by Ben K. Green
He asked me $135 a head for these four- and five-year-old mules—and that was a little high for unbroke mules if the market had been active, but this late in the year, it was a whole lot too high. I told him that the mule business was nearly over and that the mules would need to be halter-broke, their manes roached and their tails sheared before they could be led into the auction ring, but I didn’t fill him in that there were some Italian buyers in the country.
After a whole lot of conversation and a big ranch dinner, I bought the thirty-four head for $90 a head and turned them in the road and started home by way of Graham to Graford. At Graford I bought a few more and another one or two along the way and got into Weatherford with forty-seven head of mules that were just what the Italians needed to pack around in the mountains of their native land.
I had been gone for over a week and had missed one sale day at Fort Worth. In the late afternoon, I penned these fat, unbroke mules in the wagonyard and some of the local mule dealers asked me what I was goin’ to do with ’em—that there wasn’t any market for mules from now on through the summer and I would have plenty of time to get them broke for the fall trade. I told them that I had planned on dressin’ ’em up and takin’ ’em in to Forth Worth for the Italians. Silas Kemp spoke up and said, “The Italians got their boat loaded with more mules than you can shake a stick at and I think they’ve already shipped out.”
Well, since it was that season of the year when there weren’t any buyers comin’ to the market from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, the Italians hadn’t been havin’ any trouble buyin’ mules that passed their inspection, and I realized that Silas could be tellin’ me the truth.
I remembered that the Captain’s name was Spiro, so I eased up to the Texas Café, got in the pay phone booth, and closed the door real tight so the loafers couldn’t hear, then put in a call to him. When I got him on the phone, I explained why I had missed the sale the week before. I painted him a picture of how good my mules were and said I’d try to get into Fort Worth the comin’ sale day. He explained that they had nearly all the mules they wanted but if mine were as good as I said that they were, they would wait to see them before they finished their order. Well, I thanked him and promised him I would have the mules in there for sure Sunday afternoon for the Monday sale. It was Wednesday and the job of halter-breakin’ forty-seven head of mules to lead by Saturday night was something I hadn’t figured on.
When you rope a wild mule around the neck, you cause the lariat rope to be pulling down on the heavy muscular part of his neck. If he gets his head away from you and his hind quarters to you, he will pull a good horse half to death and a man afoot just can’t begin to hold him. Now, if you can manage to get him to turn his head to you and make him back up from you, the rope will slip up behind his ears and around his throat to where you can choke him down. When he hits the ground, you give him slack and put a halter on his head before he can get up.
Experience will teach you to dread ropin’ mules by the head and neck. I thought the smart way to do this would be to have a man help me cut off one mule at a time, then run him up past me in the hallway of the barn where I would rope him by the forefeet instead of the head. When the mule would hit the end of the rope with a lot of power, he’d throw himself and this would be very educational to him and easier on me.
The hallway of this barn was floored with 4 × 12 oak lumber that was well worn and had sort of a fuzzy-like finish to it from the wear of horses’ and mules’ feet. After I had put a halter on a mule and let him up, Cat Medford, an old-time trader, leaned on the fence and said, “Benny, let me tell you somethin’.”
Well, it wasn’t hard to get me to listen—if he knew anything—to get these mules gentle enough to show the Italians by Sunday, and he said, “If you’ll wet that plank floor real good, a runnin’ mule can’t stand up too good and you can bust him on that floor with a lot less effort. Don’t try to halter ’em the first time. Run ’em up and down this alley and forefeet ’em several times, and before you know it, when that rope hits their legs, instead of runnin’ they’ll stop and freeze in their tracks and you can walk up to ’em and halter ’em standin’ up.”
