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

by Dayton O. Hyde

  In the late fifties, my uncle died, and I felt depressed. It was the end of a great era at Yamsi, and the place would never be the same without him. Often, when I came into the Yamsi kitchen, I would expect to see him sitting at the breakfast table reading the Saturday Evening Post, but he wasn’t there anymore.

  The morning I picked up his ashes at a funeral home in Klamath Falls, it was twenty-five degrees below zero. I was driving home to Yamsi and was just passing the Chiloquin airport when I saw a rancher friend, Bert Stanley, working at thawing his little single-engine airplane, trying to get it to run. I had been missing some cows on the range west of the ranch, and stopped to see if Bert would fly over the frozen countryside with me and help me locate the cattle. It would also be a good time to give Buck’s ashes a good scatter over the land he loved.

  Bert had finally gotten the engine to turn over despite the cold, and was letting it warm up when I asked him to fly me over the range. Bert was missing a few cows on his Hog Creek ranch and agreed to take me flying.

  “Do you mind if my uncle goes along?” I asked. “Not at all. Where is he?”

  “He’s in this box under my arm.”

  The idea took several minutes and a pint of coffee to get used to, but eventually Bert agreed.

  We located three of Bert’s cows on Wocus Bay, then flew over Skellock Draw, crossing the long snowbound ridges to the valley of the upper Williamson River. There in the upper reaches of Haystack Draw, we saw some of my cattle grazing on bitterbrush in the pines.

  As we gained elevation to fly back to Chiloquin, I shouted to Bert above the roar of the small engine. “Would you mind?” I asked. “Would you mind flying over the ranch so I can give Uncle Buck’s ashes a scatter?”

  Bert’s tanned features turned a little white at the suggestion. I could see he was bothered, but I kept on. “He was a historical character in these parts,” I said. “You and I both owe him something.”

  The little plane climbed higher and higher over Yamsay Mountain, until the ranch was only a long white ribbon of snow amongst the pines. We were now higher than it was safe to fly, and we were both getting a little giddy from the cold and lack of oxygen.

  Soon Bert began to grin. “I used to be a pilot in the war,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll put her into a dive over the ranch, and when I holler bombs away, you get your size fourteens in the door and give the old gentleman a scatter.”

  Suddenly we were in a screaming dive toward the ranch, which was swiftly getting bigger and bigger. “Bombs away!” Bert shouted above the din.

  I had already pried open the top of the wooden box and opened the thin cardboard container within. It took all my strength to open the door against the rush of wind, but I managed to get my cowboot wedged in the door and emptied the box into the slipstream.

  “We’re running into a cloud bank!” Bert shouted. “Cloud bank, hell,” I shouted back. “That’s Uncle Buck!” Half of the ashes had been swept back into the plane, and now we were blinded and choking to death as Bert tried to see out the window.

  Just in time, he pulled the plane out of its dive. Snick, snick, snick went the tops of pine trees as the landing gear cut them off.

  Bert was as pale as though he had grown up under a rock as we roared up over the ranch. Far below, I could see my hired hand, Al Shadley, driving the team and wagon with a load of hay out over frozen meadows dotted with cattle. I still had the wooden box and half the ashes left. “One more time,” I pleaded, sweeping up all the ashes I could reach in the cockpit.

  We made one more run, and this time I threw out the whole wooden box, ashes and all. I tried to watch as the yellow cube hurtled down toward the meadows, but lost sight of it behind the plane.

  Two hours later, I was back at the ranch cooking venison over a roaring fire in the stove when Al came in for lunch. For a long time he was silent, brooding into the steam arising from his coffee, and then he said, “You know? The damnedest thing happened to that Jersey cow your uncle thought so much of. I was feedin’ the cattle an’ found her layin’ dead out on the feed ground. Wasn’t a thing I could see wrong with her except a pile of boards fell out of the sky and hit her right smack between her horns.”

