Wild Cow Tales

by Ben K. Green

  STEERS

  STEERS ARE A PRINCIPAL CLASS OF cattle that have long been referred to in livestock market quotations, various cattle operations, in song, stories, and legend. To my knowledge no writer has ever written the reason that bull calves are castrated and hence afterward known as steers, and due explanation has never been made as to their special purposes in the cattle industry.

  In the early days of the cattle business in the Southwest there was little or no market for calves at weaning age except for the few ranchers who would buy them to keep on open range until they were older and bigger. The demand for “light” beef had not developed in the early-day consumer’s trade as it has in modern times.

  As bull calves develop into maturity, their shoulders and neck become thick and masculine with lots of cartilage and tissue developing in their muscle structure that is never palatable as human food unless it has gone through some grinding and other packer’s processing. To keep a bunch of bull calves to develop into grown cattle running on one range amounted to a constant bullfight and not a profitable growth and flesh gain. By this brief explanation, the reader can readily understand that keeping a great herd of bulls was impractical and unprofitable.

  When these bull calves are castrated, their growth pattern is changed and they do not produce coarse shoulders, thick necks, and other fleshing patterns that are undesirable for beef after they have reached a mature age. Great herds of steers can be run on open range or in fenced pasture in order that they may be grown into larger cattle without any particular difficulty of handling. This would show why it is most desirable from a cowman’s standpoint to be raising steers.

  It is common knowledge among stockmen that certain regions of semi-arid pasture land that is commonly referred to as rough—meaning mountains, rimrock, canyons that produce sparse, scattered vegetation—are more adaptable to beef production by the use of steers to graze such lands because steers can cover more ground to rustle for a living and gain weight than cows can and at the same time nurse a calf. This explains why there are vast semi-arid regions of the Western and Southwestern United States that are far more adaptable to steer beef-cattle operations than to those for cows and calves. At times of drouth or other adversity it is much easier to drive, ship, and relocate herds of steers than it is to move cows and calves.

  A big steer in the early days of trail driving to Northern markets from the Southwest could make the trip on foot much faster than all other classes of cattle. He grazed along the way and maintained his flesh, and if he was driven across good grass country, might even gain weight on the trail drive. This is why “steer drives” are often referred to by cattlemen and historians of the past. The steer was the only class of cattle that could produce beef and transport itself to distant markets satisfactorily in the days when there were no railroads, trucks, and so forth. This factor alone would have caused him to be essential to a large beef-producing operation.

  It is commonly known that steers were by far the best class of cattle to be used as oxen when they were put to the task of beast of burden. The steer’s role in early agriculture and transportation has been written by historians to some extent, but the one great advantage of using steers on wagon trails for freighting purposes has been neglected.

  All freighters liked mules best and horses second where trips were short enough to be made in three or four days since the amount of feed that had to be carried for horse and mule teams took up a considerable amount of space in the freight load. It was not advisable to use them on trips of more than several days because of this factor. However, steers could be used on long freighting trips or on long wagon-train trips by pioneers migrating to the West because they would be staked out at night to graze and, being animals of the Ruminantia family, they possess more than one stomach, and as they wear the yoke and pull the load, they belch up and chew this grass from the night before and reswallow it back into the active digestive track. This is the explanation omitted in history-book accounts—that the steer had advantage over horses and mules on long trips, just as long as he could get water and graze at night. Extra feed in the form of grain did not take up room on the freighter’s load, and this, too, explains why, even though it took more time, it took less money to freight with steers.

  The steer was also much preferred in the pioneer lumbering industry to haul logs or drag logs in the forest, especially around the sawmill, because the split of his cloven hoof gave him the advantage of pulling in soft ground such as sand or mud without bogging down as a horse does with a solid hoof that creates a vacumn each time the horse drives it down into the mud and pulls it out.

  These are the principal reasons, then, that steers were indispensable as beasts of burden in the development of the West.

