Remembering Cowboy Country

John R. Erickson, well known as the author of the great Hank the Cowdog series of children’s books, knows cowdogs because he was first a cowboy. He worked on ranches in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles for eight years, and in 1986 wrote a book titled Cowboy Country based on his experiences along the Beaver River in 1978 and 1979. I’ve put excerpts from that book into four baskets labeled spring, summer, fall, and winter. We plan to publish in our Saturday Series a “season” a month from now through May. Here’s the first. —Marvin Olasky

Spring

The West still isn’t dead. The cowboy may be a vanishing breed, but he’s harder to put out of business than a cockroach. Every time we get him laid out in a casket, the rascal kicks the lid open and climbs out again.

Yes, things change. There’s no stopping that. But the cowboy has proved himself pretty adaptable, like the old coyote. They thought at one time the coyote was a vanishing breed too, that the sprawl of suburbia would push him into oblivion, but instead of becoming extinct, he learned to open garbage cans and eat poodles.

The cowboy is holding his own too, in spite of the obituaries. His range is shrinking in most places. The pastures are being cut up into smaller units and fenced off, as ranchers experiment with rotational grazing concepts and search for ways of lowering their cost of labor (which means looking for ways of doing without cowboys). The brush is being cleared and the wild brushy cattle replaced with higher-bred bovines that promise better weaning weights and a more docile temperament.

Many ranches that used to run herd bulls on commercial cows are now going to artificial insemination and embryo transplants, which offer maximum use of good bloodlines without the expense of maintaining the actual animals.

I’m glad I missed out on that. When I was cowboying, there were certain things I wouldn’t have done. Trading in my horse for a motorcycle was one. Working for an outfit that didn’t allow roping was another. And doing the job God intended for a bull to do was another.

I figure that if the cowboy can survive the indignity of breeding his own cows by hand and milking sperm out of a fat lazy bull, he will have adapted to the very worst the modern age has to offer.

No ranch I ever worked for got involved with artificial insemination. If it had, I would have agreed the West is dead, gone to town, and got a job as a welder or truck driver.

But some young fellow would have been there to take my place. That’s the way it’s always been. Just as one generation of cowboys quits in disgust, another moves in and keeps the profession alive.

Just as one generation of cowboys quits in disgust, another moves in and keeps the profession alive.

What’s interesting about all this is that the same society that is putting pressure on the cowboy from all directions has an insatiable appetite for art and rituals that depict the old ways. Western art and sculpture, which have enjoyed such a tremendous boom in recent years, celebrate the old virtues of courage, independence, and pride of the individual. I have never seen a piece of Western art that showed an AI technician at work in a sterile environment, have you? Or a guy out riding the range on his Honda three-wheeler?

So while we’re pushing the old-time cowboy out of our life with one hand, we’re re-creating him with the other, through art and sculpture—and also, I would say, in roping contests and cutting­horse competitions.

Which raises a question: If we really love the old ways so much, why don’t we try to keep them around in life instead of in art and rituals?

Many an hour when I’ve been out prowling pastures, I’ve puzzled over that question, and I never came up with an answer. Perhaps there’s a need in us to destroy what we know to be good and pure, because measuring up to an ideal is too much trouble.

Yet we don’t want to live without it either, so we rebuild it in a different form. A cowboy in bronze is OK because we can respond to it with nostalgia and longing. But a cowboy in the flesh reminds us of our own shortcomings, that we don’t want to pay the price he has paid for his bit of glory—the hands and feet numb with cold, the broken bones, the fear, the loneliness, the poverty, the aching back, the blood and sweat.

Or maybe the answer lies not so much in the human heart as in strict economics. Our economy has a way of feeding on the past. Yesterday’s forest becomes today’s coal-generated electricity. Yesterday’s mountain becomes today’s steel industry. Yesterday’s ranches become today’s suburbs.

We’re a people in a hurry. We consume things quickly. When something gets in our way, we remove it.

Maybe the old cowboy is getting in our way. He never was much of a moneymaker. He was too slow, too wedded to the past, too romantic and stubborn and independent. At one time we needed him, but now we don’t. Economic realities have changed.

And so the cowboy, once a workingman who did a job, is being changed and consumed. In our time and before our eyes, we are in the process of converting him and his simple values into new forms he never dreamed of: rodeo, country music, cigarette ads, beer commercials, art, sculpture, books, magazines, calendars, Western wear, museums, street names, and even the name of America’s favorite football team.

Is the cowboy a vanishing breed? Will we wake up one day and find that the flesh-and-blood man has gone and left us with nothing but his mythic presence? I hate to admit that could happen, yet I suppose that deep down, I fear that eventually our pell-mell way of life will do the cowboy in—or at least tame him so much that he won’t be worthy of the name.

And I guess that’s what this book is all about. As a young writer, I had the opportunity to sample the cowboy life, with all its rigors and hardships. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, either for me or for my family, but we believed it was the right course.