He had told me this in a low tone of voice because there were a few people up and down the hall of the barn watchin’ the show. I rigged up a hose to the hydrant over a water trough and soaked that oakwood floor good. I decided it might be a little hard for me with my high-heel boots to stand up on that slick floor when I was jerkin’ the forefeet out from under a mule, so I took a big four-strand silk manilla lariat rope and tied it around a big post about the middle of the hall of the barn. This way when that runnin’ mule passed me and I roped it, I’d just jiggle the slack until the mule hit the end of the rope and busted himself on that wet floor.
I worked about half of these mules through that morning and decided I would see if it was goin’ to work on ’em before I broke the other half the first time. So that afternoon I forefooted them a couple of more times, and about the fourth or fifth time around, when that rope hit their forefeet, those wild mules came to a slidin’ stop. They had rollers in their noses and things on their minds and they might stomp the floor a little like they wanted to paw you, but the idea of fallin’ kept them standin’ still while I walked up and slipped a halter on them.
During the time I had been ropin’ these mules, every time I caught one I hollered “Whoa” in a loud, firm voice, and it had gotten to where when a rope touched their forelegs and I hollered “Whoa” they would get the message and stand still. By Friday night I had a hall full of wild mules that I could walk up to and holler “Whoa” and put a halter on.
On Saturday I got a couple of stout-wristed farm boys to help me and we roached their manes and sheared their tails, and, believe it or not, they were a dressed-up bunch of good-lookin’ mules from four to five years old and weighed from 950 to 1050 pounds, which was ideal size for Italian pack mules.
Sunday morning I got some town cowboys to help me get the mules to the White Settlement Road and turned them out about daylight. I drove them the rest of the way to Fort Worth by myself with little or no trouble. They were all wearin’ halters and draggin’ halter ropes and steppin’ on them, which was pullin’ on their heads and makin’ their noses a little sensitive. I drove the thirty miles into the Fort Worth Horse and Mule Market a little before dark. I got Pete Shelton to help me get the halters off of them and we turned them into one of those nice big square pens with lots of good hay and shell corn and oats. I put my saddle horses in a pen out from under the roofed part of the Horse and Mule Market and left them well cared for. Then I got on the streetcar and went to the main part of Fort Worth.
Sure enough, I found my Italian Captain and Colonel at the hotel havin’ what they called dinner but it was supper to me. We visited and I told them about my good mules and they said they only needed sixty more mules.
When the sale started the next morning and the barn hands went to halterin’ my mules so they could lead them into the auction ring, I decided it would be best for me to go up to the auction stand and watch them come in the ring. The Italians bought forty-three head, and four sold too cheap to other buyers. Since these mules were broke only enough to be haltered and had never been tied hard and fast, I never knew whether or not they wrecked the ship at sea.
THE
LAST
TRAIL DRIVE
THROUGH
DOWNTOWN
DALLAS
I was riding past Hamilton’s filling station and garage on a pretty good sixty-dollar horse when a fellow that was buying gas hollered at me and waved me to come over. I wasn’t in a big hurry, so I reined over to the side of the road and he walked out from the station and asked, “What will you take for that horse?”
Well, that was a question I wasn’t bad to answer and I wasn’t riding one of my favorites. In order to leave some room for him to trade I said, “Seventy-five dollars.”
He said, “I really don’t want to buy no horses. I
was just wondering what one like that would be worth in this part of the country, because there was a man that tried to sell me some at Paint Rock, Texas, that were pretty nice lookin’ horses about the size of this one for $10 a head.”
I said, “I don’t know where Paint Rock is, but if you can buy horses like this one for $10 a head, it will have to be a long way to keep me from goin’ after ’em.”
He said, “Well, it’s too far to go horseback. It’s about two hundred and fifty miles southwest of here down close to San Angelo.”
I asked, “Who’s the man? That don’t sound too far.”
He told me that Shultz Bros and some other ranchers had a good many young unbroken horses for sale. By this time Hamilton had tended to his car and had made me very miserable with that piece of information, and I waved at him and rode off.
