Saddling Up Anyway by Patrick Dearen

Author:Patrick Dearen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2006-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Lightning streaking the Texas sky. (Photo courtesy of Richard Galle)

Expecting a fatal strike any moment, the desperate wrangler escaped the stirrups and threw himself flat on the ground. “I tried to die but could not,” he remembered. “The storm passed on.”

In a job that demanded self-sufficiency and precluded church-going, cowboys were seldom religious, but sky fire was better than a camp meeting for getting men to pray. As an electrical storm enveloped four night riders on an 1880 drive to Indian Territory, one cowhand kept railing that they would all be killed. His fear was contagious, prompting Bill Hancock to whirl to Jim Wilson.

“Did you ever pray?” asked Hancock.

“No,” admitted Wilson, “not in a long time.”

“Some of us have got to pray!” Hancock pressed. “The lightning’s going to kill all of us!”

The storm intensified, lightning strikes exploding on all sides. In the tumult, the four riders became separated, forcing each man to face alone a dark world of chaos and uncertainty.

“When our crowd got together again,” Wilson recalled four decades later, “we found Bill off his horse praying aloud.”

Prayer seemed the only thing that might spare a man from lightning at its most destructive—when rapid-fire bolts kept an entire herd illuminated at midnight, when the tall-grass prairie erupted like the flames of perdition, when concentrated hell bombed hillsides and gouged great holes. But whether stupendous or subtle, horrific or possessing evil beauty, electrical displays always burned themselves into a cowboy’s memory. R. C. Burns, riding guard over a herd one night, witnessed the full range of sky fire’s wonders in a single thunderstorm.

“It commenced like flash lightning, then becomes forked lightning, then chain lightning, followed by the peculiar blue lightning,” he recounted. “It rapidly developed into ball lightning, which rolled along the ground, and after that, spark lightning.”

The most chilling moment came when eerie electricity settled over the scene like a fog.

“The air smelled of burning sulfur,” he remembered. “You could see it on the horns of the cattle, the ears of our horses, and the brims of our hats. It grew so warm that we thought we would be burned up.”

When a thunderstorm threatened, a cowhand had few options. He might toss aside his six-shooter, and maybe his spurs and pocketknife, in the hope that the absence of metal would make him less of a target. If on horseback, he could lower his profile by dismounting. Even so, if he chose to hold to the reins rather than creep away, the horse could draw a strike fatal to both. But setting himself afoot on purpose—especially in a storm that could scatter his herd—went against the grain of every responsible cowhand.

One thing a prudent cowboy didn’t want to do was take refuge under a tree—especially one that stood alone—but sometimes it took tragedy to teach such a lesson. When a hard rain deluged a northbound herd near the San Marcos River in Texas one night in 1870, drover Ran Spencer and a waddy named Fly rode for sheltering branches, despite a sky rent by jagged lightning.

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