  WILD,

  WIDE-EYED

  CATTLE

  THE STOCK-MARKET CRASH OF 1929 had just stunned the world in general and upset the livestock and commodities market along with the rest of the financial structure and economy of the world. Financiers were going broke and jumping out of windows and fore-flushers were suddenly being flushed out and exposed as being penniless, and the cow business was the worst that I ever saw yet. I had some pastures leased (at too high a price) stocked with steers (that had cost too much) and apparently with no hopes of ever being able to pay out of debt, but there were a few factors in my favor. I was young, had ridden hard all my life, and even though I had made some money in the cow business, I had never taken time to spend any of it and when I made a profit had always just leased more land and bought more cattle, so whatever money that I had lost didn’t impress me much because I hadn’t sold the cattle and counted the money to realize how much was gone. Banks and loan companies were taking cattle and ranches and whatever else that they could grab in the financial disaster that had driven everybody to panic. Not being wise enough to know to worry, and having a complete disregard for cowards and weaklings and being sick of hearing people complain, I decided to go to a ranch that I had leased as far as I could get from town and hole up a while until loafing and visiting got to be a more pleasant pastime.

  I was settin’ on one end of the porch of my shack one afternoon and my favorite saddle horses were eatin’ oats off the other end of the porch. A young cowboy keeps his horses as close to him as he can get ’em, and I don’t guess I have lost the habit even this late in life. If I was building a place, I would still want a porch to feed my horses off of and lay on a pallet at night and listen to ’em eat, and I would want a water trough in the yard instead of a fish pond.

  I was sittin’ and coolin’ and restin’ and wasn’t worrying too much about Wall Street when I saw a car come in past the gate about two miles up the hill. There was no mistake about it. Any time anybody came in that pasture gate, they were looking for me or they were lost because it sure wasn’t no public road. Pretty soon this fella drove up and as I hollered to get out, he opened the door of his car and came through the yard gate, and it was natural for me to go to sizing him up. He was gray-headed, pale-complected, big-bellied, and was wearing a dress-up suit. He was wearing slippers and a white shirt, a bat-winged block bow tie, and had a little city kind of store hat on his head. You could tell for sure that if he had ever been a cowboy that he had got over it and was past riding age and had lost his shape for it.

  We shook hands and he told me that he was Mr. McCloud, and you could just tell by the tone of his voice that he expected everybody to call him Mr. McCloud. You would get the impression from looking at him that he changed them white shirts every day, but from a cowboy’s point of view I don’t know why, because he wasn’t fixin’ to do anything to get one dirty. We sat down on the edge of the porch and carried on a little worthless conversation and pretty soon he came to the point. He was pasturing a bunch of big steers on the ranch east of my ranch, and the man who had been running the ranch and pasturing the cattle for him had gone broke and been took over by the bank, and he wanted to hire me to round up all, and he emphasized that word ALL, of his cattle
for him and drive them to the railroad and ship them to Fort Worth. Money had suddenly gotten scarce and my spending money was short and I decided that a little outside cow work wouldn’t hurt me none, so we discussed how long it would take, how many cattle, and what he would pay me to get them to the railroad for him. Best he could figure, there were seventy-seven head of steers from three to five years old, branded with an open A-on the left jaw. I had seen these cattle a few at a time and knew that they were about half-breed Mexican and Hereford crosses and could be hard to handle. I didn’t tell him so, but I felt like if I was lucky I might get them all out of that pasture in ten days. But I didn’t want him to think that I was gettin’ my money without ridin’ for it, so I told him that I would deliver his steers within thirty days. I figured I would have to hire some extra help and mount them on my horses, and being out a little extra money for horse feed and grub I told him I would do the job for $100. This didn’t seem to bother him a whole lot, so we made a trade and he went on back to Fort Worth, and I was to let him know when I was ready to load the cattle on the train. I sat there and laughed to myself about how easy it was to take a $100 away from a city fella that didn’t want to ride after cattle. I told myself that I would just get two more cowboys—and cowboys were cheap and plentiful along about then—and make two big wide drives through that river bottom and canyon pasture and hand Mr. McCloud his cattle in a couple of stockcars.

