I remember one time the old man hired a stranger from Oregon to ride a
rough string. Nobody knew the boy but he claimed to be a bronc fighter.
The first horse he rode very near throwed him off. When someone caught
the horse he was in a bad way, had lost both stirrups and his bridle
reins. Someone made the remark he thought that fellow would ride that
horse and whip him. The old man said he could if he had another hand, as
he had to use the two he had to hang onto the saddle horn.
In those days the way we caught our saddle horses, when we made camp we
pulled the bedwagon up behind the chuckwagon and tied a long rope to the
front wheel of the chuckwagon and one to the hind wheel of the bedwagon.
Then a man held up each end of those ropes and the horse wrangler took
care of the gap. In that way we could corral quite a large bunch of
saddle horses. But there was always some broncs in the bunch and the
boys had to be careful in catching their horses that they didn’t scare
them and cause them to break through the ropes.
So the old man gave orders for one man at a time to catch his horse—but
Jim had hired a new man that was very fond of roping and he didn’t
always obey orders, and he used a loop half as big as the corral. So
naturally, when he throwed his big loop in among those horses he caught
something. Sometimes two or three head of horses at once. Sometimes he
caught one around the body and would cause the horses to stampede. The
old man had told him several times in a nice way to be careful of that
big loop.
This morning Jim was in the corral trying to catch his horse. It wasn’t
quite daylight yet and the fellow didn’t see him. So he throwed that big
loop in there and caught two broncs, the brake on the bedwagon and the
old man—all in one loop. And believe me there was some commotion—the
broncs jumping and the old man a-hollering. Charlie Russell helped Jim
get out of the mix-up and he said Jim bucked worse than the broncs. He
lost his hat and his big pipe and hurt his foot.
When he got straightened out, he went hunting this fellow. He said,
“Where is that big loop S.B.?” and when he found him he told him plenty.
He said, “I don’t think you are a cowboy at all. I think you are a damn
sailor the way you handle a rope. If I ever see you throw another rope
in that corral, I will shoot you. Somebody else will catch your horse
from now on.” But he didn’t fire him, and the fellow was pretty tame
afterwards.
There was a great friendship existed among those old cowboys of those
days. They would quarrel among themselves and sometimes one would think
they were bitter enemies, but if one of them got sick or hurt, even with
their small wages they would soon raise a few hundred dollars for him,
and as there was no compensation law those days it meant a great deal to
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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