Working Cattle, Long Ago

Out on the range cattle had to be watched and worried over to keep them healthy -- and even alive. Throughout the summer, for example, cows by the thousands had to be doctored for blowflies. These insects laid eggs in open wounds, such as fresh brand or castrations. The eggs developed into screwworms-- maggots about three fourths of an inch long --- which inflicted agaonizing pain, and sometimes death, on the animals. To daub the wounds and kill the screwworms the men carried bottle containing a powerful mixture of carbolic acid and axle grease, among other ingrediants.

These crude remedies occasionally turned out to be more lethal than the ailments. A cowboy named J.W. Standifer got orders to treat a bunch of cows suffering from a skin diseasse similar to the mange. He did, by dousing them with kerosene from a garden sprinkling can. This was the standard cure, and it might well have worked, except that one cow ran through a branding fire that turned into a living torch. The cow fled back to the others and ignited the whole bunch. Twenty head died, some after lingering for two or three days.

One particularly tough job on the range was pulling cattle from bogholes, where they tended to wander in the spring looking for water or trying to escape swarming head flies by wallowing in deep mud. The cowboys pulled them out with ropes snubbed around their saddle horns. An old cow bogged for a long time usually reached solid ground to weak to stand up, and might simply lie there and perish. On the other hand a young steer trapped only briefly would come out fighting and angrily turn his horns against his rescuers.

Another rugged rangeland chore was dehorning, a procedure sometimes performed on longhorns to keep them from goring each other. Puncher S. R. Cooper got a taste of it at the XIT in Texas. In a bedlam scene he and 20 other men dehorned 1,100 freshly purchased cattle that were forced out of a corral one at a time through a narrow chute. With most of the animals the men used a saw to cut the horns, but the harder horns of the old bulls had to be chopped off with an ax.

In summer, when the sun baked the treeless rangeland, cattlemen had to keep a steady fire watch. A blaze could sweep over entire counties, killing cattle and wiping out the grass. To curb the fires cowboys got behind plows and made firebreaks --- sets of furrows 75 to 200 feet apart, with the grass in between purposely burned off. Foreman Ira Aten estimateed that in a single summer he had plowed 150 miles of firebreaks. But the range was too big to keep it completly safe, and a blaze could start on any dry summer day.

One afternoon a puncher at Charles Goodnight's ranch in the Texas Panhandle saw smoke boiling up to the south and raced towards it. When he arrived at the scene he found a gang of men beating at flames with wet gunny sacks, slickers and brooms. When the fire refused to out he and the other men attacked the blaze by a grisly but effective method: they shot a big steer, skinned him on one side and tied ropes to two legs. Then a pair of riders on either side of the fire line dragged the bloody carcass over it to quench the flames, like moving an eraser across a blackboard. The horses had to change sides frequently, or the one trotting on the burned patch might have been crippled by the charring of his hoofs.