cowboy life

THE LETTERS OF GEORGE PHILIP

Edited and with an Introduction

by CATHIE DRAINE

Afterword by Richard W. Slatta

Illustrations by Mick B. Harrison

South Dakota

State Historical Society Press

Pierre, South Dakota

© 2007 by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press The Philip letters are published here by written permission of the Philip family. All rights reserved. This book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever may not be reproduced without the expressed written approval of the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, Pierre, S. Dak. 57501.

This publication is funded, in part, by the Deadwood Publications Fund provided by the City of Deadwood and the Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Philip, George, 1880-1948.

Cowboy life: the letters of George Philip / edited and with an introduction by Cathie Draine; afterword by Richard W. Slatta; illustrations by Mick B. Harrison.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-9822749-9-6

1. Philip, George, 1880-1948—Correspondence.

2. Philip, George, 1880-1948—Childhood and youth.

3. Cowboys—South Dakota—Correspondence. 4. Ranch life—South Dakota—History—20th century. 5. Frontier and pioneer life—South Dakota. 6. Cattle drives—South Dakota—History—20th century. 7. South Dakota—Social life and customs—20th century. 8. South Dakota—Biography. I. Draine, Cathie. II. Title.

E656.P49A4 2007

978.3’033—dc22

22007004290

ISBN 978-0-9777955-1-2

Cover image: Pie-Eyed, 2003, 6 1/2” x 9 1/2”, oil,

© by artist Mick B. Harrison

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many persons whose enthusiasm for this project, personal memories of some of the individuals and the times, and research skills assisted me beyond measure. Reid Riner, curator, and Ellen Bishop, genealogist, Minnilusa Historical Society, Rapid City, provided invaluable access to background information, historical records, and texts. Darrel Nelson, interpretation coordinator, Adams Museum and House in Deadwood, and Lili Sjomeling, assistant librarian at the Hearst Library in Lead, were able to provide additional information and a first name for Consul Edwards, a figure in the affair of the buffalo versus the Mexican bulls in Juarez, Mexico. Tara Hicks, Stanley County Clerk of Courts, provided the total transcript of the legal actions surrounding the unfortunate death of Clyde Whiting. The reference staff members at the Rapid City Public Library were devoted sleuths who determined titles and authors of numerous bits of poetry.

The staff at the South Dakota State Historical Society have also been supportive. They include Ken Stewart of the South Dakota State Archives and Patti Edman, Nancy Tystad Koupal, and Jeanne K. Ode of the Research and Publishing program.

Bradford Morgan, good friend and academician, provided soothing counsel on technical writing issues. Justin Eiesland at Computer Repair and Sales in Rapid City was the calm and competent restorative manager of predictable electronic crises. Glen Schut, Jeff Schut, Robert Schnell, and Dick Stoll provided many answers on horse and wagon questions, cattle and horse brands, and general range horse behavior. Robert Johnson, M.D., and Kristine Trautman, D.V.M., offered professional and personal opinion on the matter of the Texas itch.

This project has had stalwart cheerleaders, and I am grateful to them for encouragement, prodding, and enthusiasm. They include amateur historian and good friend Janet Dunlap Rathbun of Rapid City; Scotty Philip’s granddaughter Jackie Mack Means of Black Hawk; devoted historian of central South Dakota and long-time friend of the family Faye Longbrake of Dupree; and my husband, LeRoy Draine, whose frequent comment, “I don’t see an immediate problem,” was consistently motivating.

To the other grandchildren of George Philip goes my deepest gratitude for their absolute belief in the value of these letters and in making them available to everyone. Their generosity in providing material, willingness to share their memories, and consistent encouragement is deeply valued. Margaret (“Snow”) Philip in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and George Philip III in Freeport, Maine, children of George (“Geordie”) Philip, Jr.; George (“Greg”) Philip, son of Robert Philip, in Fouqueure, France; as well as I, daughter of Jean Philip Mitchell, have been custodians of our grandfather’s letters. We are united in our pleasure in seeing them published.

My task was to present George Philip’s experiences intact, as he wrote them. He valued the people and the events he wrote about, found them sustaining and entertaining, and wanted his children to be aware of and appreciate the remarkable characters and period of the open range. One always approaches another’s personal experiences with the deepest respect. Any errors or omissions that occur are mine; none is intentional.

Cathie Draine

Black Hawk, S.Dak.

1 July 2006

Old Stanley County and Lyman County, 1902

South Dakota, 1901

Introduction

“Everything that is attempted should be undertaken with some sort of purpose,” wrote Rapid City lawyer George Philip to his three adult children, George Philip, Jr., Robert, and Jean, on Christmas Day 1936. At fifty-six years of age, he was preparing to leave a legacy to his two sons and daughter in the form of lengthy letters written over the next five years. “Mine in undertaking this letter, and such others as may follow,” he began, “is to chronicle the uneventful story of an unimportant man, and to give to each of you some idea of the experiences an ordinary chap could have in the generation which preceded yours.” No one who knew George Philip as a cowboying teenager newly arrived on the Dakota prairies from Scotland or as a respected lawyer and civic leader years later would ever have considered his story “uneventful” or described him as “an unimportant man.” George Philip lived fully in his own generation, displaying his belief that, “if we are not too non-conformist, we can sometimes take advantage of the forces that carry us along.” And take advantage he did, leaving behind this quite extraordinary record of life on the open range and in the wide-open towns of western South Dakota.

George Philip was born on 16 July 1880 into a large extended family in Auchness, near Dallas, in Morayshire, Scotland. His grandfather and grandmother Philip produced a family of nine children, a number of whom emigrated to the United States. George’s father, Robert, was a stonemason who worked in the rebuilding of Chicago after its great fire in 1871, returned to Scotland, married, and died of pulmonary disease, most probably pneumonia, when his son was only three years old. Robert’s widow, Catherine Maclaren, struggled to maintain herself and young George, but she was never again “able to establish herself in life, in health, nor in happiness.” She died in 1887. Commenting on his orphaned state to his children, George Philip remarked in 1936: “Perhaps one so orphaned never fully overcomes the sense of loss; perhaps such a one values regard of others more than those who through childhood, puberty and adolescence are not subjected to that sense of loss. Who knows? At least, it is likely to give a serious slant in tender years to those who shed their tears alone.”

George Philip’s Christmas letter to his children covers his genealogy and early years, offering recollections of his youth that are probably typical of most young lads in the highland glens at the end of the nineteenth century. With his pals and a neighbor’s dog, he fished, trapped small game, cut birch for firewood, and once successfully dispatched a deer that had broken its leg in a fall. Youthful rambles in the hills soon gave way to serious discussions of the future for young George. The young man himself wanted to go to sea, and eventually his grandmother and his uncles who remained in Scotland determined that he would “join the numberless legion of Scottish trained marine engineers.” On his sixteenth birthday, he entered a five-year apprenticeship in the engineering yards of Caldwell and Company on the River Clyde. Work began in the yards at six in the morning with a quick break for breakfast several hours later. Dinner was an hour at midday and then back to work until six, except Saturday when work ended at noon. Combined with demanding evening studies at the engineering high school, this regimen led the young man to realize “that the world would have to struggle along without the mechanical services of one of its poorest engineers.”

“It seemed advisable,” he recalled in 1936, “to cast about for some means of release from the bonds of an apprenticeship. One with no parents, brothers or sisters in whom to confide, is forced to the necessity of determining without advice the course to pursue, ...[and] there is likely to be a lack of frankness in dealing with others, and a resort is sometimes had to means that are not the source of too much pride in later years.” In other words, he hatched a plot to get out of his commitment. Enlisting the advice of his cousins who were medical students, he arrived at the decision to present the symptoms of tuberculosis. He developed a hacking cough, all the while protesting perfect health. Official after official took notice, and finally the crucial medical examination was held. “I took the flat position that there was nothing the matter,” Philip recalled, and at last the examining physician suggested that a leave of absence, perhaps in the Transvaal or the western states of America, might be beneficial. In April 1897, he sailed from the Clyde to America to begin his leave of absence. It was to be a remarkably long year.

Immediately after arriving in New York, the young man hastened to the ranch home of his uncle Alex Philip in Hays, Kansas. One year of recuperation soon became two. In 1899, demands from Scotland that he return to finish the engineering program and the fact that he and Alex Philip did not get along led George to cast about for jobs farther west, and he ultimately arrived at a lumber camp near Grant, Colorado. Only a cousin in Hays knew of his plan to stay out of sight until his majority was reached. Not wanting to make a career of skidding logs, George was pleased when he received a letter via his cousin from his Uncle James (“Scotty”) Philip of South Dakota. “I understand Bob’s boy is roaming somewhere through the West,” the letter read. “If you know where he is, tell him to come up here, and I’ll put him to work.” The reluctant lumberjack headed immediately to Denver to collect his wages for the trip to South Dakota.

“On arriving at Pierre in the middle of the night,” George Philip recalled, “in a town which then could boast of no street light at all, the nearest and most convenient hotel was the old Grand Pacific, long since removed.” Looking as if it had never been grand, the hotel “on that particular night... was anything but pacific for the reason that there were some cowboys on parade.” In due time, Philip started across the river to his future home:

In those days, the only way of communication and transportation across the Missouri River was by rowboat, for passengers, and the steamship “Jim Leighten” for freight and livestock. Old John Olson was the boatman who transported me, and who enabled me to start my first visit in that quaint frontier cow town, Fort Pierre.

Scotty, whom I had seen but once before, at the wedding of Anne Philip at Hays two years before, happened to be on the street, and I completely surprised him by introducing myself to him. He then took me up to his home, introduced me to his family, where I was then accepted and still remain one of them.

That same day or the next morning I was introduced to Billy Hess, and Fred Ervin.... They were in from the roundup outfit camped on Prairie Dog north of Midland, each with a four-horse team, after provisions for the Fall roundup. Acquiring a saddle and a bed, I joined them on their outward trip and launched into what I thought would be my last business.¹

From 1899 to 1903, when he turned in his saddle and string of horses and entered the University of Michigan to study law, George Philip would work for his legendary uncle.

Scotty Philip had emigrated from Scotland in 1874 at age fifteen. After knocking around the West from Kansas to Colorado, he had arrived at Fort Robinson, where he worked as a guide and scout. He married Sarah (“Sally”) Larribee, a French and Cheyenne Indian woman in 1879, and the two of them eventually started ranching along the Bad River near the present-day town of Philip. When the Great Sioux Reservation opened up in 1890, Scotty started a second ranch near Fort Pierre, forming a partnership with the Minnesota and Dakota Cattle Company, known as the “73 outfit” for its brand. Philip also ran cattle under his own L-7 brand, and when the partners quarreled in 1899, Scotty Philip sold his interest in the 73 and shipped in southern cattle and acquired local brands to form his own L-7 cattle company. When his nephew George joined his ranching operation at the turn of the century, Scotty Philip and his family may have had up to forty-thousand head of cattle on the open ranges of western South Dakota. He also bought one of the last surviving herds of buffalo and is credited with helping to save the American bison from extinction.² Perhaps it is little wonder that the bulk of the letters that George Philip would write to his children between 1937 and 1941 focus on his early years as one of Scotty Philip’s cowboys.

George Philip owed more than his cowboy years to Scotty’s influence, however, as the older man also dabbled in banking, real estate, and politics. Scotty had given his young nephew a herd of cattle to get started in the cattle business, but a “smart operator fleeced me out of my herd,” George Philip admitted later, and in 1903 he therefore determined to “go to law school and learn how to write a contract so I would never fall prey” again to a clever operator.³ But admission to law school took the influence of his uncle Scotty who, with the cooperation of officials at the Fort Pierre high school, fabricated a secondary school record and diploma to meet the aspiring lawyer’s entrance requirements. George Philip graduated from the University of Michigan in 1906 and received his naturalization papers the same year.

After graduation, Philip partnered with Alvin Waggoner, a classmate at the University of Michigan, and they set up offices in Philip and Fort Pierre. On 30 May 1911, George married Alice Island (“Isle”) Waldron of Fort Pierre. Their first child, George Philip, Jr. (“Geordie”), was born in 1912. In January 1914, when Philip was in Sioux Falls getting acquainted with the duties and requirements of his position as assistant United States attorney, he received word of the birth of his daughter, Jean. Robert, the third and last child, was born in November 1914. Three years later, the family moved from Fort Pierre to Rapid City, where Philip was associated in the practice of law until his death. He served two terms as United States attorney for South Dakota under President Woodrow Wilson and twelve years in that capacity under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As an active Democrat, he also served as close advisor to Governor Tom Berry in the 1930s. His extensive civic interests included the Mount Rushmore National Memorial commission and society, the South Dakota cement commission, the Black Hills Power and Light Company, and the Black Hills General Hospital in Rapid City. He was one of the best-known representatives of masonry in South Dakota, holding the thirty-third degree at the time of his death in 1948. He first joined the masons in Fort Pierre, and his letters reflect his strong commitment to the organization.⁴

When Philip began to write to his grown children on that Christmas Day in 1936, they knew well his professional reputation, his civic participation and contributions. They knew him as a poetry-quoting, suit-wearing, thoroughly urban intellectual. They knew he was a sought-after speaker at political and service-club events. They also knew that he was the center of attention when tales were told at “old-timers” gatherings. But it is quite possible they did not know how well he understood the impact on society of the closing of the last great open range. Barely two generations — thirty-four years — had passed since Philip turned in his saddle in 1903 and began to write about those experiences.

At fifty-six, George Philip had an almost palpable awareness that, for a working cowboy in South Dakota, the decade that straddled the beginning of the twentieth century had been a time like none other. This era, which formed his life and career, came at the end of the open range in the Northern Great Plains. George Philip’s writings capture the free, wild, and risky era in which cowboys were loyal, independent, and largely without pretense. Ultimately, that life, bounded only by the demands of the cattle, surrendered to railroads that crawled across the prairies, to the towns that were built to support the trains, to the thousands of miles of barbed wire, to the homesteaders who fenced and plowed the land.⁵ But for the cowboys themselves, the values of the open range, its friendships, and the shared experiences remained.

In recreating the era for his children, Philip wrote of his admiration and friendship with individual cowboys such as Bunk White and Tom Beverly. Even though he recalled defending the African-American White against racist attitudes, Philip’s letters also refer to the “darky” porter on a train to Mexico and preserve Tom Beverly’s naïve solution to the “race problem” in yet another letter.⁶ His description of events on the Indian reservation during a roundup probably reflects attitudes held by many at the time that Philip was writing. It would stretch credulity to suggest that he held a bias against the American Indians since his uncle Scotty’s wife was of mixed blood, as were his own mother-in-law, Jane Van Metre Waldron, and his wife Isle. Instead, the casual language and tolerance of stereotypes when not directed at people one knew characterized his era.

George Philip was decidedly conscious of capturing and leaving an impression of his generation for his readers to appreciate. “It is impossible for one who knew Tom Beverly in the days when there was a cow country, and there were cowboys,” Philip commented, “to call one of the overdressed and underworked drugstore cowboys of this day by that name.” The early cowman’s “wealth of early cowboy lore, well understood by one who helped make it, was allowed to go to waste when Tom passed on to his reward without leaving his story told for others to come. His views on the great epoch of American life, the cow country, have since been warped out of all semblance to the living truth by pulp magazines, silver screen, plain lies, and even by that modern manifestation of showmanship called the rodeo,”⁷ Philip kept his own promise to see that Tom Beverly, almost a tradition on the range, was not totally forgotten after his death. And in the process, he helped to preserve the cowboy era for all of us to appreciate several generations later. Whatever else Tom Beverly may have been, he was clearly a mentor, confidant, and probably a surrogate father to the young Scottish lad coming of age on the vast prairies of central South Dakota.

It seems apparent that Philip began the letters in one state of mind and ended them in another. Initially he wanted to record the time, people, and events that had formed him, but as time went on, he found his health and purpose changing. “When the idea of writing letters occurred to me,” he wrote on 4 March 1937, “my intention was to make them much more inclusive than they may turn out to be, for an unusual amount of eye trouble added to the task, which I had expected to be pleasure only. I looked forward to doing a much better job than I may ever be able to accomplish.” It was important to him to paint an accurate picture. “The range country was largely peopled by young boys and young men,” he wrote in the same letter. “They were not arrayed in the spangles so liberally shown in the movies but in overalls or California pants.... They were, in fact, laborers in a hard field. Because of its freedom, it had considerable romantic appeal, but they did not live in the towns such as Hollywood depicts. Instead, they slept beneath the stars or the clouds, when they could get to it, and the rest of the time, they were dirty and sweaty and tired.” As the letters progress, they become a gift to himself of meaningful memories. Near the end of the letters, his contempt for Adolph Hitler and his concerns for the war color some of his thoughts even as the letters help to take his mind off the war.

By 20 May 1941, the date of the last letter, not only were his eyes bothering him, but other health problems and sorrows were looming. His two sons would be lost in the war. Major Robert Philip of the United States Marines was killed in the South Pacific on 24 June 1943 when his fighter plane was lost near Monono, Samoa. Commander George Philip, Jr., died on 16 June 1945 off the island of Okinawa when a kamikaze struck the ship he was commanding. George Philip would survive his sons by only a few years. He died at home in Rapid City on 13 March 1948 from the results of a stroke or, perhaps like many others at the time, of the heartbreak of war and family loss. He was sixty-eight years old. His widow Isle, his daughter Jean, and four grandchildren survived him. Remarkably, for a man who spent most of his life in decidedly urban pursuits and experienced only four years on the range, his obituaries gave great recognition and respect to the friendships formed there. His personal memories of the range, which follow, add his own contribution to the cowboying legacy.

