by Ben K. Green
He said, “Yeah, not much attention is gittin’ paid to ’em, and the broodmares of the country are gittin’ sorrier as automobiles are gittin’ more plentiful.”
Of course, when he mentioned automobiles it was just kind of a passing word. They hadn’t cut too deep into the horse business; no such thing as a tractor existed to my knowledge; and nobody was too much worried about the future of the horse. We just assumed that we’d always have to have thousands of them and that they would be with us forever.
I stood looking over the fence as Charlie walked on down through the barn, and it just kinda occurred to me that if some young man had taken over the Shield that wasn’t too interested in the horse business, this might be the place for me to get some broodmares better than I had ever owned. I thought about this all morning, made further inquiry, and learned a little about the way to get to the Shield Ranch. The best I could gather, it must be about two hundred miles—and I thought it would be a worthwhile trip to see if there were any Shield mares with all the many generations of good breeding in them that I could own at a reasonable figure and maybe keep myself mounted for the rest of my life. Horsemen are inclined to ramble like this in their thinking. Had it not been so, there would not have been developed such great breeds of horses as mankind has enjoyed through the years.
Next morning I loaded my saddle and the rest of my riggin’ on a passenger train to Uvalde, Texas. This was gettin’ pretty far down in the big steer and brush country—ranches got bigger and fences got fewer. I got off the train in Uvalde and went up to a fine old hotel of the west on the square where I stood around a little while and visited. I found out there was a man who had a trading yard down close to the stock pens by the railroad track. I moseyed off down there afoot and saw he had some good saddle horses—and some others, too. I picked out a good dun horse that had clean feet and legs and a good, stout, hard body. He was shod. You could tell he had been used and was hard on grain and would be able to carry a man a long ways.
When I asked the fellow that had the horses about buying a saddle horse, he pointed out two or three different horses to me and made me a talk about each one of them. I looked over at the dun horse and asked about him. “Well,” this fellow said, “yes, he’s a good horse, but he’s a horse I use myself, and he wouldn’t come too cheap.”
He didn’t know it, but I wasn’t looking for one too cheap. I was looking for one that could go deep into the brush country and give a man a fair chance of getting back on the same horse he left on. We didn’t haggle much. He priced the horse too cheap, so I bought it.
This fellow took me up to the hotel in a little Ford roadster and went back down to his pens. I saddled my horse and started off. The horse moved out nice and had a good, long, flat running walk. He had a good short back and carried me easy and felt stout under me. I could tell he was what I needed for the trip I had in mind. He was about fifteen hands high, weighed a thousand and fifty pounds, and had a smooth way of carrying himself. He stepped over the ground with a fair overreach and nodded his head a little bit. You could tell he was a good road horse.
I went by Swartz’s General Mercantile and bought a stake rope, a yellow slicker, and some grub to wrap up in my slicker and tie on the back of my saddle. I headed out south and a little west of Uvalde, following on the east side of the Anacacho Mountains a narrow country road that I thought would get me to the Shield Ranch. The first night out I camped in the foothills of the mountains by a little creek. My horse staked out good—behaved himself and went to grazing. I made a little fire and fried some meat on the end of a stick, then I made my bed and went to sleep.
It was the fall of the year and a little chilly—good sleeping weather—however, I waked up before daylight. My horse was full and rested, standing asleep on three legs at the end of his stake rope. He still had plenty of grass within reach. I fixed a little breakfast, got an early start, and headed out over the divide—still going toward the Rio Grande country. This country was awfully dry. I had seen very little livestock, very few cattle and hardly no horses atall. A little after noon on this second day, I rode on the site of a great big wide gate with high gateposts and an arch between them over the top of the gate. On this arch was a wide slab of oakwood with a huge shield burned into it and the name “Broquel,” the word for shield in Spanish, burned beneath the shield.