  This all happened along about middle of the week and I waited until about Saturday afternoon to ride into Granbury because I knew there would be some extra cowboys gathered in town on Saturday. I rode in and tied my horse to the chain around the courthouse and went over to Parks’s Café to eat up a bunch of stuff and to get posted on how many ranchers the bank had took over and all the other sad news that old Parks would tell me in his broken tones. I was interested in puttin’ out the word that I needed some cowboys because during the afternoon they would come in there to drink coffee.

  I was driftin’ around the square and had stopped over at Clyde Morris’s hardware store, where there was always a bunch of men a-sittin’ on some rolls of net wire. These were the days of prohibition and one of the best cowboys in the country was also the champion town drunk. He was a long, tall, whiskey-complected fella about twenty years older than me and a really good man to have on a cow drive. He walked up and tapped me on the shoulder and wanted to talk to me. We stepped back a piece from the rest of the loafers. His hands were shaky and he rubbed his face and said he heard I was needin’ some help. I looked at him and could tell that he had been in pretty bad shape for days on that white lightnin’ (corn whiskey), and I said, “Well, White Lightnin’, my friend, I don’t believe you are in shape to be of much help.” He said he knew it and that was the reason that he wanted to get out of town for a while. So I told him what we had to do and if he wanted to work to meet me on the south side of the square about dark, and we would go to the ranch. Of course, he said he would be there but I wasn’t countin’ on him too big.

  The word was gettin’ around that I was lookin’ for riders and it wasn’t but a little while till another cowboy found me and he said he was fresh married and bad broke and sure did need to work. I told him I was paying $2 a day and we would batch in a camp and I would feed him and his horse, but I had plenty of my own horses for him to ride on the drive. This sounded good to him and he said that he would be ready to leave that afternoon but sure did need $5 to give his wife before we left town. I didn’t know this boy too good but I let him have the $5 and sure enough we rode out that afternoon about dark and got into camp around ten or eleven o’clock and put our horses away and went to bed.

  I got White Lightnin’ full of some good hot breakfast and his nerves were settled considerably, and Newlywed was rarin’ to go to work. It seemed like with just seventy-seven head of steers three men could ride out and come home with them in half a day. I hoped that was the way it would be, but I had seen these steers scattered around in the cedar breaks and up and down the river in the thickets and green briars and wild-grape vines and everywhere else that it would be hard for a man on horseback to follow a steer. I had a sneaking suspicion that no matter how many or how few cattle you had to get out of a pasture like this it could be trouble. We left the shack about sunup. It was Sunday mornin’ but we was a way too far from church to disturb anybody and I didn’t see any use in waitin’ around a day or two to start earning that $100.

  We surprised a bunch of these steers going up a canyon headed out towards the open and by middle of the morning had forty head of them drifted up against the east outside fence. It was early in the day, and I couldn’t see much use in trying to take them back to a set of holding pens so we stomped the barbed-wire fence down and pushed the cattle over the fence while we still had them in a driving mood; then we tied the fence back up behind us. If cattle intend to be bad, the sooner you can get them out of pasture they are used to, the sooner they point and drift the way you want them to go because they don’t know where there is a thicket or a canyon to break back and get into. By late afternoon we had driven these cattle about eighteen miles and had them in the stock pens at Cresson, Texas, without any ordinary wild cow trouble.

  Being Sunday, there wasn’t any way for me to call Mr. McCloud at the telephone number he had given me, so Newlywed and White Lightnin’ rode back to the ranch and I waited around in town until office hours Monday morning to call Mr. McCloud. I had to know where to ship these cattle and who to bill them to. Some nice-soundin’ office gal answered the phone and said Mr. McCloud wouldn’t be in for several days but had left instructions for the cattle to be shipped to T. Z. Ham Commission Company at the Fort Worth Stockyards, and that was what I was interested in finding out. So I got a stockcar and loaded the cattle and was back at the ranch in late afternoon. My cowboys had been eatin’ and sleepin’ and enjoyin’ the rest.

