In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

CHAPTER VIII COWBOYS

When Thorp took horses up to pasture we sometimes went also. That meant a ten-mile ride up into the greener heights of the mountains, the leaving of the horses in a roughly wired inclosure, a picnic lunch, and then a ten-mile ride back in the evening. On these occasions Jack would be in old weather-beaten chaparreras (leg aprons of leather) and there would be a ready coil of rope on the horn of his saddle. Five or six loose horses would be driven ahead of us, and as like as not a mare and foal. It was very pleasant, especially in the early morning. Mrs. Thorp accompanied us, a clever, smiling, Irish woman, nicknamed generally "Blarney." She added greatly to the general good humor, and would say with an expression of much mirth, as we sallied all together into some rough and bowlder-strewn defile—"Here we go, the last of Teddy's bunch!"

Apparently Jack in his earlier days had known Roosevelt, played polo with him, or it may be, sold him polo ponies. The great Theodore, New Yorker as he was, made a great impression on the minds of the cowboys. And again I suppose his make-up of cowboy and rough rider fired the imagination of the East. You still have to be something of a cowboy to be a real leader in America. Curious that the Republican President should masquerade as one of the Wild West?

A great nation entirely composed of clerks is unthinkable. It must have peasants, or highlanders, or cowboys, behind it; something of the wild and primitive, something of romance. Therefore it is that America clings to her conception of a glorious Wild West behind her drab clerical East. The multitudes of New York men and women gloating over Emerson Hough's The Covered Wagon at the cinema is forever characteristic of the East. It must have its real or imaginary covered wagons in the background as a part of its romance.

Nevertheless the number of cowboys and cattle ranchers has greatly decreased, driven back by farmers' wire. And the type is tamer than it was. There are still great herds. You may see the chuck-wagon going round, and meet many a wild-looking boy riding in full rig-out, but it is not denied that the old-time color has faded.

Perhaps the last ground of the real cowboy is the Mexican border, hence Las Vegas Reunion, which eclipses the show at 101 Ranch, Oklahoma, and is only to be compared with the round-up at Pendleton, Oregon, or Cheyenne in Wyoming. The spirit of the West still triumphs over the spirit of the East at Las Vegas, where in one week the "flivver" is routed by the horse, and no man who is worth his salt is seen wearing a crease in his trousers.

War whoops and colored silks and silver-studded saddles and goat-wool chaparreras and daring faces and happy horses make up Las Vegas during the days of the cowboys' gathering. Here comes Leonard Stroud on Diamond, and little Buster, aged ten, on Shetland Joe. Here comes the victor of the bronk riders, Buck Thompson, who will put the fear of God into Peggy Hopkins and Orphan Boy and Anarchist.

Here comes a cowboy with no legs, yet mounted on a mettlesome black steed and wearing a scarlet and gold shirt, full as a blouse. He is a veteran of cowboys. The parade of the cowboys forms up, led by a man in a dark chestnut shirt, with a belt full of cartridges and an ivory-mounted revolver sticking out above his hip; with him the chief judge of the riding and the races, carrying a purple and gold bannerette. Here comes the brothers Neafus on race horses. Here come a wonderful miscellany of riders, in turkey-red, in luminous purple, in unfaded pink and exuberant green; rough-necks with rough hats, hairy wrists, mighty shoulders and backs, rugged faces, and the sentimental, guileless eyes of good sportsmen and daring fellows.

There are cowgirls as well as cowboys—trim, modest, light—the wives and daughters of cowboys. Chief among them is Mayme Stroud, thin, almost hipless, with a waist like a wedding ring, high brown sombrero on her head, and hair hidden by voluminous red ribbons falling in big bows under the broad shadowy brim of her hat.

Idaho Bill brings up the tail of the procession in a ramshackle Ford car drawn by a horse. He is greatly encumbered by his camping outfit, and he has in the car with him a black bear which he caught in Mexico after it had killed his horse and badly bitten him. At least, so he says, and he will raise his trouser to show you the scars. He has buffalo horns tied to the radiator of the car; he wears his hair long, has a green coat and boots of alligator hide. Every year he goes into Mexico buying outlaw horses. Whenever he hears of a horse no Mexican can ride, he buys it to bring North for the cowboys. And he drove up this year a hundred or so of bucking horses. He is a sort of successor of Cody—a picturesque figure and a fitting living symbol of the flamboyant spirit of the West.