I turned in and rode several miles before I came in sight of the headquarters of the Shield Ranch. There were a number of houses and corrals and improvements, and some of the big old trees like an old, old headquarters would have. You could see the house had thick ’dobe walls and was tile-roofed, and the outbuildings around it were of similar construction. It had been a ranch headquarters for many, many years.
Of course, a man that had lived his life in the West and had been around lots of cow outfits would readily detect which one of those buildings was the cook shack. I rode up to the cook shack, tied my horse to the hitch rack, and about the time I stepped on the ground somebody from inside hollered, “Git down, tie yore horse, and come in”—all of which I did.
There was a great big old long dining room with a great big long table running down through the middle of it, benches on both sides, and a chair at the end of the table. The cook was one of those old-timey ranch cooks, old and fat and happy about it all. Some cowboys were working in the corrals down below the headquarters. They saw me ride up, and of course they kinda got their work caught up—whatever they were doing—and moseyed up to the cook shack to get a cup of coffee and some conversation and find out who the newcomer was.
The West was pretty polite in those days. Nobody asked you too many questions. If you wanted to tell them, they listened—but if you didn’t, they didn’t ask you. Three cowboys came in and got big tin cups of coffee and sat down on a long bench and talked and visited and told about the drouth—it looked like it was going to be a hard winter. I told them how much of the country it covered, and some other things they hadn’t heard. In those days, there was not too much communication, very few radios, and not too many ways of getting news from the outside. They had heard, though, that the drouth was widespread, and we talked about all the cattle and horses that had been shipped and sold, and so on. But they were still fishing around, trying to find out who I was and what business I had in the country without asking.
After a while I told them that I bought horses, and that I needed some that would make good polo horses or military horses (the government in those days was always buying horses for the cavalry), but everything I found had been too poor or too old or too something—that I hadn’t had any luck, and I guessed that I’d head out through the west and go toward Del Rio and turn north and come into San Angelo in the next ten or fifteen days.
One of these cowboys eased up from astraddle the bench he was settin’ on and started out the door that went toward the headquarters. Nobody noticed him, and he didn’t say he was aleavin’, or acomin’ back, or make any mention he had been there. I noticed this but made no comment about it. Pretty soon he comes back following a nice-dressed, soft young man that you could tell had been staying in the shade and out of the dirt. His boots had a shine on, and his britches had a crease in them. And you could tell that his boots weren’t spur-marked, and that he didn’t have too much sign of chap leather on his britches either. I noticed all this right quick. He was clean-shaved and his hands were smooth, fingernails kinda long for a ranch hand.
In the West, a man never grew a fingernail. He had them torn off by lariat ropes or reins, or chewed them off because the weather was bad, or something. When you saw a man with nice-kept hands, long fingernails, creases in his britches, and shine on his boots, you would know that he was either the owner of the outfit or was the boss’s son or had married his daughter, that he wasn’t a common cowboy.
This young man walked in and stuck out his hand and introduced himself. He was the young Mr. Collin that was running the Shield. And, of course, for the first time, I told my name and told him that I was d
rifting by and just stopped to take on a little of his hospitality. He said, “Fine. I hope the cook fed you, and you are welcome …,” and all that kind of stuff that went with the passing of the day in the old Southwest.
Everybody else got up and got their own coffee, but the cook brought him a cup. He lit a cigarette, sipped his coffee, looked out the window, and talked about how dry it was and how they’d had to sell their cattle, cut down on their livestock, and it looked like some of the cowboys were going to have to leave and find work somewhere else. He said he’d just almost have to quit running the ranch until it rained and the place could be put back on a profitable basis. He made all this conversation sound awful high-class. He said it in a nice, cultured tone of voice without any pain or chagrin or regret; it seemed like he was kinda looking forward to shutting the outfit down and going to town and spending the winter.
Directly he gazed off past my shoulder out the window like he didn’t even see me and said, “One of the boys said that you were a horse buyer.”
I said, “Well, I’d like to be—only I haven’t found any horses to buy on this trip. They’ve all been too old, or too poor, or too something or another. I haven’t found any horses that I thought I could sell to the cavalry—or to anybody else, for that matter.”
