The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

Of the New York men who came on to San Antonio, the two Jacob boys are more frequently and more heartily spoken of by the Texans than almost any other Eastern men who have been there. They did not, as the others so often do, hire a foreman, and spend their days in the San Antonio Club, but rode the ranch themselves, and could cut out and brand and rope with any of those born on a range. Their ranch, the Santa Marta, still flourishes, although they have become absentee landlords, and have given up chasing wild steers in Texas in favor of the foxes at Rockaway.

A ranch which marks the exception in the rule of failures of our English cousins is that of Alfred Giles in Kendal and Kerr counties. It covers about thirteen thousand acres, and a very fine breed of polled Angus cattle are bred on it. Indeed, the tendency all over Texas at present is to cultivate certain well-known breeds, and not, as formerly, to be content with the famous long-horned steer and the Texan pony. Mr. Giles’s ranch, the Hillingdon, looks in the summer, when the imported Scotch cattle are grazing over it, like a bit out of the Lake country. Walnut, cherry, ash, and oak grow on this ranch, and the maidenhair-fern is everywhere, and the flowers are boundless in profusion and variety.

The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed the cowboy as a picturesque element of recklessness and lawlessness in south-west Texas. It suppressed him and localized him and limited him to his own range, and made his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb-wire fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to another, and the man of fifteen thousand acres would over-stock, knowing that when his cattle could not find enough pasturage on his range they would move over to the range of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently, when the men who could afford it began to fence their ranges, the smaller owners who had over-bred, saw that their cattle would starve, and so cut the fences in order to get back to the pastures which they had used so long. This, and the shutting off of water-tanks and of long-used trails brought on the barb-wire fence wars which raged long and fiercely between the cowboys and fence men of rival ranches and the Texas Rangers. The barb-wire fences did more than this; they shut off the great trails that stretched from Corpus Christi through the Pan Handle of Texas, and on up through New Mexico and Colorado and through the Indian Territory to Dodge City. The coming of the railroad also made this trailing of cattle to the markets superfluous, and almost destroyed one of the most remarkable features of the West. This trail was not, of course, an actual trail, and marked as such, but a general driveway forty miles wide and thousands of miles long. The herds of cattle that were driven over it numbered from three hundred to three thousand head, and were moving constantly from the early spring to the late fall.

FIXING A BREAK IN THE WIRE FENCE

No caravan route in the far Eastern countries can equal this six months’ journey through three different States, and through all changes of weather and climate, and in the face of constant danger and anxiety. This procession of countless cattle on their slow march to the north was one of the most interesting and distinctive features of the West.

An “outfit” for this expedition would consist of as many cowboys as were needed to hold the herd together, a wagon, with the cook and the tents, and extra ponies for the riders. In the morning the camp-wagon pushed on ahead to a suitable resting-place for the night, and when the herd arrived later, moving, on an average, fifteen miles a day, and grazing as it went, the men would find the supper ready and the tents pitched. And then those who were to watch that night would circle slowly around the great army of cattle, driving them in closer and closer together, and singing as they rode, to put them to sleep. This seems an absurdity to the Eastern mind, but the familiar sounds quieted and satisfied these great stupid animals that can be soothed like a child with a nursery rhyme, and when frightened cannot be stopped by a river. The boys rode slowly and patiently until one and then another of the herd would stumble clumsily to the ground, and others near would follow, and at last the whole great herd would be silent and immovable in sleep. But the watchfulness of the sentries could never relax. Some chance noise—the shaking of a saddle, some cry of a wild animal, or the scent of distant water carried by a chance breeze across the prairie, or nothing but sheer blind wantonness—would start one of the sleeping mass to his feet with a snort, and in an instant the whole great herd would go tearing madly over the prairie, tossing their horns and bellowing, and filled with a wild, unreasoning terror. And then the skill and daring of the cowboy was put to its severest test, as he saw his master’s income disappearing towards a cañon or a river, or to lose itself in the brush. And the cowboy who tried to head off and drive back this galloping army of frantic animals had to ride a race that meant his life if his horse made a misstep; and as the horse’s feet often did slip, there would be found in the morning somewhere in the trail of the stampeding cattle a horrid mass of blood and flesh and leather.

Do you wonder, then, after this half-year of weary, restless riding by day, and sleepless anxiety and watching under the stars by night, that when the lights of Dodge City showed across the prairie, the cowboy kicked his feet out of his stirrups, drove the blood out of the pony’s sides, and “came in to town” with both guns going at once, and yelling as though the pent-up speech of the past six months of loneliness was striving for proper utterance?

The cowboy cannot be overestimated as a picturesque figure; all that has been written about him and all the illustrations that have been made of him fail to familiarize him, and to spoil the picture he makes when one sees him for the first time racing across a range outlined against the sky, with his handkerchief flying out behind, his sombrero bent back by the wind, and his gauntlets and broad leather leggings showing above and at the side of his galloping pony. And his deep seat in the saddle, with his legs hanging straight to the long stirrups, the movement of his body as it sways and bends, and his utter unconsciousness of the animal beneath him would make a German riding-master, an English jockey, or the best cross-country rider of a Long Island hunting club shake his head in envy and despair.