Some thousands of dollars have been subscribed as prizes for the cowboys in their noble sports of bronk riding, bull dogging, steer roping, relay racing, and the rest, and there are also scores of bets by cowboys on themselves. Curious, is it not, that there are few Mexican contestants and no Indians? The American cowboys can outride and outdare all Mexicans, all Indians, and are not afraid of any man or beast that breathes. As the legend of High Chin Bob narrates, if they met a lion in the hills, they'd rope him; they'd hold him fast and not let go of him till they'd dragged the spirit out of him.

"Ride 'em, cowboy!" "Hold 'em, cowboy!" cries one to another as the wild horses scream with rage and rear and kick and buck and bolt with the laughing boys on their backs.

Riding wild horses is the favorite sport of the cowboys, and the untamed horse is a fearsome and beautiful beast. And he is not ill treated. There is a great deal about the inclosure which reminds one of the bull ring, but not its cruelty. The men take a chance of death; the animals do not. In the bronk-riding competition the horse is beguiled into a heavily timbered narrow pen where a slip-saddle and halter are put on him without his knowing it. The rider gets down gently on to his back from the wooden wall. Then when the president gives the word "Turn him out!" a door swings free and out plunges the horse. The cowboy beats him to the one side and to the other with his felt hat, and spurs him forward, and the horse behaves like a mad dromedary, makes double humps of his back, leaps right in air, and turns about and about. When the cowboy has been on for one minute the man in the brown shirt fires his revolver in the air and five or six cowboys race to the rider to rescue him from the bolting, careening horse. This is often the most exciting part of the event. It may develop into a terrific race. Sometimes, before the rider can be lifted from the wild horse to another cowboy's horse, or safely dismounted, the bronco has crashed right through the wooden inclosure. That was what happened to Buck Thompson, on Orphan Boy, and the wild horse got rid of him on the fence as it pounded right through it.

The little town of Las Vegas, meaning The Meadows, was crowded with visitors, some of them of an outlandish type that seldom strays from home. One dame in a restaurant, dressed in the style of the early nineties, asked us what part we came from. When I said "England" she turned to her husband with—

"Lord's sake, what do you know about that?"

Then she turned to me and asked—

"Did you come all the way by car?"

The Secretary of the Reunion undertook to house most people who came, and he sat at a desk with a telephone and kept the town awake asking all and sundry for hospitality for visitors. This secretary, I discovered afterwards, was a poet.

My wife and I were happily accommodated in a house where beside ourselves were three very eager cowboys, and in the corral at the back were their horses. We naturally were deeply interested in their fortunes. The first day was not so good for them, but on the second morning with the roping and bull dogging they shone. I think all three won prizes.

I was very eager to see the bull dogging, which is a unique western sport. Jack Thorp and his wife and the artist Penhallow Henderson, who were with us at the round-up, were glowing in their pride in it, and told some amusing stories in connection with it. The cowboys, when they joined the Army, commonly said they were off to "bull dog the Kaiser." Bull dogging started in Texas, and a Negro named Pickett is sometimes reputed as the originator of the sport. Pickett one day entered the bull ring at Juarez on the other side of the Mexican line and interrupted a bull fight by bull dogging the bull.

Juarez is on the other side of the Rio Grande from El Paso. Americans go back and forth all the while, and on Sundays many are not averse to seeing a bull fight there. It is a rough-and-tumble city; the bull ring is just a stone amphitheater.

One Sunday some years ago Pickett bull dogged the bull. He was at the entrance to the ring with his horse, and he had had enough to drink. A number of white cowboys, Texans, were about him, encouraging him, and they wagered him to ride into the ring in the midst of the fight. Then the humorous and loquacious Pickett, who was a famous character, spurred his horse across the arena, got the bull a-running, and then, overtaking him at a gallop, leapt from his saddle on to the bull's horns. The impetus of the gallop he imparted to his wrists as he twisted the horns and laid the fierce animal with a thud flat on his flanks on the arena sand—to the uproarious cheers of the Americans present and the prolonged, angry hisses of the Mexicans.

