by Ben K. Green
The cattle were not on pasture and were standing in a dry lot eating baled alfalfa hay between milkings, so the trouble had to be caused by the feed. I started through his feed barn and mixing operation and everything was just as he had said it was, and for the want of something smarter to do, I took samples of the separate feed materials and took them to my laboratory after this condition had been prevalent for over a week.
This corn, cob, shuck, and all, that was coarsely ground began to worry me, so I decided to run a few chemical tests. I didn’t find any prussic, picric, or any of the other common acids that would usually cause trouble. An old cowboy alcoholic with a sensitive nose came in the front door of my office, and as he came through the middle door to the laboratory, he said, “Doc, I smell some kind of a cheap grade of drinkin’ whisky. Have you got on that stuff?”
I said, “Hell no, it’s just your breath blowin’ back in your face.”
He said, “It ain’t either. You’re about to turn to a private drinker hidin’ back here in this dive where you won’t have to divide with nobody.”
I said, “Well, I ain’t gonna divide with you. You’ve already made fun of the quality of my whisky and you haven’t even seen it.”
He picked up a handful of that ground corn off the end of the lab table and stuck it up to his nose and said, “You’re worse’n a bootlegger. You’re puttin’ it in cow feed.”
This was the very lead I needed, but I wasn’t about to let him know it, so I said, “If it would steady your nerves any, we’ll go up to the Stockton Pharmacy and I’ll buy you some fresh brewed coffee that hasn’t been made in a tin bucket and it’ll have a different taste than what you’ve been used to.”
We walked from the Medical Arts up to the drugstore and I socialized with him just long enough to be pleasant, then broke back to run some different tests on that ground corn. I had to go back out to the dairy to get a fresh supply of corn and after about three hours of laboratory work and half a bushel of ground corn, I came up with a vial of stuff that I identified as acetone, which is a few molecule chemical structures from being alcohol.
Late that afternoon about milking time, I went out and told old man Burdine that his trouble was in his ground corn. He sputtered and slobbered and said that it couldn’t be that because this was a fresh batch of corn he got about ten days ago from the feed mill. I asked him right quick what day it was he called me for a first case of bloat. He studied a minute and said, “I’ll be damn. It was about ten days ago.”
I asked him if there was any way he could manage to feed that night without using any more corn. He said, “Yeah, I’ll just give ’em the same amount of other feed and more alfalfa hay and they won’t miss the corn much.”
He added, however, that the bulkiness of the ground corn, cob, shuck, and all made it a lot easier to mix the other feed.
I was out early the next morning and there were no cases of bloat. As we talked, he said he still had to have some more corn and if what he had was causing the poison, he would try to get it from some other source. He had lost quite a bit of milk production in ten days and two cows had died.
I told him I wasn’t practicin’ law, but I thought he had reason for the feed mill to pay him some damages. Besides that, the feed mill might be selling this same corn to other feeders and we had better take it up with them. He said, “Yeah, you go on in and tell ’em what you found, so they won’t think I’m crazy like they will when I go to tryin’ to tell ’em, and I’ll come in after I get through milking.”
I went to the feed mill and was careful to present the case to the feed-mill manager, who listened with interest and showed no signs of trying to deny that the corn might be the trouble. However, he told me that he was buying this corn by the carload in hundred-pound sacks already ground and it was being shipped to him by a feed brokerage company in Lubbock. He wasn’t sure who the brokerage company was selling it for, but, as best he could remember, the last car had an Iowa billing on it.
I happened to know the feed brokerage company since I had done business with them and told him that with his permission I would talk to them on the phone. He said, “Yeah, go ahead. We need to trace this corn down and put the blame and cost of damages on the proper parties.”
I thought it would be best to tend to this over my own phone, so I went back to the office. In talking with the brokerage firm manager, he said that they had not loaded, unloaded, ground, or in any manner handled these corn consignments and it was being shipped by a mill in Iowa to them.
I went back to the feed mill and old man Burdine had come in from milking and we all discussed his trouble. I told them that it would not be wise to make a phone call to the Iowa mill because if they had any more of that particular corn they could dispose of it and hedge against any liability concerning the loss of milk and the two cows.
Old man Burdine said, “Doc, it’d be good to have you out of town a few days, and maybe you haven’t seen Iowa, so why don’t you go up there, and if you stay out of the country long enough maybe my cows will straighten out and be all right.”
I said right quick that his talk didn’t fool me none. He wasn’t as interested in my seein’ Iowa as he was in seein’ his cows straighten’n’ out and start back to giving milk.
I drove into Iowa after midday the next afternoon. I found the feed mill and went in the office and introduced myself and met the man who owned the mill. He was a nice fellow and an old-time mill operator and I explained my mission to him.
He said, “Well, if I’d known there was such a man, I’d have already sent for you. We’ve got a lot of steers in feed lots around close that are havin’ all kinds of trouble and there have been several steers die and nobody’s put their hand on the cause.”
