Buck cut down his operation as best he could until the only regulars left were Ernest Paddock at the BK Ranch at Bly and myself at Yamsi. There was not much communication between Ernest and me. Being the owner’s nephew was not the easiest cross to bear, and as yet, in spite of trying hard, I had not proven myself a very handy cowboy. One trouble was that when I began to make some pretty fair shots with a rawhide reata or rode a bucking horse, there was no one there to see.
I was taken by surprise one day when I came into the ranch kitchen with an armload of wood, to hear the old crank telephone ringing away. It was Paddock on the line, calling from the BK. I expect a wild party was in progress, for there was lots of drunken laughter in the background. Ernie was actually very friendly, a fact that made me instantly suspicious. And furthermore, he wanted to make me a present of a horse. Not any old horse, he said, but one to drool over.
“I’ve got a King Ranch quarter horse from Texas,” he said. “He’s the prettiest little bay gelding you ever saw, and I’m in the notion of giving him to you. Throw your rigging in the pickup and come over here right away!”
Paddock knew his horses and wasn’t about to get rid of an expensive quarter horse from the King Ranch in Texas unless something was very wrong with the animal. Since the pickup gas tank was dry, I had no transportation beyond my horses and was about to tell him I wasn’t interested, but somehow the situation intrigued me. A few minutes later I had dropped my saddle on old Whingding, and was on my way through the back country to Bly.
By the time I had tied my horse in the BK barn the next day and run the gamut of a dozen back-slapping drunks, I knew that there was more to Paddock’s generous gift than met the eye. I had a sinking feeling that Paddock was giving a big three-day party, and that I had been set up as entertainment. When I walked down to the corrals to inspect the horse, a whole crowd found an excuse to go down the hill in step with me.
The horse seemed gentle enough. He was one of the most gorgeous pieces of horseflesh I’d ever seen, and I was sure Paddock had paid a lot of money for him. King Ranch horses were famous and cost a pretty penny. I caught up the beast and became more pleased and excited by the moment. Maybe the old foreman had finally recognized my true worth and decided to be nice to me.
I saddled up the horse, checked my rigging, ran him around the corral a few times to warm his back, hung a snaffle bit in his mouth, mounted carefully, and rode the animal around the corral. There was a murmur of disappointment in the crowd when nothing untoward happened. The horse responded well as I circled the round corral and did figure eights, then I nodded to Paddock to open the corral gates and turn us loose into the big field.
I had just ridden the colt up on an irrigation canal bank when he figured he had me, dropped his nose between his forefeet, shot skyward, and came down bucking hard. I lost one stirrup, got it back, then lost the other. Every jump popped me up a little higher above the saddle, and I was starting to look for a soft place to land. Out in the middle of the field, the horse gave one big freak jump that should have sent me flying, but by accident I came down hard on the saddle. There was one split second when I considered jumping off, but I doubled the animal left and right, then rode him calmly back to the corrals.
Coming through the gate, I rode straight up to Paddock, who was standing there red-faced and flustered, angry that he had given that horse away. “You got any more horses around you old bastards can’t ride?” I asked.
It turned out he had quite a few and was tickled to death that I asked. That afternoon, I saddled up one nasty horse after another and rode them until they quit. The last one was a big bay horse that ended up on top of the hayrack with me, and it took the rest of the afternoon to extract the animal and get him back to earth.
That afternoon gave me a confidence I’d never had before. There were some good old ranchers in that crowd of spectators, and I suddenly realized I was going to have to try my hand in the rodeos someday and determine just how well I could ride a bronc in competition.
It was not a good day for Ernest Paddock. He had just bought a beautiful set of draft harness for a team of Percherons he liked to drive in parades. He had hung the harness in a special place in the barn where he could show it off to visitors. We were having supper that night in the BK dining room when there was a knock on the door and in came a neighbor named Lester Hixon. Old Hick had a set of harness he wanted to sell Paddock, and his description of that harness was enough to make a teamster reach for his wallet. When Lester dragged the harness in across the floor, the leather gleamed and the silver conchas lit the room with a thousand little moons. Paddock was hooked and gave Hixon a pot full of cash and a fifth of whiskey for the set. “It’s lots prettier even than the set I bought the other day,” he gloated as Hixon left. “And did I ever get it cheap!”
