Cowboy Life on the Sidetrack: Being an Extremely Humorous & Sarcastic Story of the Trials & Tribulations Endured by a Party of Stockmen Making a Shipment from the West to the East.Benton, Frank
General
Cowboy Life on the Sidetrack: Being an Extremely Humorous & Sarcastic Story of the Trials & Tribulations Endured by a Party of Stockmen Making a Shipment from the West to the East.
Benton, Frank
Benton, Frank, 1853-1921 -- Anecdotes; Cattle trade -- West (U.S.) -- Anecdotes; Cowboys -- West (U.S.) -- Anecdotes; Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Anecdotes; West (U.S.) -- Social life and customs -- Anecdotes
Years ago Senator Warren, Manager Gleason and some other Massachusetts
Yankees started in the sheep business in southern Wyoming and northern
Colorado, and as the country was large they thought it would be a good
thing to fence in a few hundred thousand acres of government land and
save the grass so fenced in case of hard winters and other things and
graze their sheep in this enclosure only when there was no more grass
around the little homesteads taken here and there by settlers. So hiring
a young German from the Old Country, who couldn't speak a word of
English, to dig the post-holes, they got him a brand-new shovel, a
post-bar about eight feet long, the famous receipt for cooking
jackrabbits, and started him digging near the 27th degree of longitude
west from Washington. Pointing toward the setting sun in the west, they
went off and left him. The German was never seen alive again, but he
left a never-ending line of post-holes behind him. The Warren Live Stock
Company, it is said, put on a great many men setting the posts in these
holes and stringing barbed wire on them, and although they kept ever
increasing the force that built the fence, yet they never caught up with
the German, and time after time the post-setters would come to the top
of a high hill or a range of mountains and thought they would come in
sight of the German, only to see a long line of post-holes stretching
away over hill and valley towards the setting sun.
After a while the Mormons along the line of Utah and Wyoming complained
of seeing a ghost about the time they drove their cows home of an
evening. They said it was a German with grizzled locks and flowing
beard, with a large meerschaum pipe in his mouth and a shovel in one
hand from which the blade was worn down to the handle and a post-bar no
bigger than a drag tooth in the other hand. He was always looking toward
the setting sun, shading his eyes with his hand and muttering these
words: "Das sinkende Sonne, ich fange sie nicht."
But when they approached close to him, or spoke to him, he immediately
vanished. When the ghost wasn't disturbed it seemed to be digging holes.
It would go through the motions of digging a hole in the ground, then
rising up, take thirteen steps in a westerly direction, look back to see
if the line was straight, dig another hole, and go on. Sometimes the
ghost seemed to be studying a well-worn piece of paper, which was
undoubtedly the receipt for cooking jackrabbits, and would mutter in
German, "O wohene, O wohene ist er gegangen, mit Schwanz so kurz und Ohr
so lang? O wohene ist mein Hase gegangen?"
After awhile the ghost began to appear in western Utah and still later
on in Nevada, always digging a never-ending imaginary line of
post-holes. No one never knew where the actual post-holes left off and
the imaginary ones commenced.
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