants him any more, and for what he charges and what we’ve heard about you, you’d be the cheapest by a whole lot.”
About an hour and a half after that, I drove into the side gate of the man’s house in the main part of Monahans and there stood his milk cow with one side of her head swelled out of all proportion. He explained to me that the young doctor had used some great long words tellin’ him what was the matter with the cow. He said that the words hadn’t helped him none and the shots he had been givin’ hadn’t helped the cow none, and he guessed it wasn’t a common case as what was usually referred to as lump jaw.
Lump jaw is caused by an iodine deficiency and the jaw bone becomes porous and the flesh around the bone becomes highly irritated and the swelling usually appears on one side of the head. I looked at this old cow a few minutes and she was in real pain and was standing with her mouth open. Her mouth had been open so much and so long that the end of her tongue was dry and sore.
She was a gentle cow, so we didn’t put a rope or anything on her. I just walked up and talked to her a few minutes and reached in her mouth and took hold of her tongue and pulled it out to one side of her mouth. The reason for this is that a cow or horse can’t close their mouth to bite your arm if you have it blocked open by having their own tongue pulled out to one side.
As I examined her jaw teeth with one hand, I ran on to something that didn’t belong in a cow’s mouth. I went to my car and got a long blunt screwdriver and after pulling her tongue out the same way, I went back in her mouth and began to prize on something in line with the teeth in the lower jaw. In a matter of seconds out of her mouth popped a golf ball that had been wedged between two teeth in a socket where a tooth was gone. There had been a mass of feed compressed down into the socket under the golf ball, and, of course, the pus began to flow and the jaw began to go down.
There was a garden hose handy that was hooked to a hydrant so we turned it on and ran cold water through that old gal’s mouth for about ten minutes. After I stuck the hose in her mouth and the water started running through her jaw, I turned her tongue loose and she stood with her mouth open and enjoyed the relief she was gettin’ from the water washing out all that foreign matter. When I quit runnin’ the water, she walked over to the feed trough and began to eat like she was about to starve to death.
This gave me kind of a sickening feeling for the profession when doctors were being turned out of school that didn’t have common sense or nerve enough to stick their hand in a cow’s mouth to see what was the matter.
The winters in the Southwestern deserts are the most enjoyable time of the year. There are cold nights and warm, still days and just occasional unpleasant spells of weather. During this time of year, the ranchers weren’t too busy and most of them took time to have their horses’ teeth looked after. It was also an ideal time to do surgery on horses and cattle because there was practically no airborne infections and most recoveries were uneventful.
I had been doing lots of dentistry on saddle horses and that caused talk around the coffee gathering and everybody went to thinkin’ about their horses. On one of these nice, clear, cold January mornings, we were sittin’ in the drugstore waitin’ for the sun to come up so we could shed our coats and enjoy the desert climate when John Vic came up to me and in his high, whiny voice asked me what ought to be done about blind teeth on a four-year-old horse.
I explained to him that we could take the baby teeth out where the permanent teeth could come on through, but that the big knots that had formed on the horse’s head over the teeth would not go down after the baby teeth had been pulled and those knots would always show. So we made arrangements for me to remove the baby teeth.
Within a few days, Charlie Dees called me to look at a grey three-year-old colt that he had gotten from the Allison Ranch. This colt had been stifled (stifle joint dislocated), and I explained to Mr. Dees that there was nothing that could be done for this horse and that he would never be any better.
John Bennett came in within a day or two. He had a four-year-old dun horse that was known to be mean to buck and had a white spot in his eye, and he wanted to know if I could do something to cause the spot to disappear. I gave him some powder to be blown into the horse’s eye every other day and said, “If anything will take the spot off, this medicine will.”
In a few days John Vic came to me and told me that he had traded the horse that I had worked on his teeth for the stifled horse that Mr. Dees had and that Mr. Dees had told him that I said that the leg would get well.
Several days later, Charlie Dees, who was a little old man who wore a smile and a hearing aid and had one leg a little shorter than the other from some injury in his youth that caused him to pace a little when he walked, came up to me on the street. He told me that he had traded the horse he got from John Vic to John Bennett for a horse that had a little spot in his eye. Mr. Bennett had told him that I said the spot would go away, and he just wanted to ask me how long did I think it would take before it would be gone.
I said, “Yeah, and John Bennett said that I had told John Vic that the knots on the horse’s head would go away. Now, John Vic lied about the knots goin’ away, John Bennett lied about me sayin’ that the spot would go out of the horse’s eye, and if you told John Vic that the horse’s leg that you traded him would get well, or if you told John Bennett that I said the knots would go away, you lied, too—of course, you know whether you said it or not.”
As I finished my remark, he turned and started pacing off as though he didn’t hear me and said, “Aw wal, didn’t matta’.”
One hot summer day about noon I got a call from Roswell, New Mexico, concerning some cattle that were dying in the feed lots. The man calling gave me a lot of information about how many different kinds of “shots” they had given these cattle, but they were still dying, though they didn’t have any apparent sickness.
