The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West

by Dayton O. Hyde

  It got so he left his footlocker in the bunkhouse even as he quit in a towering rage, and one steel cot became permanently known as Charley’s bunk, its tattered mattress sagging in the middle with the ghost imprint of a body too long for the bed.

  I saw more of Charley on Mondays than any other day, for it was always the lot of Charley’s employers to get him out of jail after a Saturday-night brawl. It wasn’t that Charley drank so much. As I see it, he never had a chance to more than sidle up to a bar and shove an opening sentence right into the middle of someone’s conversation. Like, “I don’t mean to interrupt, gentlemen, but one time when I was driving a twenty-mule team in the cavalry —” The fight was on just as soon as someone inferred that Charley Tucker was a damn liar. No one, including me, reckoned that a man who looked like Charley could have done much of anything.

  By virtue of Charley’s brawls, I came to spend Mondays in town, banking, buying new parts for worn-out farm machines, and stocking up on groceries. I paid Charley’s fine last, leaving him to cool his heels in the drunk tank until most of the day was gone. Thus there were two glorious days of the week, Sunday and Monday, when I didn’t have to put up with him.

  It wouldn’t be long before Charley would be as sick of me as I was of him, and our divorces from one another always came easy. I had only to sit down at the breakfast table and say with a sigh, “Sure is a lot of work to do around this ranch.” I would then proceed with a list, “Got to fix the K Davis corral and check the fence around Calimus Field, get the baler and swather ready for haying, then move about a hundred fifty of those heifers down to the Barfield.”

  The thought of all that work would put Charley in a depression, and minutes later, he would be on his way to town.

  Not that he didn’t work hard when he was here; he just couldn’t stand the pressure of thinking about it.

  Once we were building a new pole gate at the K Davis corrals, Charley and I, and the ladder I provided was admittedly pretty rickety. I was in a hurry to get the gates built so we could work cattle, but Charley insisted on building a ladder that would hold. He spent one precious day peeling poles and building a good, strong product, and had just leaned the ladder up against the towering gatepost and stepped back to admire his handiwork when a freak wind came down the Bull Pasture Draw and blew the ladder back off the post.

  I suppose I was already angry that the gate hadn’t been completed and the corral wasn’t ready. When the falling ladder glanced off my shoulder, I whirled in pain and anger and gave it a kick. I hardly touched the damn thing, but it broke in two, and there was Charley climbing the west fence, heading through the timber to town. It was months before I saw him again.

  Nothing ever went well for Charley. The next time he came back, I sent him down to rebuild a fence at the north end of the ranch, and he mistakenly got on my neighbor’s property and permanently planted a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of my steel posts.

  Once, a movie company arrived, needing some footage of cattle being driven through beautiful ponderosa pines. Charley fed the director a good line about how he had ridden for this big outfit and that, and proceeded to borrow a good horse I had, named Matador, for the movie scenes.

  “When I was a sergeant in the cavalry —,” Charley said as he mounted the big black horse, but the director was busy working with his crew.

  I suppose I should have mentioned to Charley that Matador was a one-man horse and could buck better than most men could ride, but Charley kept at the director’s elbow, telling him one story after another, and I had no chance to tell him about Matador without hurting his feelings.

  Contrary to expectations, Matador let Charley ride, and soon the man and his horse had gathered a small bunch of cows and calves and were driving them toward a beautiful crystalline spring that gushed from a hillside and wandered down through a grove of ponderosa pines.

  The photographers had set up cameras on the hillside, and the director shouted directions to Charley to drive the cattle on past. The cattle were doing fine, drifting down an old trail, and Charley had little to do but follow them at a walk, but he began to dash back and forth, waving his arms dramatically and hollering at the cattle to “git” down the trail.

  Standing just out of camera range, I quietly suggested to Charley that unless the cameraman had some really fast film, it might be better to let the cattle drift quietly at a walk. Charley glared at me, kicked Matador in the ribs, and went flying at the cattle with a vengeance. That was enough for the old horse. He ducked his head and drove Charley’s face into the dirt right in front of the camera.

