The Pastures of Beyond

by Dayton O. Hyde

  That summer, I traveled widely with Slim, Margaret, and Margaret’s little daughter, Daryle Ann. One week we would be in Billings, Montana, the next in Penticton, British Columbia, then Ellensburg, Washington. I blew the $2,000 advance on the story the first month and then was forced to live on what my slender rodeo and photographic talents could provide.

  I did some suicidal things while photographing bulls, thinking that Slim Pickens was at my side and would save me. In Billings, Montana, the management cut the arena in half so the bulls would fight more. This gave me a far better opportunity for photography. I was doing some close shots of Slim fighting when a bull ran through his cape and headed straight at me. I turned and ran, leaping up the wire fence just as the bull nailed me in the seat of the pants. The wire panel sagged backward under my weight, pinning me on top of the animal.

  Someone in the audience took a photograph, and there was Slim with a big grin on his face, pointing to my wallet pocket, showing the bull where to hit.

  There was a camaraderie about that summer quite unlike anything I had ever known. I became friends with cowboys I’d only watched from afar. Often I traveled with Slim and his family. We camped together, cooked together, and shared our liniment bottles, for bruises were never far away. Between rodeos we spent restful days fishing western streams or on dude ranches such as the 4K in Dean, Montana, which was owned by Mickey Cochrane, the baseball player, and Frank Book, who owned the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. When we left the 4K, an underage girl stowed away in the backseat of my jeep, and I didn’t find her until I had crossed two state lines and an international border. Scared, I drove like a madman to catch up with Slim and Margaret, and turned the young lady over to Margaret’s keeping. The girl thirsted for an exciting, adventurous life like ours, but her father had arrived at the 4K just after we departed and was not pleased to find her gone. We heard over the radio that there was a manhunt on for the cowboys who had kidnapped her. We sent her home with a calf roper who was heading back to the States and failed to notice how young she was.

  Before long, we were back in Montana. Slim and Margaret were invited to a barbecue by two all-time great lady bronc riders, Marge and Alice Greenough, and took me along. I had met their brother Turk, who was then married to Sally Rand, a famous exotic dancer. I had expected the Greenough girls to be big and tough like Turk, but here were two slender, lovely women who could have been pouring tea at a garden party.

  The rodeos were hard work, but there was always time to relax. We would often arrive a day or two before a rodeo and give the horses time to get over the trip. Slim owned a big Appaloosa named Dear John and a pinto mule named Judy. John had been trained to buck on cue and could outperform most rodeo broncs. Riding him was part of Slim’s clown act. Slim would rope and bulldog off the mule, Judy, to the delight of the crowds.

  Often we would set up camp behind the chutes, amongst the livestock trucks and pickups hauling horse trailers, greeting new arrivals as they came. There would be bronc riders braiding new bucking reins and working over their bronc saddles, bull riders working rosin into chaps and bull ropes, ropers swinging loops, and trick riders exercising horses and practicing runs. Inevitably there would be cowboys playing cards on a bale of hay covered with a blanket or playing pitch with pennies against the tire of a cattle truck.

  Montie Montana, the great trick rider and roper, would generally be there caring for his horses, and I would wander over to help him. Montie’s horses came first with him, and I don’t ever remember seeing one of his horses that wasn’t groomed to shine. Montie had worked in many an early movie with such greats as Tom Mix and William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), and if I hung around until after the work was done, I could usually tease out a story or two.

  Montie and I remained friends for years. When he was in his eighties and still performing, he got two plastic knees. I was talking with him on the telephone and I said, “Montie, don’t those artificial knees interfere with your lovemaking?”

  “Only when I have to beg for it,” Montie replied.

  One morning, Slim and I had finished exercising the horses and were sitting in the shade of the grandstand, talking about fishing, when a cowboy named Bud Linderman came up. Bud was a brawny, curly-haired, hard-drinking, brawling black sheep of a great rodeo family, but he was a champion cowboy. According to Slim, Bud won most of his fights by jumping in quickly and putting out a cowboy’s lights before the man even knew there was a fight happening. He had killed a detective at Madison Square Garden with one punch and was generally feared. Bud had been in a fight the day before, and the police had broken it up before Linderman had a chance to clobber his opponent. Now as Bud joined us, we could see his hapless cowboy opponent doing laps around the racetrack.