After supper we helped the old foreman pack the heavy harness down to the barn. It was an awful moment for Paddock. The harness hooks were empty. Hixon had sold Paddock his own rigging.
Not long after Lester Hixon sold Paddock the harness, he was arrested by livestock theft officers for possession of about fifty head of horses he had stolen from his neighbors. The law impounded the horses over in Medford, Oregon, some two hundred miles away, and held them as evidence in Hixon’s coming trial. Hixon himself was released on bail.
The case never came to trial, for someone crept into the Medford stockyards one night and stole the herd of horses. The tracks led east to the Oregon desert, where the animals scattered like the winds and were never seen again.
Hixon was eventually sent to the pen on other charges. There he distinguished himself by doing leatherwork and silversmithing, creating items which were of great demand amongst his former neighbors. He sent Jack Morgan a breast collar inlaid with silver hearts, and Margaret Biddle acquired a half-breed bit whose shanks were inlaid with silver hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs, all done by Hixon while he was doing time.
I was afraid that Paddock would renege on his promise to give me the bay horse, but next morning he was out in the corrals helping me halter the little bay and tie the lead rope to Whingding’s tail.
In a week, I was back at the BK a-horseback to pick up a string of colts to start, for Yamsi was in dire need of horseflesh, even though it was hard to come by cowboys willing to ride. I left the BK early one morning leading five colts tied nose to tail. I rode north of Bly past the Obenchain Ranch and headed for the Sycan Marsh and the ZX, where I would spend a few days.
The ZX was then owned by Kern County Land and
Cattle Company down in Bakersfield, California, and butted up to my uncle’s ranch. It was a big tradition-bound outfit with a million and a half acres of land, including the twenty-three-thousand-acre Sycan Marsh ranch. I rode down out of the hills to Sycan headquarters and was greeted by the sight of over a hundred fine registered broodmares that had all been bred to a jack and were nursing mule colts.
I fed my horses and found an empty cot in the bunkhouse. One by one cowboys kept drifting in and, tired from a long day’s work, lay on their cots rolling Bull Durham cigarettes and waiting for supper. A few of them did leatherwork, mending tack and splicing reatas that had been broken in the day’s work. We washed carefully in enameled basins filled from a hand pump and threw the gray wash water off the bunkhouse porch into the dust.
There were several beef carcasses hanging in a shed near the cookhouse, and I wandered over as the cook took a canvas off one of the beeves and commenced cutting it all up into great piles of steak. To cowboys everything was steak, and no other cuts were edible. There was no meat rationing here on the ZX, and the war seemed very far away.
Before daylight, we went out into the chill of morning, ate breakfast at the cookhouse, saddled our horses, topped them off, and rode out across the Sycan River to gather up a big herd of ZX cows and calves. These we herded up into a fence corner so that the buckaroo boss could work the herd for dry cows. Not trailed by suckling calves, these cows tended to be in better conditi
on than wet cows nursing babies, and were slated for market.
My uncle’s cows had all been dehorned as calves and were uniform in color and body. The ZX cows had long sharp horns and were big, rangy cattle as wild as deer. It took good cowboys and fast horses to keep up with them, but we were a skilled crew even if most of us were too old, too young, or unfit for military service. For part of the morning the work went slowly but well. We sat quietly on our mounts, holding the herd until the boss came at us with a dry cow, and then we would let that designated animal slip by and hold the rest.
Midmorning a rider came out from headquarters, riding a fancy horse and outfit. It was one of the big bosses who had just arrived from Bakersfield on an inspection trip and wanted to help. The cowboss stuck the man out on the edge with the rest of us waddies to hold the herd and went back to cutting out drys.