After he finished writing the letters, George Philip himself shaped them into a polished whole. The letters were typewritten and corrected in his own hand. They were then bundled together, titles and subheadings were added to most of them, and a set given to each of his children. At least a portion of one letter, the Mexican adventure, was published in Philip’s lifetime when he shared it with the South Dakota State Historical Society. Another letter appeared in Bert Hall’s classic compilation of cowboy documents entitled Roundup Years.⁸ In preparing the letters for publication, I have preserved their order as written, and, other than breaking large blocks of text into paragraphs or combining short ones, I have kept editorial corrections and insertions to a minimum, adding notes at the end to explain or expand on items in the text where possible. Over time, some stories were told more than once, and I have removed repetitions, marking them with an ellipsis, and combined stories. In the interest of focusing on life in early South Dakota, the first letter about Scotland, which is quoted extensively in this Introduction, one about Hays, Kansas, and those containing his speeches on unrelated topics have been omitted. With these exceptions, the document remains as George Philip wrote it—the story of his generation and his own “ordinary life.” At his death, the Rapid City Daily Journal eulogized him as “Scottish immigrant, western cowboy, forthright citizen, an eminent lawyer [and] a friend of man.... Whether on the range or in the court room or by the fireside, here was a man to tie to.”⁹

Cowboys George Philip, Tommy McDonald, Art Woods, and Johnny Cruikshank (from left) posed for this photograph around 1900.

CHAPTER 1

The Open Range

March 4, 1937

My dear Geordie, Jean, and Bob:

One of the greatest epochs in the development of any country was manifested in that part of America’s west, known as “The Cow Country.” Migration and settlement took it over piece by piece from the wide-open spaces to the restrictions of community life. The last of the cow country was that part of South Dakota lying west of the Missouri River, with a little strip along northern Nebraska, southern North Dakota, and eastern Wyoming and Montana. That life, and it was a life all unto itself, passed out much too rapidly for people to realize at the time just what was happening.

The range country was largely peopled by young boys and young men. They were not arrayed in the spangles so liberally shown in the movies but in overalls or California pants.¹ Their feminine acquaintances were not the dancehall girls, but much more likely to be bunch-quitting cows none too kindly disposed to their herders. They were not at all the pretty boys of the silver screen. They were, in fact, laborers in a hard field. Because of its freedom, it had considerable romantic appeal, but they did not live in the towns such as Hollywood depicts. Instead, they slept beneath the stars or the clouds, when they could get to it, and the rest of the time, they were dirty and sweaty and tired. The cow country was a law unto itself, and if I ever get the time and the energy simultaneously, I am going to write you a letter on “The Law of the Range.”²

The great day of the cow country reached its sundown with the homesteader influx. That was true everywhere, and no less true in South Dakota than it was in other places. No one has written the principle of the cow country into better or more inclusive language than the poet Badger Clark in his poem “The Passing of the Trail”:

There was a sunny, savage land

Beneath the eagle’s wings,

And there, across the thorns and sand,

Wild rovers rode as kings.

Is it a yarn from long ago

And far across the sea?

Could that land be the land we know?

Those roving riders we?

The trail’s a lane, the trail’s a lane.

How comes it, pard of mine?

Within a day it slipped away

And hardly left a sign.

Now history a tale has gained

To please the younger ears—

A race of kings that rose, and reigned,

And passed in fifty years!

Dream back beyond the cramping lanes

To glories that have been—

The camp smoke on the sunset plains,

The riders loping in:

Loose rein and rowelled heel to spare,

The wind our only guide,

For youth was in the saddle there

With half a world to ride.

The trail’s a lane, the trail’s a lane.

Dead is the branding fire.

The prairies wild are tame and mild,

All close-corralled with wire.

The sunburnt demigods who ranged

And laughed and lived so free

Have topped the last divide, or changed

To men like you and me.

Where, in the valley fields and fruits,

Now hums a lively street,

We milled a mob of fighting brutes

Among the grim mesquit.

It looks a far and fearful way—

The trail from Now to Then—

But time is telescoped today,

A hundred years in ten.

The trail’s a lane, the trail’s a lane.

Our brows are scarcely seamed,

But we may scan a mighty span

Methuselah ne’er dreamed.

Yes, pardner, we are dull and old,

With paltry hopes and fears,

Beside those rovers gay and bold

Far riding down the years!³

Queer Fellows

No end of queer individuals appeared on the range, and it is too bad that they should be forgotten simply because there is no one with a facile pen to record them. The incidents of Cy Hiett alone would make plenty reading without any embellishment of the facts. Indeed, to try to improve on some of Cy’s experiences would be a good deal like trying to paint the rainbow or the sunset.

I knew him well and we were and still are good friends. When sober, as he usually was, he was a hardworking, serious-minded cowboy, intensely loyal to his job and to his employer. When drunk, as he occasionally was, he was the very emblem of irresponsibility, engaging in escapades that would put to shame the best efforts of the romancers. For some years he was Scotty’s foreman. On occasions he would fall from grace, making a holy show of himself, and Scotty would fire him. By reason of a strange mental quirk by which Cy Hiett, sober, had no knowledge at all of what was done by Cy Hiett, drunk, the incident of being fired was completely obliterated from his mind with returning sobriety, and the first thing Scotty would know, Cy was back out in the country in charge of the outfit, doing more and better work than anybody, wholly oblivious of the fact that he had been fired.

There is a well-authenticated story on Cy, which happened at a time when I was not with the outfit. “The wagon,” which was the usual name applied to a cow outfit, was moving into Fort Pierre in the fall, with a beef shipment. When they reached Frozenman Creek, where a large dam had been built by the Northwestern Railway for the accommodation of shippers, at about the point where the road crossing at the town of Hayes now is, camp was made for the night. There was a post office and store called Hayes a couple of miles farther down the creek on the old Deadwood trail crossing. Will Hopkins ran the store, and it is of interest that he still has a store at Hayes.

The mood was on some of the boys, particularly on Cy, to indulge in alcoholics, but the only thing available was Hostetter’s bitters.⁴ Cy bought a considerable supply and promptly was tight on that insufferable beverage. As was customary with him on such occasions, he spent the night going back and forth from the bed of one cowpuncher to another, waking him up with whispered confidences of a great secret. Each one knew him, of course, and said that so and so wanted him to come over, and so he would go over to so and so’s bed, repeating the performance. There was one thing about Cy, he was always self-sustaining and wholly capable of taking care of himself, so much so that when he became intoxicated and thereby wholly useless for any work, everyone simply turned him loose to his own devices.

In the morning, the night-hawk brought in the saddle horses in the fog, which did not lift until after camp was broken. On going out to catch his horse in the rope corral, Cy caught a pony which he had not ridden for a long time because he was very likely to buck, and the sober, serious-minded, hard-working Cy Hiett had not cared to ride him, although he was a good rider when sober, and a splendid rider when drunk. Catching this wild pony and dragging him out to his saddle was something of a task, and no one offered to render any assistance. Almost under any other circumstances such help would have been forthcoming. Cy finally got his saddle on the pony and a bottle of bitters protruded from each saddle pocket. As the other fellows were going on with the serious business of work in hand, Cy got on his pony, which immediately started to buck; away he went into the fog, which closed behind him, and Cy was gone. No one paid attention, nor gave a thought to what might happen to him, knowing that his instinct would land him in the next camp.

The outfit moved on to Lance Creek Holes, and while the boys were eating dinner, preparing to go out and relieve the day herders, along came Cy, the fog having lifted in the meantime. Cy was still drunk, both bottles of bitters were gone, his pony was completely played out, and across the saddle in his lap was a grey wolf he had roped sometime during the forenoon. Cy, of course, not having any recollection of having seen a wolf, far less catching and killing it, could offer no explanation of where he had been or what had happened. It is a safe comment, however, that when Cy took out after that wolf and got his rope down on the wild animal that morning, up until he had him dead on the saddle, there transpired events that would look well in a movie screen but cannot be put there. That picture was wholly lost, even from Cy’s mental vision, and the only evidence on which one could build a story at all was on the fact of the dead wolf, the exhausted pony, and the drunken cowboy. It was law of the range to attempt to catch and kill grey wolf every time he appeared, regardless of what might happen to your horse, so Cy was automatically following the law of the range, the spirit of the hunt, and the instincts of a cowboy.

Old Alligator

Not all the horses on the range were gentle. They all had some streak of wildness, and occasionally one came along from which that streak could not be erased. Compared with the great number of saddle horses in the cow country, the number of “outlaws,” as the untamable horses were called, was small, but few as they were numerically, they were potent, and everybody knew them by name and number.

Prior to the fall of 1899, Scotty Philip; [M. (“Pat”)] Mullen, a banker, and [Charles] Stuebe, a merchant, from New Ulm, Minnesota, were all the stockholders of the Minnesota and Dakota Cattle Company (the 73 outfit). After a row with Mullen, Scotty sold out his interest in the company to Robert W. (“Bob”) Stewart (later Colonel Stewart of Standard Oil fame) and Captain Joe Binder, both of Pierre.⁵ All, or nearly all of the saddle horses supplying the 73 outfit were Scotty’s, so, when he withdrew to run an outfit of his own, he took his horses with him, which left the 73 practically afoot, and that was no way for a cow outfit to be.

Jack Borden of the 73 (Ruth Philip’s father) went over to Ross, Wyoming, and bought about one hundred twenty-five head of horses from the Oglala Cattle Company. They were a terrible bunch of horses, but among them were three, Alligator, Face and the third name has slipped my memory, worse than terrible, and Alligator was worst of all. Slim Taggart (“Slobbering Slim”) who was riding a wild string for the 73 was given all three of these horses. He could stay on them, but could not tame them, nor do any worthwhile work on them. Pat Mullen was out one time looking the outfit over and Slim was riding Alligator. His instruction to the foreman was, “Either fire that rider or kill that horse, or both.” Alligator was just a bad, wild horse that nobody wanted to ride, and that very few could ride.⁶

The 73 established a winter camp on Sansarc Creek, with a number of riders in the charge of Cy Hiett, to hold those Oglala horses and keep them from going back to Wyoming.⁷ Pete Ashley told me this story. Along in the spring some one brought a lot of whiskey out to this camp, and the boys began to celebrate. Cy, having a lonely streak that day, took a quart bottle full of whiskey and sat off to one side, drinking only from his own bottle. As the party progressed, the occasion grew merrier and such timid spirits as there were became emboldened. Pete Ashley for some time had been trying to get his courage up to the point of riding one of his horses that had not been ridden all winter, and the added encouragement of John Barleycorn got him up to the point where the riding of that horse looked easy. He said, “Cy, I think I’ll run in my D P sorrel and ride him.”⁸

Cy said, “No, you wait a while. Wait until I finish this quart, and we’ll have the horses run in. Then you can ride your D P sorrel and I will ride Alligator.” The sober Cy would not get on Alligator if the owners were to give him the whole outfit. Cy, drunk, was now looking for the chance to get on him. Shortly he announced, “Well, that’s finished. Somebody run in the horses.”

When the horses were run into the corral, Pete caught his D P sorrel and Cy roped Alligator. After plenty of struggle, the two horses were saddled, and Pete successfully gave his horse, which was merely an untrained horse that knew how to buck, the first ride of the season. Then Cy climbed aboard Alligator. The horses had not yet shed off the long hair of winter, and Pete’s account of the duel between the drunken Cy and the man-hating Alligator was nothing short of graphic. On horseback at anytime, Cy was capable, and with a “skinful” his equilibrium was uncanny. Alligator did all the things that had made him a terror to the souls of cowboys, but Cy’s spurs raked him from the neck to the hip bones, right and left, until, as Pete said, he threw so much of Alligator’s long hair into the air with his spurs that it seemed as though a feather pillow had been torn and thrown.

After Alligator’s bag of tricks had been exhausted, Cy fought him back to the corral and got off, no inconsiderable task in itself. By this time the blood of battle was commencing to ferment in Cy, and, when he got his saddle off the outlaw, he proudly announced that he could ride him bareback. Suiting the action to the word he was on, and the horse, seeming to feel that now he had all the best of it, repeated his efforts, which in return brought a repetition of his rider’s effort and with like result. Poor old Alligator, nearly skinned with the spurs that he could not dislodge, gave up the struggle for the day only. Then Cy “thumbed” him, which means running the thumbs hard up the neck of the horse, and which will nearly always make even a gentle range horse buck, but Alligator had enough for that session and refused to perform. Cy then thumbed him again, this time with such vigor that he sprained both thumbs, so the hunt for too much victory made the struggle end in something like a draw. In later days the sober Cy would look apprehensively at the storied horse he could not remember having ridden.

Rattlesnakes

From that memorable day when Eve in her guilelessness listened to the story that the “varmint” had to tell, and thereby became a sadder, but better-informed girl, poor humans have had great respect of a kind for hissing crawlers. None can say that in that original nudist colony the vocabulary of her who was to be the universal mother may not have been somewhat limited, and that she mistook the vibrating rattle of the pit viper for the dulcet tones she wanted to hear, tempting her to find out what she really wanted to know. Whatever the language, she seemed to understand, and to this day cursing men tread on the head of the snake as a reward for the inestimable benefits he conferred on mankind. Suppose he had kept still. There would have been neither wars nor stratosphere flights, nor even a federal constitution for men to wrangle about, for there would be no men. But he spoke, she listened, and, “Lafayette, we are here.”⁹

In nearly all the places where the genus homo should be content to make his home, we find the uncles and the cousins of the snake we know the best. They have explored and located everywhere worthwhile. It may be the stylish head of India’s hooded cobra. It may be Africa’s black mamba, that swift dark streak of poisonous terror, or his brother trimmed in green. The fer-de-lance or his equally deadly brother, the bush-master, may hold the tropical, western hemisphere stage. Some may know that mass of crushing muscle and elastic, which, in violation of the Law of Moses, is satisfied with just one pig for a meal. And how fitting it is that in all the length and breadth of our own United States there should locate the noisiest and most garrulous of them all, the pit viper, whose bony, buzzing extremity has made him to all man the rattlesnake.

He’s a sociable cuss, the rattlesnake. When that “race of kings that rose, and reigned, and passed in fifty years,” and who were still living on the earth up to 1904, the American cowboy, was in the heyday of royalty in an area “half a world” in western extent, the rattlesnake was often, indeed almost continually, condemned to eternal perdition and the damnation of his soul.¹⁰ A roomy place hell must be to afford even miserly accommodations to the generous consignments made to it in the course of a day, and even in a busy hour, by those roving riders. In those consignments the rattlesnakes were not forgotten.

Still his snakeship seemed to bear no particular grudge and, often in the most neighborly fashion, would establish himself in the bed or boots of the cowboy, whose friendship, even with those gentle advances, was hard to win, and, indeed, was usually denied entirely. Under the door step of a log hut could be heard his vocal tail humming its vibrant song, inviting the high heeled approach that always came, but never in friendship. Someone said he was poisonous, and the cowboy, whose mind ran to other things than science, just took it for granted. Some of them learned to know by bitter experience. If the unlearned, untutored, sunburned cowboy had been dropped into that Garden of long ago he would have chosen Eve and discarded the serpent, thereby proving to the world that he belonged in the class of vigorous and reckless courage.

Nothing long continued is without its measure of romance or of fable, and so it is with his snakeship of the plains, and, let there be no mistake about it, a snake there meant a reptile with a rattle on him. One of the strange friendships cultivated and brought to fruit on the plains is that between the marmot or prairie dog, the little prairie owl, and the rattlesnake. Neither is that friendship completely without its fable. In an earlier day the prairie-dog town might encompass an area as large as a section of civilized land, or maybe more. All over the area of the town could be seen these little land-locked squirrels, each timidly sitting or ranging close to his hole, with each tail nervously twitching as its owner gave his chirping bark. The little prairie owl, whose head has all the appearance of being fastened to his body with a universal joint, stands around on the little mounds, quietly and stupidly watching a visitor. A pleasantry among the cowboys was that the best way to kill a prairie owl was to ride around him and have him twist his head off. The third member of the partnership was the rattlesnake, who lazily sunned himself and disappeared down a prairie-dog hole when disturbed.

The prairie dog must be some distant relative of the squirrel (certainly more closely related to the woodchuck) that got caught in a treeless waste, just as did his roommate the owl. Maybe a geological breathing spell sent them as far below the grass roots as their climbing cousins got above in the branches. The rattlesnake, a ubiquitous American nuisance, missed neither his trees nor their fruits. He was at home in the homes of those who built them, a fearsome moocher whose appetite was regularly satisfied by the young of the prairie dog and the owl. Nature has no court to which an outraged partner can go to effect a dissolution of an oppressive partnership. So the rattlesnake stays on. The partnership was always agreeable to him.¹¹

In the winter time the rattlesnake “dens up,” or holes up. That means only that they assemble in considerable numbers in favored places and enter into their winter hibernation.¹² There they “ball up,” which they do by intertwining themselves into large balls, before they go into that torpor which keeps them from wandering around in the blizzards and getting lost. That is no suggestion that the blizzards are of common occurrence, for they are not, but that they do spread their destructive terror once in a while cannot be denied by the normally truthful enthusiast for South Dakota weather as easily as can the earthquakes by the dyed-in-the-wool Californian....

