by Ben K. Green
I had numbered the vials and written on a piece of paper their identity and had given it to Frank Young, who was a disinterested party, to keep until the proper time. Frank was sittin’ in a chair over in the corner of the room and I think he had begun to wonder whether my luck would hold or not.
After considerable hesitation, this expert of experts identified the pure sample as the one off the corn, and the sample from the steer’s stomach to have come out of the container, which left the third sample to have come out of the steer’s stomach, which was wrong too.
I told Frank to hand Mr. President my note, and as he finished reading it to himself, he turned to his secretary and said, “Pay all just claims as represented, and be sure to pay the doctor his fee and expenses.”
YELLOWWEED FEVER
In late November of my second year in Fort Stockton, yellowweed was lush and had enough size that I could begin to pull it and continue the experiment I had started my first winter but had been halted by the tough summer weed. I had started to go pull some yellowweed to feed the experimental sheep when an old man stopped me as I was gettin’ in my car. He happened to be one member of the welcoming committee that had told me the country didn’t need me when I arrived. He said he had a bull that was damn bad sick and for me to hurry up and follow him out to his ranch in my car. I said, “Surely you must be mistaken.”
He looked at me hard and bellowed out that he wasn’t no doctor, but he had enough sense to know when a bull was sick.
I said, “Well, it don’t seem possible when you told me that this was a healthy stock country. Besides that, I don’t believe that I can be worried about him because you told me that when there was a ‘die-out’ here, there was always enough left to restock the country.”
This made the old man holler and wave both hands and he told me that he didn’t want to lose no bull just because of some bull he put out once, and he would consider it a favor if I would come and doctor his bull.
I asked him, “Well, you sure that you want to spend money to have me doctor stock for you when you could do it just as good yourself?”
This would have made him mad only he was pleading by now and said, “I’ve done doctored the bull and he ain’t no better.”
For meanness, I said, “Do you suppose I’ve got to cure what’s the matter with him and what you done to him too?”
In desperation he said, “Hell, you can charge me double. Let’s go doctor the bull!”
The bull got all right after I treated him and the old hardhead may never have bragged on me but he, at least, shut up talkin’ about the country not needin’ me.
In the summer I had done a great deal of research on the therapeutic action of drugs that would be usable in feeds that I hoped would counteract the toxic effect of vegetation that grew in an alkali soil. By now, this research had begun to get expensive and it had taken a lot of the money I had earned in my general practice to carry on this project. However, sheep were more plentiful than money and I had no trouble getting plenty furnished me by those who were hopeful that the research would be successful.
The first sheep that I was feeding this second winter on still another formula died the sixteenth day from the beginning of the test, which was five days longer than one had lived up to this time. The last sheep to die in this group lived thirty-four days. This was the first sign of improvement since I had started working on the project about a year before, and this was the twenty-seventh medical preparation I had tried.
It had still been impossible for me to break the liquid of the fiber and extract anything harmful from the contents; however, I continued to grind weed and work with it, and the back of my office had a sickening sweet, fresh yellowweed smell that filled the air for months and months.
With the encouragement from the last group of sheep, I reworked that particular formula and started on another group of four sheep. In this group there was one half-breed Navaho sheep. He was older than the others and bigger and ate more weed than any of the other sheep. I pulled weed nearly all winter for this bunch of sheep and the first one died on the forty-third day. The other two died within sixty days, and the big old Navaho sheep got sick but refused to die and I turned him out in the spring.
This particular experiment caused quite a lot of conversation around and more than a few people drove over to the Posse grounds to see these sheep.
I was ready to start feeding sheep the third winter when Dow and I decided that we could have better water and feed arrangements in a corral at the Red House pasture south of the stock pens on the north side of Dow Puckett’s ranch. This was a handy place to get to from town and was real close to all the yellowweed that I needed to pull up and down the draw in the same pasture.
I had changed my formula several times by now, using some rabbits and guinea pigs to experiment with. This particular formula was number forty-seven and was the last in a two-year period of experimentation. I had compounded the medical ingredients in my laboratory for all these experiments and this one I mixed into soybean meal and put it in a trough at the rate of one half pound of medicated feed per sheep per day.
Drugs cannot be used in a dry-feed mixture successfully unless they are all in fine powder form. Any variety of ground grain is included to let the drug elements sift to the bottom of the trough and will not afford a uniform dose of medication in the feed. However, heavy protein meals, such as cottonseed and soybean meal, are finely ground and are much heavier and still contain a small percentage of oils and this makes it possible to mix powdered drugs with meals into a stable proportion that will be reasonably equally mixed in the trough as the feed is eaten, thereby ensuring a uniform dose of medication.
I still had help from some of the ranchers around, and the days that I was too busy I would see them at coffee or pass them on the road and tell them that I needed weed for the sheep and ’most everyone was glad to help. When someone passing by saw them pulling weed, they’d hurrah ’em about Doc Green havin’ them on yellowweed too.