  After Buck’s death we still cooked in the kitchen of the big house, but when cold weather came, I grew tired of keeping fires burning in the kitchen just for me. The bunkhouse had an ancient box stove that took a pretty good log, and I soon moved in both to stay warm and share company with Al, who never seemed to run out of stories.

  That stove had a personality of its own. It was forever either getting hotter or cooling down, and the monotonous tick it made as the temperature fluctuated paced the flow of cowboy conversation like a metronome. Sometimes pockets of gas in the pine logs would explode and startle us into thoughtful silence; sometimes amidst the crackle and pop of a healthy fire, moisture would ooze from the logs and spit and hiss as it boiled away in the heat. Sometimes the stove rumbled and shook as the logs collapsed into coals. The old castiron stove was held together with a couple of bad welds where some forgotten cowboy had attempted to mend the cracks. Firelight danced upon the rough boards of the floor, and a sudden downdraft in the night could cover the cots and tables with gray ash. Cigarette smoke hung in ghostly layers in the superheated air, and the talk in these postwar years was often desultory. Except for Al and myself, there was seldom anyone there with a sense of local history, or with much experience with cattle and horses.

  Often Al and I talked of the old days when cowboys looking for jobs traveled light, arriving at a ranch with little more than their saddle, bedroll, and, rolled in the blankets of the bedroll, a change or two of clothes. If they wanted a chair in which to sit before an evening fire, they picked up a couple of old boards around the ranch and, without benefit of nails, whittled a crude chair which could either be left behind or knocked down, wrapped in a bedroll, and taken to a new job.

  Until World War II, these cowboy chairs were a common item in line camps and bunkhouses throughout the West, along with orange crates and apple boxes which were handy for storing rain gear, spare socks, western novels, and other necessaries. After the war, these chairs were the first traditions to be lost and, most likely, made a ready source of kindling for winter stoves.

  Lost along with the crude chairs was the art of storytelling, once kept alive by old cowboys who could spout a verbal history of each ranch around the bunkhouse stoves. Often, as I sat around the bunkhouse waiting for bedtime, I would glance about at empty cowboy chairs and try to remember old friends who had sat there spinning magic tales.

  One favorite of mine was a cowboy named Dick Blue. Dick’s ancestors were eastern Indians who had migrated west and settled in Washington State at the turn of the century. They homesteaded a small ranch along the Columbia River, not far from the Canadian border.

  Dick would add a log to the bunkhouse stove and talk about his relatives as the fire began to roar. “I was never sure who my real grandma was,” Dick told me. “The old man always had plenty of women around to do the work and never seemed to show much affection for any of them. I remember one day about noon, one of the women came in sniffling, holding on to her arm.

  “ ‘What’s wrong with you, woman?’ the old man snapped. “ ‘I was out chopping wood and got bit by a rattlesnake,’ the woman whimpered.

  “ ‘When do we eat?’ the old man demanded.”

  After lunch, the old man harnessed a team and drove the woman out to the highway, where she could hitch a ride into town. It was months before Dick saw the woman again.

  Dick finally settled on one of the women as his grandmother, mainly because she was nicer to him than the rest. To show affection for the woman, Dick and his brother saved up and bought her a gasoline-powered washing machine. To start the engine, there was a big foot crank. She still had to pack water from the river, but the job of doing the old man’s wash was now lots easier. One stroke of the crank and the engine would shoot blue doughnuts of exhaust and start puttp
utting away, and the drum containing the clothes would turn round and round until the wash was done. The boys, pleased that they had done something nice, headed home.

  Just about that time, the old man traded some horses for a battered 1930 Model A Ford pickup. It wasn’t running too well, so he borrowed the spark plug out of his wife’s new washing machine. The pickup still didn’t run very well, but the woman discovered that the washing machine didn’t run at all. But she noticed that every time she mashed down on the foot pedal, the barrel of the washer would turn around one quarter turn. From then on, that is how she powered the washing machine, pushing down on the cranking pedal with her foot until the washing was done.

