“The first drive in the morning would probably be to 10 o’clock, or later, owing to the weather and distance between favorable camping grounds. Cattle were then unyoked and the men got their first meal of the day. The cattle were driven in and yoked for the second drive any time from 2 to 4 o’clock, the time of starting being governed by the heat, two drives of about five to seven hours each being made each day. The rate of travel was about two miles an hour, or from 20 to 25 miles a day, the condition of the roads and the heat governing. “This, then, was the regular daily routine, though the yoking up of cattle was often attended with difficulty. Many freighting trains started from the Missouri river with not more than two yoke of cattle in the six that comprised each team, that had ever worn a yoke before. Many had to be ‘roped,’ and not a few of the wildest, as the Texas and Cherokee varieties, were permitted to wear their yokes continually, for weeks. “While the bull-whacker’s life was full of that adventure and romance that possessed its fascination, there were some very rough sides to it, though taking it all in all, it afforded an experience that few indeed would part with, and in after years there is nothing that I recall with more genuine pleasure than life in the camps upon the plains during the freighting days. “In an aggregation of men such as manned the prairie schooners of thirty odd years ago there were some very peculiar characters. This was especially true of those old ‘Desert Tars,’ who for the time made bullwacking a profession and who were never so happy as when swinging a twenty-foot whip over a string of steers. “These droll people bore nicknames suggested by characteristics or conditions, and there were few indeed who responded to any other name, in fact, I have been intimately associated with men about the camp fire for months and never knew their real name. “A tall, slender person might be known as ‘Lengthy’ or ‘Slim’; a short, stout one as ‘Shorty’ or ‘Stub-and-Twist.’ We had in one of our trains ‘Kentuck,’ who happened to hail from the Blue Grass State, also ‘Sucker Ike,’ who was from Illinois; ‘Buckeye Bill’ was from Ohio, while ‘Hawkeye Hank’ was from Iowa. ‘Hoosier Dave’ was from Posey County, while ‘Yank’ hailed from the far east; ‘Mormon Jack’ was an old-time bullwhacker who used to pass himself off for a Mormon when it suited his convenience; ‘Bishop Lee’ also played Mormon when we were over in the Salt Lake Valley; the man with red or auburn hair was invariably called ‘Reddy,’ ‘Sandy’ or ‘Pinky,’ while another whose facial architecture was of the Romanesque style would be called ‘Nosey.’