The Petrified Forest

It was the custom in the range country to keep a very few men on for winter men, and the rest of the cowpunchers were let go until work opened again in the spring. Then, if they were wanted, they would go back with the old outfit, and if they were not wanted they went to work for someone else. During the winter some of them tended bar, some loafed, some gambled, some rode “grub line,” and others roamed away. The winter men were usually those who could be counted on to give a fair account of themselves when the going was not so good, and the work harder, or at least more lonesome. Besides they had to be of the class that was willing to do anything that the circumstances called for in the way of work and not quit.

One fall Fred Jones and I were the only ones kept on as winter men, and about the first thing we had to do was to build a number of dams in the gumbo soil of the Missouri River brakes. Fred was about my size, but a bit slimmer. He was a tireless dynamo for work, and many a tired night I saw an example of the vigor of “Rawhide,” as some of the fellows called him. While we were in the pink of physical perfection so far as miles and hours of horseback riding mattered, we set a new list of muscles in motion when we were plowing and scraping in the terrible gumbo. The result was two aching bodies, and a couple of cranky young men who were in no mood to be kidded, either by the other. Being well acquainted by experience with the affect of such things, each maintained a respectful attitude to the other.

It never occurred to either of us to take it a bit easy until we got used to the work, for that was not the cowboy’s way of going about things. His work was done in a mad fury until it was done, or as long as it was light enough to see. Then when there was nothing to do he rested with lethargy supreme. Such was the condition of our minds and bodies one day as we quit our work at dark to go back to the little shack we called home where we cooked our meals, and slept on the hard, cold floor in a roundup bed. In the dark of the morning we had hitched our four horses to a wagon, which had a triple box on it, for no good reason at all, and a spring seat on top of that. By daylight we were hitched to our plow, and when we had enough plowed up to justify we unhitched the four horses from the plow, and each hooked to a scraper, or slip, with a team. That performance was repeated all day. When plowing we took turns holding the plow and driving the four horses.

On this particular day we happened to plow up a lot of petrified wood in the gumbo. When we quit and started home, both of us perched on the high spring seat, with Fred driving, he remarked, “Say, we sure ran into a lot of petrified wood today.”

I answered, “We sure did.” I then remembered having heard some fellow on the range tell about a petrified forest in Arizona and, in a moment of recklessness, asked, “Did you see in the last Sunday paper about the big petrified forest they have discovered down in Arizona?”

Although Fred should have known, and did know if he had only stopped to think, that I had not seen a Sunday paper, nor any other, for six months, he answered, “No.”

Although I knew better than to kid a tired and cranky man, I said, “Yes, they found one down there where the trees, sections in extent, are all petrified, solid stone.”

An interested, “Is that so?” from Fred gave impetus to my story.

There seemed to be no proper place to call the end, so I said, “Yes, sir, and all the branches are standing out, solid stone, just as they were when they were growing.” Encouraged by a profane comment of interest from Fred, I turned my imagination loose, and said, “Even the little twigs on the branches appeared just as they did when the wind blew them about, and the bark, now in stone, was perfect.” Greater interest, evidenced by more lurid language from Fred, called for more details of the great discovery, so I said, “Yes, that’s a fact, and even the leaves were on the branches and twigs looking just as they did when the sap was running in them, and you can see the veins in the leaves just as plain as the day when they were alive.”

I would like to have stopped about there in the interests of personal safety, but Fred’s ever increasing interest and strength of language was too encouraging. I said, “They even found a lot of petrified birds in the trees.”

Fred said, “Petrified birds?”

I said, “Yes, and every one of them was singing a petrified song.”

Quicker than it takes to tell, Fred’s adrenal glands, or whatever it takes to make men active and angry, pumped him full, he threw the lines into the bottom of the wagon, jumped off our high seat to the ground, and said, with no diminution in interest, “You Scotch ___ ___. Get down and I’ll kick ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ out of you.”

On the range you should smile when you called someone that, but Fred did not. Feeling too tired to get off and having no desire for any more exercise that day, I smiled for him, but did not accept his warm invitation. After extending his invitation in every variation of the only two languages he knew, English and profane, but no takers, Fred finally climbed back to the seat with threats of annihilation in the event of a repetition of any such nonsense. He lapsed into silence for the rest of the night.

Years passed, and I went to law school and got admitted to the bar. Fred became a bartender and finally owned his own saloon in Midland, one of the many towns brought to life by the building of railroad lines across the width of the cow country. The Democratic party in the county (old Stanley County, which is now Stanley, Haakon, and Jackson counties) was to hold its county convention at Midland. A lot of us went up from Fort Pierre on the afternoon train. On arriving at Midland, I suggested that we all go over to see my old friend, Fred Jones. Democrats being what they were in those days, we all went over to Fred’s. I happened to be the first one in the door, and by good luck Fred himself was on shift tending bar. As I said, “Hello, Fred,” he just looked in wonder at the Fort Pierre gang trooping into his place. Then he turned to me and brought up a subject that had never been mentioned except at the time of its original telling.

He said, “I am going to set ‘em up for the crowd, but not a word about those ___ ___ birds.” Fred set ‘em up, and then I told the story, after which business became greatly enlivened in Fred’s place.

A Trip to Mexico¹³

During the winter of 1906-1907 in that typical western cow town on the west bank of the Missouri River, Fort Pierre, no end of excitement was generated among the sporting fraternity. Bob Yokum, a former Texan who had been transplanted in South Dakota and who operated saloons in Pierre and Fort Pierre, seemed to be the motivating impulse. His nephew, Billie Harrell, also a Texan who worked for Bob, added to the ferment. Both of them were well acquainted with Tom Powers and Billie Amonett, who were the famous proprietors of the still more famous Coney Island saloon in El Paso, Texas. Also, they were still more acquainted with Felix Robert, himself a matador, who managed the bull ring at Juarez on the south side of the Rio Grande, across from El Paso. Some years before there had been enclosed on the Scotty Philip ranch up the Missouri River from Fort Pierre, under an unusually strong fence surrounding thousands of acres, a herd of native American buffalo. These buffalo, or bison, were about as nearly in their natural state as the presence of any kind of fence anywhere would permit one to imagine.¹⁴

As local pride always plays an important part in formulating local views, the people of Fort Pierre had come to believe that a self-sufficient buffalo bull could whip any animal that would care to match up with him. But local pride was not indigenous to Fort Pierre alone. It likewise flourished in Juarez, the city whose namesake was the full-blood Indian lawyer who was president of Mexico both before and after Maximilian’s unfortunate aspirations to royalty.¹⁵ Those southern neighbors could not believe that the fighting bulls, whose aggressive fierceness they saw exhibited in the bull ring at Juarez each succeeding Sunday, could be conquered by anything but the tinsel-bedecked man with the sword. It was a natural enough development of the argument as to the fighting merits of the native buffalo and the Mexican fighting bull in the frontier town of Fort Pierre, where “I’ll bet you” was then no idle phrase, that efforts should be made to end the discussion by a definite test that would decide the bets. Thus it came about that all the arrangements were decided upon to take two of the buffalo bulls from the Scotty Philip herd by rail to Juarez to test their fitness to survive against the bulls of Mexico’s choice.

Although the Mexicans may have been able to make their choice of animals for the contest, it was a vastly more difficult task for the northern cowboys to choose their champions. After herculean efforts, such as men of the open range alone know how to make, two buffalo bulls, one about eight years old and the other about four, were corralled, crated and hauled on sleds over the snow to Fort Pierre and then across the Missouri River on the ice to the stockyards at Pierre, which was then the railroad terminus for the cow country. There a box car was fortified and prepared to convey the heroes of Fort Pierre’s hopes to the chosen battleground in Mexico. And let not the fact that the box car was fortified and prepared for their captivity be too lightly considered, for the hind legs of a buffalo can teach tricks in kicking to an army mule that before then were beyond the frontiers of his dreams. The extra heavy planking on the interior, sides, and ends of the box cars was no idle gesture, as each end of the car was equipped to house a monarch of the plains, barred off with heavy planking in such fashion that the full width between the side doors was left free to furnish space for the baled hay, and equipment for watering to furnish food and drink for the buffaloes on the long railroad trek from South Dakota’s snows to Mexico’s sunshine.

And now arose the question as to what manner of men should accompany them. At first it was intended that the men to go were Scotty Philip, who had devoted much time, effort and money to save the bison from extinction; Bob Yokum whose efforts materialized the sporting event; and Eb Jones, a cowman then about forty, who had spent his entire life on the range, and whose activities in the cattle game had not always escaped question.¹⁶ Scotty, who was not devoid of the instincts of a race which invented golf and gave it to the rest of the world so that it would not attend to business, decided that his buffalo bulls were worth three hundred dollars each, and the venture was divided one half to Bob Yokum and one fourth each to Eb Jones and Scotty. As the time for departure arrived a serious blizzard broke, and Scotty decided that his extensive cattle interests demanded his presence at home. His nephew George, who had previously been a rider on the range but who had graduated from the law school of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor the preceding June and was then engaged in the more or less hazardous occupation of starting a law practice at Fort Pierre, was not so busy that he could not accept Scotty’s proposal to take his interest in the venture off his hands, so he became the third adventurer.

As the freight train pulled out of Pierre, South Dakota, on that day in January 1907 in one of those blizzards that are meteorological milestones in that state, the warmth of the stove in the caboose was shared by the trainmen with Bob Yokum, Eb Jones, and George Philip.... They thought no farther into the future than the Sunday just a week ahead as they contemplated the contest then to take place in the bullring at Juarez. As with the man who had gone to a distant city and there became unfortunately involved in a poker game, and who could not sleep any of the way home because of the unending monotony with which the car wheels and the rail joints clattered out their reminding song of “jacks and sixes, jacks and sixes,” so these men suffered the monotony of the present, tinctured and enlivened by the exciting hopes of next week.

At Sioux City, Iowa, the buffaloes were fed and watered in their well-planked private compartments while waiting for the train to Omaha. The lively curious came in numbers to see real buffaloes that weighed each a ton. They came, looking skeptical of the story which had brought them there, and as they turned to leave, each seemed to echo the sentiments of the intoxicated gentleman who looked long and earnestly at a beautiful salmon displayed on ice in the window of a sporting goods store and, as he turned away with drunken solemnity, muttered, “Well, the fellow who caught that fish is a damn liar.”

But the railroad trip was not all monotony. Nothing is. Bob Yokum decided at Sioux City that he should speed on to El Paso and Juarez, there to make the necessary arrangements for crossing the international boundary with buffaloes, and to do whatever else was required to make success easier. Never having been there before, his two companions did not until afterwards suspect that perhaps the hospitable splendor of the Coney Island saloon, and the splendid hospitality of Tom Powers and Billy Amonett, as compared with the rugged individualism of a freight caboose, may have played no small part in Bob’s decision. Be that as it may, Bob rode the cushions from there to El Paso.

With storms and Sioux City left behind, the next objective was Omaha, and on arrival in the railroad yards of that city at two o’clock in the morning, the two remaining buffalo attendants sought some rest at a hotel in the brief time between then and 6:30 in the morning, at which hour they were to leave Omaha on a Rock Island freight train. Perhaps to show them that clouds are not clouds clear through, when the train was all ready to leave, the buffalo car was not in the train, and could not be located. Fretting at the delay, and engaging in the national pastime of cursing the railroad octopus, they joined in the almost frantic search for the car, with the result that it was located on a sidetrack about ten miles out, where it had been left by another train crew which had discovered its mistake.

Joining up with the next freight train out, the car was picked up and made a part of the train. Having their buffaloes once more safely in hand served as a signal for rest, and down they laid on the none too downy cushions of a Rock Island caboose. After moving along for sometime and some miles, they were awakened by a trainman who said, “Say, would you fellers like to see the caboose you should have left Omaha in this morning? If you do, look out on the left side of the train when we get to the next curve!” Having nothing else that required much doing at that time, they followed the trainman’s instructions, and there in the right of way, smashed to kindling, lay the caboose, the victim of a rear-end collision. That made it a little easier to become philosophical over the delay.

The rail ribbon unwound its miles until arrival at McPherson, Kansas, then a place of much railroad and few people. A thirty-six hour delay, to this day unexplained, at that railroad crossing drove out most of their philosophy. A pool hall offered the only form of entertainment, but as neither of them had even a semblance of skill with the cue, the pool hall man reaped little profit, for it seemed that they could play for hours on a ten-cent game of rotation pool. Time moved on, but seemed to get nowhere. Trains passing through did not pick up the buffalo car. It should not be forgotten that Kansas was then away from the days of Wyatt Earp, Bob Masterson, and Wild Bill and was exhibiting another form of complex, which we may well enough call Carrienationitis, and that state was as dry as a dehydrated bugle blast. As time went on the younger of the amateur pool players more and more suspected that somewhere in that area of constitutional and statutory aridity there was beer. Prompted more by curiosity than by appetite (for Bob’s emporiums at Pierre and Fort Pierre had furnished all their grips with plenty of bottled in bond, which was still in the original packages), the suspicion developed into a search.¹⁷

“Seek and ye shall find,” is merely an older version of the maxim that “Equity aids the vigilant.” The younger man happened to be wearing at the time a watch charm in the form of a double-headed eagle, and the pool hall men mistook it for the emblem of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, then a very popular secret order among the sporting fraternity. Although neither belonged to the order of the other, a few mysterious passes were indulged, and the pool hall man became convinced that he and his visitor were tied together in an oath-bound brotherhood. He probably thinks so yet. When fraternity was definitely established to the satisfaction of the Kansan, and he had told in graphic detail about a state meeting of the order held at Lawrence the preceding Wednesday where potables were in quantity, the South Dakotan ventured a question as to whether the town of McPherson was as dry as the statutes which governed it. A mysterious look toward the elder man, who was still at the pool table more or less vainly trying to get the balls in the pockets, and a whispered, “Who is that other fellow?” seemed to establish a prima facie case that beer was obtainable. On being assured that, although he did not belong to the brotherhood, the older man was absolutely in accord with some of its principles and entitled to trust otherwise, an invitation was extended to follow him. A faithful and fruitful leader he turned out to be, for in that part of his domain where they came to rest were cases of beer stacked to the ceiling. Beer, real beer, in quantity and in Kansas. Once more philosophy reigned in the bosoms of the buffalo men.

But as all good things must come to an end, so this pleasant association was terminated by a train that came along and picked up the buffalo car. On and on they bumped to and through Liberal and into the flattest part of the earth’s surface toward Dalhart, Texas. Here occurred an adventure, born of ignorance and folly, that did not end disastrously. In that stretch, as elsewhere along the way, the presence of the buffaloes on the train excited no end of curiosity, and every stop produced its crop of visitors. As proof of the eternal fact that the world is none too large for those who genuinely seek to become acquainted, the conductor informed his two passengers that he had seen a very large herd of buffalo during a visit he had made to see his brother-in-law in South Dakota during the proceeding summer. Well, who was the brother-in-law? Walter Roush of Fort Pierre. Sure, everybody knew him, and thus were established the bonds of mutual acquaintanceship. This reminded the South Dakotans of what they had in their grips, and although the conductor refused to mingle sociability with professional service, the others did not seem so particular.

At a point where some switching was being done, while Eb lay asleep in the caboose, the younger man got out to stretch his legs. The engineer, whose great physical person fitted well with the size of the monstrous engine he was driving, motioned his fellow traveler and asked him if he had ever ridden on a locomotive. The negative answer seemed to provoke the further question whether he would like to do so. The enthusiastic affirmative showed that here was considered to be an end to, or at least a break in, the monotony, for as the darky porter said, “railroad ride across the plains can be most montonious.”

Before there was time to crawl up on the engine, the inviting host said, “It looks like you fellows are pretty stingy.”

“How’s that?”

“You’ve got some liquor back there. It looks like you’d give the engineer a nip.”

“Sure.”

Then came the hurried trip back to the caboose, and the return with a bottle of whiskey. There was a simultaneous pulling out of the train and the cork. That engineer seemed to have an excessive thirst and gave evidence of his belief that an individual quart was required to allay it. The spirits of the engineer went up as those in the bottle went down. He got his young friend over from the fireman’s side to sit with him, there to receive instructions on the mechanics and operation of a locomotive engine and to listen to vile songs sung to the accompaniment of the toot-toot-toot of the whistle.

This highly instructive and entertaining program was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the conductor running furiously forward on the top of the train, over the coal in the tender, and into the engine. An immediate and forceful argument occurred between the Goliath at the throttle and the David from the caboose. When David tried forcibly to take the throttle away from Goliath, he landed sitting in the coal. About this time South Dakota’s somewhat perturbed and conscience-stricken representative concluded that this must be a private discussion between the inner family members of the Rock Island, and he withdrew as a matter of courtesy and tact to the fireman’s side. Each time the conductor was knocked away from the throttle that enthusiastic engineer “gave her another notch” for the good of the service. A look through the fireman’s window gave the northerner an idea of what the fuss was all about, for there in the far distance, squarely between the rails, rose a stream of smoke, and that engineer seemed to be able to do everything with his engine except to stop it. Places intended as stops seemed to flit by in a fog, a real case of “that is a pretty little town, wasn’t it?”

