by Ben K. Green
Whether Uncle Sam knew it or not, he was seein’ cowboy’n’ and horse handlin’ at its best by lifetime experts.
As we got nearer town, he said that if he wrote his report and tried to explain the distances between calls and the vast amount of country I was covering, and describe the friendly, informality of the people, from his experience, Washington would send out another “brain-washed civil service idiot” to see if his report was true. He readily confessed that he never would have believed any part of what he had seen if it had just been told to him or written up in a report. For ten miles he was almost a human being and actually showed some kind of admiration for me, my clients, and the great Far Southwest.
I let Mr. Civil Service Expert out at the hotel and told him I would call him when I had to leave town again. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and I lay down to take a nap and slept until almost dark. This was the first time in over a week I had been on a bed. I would catch a nap here and yonder in my car while I would be waiting for an owner to get his horses in the corral or during some other short delay.
My phone rang a little after dark and I had several calls stacked up in a matter of a few minutes. I loaded the refrigerated vaccine boxes in the back of my car and picked up other fresh supplies.
I pulled up in front of the hotel and told Benny to get my man. He said, “Doc, what have you done done to that feller! He took a bath and took a plane, an’ he acted plum fitified about gettin’ a taxi to take ’im to the airport and get away from hea’. He looked like he needed some res’.”
Every horse owner had vaccinated every active case and the neighbors who had pet horses and using horses had all vaccinated too, but it seemed that there would be no end to the epidemic; and now after three weeks, the disease was still spreading and I hadn’t turned down a call and had lost very few cases. Any horse being treated for a disease that is accompanied by high fever and severe dehydration might get over the disease but die from the exhaustion and malnutrition that had occurred during the time of the most severe part of the sickness. Almost any sick animal with a raging fever will have the presence of mind or enough instinct to drink, but few if any will eat feed. All the cases that I had that were not beyond the secondary stage and hadn’t gotten down, I fed by means of stomach tube and pump. I carried hundred-pound sacks of oatmeal and gallon jugs of molasses in the back of my car and as soon as a horse showed response to treatment, I would mix up in a tub a gruel of oatmeal, syrup, and sufficient water to make the mixture thin enough to go through a stomach pump. With the nursing and care of the owners, we rarely lost a horse that was still standing when I got to him for the first time.
Dick Arnold, a transplanted Vermonter who had come to the Far Southwest as a very young man and had aged out in the business, was still looked on by many of his neighbors as misplaced rather than transplanted. Dick had lots of horses and I was always doing some practice for him. He called early in the morning to tell me that he had three sick hosses and for me to come pa’pared to treat and vaccinate all his hosses.
Tires were very scarce, and although I had three permits from the ration board in my pocket to buy tires, there were no tires available; I had borrowed the spare tire from three different people’s cars. I owned one tire that was on the ground, hopin’ every day that some of the filling stations in town would be lucky enough to get a shipment of what we called war tires, which were mostly synthetic rubber.
Dick’s ranch was between fifty and sixty miles south and I got to within about a mile of the ranch house when I blew out a tire. It was a country road with very little traffic, and after I blared my horn and hollered a few times, Dick drove up the road in a new Packard to see about me.
We loaded in his car all the medicine and vaccine that I would need to treat his hosses, and I decided that I would worry about the tire when I got through with the stock. During this period everybody tried to help those of us who needed to travel in order to be of service to the community, and I knew that Dick would have his men help me repair that tire one way or another.
He did have three very sick horses that we treated first and then vaccinated one hundred and four head. It was noon and Dick had a good housekeeper and cook who called from the back porch that dinner was ready. By now I had noticed that both of Dick’s pickup trucks had brand-new tires on them, and as we went into the screen porch, layin’ over in one corner were two more new tires, but I could see at a glance that they were truck tires and wouldn’t fit my car. The thought ran through my mind that Dick had some better source of gettin’ tires, black market or otherwise, than I did.
We got in place, as was the custom of the country, and went by the kitchen stove and helped ourselves to the barbecue, beans, and potatoes that were in Dutch ovens on the top of the stove. After I had eaten a big dinner in a hurry, I stepped up from the table, reached for my hat, and said, “Dick, I’ve got to go.”
He said, “Don’t hurry me. I’ll get my hat.”
While he was comin’ off the porch, I stepped in that big new Packard about two hundred feet away, started the motor, and slammed the door and as I waved at Dick, I hollered to him, “Bring my car to town after you get new tires on it.”
I looked back in the mirror and saw him stompin’ the ground and whippin’ himself with his hat: I had thought about askin’ him for a pickup, for he would have gladly loaned me one, but then he wouldn’t have been worried about gettin’ me new tires for my car. Since he always owed me a good deal more than a set of tires would cost, I knew that he would make the necessary arrangements, fair or foul, to get that new Packard back as soon as possible.
On the third morning at about daylight he drove up in front of the office in my car, which had four new tires on the ground and a spare in the turtle. We both had a big laugh and went up to the hotel and had breakfast together and traded automobile keys and drove on.
