I WAS WEARING MY chaps the other day, those beloved shabby old chaps of dingy gray leather, with scallops of nail heads down the wings and a large steel R at the lower corner, which I wear only for photographs and long horseback journeys. And a new “dude” man at the corral asked me if I got them through a mail order house!
When I told him that they came from the man in Sheridan whose business it is to make them, he seemed extremely surprised. But it came to me then, almost as a blow, that a good many people believe that the cowboy now exists only in fiction and the rodeos; that the mail-order cowboy, a term jocularly originated by the cowboy himself to refer to the dandies of his profession, has been taken seriously by the East; that it is convinced that all the old cow country now raises is either wheat or dudes, that the beef animals of the country are collected for the packing houses by ones and twos from the milk herds of small farmers, and that the former cattle ranges are all now cut up into suburban lots, neatly fenced in and smelling strongly of cabbages after a rain.
But, as it happens, the cowboy is still with us. Discouraged he may be, but not extinct. Still on circle he wakens to the call of “Roll out” at 3:30, sits up in his tarp bed, puts on his hat and is dressed; still as nighthawk he drives the bed wagon all day and stands guard all night over the “cavvy”; still as night guard he circles the beef herds through the hours of darkness, singing to the cattle to quiet them; and still he drives his nervous snuffy animals incredible miles to the railroad and points them to the pens only to have, as of yore, the switch engine come along, whistle, and stampede them wildly to the four corners of the earth.
True, his herds are smaller today. The old days of bunches of 25,000 cattle and upward are practically over. But save in this one particular, his life and his methods are unchanged. On the range he makes and implicitly obeys his own laws; his apparently loose and haphazard organization on the round-up is actually compact and fitted together like the pieces of a scroll-saw puzzle; from the folding of the blankets in his round-up bed to the place for the nighthawk’s saddle, he follows certain arbitrary rules based on experience and custom, and thus eliminates friction. He is, as always, his own doctor, surgeon, blacksmith, cook, carpenter, hunter, wrangler, packer, herder and mechanic. He works in season eighteen hours a day and often twenty. And he has about as much time to think how picturesque he is as a one-armed man with the hives.
About two weeks ago, Domo’s nephews rode over from Birney to ask me to go with them “on circle.” It was during some riding, and just about that time Bruce’s horse came out of the bucking chute with a roar, “broke in two” as they say out here, leaped, whirled, reared and finally fell. When he got up again there was Bruce stretched out on the ground and not moving.
There was one of those horrified silences, then people ran. But he lay still for a long time, and when they finally carried him off we knew that he had a badly broken leg, and would never ride a bucking horse again. He was conscious, when they put him in a car to take him to Sheridan, and he waved an indomitable good-bye as he left. But whenever I get a letter from somebody protesting against the cruelty to the horse in this riding, I think about Bruce. And about Jack, too, only that is much, much worse.
And I wonder if these people know anything about these outlaw horses who will not be broken, and remain potential killers to the end. And I wonder, too, if they think this sort of riding is all show stuff. If they do, let them ride the circle with me; let them see wicked old Alizan standing quiet, apparently watching the cattle, and then watch him, as I did, suddenly and without warning rear up straight in the air and fall over backward! How Irving escaped that attempt at murder, I do not know; for an attempt at murder it clearly was.
And let them watch Burton and his buckskin; warily approaching it, finally a foot in the stirrup and easing himself into the saddle, and then, as regularly as he is mounted, see it using every trick in its little buckskin brain; bucking, rearing, stamping, squealing and bolting. It takes about ten acres of ground for Burton to mount that buckskin, and he can have it for all of me. It bucked into a mud-hole once and I hoped it would stick there and die, but it only threw up its head and knocked one of Burton’s nice front teeth back against the roof of his mouth, and came out unharmed.
Let them, to come right back home, watch my own Bluebeard the day they put a packsaddle on him. I was standing by when I saw this child of my heart rush out of the corral, kick, buck, roar and finally bolt to parts unknown. The thought that some fine day he might mistake me for a packsaddle was too much for me, and I am now riding a tall bay named Prince. Aside from the fact that I should have a stepladder to mount him, he seems safe enough. But who can tell? Some day a wasp may sting him, or something may touch his right ear—he is mighty peculiar about his right ear—and then “one toot and I’ll be oot” as the sexton said in church to the old lady with the ear trumpet.
But, as I was saying, the Bones boys had asked me to ride the circle with him.