The visitor in the fireman’s seat then looked back to see what, if any, emotions were being kindled along the train. There, on the lowest step of the engine, hung the fireman, ready to jump. Halfway back along the train hung a brakeman in an unusual state of expectancy, while on the lowest step of the caboose was the other brakeman, apparently feeling about the same. These visions of flight inspired no phenomenal enthusiasm in the mind of him who was taking his first ride on an engine. An engineer and conductor still fighting for the throttle of a runaway engine that now seemed as intoxicated as its master, a long heavy train behind with the crew ready to go, Eb asleep in the caboose, the guest on the engine imprisoned on a monstrous thing from which he could scarcely escape when in repose, and not at all when in motion, and the Golden State Limited in front, combined into a situation that caused him to close his eyes and wish himself back in South Dakota.

It was not a situation calculated to evoke any worthwhile enthusiasm at the moment. Fortunately the engineer on the Golden State Limited had had no such purveyors of immodest courage visit him, and his discretion put him and his train on a side track, not the first occasion of a train giving buffaloes the right of way. The yell of profane defiance from the engineer of the freight train as it swished past the crack passenger train in repose on the sidetrack foretold a visit to the carpet and perhaps back to the farm. But the taming influence of hunger came into play, and the strong man of the rails bowed before it and stopped at a town that had a restaurant to suit him. As the South Dakotan crawled down from his post of complexity, he was heard to mutter, “Well, thank God, I can tell I have had a ride on an engine.” To give away, to be generous, may be an admirable qualification, but it is not without its limits. Succeeding incidents were so insignificant in comparison with the engine ride (and there was but one such) that nothing more happened until they drifted into El Paso in the very early hours of Sunday.

As a fight had been scheduled and advertised for the afternoon of that day, reasonably prompt contact was made with Bob Yokum and Charley Burney, the El Paso superintendent of the Mexican Central Railroad. That contact established the fact that no arrangements had been made to get the buffalo car over the border, nor had authority been received from the customs officials, who seemed to swallow hard on the law of the case. That required a trip to the customs authorities where it was necessary strongly to assert and plausibly maintain that to take a pair of buffaloes over the line and then bring them back should mean little in the young life of a young officer of the customs. Whether the theory was sound, or whether the officer wanted to see the fight, has never been entirely clear. At any rate, such was the decision, and no appeal was taken, so it became final.

With the legal handicaps smoothed out, the remaining thing to be done was to arrange for the physical transportation of the car across the Rio Grande from El Paso to Juarez, from the United States into Mexico. In Juarez the first contact of consequence was with the yardmaster, but with such English as was at their command, and no Spanish at all, the men from the North could not make themselves understood. From man to man, up the ladder of officialdom, until the Lord High Commissioner, or whatever he is in Juarez, was reached. A handsome man, wonderfully groomed, he could neither understand nor speak English. An angry fist landed on his desk, and a demand followed for some one who could talk United States. The Spaniard’s eye lit up when he observed a ring, and with a smile he said, “Where do you belong to the Consistory, brother?”¹⁸

The answer came, “At Yankton, South Dakota, but what the Hell has that got to do with getting a couple of buffaloes across the line?”

He seemed to think it had something to do with it, and he introduced himself to the three South Dakotans. He pushed a desk bell, and the underling who answered was told to have Monte come in. Almost immediately Monte, the yardmaster, was in and seemed to have had an amazing education in English in the intervening few minutes. The introductions with Monte completed, he showed his South Dakota brother his Scottish rite ring from which he had lost the diamond that morning in the yards. A few hasty commiserations expressed, and Monte, with his new friends, mounted an engine, with a thoroughly sober engineer, scurried over to El Paso, and in almost nothing flat the buffalo car was spotted at the unloading chute to the bullring. Felix Robert and a host of toreadors of varying ranks were promptly on hand to inspect the new aspirants for butchery in the bullring.

Shortly succeeding the noonday meal came the crowd to the arena to witness a scene similar to that so graphically and forcefully described by Ernest Hemmingway twenty-five years later in his novel Death in the Afternoon [1932]. A motley crew was the audience that filed in through the amphitheater of that arena. Mexicans, from princedom to peonage, mingled with the residents from across the river and tourists galore, for that afternoon there were to be four regular bulls, and then a Mexican fighting bull was to compete for honors with a peace-loving buffalo. The South Dakotans and the manager of the bullring were to divide the gate receipts equally, half to the Mexicans and half to Gringos.

To the South Dakotans, except Bob Yokum, the business of bull fighting was something read about, but never before witnessed. A bloody, cruel sport it was considered to be. Nothing was known of the technique of the game, nor of the efforts that had been made through generations of participation in it by enthusiastic devotees to make it an equal contest, or nearly so, between man and beast. The rules are modeled on the habits of the bull, and haphazard or easy killing is not permitted. The man knows the rules and must not violate them, but there are no such restrictions on the bull. Although it may not be a sport suited to the Anglo-Saxon turn of mind, it presents a romantic and thrilling spectacle, from which brutality has been largely removed except in relation to the horses. The president of the bullfight, usually some high official honored for the day, occupies the presidential box with his guests. Then comes the parade in the bullring, with the matadors, the men who kill, leading, followed by their banderilleros and then their picadors in the order of seniority, all decked out in the tinseled trappings of the bullring, which looks gorgeous and romantic at a distance. After the parade is over and salutes are given to and acknowledged by the president, the cavalcade disperses to seemingly appointed places about the ring.

Then the first bull, chosen by lot, is admitted to the ring. After he enters the arched gateway leading from the corrals to the ring, his first experience is to have a small barbed dart, with a small bright flag, stuck into his withers. Being about in the same relation to the usual run of cattle that the wolf is to the dog, the fighting bull seems none too pleased over this initial affront to his dignity. The angered animal is skillfully led to conduct his offense against a picador, a bullfighter mounted on a crow-bait pony, his right leg, which is the one he must keep toward the bull, encased in armor, and armed with a long lance, called a pic. With the pic he is expected to withstand the charging attacks of the bull and keep him away from the horse. He rarely succeeds in doing so throughout, and quite usually the horse is fearfully gored and sometimes thrown, a jumbled mass of bull and horse and picador.

Then comes in the skilful work with the capes to get the bull away from the unhorsed picador, nearly always successful. When the rules relating to attacks on the picador have been complied with, the banderilleros come into play. They must first play the bull with the capes then place the banderillos, varicolored, gorgeously wrapped wooden shafts about three feet in length with heavily barbed points. They are placed two at a time in the withers, or shoulder tops, of the charging bull by the banderillero who stands squarely in front of him. It is no place for a timid, a cross-eyed, or a club-footed man. Three sets of banderillos are placed in the bull, and by this time he is mad enough to make the acquaintance of the matador, who takes charge at this stage.

After working the bull with the cape, and so close that it seems impossible to escape those dreadful horns, the matador places his bull and gets his sword. Then, with the muleta, a small triangular flag on a stick, he plays the bull into a required number of charges, after which, with the bull charging directly at him, and not otherwise, he delivers the thrust. If successful, the bull collapses in his tracks, instantly dead. Up to that moment he has had no right to hurt the bull, although the bull has had full opportunity to do any manner of harm within his power to his annoyers, and no one can justly question the enthusiasm with which he sets out to do that harm. If the bull is unsuccessful he is scientifically and almost painlessly killed. If the bull is successful, a picador, a banderillero, or a matador goes to the hospital or the morgue. Although the game is to kill the bull skillfully and strictly within the rules, it is anything but a onesided game. On the Sunday in question four bullfights were held, one closely following the other. The temperamental crowd would cheer for the bull or for the man, depending altogether on which seemed to be the winner at the moment. With varying fortunes, some minor injuries to men and serious ones to horses, those four bulls met death in the afternoon in the Juarez bullring.

About then the crowd began shouting its skepticism about the appearance of the northern contestant, when, lo, and behold, who should come in under the arched gateway from the corrals but the larger buffalo bull, the eight year old. The unusual applause evidenced the surprise at the unusual spectacle. Scarcely had he entered the ring when the men who brought him noticed that in his left hind leg the fetlock joint was dislocated, done perhaps when kicking in the boxcar. He walked out and stood peacefully about in the middle of the ring. Just about then a handsome, red Mexican fighting bull was ushered in through the gate. Full of whatever it is that makes things want to fight, he surveyed the bullring, and there saw the buffalo standing three-quartering away from him. It was plain that the buffalo, for no reason at all, incurred his immediate displeasure, and he made a charge calculated to annihilate this object of his wrath.

Something should here be made known that was then within the knowledge of the men who had handled both buffaloes and cattle but was not suspected by the Mexicans, or at least by the Mexican bulls. When a domestic or a fighting bull has occasion to pivot, he pivots on his powerful hind legs. When a bison, whose great weight is distributed over his front legs, is pivoting in fight, he does it on his front legs, swinging his lighter hindquarters away. As this bull charged the buffalo, which continued three-quartering away from him, it seemed certain to the Mexicans, and apparently to the bull, that in an instant the buffalo would be fearfully, if not fatally, gored in the flank. But the buffalo is fitted by nature for survival, and almost at the instant of contact, those hindquarters mysteriously swung away, and his frowsy head met that of the bull full on. As he backed away, it was plain that the bull was a skeptic and that he believed the first blow was a pure accident. His blood told him that he was one of Mexico’s choicest bulls. He backed away to the right distance and angle, about the same angle as before, and charged again. This assault was the same as before and with similar consequences, except that this time the buffalo put a little more steam into his punch and knocked his red majesty back on his haunches.

The courageous heart of the bull left him still unconvinced, and, after some little delay, he got himself in position to deliver the charge that would settle the fray. A third time he charged, and with still worse luck. Backing away he surveyed his enemy and seemed to regard him as a foe-man more than worthy of his steel. Admiration seemed to be written all over the face of the bull, and yet the will to conquer would not down. He had been the aggressor throughout, and the buffalo had waged only defensive war. Of course, in all justice it should be remembered that the buffalo had been suddenly transported from a cold to a warm climate, he was in entirely strange surroundings, he had ridden cooped up in one end of a boxcar for seven straight days, and he had a dislocated fetlock. If Jack Dempsey had been similarly handled before he went up against the wild bull of the Pampas, a different championship story might have been written.¹⁹ The bull decided to make one more try for glory, and he again maneuvered himself into position to gore that tantalizing flank. The charge was met this time by a greater show of buffalo force, and the bull went down under the impact. That seemed to terrorize him, and the poor creature actually tried to climb out of the ring.

Realizing that which his joint adventurers from the Northwest did not know, that an advertisement in Mexico was a contract with the public, Felix Robert requested the right to turn in another bull with the buffalo. This was immediately granted, and promptly another Mexican bull made his angry entrance through the gateway to the bullring from the pens. A quick look about and he seemed imbued with peeve against the shaggy monster standing strangely three-quartering away from him. His decision was quickly made to gore that flank, and with a confidence born of careful breeding, he proceeded without delay to execute his resolve. By some legerdemain which that bull likely never did understand, a monstrous, well-protected and well-armed head was suddenly substituted for the flank he had in mind. Three runs that bull made, and then, like his red companion of the first encounter, he sought refuge in flight. From then on no coaxing born of bullfighting skill could get him to charge man or beast.

Negotiations were quickly completed for the right to turn in a third fighting bull, and his experience was an exact duplicate of that of the second bull. Three panicky bulls were now careening around the ring with the bullfighters exercising all the wiles of their game to get them to put up some semblance of a fight, but to no avail. About then the buffalo seemed to lose all interest in the show and lay down in the ring with the idea of making himself comfortable. That seemed to arouse the enthusiasm of the crowd, and they lustily cheered the buffalo, which was now nonchalantly resting.

Felix Robert, still fearful of an adverse order from the president of the fight, came running up to his friends from Dakota, and said, “Now I know this isn’t very sporty, but the bulls have disappointed me, and I would like to have you agree that I may turn in one more.”

One of the northerners said, “Turn in all the damn bulls you wish, just so you give that buffalo room to turn around.”

The fourth bull was turned in, and he, with no lack of courage at the beginning, charged as did his predecessors, and did it three successive times. By this time, apparently in resentment at the interruption to his nap, the buffalo undertook to carry the fight to the now thoroughly frightened bulls, but his injured hind leg prevented the display of speed required, and he was unable to catch his opponents in the race, for such it now was. Soon the gate to the pens was opened, and almost magical was the disappearance of the bulls through it and to safety. Shortly the buffalo, too, betook himself to the recesses beyond the gate. So ended the first formal contest between bull and buffalo.

Then there was turned into the ring a bull with brass knobs fastened on the ends of his horns to prevent goring, and a small sack of money tied on his head with a string around the base of his horns. It seemed as though all the children south of the Rio Grande piled into that ring after the little sack of money. Many were tossed but none seemed badly injured, and eventually one small chap got caught on the horns, and before the bull had time to toss him, he had disengaged the sack. And the afternoon’s performance was over as the shadows of evening fell across the bullring and the crowd filed out.

A week’s stay was then required because on the next Sunday it was planned to have another affair, which was expected to net greater financial returns than the first. The proceeds from the first fight were enough to pay for the buffaloes and all the expenses of the trip, fortunately. El Paso, Texas, formerly famous for gun men of the John Wesley Hardin type,²⁰ was sufficiently interesting in itself to justify a week’s visit even if one were to discount the equally interesting Mexican city across the Rio Grande. Juarez, with its cock fights, its gambling halls, and other forms of stormy amusement correctly calculated to draw the money from the folks away from home, was not a place in which time was expected to hang too heavy. One of the places of interest was the jail of the city, built in the sixteenth century by the Spaniards, with its tremendous walls of solid stone masonry and its company of armed soldiers standing guard, and the observer would never be led to believe that a wooden pistol would be a sufficient vehicle of escape.

The hordes of bullfighters were a unique group of loafers six days in the week and active showmen on Sunday. Well-armed Mexican rurales, or mounted police, with their turnip-horned saddles, looking like men who would be greatly amused to see a bullet-riddled man fall, added a touch of romance to an already wholly romantic picture. Here and there, too, would be pointed out the American who could not go home. At least one of the northerners, perhaps in a spirit of caution, made a genuine, friendly acquaintance with United States Consul Edwards, who hailed from Lead, South Dakota, and who seemed especially pleased at the chance to see folks from home.²¹ Anyway, it is not always a poor idea to have friendly connections with those in authority.

On the El Paso side of the river were many unusual personages to be met, especially if one were not too unwilling to mingle with the guests at the Coney Island and Gem saloons. In the Coney Island, a place famed in the annals of the Southwest and operated by his two good friends Tom Powers and Billy Amonett, the famous Pat Garrett, then collector of the port of El Paso by appointment from Theodore Roosevelt, was not an infrequent visitor. Garrett, with his gunfighting friend Tobe Driskill and other cowboys on the rampage in Dodge City when it was the end of the trail [1878], had been cowed into submission and arrested before the cold gray eyes and effective pistol of Wyatt Earp. At a later time [1881], as a New Mexico sheriff, Garrett had also been the law’s instrument of death for the notorious Billy the Kid. In 1907, no one suspected that Pat Garrett would meet his death in the next calendar year at the point of an opposing pistol and that his funeral sermon should consist of Robert Ingersoll’s speech at the grave of his brother, read by his friend Tom Powers. Interesting places and people they were and no mistake.²²

But to pierce the veil of the future into the next calendar year seems to be little if any more difficult than to see clearly to next Sunday, and so it was in this instance. The first fight, as carried out according to schedule and advertisement, was to have four regular bullfights and then a fight between the buffalo and a bull. For the next Sunday the program was for four bullfights, and then the younger buffalo bull would be fought by the men in regular bullfighting procedure. A lot of badinage and bluffing was carried on as to the relative merits of bulls and man and buffaloes. El Cuco, who seemed to be the Babe Ruth of the Juarez bullring, was the man given the doubtful post of honor as matador, and his was the job to administer the fatal thrust to the buffalo bull. A highly popular man, a jovial companion, and a courageous fellow, he knew by heart everything that a bull could be expected to do in the ring, and it never occurred to him that a buffalo might not consider himself bound by the rules governing the ring conduct of mere bulls.

A bull charges straight, while a buffalo is likely to go into battle feinting and jabbing with those dangerous horns of his after the manner of a skillful boxer. While a bull pivots on his hind feet, the buffalo makes his swing on his front feet. A bull does not kick, while a buffalo seems to delight in damage done by those outstandingly capable hind feet. Moreover, the thin skin that protects the spinal cord and vital organs of the bull is not the character of the buffalo’s protection, which nature has designed for the survival of the buffalo. One should not be led into the thoughtless error that the hump on the buffalo is caused by curvature of the spine, for indeed his spine is just as straight as that of any bull, beef or fighting. The upper prongs of the vertebrae are elongated to about a foot at the height of the hump, filled in with muscle or steak, and hence the preference for that part of the animal by those who in earlier days used him for meat. Over that part of him nature has placed on the full-grown animal a tough hide about an inch or more in thickness. Over that thickness of skin is placed an almost impervious blanket of matted, curly, woolen hair, six inches or more through. Still more, the great height of the buffalo makes him a far better target for the heavy rifle of the expert hunter than for the slender sword of the matador.