It was early summer and I had been out of school for about two weeks and was pretty well caught up with my loafin’ and visitin’ and kind of needed some place to go after a bunch of horses. I talked it over with my dad late that evening about them cheap horses out in West Texas and that I had all summer to go get ’em, break ’em, and sell ’em. I thought I would be less trouble to him if I was gone for two or three months.
He didn’t see much wrong with that and he knew I had several hundred dollars of tradin’ money, so he told me to rig up and leave when I got ready but be back in time to start to school that fall. He said he wanted to hear from me once in a while so he would know that the rest of the horse traders hadn’t gotten all my money and I hadn’t starved to death.
That night I got a map and figured out where Paint Rock was and how to get there by common roads and highways ahorseback. I wasn’t worried too much if this particular bunch of horses had been sold, because if horses sold that cheap, they must be plenty more in the same country.
Next morning I rigged up Beauty and led Charlie with a light pack on him, mostly just a bedroll and some extra clothes. It was a nice time of year, the grass was green along the roads and the running water was clean in the creeks that crossed the roads and highways and the nights were always nice and cool. I did get rained on a few times during the trip, but there wasn’t much danger of me meltin’ and there was no other reason that a good rain would hurt a young cowboy.
About ten nights later I camped in the wagonyard at Ballinger and ate supper at an old-timey two-story concrete block hotel over by the railroad. Settin’ on the porch of the hotel after supper that night. I got into a conversation with some railroad men and two or three native merchants and began to ask questions about the horses and ranches.
The country around Ballinger was mostly farms, but I had already crossed lots of grassland and the farms were along the Colorado River and plenty of ranches lay beyond there. These old native merchants said that if I wanted to buy horses I had better not say it very loud or I’d get more than I could handle.
The next morning the wagonyard man told me that it was about twenty miles to Paint Rock. He said that anybody there could tell me how to find the Shultz Ranch or the Paint Rock Cattle Company, which was the two names that I had. I rode into Paint Rock a little after dinner and an old country mercantile man told me that the Shultz Ranch had a phone and before I rode out there, why didn’t I call ’em. Well, I was just a big green country boy and hadn’t learned to cut off much mileage by usin’ the telephone and writin’ letters.
He got the Shultz Ranch on the phone for me and talked to the foreman; he told him that there was a kid that wanted to buy some horses. As he stepped back from the phone, he said, “Here, you talk to him.”
The old man had said I was a kid and I guess my conversation sounded like it too, so the foreman wasn’t too much impressed and evidently didn’t think he had much of a horse buyer because he said he would come in and talk to me that afternoon when he had finished working on the windmill.
I bought up a batch of cold grub and ate it off the counter at the mercantile. It was the heat of the day and business wasn’t too rushin’, so the old man and me had a good visit. After he found out where I was from, he said it looked like I came a long way to get eight or ten horses. He was talkin’ to me like I was a kid and I thought I was grown but he probably didn’t think I had enough money to pay for more than eight or ten horses and then they would have to be cheap.
There was some shade trees around the mercantile and a good place to graze my horses, so I slipped the bits out of their mouths where they could drag the reins and graze till they was full, and I stretched out under the lacy shade of a mesquite tree and went to sleep. I waked up after a while and made it back to the mercantile and got me some candy and a cold drink for a wake-up tonic.
It was a long, draggy afternoon and it was real late when this foreman drove up in a pickup and walked out to where I was shadin’ under a tree with my horses and asked, “Are you that kid that called about buyin’ some horses?”
He was a big, stout, ranchy-lookin’ fellow about forty years old, and I guess he had a right to call me a kid, but I thought horse buyers ought to be treated with a little more respect, so I said, “Yeah, are you the flunky of the outfit that’s got ’em for sale?”
He started to bristle a little bit but then he decided it was funny. As he looked at the sucker rod windmill stains on his clothes and hands, he said, “Yeah, I guess you would call me that.”
We talked on and he said that he didn’t believe that he had time to round up these horses just to sell three or four head.