  Next morning we started out and rode into real trouble. These cattle were scattered three or four in a bunch all over the river bottom and the cedar breaks, and it didn’t seem that they were on good terms with each other and were going to try to stay where they were. We rode, cussed, cried, whooped, hollered, and fought the brush and cedar thickets. When we came out to the top of the prairie about the same time and all three of us got up to where we could see each other, we had eleven head of cattle between us. These were big, old, rough, odd-colored red and brindled Mexican crossbreed cattle with no intentions of doing the right thing. There wasn’t enough to ship and the hope of takin’ them back to the canyon to the corral at my ranch was a lost cause because they would sure get away. I told Newlywed to ride way around them, let the fence down at the corner of the pasture which was about a mile ahead of us. As White Lightnin’ and I held them in a pretty tight bunch and pushed them over the fence that Newlywed had let down, he asked me what I was going to do with them in that pasture knowing that it belonged to another rancher. I said, “It’s a big open prairie pasture.” I decided that I would just “pasture them out” until I got some more to go with them.

  We rode hard all the rest of that week, and I had twenty-five in all pushed over in that prairie pasture by Saturday morning. One day we rode hard all day and didn’t get a steer. The brush was thick and the vines were everywhere and the cedar was dense and these cattle had a good way to hide. Twenty-five wouldn’t be a carload, but I was going to ship them anyway. We took them to Cresson by sundown and put them in the stock pens. When I told Newlywed and White Lightnin’ that they could go back to the ranch and wait again until Monday for me until I shipped these cattle, they went to tellin’ me a lot of things that I was already expecting. I had noticed that morning that both of them had got their own horse to ride on the day’s drive instead of some of mine. White Lightnin’s health had considerably improved on a good hard grub diet and hard work. He said he believed if I would pay him he would turn back to Granbury instead of going back to the ranch on Fall Creek. This wasn’t no shock to me so I paid him, and about that time when Newlywed
saw that I had money on me he spoke up and said he guessed he had better get back to Granbury too to see about his wife, so I paid him too. This left me without any help and twelve wild steers freshly boogered in a big canyon and river-bottom pasture. Since I already knew where these cattle were going, I billed them to T. Z. Ham Commission Company and loaded them Saturday night. I put my horse in the stock pens and fed and watered him and spent the night in the country hotel at Cresson.

  Next morning I rode back to Weatherford to visit around and rest a day or two and let my wild cattle maybe settle down a little. I got to thinking that it would be a good idea to go over to Fort Worth and visit a little with Mr. McCloud and draw some of my money since I had delivered all of his steers but twelve. I went up to his office in the main part of Fort Worth and this lady that had been answerin’ the phone told me that Mr. McCloud had not been back to the office yet and that she didn’t know when to expect him. I looked around and I could tell that this was no cowman’s office. He had big real-estate signs and pictures around on the walls with fancy furniture and rugs on the floor, and as I left I couldn’t help but wonder about this Mr. McCloud.

  I got on the streetcar and rode over to North Fort Worth to the stockyards, which was about five miles from the main part of Fort Worth. I went out on the stockyards and hunted up T. Z. Ham. He was a good honorable commission man; I had never had any business with him, but I knew him on sight and he knew me. This last twenty-five steers that I had shipped were in his sales pens. I shook hands and told him what I had been doing and that I had shipped him those steers for Mr. McCloud. He asked me if that would be all of them and I told him, no, that there was supposed to be twelve more head, but that I had found the carcass of one steer and there might be another one or two missing. Then I told him about going over to Mr. McCloud’s office, and I also told him that McCloud owed me some money for gathering his cattle.