6,000 Miles of Fence by Cordia Duke

Author:Cordia Duke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2005-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

“Of all the horses I ever forked—”

HORSES

“MUCH ADO is made nowadays about rodeos. Why, in the roundup season of the year we had one every day after dinner. Each man had two good broke horses in his mount, and after dinner was the time to ride them. Some six or eight men would ride their broncs all at once—a regular six-ring circus, and such pitching and bucking you never saw before. People would come from afar to see our rodeos.”

It wasn’t all a horse circus by any means. But the cowboy is famed as the knight on horseback, and the XIT hand was no exception. He had to know how to sit a horse, to take care of a horse, to work from a horse, in effect to live with a horse. When the old XIT hands gather for their yearly reunion in Dalhart each August, some of their tenderest, and some of their wildest, memories stem from their associations with horses.

The XIT had good horses. At first the ranch imported its mounts from South Texas. Mainly they were older Spanish horses with outsize Mexican brands all over their hips; some were “gotch-eared, mostly red roans and gruyers, some fine old cowhorses and some spoilt outlaws.”

After the XIT had begun to raise its own horses, every colt, like every calf, was branded on its jaw with the year of its birth. As the horse matured it was watched closely, and when it began to show age it was retired, or “condemned,” as one hand put it. Men were assigned regular bronco-busting chores, and after they had ridden wild horses a few times, the “half-broke” horses were added to the various cowboys’ strings. By fall they were usually well broken. After that, with the hardest riding behind for the year, the cowboy turned out all his string except two or three favorites for his winter mount.

Occasionally a hand lost his mount. North of the Platte in Wyoming, Milt Whipple, a trail boss, lost an old dun that he used as a night horse. All spring and summer he looked for him, and wondered. In the fall Whipple went back up the trail, but still no dun. When in the next spring Whipple’s outfit began gathering saddle horses at Rito Blanco, the boss decided to make a drive down into the breaks where the old dun had usually wintered in the past. There the horse was, on his old range. By himself he had come all the way from Wyoming.

Horses’ names ran the gamut from commonplace, to literary, to imaginative. J. W. Standifer’s winter mount consisted of Limber Jim and Spike, “two of the finest cutting horses I ever rode.” Lynn Boyce’s favorite horse was Rooster, a sorrel paint. Another hand chose Trilby and Terrapin for his winter mount, while Roy Frye claimed Sop an’ Taters as part of his string.

A horse might well be the cowman’s best friend, and his most understanding working partner. Another horse might be the death of him.

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