I told him there were several good veterinarians closer to him than me, and he said that he didn’t know about that because he had tried the most of ’em, and he and some other feed-lot operators had decided that they needed some outside help. He went on to tell me that they had heard that I “worked” on poisons and they would be willing to pay me to come up and look at their troubles. It was about two hundred and twenty miles to Roswell, and I told him I would be there before dark.
There were several of these big feed lots around Roswell, and they were being operated very efficiently, business-wise, and were using the best of milling and mixing equipment in making their feed-lot rations. There weren’t any sick cattle out of about three thousand that they showed me from the time I got there till midnight, but I did note there would be an occasional steer that did not appear to be carrying as much fill as the rest of the cattle.
I went to the old Nickson Hotel and checked in and told the several fellows that had taken me over the feed lots that I would see them at breakfast. This was another case of needin’ to be a better detective than doctor, and I decided to go to sleep and forget about it all till morning.
I spent the next day in the feed lots south of town trying to find some source of chemical poison that might be getting into the feed through the milling process. Late in the afternoon three steers died within an hour of each other, and these were cattle I had seen the day before that hadn’t shown any signs of illness.
I hadn’t been wishin’ for a steer to die, but this was sure enough a start because I could “post” them and possibly pick up some indication of the trouble from the internal organs. The steers that had died were two years old and had been on feed long enough to show bloom but weren’t quite fat enough to be termed finished. There was no indication of anything wrong in the liver, spleen, or kidneys, which are the organs that first show damage or presence of poison.
We went back to the office at one of the feed lots a little after dark and sat and talked for about three hours, and I told these feeders that their outside help up to now hadn’t found anything seriously wrong.
Early the next morning while it was still cool, I was sittin’ on the curb in front of the Nickson Hotel with Frank Young, waitin’ for the feeders. Frank was an old-time sheriff and had been head of the State Police of New Mexico, but since his retirement from political life, he was in the real estate business with an office in the hotel.
We were looking out across the courthouse lawn when a middle-aged man started walking across the lawn on feet big enough for a man twice his size, long arms and hands that hung down almost to his knees, and his head was shaped about as round as a hicker nut.
Frank said, “You see that fellow goin’ yonder?”
He was the only one crossing the lawn and I said, “Yeah, what about him?”
“That’s the most ignorant man in the world.”
“Aw, Frank, I don’t see much difference in the way he looks and a bunch of the other natives around here.”
Frank was a big, dark-complexioned fellow, and when he laughed his belly jumped up and down. He laughed real big and said, “I don’t care, there’s some difference.”
“What’s he done that makes you think that he’s the champion of ignorance?”
“Well, there was a big family of them people living back up in the mountains. They made their livin’ by hard labor, cuttin’ posts and trappin’ varmints, but the youngest one saved his money and got a hold of some good teams, wagons, harnesses and other equipment, and he left here and got jobs doin’ dirt work on railroad right-of-ways.
“He wanted to come home and visit a few days and he decided he would send a wire and gave it plenty of time to be delivered, so some of his family could come in and meet him at the train. When the depot agent got the wire, he stuck it in his pocket and walked up here on the square, and that one you see goin’ yonder was loafin’ over by the saloon.
“The depot agent walked up and said, ‘Rufe, I’ve got a wire here from your brother, Eck.’ Rufe took the wire and looked at it a minute and said, ‘Yep, that’s Eck all right. I’d’ve knowed his handwrite anywhere.’ ”
About that time some of the feeders drove up and we went to the feed lot. I walked around among fat cattle, fresh feed, and hidden trouble looking for symptoms.
These feed-lot operators had started the practice this year of feeding green chopped feed the first thing in the morning fresh out of the field. Corn was planted in the irrigation fields as thick in rows as it could stand, and with liquid fertilizer added to the irrigation water, this corn grew eight to ten feet high real quick. Before the stalk and foliage had time to start getting tough, it was cut and chopped by a machine in front of a truck that was especially equipped with a feed body on it. As this feed was cut green and chopped, it was moved by a conveyor over the cab of the truck and into this specially built body as the chopping machine and truck moved down the rows of feed. Then this truckload of fresh green chopped feed was hauled up to the feed lot and a specially built auger filled the troughs from the side of the body as the truck drove down the alleys between the different feed lots.
Fresh green chopped feed going through this process could have some chemical reactions occur between the time it was chopped in the field and the matter of four or five hours before the cattle would finish eating it all. I rode the truck in the field and watched the chopping going on, and then I walked around through the feed lots all morning watching the steers eat this green feed before they were given their mixture of concentrated dry feeds that afternoon.
The green chopped feed grown under irrigation was juicy and good and had a nice smell when piled up in the trough, and the steers like it. Late that afternoon I took a saddle horse and rode down through the corn for no particular reason that I can give, other than riding around on a good horse through green fields was at least restful and the company of a good horse sometimes improved my thinkin’.