My day’s work started by heading east to the Baker-White Ranch Company, where Pete TenyCke was foreman. He didn’t have a sick horse, but he had a bunch of good horses that he wanted vaccinated.
Next I had a lot of work to do at the Elrod Ranch at Sheffield and went on across the Pecos River to Vic Montgomery’s, where I vaccinated his horses and treated a sick stud, but not for sleeping sickness: he had a heart condition. I went on to Ozona and treated several horses in town in people’s backlots.
By now it was night and I was way past due up north of Ozona around Rankin and Crane. I drove into Crane that night and gave some further treatment to horses that I had treated a few days before. I went on into Midland, where there was a Chrysler garage that had an all-night service department.
Midland was one hundred and ten miles north of Fort Stockton and sort of the north edge of my territory. I got over there rather often and the night crew always serviced my car while I went across the block to the Scarborough Hotel and got some sleep; because I was away from home the chances were good that I wouldn’t be bothered. The next morning I would start out in a car that had been well serviced while I slept.
I was never a very good businessman and always a poor bookkeeper and this Chrysler car was sort of a dirty sand color, so I used the outside of the cab for bookkeeping purposes. When I made a call, either before I left or the next time I stopped I would take my pencil and write the amount of the call somewhere on the outside of the car and put an initial of some kind on it so I would know whose it was and then draw a circle around it. This was all the bookkeeping system I needed since I rarely sent out bills. When a rancher would see me in town and say that he had sold something, such as lambs, wool, or cattle, and wanted to pay me, we would walk out to my car and I would look around on it for his bill. During the time we were doing this, we would be discussin’ what all we did to the livestock the time that I made his call.
I cared very little about a car; it was just a means of transportation. And although I had one serviced, I never had one washed. This particular night after I had gone, the service crew were talkin’ about all
the business I gave them and the fact that I never got a wash job, and to show their appreciation for me coming by, after they got through greas-in’ and packin’ the wheels, they just gave me a great big wash job, free—and I lost my books!
People who have never lived horseback and are not familiar with the big pastures in rough country would not understand the feeling that is developed among all members of a ranch family for certain individual horses. During this epidemic I rarely, if ever, heard discussed the value in dollars of a horse that was sick. The conversation about an older horse would concern the “good he had done” in helping establish a ranch or in helping raise the kids. In talking about one of the younger horses that were hard from constant use, the stories would be about the bad spots he had carried his rider through in working stock and how much endurance he had in rough country.
One night I was treating a horse that was sick and staggering bad but had not been down on the ground. As I walked and staggered with him, trying to get a needle in his jugular vein, the old cowboy leadin’ him and holdin’ his head and talkin’ to him said, “Doc, I’ve dropped my rope into lots of wars on this old friend and we always won ’em, and we sure need to save him if we can.” This meant that he caught lots of fightin’ cattle and horses and brought them in and this horse was worth saving.
It was a common thing for a rider to leave the headquarters early in the morning and if in the late afternoon, he hadn’t gotten back, when word got out, the first conversation would be about the horse he was ridin’. If his wife or somebody spoke up and said he was on a certain old horse that was known to be trustworthy, there would be a feeling of reassurance that he just had had some trouble but would be in after a while.
In the event a rider was past due to come in and someone remarked that he was ridin’ a “green” horse (an inexperienced animal) or a horse that had a lot of endurance and was used for hard rides but was known not to be dependable in a tight, then whoever was around and whoever could be called easily would start lookin’ for the rider, who might be crippled or killed. Horses that had no affection for people and were undependable would rarely come back to a headquarters and would usually be found grazin’ or at a water hole.
When I was doctor’n’ a horse, the story would come up about what he had done and who he had saved and they’d say, “Save him if you can!” Nobody in the ranch country ever insulted a good horse by talking about what it would cost to replace him and the telephone operators whose help was indispensable in this particular epidemic were mostly all girls and women with ranch background or were married to a cowboy and the general thought in treating horses was never about money but instead was to save the horse for the good he had done or for what he meant to somebody.
One night I was way below Sanderson on the Rio Grande River treating some horses and the ranch wife came to the corral and said, “We just talked to the telephone operators and they have gotten together and figured out that you haven’t been to bed in about nine days. They told me to tell you that so far as they know, your calls are sort of caught up, and I should put you to bed.”
This kind of concern was very touching, but I had more work lined up than they knew about, so I thanked the good woman and kept on doctorin’ horses. When I left the ranch and pulled out into the highway, I noticed several hot biscuits stuffed with venison steak layin’ in the seat of my car. During these several weeks, the ranchwomen in the country kept me fed by havin’ food ready at the most ungodly hours or by puttin’ it in the car so I could eat on the way.
