Just then the colt smashed into a tree, and the branches smacked my face, temporarily blinding me. In a split second I was on the ground, and as the colt whirled to kick at me, he jerked the lead rope from my hands and galloped off through the trees.
The snow was falling fast and furious as I trailed him through the woods. Moments later the colt circled and came up from behind me, following his own tracks. I tried to stop him and grab my lead rope, but I missed and the animal was gone, nickering wildly to the horse he thought was ahead of him. Soon snow obscured the tracks entirely, and I walked back to the ranch rather than be trapped in the woods by darkness.
The colt had been born on the BK, and it was natural for a horse to head back to the range where he was born. I called Paddock at the BK and told him to leave gates open so that the horse could come in on the ranch, but the animal never showed. Years later, a logger found the bones of the horse and the remnants of that saddle at the base of a fortyfoot cliff, over which the animal had plunged in the snowy darkness.
I dreaded facing my uncle. His first words to me were, “How do you like that new saddle?” I had to explain to him that the horse had bucked me off and neither the saddle nor the horse had been recovered. He might at least have asked me if I’d gotten hurt, but instead he went storming off to town. It wasn’t hard, the next time I saw him, to tell him that I was joining the army.
I had hardly given him notice when we were scheduled to move several hundred steers from a pasture in Fort Klamath to the railroad stockyards in Chiloquin. To get to the yards we had to cross the tracks and had been given clearance by the stationmaster. We were delayed in crossing the bridge over the Williamson by some Indian boys who demanded ten dollars before they would get out of the way and let the animals pass. An unscheduled wartime freight train roared down from the north and smashed into the herd just as they were crossing the tracks, killing sixty of the animals. I felt sorry for the old man then.
Waiting to hear from the army, I helped ship some four thousand cows to California and planned to drive them through the town of Williams west into the hills, where Buck had leased several square miles of pasture. Buck loved fresh eggs and had a pretty flock of Rhode Island pullets just ready to lay. As I loaded the ranch pickup and got ready to drive to California to receive the cattle, I crated the hens for him and placed them on my load. Somewhere along the way the door of the cage came open in the darkness, and when I got to Williams there was not a single hen left.
I left the outfit and my horses with a heavy heart, wondering if I would ever see them again. Some things I refused to leave behind were my big hat, boots, and spurs. Somewhere along the way I might get a chance to rodeo. I pressed them flat and managed to hide them through hundreds of shakedowns and inspections.
Not long after I finished Signal Corps basic training at Camp Crowder, Missouri, I got a weekend pass and signed up for the saddle bronc riding at a local rodeo. My hand shook as I signed my name as a contestant for the first time. I might have backed down, but I had done a little bragging around camp to my fellow soldiers, and several had come to the rodeo to watch me.
The hat was a little peaked, and the boots were mashed to where they put blisters on my feet, but I came out of the chute on a big white bronc named White Cloud and managed to hang in there for ten seconds to win some money, by virtue of the fact that there was not much competition.
At that first rodeo, I made friends with several local cowboys, who kept me informed of other rodeos and often picked me up at the camp gate and furnished transportation. The horses I drew in the bronc riding didn’t buck half so hard as some I had been breaking in Oregon, and it didn’t take me long to get pretty cocky about my talents. That ended quickly at Cassville, Missouri, where I drew a big Madison Square saddle bronc named Cheyenne from the famous Coburn string, who promptly sent me flying. For one thing I was scared and out of my league. I hit the big horse unevenly with my spurs and threw him into a spin I couldn’t handle. It was like dropping a matchstick on a spinning phonograph record. I flew through the air and landed on what must have been the hardest, rockiest ground Missouri had to offer. That night I pulled two rocks as big as marbles out of my hip.