  “What in hell’s that dumb S.O.B. doing?” Bud asked Slim. “He’s training to whip you, Bud,” Slim said with a grin. Bud sat and watched as the cowboy did his laps around

  the track. Finally, when the man staggered by one more time, gasping for breath, Bud got to his feet. “I guess he’s developed his muscles well enough by now,” he said, and went down to the track to beat the daylights out of the cowboy.

  In Red Bluff, California, I was mugging wild horses in the wild horse race. In this race some dozen or so wild horses were turned out all at once into the arena. Each horse wore a halter and trailed a lead rope. My two partners and I latched on to a horse that looked as though he could run a little and won the first day’s prize money. On the second day, we scrambled to grab the same horse. We had a big Klamath Indian for an anchor man, who held on to the lead rope. My job was to mug, that is leap past the horse’s front feet as it struck at me and grasp its head in a headlock, while the rider threw his saddle on the horse, cinched it tight, and vaulted up, ready to ride. The rider had just gotten the saddle cinched when Bud Linderman, who had been watching us, knocked him aside, leaped into the saddle himself, and rode the horse down the track to the finish line. We were all pretty disgusted when Bud won first money on our horse and our saddle.

  I was working a rodeo in Lodi, California, when I next saw Bud. I was in a motel, and Bud was having a fight with his girlfriend in the room next door. Things were getting pretty loud. The only bathroom was down the hall, and as I went down the hall in my bathrobe, Bud grabbed me by the collar, dragged me into his room, and threw me on top of the woman in bed. I was scared and embarrassed, and the woman looked ready to die of fright.

  What saved us both was that Bud started to build a cooking fire right on the rug, and suddenly alarms were going off, and the woman and I were able to escape in the smoke.

  In Tucson, Arizona, Bud was raising hell in the drunk tank when the jailers subdued him by squirting him with a fire hose. Bud caught pneumonia, and soon died. Slim Pickens claimed that he went to see Bud in the hospital and could hear the man cussing three floors away.

  “What the hell are you mad at, Bud?” Slim asked.

  Bud grinned sheepishly. “I was just lying here reading the funny papers and caught myself siding with Dick Tracy.” Bud excluded, the Lindermans were a great Montana family. Bill Linderman was as fine a gentleman as I ever met,

  and one of the most talented cowboys that ever lived.

  In September, I met with Bob Girvan and showed him the photographs I had taken. The editors of Life decided to do a Speaking of Pictures story of me taking pictures, and sent a Life photographer named Jon Brenneis to photograph me at the Merced, California, rodeo. The spread came out in the November 1, 1948, issue.

  I had hoped that when the story broke it would make me a household name in America. A few days later, I began to wonder if Life had sent me the only copy of the magazine with my pictures in it.

  “Kid,” Slim Pickens teased not long after the event, “I

  reckon you just don’t have what it takes to be famous.”

  In the spring of 1949, I was hired by a rodeo promoter who was trying out several carloads of Brahma bulls for rodeo potential. The very first bull jerked the ca
pe out of my hands, and when I started to retrieve it off the ground where the bull was raking it with his horns, the animal charged from twenty feet away. I ended up with my right side in a heavy cast. For some months I had plenty of time to study, but had to learn how to take notes left-handed.

  That November, Slim wanted me to work the Cow Palace with him again, but I was still wearing a cast. By then, Slim was well on his way to becoming a movie actor, and had lost track of the bulls and how they bucked and fought. I knew the animals well and agreed to be in the arena with him and spot the bulls.

  I was a few feet from Slim in the arena when Twenty Nine came out of the chute. “Slim,” I called. “This is Twenty Nine, the bull that hurt Homer. Let him go. It’s not worth taking a chance.”

  That wasn’t the thing to say to Slim. His big jaw tightened. “This one’s for Homer,” Slim said. As the rider bucked off, Slim stepped in to take Twenty Nine’s charge.