  Dick’s grandfather was a good enough worker, but he had a real resistance toward planning a job ahead of time. Whenever Dick would suggest that the old man plan his projects better, he would reply, “When you build a roun’ corral, it don’t matter a damn which post you set first.”

  Dick’s partner, Claude, was taking a pack trip into the Washington Cascades. He and his brother were packing with horses miles away from civilization when the brother began complaining about a pain in his heart. They were just breaking camp when the brother said “Claude! I think I’m having a heart attack!”

  Claude said, “You see that pine log over there? Go drape your body over it with your head hanging down.”

  “Will that help my heart attack?” the brother asked. “Well, no,” Claude admitted, “but if you die, it will sure as hell make it easier to pack you out of here.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT RODEOS — the dust, the roar of the gaily shirted crowd, the camaraderie between contestants who travel together and help each other, the near-death experiences, the all-night drives from one town to another, the great horses, the hoofbeats of charging bulls and the clanking of brass cowbells hanging from bull ropes as the bulls buck, the friendships with bull riders whose life you’ve saved while risking your own. The hospitality of folks in rodeo towns and the adoration of fans. But in the life of every rodeo athlete there comes a time to retire.

  Slim Pickens was getting well known as an actor. He was the cowboy who rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, and later would play a sheriff in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. With every successful part, his studio was more and more reluctant to let him risk his neck clowning. He held the clowning contracts at some major rodeos and offered them to me, since he was now unable to honor them. It was a chance of a lifetime, but not something I could abandon the ranch for. I hadn’t practiced with my cape in months and knew I had to come to grips with reality. Sooner or later I would face a smart bull I couldn’t handle, and I’d end up injured or even dead. Also, if I went back to clowning, I would have to get funnier in order to endear myself to a crowd. With his big, round, chinless face, Slim was a natural comic. The audience was bound to be disappointed if I appeared in place of the great Slim Pickens. Rodeo would require a full-scale investment of time and money, and there would be little room for other interests. I knew that I wasn’t ready for big-time rodeo responsibilities.

  Slim found other clowns to take his contracts, and so the rodeos went on without me. The champions made money; lesser cowboys spent their meager winnings on travel, doctor bills, and entrance fees, and soon disappeared like me from the rodeo scene.

  Looking back, I was lucky to quit when I was in one piece. Through the years the rough stock got rougher and the bulls more savvy and dangerous. Ranchers began breeding superior bucking bulls and pairing talented bucking mares with talented bucking stallions. For a contestant, the margin between winning and coming up empty was often measured in split seconds, and how long you could take that beating and keep your body healthy.

  More and more bull riders were tying themselves on the beasts using what became known as the suicide wrap and were often hung up, bucked off with their hands still caught in their riggings. I was a cape fighter, and the cape would only be in the way of my getting a bull rider’s hand out of his bull rope fast enough to save him.

  I suddenly found myself with only two real choices, paying money to sit in the stands and watch or, what was easier, just staying away. I loved the ranch, and wanted to become a writer and a family man. The friends I had in rodeo would always be my friends, and maybe I could become better at other jobs than I had ever been in the rodeo arena, where I’d had my moments but was never great. I could look back on some real adventures, like coming out of a chute on such great horses as Coburn’s Cheyenne or Harry Rowell’s Sontag, producing and starring in the first American rodeos in Arles, France, fighting bulls and clowning with Slim in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, and winning honors with my rodeo photography.

  I moved back to the ranch for good. Maybe it wasn’t the Yamsi I loved back before the war, but it was a good life, and I still had lots of friends there and things to write about. Like Toy Brown, one of my Indian friends from Beatty.

  Toy was a huge man with a head the size of a basketball, and he could have stolen his gap-toothed grin from a jack-o’lantern. He worked behind the bucking chutes at many a rodeo, and producers like Mac Barbour claimed they couldn’t put on a rodeo without him. Toy was a master at tightening the flank straps on bucking stock and could make you get bucked off or let you ride and maybe win.