  “Cut!” the director called as the old man rose sputtering from the dirt. “Get back on, and we’ll try that bucking scene again!”

  We never did the scene again, of course, for Charley caught his horse, tied it to the fence, and took off walking for town.

  When I next saw Charley, it was late in the fall, when the harvest hiring was over and jobs were scarce. I heard the rumble of an old automobile out on the main road and moments later saw headlights lurching through the trees as a car came rumbling down the dirt road into the ranch. When the driver parked in Charley’s old spot under a pine tree next to the bunkhouse, it was obvious the old boy had come home.

  That evening, Charley was back at his old place at the table, and his windy stories were once more of the background murmur as we ate our supper.

  “Back before the Second World War,” Charley began, “when I was up in the Yukon prospecting for gold —”

  I dropped a serving dish in the kitchen, and the story was never finished.

  About a week later, a cattle buyer from California drove down the road, hoping to make a deal on the fall calves. He was driving a big, fancy Chrysler, and his wife was a beautiful, well-dressed lady who wore high heels and was obviously out of place in such rustic surroundings. The man was attentive to her needs, and it was obvious that they adored each other.

  I invited them in for lunch and soon had a table of food ready for them and my crew of one. I rang the chow bell for Charley, and we were seated at the table when he came over from the bunkhouse.

  I was about to introduce Charley to the guests when he stared at the woman, spun around, and departed. We had our lunch, but Charley never reappeared.

  After lunch, when the buyer was making phone calls, I walked over to the bunkhouse and found the old man sitting on a block of wood.

  “Charley, I reckon you knew that woman,” I said. “Yep,” Charley said slowly. “Back in Anchorage, Alaska,

  during the war, I was running a fleet of taxis, and she was running a fleet of whores. Looks like she’s got herself a fancy husband now, and I didn’t want to recognize her and have her old man ask where we met.”

  “Charley! Charley, you old devil, how are you?” the woman said, coming up from behind. “You don’t need to worry about my old man. Hell, it was my money set him up in the cattle business. We’ve been married for years. Ain’t much about me he don’t know.”

  Charley stayed on that fall pretty well, and even agreed to stay on during the winter as caretaker when the cattle were shipped to northern California pastures for the winter. He would be snowed in for months, but I didn’t worry about the man. There would be no one around to take offense at his stories, no one around with whom to do battle.

  In the kitchen was the old crank telephone, connected to the world by a single line from tree to tree. To get out, one first had to ring an operator in town. Since Charley would be snowed in for long periods, I made arrangements with a woman in town to phone Charley every day to make sure he was safe.

  Charley and the woman had three things in common. They both loved to talk; they were both lonely people; they were both homely as sin. Before I knew it, they had fallen in love sight unseen and were thinking of getting hitched come snowmelt in the spring.

  There was a time that winter when snow came drifting down off Calimus Butte and the road was totally obscured. Even the chickadees and gray jays forsoo
k the ridges until spring.

  I was in California with the cattle and seldom got a chance to phone, but sometimes I talked to the woman, and sometimes, even, I managed to hear Charley’s voice across the miles of snow. Charley’s stories took her to a new world as he traveled with elephants in the circus, panned for gold in Alaska, and drove twenty-mule teams in China.

  I first knew the snow had melted on the road when the sheriff called me in California to let me know that Charley was drunk and in jail.

  I realized that there was no one left at the ranch to care for the livestock and drove two hundred miles north immediately. “What happened, Charley?” I asked as I paid his bail. “I thought you and that woman were going to get hitched.”

  Charley looked to be in bad shape, as battered and bleary-eyed as anyone I ever saw.

  “It was that danged woman’s fault,” he said. “Over the phone she said she weighed about ninety-three pounds. She got to sounding more and more like Marge, and I got to picturing her as movie-star pretty. I won’t say how big she was, but when she got to the ranch in her old pickup truck, the springs were all broke on the driver’s side.”

  Either Charley’s disappointment was too great or he had been in one place too long, for he disappeared from my life.