  The bull jerked the cape from Slim’s hands and stopped, eyes snapping with anger. And then Twenty Nine started that deadly tiptoe. Slim tried in vain to get the bull to charge so he could sidestep the animal, but the beast kept creeping forward. Suddenly Slim was down under the bull’s horns, and the bull was working a horn into his groin.

  I forgot about my body cast and threw myself on the bull’s stubby horns. Twenty Nine spun off Slim to meet me coming. I took a horn hard to my stomach that almost knocked the wind out of me but set me on my feet. Backing away, I slapped the bull in the face as I retreated. I ran just ahead of the bull’s horns until he caught up and sailed me clear up into the stands. There was a look of surprise, then terror, on a woman’s face as I dropped into her lap.

  I was walking back to the dressing room after the performance with Slim and Margaret, when Slim put his arm on my shoulders and said, “Ya know, kid. I’m going to take you out tonight an’ buy you the biggest steak that ever came off a steer.”

  “You sonova gun,” Margaret muttered. “We had Slim insured for a quarter of a million dollars!” She was kidding me, I hope.

  * The time needed to make a qualified ride was shortened to eight seconds in the mid-seventies.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THERE WERE, OF COURSE, SOME REAL RANCH COWBOYS who did well in rodeos. Ross Dollarhide was one. He was raised on the P Ranch near Burns, Oregon. A natural athlete, he became a great saddle bronc rider and bulldogger, and a world champion. Ross and I were friends. We both came from Oregon, and when we would meet at some distant rodeo, we would exchange news from home. He died young, some say as a result of injuries from stunt work in Hollywood.

  There were some fine ropers on the Klamath Reservation. Lawrence Hill, Friedman Kirk, Sandy Miller, and Dally Givons could win prize money at any rodeo in the country. There were saddle bronc riders like Buck Scott, Lee Hutchison, Jerry Choctoot, Dell Smith, Harold Hatcher, Phil Tupper, and Irvin Weiser, who could, on a good day, ride anybody’s tough horse. But Monday morning would find them back at their ranches. With them, rodeo was a sport they loved to play but not a demanding career.

  Sometimes I saw good friends die, like Kenny Madland, whose happy-go-lucky ways and infectious grin were snuffed out instantly by a Brahma bull. I had my own share of bruises and hungry times, but for me there were other considerations. When I rodeoed, it didn’t matter a damn how many cattle and ranches my uncle owned. I was out there by myself, and if I succeeded or failed, it was all my own doing. Even as a rodeo photographer and bullfighting clown, I was living a life many a man would have envied, and I could count some great rodeo stars as friends, men like Jerry Ambler, Jack Sherman, trick roper Montie Montana, clown Homer Holcomb, Mel Lambert the announcer, Slim Pickens, and Ross Dollarhide. I hated to miss a rodeo for fear I’d be somewhere else when the excitement happened.

  I got to meet interesting people with diverse talents, like Rex Allen, a western actor and singer who invited me to his home when he was throwing a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party for Slim Pickens and his wife, Margaret. There was a story making the rounds that night about the time when Rex was waiting for a plane in the Los Angeles airport, and a fan rushed up and cornered him. “Mr. Autry,” the man said, “would you please give me your autograph?”

  Rex signed the autograph, “Gene Autry, who will never be half the cowboy Rex Allen is.”

  For a time, as a photographer, I knew all the great bucking horses — Badger Mountain, Snake, Five Minutes Till Midnight, Sceneshifter, Sontag, Miss Klamath, and Major Lou — and could tell you how most of the current crop of Brahma bulls on the circuit would handle with a cape. I wasn’t good at many things, but there were cowboys walking around whose necks I’d saved from Brahma bulls.

  Not a week passed when I didn’t store up memories. Slim, Mel Lambert, rodeo clown Mac Berry, and I were at Red Bluff, California, and were visiting with Rex Allen, who was the featured entertainer at the famous rodeo. Some Chiloquin Indians I knew came up and invited us up to Oregon after the show to fish the Williamson River. “We got a place on the Williamson,” one man said, “an’ if you guys got a few days off, we’ll take you fishin’ on our property. Hell, we got trout on our place weigh fifteen pounds.”

