Memories of Old Montana

by Con Price

I had a little Spanish horse in my string, didn’t weigh over 900 pounds, built kind of squatty and close to the ground, about 15 years old, but he knew more about working cattle than lots of men. I caught him. We went back to the roundup and started to work. I stayed on the outside of the bunch with my eye on this old bird. The boys had gotten out about 50 head when someone got too close to this old steer, and here he comes as fast as he could run, headed for the Badlands! I had a big grass rope about 40 feet long and had one end tied hard and fast to the saddle horn and when he came out of the bunch my little horse was watching him and went right along with him. I run him about 50 yards. He was going down a hill. I dropped my loop over his pretty horns and let him jump over the slack with his front feet, and turned my horse the other way as fast as he could run. When that rope tightened that steer went about 10 feet high and hit the ground with his head doubled under his body. One of his pretty horns was broken off right close to his head and he was bleeding badly, and he was bawling like a calf—where otherwise he would only snort when you got in his way.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the boys that I had made the bet with had framed on me—and it was understood among them that nobody was to help me—just to have a joke on me if the steer got away.

So after a few minutes, when nobody came to help me, I let him up with the rope still on him. The fall had taken most of the sap out of him. He made a kind of a weak attempt to get to my horse, so I busted him again. The next time he got up I led him back to the roundup and into the bunch where I wanted him, throwed him down, took the rope off, and he never made a break to get away. We took him to the railroad and shipped him to Chicago. He was a rather funny looking old fellow with one of his long pretty horns gone and blood dried all over his face. I don’t think he made very good eating but I tallied him: “One beef steer shipped to Chicago.”

In the year of 1897 the Circle Diamond outfit turned loose 5,000 head of Arizona yearlings on their range on Milk River in Montana and instead of settling down and locating there they kept on going north until the outfit heard of some of them 200 miles up in Canada.

So they sent an outfit of about 20 men with horses and bed and chuckwagon to bring them back and try to locate them on their own range.

The DHS outfit sent me with them, thinking some of their cattle had drifted with the Arizona’s.

The country was all open—north, south, east and west—for miles (I don’t know how far) and no ranches after we crossed the Canadian border. We didn’t know any particular place to go to find those cattle, so we just wandered around for days, first one direction, then another. After we got as far north as Moose Jaw, which is well north in Canada, we began to see some signs of cattle, and would pick up a few each day. And those cattle hadn’t seen anybody for four or five months and were plenty wild and, of course, we had to nightherd those cattle every night. And badger holes were so thick in that country you could almost compare them to a saltcellar—and the grass was thick and tall so a horse or man couldn’t see the holes. Somebody would get a fall every day and night.

One morning we were making a circle, looking for cattle, and we saw two animals standing on a butte. We got close to them—could tell they were two head of cattle—and away they went like a couple of antelope. We finally got ahead of them and got them stopped. They ran around in a circle for awhile, just like they might be tied together. One wouldn’t get no distance away from the other. When we got them to the roundup and could get a good look at the brands, we found they both belonged to the DHS outfit, and we knew from the Arizona brand on them and the year the outfit bought them as yearlings that they were 13 years old. They were pals and had ranged in that part of the country for several years alone, as we did not find any sign of cattle anywhere within several miles of them.

It was quite a problem to get those two old fellows to the railroad. They were easy to hold in the daytime but at night it took all of one man’s time to watch them two. We would bed the herd down at night and those two would lay down in about the middle of the bunch—and sometimes they would lay ten minutes when they would come slipping through the herd, heading back the way they came from. They wouldn’t make any noise and reminded one of two big cats trying to steal away. When they got to the edge of the herd, the man watching them would holler at them—they would shake their heads and go right back into the herd and lay down for a short time and then try again, and would keep that up all night. We finally got them to the railroad and shipped them to Chicago.

The man that had charge of that Circle Diamond wagon, or that part of the outfit that year was Win Cooper. He came from Jack County, Texas, and was a wonderful cowboy. He used to carry a 45 Colts six-shooter and had the trigger filed so it wouldn’t stand cocked, but fanned the hammer with his thumb. He told me the reason he had his gun fixed that way was for quick action. He could fill the chamber with bullets and start a tomato can rolling and keep it going until his gun was empty. He used to tell me about the gun fights they had in Texas a long time ago ... and I think he sometimes got lonesome for those old feuds and would like to go back and have a little excitement.