The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

Mr. Kleberg, for instance, receives an order from a firm in Chicago calling for one thousand head of cattle. The breed of cattle which the firm wants is grazing in a corner of the range fenced in by barb-wire, and marked pale blue for convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in colors, like a patch-work quilt, which hangs in Mr. Kleberg’s office. When the order is received, he sends a Mexican on a pony to tell the men near that particular pale blue pasture to round up one thousand head of cattle, and at the same time directs his superintendent to send in a few days as many cowboys to that pasture as are needed to “hold” one thousand head of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The boys on the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which one man leads, and from one to another of which they shift their saddles as men do in polo, and go directly to the water-tanks in the ten square miles of land. A cow will not often wander more than two and a half miles from water, and so, with the water-tank (which on the King ranch may be either a well with a wind-mill or a dammed cañon full of rain-water) as a rendezvous, the finding of the cattle is comparatively easy, and ten men can round up one thousand head in a day or two. When they have them all together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station arrive, and take them off.

At the station the agent of the Chicago firm and the agent of the King ranch ride through the herd together, and if they disagree as to the fitness of any one or more of the cattle, an outsider is called in, and his decision is final. The cattle are then driven on to the cars, and Mr. Kleberg’s responsibility is at an end.

In the spring there is a general rounding up, and thousands and thousands of steers are brought in from the different pastures, and those for which contracts have been made during the winter are shipped off to the markets, and the calves are branded.

A SHATTERED IDOL

Texas is the great breeding State from which the cattle are sent north to the better pasture land of Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming Territory, to be fattened up for the markets. The breeding goes on throughout the year, five bulls being pastured with every three hundred cows, in pastures of from one thousand to ten thousand acres in extent. About ninety per cent. of the cows calve, and the branding of these calves is one of the most important duties of the spring work. They are driven into a pen through a wooden chute, and as they leave the chute are caught by the legs and thrown over on the side, and one of a dozen hot irons burning in an open fire is pressed against the flank, and, on the King ranch, on the nose.

An animal bearing one of the rough hall-marks of the ranchman is more respected than a dog with a silver collar around his neck, and the number of brands now registered in the State capital runs up to the thousands. On some ranches each of the family has his or her especial brand; and one young girl who came out in New York last winter is known throughout lower Texas only as “the owner of the Triangle brand,” and is much respected in consequence, as it is borne by thousands of wandering cattle. The separating of the cattle at the spring round-up is accomplished on the King ranch by means of a cutting pen, a somewhat ingenious trap at the end of a chute. One end of this chute opens on the prairie, and the other runs into four different pens guarded by a swinging gate, so hung that by a movement of the foot by the man sitting over the gate the chute can be extended into any one of the four pens. With this mules, steers, horses, and ponies can be fed into the chute together, and each arrive in his proper pen until the number for which the different orders call is filled.

It is rather difficult to imagine one solitary family occupying a territory larger than some of the Eastern States—an area of territory that would in the East support a State capital, with a Governor and Legislature, and numerous small towns, with competing railroad systems and rival base-ball nines. And all that may be said of this side of the question of ranch life is that when we are within Mrs. King’s house we would imagine it was one of twenty others touching shoulder to shoulder on Madison Avenue, and that the distant cry of the coyotes at night is all that tells us that the hansoms are not rushing up and down before the door.

SNAPPING A ROPE ON A HORSE’S FOOT