“Well,” I said, “you think like a flunky too. How many head you got?”
He went to tryin’ to figure up and count on his fingers, talkin’ about thirty head of four-year-olds and a few threes and some older horses. He finally squinted one eye and looked up at the sun and said he guessed it would be about a hundred and thirty head of horses.
I asked, “What’s the askin’ price?”
He said that he had been told to get $10 a head for them straight across and I asked, “Will you round ’em up if you could sell half of ’em.”
He said, “We got so many horses and grass is gettin’ short in the horse pasture that we’ll round them up to sell less than that. But how do I know you got any money? You’re just a kid.”
I said, “How do I know you got any horses? You’re just a flunky.”
We was gettin’ pretty well acquainted by now and he said, “Why don’t we drive out there in the pickup and see some of them before dark and then you’ll know whether you’re interested or not.”
I said, “That’s a good idea, only it’s a poor way to buy horses.”
He said, “Well, we could round them up tomorrow morning if you think you would buy enough of them to make it worthwhile.”
Since I was goin’ to be gone for a little while, I tied my horses up like they ought to be to wait on me and we drove out to the ranch. I opened several gates while he did the driving and we went into a pasture that was fairly open, with only some scattered mesquite trees and big rocks in the way. We drove around close to several small bunches of horses that had just left the shade and began to graze in the late afternoon. I didn’t see a horse that wasn’t worth more than $10 and I thought a lot of them were worth $50 if I could move them far enough east—and break ’em on the way—where horses weren’t quite so plentiful and there were more people to use ’em.
It was dark when we got back to town and I guess my conversation had convinced him that I could buy some horses even if I was a kid. He told me he would have the horses in the corral by middle of the next morning. I told him that was plenty of time to ride out there. And we said our good-byes.
I made camp under the big mesquite tree and took some of the feed that I had tied on the back of my pack horse, fed my horses, and staked them out to graze for the night.
I broke camp before daylight and packed my riggin’ on Charlie and saddled old Beauty and started for the ranch. I got there way ahead of the horse herd and was settin’ on the fence when they came into sight and watched t
he cowboys bring them into the corral. This was a very colorful bunch of West Texas ranch horses. They were from three to seven years old, but most of them were fours and fives, mares and geldings, unbroken and would weigh from 850 to 1,000 pounds. They were bay, roan, grey, and the chestnut horses had lots of splashy white markings on their faces and legs. There was twelve head of old, fat cow horses that had been turned out for one reason or another and they would do to ride while moving the herd. There were six little hard, fat mules, but I wouldn’t describe them as being “wore out” because nobody can quite tell by lookin’ when a mule is wore out.
There were no brood mares nor colts in the bunch, but I did want to cut out enough horses to have just a hundred head and I still hadn’t agreed to give $10 for ’em, so we had a whole lot of smart conservation for each other while we was tryin’ to make the trade. I offered him $5 a head and take ’em all or $6 a head and cut out thirty.
Well, he acted like this made him mad enough to fight, and after he had slobbered and stomped in the dirt and jerked his horse a time or two, I said, “Well, I guess you were sure enough right about me wastin’ your time.”
He finally said he would take $10 a head for a hundred head or he would take $7 a head for all of ’em. We argued a little while longer and I pointed out ten head to him that were crippled one way or another that wouldn’t “road” good and told him that if he would cut out that ten head I would give $7 a head for the rest of ’em.
I could tell that he thought he had cheated me to death and was real proud of himself and was going to be glad to tell his boss about robbin’ a kid, but he sobered up a little bit to ask who was I going to give the check on and what town the bank was in. I got off the fence, turned around, and unbuckled the flap on my saddle pocket and pulled out a couple of brown paper sacks full of peanuts and candy and stuff. From down in the bottom I pulled out a wad of money that pretty near made this old boy faint and gave him forty-two twenty-dollar bills—$840 for a hundred and twenty head.