The next time I drew that big horse, I had already encountered the unknown and was determined to ride. He bucked straight across the arena, and I managed to make the whistle, but I took a beating. A week later, before my bruises were yet healed, I was shipped off to Camp Beale in California, where I was quick to locate a set of practice broncs owned by a local contestant, and managed to sneak out of the camp every evening to ride. There was no pickup man to help us off our broncs when the ride was over. Both of us became adept at stepping off the plunging animal and landing on our feet.
For want of better things to do, some of the soldiers in my outfit took to traveling with me, and when I won the saddle bronc riding at Marysville, California, in 1944, I had my first cheering section. My conceit didn’t last long, however, for the next week I drew a famous Harry Rowell saddle bronc named Sontag. The rodeo was in San Carlos, California, in a small arena whose floor was covered with black peat. I paid my entrance fees, conscious that I had been reading about Sontag for some time as one of the great saddle broncs of the day.
I must have been overwhelmed by Sontag’s celebrity, for I came out of the chute unable to psyche myself into thinking I could handle him. I was right. With no one to advise me, I took too short a rein. On the third wild jump, Sontag jerked me forward and I sailed out over his head and lit facefirst into the arena dust.
I had bruises on top of bruises when I was sent overseas on the Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted into a troop ship. Landing in Scotland, we moved by rail to England, where we were hidden in an old cotton mill in Stockport, Cheshire.
While there, the army tried to toughen us up by making us bivouac in foggy, frozen parks, preparing us for the invasion of France. Some nights we were crowded back into the cotton mill, where we lay on cots, listening to the sounds of German buzz bombs overhead and dreading the moment the motors stopped and the bombs dropped on the villages below. By D day, June 6, 1944, we waited along the English Channel while planes roared above us and thousands of invasion craft, fraught with stormy seas, set off across the Channel for France.
Fate was playing roulette with our lives, and it wasn’t much fun. Even as we waited, thousands of soldiers had already crossed the Channel and lay dead on the beaches. Soon I was huddled in the front of an invasion craft on its way to an army designation, Twenty Grand, near Le Havre. A little soldier named Nookie DeJovin called out, “Tonight’s the night, men!” We all laughed, but the humor was only skin-deep. In no time we were back to eyeing the faces about us, wondering which of us would be lucky enough to survive.
There was a small galley on the boat, and as I passed it, looking for a latrine, I saw a whole case of canned Danish bacon. There was no one watching, and I stole every can I could pack under my coat. Moments later, as I watched the shoreline of France approach, an officer hollered, “Jump!”
Jump I did, thinking the water was only waist-deep. The heavy cans of bacon, the steel helmet, the rifle, and my ammunition took me down fifteen feet to the bottom. I struggled to remember in which direction the shore lay. Boots kicked at my helmet as other soldiers tried to swim. Suddenly a big hand grabbed my belt and pulled me along. It was my friend Bob Turner, a former heavyweight boxer from California. He dumped me choking and gagging in the sand. “I don’t give a damn about you, Hyde,” he said with a grin. “I was just trying to save your bacon.”
I shared, of course. Turner stuck to me like a leech, and when finally we could stop and huddle behind a burned-out vehicle, we built a tiny fire and cooked strips of bacon. Never has food tasted so good since.
Assigned to Patton’s Third Army, my outfit fought through France, Belgium, and Germany. We survived the Battle of the Bulge, the Ruhr Pocket, and the Rhineland campaign, helping set up signal communications for our fast-moving troops.
All during my sojourn overseas, I had carried a photograph of myself winning the saddle bronc riding at Marysville, California. Now I plunked it down on the general’s desk as the sole proof of my ability. For once in the army, things happened fast. The next day, there was my picture on that bucking horse on the cover of Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, announcing that Dayton Hyde, the great bronc riding champion, would be producing and starring in rodeos for troop entertainment in the famed Roman coliseum in Arles. I read with fascination that I would be producing one rodeo and one Portuguese-style bullfight a week.
Fortunately for me, the town of Arles was not far from the Camargue, that wild, marshy plain that is the delta of the Rhone River. It was a land of wild horses and Spanish fighting bulls. During the German occupation, the animals had proliferated and were a perfect source of bucking stock for my rodeos.