All through the discussion of the probabilities of the next Sunday, El Cuco had all the coolness of complete confidence of a brave and skillful man. His confidence was communicated to his friend, Felix Robert, who in the warmth of discussion said, “I’ll bet you $500.00 Cuco kills your buffalo.”

Bob Yokum, who was a sport if he was anything, retorted, “Hell, I’ll give you a better bet than that. I’ll bet you $500.00 the buffalo kills Cuco.” So the bet was laid, but the mystery was never solved, nor the bet paid.

At last the long awaited Sunday came, and with it a paying crowd that filled the great arena to capacity to witness a bullfight presided over by the Governor of Chihuahua as president of the fight. Then came the fiasco. After the cavalcade had made its pretentious entrance, the salutes were given and acknowledged, the first bull was let into the arena, and what should he be but the beautiful, red fighting bull that had first fought the buffalo on the preceding Sunday. No amount of coaxing could get him to believe that his adversary of the week before was not somewhere in that ring. Without regard to men or horses, capes or pics, he persisted only in his search for the most accessible spot to climb the walls. Said to be one of the best specimens of the fighting bull ever exhibited in the Juarez bullring, he had left only the instinct and desire for escape. He was finally run back through the chute into the pens, and another bull was let in to take his place.

Then followed an experience said to have been unparalleled in the annals of the bullring. Three other bulls were successively let in, and each in his turn refused to fight and could not be prevailed upon to charge horse or cape. It must be remembered that the advertising had said four bullfights. At this point, Felix Robert, realizing that the fight was going flat, went running to the ringside seats of the three Dakotans and said, “I don’t know what I am going to do. My bulls won’t fight, and I never saw anything like this before.”

Not realizing the dire financial possibilities, one of the Dakotans said, “Don’t blame us if your bulls won’t fight.”

“But,” said Felix, “the President will call off the fight and make us return the money.”

That presented a more dismal prospect than some of the Dakotans could enjoy, and one said, “Well, what do you propose to do about it?”

“We’ll turn in the buffalo and see if he will fight,” said Felix.

The Dakotan answered, “Just have one of your men stick a sword or one of those pics in the buffalo, and by God, he’ll fight.”

Amid the hubbub of disgruntlement from the crowd, the younger buffalo was admitted to the ring, and he came in just looking for trouble. A few skillful and careful passes were made at him with the capes, and he seemed to discard all his passive good humor. At this time a tremendous uproar came from the crowd, and all eyes seemed glued on the president’s box. A blackboard with a lot of writing in chalk on it, none of which meant anything to the three northerners, hung in front of the box.

Felix Robert said, “They have called off the fight and ordered the money refunded. I’ll go and see what I can do.” He hurried to the president’s box, where he seemed to be discussing the matter with agitated eloquence, but to no avail.

Down in the ring was the courageous Cuco, with a banderillo in each hand, petitioning the president that if he would not let him fight the buffalo at least to let him plant the two banderillos in him. Much less privilege than that would please most folks acquainted with buffaloes. The president’s answer was that, unless Felix Robert would quit talking to him and Cuco get out of the ring, in addition to ordering the money refunded he would fine each of them five hundred dollars and suspend Cuco as a bullfighter. There a buffalo was spoiling for a fight, and Cuco aching to fight him. But the president was adamant, and the crowd filed out of the amphitheater, each receiving back his entrance money, aggregating thousands of dollars. It was a stormy, angry scene, and the mystery remains: could Cuco kill the buffalo, or would something permanent happen to Cuco?

Three disappointed Dakotans crossed the international bridge to receive the stimulating sympathy of their friends in the Coney Island. Early the next morning a deal was made with an El Paso butcher, or maybe it was made that night, to buy the two buffaloes at $200.00 each and hang them up in his shop as an advertising stunt. Over to Juarez went the four of them to get the buffaloes for the butcher and found Felix in a corner saloon in none too good humor. When they got to the little abode that Felix Robert used for his office, with several impressive appearing rurales strategically placed, the Dakotans heard the amazing news that Felix did not intend to give up the buffaloes. They were to be his from then on. The fact that Bob Yokum had been suspected of making eyes, or something, at the beautiful Mexican wife of a matador did not seem to lend any peaceful atmosphere to the negotiations, so he had to be completely eliminated from the discussion.

Expressed reluctance to the loss of their buffaloes seemed to make matters no better, and the two remaining negotiators were startled to hear Robert say, “Well, I lost $1500.00 in expenses on yesterday’s fight. I am going to sue you fellows for that amount, and I am going to put you in jail until I get ready to sue you.”

One look at the savage six shooters of the rurales lent conviction to his argument and made calm thinking a virtue. One could probably escape any evil effects of the six shooters by marching peacefully to that terrible fortress used there as a jail. But then, when would Felix Robert get ready to sue them? That was an impressive question in a country like Mexico, where time seemed of little moment, and where the Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus had no place. The only silver lining to the terrible cloud cast by the thought of that jail was the man from Lead, American Consul Edwards, who could be used if necessary. Acting on the Presbyterian belief that a soft answer turneth away wrath, the negotiators expressed no end of sympathy with the manager of the bullring at the loss sustained and the sorrow, to which all were party, caused by the refunding of the money. The deal proceeded to the final compromise of Robert taking his pick of the buffalo and the butcher taking the other. The older buffalo was selected by Robert, and the butcher, a good sport, agreed to take the younger one.

The rurales were then dismissed, the three Dakotans and the butcher returned to El Paso, and the two hundred dollars was paid, the transaction being finally closed in the hospitable grandeur of the Coney Island. A real homey place the Coney Island seemed on that occasion, after the distressing business surroundings of the morning. The experiences filed away in the storehouse of recollection and the goodbyes said to the friends in El Paso, the three men took transportation back to the snows and the blows of South Dakota, their bullfighting days over forever. Still they wondered who would have won that bet. Could Cuco kill the buffalo, or would the buffalo have killed Cuco?

After the first fight Eb Jones and his younger companion had visions of the sporting life, and they agreed to a rather ambitious program in which Bob Yokum refused to join because his business interests in Pierre and Fort Pierre demanded his return. The plan was that after the second fight, the results of which they did not doubt so far as the buffalo was concerned, they would take the two buffaloes to Chihuahua and fight them there against any and all comers, man or beast. After exhausting all the sporting and financial possibilities there they would go on to Mexico City, where [Porfirio] Diaz then held sway. When that city was conquered, they would take their buffaloes and go on to Madrid.

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley,” but plans must be made even if they fail of fruition.²³ Several years afterwards at one of the Gas Belt Expositions, an annual event formerly held in Pierre, one of the group met a lady who was quite thrilled over a visit she had made that day to see the Scotty Philip buffalo herd. She then told about being in El Paso and going to Juarez on two successive Sundays to see some fights in which buffaloes participated. When she learned that her listener was there too, she asked him if he knew what had become of the remaining buffalo. He admitted that he had lost all interest in the animal and did not know. She then told that several Sundays later, after his leg had fully mended, the big buffalo was advertised to fight a bull in Juarez. A specially constructed pen had been built of four-by-four timbers in the center of the bullring, with a chute leading to it from the pens. The buffalo was run into it, and a fighting bull followed. In the fight that ensued, there was neither escape nor flight, and the bull was fought and killed. A second bull and then a third shared the same fate. Then a fourth bull was run in, and when the buffalo killed him, he broke the pen shoving his slain opponents through the side. According to her story there was no refunding of the money that day.

She was then asked what eventually became of the buffalo, and she answered, “I don’t know, but the story I heard is that they took him to Chihuahua and fought him there against the bulls. Then they took him to Mexico City and fought bulls with him there, and the last I heard of him it was said he was in Madrid.”

Maybe the lady had the story straight. Who knows? But still the question, forever unanswered, is: Could Cuco kill the buffalo, or would the buffalo have killed Cuco?

Frontier Medicine

The first winter I was in South Dakota a persistent cough made me wonder what was the matter, until a little self-inspection disclosed an unusually long uvula, which hung into the throat, causing a constant tickle. Having no acquaintance with doctors prior to that time, and supposing that they were all somewhere near even in knowledge and skill, I went in to see old Doc Dickey, who kept no office but could usually be found back of the prescription case in Jim McGarry’s drugstore. There I found him looking unsanitary as usual. Telling him my desires for surgery, he made me sit in a rickety old kitchen chair, with my head thrown backward, mouth open and uvula exposed to view. Scotty happened in at that time and made remarks about my choice of physicians that shocked me but did not appear to disturb Doc in the least. Scotty’s suggestion that I go to Pierre and see Dr. Ruble, who knew something about medicine, which Dickey did not, was not enough to divert a youngster who was still timid in the presence of professional men.²⁴ So, Scotty went out.

Doc reached over the prescription case and got an old pair of scissors and a whetstone. Spitting on the stone and sharpening his scissors, Doc proceeded to visit with me, spitting and sharpening, spitting and sharpening, while I made an effort to conceal my terror. Finally getting the scissors sharpened to suit him, he wiped them off on the leg of his pants, which lost nothing in appearance in consequence. Then he said, “Put your head back and open your mouth.”

Dismayed and afraid, but without the courage to break away, I obeyed. Doc reached the scissors back into my throat and made the initial swipe at the offending uvula, with the result that it was cut halfway through, and said, “Huh, we didn’t get it that time.” He certainly drew first blood in no uncertain style. His command, “Well, open her up again,” put my head back over the chair, jaws wide apart. He inserted the scissors again and took another swipe with like result, more blood and discomfort for me. Doc said, “Open up.” I opened up, and Doc went half through the uvula again. That seemed almost too much, so Doc said, “We’ll fix it next time,” and he produced a pair of pincers with which he reached into the bloody recesses of the throat, took hold of the lower end of the uvula, pulled it forward over the tongue, reached in with his scissors and this time cut it off above all the other wounds. Doc said, “All right that is a dollar.”

He was paid and the patient left for home, spitting a bloody trail along the way. When I arrived at home, my cousin Clara inquired the reason for the very apparent situation. With a kindness habitual to her, she immediately set about to make some hot tea.²⁵ The first swallow of that steaming hot tea was almost as terrible in its torture as the wayward scissors of Doc Dickey. Prompt recovery bore testimony to healthy youth and discounted the need of ether and Listerine. Such was surgery in the good old days as practiced by some. The operations may not have been successful, but the patients got well.

Another visit to Doc Dickey occurred one summer when we were holding a herd of bulls and cows on Plum Creek (Bad River Plum). Most of the time we were down the creek from the old Deadwood trail, and later we moved up the creek above the trail crossing.²⁶ Plum Creek is the last creek one crosses going north from Midland just before turning east to go to Hayes. The present bridge is exactly at the Deadwood trail crossing. Although the country looks, and is, different now, the place on the face of the earth about which I am talking is right there, where it was my bad luck in getting a cow out of a plum patch, which was a job not always calculated to give peace to one’s soul, to run a plum thorn between the bones in my forearm. Cowboy surgery, which consisted of digging around with a pocketknife, did not prove successful in extracting the offending thorn. Days added to days passed, and the arm got sore and sorer, until finally it was swelled up, painful and useless from blood poisoning.

Billie Hess, who was boss at the time, told me to go to Fort Pierre and see a doctor. That was at the noonday meal, and it was fifty miles to town. I don’t remember who all were there, but Hugh Burgess, Harry Read and Posey were.²⁷ My going to town provoked discussion of the best means of transportation because there were all kinds of horses. It was finally decided that I should ride old Tamarack, a blaze-faced bay horse that was not in my string. Tamarack was an especially tough and long-winded horse, but when he had a few days’ rest it was a feat of combined contortionism, hypnotism, agility and legerdemain to get on the old devil. He was the hardest horse to mount that I ever saw, but once you were on him it was a marvel to watch him unwind the miles. After dinner I caught Tamarack and put my saddle on him, the first time he had been saddled in several weeks. All hands turned to and held him while I got on him with that quite helpless arm. It never entered the mind of anyone to question that Tamarack was the right horse to carry a man with a blood-poisoned arm to town, and he was. Consideration in those times meant doing the practical thing.

About sunset that evening Tamarack and I galloped into Fort Pierre, and it is no exaggeration to say that by that time anyone could have mounted Tamarack forward or backward. As soon as I got him in Dave Crippen’s livery barn (it was always first in order to take care of the horse), I went directly to Jim McGarry’s drugstore, and Doc Dickey was there, standing back of the showcase. As soon as he was told of the situation, he said, “Roll up your sleeve and let me see it.” As soon as this was done he grabbed an antiquated lance, and, without even the formality of cleaning it on his pants, he plunged it into my forearm as I stood with my elbow on the showcase and arm upraised. He stood behind and I in front of the showcase.

Having difficulty locating the thorn, in spite of a lance that carelessly roved through the muscular construction of my arm, Doc noticed that I finally began to wilt. He said, “Sit down on that chair,” and I had just about enough strength to obey. Doc got a big swig of brandy, which he poured into me with reviving effect. Then he told me to resume my position on the operating showcase, retrieved his lance, and after further devastating exploration, he got the thorn. I paid him the demanded dollar, without even the formality of wrapping my arm, and I left cured, but wondering if surgery could not be made over into a more gentle art.

Comedy or Tragedy?

Pollyvoo, a Parisian, whose real name was Paul Clogenson, found his way to the range country and became a very competent cowhand. He worked for Doug Carlin and for some of the Duprees on the Cheyenne River. The Duprees were owners of the buffalo that ranged that part of the open range at the turn of the century, and which Scotty bought from Doug Carlin, the administrator of the estate of his brother-in-law, Pete Dupree.²⁸ Pollyvoo went to work for Scotty about the time of that purchase. Claiming special knowledge of the buffalo, and I believe he had it, he was given the job of looking after them in the winter. He had a saddle horse named Flaxy, and between them they seemed to know just what to do with the buffaloes. He had a good barn and corral for Flaxy and a cold, board shack for himself, the same one occupied by Fred Jones and me when we heard the petrified song.

Pollyvoo’s main weakness seemed to be an obsession that everybody wanted his job, when in fact its lonesomeness made it unattractive to most. On one occasion when I was loafing around Fort Pierre, Scotty asked me to go out and help the Frenchman butcher a cow. I rode out and told Frenchy my mission, so we ran in the cow that was to be butchered on that cold winter day. When we got this Texas cow in the corral, she was as wild as the joker and the one-eyed jacks in what passes today in the high society as poker. We went to the house to get the butcher knives and the 30-30 rifle and returned to the corral for the butchering.

Conceded to be the better rifle shot, I took the rifle to shoot the cow, which was standing in the center of the corral, tossing her head, and showing every willingness to sheath one of those long horns in anybody, no favorites. Taking a bead on that tossing head, I fired, and down went the cow. Pollyvoo, who had been sitting on top of the corral waiting for just that, was almost immediately sticking the knife in the cow’s throat to bleed her. At the first stab of that knife, a highly incensed cow was on her feet declaring war on the French, and Pollyvoo beat a rapid and strategic retreat to the corral fence with those horns about close enough to pick his hip pockets. The lack of dignity produced loud and hearty merriment from me. All that made Pollyvoo as much out of patience as the cow. His obsession immediately took control, and with angry oaths, he declared that I shot the cow high on purpose and just stunned her, to allow him to get killed so as to get his job.

The realization of this awful purpose so angered him that he promised to let my guts out on the snow, and he started for me with the butcher knife. Thinking that my intestines where they were better suited my purposes, I raised the rifle and told him in effect that I would postpone the shooting of the cow until after he was effectively shot. About fifteen feet apart we stood, he with the butcher knife in his hand and I with the rifle pointing at him. In that position we argued our respective points of view, and the 30-30 and I finally convinced the Frenchman that the shot was really meant to kill the cow, but the tossing head allowed the bullet to go a couple of inches too high.

We decided to butcher the cow instead of each other, and the next shot fixed matters so that the Frenchman could bleed the cow without any protest from her. By the time we had her skinned and cut up, we were good friends again, and Pollyvoo was told with convincing definiteness that I would rather herd sheep than hold his job. The whole incident was a bit tough on the cow, but there were no other casualties.

On November 1st, 1903, I turned in my string of horses and quit the range. That was caused very largely by the range quitting as such and becoming peopled with all kinds of human beings, who were determined to make it a farming country and own their own farms.²⁹ What a dream that was, and what a nightmare it became for so many of the dreamers....

Affectionately,

Dad

CHAPTER 2

A Few Days on the Range

August 24, 1939

My dear Geordie, Jean, and Bob:

If you will take a map of western South Dakota, you can see where the acts set forth below occurred, and, inasmuch as the facts are set down as accurately as memory serves, it may be of interest to know where they transpired.