  Properly tightened, not too tight but not too loose, a flank strap makes an animal kick back. Toy knew his rough stock and how to get the best performance out of every one of them. When a cowboy got bucked off and staggered back to the chute, Toy Brown’s ear-to-ear grin was often the first thing he saw.

  The Browns were a ranching family who had a good cattle ranch just east of the Beatty, Oregon, rodeo arena, and Toy had a reputation for being a good man with horses and a steady hand on a haying crew. He seemed always glad to see me, and I counted him as being a good friend.

  One day as I was driving through Beatty in my pickup, I saw Toy sitting on the front porch of the general store and stopped to visit. He was holding his great moon face in his brown hands, and for the first time ever, he failed to grin at me as I approached.

  “What’s the matter, friend Toy?” I asked. “You look down in the dumps.”

  The big Indian motioned me down beside him. In the distance on the hillside we could see the ranch house where old Toy had been born.

  “You’ve known me a long time,” Toy said. “I always worked hard, didn’t I?”

  I nodded, wondering where this was headed.

  “I saved my money and made something of the old family ranch, didn’t I? Never bothered anybody or raised hell like some of my neighbors. I married a woman with a grown daughter, and I was happy, and worked hard to give them a good life. Well, them two went through all the money I had, even cost me my ranch. This morning the daughter told me she was going to pack Mama’s bags and take her away. You know what I told her?”

  “What, Toy?” I asked.

  “I told her if she tried to take Mama away from me, I

  was going to shoot them both. That’s what I told her.”

  Poor, kind, gentle, old Toy. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were shaking so much most of the pack slid out and fell in the dust.

  I struck a big kitchen match on my thumbnail, and when I lit his cigarette for him, I was surprised to see he had tears in his eyes. He lumbered to his feet and went off toward his pickup without even saying good-bye.

  I was at the ranch the next day eating lunch in the kitchen when the phone on the wall rang my ring. It was Toy. He was in the Klamath Falls jail and wanted me to bring him a carton of smokes. He had done just what he had promised. When the girl tried to take her mother away from home, he shot them both.

  Toy had flanked his last bucking horse. For several years he was a trusty at the Oregon State Penitentiary, and grew flowers in the gardens. His hair grew white with age, and he could have been granted a parole anytime he wanted, but he stayed on to the very end. Knowing Toy, I’m sure there was never much sense of remorse over what h
e had done. He had warned the women ahead of time, and that was that.

  Soon after Toy left the rodeo scene, I lost another old friend, an aging Indian saddle bronc rider named Jerry Choctoot. Jerry was an institution at Mac Barbour’s rodeos. More often that not, Jerry would win some money in the saddle bronc riding the first day of a rodeo, but the other cowboys would make sure he was too drunk to ride the next day.

  I was in the arena that year in Klamath Falls, Oregon, when Jerry showed up drunk to ride his second horse, which was already saddled and ready in the chute. I cornered Mac Barbour behind the chutes and told him that Jerry was in no condition to ride, and that I was going to unsaddle his horse and turn him out. Mac seemed to agree and went over to talk to him, but suddenly I saw Jerry crawling down on his horse, and Mac Barbour pulling the pin to let him out into the arena. One moment, the horse was bucking hard; the next, Jerry Choctoot had ridden his last bronc and lay dead of a broken neck. The rodeo went on, of course, but that was the last Mac Barbour show I ever went to.

  During the long winters at Yamsi, I had plenty of time to do what I had long dreamed of doing, and that was to write books about wildlife and the West. I was wandering through northern Nevada one day, looking for something in the way of history that I could write about, when I stumbled upon the story of an Indian family who had fled the reservation system and gone back to living wild and free. Whenever I could shake myself loose from the ranch, I would rent a room in Winnemucca, Nevada, and spend a few days in the local library, reading anything I could find in old newspapers about the family. Oddly enough, there was plenty to read.