He called his mill foreman in and talked about the corn that they were grinding. It developed that this corn had been stored in an old warehouse and lots of water had dripped in and been blown in from snow through the winter and spring, but since they had corn stored in outside wire granaries and even in small silos made out of red panel fence, they hadn’t felt that the water damages could have been of any consequence to this corn. If it was true, this would be the first time that they had ever experienced any trouble from grinding corn that had been damp from weather.
I was fast to explain the difference in their storaging process and pointed out that the water seeping through the ear corn under a shed and surrounded by solid walls would be more likely to go through a fermentation process than corn stored in the open, where the wind and sun could hit it. This all made sense, and without much argument, the mill owner was glad for me to have samples of freshly ground corn that was going through the mill at this particular moment. It was easy to see that he had quite a bit more at stake than the losses at one dairy in Texas.
I took the corn samples and drove into Omaho, where I knew a lab technician from years past, and we extracted the same faint-smellin’ stuff that Old Alcoholic had sniffed in my office. The mill owner was quick to call the feeders that had this corn in their feed lots and instruct his mill foreman to start grinding corn that he had stored in other buildings and told me that an immediate settlement would be made with my client in Texas. This old gentleman was a businessman and fair in his dealings.
I thought I was far enough from home, and as old Burdine wanted me to be gone an extra day or so, I went by Kansas City and then worked my way back to Fort Stockton about the third day. It was right after noon and I went to the feed mill to give a report and the old Iowa corn miller was sittin’ in the office with old Burdine.
They were discussing what the damages would amount to and old Burdine was trying to be as fair as Mr. Iowa. They asked me what my fees were in the case and I told them and Mr. Iowa said, “I’ll include it in Mr. Burdine’s check.”
In a few days I got a nice letter of appreciation with a one hundred dollar check in it from the Iowa corn miller. This was the most pleasant mishap in my entire veterinary practice that I ever experienced with peo
ple where cattle, feed, milk, and money were concerned.
The seasons of the year had ceased to have much meaning because they were all dry. We talked about the possibility of rain at equinox. The seasons of the year were passed as designated by the calendar, but in truth the drouth and the desert had given the year only two seasons, winter and summer, both dry. What few livestock that were in the country after winter set in could be generally assumed that the ranchers and their bankers had decided to stay with another year and my winter practice was a matter of survival on accidental cases of injury to livestock and other emergency-type calls.
The economic influence of ten years of drouth had more than separated the men from the boys, and the common run of jokes about dry weather only produced a grin instead of a laugh in a crowd. Occasionally somebody would buy a new pickup or a new car, and when it came up in conversation, people would ask in not quite a half-joking manner, “Where did ya get the money?”
The best answer was, “I’ve been savin’ my feed sacks since the drouth started and I just sold them all,” and there had been enough feed sacks bought on some ranches to have paid for a new car or truck.
Most of the concentrated feed being put out for range livestock was ground maize, cottonseed meal, and salt. The salt content would run about 25 per cent and in some cases was stepped up to 33⅓ per cent. The reason for this huge amount of salt was because feed was being put out in self-feeders. Since the pastures were so big and the livestock population was so small, a rancher couldn’t very well drive to them and hunt up what needed to be fed and these self-feeders were usually placed in reasonable distance from the water troughs.
Some form of hay or ground bundles of feed were being used as roughage, but true to their nature sheep and cattle constantly walked the range and tore up the ground with their sharp hooves hunting a bite of something green. Whenever I posted a cow or a sheep, there was always an unusual amount of indigestible sticks that were small enough to be bitten off a bush, and sometimes an entire impaction would be black brush or mesquite bark that had been gnawed from the lower limbs of the trees. Medicines and medical science were of little benefit in these sorts of cases.
When the spring winds started and the earth that had been mulched by trampling hooves on the trails to and from the water troughs and feed grounds began to blow, I began to get another kind of practice. I was called out to Burnt House Draw, about thirty miles west of Fort Stockton near the railroad switch of Hoovey, to see some poor-grade Mexican steers that were dying.
It was generally thought among cowmen that these native Mexican cattle could live longer and do better under bad range conditions than any other class of livestock, but when they started dying, it about wiped out any doubt in the rancher’s mind about having enough feed on the range to keep a few livestock.
These Mexican cattle were about three years old and maybe weighed six hundred pounds, and their appearance gave a very pronounced impression of heads, horns, pot bellies with little frame and no flesh. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference in the appearance of a live one and a dead one. I got down on my knees in the dirt and went to cutting open a Mexican steer, more for the want of something to do than any idea that I would discover any different causes for these cattle dying.
The Mexican steer was still holding his reputation for being able to digest anything that he could chew because there was no impaction in this steer, but as a matter of routine examination, I dissected his lungs and laid them out on top of the carcass. I made a cross-section cut and took one lobe of the lung about half in two. I reached over and put my hand on the lung to shift a little weight from standing on my knees while I did the post-mortem, and the pressure of my hand caused thin mud to secrete from the tissues of the lung. Then as I began to make further study of the lung, I even found deposits of solid earth in some of the tissue. In most cases these deposits would be surrounded by pus, and the supposedly toughest of all breeds of livestock were dying from dust pneumonia.
