My intention, however, in approaching the great cow industry, which, by the way, is anything but an industry, being in fact more like the seductive manner whereby a promissory note acquires 2 per cent. per month without even stopping to spit on its hands, was to refer incidentally to the proposition of an English friend of mine. This friend, seeing at once the great magnitude of the cow industry and the necessity for more and more cowboys, has suggested the idea of establishing a cowboys' college, or training school, for self-made young men who desire to become accomplished. The average Englishman will most always think of something that nobody else would naturally think of. Now, our cattleman would have gone on for years with his great steer emporium without thinking of establishing an institution where a poor boy might go and learn to rope a 4-year-old in such a way as to throw him on his stomach with a sickening thud.
The young Maverick savant could take a kindergarten course in the study of cow brands. Here a wide field opens up to the scholar. The adult steer in the great realm of beef is now a walking Chinese wash bill, a Hindoo poem in the original junk shop alphabet, a four-legged Greek inscription, punctuated with jim-jams, a stenographer's notes of a riot, a bird's-eye view of a premature explosion in a hardware store.
The cowboy who can at once grapple with the great problem of where to put the steer with "B bar B" on left shoulder, "Key circle G" on left side, "Heart D Heart" on right hip, left ear crop, wattle te wattle, and seven hands round with "Dash B Dash" on right shoulder "vented," wattle on dew lap vented, and "P. D. Q.," "C. O. D.," and "N. G." vented on right side, keeping track of transfers, range and post-office of last owner, has certainly got a future, which lies mostly ahead of him.
But now that the idea has been turned loose, I shall look forward to the time when wealthy men who have been in the habit of dying and leaving their money to other institutions, will meet with a change of heart, and begin to endow the cowboys' college, and the Maverick hotbed of broncho sciences.
We live in an age of rapid advancement in all branches of learning, and people who do not rise early in the morning will not retain their position in the procession. I look forward with confidence to the day when no cowboy will undertake to ride the range without a diploma. Educated labor is what we need. Cowboys who can tell you in scientific terms why it is always the biggest steer that eats "pigeon weed" in the spring and why he should swell up and bust on a rising Chicago market.
I hope that the day is not far distant when in the holster of the cowboy we will find the Iliad instead of the killiad, the unabridged dictionary instead of Mr. Remington's great work on homicide. As it is now on the ranges you might ride till your Mexican saddle ached before you would find a cowboy who carries a dictionary with him. For that reason the language used on the general roundup is at times grammatically incorrect, and many of our leading cowboys spell "cavvy-yard" with a "k."
A college for riding, roping, branding, cutting out, corralling, loading and unloading, and handling cattle generally, would be a great boon to our young men, who are at present groping in dark and pitiable ignorance of the habits of the untutored cow. Let the young man first learn how to sit up three nights in succession, through a bad March snow storm and "hold" a herd of restless cattle. Let him then ride through the hot sun and alkali dust a week or two, subsisting on a chunk of disagreeable side pork just large enough to bait a trap. Then let his horse fall on him and injure his constitution and preamble. All these things would give the cow student an idea of how to ride the range. The amateur who has never tried to ride a skittish and sulky range has still a great deal to learn.
Perhaps I have said too much on this subject, but when I get thoroughly awakened on this great porterhouse steak problem I am apt to carry the matter too far.
Overheard in Dudedom.
"Why, Awthaw, what makes youah hand twemble so?"