All four of these experimental sheep lived and thrived on a complete diet of yellowweed with the supplemental half pound of medicated feed. However, the yellowweed year was over and the big pasture demonstration experiment remained to be tried the coming fall and winter.
By now there were a good many ranchers who thought the research and formula showed promise and were very enthusiastic about the possibility of grazing yellowweed successfully. However, there were still a lot of skeptics who advanced the idea that you might be able to pull weed and keep sheep in a pen and make them live, but it would never be successful to feed in the pasture where sheep could graze their own diet of yellowweed.
Several different methods were used in trying to live with yellowweed and graze sheep on it. Some pastures that were good with the exception of a certain yellowweed-infested hill or ridge could be used by fencing off the yellowweed and leaving that part of the pasture idle. In many cases these fenced-off yellowweed traps might amount to as much as two or three thousand acres.
Another practice followed by ranchers who had pastures that were partially free of yellowweed was to rotate the sheep. Instead of having the proper number of sheep in each pasture, they would concentrate all of them into one yellowweed pasture and let them eat the yellowweed down the ground; with so many sheep none of them would get enough to make them sick, and this took about three days. Then the sheep would be scattered back into the regular pasture for a week or so and then all back into the yellowweed pasture. This procedure would go on all winter, which meant lots of ridin’, herdin’, handlin’, and chousin’ during the winter months. The theory behind this was that if they ate the weed up for enough years that it wouldn’t seed, and some thought that they would kill it out and get rid of it.
There was another practice that was far more expensive and this was used on ranches that had nothing but yellowweed. The sheep would be turned into a yellowweed pasture for several days, and at the first signs of sickness they would be put in a corral on alfal
fa hay and fed a full ration until the yellowweed was fed out of them. This was an extremely costly and not too satisfactory method, but it was another way to survive the yellowweed season.
Drugs that I had needed for these limited group experiments had been fairly easy to purchase in the small quantities, but now it was necessary that I arrange for enough drugs to feed seventy-five to one hundred sheep for as long as sixty days or more.
The meal mixtures were far better than grain mixtures, but the final perfection of dosage would have to be accomplished by the pelleting of these mixtures into sheep-size pellets. This brought me to the decision to have the feed for the pasture experiment run through a pellet machine at some feed mill, in order to make sure that each sheep would get its proper dose. When I began to contact the drug companies for these medications and ask for some of them in quantities of a hundred pounds, I discovered that there had never been such an extensive use of any of these elements, and quantity procurements would pose a real problem.
I bought up all the quantity stocks that I could find for my next year’s experiment and by early fall had enough medication to process 1,400 pounds of medicated feed. I didn’t have equipment and there was no one available in my territory to compound a medical formula for 1,400 pounds of feed, so Dow Puckett and I went out to his ranch headquarters to use a small hand-turned concrete mixer to mix these drugs.
The mixing of this formula in such quantities was going to be a pretty messy job, because the coarse animal charcoal continues to break and give off dust that goes deep into clothes fibers and deeper into skin and under fingernails and works around to the back side of your eyeballs, and so we put on some old clothes and began mixing. As Dow was turning the crank on the mixer and I was breaking up any lumps or clods in the drum with my hand, we were both getting a good coat of charcoal dust and powdered medicine over us and I asked, “Dow, do you feel like you are about to go down in medical history with Dr. Lister and Pasteur?”
Dow laughed real big and said, “I think when this is over we can go into town disguised as misplaced coal miners and nobody would recognize us.”
A few cranks and another coat of dust later he said, “Since I’m turning the crank, I’ll be Henry Ford. He made the most money. You be Pasteur.”
This kind of conversation kept the day’s mixing from turning into real work. It turned out that by the time we had finished sackin’ and loadin’ the mixture in my car that Dow’s description of us was far more accurate than either of us being put into medical history.
Soybean or cottonseed meal was very scarce and at that time of year the new crop of seed had not come in and I was having trouble finding any. H. H. Matthews, superintendent of the El Sinora Cattle Company, operated a three-hundred-section ranch. It was strictly a cow ranch and Mr. Matthews was not interested in sheep, but he was interested in the country and his fellow ranchmen and was glad to see the research being done. I had done some practice for the El Sinora and our business relations had been pleasant.
The El Sinora had two or three tons of soybean meal that by some mistake had been delivered to them with a carload of soybean cake, and Mr. Matthews agreed to sell as much of this meal as I wanted, on the condition that I NOT pay for it with cash but that I had to practice it out on the El Sinora as they needed me. He explained that the El Sinora Cattle Company, whose bookkeeping office was in San Antonio, had no arrangements to buy and sell feed, but it would be all right for me to render statements marked paid for my services until such feed had been worked out.
Several months before this, my friend Gid Reding had built a solid concrete building. One side of the building was partitioned off for my office and there was a partition separating my laboratory from the front office. Gid opened a whisky store on the other side of this new building, and with a whisky store and a horse doctor in the same building, the native cowboys immediately named it THE MEDICAL ARTS.