The Dream

I think every cowboy has a dream of moving on to a country that’s bigger and wilder than what he’s known before, where the fences and windmills are farther apart, where the horses are a little ranker, where the cowboy crews are bigger, where a man can climb on his horse in the morning and ride all day without seeing or hearing another human being.

There are certain names and places that evoke that dream, places a guy has heard about or read about: Montana, northeastern New Mexico, the Davis Mountains of far west Texas, the Canadian River country in the Texas Panhandle. Now and then you run into a man who’s worked those big pastures and big herds, you hear his stories and you think, “That’s where the real cowboys are, and someday … someday I’m going to pack up and move out there, ride with the best, and find out what I’m made of.”

Maybe that’s an odd dream for a young man to have in the age of computers and space travel and cement cities. It’s an old-fashioned kind of dream, the kind our great-grandfathers had back in the 1880s as they left the comforts of Ohio and Kentucky and Missouri and plunged into the vastness of the West.

I think every cowboy has a dream of moving on to a country that’s bigger and wilder than what he’s known before.

Louis L’Amour understands that tug on a man’s heart, and so does every old boy I ever met who has cowboy blood in his veins. I’ve dreamed that dream too.

It used to hit me at certain times of the year—in the spring when I got the first whiff of green grass; in August when the wind died and the windmills didn’t pump and the days were so still that you could hear all the way into next week; in October when the first northers blew in and a crisp wind rattled the cottonwood leaves and whispered in the dried grass.

At those times, my eyes went to the horizons and my mind flew to distant mountains and rivers, where the real cowboys gathered at first light and rode out to do their work.

In April of 1978 I was taking care of a 5,000-acre ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle. It was a cow-calf operation located in the high sandhills north of the Beaver River. I’d been there for four years and it had been a good learning ranch for me. I’d had plenty of adventures, which I later wrote about in the book Panhandle Cowboy, and I could have stayed there the rest of my life.

Oh, I still had those cowboy dreams of moving on, but we were comfortable on the Crown Ranch. I worked for people who left me alone and treated me right. We lived in a nice house and I had a wife and two little kids.

If you’re young and single, you can sack up your saddle and move on, but when the kids come along, all at once you have toys and clothes and diaper bags and baby bottles and playpens.

For most of us, the cowboy dream never really dies. It slowly fades away and loses its urgency until, around the age of 35 or 40, a guy finds himself satisfied with where he is or thinking about a job in town that will pay better money. When he gets a little age on him, he’s not so quick to uproot his family and drag them off to a wilder place.

A lot of cowboy dreams have ended there. Maybe the wife says no. Maybe the man wants to spare his kids that long school bus ride into town every day. Or maybe he doesn’t have the stomach to pack up all the danged toys and plates and stuff.

I was 35 in April of 1978 when my boss drove out to the ranch and we sat down in the living room and had a beer. We talked about the grass and the cattle, and then he said, “John, we’re going to put the ranch up for sale. You’d better start looking around for another job.”

I was a little bitter at first. I’d come to think of that ranch as mine. I’d ridden horseback over every square foot of those sandhills, and I’d had my nose buried in several of them by a big Thoroughbred mare named Gypsy. I’d thought I was tougher than she was, but she’d sort of straightened me out on that.

I’d given that ranch four good years. I’d given it blood and sweat. I’d just about decided to stay there until they hauled me out in a box.

The bitter feelings passed pretty quickly. It wasn’t my ranch, never had been. Nobody had ever promised me a lifetime job. My boss had been good to me, I’d had some fine old times, I’d made him a good hand, and now it was over.

My boss had been good to me, I’d had some fine old times, I’d made him a good hand, and now it was over.

After the anger came fear. In thirty days I would lose my job, my home, my salary, my security. It’s one thing to have that cowboy dream when you’ve got a paycheck coming in every month. It’s a little different, though, when you look it square in the eyes. Then you begin to wonder. You become aware of your weak spots and your age: You ain’t a bronc stomper, you ain’t the best roper around, and you ain’t even the second-best roper around.

Maybe you ain’t all the cowboy you’ve thought you were, and maybe it’s time for you to take a pumper’s job and move to town.

If a pumper’s job had popped up right then, I might have taken it. It would have been the easy thing to do. Pumpers worked regular hours, made good money, got all sorts of benefits, and they didn’t have to worry about sour horses or busted legs or getting a finger caught in the dallies.

But around the middle of April, one of my cowboy friends came by the ranch. His wife had left him six months before and he’d taken a job down on the Beaver River, on the headquarters place of the old Otto Barby ranch. He’d been living out there alone, thirty miles from the nearest town.

That was real cowboy country down there and he loved the work, but he was lonely and tired of eating cold beans out of a can. He wanted to find another wife and start over again, and he was definitely in the wrong place for that.

“I heard you were looking for a job,” he said, “and I thought you might want to know that I’m leaving the first of May.”

Well, that sent a little thrill through my bones. In our part of the world, when you talked about Real Cowboys you were talking about the boys down on the river, and never mind about Montana and the Davis Mountains. The work down on the river got about as Western as you’d want it to be, and those boys could handle anything that came along. I’d met some of them and knew others by reputation.