“A lot of horses,” he said, “have been sold here during the drouth, and there are not many good horses left in the country. Most of what’s left are yearlings and twos and unbroke horses and broodmares.”
I knew all of that—and of course those were the classes of horses that weren’t worth much money. There wasn’t much demand for them. He went on to comment that he had a lot of yearlings, twos, and threes, enough to last the ranch several years without raising any more.
I thought to myself, this is going to be easier than I intended for it to be; he is already offering to sell me what I came after, and I haven’t had to show my hand. So I told him that since I hadn’t been able to buy anything else, I might ought to try to buy some broodmares instead of going back to the north part of the country without any horses at all.
He said he had about thirty broodmares in the canyon pasture which wasn’t more than a mile from headquarters. We could see some of them from an automobile if I wanted to drive down there with him and have a look. Well, this showing you horses from an automobile was kind of a new fandangle way of doing things, but you could tell alookin’ at him that he wasn’t too anxious to go showing them to you horseback; so I told him I guessed that would be all right.
He had a Mexican boy get in the back seat of this big automobile with the top laid back and several spare tires mounted on the rear. It was sure a long, fancy rig. We went down and dropped off the rimrock, went through a gate, and drove into the canyon pasture. He drove kinda slow down in through some great big boulders and greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite—there wasn’t any grass in this pasture to speak of—and we found a few mares standing in the shade down in the lower part of the canyon. Sure enough, they had the shield on them, and they were those kind of solid-color mares with good feet and legs, clean heads, nice keen necks, and beautiful backs. He said they were the old Shield mares, that they had bred them pure for many years, and they were a pretty good kind of horse.
I could tell right off he didn’t really know how good they were. He’s just had good horses all his life, and he hadn’t had any experience trying to work stock ahorseback on a sorry horse or he’d never have been willing to sell these deep-bodied, ribby kind of good mares. We saw about eighteen or nineteen head of them before we got to the other end of the pasture, and right at the gate there were five more,—made twenty-four altogether. He told me he thought there were twenty-eight in the pasture, that he didn’t remember, but that he could ask somebody (he called his name) at the headquarters when we got back. These mares were mixed ages. There were a few old mares in them; there were also some nice, bright-headed young mares. There weren’t any colts left on these mares—evidently they had been weaned and taken off to some other pasture, and these mares had been put in the canyon pasture to make the winter. All the mares I saw showed to be bred and would drop foals in the early spring. We had not seen a stud; so I asked what sort of a stud they were bred to. He said the stud was an old horse of the same type as the mares, but he had died because at his age he could not stand the drouth.
As we went out the gate at the lower end of the pasture, I noticed there was a good set of working corrals, plenty big and tall with good swing gates, that would be a nice place to pen a bunch of horses and look at them—or do whatever you wanted to with them. We drove on back toward the house, and he didn’t say much more about the mares.
We got to the cook shack where I had left my horse, got out, and went in and sat down at the table. He asked one of the older cowboys how many mares there were. This cowboy said there were twenty-eight head. I asked how many old mares there were. He said there were four old mares and the rest were either middle-aged or young mares. He talked about this mare and that mare being just a four-year old, and another one that was seven, and so on. This kinda tallied out with what I had observed when I was looking at them. They were all solid colors. They weren’t great big, but they were very typy and carrying lots of balance and body and good bone structure. And they were sound, clean-legged kind of mares, having plenty of substance without being coarse. I had secretly thought to myself that with mares like this, I’d never be afoot the rest of my life.
Still no mention had been made about price, but, after all, there wasn’t really much demand or much sale for mares, especially in a drouth. I thought surely they wouldn’t be very high. When he finally got around to pricing these mares, he said that they were going to go out of the mare business and that mare buyers were pretty scarce. He would price them to me where I would try to buy them.
I asked, “What would that be?”