It was in the front office of the Medical Arts that I moved out the furniture and covered the floor with building paper, pulled off my boots and in my bare feet on the floor mixed and compounded drugs with 1,400 pounds of soybean meal, using a garden rake and a stove shovel. By raking and shoveling it up against one wall and working it back on the floor against the other wall, I was using the same principle of shoveling and raking as would be used by a druggist compounding powders with a spatula.
While I was mixing this feed, Scuddy, the plumber from next door, stopped by, stuck his head in, watched me a minute, and said, “Doc, I’ll turn the water on that if you want to make a loblolly while you’re playing.”
I got a lot of this kind of good-natured native help.
By now it was early fall, and I was anxious to get this feed ready far in advance of the time I would start using it. I naturally assumed that any feed mill would be glad to run this mixture through their pellet machine for me and compress it into one-half-inch sheep-size pellets. Early the next Monday morning I hooked on my horse trailer and loaded this sacked mixture and started to San Angelo, one hundred and sixty-five miles to the cottonseed oil mill.
The manager of the mill thought they could do this little chore for me, but it would be late in the afternoon before there would be a break in the cow-size cottonseed cake that they were running. When they changed to a half-inch die, they would run my pellets for me. I backed up to the dock and unloaded my meal and mixture and planned to spend the day around San Angelo and haul my finished feed back that night.
I went back late that afternoon to discover that the manager didn’t have a whole lot to do with running the mill, and the mill superintendent had refused to have anything to do with the stinkin’ stuff. So, I loaded it in my trailer and drove to Ballinger, to another cottonseed mill. They listened to my story and said their customers didn’t have much yellowweed and were not interested in wasting much time trying to clean up their bins and other equipment after having had that there medicine in it.
By this time I had between three and four years’ worth of research invested in this forty-seventh formula and that included many weary nights of laboratory work and lots of hours of pulling yellowweed together and all the post-mortems and so forth, so I wasn’t about to be discouraged by being turned down a few times by mill operators.
I drove from Ballinger over to Abilene to a mill owned by the Paymaster Milling Company. The mill was running on a twenty-four-hour shift and it was late in the night, so I curled up in my car and went to sleep to wait for the office staff to show up for work the next morning.
The manager of the mill was there about seven thirty, and I told him my story about all the research and experimentation that had been done on this formula and explained to him the reasons for wanting it made into pellet form. He was just a little short of polite and told me that they were making cow-size cottonseed cake that they knew cattle would eat and was already sold and waiting to be milled and delivered, and he wasn’t going to break into that kind of a money-makin’ arrangement to mess with some kind of medicated “mix-up.” I had had a bad night’s rest in my car and hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I gave him a fair cussin’ and drove off.
I had a few more mild refusals from mixed-feed mills that made grain cubes, and the third day after I left home, I drove back and unhooked the trailerload of feed in front of my office, still not processed, and began to ponder the expense and trouble of having to buy a pellet machine of my own.
This trailerload had been sitting in front of my office for several days when Johnny Clark, a feed salesman for the Minimax Feed Mill in Lamesa, Texas, came by to visit me. Johnny was a very aggressive salesman and was interested in the welfare of his territory and the possibility for a new business. He told me that he would take it up with the management at their mill and call me.
He knew that I left early and rode hard, and the next morning he called me before daylight and told me that he had discussed the matter with Roscoe Holton, the general manager for the Higginbotham interests, who owned the Minimax Mill. John must have done
a good job of presenting my case because his instructions were to tell me that they would cooperate to the fullest extent and that I should bring in at my convenience whatever I had that needed milling.
I left the next morning with my load of feed. We unloaded and started milling before noon. It turned out that this was not going to be so simple since the holes on the die of the pellet machine were tapered, and as the feed was pushed in from the inside of the die, the pellet was formed by the feed passing through the tapered hole under pressure. The drugs in the presence of heat and pressure caused the pellets to be much harder. In fact, so much harder that it was doubtful that sheep could eat them.
Johnny, Roscoe, and even the mill foreman worried and discussed this situation and decided to use an old die that had been discarded because the taper had been cut out by too much use. This turned out to be ideal because this minimum amount of taper made a pellet of the right firmness.
We spent all day changing dies and regrinding pellets until we had all the feed in pellet form, and about dark we loaded it on to my trailer. Minimax Mill refused to take any pay for their services, apologized for the delay, and expressed their willingness to continue with whatever I needed to have done. I drove home feeling better about the situation and stored this feed for the yellowweed season.
Rains had been good that summer and I began looking around for a yellowweed pasture that would be free of any desirable vegetation. J. Harrison Dycke had a ranch about six miles north of Fort Stockton and he, Dow Puckett, Doug Adams, Concho Cunningham, Ernie Hamilton, and I drove out and went over most of the ranch and picked out a four-hundred-acre block that in their opinion was the solidest growth of yellowweed on the ranch—or on earth, for that matter.