“All you foremen who have been over the Chisholm Trail remember the
stage-stand called Bull Foot, but possibly some of the boys haven’t.
Well, no matter, it’s just about midway between Little Turkey Creek and
Buffalo Springs on that trail, where it runs through the Cherokee
Strip. I worked one year in that northern country—lots of Texas boys
there too. It was just about the time they began to stock that country
with Texas steers, and we rode lines to keep our cattle on their range.
You bet, there was riding to do in that country then. The first few
months that these Southern steers are turned loose on a new range,
Lord! but they do love to drift against a breeze. In any kind of a
rain-storm, they’ll travel farther in a night than a whole outfit can
turn them back in a day.
“Our camp was on the Salt Fork of the Cimarron, and late in the fall
when all the beeves had been shipped, the outfit were riding lines and
loose-herding a lot of Texas yearlings, and mixed cattle, natives to
that range. Up in that country they have Indian summer and Squaw
winter, both occurring in the fall. They have lots of funny weather up
there. Well, late one evening that fall there came an early squall of
Squaw winter, sleeted and spit snow wickedly. The next morning there
wasn’t a hoof in sight, and shortly after daybreak we were riding deep
in our saddles to catch the lead drift of our cattle. After a hard
day’s ride, we found that we were out several hundred head, principally
yearlings of the through Texas stock. You all know how locoed a bunch
of dogies can get—we hunted for three days and for fifty miles in every
direction, and neither hide, hair, nor hoof could we find. It was while
we were hunting these cattle that my yarn commences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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