Pursuing this lead, I was introduced to a Frenchman named Joseph Calais, who had been a leading bullfight impresario before the war. His wife had been a great bullfighter in the Portuguese tradition of fighting from horseback. Ordered to give a command performance for the Germans in occupied Paris, Mme Calais placed her darts in the bulls, each one breaking out in the red, white, and blue colors of free France.
The German officials watched in silent anger but did nothing. As M. and Mme Calais motored back to Arles, towing a trailer containing their famous bullfighting horse, Pronto, a lone German plane strafed them, killing Mme Calais and wounding Joseph and the horse.
Joe Calais was the perfect ally for me, but he had his price. He would furnish the wild stock for one weekly rodeo and bullfight if I would agree to produce and star in another weekly rodeo in the coliseum for his personal benefit. Not having any other access to stock, I agreed, and began canvassing the thousands of GIs in southern France for anyone who had rodeo experience.
The general himself got into the act by advertising that the army would pay one hundred U.S. dollars to anyone who could bring me a horse I couldn’t ride. This produced a big gray coach horse who already had a reputation as a killer. During the occupation, the Germans had commandeered the horse, but he killed two soldiers before they led him the first mile, and the outlaw came back to the farm.
Beautiful as it was, the Roman coliseum at Arles was set up for bullfights, not rodeos. The worst problem was a low red fence called a barrera that circled the inside of the arena. On the plus side, it would enable the riders to escape the Spanish fighting bulls we were using for the bull riding. On the down side, the bucking horses might decide to jump the fence and would crash into the stone base of the stadium, pinning the riders between the fence and the ten-foot wall.
Lumber was scarce, but we finally scavenged enough planks to build a flimsy bucking chute. The horses and fighting bulls were brought in on trucks covered with a grid of steel bars so they couldn’t jump out, and were housed beneath the coliseum. The day of the first rodeo came all too soon. That afternoon the coliseum filled clear to the ring of blue sky above it.
We had come up with a sprinkling of suicidal GIs who had rodeoed some before the war and were willing to try to ride those murderous fighting bulls. But I was apparently the only bronc rider, and it was evident that I would have to not only produce the show and keep it running smoothly but ride several bucking horses myself. I also took on the job of rodeo clown, whose responsibility it was to draw the fighting bulls away from fallen riders.
Joe Calais had loaned me an old Portuguese-style bullfighting saddle with birdcage stirrups, and a cowboy hat more glamorous than my beat-up relic that had to be his prized possession. I swept out of the darkness beneath the stands riding Pronto, his big bay Portuguese Alter, circled the arena three times at a gallop, and slid the horse to a stop. The horse reared dramatically, pawed the air at the crowd, then dashed away again out of the arena.
I had little time to get my breath as I dragged the saddle over to the bucking chute and put it on the back of the big gray coach horse we had named Widowmaker. The French term for a bucking horse was cheval sauvage, and savage that horse was. By the time I got out on him, he had kicked apart half the chute, and he reared out bucking high and handsome. By the time he made it across the arena and was about to slam into the red fence, I stepped into the right stirrup and sailed into the air, landing on my feet. The man-hating horse charged back ready to eat me, but I managed to leap the barrera and save myself.
While we repaired the chute, I sent out a big Indian soldier named Chief Coser to do a trick rope act. The man was a little rusty and out of shape, but he bought us time. Soon we were firing out soldiers riding fighting bulls with looseropes around their girths, and the rodeo started getting wild.
The biggest wonder was that we didn’t get anyone killed. Every time a bull came out and bucked off a rider, half the French youths in the stands would jump down from the parapets and start dodging the bulls, sometimes leading them right over the fallen rider. It would take fifteen minutes for the military police to clear the arena, and then the scene would start again.