In the summer of 1901, all of western South Dakota was still “a sunny savage land/Beneath the eagle’s wings,” where hundreds of thousands of cattle and horses roamed the open range and fattened on the free grass of the public domain. The free and easy days (speaking in an economic sense) were not yet ended by the filing of homestead entries on Uncle Sam’s land acquired in many ways, all somewhat dishonest, from the Sioux Indians. In those days a cattle outfit established its headquarters where it pleased and let its cattle roam where they would, knowing that alert cowboys with the roundup outfits would look after them and see that they were turned toward their own range....

In that summer the L-7 outfit, which paid me on the union basis of the day, $40.00 a month and one hundred sixty-eight hours a week if need be, established its headquarters under some sort of arrangement with the authorities of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation on Thunder Butte Creek, which runs into the Moreau River from the north, and not far east of what was then the west line of that reservation.¹ Outside men, “reps” as they were called in cow country jargon, were the riders who represented their own outfit while riding with other roundup wagons. Often times they did not see their own outfit for long stretches at a time, and when they did get back to the home wagon, they might well expect to be sent soon to another roundup operating somewhere on the range. Although I knew that the outfit was headquartered on Thunder Butte Creek, and that any cattle picked up by me had to be “thrown” or “shoved” towards that place on the face of God’s green earth, I had never been in the Thunder Butte area and had never seen Thunder Butte.

Now what is Thunder Butte? Without attempting any explanation of the geologic forces that laid it down, that caused it to emerge from the waters, and caused its erosion to the shape it bears in our age, suffice it to say that to the east of the creek that bears its name, about thirty-five miles northwest of the present town of Dupree, the county seat of Ziebach County, on the divide between the Moreau and Grand rivers, it presents a noteworthy landmark. It is a great cone rising from the open prairie with its upper part off, presenting a flat rock top. To say it is sheared off is an inaccuracy because the flat top presents the surface rock that saved that part, as the rest of the countryside eroded over the ages, and sent its silts down the rivers to form other Thunder Buttes that will some day arise out of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The top, as a rough estimate based on recollection over the years, is perhaps about one hundred fifty feet across. At the base, where it begins to rise from the surrounding prairie, it is about a mile in circumference. Rising as a fairly sharp cone, it is grass covered for about half its height, and there gets rocky and steeper. The higher one ascends, the rougher are the rocks. The east side then presented the best climbing possibilities, and as one reached a point eighteen feet or so from the top, he was confronted with a rimrock, roughly perpendicular, except that at the extreme southeast corner there was what unbridled imagination might call a path over and through the rocks. The south side of the butte was rocky and steep for practically its entire height, and from a point immediately south of what by courtesy was called a path, extended a V-shaped gully for a long way down the butte. In brief such was Thunder Butte.

Among the boys on the range there were many stories of experiences on the butte, as well as traditions borrowed from the Sioux. The main story of the butte was that of being trapped on top by the rattlesnakes and having to stay there until the dark and cold of the night, when the imprisoned cowboy could make his way back to the pony that he left early in the day about a third or half of the way up the butte. And let it not be forgotten that a well-trained cow pony would stand there for a long time. Many like myself regarded those stories with a degree of unbelief that would do credit to the school of Tam O’Shanter.²

Until well along toward the latter part of September, it was my job from early spring to rep with outfits that worked on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, along White River, on the Lower Brule reservation, and the Bad River country. Reaching the end with a roundup outfit that quit working north of the White Clay Buttes, at a point between where the towns of Murdo and Van Metre now stand, I was left with quite a bunch of cattle (a throw back) to be taken to the Thunder Butte country, a hundred miles away. There was nothing but disinclination to prevent it because there were no fences nor other obstacles, natural or artificial, and the cowboy did not dare encourage in himself disinclination to travel long distances across country. So, with a considerable herd of cattle and my string of horses, about ten in number, one of them packed with my bed and all other belongings, I took a beeline for Thunder Butte, a little to the left of the North Star.

A couple of days later, off in the distance to the east of me, and early in the day, was a rider who appeared to be trailing some cattle and horses northward. A sharp gallop over to him quickly disclosed that it was Jimmie Harrell, who was working for the same outfit and was headed for the same place. It did not take long to get Jimmie’s throw back in with mine, and that meant company and cooperation for both of us. The lone prairie can get lonesome enough at times. Later on in the day Jimmie and I spied a rider away to the west of us as we were coming into the Minneconjou water shed. He seemed to be driving cattle and a string of horses northward. Such things were the subjects of careful notice on the range, so, after an exchange of ideas with Jimmie, I galloped over to investigate. Well, it was Hughie Burgess,³ another rider for the same outfit, who like Jimmie and myself, had been repping with an outfit on the southern portion of the range and was now throwing back what cattle he had gathered to Thunder Butte. It took small time to get Hughie’s stuff in with ours. Our lonesomeness was gone and our work was easier.

It is seldom that the cowboy is pictured at his work. Sweaty, dirty, tired, often sleepy, and sometimes frightened young men, who worked dreadfully long hours at times and in every sort of weather, are so often pictured as over-dressed, over-manicured, over-armed and underworked Romeos that one is forced to wonder who on earth hired those and for what class of work. But we three made our way across the prairie as fast as careful treatment of cattle, from which it was intended that their owner would make money, would permit. Eating where and when we could, and going without when we could not, we reached and crossed the Cheyenne River and in due time came to the Bear Creek ranch, home of Joe Langlois, about a mile or so east of where the town of Dupree is today. Jimmie Harrell was one of old Joe’s four sons-in-laws. The others were Eb Jones, Quill Ewing, and Babe LaPlante. With Langlois’s hospitality, typical of the frontier, we were all made welcome at Joe’s home, and with a good supper after dark and a good breakfast before daylight, we were off on the last leg of the trip. That was the last time I saw old Joe Langlois, for he died soon after.⁴

By shoving the cattle along all day, ...we reached the Moreau River after dark and found it in flood, running bank full. That was not considered a deterrent to crossing in those days, so the cattle were herded into the flood, went over, and were turned loose. Then the saddle horses, three of them packed, for each of us had a packhorse, were put in, and then the three riders followed and swam their horses across. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the Moreau in flood is a miserable river to cross. Of course, no one of them is easy.

Safely across the river and the saddle horses rounded up, there was nothing to do but to hit for the ranch headquarters, which consisted of a log house and a round pole corral. Men and packs were dripping muddy Moreau water when we rode up in front of the log hut and unsaddled and unpacked. Jimmie and Hugh had put in a good share of the summer at the ranch, and they knew the way, so no time was lost, and we got there along about midnight and found Billy Hess, the foreman, Happy Jack, Posey, and Slim Sargent asleep in their roundup beds on the floor.⁵ A light, a fire, a meal ended the trip. It is not set down here as anything unusual but to show the usual thing in the life of the young man on the range, particularly after he got to be a rep.

The Texas Itch

Let those who never had disturbing occasion to obey its commands make light badinage or slighting remarks about the Texas itch.⁶ “He jests at scars who never felt a wound.”⁷ That very spring large shipments of southern cattle to Fort Pierre brought also some Texas men to work on the range. Although Texas was the original and the greatest cow country from the end of the war between the states until the state was put up in barbed wire packages, it had ceased to be open range, and the boys who came up from there were fence-line riders, windmill tenders, cotton pickers, and the like. South Dakota, the last of the free range, looked good to them, and they came. Some of them, or at least one of them, that spring was afflicted with Texas itch. Most of the fellows, including your humble servant, got it early and kept it late. In the struggle to avoid getting it, only a few of the cowpunchers were successful.

What about this itch? It was bad. When the victim was cold or wet, it was inactive, but let him begin to warm up, and then, whether up or in bed, afoot or on horseback, there was a single urge and that was to get off to one side, take down his pants and drawers (union suits were not worn on the range) and go to work, scratching until the blood came. Then he could go back to work.

We had not been together long until we learned that each of us had acquired the curse of the range country that summer, the Texas itch. Why it should be called by that name I never knew, unless it was that every other place had made a timely denial of paternity and Texas was guilty of laches.⁸ Be that as it may, Hugh, Jimmie and I were then members of that great fraternity, The Mystic Knights of the Scratch. It so happened that Billy Hess, Posey, Happy Jack, and Slim Sargent had managed to steer clear of it.

A few days before Jimmie and I had joined forces on the prairie, as told above, he had been in Fort Pierre, and Dr. C. J. Lavery gave him a prescription for itch medicine, and he had it filled in a can that held nearly a quart.⁹ Hugh and I on the trip begged and coaxed and cursed to get some of the itch medicine, which Jimmie was using on himself to good purpose, but Jimmie, who would have shared his last dollar or his last crust with either of us, was adamant in his determination that his itch medicine should salve no other person than his own. Moreover, he kept it packed in his bedroll, and that was the cowboy’s castle, where neither search nor seizure, just or unjust, was permitted. But more of that later.

The four fellows at the ranch knew that Hugh and Jimmie had the itch, so they were told in no uncertain way that, “You can sleep in your wet bed or stand up in the corner, just as you damn please.” Slim Sargent looked down from his six feet three and told me that if I did not have the itch I could sleep with him. Cold and wet, no man was freer from the itch than I at the moment, and Slim was so assured. Accordingly I took off all but my wet undershirt and drawers and rolled in alongside Slim.

With a warm meal in me, and the warmth from Slim’s body warming me from the outside in, it was not long until my vigorous young body got warm, but returning warmth brought with it the distressing necessity for a finger nail massage on my itching lower extremities. Standing out against the urge until all the resolution in my soul was worn away, I broke the news by saying, “Slim, it’s no use. I must get up and scratch.” Suiting the action to the word, I stood up on the dirt floor, dropped my drawers and went to work. Slim got up too, and in militant mood. There was only one window in the hut, but through it a beautiful peaceful moonlight shone down on Slim and me as I was bent over scratching, while Slim towered over me with fists clenched, inviting me to engage in fisticuffs in combinations of language that it is shameful for any one to know.

If he had ever had the Texas itch, he would have known that no man could have been coaxed from his scratching to engage in a mere affair of honor. When Slim realized that his gentle invitations were spurned, he went back to bed, leaving me to my purposeful operations. After my itch was curry-combed to a fair degree of subsidence to the accompaniment of Slim’s expositions of my family tree, he said, “___ ___ ___ ___ ___. You have done it now anyway, so you might just as well sleep here the rest of the night.” I did so and was glad afterwards to know that some miracle saved Slim from the itch.

Rattlesnakes on the Butte

The next morning, after spreading beds and contents on the bushes and the grass to dry, I tried to get some information from the boys who had been there all summer as to whether there was any truth in the stories that had been circulated among the cowpunchers about the assembly of rattlesnakes on Thunder Butte. With one accord they assured me that the stories were nonsense. They had been up on the butte many times, but not lately. In fact any time they had lost any of the saddle or work horses they would go up on the butte, from the top of which they could see the bottom of every draw for fifteen miles around, and thus spot every bunch of horses in that part of the country. They were sure there were not as many snakes in the country surrounding Thunder Butte as there were down on the Big and Little Prairie Dog Creeks, north of Midland. They were telling the gospel truth, but a status is not permanent.

This day was a Sunday, which made no difference on the range. It happened, however, that there was nothing to do, and the cowboys could do nothing just as diligently as they could do any part of their strenuous work. No amount of persuasion could get Hugh or Jimmie to go on to the butte. It could go places, one in particular, and I could go with it, but they were going to rest. Billy Hess, Slim Sargent and Happy Jack all agreed to go, so a picketed horse was saddled and someone ran in a bunch of saddle horses. Each of us caught a horse, saddled, mounted, and rode up to the east side of Thunder Butte, only a few miles away. Riding up the east side of the butte as far as the footing was good for the barefooted (unshod) horses, we dismounted and left our bridle reins hanging on the ground, the sign to the well-trained cowpony that he is to stay there until his rider returns.

As we got off our horses Happy Jack said to me, “I’ll bet you a box of cigars that you can’t go to the top without stopping to rest.”

“I’ll bet you” was a common, but not an idle, phrase. The bet was accepted and my ascent began. There was nothing difficult about climbing the butte provided it was not done with exhausting enthusiasm. The way grew rockier near the top, and for the last thirty or forty feet, it was all rocks that had fallen at one time or another from the rimrock crown. Following what a generous imagination would call a path at the southeast edge of the rimrock, it was no trick at all to climb the butte and to do it without a rest. On reaching the top I looked down to see how the other fellows were coming along. A little more than half way up the butte, they were lashing away with their quirts at rattlesnakes, which apparently were out investigating. I had seen no signs of snakes and had accepted the assurance of the other fellows that there were none on Thunder Butte. We did not then know that in the fall the snakes from far and near denned in on that secluded eminence. It was then about 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning of the last day in September, a sunny day, and about time for the snakes to sun themselves.”¹⁰

Perhaps in order to appear facetious and matter-of-fact about it, I yelled out to the others, “Come on up. There are no snakes here.”

“Brr-Brr-Brr-Brr.”

Here and there on the top the sound called my attention to about a dozen snakes up sunning, but before I could get at any of them with the quirt slung on my wrist, they dropped into the wide cracks that seamed the cap rock. On looking down into those cracks, it is no exaggeration to say that the butte itself seemed to be weaving back and forth. Soon it dawned on my sluggish consciousness that the stories of the snakes were true, and that another cowpuncher was marooned on top of Thunder Butte. If alone, it meant staying there until the cool and the dark of the night made descent possible. Any part of the descent could have been made with care, except over the alleged path over the fifteen or eighteen feet of rimrock, but there a fellow would have had little chance to protect himself. Then it became a problem for the three men down on the side of the butte to furnish a way down for the fellow who had been shortsighted enough to get on top.

At one place on the east side there was a hole back in the rimrock with some rosebushes at its outer edge or mouth, and on these bushes were resting about half a dozen of the graceful blue racer snakes, prairie cousins to the black snake. Out beyond the bushes, and about in line with the rimrock, was a small grassy plot, maybe seven feet across, and free from rocks. Rendering lip service to the fellows who were killing snakes as they came slowly up the slope, I could see the advantage of the little level grassy plot, but there were snakes making their way back and forth across it. After what seemed a long time, but was in fact quick work, the three men reached the grassy plot, cleared it of snakes, and extended profane invitations to the man on top to jump, which he did, landing safely.

Billy Hess and Slim Sargent, being old enough to have sense, although in the fall of the year all cowboys denied that any of them had any sense at all, went back to their horses, killing such snakes on the way back as presented, for the man on the range always was willing to go to quite a bit of trouble to kill a rattlesnake. It may be that they knew that nature never intended man to play a good hand, because she never deals one, but nature does intend that a poor hand should be played well, and they calculated that their poor hand had been played well enough in that experience, and they were retiring without casualties. However, Jack and I worked our way over to the south side and sent large, flat, circular stones hurtling down its steep side, where untold numbers of snakes were out taking a lazy look at the noon-day sun, for it was now about that time. Soon tiring of the fun of seeing snakes and pieces of snakes hurled into the air, and also of the vile imprecations hurled at our heads by our two friends now safely seated on their horses, we worked our way down to them and mounted our own ponies. Instead of going back the way we came, we went around the north side and down the west side of the base and on to camp, encircling the butte. On the way around we got off and killed snake after snake headed toward the butte.

Happy Jack and Billie Hess complained bitterly of the odor (the snake smell) up on the butte. Slim insisted he never noticed it, and I am certain I did not. Many claim to be able to detect the smell and can give convincing proof that they do, while others cannot.¹¹ Before we got to camp, Billie Hess and Slim became nauseated and threw up pitifully from off their horses. About the time we got to camp and started to get a bite of dinner, Happy Jack and I, too, were sick, so preparation of food for us was suspended.

It is my candid belief, in retrospect, that if a blanket of some modern deadly gas, fatal to reptiles, could have been laid down on Thunder Butte that day, a host of rattling pit viper descendants of Eve’s counselor would have been gathered in, to the benefit of a large surrounding territory. How many that would be is problematical, but from the way they were balled up and huddled together on that large and lonely rendezvous that day, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand would not be out of reason in my opinion. I have many times stated without any thought of exaggeration that a quarter of a million snakes were on that butte that day.

A few years ago, when Col. W. R. Pope was commanding officer at Fort Meade, near Sturgis, we, with Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Hill and Mrs. Eva Wortman, were invited to dinner at their home at the fort. While there the colonel told of his earlier days as a lieutenant, when he was sent to western South Dakota to assemble the Ute Indians, who had left their western reservation and come in a body to settle with the Sioux.¹² After quite a discussion he got around to Thunder Butte. Then he fell to questioning me: Had I ever seen it? Had I ever been near it? Had I ever been on top? What season of the year? On being told that I had been on top on the last day of September, he cautiously ventured the question, “Did you see any snakes?”

At this point Mrs. Hill laughed and said, “Colonel, go ahead and tell your story. We want to see if it is like the impossible snake story George has told us about that butte.”

