Memories of Old Montana

by Con Price

When I got to Helena I heard Charlie Russell was in Cascade and as I was badly in need of money, I headed for there and found him batching in a cabin with plenty grub—and he sure looked good to me.

After my experience in Cripple Creek I decided that I belonged back on the range among the cows, and wrote to the foreman of the DHS outfit at Shelby, Montana, for a job. I had known him several years before and he told me to come on, he would give me work. So after being outfitted by Charlie, which meant everything a cowboy needed, including some money, I went to Shelby.

I worked for the DHS outfit the first time in 1889 for only one season. They were one of the pioneer cow outfits of Montana and was owned by Granville Stuart and Reese Anderson, and were located near Fort Maginnis and ranged on Flat Willow country in the year of 1887. They moved all their cattle north of the Missouri River on what was known as the Little Rocky Range. They swam this big herd across the Missouri River at an old steamboat landing called Rocky Point.

The cowboys had a dance while I was in Shelby that I believe there is a record of in the files of some of the old newspapers of that day.

There was an opera troupe on their way to Spokane, Washington. For some reason they were sidetracked at Shelby and as they were from New York, some of the ladies had never seen a cowboy, so they said (I guess they thought cowboys eat grass and were only half human). Anyway, some of them left the train and went to the hotel where the dance was going on and mingled with the crowd and as those cowboys were very easy for a lady to get acquainted with and as there was considerable liquor consumed, the dance was a great success and the ladies found the boys much nicer than they had anticipated and invited some of them over to their train.

Now the male population of the troupe did not take to the cowboys too well and finally ordered them out of the car which, of course, insulted the boys and a fight started. But some of these fellows in the troupe were good boxers and the cowboys didn’t have a chance in a fist fight, so they brought their guns into the play. They didn’t shoot anyone but made the car very smoky, and the troupe quit the car and most of them scattered out in the sagebrush, Shelby being a little cow town on the Great Northern Railroad.

It seems that the worst thing that happened was one of the cowboys shot a lantern out of a brakeman’s hand. So in a few days there was railroad officials around there, thick as flies, but they couldn’t get any information and there wasn’t a cowboy in fifty miles of Shelby. The railroad sent several detectives there at different times but the population of the town was all in sympathy with the cowboys and nobody knew any cowboy’s name that attended the dance. So they could not get any evidence and didn’t know where to find anyone to arrest, and had to drop the matter.

My old boss was one of the leaders in that mix-up and he, of course, made a couple of days ride away from Shelby. It happened he stayed a few days in a locality where there was considerable stock rustling going on and he didn’t go to that part of the country very often, so his presence there created quite a commotion and fear among those fellows living there, as they thought he was after them. But the old man was simply dodging the railroad officials and was more frightened than they were.

At that time the DHS ran two outfits—one at Shelby and one at Malta on Milk River about two hundred miles apart. Those big outfits in the course of a few years all accumulated quite a few spoiled horses for different reasons, sometimes from bad breaking and sometimes on account of putting strange riders on them so often, sometimes from getting away when they were half broke, and maybe not finding them for a year. They would then be harder to handle than a green bronc and would buck a few riders off. They would get pretty tough and the average cowboy could not ride them. So the boss would hire a bronc fighter to ride the rough string. A strange thing about it was that most of those kind of horses were the best ones in the bunch when they were thoroughly broke.

The DHS had accumulated about twenty head of those kind of horses. So the boss sent me to Malta to ride some of those horses. They also hired another fellow to help me. The only name I ever knew for him was “Red Neck Davis” and he was a good bronc fighter.