He said he would take $30 a head for them. Well, along about then the average run of good ranch mares were bringing $10 to $12 apiece. Young, broke mares sometimes would bring twenty, but $30 for broodmares was sort of unheard of. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t show much weakness. I wanted those mares worse than anyone else would ever have wanted them; so I just sat there a few minutes and didn’t answer.
He said, “What’s the matter? Did that chill your blood?”
I said, “No, not exactly, but that’s an awful lot of money for mares.”
“Well, then,” he said, “what do you think you would give for them?”
I said, “I might give $25 a head for twenty-eight head, if they’re all just like the ones we saw.”
Of course he said they were. And the old ranch foreman said the mares were all of the same breeding and all close kin. You could tell this young Collin wasn’t too interested in their breeding, but he said that since this was Friday, it would be Monday before he could get them up and deliver them in the pens to me—for $25 a head. If I wanted to buy them, I could pay him half of it in cash now and the other half when I got the mares.
Well, I tried to set like I was worrying about it. Of course I had long since known I was going to buy the mares, but I didn’t want to seem too anxious. I might scare this young blade a little bit about that being a pretty high-price for horses. I walked over by the stove and tore a piece of sourdough bread out of a pan and chewed around on it. Finally I said, “Well, I don’t know what they’re worth, and I don’t believe anybody else does. But I believe if you’ll take it, I’ll give it and we’ll have ourselves a horse trade.”
He said he hoped I would take the mares plumb out of the country. I told him I would, I’d take them back up into northwest Texas. So I gave him $350 in cash. I had about that much in one pocket, and I could pay him that without showing whether I had any more money or not.
In the conversation he had mentioned twice that I could come back Monday after the mares. I thought it was a little peculiar that he didn’t invite me to just stay until they could get the mares in the corral for me Saturday or Sunday. He cou
ld furnish me some help, and I could drive them out from there. That would kind of be the custom of the West, but I wasn’t going to let any little customs interfere with a good horse trade; so I told him that I would ride on over to La Rio, which was a little town over about another twenty miles, and that I would be back Monday to get my horses.
He counted the money. The cook and the cowboys sat and listened and watched, and nobody made any comment about the trade atall.
My horse had got his breath, and I had eaten a batch of that ranch grub around there. Beans, beef, and potatoes—that was the common diet about that time on ranches. There wasn’t any refrigeration to speak of, and nobody bought any canned grub to feed cowboys. So I’d made out a big dinner on what I was used to, and told him that I guessed I’d water my horse at the windmill over there and drift into town. I thanked the cook for fixing me some chuck, said good-bye to the boys, shook hands with the Señor Capitan, Mr. Collin, and got on my horse and rode away.
As I stepped on my dun horse, young Collin mentioned that he was a good stout horse but didn’t look like he would have much speed. I said that I hadn’t had him long and hadn’t tried him—he might not, I didn’t know. I did notice that when the young Collin commented about my horse, one of those cowboys had just a little bit of a smile on one side of his face. Of course, everybody said something about one another’s horses, and I didn’t think much about it.
I rode into the little town of La Rio on the banks of the Rio Grande, way up high on the bluff and looking over into Old Mexico—a typical little bitty old border town. You wondered how it got built there and how it survived. But there were some people, and some business—a country store, a few other little buildings. Wasn’t anybody around much it was nearly sundown, but dusk lingers in the dessert regions of the Southwest and it would be a good while before dark. At the back of this country store was a set of corrals to be used by anybody that rode in to spend a day or two in town. Whatever you might buy at the store, your horse or your team was handy there for you. Everybody just generally understood this, and a newcomer knew at a glance that this was the place to leave his horse. At the back side of the corrals there were some little old low sheds, and a few snarled old mesquite trees were in the middle of the corrals. The trees gnarled and you could tell by the bark on them that they had been rope-burned by broncs and that all kinds of horses had been tied to them. The leaves were picked off pretty high, like some old pony had stood there waiting for a rider that was spending a little too much time in town and had left him there to pick at the mesquite or starve. I tied my horse to one of these old trees.