  I got a few cards from him over in the Winnemucca, Nevada, country where he was riding for a big cattle outfit, then from the Sacramento Valley in California where he was working the rice harvest.

  For a couple of years there was no word at all. Then one day I received a letter from a rancher in Colorado saying that a man named Charles Tucker had died on his ranch and had been buried there on the land. He had found my address in Charley’s wallet. Charley had some back wages coming, and the man wanted to know where he could locate Charley’s next of kin.

  I didn’t know, of course, but I went over to the bunkhouse and pried the big brass padlock off Charley’s footlocker, hoping to find some clues about his family. There on top of some clean but faded military uniforms were photographs of a handsome sergeant in uniform driving a team of twenty mules in China, Charley putting a group of circus elephants through their paces before a cheering crowd, Charley sluicing gold in Alaska, and the hauntingly beautiful face of a woman looking out of a photograph signed, “To Charley, with all my love forever. Marge.”

  Book Two

  Chapter Eighteen

  NOW AND THEN, WHEN RETURNING TO YAMSI from photographing a rodeo, I would ride south over the table-lands and run into Bart Shelley, driving his tobacco-stained pickup, and ask him about my favorite bucking horse, Blackhawk. It would get the old man to talking, since the horse was the center of Bart’s world. Blackhawk ran free with Bart’s horses on the tableland, and it was only once or twice a year that the old man would run his horses in for haying or for weaning colts. Then, according to his mood, he might put a halter on the old bronc and lead him over to Beatty for a Sunday rodeo to give some unlucky cowboy a chance to ride him.

  The horse was a lot better than the local competition, and in the dozen or so times I saw him buck, I only remembered seeing one cowboy make a qualified ride. That was Ed Donovan, whose ride I had photographed as a boy. Blackhawk leaped so high you could have driven a pickup under him, and turned flat on his side in midair in a sunfish. I would have sworn the big animal was going to fall on Ed’s leg.

  The next jump was mightier than the first, and Blackhawk squealed in anger and kicked toward the heavens. The horse’s back hooves sent a rain of gravel rattling down on the cars parked outside the arena fence. The crowd lurched to its feet in excitement, and the cheers began before the ride was half over. When Ed Donovan made it to the whistle, I felt as though my old friend Blackhawk had been cheated somehow, and I stayed back in the catch pens with the old horse until the rodeo was over and Bart trotted up a-horseback to lead the animal home.

  The rodeo promoters up and down the coast all wanted that horse desperately, but Bart wouldn’t sell. Potential buyers would come from as far away as Montana and stand, looking longingly at the long-bodied athlete as he stood in Bart’s corral, so engrossed that they failed to notice that Bart was staining their fancy boots with tobacco juice. The old man could spit through a log fence and hit a man’s boots every time.

  “By gawd,” Bart would say, “thet Blackhawk is shore some buckin’ horse” (spit).

  Every year, Mac Barbour would try to buy the horse for his bucking string, but with no more luck than the others. I hated it that the animal was getting on in years but had not yet made it to the big time. The big black was twenty-two years old when Bart finally died and Barbour was able to get his hands on the animal.

  For some reason the horse had always had a liking for me. Whenever I would see him standing in Bart’s field, I would get out of my pickup for a visit. The horse would leave his group and come over to the fence, and I would stand rubbing the arch of his neck as he nosed my pockets for grain. At Yamsi I would lie awake nights dreaming that I was at some famous rodeo or another and had drawn Blackhawk in the finals of the bronc riding. He would be nice to me, of course, and let me steal a ride. I would step off into the air just before the whistle to let Blackhawk’s record of buck-offs remain unblemished.

  The Pendleton Round-up in Oregon was, and still is, one of the greatest rodeos in the United States and Canada. Only the best saddle broncs in the country are selected for the finals of the saddle bronc riding event at the end of the rodeo. Blackhawk was one of those selected. At twenty-two years of age, he had finally made it into the big time. Pendleton is some four hundred miles from Yamsi; I would have walked the whole distance rather than miss the finals.