As I was unsaddling the horse about dark, one of the men working around the feed lot had come back to the feed mill to tell me that he saw a steer dying in the last pen as he had started home. I got in my car and drove down close where I would have my instruments and other supplies with me and this fellow stayed and helped me post the steer.
This time I was looking harder and thought I’d better do a very thorough job if I were going to find the trouble. I took the paunch, which has separating divisions in it—and it’s generally stated that a cow has three or four stomachs, depending on what you are going to term a stomach, and this assembly constitutes the paunch—and washed all the waste matter and undigested feed out with a hose. As the pressure of the water hit the lining of the stomach, the lining would sluff off and after it dried was brown and had the same thickness and feel as a piece of printing parchment. I had found the trouble—but what caused it?
I carefully cleaned the rest of this paunch without any more water and stuffed it into some large glass jars that I had in the back of my car and tightly sealed the lid on them. It would be necessary for me to go back to my home laboratory with these specimens to do a good job of analyzing and diagnosing.
I called the hotel from the feed lot and told them that I was leaving but not to check me out and to tell whoever might be lookin’ for me that I would be back the next night. I reached Fort Stockton by midnight and by morning I had ground this fresh paunch, extracted all the serum and juices with the addition of triple-distilled water, and through a distillation process had about four liquid ounces of a very potent chemical insecticide. Now the problem was, Where did it come from? I had not been able to find it in any of the feeds that I had analyzed.
I drove into Roswell in the early afternoon and told the feed-lot operators of my discovery. We started hunting for an agricultural chemical insecticide. I finally wound up back in the cornfield, and in the hot, bright sunshine, I got a glimmer of a strange lacquer-looking finish over the leaves and some of the stalks of the corn.
I cut about twenty stalks of corn and headed back for my laboratory, and after a careful washing and distillation process, I was headed back to Roswell two days later with the same chemical substance in a vial that had been extracted from the lining of the steer’s paunch.
When I told the feed-lot operators this, they all said that they were spraying the lush tender corn with an insecticide in an oil base that they had been assured was harmless. The very explicit guaranteed instructions on the container stated that this insecticide would be harmless to livestock to graze the vegetation after three weeks from the time it was applied.
The extracted chemical from the steer’s paunch was sufficient evidence to call the chemical company in on the case. I put in a long-distance call to Michigan, and they assured me that extensive research had been done and that my diagnosis could not be possible. The next morning a staff of scientists landed at the airfield and came to the hotel with the positive intention of having my scalp, professionally speakin’, in the matter of a short time.
I had investigated the area where they had done their experimentation as best I could from a distance. All of their experiments had been conducted in acid soils with natural rainfall of more than forty inches per year, and with the usual amount of dew and fog at night that would occur in climates of this humid nature, leaching and dissipation of chemicals from the foliage would occur and it was true that such vegetation would be clear of any chemical residue in three weeks.
The desert regions of New Mexico had little or no summer rainfall, hardly any dew, and never any fog, and there was no dissipation of a chemical substance in an oil base sprayed onto lush corn, and the heat of the desert sun caused it to dry suddenly and be firmly fixed to the foliage of the corn.
I ran back and forth between Roswell and my laboratory at Fort Stockton three or four times during the next several days and came up with much proof and evidence. The president of the company had flown in on the case, and he was a high-class business executive who was concerned with the facts, and if his company was liable, he was interested in a peaceful settlement without publicity.
However, their chemist, so far as my judgment of stock was concerned, was a little on the stupid side. His hairline in front nearly touched his eyebrows and there was a ridge across the front of his head that showed his skull was as thick as my thumb, and whatever he knew he had left at home in his test tubes. Of course, he was in a hot spot and was determined to shed as much bad light on me as possible.
At a meeting of all concerned parties back at the hotel, I had with me three separate 4-cc. vials of chemicals that I had very carefully filtered under exact conditions. I took them out of my pocket in the midst of a conversation after Mr. Chemist Wizard had gotten unpleasant and set them on the desk and told him that with his vast knowledge and acute observation that I was sure he would be able to tell which of these three vials had its content drawn from a fresh-opened container of the chemical, which had been distilled from the tissue of the steer’s paunch, and I was sure he would have no trouble knowing which vial had been gathered and distilled from the green corn.
He stood and looked at the vials a few minutes and sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wet his lips and wiped his head with a white handkerchief. By now the president of the company wasn’t too proud of him and didn’t think that he was goin’ to win any blue ribbons anyway, so he insisted that he identify where the substance in each of the vials came from.
I had numbered the vials and written on a piece of paper their identity and had given it to Frank Young, who was a disinterested party, to keep until the proper time. Frank was sittin’ in a chair over in the corner of the room and I think he had begun to wonder whether my luck would hold or not.
After considerable hesitation, this expert of experts identified the pure sample as the one off the corn, and the sample from the steer’s stomach to have come out of the container, which left the third sample to have come out of the steer’s stomach, which was wrong too.
I told Frank to hand Mr. President my note, and as he finished reading it to himself, he turned to his secretary and said, “Pay all just claims as represented, and be sure to pay the doctor his fee and expenses.”