After a few bulls, I would run in another saddle bronc and make a ride, then rush back to the chute to put another wannabe cowboy on a bull. Probably the most dramatic event of the day happened when I attempted to save a rider from being gored, and hit the bull across the face with Joe Calais’s hat. To my horror, the sharp horn went right through the hat and left a big tear in the crown. I heard Joe Calais’s scream of rage clear across the arena.
We survived the day, and by the next performance we had done some needed refinements to the chute and acquired some better cowboys from amongst the thousands of GIs who were camped in southern France awaiting transport to the South Pacific. If in that great Roman coliseum at Arles we performed countless acts of bravery, it was only because we hoped we would be injured and sent back to the States. Even death in the arena was preferable to being shot by the Japanese.
Eventually I shipped out of Marseilles on a troop ship bound for New Guinea, but the bomb dropped on Japan before we went through the Panama Canal, and we were rerouted to Norfolk, Virginia.
I was a long time getting back to the ranch. Stationed at Camp Polk, near Leesville, Louisiana, I paid the fine on a scrawny mare the sheriff had impounded and hid her in the empty barracks next to mine. Every night, I would slip out and lead the poor animal out to graze on orderly-room lawns, until finally she put some meat on her bones and began to prosper.
When at last I was discharged, I bought an army surplus truck, loaded my mare in the back end, and struck out for Oregon. I had spent all my money on the truck and needed gas money, so I ran a gambling ship, picking up hitchhiking GIs and running crap games in the back of the truck. By the time I reached Winnemucca, Nevada, I had just enough money to buy some hay for the horse and enough gasoline to head cross-country across the Black Rock Desert to Alturas, California, and Oregon. I was coming home at last to horses I hadn’t seen in over two years.
Chapter Thirteen
I WORE MY UNIFORM WITH RIBBONS AND BATTLE STARS for a couple of days around the ranch just to remind my uncle that I had been away to war and he’d better not treat me as a kid anymore. He didn’t seem to be impressed one whit. If I’d come home a general instead of a lowly private first class, it would not have mattered. All he needed was a hand who could take care of ranch emergencies and ride with him to open gates.
The first chance I got, I went to town and bought some western clothes. As to boots, I was too bound by tradition to tolerate store-boughts. I sent in the outline of my feet to Blucher
Boots in Olathe, Kansas, and ordered some new boots, knowing that two years of marching in the army had altered the shape of my feet.
My feet weren’t the only things around that had been altered by the war. So many of the old horses I’d come home to see had aged out during my absence. Sleepy, BK Heavy, Yellowstone, Roany, Spade, Badger, even the cranky colt I’d broken and named Brown Bomber after Joe Louis, every one of them was gone. Paddock told me they had all died of old age, but I suspected he had sent them down the road to be made into chicken feed. Had I not gone to war, I’d have fought for them, made damn sure they lived out their days on the ranch they loved. Whingding and Bright, the King Ranch horse Paddock had given me, were still around and were fixtures at Yamsi. Bright came up to the fence and nickered to me, but Whingding snorted, which was about all the real welcome I got. I hadn’t been home ten minutes when Buck drove up in a new Chrysler and wanted me to open gates for him. The routine was the same, but I learned from the old man just how much the country itself had changed, although I had come home hoping things would be the same as I had left them.
For one thing, the Indians had sold out their reservation to the government for a national forest. It would not be long before the traditional grazing permits would be crowded out in favor of the recreationists. Down in California, folks were selling out their homes in an inflated market and paying such high prices for Oregon ranches that ranch kids had no chance of buying out their parents and were moving to town in record numbers.
And wages! When I’d left for the war, I was getting thirty dollars a month, thirty-five if I rode colts, and forty if I rode spoiled horses. That was more money than I knew how to spend. Now if I took a job with some absentee Californian, I could get four hundred or even more, but a good Visalia stock saddle would cost me over a thousand. What disturbed me more was that the out-of-staters were plowing up native grasslands, planting grains and grasses that wouldn’t survive a summer frost.
The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West Page 10