Cowboy Wisdom (4 page)

—N. R. D
AVIS
Cheyenne, Wyoming c. 1870

I
have been on cow hunts when there were as many as one hundred men working together from different counties. Stockmen of today
do not know anything about the hard work and strenuous times we encountered in those days. Sometimes we would be out for weeks
at a time, starting every morning at daylight, and probably not getting in before dark, tired and hungry, and having to do
without dinner all day. Our fare consisted of cornbread, black coffee, and plenty of good beef.

—W
ILLIAM
J. B
ENNETT
Pearsall, Texas 1920

O
f all places in the world, traviling in the mountains is the most apt to breed contentions and quarrils. The only way to keep
out of it is to say but little, and mind your own business exclusively.

—A
NONYMOUS
Colorado c. 1870

A
ll range is not the same, nutrients and conditions vary greatly; and all country is not of equal value. Where a cowboy in
eastern Montana may be able to run a cow per acre, it might take twenty acres to run a cow in Western Colorado, and fifty
acres more to run a single bovine in the deserts of the Great Basin.

—C. J. H
ADLEY
Publisher-Editor,
Range
Magazine
Carson City, Nevada 1994

A
typical cowboy direction: “Head out to that juniper, turn left, go west to the Rocky Mountains and may the Good Lord bless
your skies.”

—R
OBERT
R
EDFORD
Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming 1975

Y
ou get yourself lost and you’re playing with trouble. No matter whether you’re out on a high plain or down in some forest,
you got to find water to find your way home. What I do is I scout out a trail broke by any grazing animal—don’t matter whether
it’s deer or cattle or what—and follow that trail, because it eventually leads to water. Then, when you find a little stream
or creek or whatever it is, you follow it down a valley, and not up. Going up a valley takes you nowhere but nearer to God,
and that’s what you want to avoid, frankly. But if you follow water downstream far enough, you’ll come to people, guaranteed.
Of course, they may be lost, too. In fact, most people are lost most of the time, so if you’re one of ’em, don’t feel too
bad.

—F. M. M
EAGHER
Virginia City, Montana 1921

[
B
efore bedding down for the night] find out what relief you are to go on, who to call and where they will sleep, so you won’t
be waking up everybody in camp to find the right man. It makes a cowpuncher fighting mad to wake him up from his needed sleep
when not wanted.

Sleep with pants on and stuffed in your socks. Never take the spurs off your boots. Put your boots down first, your chaps
on top of them, and your jacket over all for a pillow. It’s nice to leave your boots outside in the weather and find when
you try to pull them on in a hurry that they are either froze stiff as dry rawhide or full of rainwater.

Have everything ready to rise up, fling on, and skin out like a flash of lightening if there is a stampede, or to get out
on time when you are called to go on guard. Remember that the safety of the herd depends on good ponies and good men ready
to roll the instant they are needed. If the cattle are restless and there is liability of a stampede, you’d better go to bed
just as you are—hat, jacket, pants, boots, spurs, chaps; and if snowing, or raining, your slicker, too—all on. A cowpuncher
can sleep anyhow.

—
Trinidad Weekly News
Trinidad, Colorado July 20, 1882

Y
ou have to be careful how you wake a cowboy. Some men will kill you if you touch ’em while they’re sleeping, kill you before
they even open their eyes to see who’s there. Most times, somebody’d just yell loud, and that was safer. My favorite jump-up
holler was, “Wake up, snakes, and bite the biscuit!” That got me up right quick.

—L
ADDY
N
EWMAN
Aurora, Colorado 1911

T
o understand ranch lingo all yuh have to do is know in advance what the other feller means an’ then pay no attention to what
he says.

—P
HILIP
A
SHTON
R
OLLINS
Cheyenne, Wyoming 1922

• Rheumatism:
  Take an empty whiskey bottle about half full of vinegar; put in a handful of large red ants. Shake well and apply internally
  and externally.
  

—M
RS
. G
EO
. R. G
ILLETTE
San Antonio, Texas 1890

• Whooping cough:
  Drink liberal quantities of mare’s milk.
  

—M
ARVIN
H
UNTER
Bandera, Texasc. 1900

• Foot rot in goats:
  Make a mixture of the following in an old wooden bucket: Two teaspoonfuls of alum, two and one-half teaspoonfuls of turpentine
  and one and a half gallons of water. Wash the goat’s feet in this. It is enough for one hundred goats.
  

—A
NONYMOUS PAMPHLET
c. 1890

• Horse tetanus:
  Founder and lockjaw caused by overheating can be cured by driving eighteen or twenty nails—make three rows of them—in a board
  so that the sharp points stick out from a quarter to half an inch. Then lay the board on the horse’s forehead and hit the
  board with a hammer. I have seen my father cure more than a hundred horses which had lockjaw by hitting this board a wallop.
  

—J
OHN
G
RISSOM
San Antonio, Texas 1888

• Blisters from hot grease, or for frostbitten feet, fingers, or ears:
  Scrape a raw Irish potato and apply to the parts affected.
  

—A
LBERT
W
EST
Uvalde, Texas c. 1890

• Toothache:
  A
  chaw of tobacco’s good.
  

—H
OPALONG
C
ASSIDY

• Worse toothache:
  Cut the first skin off the “frog” of a horse’s front hoof, and then put the skin over the fire and char it until it crumbles,
  and put it in the tooth.
  

—P
ETE
A
NDERWALD
Bandera, Texas c. 1900

• Horse gas:
  A positively O.K. remedy for colic in a horse is to take a tablespoon full of turpentine—or, if you’d rather, take two tablespoon
  full of turpentine—and put the turpentine in a shallow saucer, and then hold the saucer to the horse’s navel. The astonishing
  thing about this remedio is the immediate disappearance of the turpentine. It disappears right while you’re looking at it.
  

—F
ROST
W
OODHULL
San Antonio, Texas c. 1930

• Baby colic:
  Take teaspoonful of soot in a cloth, pour over three tablespoonfuls of hot water, let steep a few minutes. Give baby teaspoonful
  every half hour.
  

—A
NONYMOUS PAMPHLET
c. 1890

• Hair loss:
  One of the best hair tonics is to boil and wash the head with sotol (
  Dasylirion texanum
  ). It will just make hair grow where there ain’t no hair.
  

—F
ROST
W
OODHULL
San Antonio, Texas c. 1930

• Hay Fever:
  An absolutely positive cure for hay fever is to smoke coffee grounds in a pipe.
  

—F
ROST
W
OODHULL
San Antonio, Texas c. 1930