I remember a very amusing incident on a roundup. We had been out on the
range for about three months, and nobody had shaved. We came into a
little town (a shipping point) and when we had got the cattle all loaded
on the train, we found out there was a barber shop in town, so we all
patronized it, but there was one stingy old fellow in the outfit that
wouldn’t spend a quarter to get shaved, so when we got started back on
the range, he felt out of place, as we were all shaved and slicked up.
He asked if there was anyone in the outfit that could shave him. I told
him I could. Now I had never shaved a man in my life, the cook had an
old razor in the Mess box, and God knows when it had been sharpened, (we
had no safety razors those days). I started in on him, of course his
beard was full of sand and dust, and I used cold water and lye soap to
make the lather. When I got to working on him, the blood followed the
razor wherever I touched him. We didn’t have any mirror so he couldn’t
see himself bleed. The boys would ask him occasionally how he was
getting along, he said the razor pulled a little but Con was doing fine.
Charlie Russell was laying on his belly looking at the performance, and
he laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. When I got through
with him he looked like he had broke out with the small pox. He picked
scabs off his face for several days, he didn’t complain, but he never
asked me to shave him again. Nobody felt sorry for him because he never
was known to buy a drink, and he had three thousand dollars in the bank,
which was a big fortune to a cowboy.
CHAPTER XX
COWBOY PHILOSOPHY
As I grow older there are rather strange thoughts come to my mind about
cowboys and cow people. I have mingled with most all classes of the
human race and I have some very true and sincere friends among all
classes—but I don’t believe there is any other people in the world that
was as intimate and friendly on short acquaintance as the old time
cowboy and cowman.
They would fight among themselves and some of them would steal from each
other but let one of them get in a tough spot and his clan would come to
his rescue when everybody else had throwed him down, I was on a roundup
on the Moccasin range in Montana in the year 1888 and a small rancher
lost a milk cow. He had come to the round up to ride with us for a few
days to try to find his cow. The next morning we left camp about
daylight and hadn’t went a mile from camp when his horse fell and broke
the man’s leg above the knee. We got the bedwagon and fixed some
blankets in it the best we could and drove him 20 miles to a doctor. The
boys raised three hundred dollars for that fellow ... and none of them
had ever seen him before that day he came to camp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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