To the big boss, however, cutting out the drys seemed like a lot more fun than holding the herd, and pretty soon he spotted a dry cow and rode into the herd to get it. The cows were nervous and melted away before his strange horse, but soon he got the dry cow started out of the bunch. At the edge of the herd, however, the cow refused to leave and ran back to the others.
Again and again, the man tried the cow, and each time the cow would make a fool of him. By now the herd was getting restless with all that activity, and we were having a hard time holding them. I could see that the cowboss was getting a little red in the face over this breach of cowboy etiquette. It was his job to cut the drys and no one else’s. The herd was getting ready to explode when the cowboss rode over to the boss from Bakersfield, touched the brim of his hat politely, and said, “Mr. Smith, why don’t you just hold on to that cow and let us boys drive the herd away.”
A few months later, in an act of corporate fiddling, the management in California sent up a young man named Ray Stansfield to take over from the old boss, Buster Vaughn. Ray was short, handsome, a graduate of Cal Poly, and had a good understanding of the cattle industry. He was teamed up with Rich Bradbury, a big, tall beanpole of a man who had been a cowboss on the ZX since before I could remember.
In areas where heavy auto traffic passes through fences, ranchers put in auto gates or cattle guards, which are often made of railroad irons placed over a shallow pit. Cars can drive over the rails, but cattle hooves slip between the gaps in them. On dirt roads, the pits beneath the rails require frequent cleaning. I was digging out a cattle guard one day east of Yamsi when Rich and Ray came along, driving a ZX pickup. I had the road blocked and made them wait. They sat bemused, watching me make the dirt fly. I might have been running my uncle’s outfit by then and was sweating hard, but they were bosses of a really big outfit and didn’t do physical work. I tried to con them into giving me a little help, but they didn’t even have a shovel in their pickup. It reminded me that on a small outfit, one did everything; on a big outfit, you were highly specialized.
Bradbury must have said a few good words about me to Ray, for he invited me over to his house in Paisley for dinner. He and his wife, Ocie, lived in a great big ZX house. I arrived for dinner and nearly froze to death in the dining room. All I remember was that the wind blew so hard through the house, it kept blowing out the lanterns, and there were whitecaps in my coffee cup.
The ZX was famous for having a bunch of cranky, spoiled old saddle horses that were a pain to ride. They could kick your overshoes off in the stirrup, buck you off miles from anywhere after a hard day’s ride, and were just as dangerous to a cowboy on the ground as in the saddle. Paying extra to have those horses ridden didn’t make much sense to Ray Stansfield, since there were too many good, honest, gentle horses to be had. The former boss, Buster Vaughn, was still there helping with the transition of power when Ray ordered that every sour old outlaw of a horse on the ranch be sold. He contacted Mac Barbour, a rodeo stock contractor from Klamath Falls, and arranged to sell the horses.
When Ray mentioned to Buster Vaughn that he had a deal with Mac Barbour, Buster looked at him and grinned. “That will be something to see,” he said. “There’s no way a man can do business with Mac Barbour without getting taken. Absolutely no way!”
Ray Stansfield bridled a little. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “I appreciate the advice, but Bradbury and I will watch every move the man makes, and we’ll weigh up the horses ourselves on ZX scales. How’s the man going to cheat us?”
Buster Vaughn just leaned back in his chair and grinned. The next day, Mac Barbour showed up with his stock trucks and a group of cowboys. Barbour was a little, short, bustling man with pink cheeks and a nervous laugh, who knew as much about bucking horses as any rodeo promoter in the country. He would sell out his string to someone like Gene Autry, then come up with horses just as good within months of the sale. He got some of his best horses by lending Indians on the reservation money, then collecting the debt in horses.
He climbed out of his fancy car and shook hands with everyone. To Mac no man was a stranger.
“Ray,” he said to Stansfield. “Your boys are awfully busy, and I’ve brought my boys with me. They all have their saddles with them; if you’ll just lend us some saddle horses, we’ll do all the work and run those spoiled horses in for you. When we get them in, you and Bradbury run the scales. We’ll weigh up, then I’ll hand you over the cash, and we’ll be off down the road.”