The colonel was visibly relieved and said, “Well, I have told this story many times, and nobody will believe it, although it is the gospel truth.” Then he told a story about going on top to survey the surrounding country on the first day of October in the Ute year (I think 1907) and being held prisoner there by rattlesnakes until a few soldiers of his command saw his predicament and cleaned off the snakes so that he could jump off the rimrock, just as Billy Hess, Slim Sargent and Happy Jack had done for me a few years before. Whatever may be the fact now with Jackley on the job, do not let anyone convince you that the rattlesnakes “in shoals and nations” did not, in former days, make winter headquarters on Thunder Butte.¹³

Off Repping Again

The next morning, after health reasserted itself, the boss, Billie Hess, told Jimmie Harrell and me to get our strings (assigned saddle horses) and go to the mouth of the Cheyenne River to Ed Delehan’s wagon,¹⁴ which was to work from the mouth of the Cheyenne River up to Pedro and then down the divide between the Cheyenne and Bad rivers to Fort Pierre and ship beef from there. Quickly catching out our horses and packing our bed horses, we were on our way for the long drag to the mouth of the Cheyenne River. Changing horses anytime we wanted to rope one that had not been ridden that day, we made good time, and in early dusk we joined up with the outfit, turned our horses loose, unpacked our beds, and got ready to interview the cook, often a touchy gentleman, but one whom every cowboy was willing to vote a gentleman, at least, to his face.

There seemed to be a lot of excitement, and riders were galloping back and forth between the camp and the other side of a small hill about a quarter mile to the south. As I was getting my bed off my packhorse, one of the fellows rode up to me and said, “George, don’t turn that horse loose. Saddle him up and come over where we are.”

Not having any special urge for a horseback ride at the moment, I said, “Why?”

He answered, “We have found a rattlesnake den, and we had killed a hundred and eleven just before I left. Come on over.”

I said, “That is just chicken feed. I saw my snakes yesterday.” I did not go.

The roundup started the next morning, working up the Cheyenne River. After dinner (noon) just as the outfit was all ready to go, Terry Singleton got on a horse that started to buck in accomplished fashion, and Terry was doing a fine job of riding him when suddenly the horse sunfished too far and landed flat on his side, cracking Terry’s head against the ground. The horse got up, but Terry did not, so after making our best efforts to bring him to without success, it was decided to leave him there. Like the show, the roundup must go on. A tepee was taken from the bed wagon and set up over unconscious Terry. His uncle, Henry Singleton, afterwards sheriff of Haakon County, who was with the roundup, stayed with him. A couple of horses were picketed for them and their saddles, etc., left there.¹⁵

A doctor must be had, so Jet Calhoon, who was riding a big U-necked gray horse to which the number of miles on the ride meant little, started off for Fort Pierre, more than fifty miles away, to get Dr. Lavery.¹⁶ Late next afternoon Jet caught up with the outfit farther up the Cheyenne River and told us that Dr. Lavery got out there about noon, and Terry, who had been unconscious for twenty-four hours, had just commenced to come to. The next day Terry and Henry caught up with the wagon and announced that he was all right, so the incident furnished no more conversation.

It should not be forgotten that I still had the itch; that Jimmie had the itch medicine, which he would not share, still carefully stowed in his bed. The outfit worked up the Cheyenne to Pedro and then moved out to the divide and commenced working east towards Fort Pierre, where I hoped to get some itch medicine just like Jimmie’s. One noon when we were camped on Sansarc Creek, a rider came out from Fort Pierre with word to me that Scotty had bought out George Jackson’s interest in the JR- [J R Bar] cattle, which he had previously owned with Bill Hayes, and instructed me to take a saddle horse and a pack horse, go to the JR-ranch, tally out the JR- cattle, and stay there alone that winter. (Incidentally I did not have to stay alone, for Bill and Mrs. Hayes came out to the ranch, with their daughter, Mary, who was then a baby. But those were my instructions.)¹⁷

Lead us not into temptation. Here was I with the itch, and there was Jimmie’s bed with the medicine. I would be batching on a ranch all winter. He would be in Fort Pierre in a week and could get plenty more. He was nearly cured anyway. A good deal of rationalizing was done in a very short time, and then I violated one of the most binding provisions of the cowboy’s code and raided Jimmie’s bed. I stole his itch medicine. By the time the cowboys with Ed Delehan’s wagon were ready to spread their beds that night, I was over the hills and far away, and so was Jimmie’s itch medicine. When he got ready to apply it to his ailing parts, he discovered it was gone. It took no Conan Doyle to deduce a proper conclusion from the well-known facts that the medicine and I were both gone.¹⁸ According to reliable reports that came to me, Jimmie’s wrath was as boundless as the damage he promised to do to me with a six-shooter the first time we met. It was effective itch medicine, and in a reasonable time it cured me.

Quite a few years passed before I again saw Jimmie. The country settled up, and the cowboys had to change into a different class of folks. They had to settle down somewhere because there was no more range, and there could be no more cowboys ever again. To a Gas Belt Exposition in Pierre in the fall of 1909, I believe, I went over from Fort Pierre, where I was then practicing law, in company with A. L. Bodley, who was working for the Robertson Lumber Company, and Dr. T. E. Bowen, who was a practicing dentist in Fort Pierre.¹⁹ In the densely crowded lobby of the Locke Hotel, I spied Jimmie some distance away and hailed him.

At first he seemed as delighted to see me as I was to see him. We worked our ways through the crowd, and just as our hands were about to come together in friendly grasp, Jimmie pulled his hand back, a look of anger came on his face, and he said, “You ___ ___ ___ ___ of a ___. You stole my itch medicine.”

Jimmie didn’t smile when he said it, but it made me laugh heartily. I said, “Oh, well, Jimmie, let’s shake hands anyway. We’re both cured of the itch.” Jimmie grudgingly consented, but he still wanted to do something about it.

The code, which protected his bed as sacred, had passed into oblivion, and its place was taken by prosaic statutes including the statute of limitations. The incident passed off with Jimmie only partly reconciled. Years passed with only occasional stories of crimination of me by my friend Jimmie. About 1935, when Jimmie, still living in the spirit of the old days, was gambling in Deadwood to earn a precarious living, his daughter, Loretta, wanted a position as a stenographer. I saw that she was employed in the United States attorney’s office and located at Deadwood. When she wrote me a note of thanks, she said in the letter, “Dad is delighted because I got the job, and he told me to tell you that the itch medicine deal is all forgiven.” It took a long time to earn full forgiveness for that violation of the cowboy’s code, but I cured my itch....

The cow country, or the open range, died about 1904 when the homesteaders had taken a good part of the country. The cowboys died with it, and they never can live again. Their world is gone. The cow country was both an epic and an epoch that lasted less than forty years. The only purpose in writing this at all is to give a sketch of about three weeks of life on the range, with what little light it may cast on an extinct species, the real cowboy, who bore no resemblance to the silly, rootin’-tootin’ make-believe of the stage, the screen and the rodeo.²⁰

Rattlesnake Butte

About five years or six years ago, during a deer-hunting trip in the southern Black Hills at Bob McAdam’s ranch, Tommy McDonald, Bob McAdam and I were visiting about old times. Tommy and Bob were boyhood acquaintances dating back to the time when Tommy’s older brother Alvin and Bob and his older brother Mack were voluntary boy explorers of the now famous Wind Cave. Alvin was the young man who, after he and the McAdam boys quit their joint exploration, went on and on, leaving his marks almost everywhere in that underground labyrinth until his death in early manhood.²¹

Tommy and I had known each other well when we were young men. Then he was riding on the range for Billie Borst²² and I for Scotty Philip.... Bob and I had been good friends for many years, so it is not hard to believe that there was no shortage of gossiping material, and the evening hours did not drag slowly. Each reminded the other of many things, and a lot of breeze was shot about. Tommy, in reminiscent mood, told of an experience he and another young cowpuncher had up on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, when he was up there rep-ping with Narcisse’s wagon. Narcisse Narcelle was a half-breed Sioux, who at one time was wealthy in cattle and horses. Anyone with a gifted pen and knowledge of the facts could certainly tell a stirring story about the “Savage” as he dubbed himself.²³

Tommy told how he and his companion were on circle, which meant the way the cowboys gathered in cattle for a roundup by spreading out fan shape and then gathering all the cattle seen on the way as they converged to the handle of the fan. The roundup was to be made on the west side of Red Scaffold Creek, near Rattlesnake Butte. This butte must not be confused with Thunder Butte, about forty-five or fifty miles to the north. The two buttes are very much alike in immediate appearance, with the difference that Thunder Butte arises from a divide, while Rattlesnake Butte comes up from the level bottomland along the creek. The former is so much more striking, but the latter is much more unusual.

It so happened that Tommy and his pal did not strike any cattle, and they were empty handed as they came by Rattlesnake Butte. As Tommy told his story, not one of the three knew, and I do not know now, whether that butte was a rendezvous for rattlesnakes as its more noticeable brother to the north assuredly was. Being young and full of whatever fills youth, and having some time on their hands while waiting for the other circlers to come in with the gathered cattle, the thought of climbing the butte quickly suggested itself, so that decision was soon made.

They rode up the side as far as it was convenient for the horses to carry them. Dismounting, one or the other suggested taking the horses up on top, if possible. Tommy described in graphic detail how they pulled and pushed their horses over the large rocks that seemed insurmountable obstacles, and how finally, by dint of sweating and swearing, the two boys and the saddle horses were on the flat top of Rattlesnake Butte. He then told how he and his friend got on their horses atop the butte, and as the other riders went along its base with the cattle, the boys on top waved their hats to them.

Tommy’s story ended there, and I said, “Well, well, and you were both riding white horses.”

He gave me a sharp look, banged his fist on his knee and said, “By God, I have told that story over and over in the last twenty-five years, and I never could remember who was up there with me. Anyway, George, we sat on our horses on top of Rattlesnake Butte, didn’t we?”

If rattlesnakes rendezvous and hibernate on Rattlesnake Butte, as I have been informed they do, I have no knowledge of it, never having been on it at the right (or wrong) time of the year. However, I am not a skeptic on rattlesnakes, and proper evidence would make me a true believer.

This letter makes no pretense to literary merit and is written for no other purpose than to afford in days to come a glimpse of days that were.

Affectionately,

Dad

NOTES

Introduction

1. George Philip to his children, 25 Dec. 1936, George Philip Letters, Philip Family Collection. All preceding direct quotations come from this letter.

2. George Philip, “James (‘Scotty’) Philip, 1858–1911,” South Dakota Historical Review 1 (Oct. 1935): 5–47; “Dakota Images: James (‘Scotty’) Philip,” South Dakota History 16 (Spring 1986): 88/back cover. For more on Scotty Philip, see Wayne C. Lee, Scotty Philip, the Man Who Saved the Buffalo (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1975), and James M. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1974).

3. Quoted in Rapid City Daily Journal, 15 Mar. 1948.

4. Ibid.; Philip to his children, 4 Mar. 1937.

5. For more on Great Plains cowboys in the era of the open range, see Richard W. Slatta, “Long Horns and Low Pay: Cowboy Life on the Northern Plains,” South Dakota History 32 (Fall 2002): 194–216.

6. Philip to his children, 4 Mar. 1937, 1, 24 June 1940.

7. Ibid., 1 June 1940.

8. See South Dakota Historical Review 2 (Jan. 1937): 51–72, and Bert L. Hall, comp., Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills, Centennial ed. (Winner, S.Dak.: Western South Dakota Buck-a-roos, 2000), pp. 123–32. Copies of the unedited letters and related materials are available both at the State Archives, South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre, and in the Richardson Archives, University of South Dakota, Vermillion.

9. Rapid City Daily Journal, 16 Mar. 1948.

1. The Open Range

1. California pants are described in Western Words: A Dictionary of the Old West (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1998) as “a style of pants used on the range, usually of striped or checked heavy wool of excellent double weave” (p. 27). Rancher Faye Longbrake noted, “They were dressy looking pants” (Longbrake to Cathie Draine, 11 May 2006).

2. See George Philip to his children, 16 July 1940.

3. Badger Clark, Grass-Grown Trails (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1917), pp. 58–59.

4. A familiar patent medicine, Dr. Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters was developed in Pennsylvania in 1853 by Dr. Joseph Hostetter and made popular by his son David. The concoction contained up to 44 percent alcohol. “Dr. Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters,” California State Parks, www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=22424, accessed 10/20/06; “Drunkenness: Temperance Drinks?,” Digger Odell Publications, www.bottlebooks.com/temperance/temperance.htm, accessed 10/20/06.

5. Robert W. Stewart, an Iowa native, began his law practice in Pierre in 1889 and was a state senator in 1898 and 1899. He developed a reputation as a competent attorney and moved to Chicago in 1907 to serve as western counsel for the Standard Oil Company. Stewart joined the company’s board of directors in 1915 and was elected chairman in 1918. He rode with Grigsby’s Rough Riders (Cowboys) during the Spanish-American War and attained the rank of colonel in the South Dakota National Guard. Paul H. Giddens, Standard Oil Company (Indiana): Oil Pioneer of the Middle West (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 103, 210; Memorial and Biographical Record and Illustrated Compendium of Biography... of Central South Dakota (Chicago: Geo. A. Ogle & Co., 1899), p. 315–16; Christian Science Monitor, 13 Apr. 1923. Captain Joseph B. Binder, who may or may not have been a riverboat captain, was a partner in the cattle business with Scotty Philip. He also owned a hardware store and was mayor of Pierre from 1918 to 1924. Harold H. Schuler, Pierre since 1910 ([Pierre, S.Dak.]: By the Author, 1998), p. 267; James M. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1974), p. 114.

6. Jack Borden was foreman of the 73 outfit. His daughter Ruth married Scotty Philip’s youngest son, Roderick. Faye Longbrake to Cathie Draine, 11 Dec. 2005; Wayne C. Lee, Scotty Philip, the Man Who Saved the Buffalo (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1975), p. 189. Alligator’s reputation as an ill-tempered, dangerous horse was widepread, although stories suggest that both John (“Slim”) Taggert and African-American cowboy Bunk White could master him. Slim Taggert, a Nebraska native, was also known as “73” Slim for his work with the 73 outfit. He married Louise Swarthout of Fort Pierre and after his cowboying days opened the 73 Saloon in the town of Philip. Clara Roseth, ed., Prairie Progress in West Central South Dakota (n.p.: Historical Society of Old Stanley County, 1968), p. 46. See also Bert L. Hall, comp., Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills, Centennial ed. (Winner, S.Dak.: Western South Dakota Buck-a-roos, 2000), pp. 252, 487.

7. Cyrus Hiett, mentioned frequently in these letters, was a native Minnesotan who had homesteaded on the Cheyenne River in the mid-1890s. He worked as a cowboy and rancher well into his seventies. See Hall, Roundup Years, pp. 296–97.

8. Cowboy Pete Ashley’s D P sorrel may have been one of Dan Powell’s horses. Powell and Scotty, friends and neighbors, had as young men been hired as government cowboys to trail cattle herds from Fort Robinson, Nebraska, to the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Longbrake to Draine, 11 Dec. 2005; Roseth, Prairie Progress in West Central South Dakota, p. 495.

9. This phrase was first uttered during World War I by Captain Charles E. Stanton at Lafayette’s gravesite in the cemetery at Picpus in Paris, France, on 4 July 1917. “In their own Words,” World War I Trenches on the Web: An Internet History of the Great War, www.worldwar1.com/dbc/ow_3.htm, accessed 2/24/06. The stratosphere flights were manned balloon flights that took place in 1934 and 1935 from a site eleven miles south of Rapid City. The balloon Explorer II and its United States Army Air Corps pilots set a world altitude record (13.7 miles) and paved the way for manned space flight. Gene Bauer, “On the Edge of Space: The Explorer Expeditions of 1934–1935,” South Dakota History 12 (Spring 1982): 1–16.

10. Philip is referring back to Badger Clark’s poem “The Passing of the Trail,” which he quoted at the beginning of this letter.

11. In western South Dakota, these three partners are commonly known as the black-footed prairie dog (a member of the squirrel family), the burrowing owl, and the prairie (western) rattlesnake. For more information on plains wildlife, see Paul A. Johnsgard, Great Wildlife of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

12. For a classic cowboy encounter with rattlesnakes denning up, see Philip to his children, 24 Aug. 1939.

13. Robert Philip’s typewritten copy of this letter contains this handwritten note from his father:

This was written in the third person to you in the form of a letter, intended for the eyes of my children, and for no others. The real purpose was to give each of you the true story of the trip, inasmuch as so many fakers had been writing it up and claiming personal participation in the events of which they wrote, and which bore no similarity to the plain facts. Then, as you know, the State Historical Society got it, and published it in pamphlet form. It is put in here just for compactness of telling.

The South Dakota State Historical Society first printed the story as “South Dakota Buffaloes versus Mexican Bulls” in its quarterly magazine South Dakota Historical Review in January 1937. It was reprinted under the same title in South Dakota Historical Collections 20 (1940): 409–34. The third-person narrative style of this section is different from all Philip’s other letters to his children, and how and when it was originally drafted is unknown, but clearly it was earlier than Christmas 1936 and the other letters in this series.

14. For more on the Scotty Philip buffalo herd and Bob Yokum’s experiences training buffalo, see Lee, Scotty Philip, pp. 269–76. Bob Yokum’s obituary in West River Progress (Dupree, S.Dak.), 2 Feb. 1939, recalls that he had tamed a pair of buf-falos that he drove around, “creating nothing less than a sensation, of course.” Yokum, born in California in 1861, moved from frontier to frontier throughout his long life. He spent many years in early Fort Pierre and Dupree before moving to Wyoming to work in law enforcement.