By the end of the fifth week the epidemic slowed up and by then I had vaccinated (two injections) over four thousand horses and had treated three hundred and seventy-five active cases and had driven over thirteen thousand miles. Outside of the cavalry, there have never been this many horses vaccinated or treated during the same length of time and over as wide a territory. This siege could not have been brought under control without the help of everyone who was interested in the horses of the great Southwest. The highly mechanized, direct-dialing telephone systems now in existence could have never performed the service to the ranch people and to me that those switchboard operators had, voluntarily and without any thought of gain or reward. Filling-station operators, café waitresses, druggists, and some few others all helped by taking and relaying messages.
YELLOWWEED TERRITORY
FROM the day that I first met Con Cunningham on the street he confronted me daily with questions about yellowweed and insisted that I try to learn something about the treatment of sheep affected by it. After the streak of good luck I had had with lechuguilla, more ranchers became insistent that I “try my hand” on yellowweed.
I had become considerably more interested in yellowweed than the ranchers realized, but I’d begun to hedge and not ask as many open questions and had also begun to ponder what the financial return would be if by research I could develop a satisfactory antidote or treatment for sheep grazing on yellowweed. There were no figures available and no estimates that were accurate as to how many thousands of acres of yellowweed were in the Trans-Pecos Region and no fairly accurate guess as to how many sheep were being partially grazed on yellowweed.
Ernie Hamilton represented a livestock loan company, and was an old sheepman who covered most of West Texas in his job. He told me he thought that some quantity of yellowweed was found in as many as ten counties in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. I had become well acquainted with the growth characteristics and appearance of the weed and decided that I would make my own personal survey to try to determine the territory that it covered.
The more I studied the weed the more I realized that it restricted itself to certain types of soil and terrain. In a good pasture next to a yellowweed growth, the soil and drainage might be such that the weed would not spread into it. It was rather inexplainable why it thrived on what was not necessarily the best soil.
I drove north from Fort Stockton and found an abundance of yellowweed nearly everywhere along the highway running from Fort Stockton to Pecos. But in a good part of this country there was barbed wire fence for cattle and no net wire fences for sheep, which meant that the weed was not a problem in that part of the country. However, I found yellowweed as far north as Lovington, New Mexico, and scattered amounts of it almost everywhere in southern New Mexico, but some of the sheep in this particular country were under herd and were kept from the yellowweed ridges.
West of Fort Stockton and all of Pecos County was yellowweed country. The Davis Mountains regions didn’t furnish any yellowweed of importance, but I found several hundred sections of scattered weed in Culberson County and even in parts of Hudspeth County. To the south of Fort Stockton, in the southern part of Pecos County there was very little yellowweed and hardly any in Terrell and Brewster counties. There was lots of yellowweed east and slightly north of Fort Stockton all the way to McCamey and plenty in Upton and Crane counties, but most of that land was not being pastured with sheep.
My final analysis showed that Fort Stockton and Pecos County was for sure the capital of the yellowweed range in the West. Another peculiar finding was that very little yellowweed grew east of the Pecos River in the Edwards Plateau. In later years I transplanted some yellowweed that failed to make seed in that part of the country. With this information at hand and knowing that there were as many as a hundred thousand sheep subjected to the possibility of yellowweed poisoning, I decided to begin research on the weed.
One morning I met Dow Puckett in front of the hotel and told him that I had some ideas that I would like to experiment with on some sheep. I would put them in a small pen and feed them yellowweed, keeping them off any other feed.
Dow said, “I think that’s fine, Doctor. I’ve got a number of sheep that will die from yellowweed before the winter’s over anyway, so I’ll bring you some of them. How many do you want at a time?”
I thought for a minute and said, “Until I find out how much weed they will eat per day, I think I would like to have four to put in the
first pen; that will make percentages easier to figure both in my formulas and in the days of weed and days of death.”
Dow laughed and said, “I don’t think you’ll learn much from four dead sheep, and I’ll be willing to furnish you more as you need them.”
The next day he brought the sheep in a pickup. The old Sheriff’s posse barn was across Comanche Creek from town. I built panel pens on the outside of the barn, where we kept these yellowweed sheep.
The next day Doug Adams saw me at Dee Walker’s filling station and said, “Doc, I heard that you and some sheep are eating yellowweed.”
I said, “That’s right and from what I’ve begun to learn from yellowweed, I may get sicker on it than they will before this is over.”
He laughed and said, “I’ve been on and off it all my life, and I can promise you that it won’t improve your health or your pocketbook.”
As I started to leave, he said, “If you kill off all of Dow’s sheep, I think I’ve got some to spare that the weed wouldn’t be foreign to.”
Not long after that, Ernie Hamilton was making his rounds for the loan company. These sheep had been on weed for several days and one was already showing signs of sickness and was beginning to vomit some weed. Ernie looked them over, gave me some encouragin’ speech and said, “As much as feed bills and death loss have cost the loan company, I’ll tell some of my customers that we’ll give ’em credit if they give you some sheep.”
I said, “Ernie, it may make it awful hard for your customers to keep up their head count if this research lasts as long as some think it will.”