Ray flashed a triumphant look at Buster Vaughn, who sat on the corral fence and watched the procedure without saying a word.
The Barbour cowboys were mostly kids off the reservation and a good bunch of hands. They borrowed some ZX horses, saddled them up, and soon had the bunch of outlaws to be sold trotting toward the corrals.
Bradbury and Stansfield stood at the gate, counted the horses into the corral, cut bunch after bunch onto the scale, weighed them carefully, and balanced the scale after each and every draft. Everything went smoothly. Barbour paid for the horses in cash, and pretty soon the horses had been loaded and the trucks disappeared down the road toward Lakeview.
“Well, sir.” Stansfield grinned as he approached the old boss. “That whole operation went smooth as silk. Rich and I watched that little scoundrel like hawks and made sure he
couldn’t get away with a thing. I told you we were too smart for him!”
“Oh, everything went fine,” Buster Vaughn said, “up to a point. While you were weighing up those horses so carefully, Barbour’s men loaded up the saddle horses his men had borrowed, and by now they are safely in California.” According to some, Mac Barbour sold those ZX outlaws in Los Angeles as gentle horses, and for a time, you could see dude riders flying clear up over the skyline of the city.
As for the ZX, with the selling of those horses, the operation succumbed to modern times. A few months later, they decided that work teams were obsolete. I bought their draft teams just to give them a home, and used them to feed cattle. Their old wooden-wheeled freight wagons, that had once freighted supplies from Lakeview to Paisley across the desert, I bought for twenty-five dollars each. The wagons were considered junk by the new managers, but they still stand on the ranch at Yamsi. To us they are a precious bit of history.
Chapter Twelve
IF MY UNCLE WAS PROUD OF THE WORK I DID, or the way I handled horses, he was damned careful not to let it show. Sometimes he would be standing on the street corner on Main Street, Klamath Falls, talking to his friend and banker, Ernie Bubb, and would be bragging on me as I approached behind him. I would catch only the tail end of a compliment before he saw me and froze up. Likely he would restart the conversation with a statement about how worthless my generation was, and how I had rodeos on the brain and was bound to get crippled for life even while my father languished in a wheelchair, a millstone around my mother’s neck.
It was not that my uncle hated rodeos. He just didn’t want me involved in anything but ranching. He thought Jerry Ambler was great. In time, Buck came to visit the Montgomery Ward’s saddle department with increasing frequency and talk to Jerry about balance riding, a sty
le where a rider rode loose instead of gripping the swells of the saddle with his knees. It took balance, not strength.
The old man never got on a horse himself, but he decided that he’d have Jerry design a saddle that would make a balance rider out of me. I was pleased that he thought of me, but when my uncle came over to the corral one day and dumped the new saddle on the grass beside me, I had all I could do to keep from laughing. The saddle had a nineteen-inch tree, in other words measured nineteen inches between the swells in front and the cantle behind. When I sat in it and brought up my knees to grip the swells of the saddle, I missed the swells entirely. I should have had it out with the old man right then and there, but he jumped into his Chrysler and was gone in a cloud of dust.
I was breaking some seven-year-old colts at the time which were a little old to train easily. When I could, I kept them from bucking, since they were big enough and strong enough to put me on the ground. The task was tough enough without riding a saddle that I couldn’t grip. But my uncle was the boss, and I put my saddle in the barn and dropped the new rigging on a big bay colt that was my favorite in the bunch.
The leather was stiff and new, and the colt took an instant dislike to the noise it made, but in time the horse settled down. After a half hour of riding in the round corral, I rode out onto the range, intent on putting some miles on the colt to tire him out. It was just beginning to snow as I started up the ridge toward Taylor Butte and the Sycan country.
Halfway up the hill, the colt suddenly went insane and blew up. He bucked under trees, over windfalls, getting better at bucking with every jump, squealing in anger every time he hit the ground. Sometimes I would get him stopped, but as soon as I urged him to walk he would start again. I was riding on balance because I had to; there was no way I could grip that plunging saddle with my knees.
The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West Page 9