15. Benito Juarez (1806–1892), a Zapoteco Indian, was president of Mexico from 1861 until French troops put Archduke Maximilian of Austria into power in 1864. In 1867, Juarez was reelected president, serving until his death in 1872. “History of Benito Juarez,” Mexonline.com, www.mexonline.com/benitojuarez, accessed 11/08/06; “Benito Juárez,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Juarez, accessed 11/08/06.

16. According to his obituary, Eb Jones “was one of the few native born South Dakotans who came West to be a cowboy.” He was born in Union County in the southeastern corner of the state. From age fifteen, he cowboyed in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana until the end of the open range, when he started a ranch near the town of Dupree in Ziebach County. Ziebach County News, 23 Feb. 1939. In the months before his death, Jones’s memoirs ran as a series entitled “The Cowboy as He Was” in the Ziebach County News, 29 Dec. 1938–19 Jan. 1939.

17. Kansas law had prohibited liquor and saloons since the 1880s, but officials did not always enforce the prohibition. “Carrynationitis” is a reference to Carry Nation of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, who as a proactive temperance supporter attacked Kansas saloons with a hatchet in an attempt to get the owners to close down. Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 760. Saloon proprietor Bob Yokum had made sure that the party “left Pierre in a cab with a suitcase stocked full with the best brands of whiskey that Bob’s saloon could procure” (West River Progress, 2 Feb. 1939). Philip, the lawyer, observes that this liquor remained “in the original packages,” which is a reference to an 1890 United States Supreme Court ruling that allowed liquor to be transported across state lines—even those of prohibition states—if the original packaging was not removed or broken. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 17 May 1890.

18. In freemasonry, the organization that confers degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is officially known as the Consistory of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret.

19. Jack Dempsey defeated Argentina’s Luis Firpo, known as the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” by a knockout in a heavyweight championship fight at the Polo Grounds in New York City on 14 September 1932. “Enshrinees,” International Boxing Hall of Fame, www.ibhof.com/dempsey.htm, accessed 11/22/06.

20. John Wesley Hardin (1853–1895), one of the Wild West’s deadliest outlaw gunslingers, reputedly killed over twenty people. Lamar, New Encyclopedia, p. 468.

21. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Thomas D. Edwards as consul to Juarez, Mexico, in 1905. Edwards came to the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1877, ran the first post office in Lead, and eventually became editor of the Lead Tribune for many years. After Edwards’s stint in Mexico, Woodrow Wilson appointed him to a consulate in Canada, but ill health caused an early retirement. Lead Daily Call, 5 Aug. 1935.

22. President Roosevelt nominated Patrick Floyd Garrett to the position of customs collector at El Paso after obtaining a promise that Garrett would “abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors” during his term of office. Garrett was confirmed on 6 January 1902. President Roosevelt refused to reappoint him to the post in 1905 after Garrett introduced his friend Tom Powers to him as a cattleman when he was, in fact, a notorious gambler. The Coney Island Saloon was a well-known and infamous gathering place for many men of dubious reputation, but it is unlikely that Garrett was any longer visiting the place frequently after his dismissal as customs officer. Antonio Perez, Angel Villalobos, and Jeremiah J. Miranda, “Pat Garrett Enjoyed Controversy,” Borderlands: An El Paso Community College Local History Project, www.epcc.edu/nwlibrary/borderlands/20_garrett.htm, accessed 2/24/06. Tobe Driskill, Texas herder, and a group of cowboys tangled with Wyatt Earp in Dodge City in 1878. Beth Gibson, “Wyatt Earp,” AOL Hometown, members.aol.com/Gibson0817/wearp.htm, accessed 2/24/06; Lamar, New Encyclopedia, pp. 326–27, 421. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), lawyer, political leader, and popular orator, was best known for his defense of agnosticism. “Robert G. Ingersoll,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll, accessed 2/24/06. For more on the life and times of Garrett, see Leon C. Metz, Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974).

23. This line appears in Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse, on Turning up Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785,” in Seven Centuries of Verse, English and American, from the Early English Lyrics to the Present Day, ed. A. J. M. Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), p. 276.

24. James McGarry’s drugstore was in the town of Fort Pierre, where John W. Dickey was listed as physician in the 1910 federal census. U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Fort Pierre, Stanley County, S.Dak., in AncestryLibrary.com (subscription required). Dr. V. H. Ruble, a highly respected member of the Pierre community, graduated from the Bellevue Medical College of New York City in 1887. Memorial and Biographical Record, p. 610.

25. Clara, Scotty and Sally Philip’s fifth child, had been born in 1888. She would have been about twelve years old. Lee, Scotty Philip, p. 160.

26. The Fort Pierre to Deadwood trail was a freighting route between the end of the railhead in Pierre and the Black Hills, plied by oxen-drawn wagons that left lasting ruts in the plains landscape. The 1877 agreement between the western Sioux, or Lakotas, and the United States government had allowed this corridor across what was then the Great Sioux Indian Reservation. Bob Lee, “It Started with a (Mining) Boom,” South Dakota History 31 (Fall/Winter 2001): 273–74.

27. Louis (“Posey”) Moran was Scotty Philip’s stepson, the only child of Sally Philip’s first marriage. Lee, Scotty Philip, pp. 249, 323n.9. For more about Bill Hess and Hugh Burgess, see Philip to his children, 24 Aug. 1939.

28. The Duprees were a ranching family similar to the Philip family. Fred Dupree, a French-Canadian trapper, married a Lakota Indian woman, and they and their children ranched from allotments on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. The Dupree and Philip families were friends and ran their cattle together on the open range between the Bad and Cheyenne rivers. Fred’s children included his son Peter Dupree and his daughter Marcella, who married stockman Douglas L. Carlin in one of the range’s biggest social events of the 1880s. In the early 1880s, Pete Dupree had taken in five buffalo calves after the last buffalo hunt along the Grand and Cheyenne rivers and nurtured them on the open range into a herd of fifty-seven animals by 1901, when they were sold to Scotty Philip. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre, pp. 74, 124–26; Lee, Scotty Philip, pp. 156–57; Doane Robinson, History of South Dakota, 2 vols. (n.p.: B. F. Bowen & Co., 1904), 2:1764–65. The 1900 federal census lists Paul Clogenson as a native of France who was working as a herder for Doug Carlin. Twelfth Census, 1900, Ziebach County.

29. For the story of the homesteaders in the region that was once the open range in South Dakota, see Paula M. Nelson’s After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986).

2. A Few Days on the Range

1. Because the Philip and Dupree families ran their cattle together, the leasing or grazing arrangements were probably made through the Dupree family, whose members were affiliated with the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. James M. Robinson, West from Fort Pierre: The Wild World of James (Scotty) Philip (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1974), p. 74.

2. A Scotsman, George Philip knew the poetry of his fellow countryman Robert Burns and the poem “Tam O’Shanter,” which can be found in Seven Centuries of Verse, English and American, from the Early English Lyrics to the Present Day, ed. A. J. M. Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), pp. 279–85. In the poem, a drunken farmer runs afoul of a witch, a misadventure for which his horse pays the price.

3. By 1939, cowboy Hugh Burgess had moved to Rapid City, where he worked as a railway engineer. Bert L. Hall, comp., Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills, Centennial ed. (Winner, S.Dak.: Western South Dakota Buck-a-roos, 2000), p. 558.

4. The Frenchman Joseph Langlois had been a scout with George A. Custer in Kansas. He married Zoeie Kensler, who was part American Indian, and settled on the Cheyenne River reservation, where he ranched and raised a large family. Quill Ewing, who married Langlois’s daughter Louise, was wagon boss for cattleman Narcisse Narcelle. J. W. (“Jim”) Harrell, a well-educated Texas native who came north with the big herds, started a ranch near Lantry, South Dakota, after his cowboying days on the open range. He later moved to Idaho, dying there in 1939, the year this letter was written. South Dakota’s Ziebach County: History of the Prairie (Dupree, S.Dak.: Ziebach County Historical Society, 1982), pp. 362, 390–91. Ovila (“Babe”) LaPlante was the son of Louie LaPlante, a pioneer rancher on the Cheyenne River reservation. Babe LaPlante enlisted in the service during World War I, and he died at age seventy-three in 1954. Hall, Roundup Years, pp. 27, 270; Hot Springs Star, 2 Dec. 1954. The rest of this letter is a combination of two versions Philip told of the rattlesnake and Texas itch stories. The first version, which was much less complete, appeared in his 4 March 1937 letter.

5. The transient nature of a cowboy’s life makes these men hard to place or track, but the 1900 federal census lists William R. Hess, “stock herder” in Stanley County, as a native of Pennsylvania. U.S., Department of the Interior, Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Fort Pierre, Stanley County, S.Dak., in AncestryLibrary.com (subscription required). George Philip reported in 1939 that Hess had committed suicide in a small town in Montana “years ago.” Likewise, cowboy Happy Jack Savage died in Fort Pierre in 1904 “when a horse fell over backwards with him, and drove the saddle horn into his abdomen,” while Slim Sargent had moved to Redfield, where he died in a hack accident.

6. Technically, Texas itch was a disease that affected cattle only. The cowboys probably had scabies, a related parasite that affects humans and spreads quickly through close physical contact and the sharing of clothing or bedding with infected persons. As Philip relates, this “Texas itch” no doubt came north with the Texas cowboys who ran cattle on the northern range. Topical medications such as the one Jimmie used quickly killed the mites themselves, but the itching persisted for weeks. N. S. Mayo, Texas Itch, Kansas State Agricultural College, Experiment Station Bulletin, no. 69 (Manhattan, 1897), pp. 103–4; “Scabies,” Centers for Disease Control, Division of Parasitic Diseases, www.cdc.gov/NCIDOD/DPD/parasites/scabies/factshtscabies.htm, accessed 12/1/06.

7. This line appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2, line 1.

8. Laches, a legal term, refers to negligence or undue delay in asserting a legal right or privilege. “Laches,” www.answers.com/topic/laches-equity, accessed 11/20/06.

9. Dr. Charles J. Lavery, a New York State native, attended Starling Medical College in Columbus, Ohio, and worked in Fort Pierre from 1890 to 1893. He returned to medical school for post-graduate work before resuming his frontier practice in 1895. He worked in Fort Pierre for another decade and then relocated to Aberdeen, South Dakota. Doane Robinson, History of South Dakota, 2 vols. (n.p.: B. F. Bowen & Co., 1904), 1:821–23.

10. Because prairie rattlesnakes are cold-blooded and cannot maintain their own body temperature, they search for shaded areas to keep cool and seek sunny areas when they need warmth. Reptiles in South Dakota must hibernate to avoid the freezing cold of winter. Early fall frosts and shortening daylight encourage snakes to move together toward dens, normally found on hillsides with a southerly sun exposure so that the snakes can bask in the sun. They will congregate near the den until the lower temperatures drive them underground. South Dakota, Department of Game, Fish and Parks, Division of Wildlife, “Prairie Rattlesnake,” www.sdgfp.info/Wildlife/Snakes/PrairieRattlesnake.htm, accessed 11/21/06.

11. Faye Longbrake, a long-time resident of Ziebach County, writes, “The snakes have a strong, musky odor when they gather up” (Longbrake to Cathie Draine, 11 May 2006).

12. From 1934 to 1938, Colonel Pope of the United States Fourth Cavalry commanded Fort Meade, an active military post in the northern Black Hills until 1944. [Herbert B. Cleveland], comp., Fort Meade, D.T./S.D., 1878–1978 [Fort Meade, S.Dak.: Veterans Administration Hospital, 1978], pp. [17–18]. For a general history of Fort Meade, see Robert Lee, Fort Meade & the Black Hills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Robert S. Hill, a mining engineer, and his wife Maud resided in Rapid City, where he was the mayor in 1939. Eva Wortman was also a Rapid City resident. South Dakota, State Census, 1935, State Archives Collection, South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS), Pierre. For more on the Utes, who were in South Dakota from 1906 to 1908, see David D. Laudenschlager, “The Utes in South Dakota, 1906–1908,” South Dakota History 9 (Summer 1979): 233–47.

13. In 1937, the South Dakota Department of Agriculture hired A. M. Jackley to head its newly-created Reptile Control and Eradication Division. In his reports, Jackley noted that over one thousand dens had been located in twenty-eight South Dakota counties in 1941 and that some dens had been occupied for over forty years. Jackley, “Report of Reptile Control Campaign,” 1941, and untitled report, [ca. 1938], both in Vertical Files, s.v., “Rattlesnakes,” State Archives Collection, SDSHS. The numbers of snakes in this era recalled to George Philip’s mind the Robert Burns poem “To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church” (Seven Centuries of Verse, pp. 278–79), which contains these lines regarding the louse:

There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,

Wi’ ither kindred, jumping cattle,

In shoals and nations;

Whare horn nor bane ne’er daur unsettle,

Your thick plantations.

For more on rattlesnakes during this time period, see H. K. Gloyd, “The Problem of Too Many Snakes,” Chicago Naturalist 7, no. 4 (1944): 87–97.

14. Ed Delehan, a Pennsylvania native, worked cattle in many parts of western South Dakota and, with partner Ben Ash, bought and sold southern cattle. In 1914, while branding on his ranch near Faith, he was gored in the eye by a steer and died a week later. South Dakota’s Ziebach County, p. 332.

15. The term sunfishing describes a bucking horse that twists its body in such a way that he appears to be trying to turn his belly to the sun. Ramon F. Adams, Western Words: A Dictionary of the Old West (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1998), p. 159. Bert Hall’s Roundup Years mentions an old-time cowboy named J. T. Singleton, who, in the roundups of the 1900–1902 era, worked as a rep for the Cheyenne River Pool, which he defined as “all the cattlemen east of the Limekiln pool outfit range, which was Spotted Bear Creek or thereabouts down the Cheyenne River to Sansarc Creek or thereabouts, and south from the Cheyenne River to the divide between Bad river and the Cheyenne river west” (quoted, p. 391). A roundup pool levied its members for the necessary gear to join the roundup. In 1939, Philip records that Henry Singleton died in Philip “a few years ago,” and Terry lived on Cheyenne River, Plum Creek.

16. A Chet Calhoon was a member of the March Brothers Company, a smaller cattle outfit in the Bad River/Cheyenne River area, according to Hall, Roundup Years, p. 359. In 1939, Philip reported that Jet Calhoon, who had been a good horse rider on the open range, was now an underground miner for the Home-stake Mining Company in Lead, South Dakota. A U-necked, or more accurately, ewe-necked, horse has a long, thin neck like that of a ewe.

17. George Jackson and William Hayes, early Stanley County stockmen, started their herd by purchasing several hundred head of cattle from John Rabideaux for sixteen dollars a head. Their brand, JR-, had developed from the initials of the original owner, with the bar added as a tally mark when he sold the cattle. Scotty Philip bought out Jackson, and Hayes would in turn buy the herd from Philip, eventually owning a thousand head on a ranch seventy miles from Pierre on Cherry Creek. Hayes had married Jessie Stewart from Highmore in 1899, and the couple maintained a home in Fort Pierre for the family. Bill Hayes died in Fort Pierre in 1934. Clara Roseth, ed., Prairie Progress in West Central South Dakota (n.p.: Historical Society of Old Stanley County, 1968), p. 535.

18. Arthur Conan Doyle, an English author, is best known for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

19. In 1939, A. L. Bodley had moved to Sioux Falls as an abstractor, while Dr. Bowen continued to practice dentistry in Pierre.

20. In a long paragraph that preceded this lament for the passing of the open range, Philip listed what he knew about the whereabouts of the people he mentioned in his letter; many were dead and that is all he knew. Where possible, I have added to his information and placed it in notes closer to the first mention of individuals.

21. The McAdam and McDonald families played important roles in the early development of Wind Cave National Park in Custer County. Jesse McDonald, Tommy’s father, began managing the property for the South Dakota Mining Company in April 1890 with his sons Elmer and Alvin. Alvin McDonald systematically explored and named features of the cave, recording his finds in a diary. Alvin died 15 September 1893 of “walking typhoid fever,” supposedly complicated by pneumonia that he contracted while exploring the cave. John W. Bohl, “Seventy-five Years at Wind Cave: A History of the National Park,” South Dakota Historical Collections 31 (1962): 365–468.

22. William O. Borst came to Fort Pierre from Wisconsin in 1877 and raised cattle in Meade County from 1883 to 1889, when he established a ranch in Ziebach County. Robinson, History of South Dakota, 1:825–26.

23. Narcisse Narcelle, whose brand was NSS, was one of the earliest big cattlemen of the open-range era in South Dakota. The son of a French fur trader and a Lakota woman, Narcelle headquartered his cattle operations on the Circle Dot Ranch, halfway between Philip and Faith in west-central South Dakota. Sometime after 1900, he moved his operations farther north onto the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. He usually had ten or more cowboys working for him, including Quill Ewing, who was mentioned earlier. “Narcisse Narcelle, Ran Thousands of Cattle and Horses,” South Dakota Heritage 16 (Fall 1990): 22–23. Ike Blasingame, who knew Narcelle around 1906, referred to him as “a great Indian humorist,” who “loved to tell stories around the campfire” (Blasingame, Dakota Cowboy: My Life in the Old Days [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958], p. 215).