Well, that is bull dogging, the Wild West's substitute sport for the Spanish corrida. I watched it and steer riding for hours in the cattle ring of the cowboys, and I suppose it would be difficult to find a sport with a greater thrill in it—to see a cowboy on a fine horse going full tilt after a frightened steer that has got the start of him—and how these clumsy animals can go it when once they think they are being chased!—neck to neck, horse and bullock, dark mane and long horn, dirt splashing upward as they go, cowboys looking on and laughing and shouting, "Let go that horse—on'm, cowboy!" and then the leap in air and the rider clutching the brown bovine neck or actually sitting with one thigh across a madly plunging horn, and the bullock going on with him, trailing him, wiping the ground with him for fifty yards or more, if the cowboy has not been able to impart the momentum of the galloping horse to the twist which he gives to the horns to bring the animal down.

Each rider is timed, and the one who performs the feat in the shortest time wins the prize. I saw it done in fifteen seconds—a turning over of the bull with the rapidity of a pistol shot; the leap from the horse and twist of horns and thud all consecutive. I saw it also done in two minutes and thirty seconds, where the bull dogger, holding on to the horns yet lying full length ahead of the bull, was rushed part way round the arena like a toboggan.

And besides this risky thrilling fun there was steer riding, which is also what might be called a part substitute for a bull fight. Riding at full pace on a rushing steer is a violent sport—clown's fun after the bull dogging. The bullocks are greatly enraged at being ridden, and they flounder and blunder and toss imaginary bundles in air and glare out of their eyes like searchlights while the wild boy above, with chaps on his legs, waves his sombrero in air and gives forth Indian war whoops all the while.

The great Western crowd laughs, so do the cowboys, so do the judges, and even the many horses ranged on all sides seem to look on with mirth. It hardly feels like this century—one thinks of medieval jollity, but comparisons are misleading. Such fun is of all time. The Athenians would have loved it. And bull dogging would have been a greater diversion in the Roman Coliseum than the Christians and the lions.

After the bull dogging there was roping of wild horses, saddling them and riding them. The horses were let loose in the arena and each cowboy had to catch his. As these had never been broken the excitement can be imagined, excitement of the horses, of the would-be riders, and of the crowd looking on. It was fully twenty minutes before even one cowboy had saddled and bridled a horse—and he could not make the animal go round the course.

Then we had a chuck-wagon race, wagons blundering round the course to given points where they had to stop, horses had to be taken out of shafts and put in imaginary corrals, rear flap of wagon to be let down, a fire lit on the ground and a pot of coffee boiled.

Then a Roman race and a relay race. And Idaho Bill in his alligator hide boots chewed his cigar all the while as if to him all the horses belonged, and the president of the reunion galloped from point to point of the arena judging the competitors in each race. And all the while a brass band played "I'm Nobody's Darling" and kindred airs.

In the evenings after all these doings there were cowboy dances and a rolling up and down Las Vegas' streets of a vaunting, leather-lined crowd. Some still rode about on their horses, but most had taken their steeds to their "corrals" and thrown them out their armfuls of green alfalfa for the night. The legless cowboy in his crimson shirt still rode his ebony horse and had evidently found liquor, for he rode into the main entrance of Las Vegas' only fine hotel, clattered round the stone hall and stood with his horse in the doorway of the main dining room, asking in a stentorian voice for a roast beef sandwich. The pallor in the faces of some Easterners who had "stopped off" on the way to California was most apparent. "Why don't they phone the police?" said one old man, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.

But the cowboy kept quite calm and, unloosing his rope, made a pass to rope the old man and roped a young girl with chestnut hair instead. She laughed, but was not a little alarmed, so the cowboy unloosed her and lassoed the cashier at the desk instead, and then the hotel manager. Then they brought him his beef sandwich, and with a splutter of hoofs he rode out of the hotel into the gay streets again.

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