  In those days the best fishing places on the river were Indian-owned, and unless a feller had an invitation from one of those Indian ranchers, he could maybe get gut-shot trying to slip into the river.

  I had a sinking feeling, however, that the fishing trip might not turn out as well as we hoped. Once we had gathered any money coming to us from the rodeo committee, we headed north to Oregon, leaving Rex Allen to load his horses and music equipment and follow on his own.

  If there was anything those rodeoing Indians knew better than team roping and bronc riding, it was how to throw a good party. As soon as they got back from Red Bluff, they got on the phone line and started calling relatives and friends.

  “Hey,” one of them said. “You better get your ass over here to our place. You know who’s comin’ here? Mr. Rex Allen himself. He’s goin’ to play his guitar and sing for us. You come an’ don’t forget to bring your old lady an’ kids, an’ say, bring plenty of whiskey an’ beer.”

  By the time we arrived, the hay meadow along the ramshackle old ranch house along the river was already packed with cars. Kids a-horseback were galloping their mounts, playing games, and raising clouds of dust around the pickups and horse trailers.

  I knew most of the folks, but Slim, Mel, and Mac, being celebrities, were introduced around, although they were impatient to slip away and fish.

  “Where the hell is Rex Allen?” one of the hosts said, looking down the road. The man had worked for my uncle, and I knew him as someone not to be fooled with.

  “He’ll be here directly,” Mel Lambert said, helping himself to a big venison steak off the barbecue grill. “He had to load up all his music stuff in his truck, but he promised to come right along.”

  Somebody hollered, “Chow!” and there was a general stampede of hungry kids to get to the head of the line. There were washtubs of beer and pop on ice, and some of the men had whiskey bottles stashed out in their pickups.

  “That Rex Allen had better show up soon,” one of the hosts growled angrily. “If he don’t hurry, he’ll have to go to town to a restaurant. Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  “He’ll be here,” Slim promised, glancing nervously down the dirt road, which was already beginning to disappear in the gathering darkness. Someone popped a beer can near Slim’s ear and dropped the can on the floor in a gushet of foam. Things were already starting to get out of control.

  A woman started playing Indian drums and chants on a tape deck, and folks started dancing in a circle, while a few ladies corralled their children and left, as though they had seen wild parties like this start before. The Indian tape broke and was replaced by some forties swing. Mac Berry took a big lady by the arm and started jitterbugging, and pretty soon, she wound up kicking her legs up over her head as she danced. “I see you lookin’ at my panties,” she called out to
Mel. “I made them myself out of flour sacks. See, they got Pillsbury’s Best on one cheek an’ Occidental on the other.”

  “Hell, lady,” Mel muttered. “I thought I was lookin’ at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado!”

  One Indian was not mixing with anyone. He was sitting over in the corner shadows, drinking from a pint flask and chasing it down with beer. He got up and lurched unsteadily over to where Mel was standing, watching the dancers.

  “Damn that Rex Allen! When’s he comin’?” he snarled. “You know what I think? He ain’t comin’ at all! You white guys come here an’ eat up all our food, you drink our whiskey, you dance with our old ladies, an’ you tell us Rex Allen is going to come here an’ make nice music for the kids. You lie to us. Hell, you just want to catch fish in our river!”

  The man moved closer to Mel, breathed heavily on his face, slipped a long hunting knife from a sheath on his belt, and held the point to Mel’s twitching Adam’s apple. “You lie to this Indian, I’m goin’ to take this knife an’ let yer hot blood run out on the cold linoleum.”

  Slim Pickens rushed to rescue his friend. “He’ll be here,” Slim promised. “Rex gave me his word. He told me he’d be here, an’ he will!”

  A big old barn cat with markings like a raccoon came in through a broken window and began chewing on a venison steak off someone’s plate. Mac Berry grabbed the cat from behind, and held it spitting and hissing in his arms.

  “What you doin’ with my cat?” the man growled.

  Mac had been having a good time and hadn’t the slightest idea of the danger they were in. “I’m goin’ to take him home and have him made into a coonskin hat,” he joked.