They were the best.

A guy dreams of working with the best, but in practice it involves some risks. When you work by yourself on a one-man outfit, you’re the top hand and you can talk yourself into a lot of vanity. But go out and ride with the best and you’re playing a game with a new set of rules. The ante goes up. You start at the bottom and have to prove yourself to a class of men who aren’t easily impressed. It’s hard enough to do that when you’re 18 and still a little crazy, but when you’re 35, it’s harder still.

A guy dreams of working with the best, but in practice it involves some risks.

All at once the dream of going to bigger country and a tougher life was within my reach, and when I wasn’t giddy with excitement, I was scared out of my wits. There was only one thing that scared me worse: not having a job in May.

So one Sunday afternoon I drove down to the river, about fifteen miles from the Crown Ranch.

Roundup seasons lasted weeks, not days, and if a man loved cowboying, this was the place to be.

I got the job on the LD Bar, and the first week in May found us moving our things in a stock trailer, over fifteen miles of roads that were either dusty or muddy, depending on what the weather had done that day. On the eighth of May, around six o’clock in the afternoon, I pulled in with the last load, which included our two dogs and a two-year old mare that I was in the process of breaking.

The next morning at daylight I approached the shipping pens, about two miles west of Rosston. I could see ten or twelve pickup­trailer rigs parked out front. When I pulled off the highway, there were two rigs behind me and another one or two coming in from the east, headlights still glowing.

My headlights cut across a group of cowboys, more than a dozen of them, wearing leather vests and denim jackets against the morning chill. They stood around talking. Some had brought thermoses of hot coffee and they passed them around to the other men. Some were zipping up their shotgun chaps, others buckled on their spurs, others led their horses out of trailers.

This roundup had pulled in cowboys from an area fifty miles in all directions. Most of them worked on ranches along the Beaver River, from Beaver City to Laverne, a distance of forty miles. But others had come from ranches on Kiowa Creek, the Cimarron River, and even Crooked Creek up in Meade County, Kansas.

They had all come to take part in rounding up one of the biggest pastures in the Oklahoma Panhandle. I had heard stories about the Rosston river pasture. It consisted of 6,000 acres under one fence, and it was rough and hard to gather. The northern three-quarters of the pasture was composed of high, brushy sandhills. Finding cattle in the hills was difficult, and riding a horse up and down, through loose footing, wore him down in a hurry.

But the southern quarter of the pasture was even worse. Along the flood plain of the Beaver River, the crew faced a jungle of tamarack brush, about three miles long and a mile wide. In the middle of this maze you could lose your sense of direction. You had to pick your way through trails made by deer and cattle, while avoiding slews that could bog a horse and river crossings that might turn out to be quicksand.

I had heard that the cattle in this pasture were wild and “brushy,” and that they often had to be roped and dragged out of the tamaracks. I had heard about the time this pasture was rounded up in a heavy fog and cowboys had gotten lost and stayed lost for hours. I had heard about horses going down in quicksand and about cowboys meeting low branches in the midst of a chase.

Our line of cowboys rode east across the width of the pasture, until we reached the east fence line. There, we all turned south and pushed our cattle down into the flat flood plain of the river. When we got there, we had to hold our cattle and wait for the boys on the river to come out of the brush with their stock.

They had gotten the harder part of the job, bringing those brushy cattle out of the shadows and into the light of day. Some of those river cattle had never been gathered before. They were experts at hiding and losing themselves in the brush. They didn’t like humans, and they didn’t have much use for our roundup.

You could pick out the worst ones at a distance. They came flying out of the tamaracks with their tails curled over their backs in a figure nine and their heads up in the air. Some were branded cows, but some had never heard of a branding iron. They had grown up in that brush, escaped two roundups a year, and were now teaching their own calves the ways of the wild.

They had grown up in that brush, escaped two roundups a year, and were now teaching their own calves the ways of the wild.

They sure were surprised when they popped out of the brush, took aim for the sandhills, and saw a line of cowboys there on the north side of the river—every man with a rope in his hands and an itch to stick it on a nice set of horns.

We held our line on the north, but some of those old sisters didn’t make the trip to the roundup ground. When they saw us blocking their path to the hills, they had the deal figured out. They changed directions and headed back to the brush. Some got stopped and turned around, but others couldn’t be stopped with anything but a nylon rope. If you put a horse in their path, they would go under you, over you, or through you, just any way you wanted it.

We spilled some but we got most of them gathered. When all the cowboys came out of the brush, we shaped the herd and started driving them west, up the river, and drove them to a big grassy flat that served as the roundup ground.

We stopped them there and loose-herded them, while Darrell Cox, Alfred Barby, and Stanley Barby entered the herd and started cutting out dry cows and bulls.

That was something to see—a herd of eight hundred cattle, loose-herded by twenty-three cowboys. It wouldn’t have been uncommon fifty years ago, but these days, in the age of shipping pens and squeeze chutes and ranchers who are too busy to swap out work, it’s a pretty rare sight.

I’m glad I got to see it.