The Prairie Schooner

by William Francis Hooker

Yoking and stringing out the oxen is the next operation, and a short one in a well regulated outfit. Twenty minutes, usually, from the time the bulls are driven in, the lead team is moving, and when the "outfit," as every train is called, is well under way, the lead wagon is perhaps a half mile from the last one, which is the mess wagon, containing the provisions, cooking utensils, levers for raising a load of four or five tons, the iron jacks, extra tires, coils of rope, pulleys, wheels, extra spokes, bars of iron, and almost always a small forge—a regular wrecking outfit.

In hot summer weather on fair roads a bull train would make four or five miles before the sun was high enough to burn—usually nine o'clock. Then, if the camp was to be a "wet" one—at a creek, river or spring—there would be a "layover" until four o'clock in the afternoon, during which time the boys could sleep under a wagon, wash their clothes, or if in a creek or river bottom, shoulder a gun and look for moccasin, lodge pole or bear tracks.

All day long, however, the men who were on the cook trick would make bread in Dutch ovens. And let me tell you, no bull outfit ever stopped for a long mid-day rest without putting on a huge kettle of beans, for the army or white bean was the staple food in those days; and there was always, on these long mid-day stops, plenty of soup.

Perhaps one of the boys in his meanderings up or down the creek would bag a deer. If he wandered out upon the plain he was sure of an antelope, if he was a good shot. The deer kept to the trees along the rivers and the hills, while the antelopes' territory was the open plain, hard to get at unless the plain were rolling, and the hunter could be in the right place as regards the wind.

Sometimes there were poker games, usually freeze-out, which the men played with plug tobacco cut up into small cubes. Others would spend their time braiding whips or mending clothing.

The bullwhacker's whip not only made a tenderfoot open his eyes with wonder, but it usually shocked him. It was something he had never seen before, and if he had been told that a man of ordinary strength would be able to wield it he would have been decidedly incredulous.

Differing from a cowboy's or herder's whip, the bullwhip lash was attached to a stalk of hickory or white ash three feet long upon which the whacker could firmly plant both hands. The lash at the butt, which was attached to the stick by a soft strip of buckskin, formed in a loop or swivel, frequently was more than an inch thick. These lashes were from eighteen to more than twenty feet long and were graduated in thickness from this great bulk to the tip, which was the thickness of a lead pencil. The number of strands in a bullwhip were also graduated. At the butt there were as many strands as the maker—usually the bullwhacker—could weave, often fourteen. At the tip, this number was reduced to six. The top, and down to six or eight feet from the end, the whip was made of leather, often old boot tops. The rest was of tough buckskin or elkskin. But on the very tip of the whip—the business end—was a "popper" of buckskin cut in the shape of a long V, the bottom end of the V running into a strand which was braided into the tip.

The bullwhacker, when using this instrument, first threw it out before him upon the ground; then by the use of all his strength he swung it in over his head, to the right, often whirling it several times before he let it go upon the back of the bull he wanted to reach.

To the man who never saw this operation before, there was a shock, for as the whip landed on the bull the popper made a roar like the report of a cannon.

As a matter of fact the bull was uninjured, unless the bullwhacker was careless and allowed his popper to strike a tender spot, the nose, an eye or the belly.