As long as the late-winter and early-spring winds blew and sheep and cattle followed one another in the dust-filled trails back and forth across the range, we continued to lose livestock. Sheep died much worse than cattle, perhaps because of their lack of resistance, but principally because their heads were closer to the ground, where the density of the dust was the greatest from the stock that were traveling in front of them stirring it up.
Cactus had come into its own as a range feed and thousands of acres of it had been fed by burning the stickers off with butane flame-throwers that were by now in common everyday use. After sheep and cattle learned to enjoy the juicy leaves of pear cactus, sometimes they wouldn’t wait for mankind to burn off the stickers and “pear mouths” became another malady in the stock business.
The mouths and throats of livestock would become lined with broken-off stickers and this could counteract any good effects to be had from the juices and the food value of the cactus. However, driving hunger seemed to reduce the pain and pear-mouthed cattle and sheep seemed to ignore the stickers in their effort to survive.
The seasons changed by the months on the calendar and the winds settled some, but the only greenery that was proof of spring was the pale, thin leaves that came out on what was left of the mesquite brush. This siege of drouth had developed more ulcers in people and untimely deaths from heart conditions and the usual infirmities of age were hastened by the living conditions of drouth in a rugged breed of people. Most ranchers had begun to know that they and their families would show the effects of drouth even after the country was lush and with green feed in some future years to come.
Rainmakers made their appearance in the spring and there were various promotional ideas brought about in the theory of seeding clouds that would occasionally form and float around over the desert. Aviators moved into the country with rain-promotion experts and money was raised by various groups of ranchers. These aviators would fly into cloud formations and seed them with dry ice and a short cloud burst over a small area would be produced from this procedure.
Since there were not enough clouds to go around and not enough moisture in the sky, ranchers and farmers then began to take envious views of the way that this possible artificial rainfall was being distributed and bitter arguments arose among friends. The possibility that such procedures might be preventing enough cloud formations to really produce a beneficial rain for the country was even discussed. Cloud seeding finally amounted to nothing more than a man-made agitation to be borne by a rugged breed that nature had not been able to conquer.
THE DESERT
When a region is referred to as desert, with few exceptions it will arouse all the civic-minded people at the Chamber of Commerce, and all the one-man Chamber of Commerces in hearing distance will rear up to explain that the desert is some other region and this country that you have so rudely referred to as being desert is semi-arid. Now, “semi,” hell! “Semi” would be the real good years in which enough rain falls and it would be on rare occasions that such reagions could be referred to as “semi.”
The West has many stories and legends that are built on the lack of rain. When a newcomer first hears some of these old tales, his reaction is that they are sure stretchin’ it. Then after he’s been there a few years, he will come up with a story of his own that’s worse than the ones the natives originated.
In a year when a desert region does get rain, vegetation will be lush. Weeds, cactus, and bushes will be ornamented with blooms of various hews of yellow and a few varieties will have white and pale-red blooms. Not all plants bearing a yellow bloom are toxic, but it can be safely stated that the majority of toxic plants do have yellow blooms the years that there is enough moisture for them to produce a bloom and thereafter seed.
The seeds of the desert plants and especially those of toxic desert plants will lay on the ground for a minimum of ten years or until time unknown, and the theory or thought that drouth could ever be long enough to kill the weed seedbed in a desert is folly of th
e human mind.
Before the desert was stocked with the human race, much of these remote regions were never grazed by many of the wild species of animal life. The grazing animals of the desert were principally deer and antelope and the lowly burro.
Deer and antelope could do without water for longer periods of time and then travel great distances for an occasional fill. The digestive tract of the burro is so constructed that he thrives best on coarse forage of low food content and can smell water from one mountain range to another. It might be well to note that the buffalo or any other animal that requires huge amounts of forage never inhabited the Trans-Pecos and regions west of there.
The sheepherders that came to the desert following the years of rain thought they had found a shepherd’s paradise. It was true that it was a good herder’s country for a while since they were uninhibited by fences, definite ownerships, and landmarks and could follow the rains and reduce the heat of the summer by drifting into the higher mountainous regions and then cheat the winters by herding back into the desert’s sunbathed flats.
This form of range operation did not last for a long period since mankind is probably the most destructive of all the animal species. He began to build fences and confine flocks and herds to tromp out the better grasses that were not too resistant to abuse, and capably made way for the less desirable and more worthless varieties of vegetation to take over as the good grazing plants disappeared.
This process has been described by the great thinkers as progress, and in a sense this might be right since it was progressively worse for the preservation of the natural and desirable vegetation of the Far Southwest. From my experience and observation I think that the deserts have been mined, so to speak, by the reckless misuse of earlier generations and because of the fact that the good grasses and other plants that have been destroyed will not re-cover the thin soils and rocky surfaces that it had taken nature millions of years to provide a sparse range for a few wild grazing species of animals.