Riding wild horses is the favorite sport of the cowboys, and the untamed horse is a fearsome and beautiful beast. And he is not ill treated. There is a great deal about the inclosure which reminds one of the bull ring, but not its cruelty. The men take a chance of death; the animals do not. In the bronk-riding competition the horse is beguiled into a heavily timbered narrow pen where a slip-saddle and halter are put on him without his knowing it. The rider gets down gently on to his back from the wooden wall. Then when the president gives the word "Turn him out!" a door swings free and out plunges the horse. The cowboy beats him to the one side and to the other with his felt hat, and spurs him forward, and the horse behaves like a mad dromedary, makes double humps of his back, leaps right in air, and turns about and about. When the cowboy has been on for one minute the man in the brown shirt fires his revolver in the air and five or six cowboys race to the rider to rescue him from the bolting, careening horse. This is often the most exciting part of the event. It may develop into a terrific race. Sometimes, before the rider can be lifted from the wild horse to another cowboy's horse, or safely dismounted, the bronco has crashed right through the wooden inclosure. That was what happened to Buck Thompson, on Orphan Boy, and the wild horse got rid of him on the fence as it pounded right through it.
The little town of Las Vegas, meaning The Meadows, was crowded with visitors, some of them of an outlandish type that seldom strays from home. One dame in a restaurant, dressed in the style of the early nineties, asked us what part we came from. When I said "England" she turned to her husband with—
"Lord's sake, what do you know about that?"
Then she turned to me and asked—
"Did you come all the way by car?"
The Secretary of the Reunion undertook to house most people who came, and he sat at a desk with a telephone and kept the town awake asking all and sundry for hospitality for visitors. This secretary, I discovered afterwards, was a poet.
My wife and I were happily accommodated in a house where beside ourselves were three very eager cowboys, and in the corral at the back were their horses. We naturally were deeply interested in their fortunes. The first day was not so good for them, but on the second morning with the roping and bull dogging they shone. I think all three won prizes.
I was very eager to see the bull dogging, which is a unique western sport. Jack Thorp and his wife and the artist Penhallow Henderson, who were with us at the round-up, were glowing in their pride in it, and told some amusing stories in connection with it. The cowboys, when they joined the Army, commonly said they were off to "bull dog the Kaiser." Bull dogging started in Texas, and a Negro named Pickett is sometimes reputed as the originator of the sport. Pickett one day entered the bull ring at Juarez on the other side of the Mexican line and interrupted a bull fight by bull dogging the bull.
Juarez is on the other side of the Rio Grande from El Paso. Americans go back and forth all the while, and on Sundays many are not averse to seeing a bull fight there. It is a rough-and-tumble city; the bull ring is just a stone amphitheater.