I really had no business on that side of the ravine, with those cattle feeding there—but I guess I was, as always, a little too venturesome. I knew that herd had some bad actors in it. In fact, I had been warned to never get off my horse when riding as relief herder of that same herd, on several occasions. And one time while all alone at the dinner hour my mount, in jumping a ditch, broke the saddle girth and spilled me on a rattlesnake infested prairie, amongst those longhorns—with not a tree in sight.
However, nothing untoward happened. Had my luck been running true to form, there should have been at least one rattlesnake coiled on the margin of the shallow ditch into which I squeezed myself, and waited in misery for the day herder to return. As I lay in the ditch I just had to recall the time, a short while before, when a rattlesnake, coiled by a cowpath, struck as I trotted past—barefoot, of course—and got his fangs hooked in my trouser leg, requiring two wild jumps to dislodge his snakeship.
The herd was owned by Than Morris and Abe Williams, the latter a brother of Mrs. Jake Wolfley. Morris and Wolfley were brothers-in-law. John Taylor, herder, was a son of Hebe Taylor, of Atchison. John Taylor was later bailiff of the Nemaha county court, in Seneca. And he was the father of Earl W. Taylor for whom the Seneca American Legion Post was named. Hebe Taylor also, at one time, ran cattle in the open country southwest of Wetmore — with Ed. Keggin.
Charley went straight to the Morris general store in Wetmore and told Than of my predicament, and Morris immediately rounded up two cowpunchers. John Taylor, working with a herd to the southwest, chanced to be in town, and rode out with Abe Williams.
The herd had grazed on past my tree-perch. The unruly steer did not follow, but if the critter was capable of the sound thinking I was willing to credit him with, “I betcha” he always wished he had. A good cowhand could play a tune with a cattlewhip on a critter’s rump, under dead run. And John Taylor was good. He lashed his short-handled 10-foot whip overhead to the steer’s rump, right and left, with rhythmic timing, making the hair fly with each crack. The steer’s hindparts, seemingly trying to outrun his foreparts, swung to the right and swung to the left with clocklike regularity—and he thus wove himself deep into the herd, bawling “bloody murder.”
When told of John Taylor’s adroitness with the whip, my father said, “I wouldn’t care to tan his hide”—meaning the steer’s, of course. While father bought the hides from the lost dead of all those big herds—sometimes the losses in the early spring were heavy—he tanned only a few of them. He didn’t like to tan a mutilated hide, nor the hide of a branded critter—and he wouldn’t tan a grubby murrain hide.
Thus it was, I herded the cattle that produced the hides that made the leather which I helped make into shoes—all while still in my teens. My apprenticeship as a shoemaker began by holding a candle for my father to work by, at night. And if you could think it was not a wearying task for a sleepy boy, you can think again. The light would have to be shifted from side to side with each stitch as he sewed the soles on shoes. By midnight he usually ran out of “endearing” terms by which to bring me to attention—and he was willing to call it a day. Sometimes my mother would relieve me of this chore, but too often at such times she would be engaged in sewing up the side seams of a new boot, with awl and waxed thread. While I did a lot of repair work satisfactorily, I made out and out only three pairs of shoes. And though always behind with his orders, my father very wisely demanded that I make them all to my own measures.
Might add that we boys, sons of the tanner, and other rough and ready town boys—just to be doing something of our very own—tanned, in the big leather vats, squirrel hides, coon skins, and, of all things, two rattlesnake skins. Wes Shuemaker proudly wore the belt made of those rattlesnake skins for a long time.
Dr. Holland was another Atchison man who, in partnership with his brother-in-law, Mr. Prunty, of Soldier, ran a large herd southwest of town. His corral, a 10-acre pine board enclosure, was in the northwest corner of the Harry Cawood quarter. The land was then owned by Billy Cline, of Soldier. Where there were no corrals, a night herder would have to stay with the cattle.
The Bradford spring—now known as the Joe Pfrang spring—gushing up from a hilltop, was the main attraction for those early day cattlemen. Just how the free range was divided up to carry several individual herds, without clashing, I do not know—but there were no cattle feuds, and no gunplay.