  Jack Sherman was one of the saddle bronc finalists that year. He had drawn another of Mac Barbour’s great bucking horses, and Mac, in a fancy white western shirt and red bola tie, was bustling up and down behind the chutes, peering through the slats at the horses, making sure the finalists were there with their riggings ready to ride. Jack’s animal was all saddled and standing quiet in the chute, and Jack himself, with a new black hat and his usual crooked grin on his face, was psyching himself up to win.

  I was helping behind the chutes when it came time for Jack to ride. Directly above the bucking chutes was an extension of the grandstand, heavy fir planks that were now sagging with the weight of three very large ladies who had drunk more than their share of beer. Their bare thighs overflowed the planks and cause a giggle or two from us cowboys who were working beneath them.

  “Look at that, will you,” Jack said with a grin. “I’d better come out on this old horse fast before those planks break.”

  Jack had just started to climb down on his mount, and was measuring off the proper length of bucking rein, when Mac Barbour reached up with a couple of electric cattle prods and touched the ladies on their bare flesh.

  With a horrendous scream, the ladies grabbed each other and lost control of their bladders. There was no stopping the flow. For the next minute, buckets of urine poured down over the chutes. Jack Sherman, his big black hat and rodeo shirt sopping wet, hit the ground in a towering rage. Mac Barbour took off down an alley as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him.

  “Now Jack,” he pleaded. “Now Jack, be careful of me! I’ve got a real bad heart!”

  When Jack came out of the chute a few moments later with a borrowed hat and shirt, he was still mad enough to make one hell of a ride.

  Blackhawk had been drawn in the finals by a Washington State cowboy named Alex Dick, who was known to be a hard man for a horse to buck off. To Alex, the big black horse in the chute must have seemed like just another horse. He sat watching from his perch on the chute as Ross Dollarhide came out on a little bronc named War Paint. That feisty little paint horse reared and came over backward on Ross, but the big cowboy rolled away and escaped injury.

  It was now Alex Dick’s turn. The announcer described

  Blackhawk as one of the greatest bucking horses ever to come out of Oregon. I looked over the top of the chute to se
e the horse’s black eyes snapping with anger, then glanced at the brown features of Alex Dick, and saw the intensity of his concentration.

  I was standing in the arena when the chute gate opened. On the first jump Blackhawk leaped so high I could see the face of one of the judges beneath his hooves. Alex Dick’s neck snapped back as the animal hit the ground. On that next jump Blackhawk turned sideways in the air in the sunfish he was famous for, then, as his black hooves pounded the arena floor, he ducked back underneath himself and changed directions with a lurch that would have sent most cowboys flying. But still the Indian cowboy spurred from the shoulders of the horse to the cantle board of his saddle.

  I scampered past one of the judges and kept pace with Blackhawk, screaming encouragement. If Alex Dick managed to hear me, he probably thought I was cheering him on. In reality, I was encouraging the horse.

  Suddenly there was the whistle, and a pounding of hooves as the pickup man galloped past me and raced alongside Blackhawk. Alex Dick grabbed the man’s shoulders and swung to the ground. The crowd was on its feet, cheering, and I stood stock-still in the middle of the arena as Alex walked back to the chutes in triumph.

  That evening, I sat with Blackhawk and the other saddle broncs behind the chutes. The big horse stood calmly munching some grass hay as though the afternoon had never happened. I cupped one hand over one of Blackhawk’s sweaty eyelids and scratched him, while the animal raised his nose in ecstasy. I could not know that I would never see him alive again.

  On the way back to Klamath Falls from Pendleton, Mac Barbour’s big livestock truck, driven by my friend Jackie Houston, tipped over, and Blackhawk had to be destroyed.

  I was back at Yamsi when I learned about Blackhawk’s accident. I loved that animal and always dreamed that someday I’d make a ride on him. Now it would never happen. Something went out of me with his death, as though a family doctor had told me I’d never ride a horse again. Bart Shelley never did the horse a favor by owning him so long. At twenty-two, Blackhawk was past his prime when he got his chance to prove himself at a major rodeo, but some of us will always tout him as one of the great bucking horses of his day.