Owd Freds very excellent blog about droving(I always love his blogs, I can "see" the past in British farming) inspired me to write one of my own about what I know of droving. Probably everyone knows about the old time cattle drives of the USA, many of the railheads were in Kansas, our state has quite a history of being a "happening place" from the pre-Civil war days of "bleeding Kansas" to the 1880s era of Dodge City and cattle drives. You will have to read the history books for those accounts, what I know firsthand comes from the 1980s to present, and from stories of my grandfathers from the 1920s-1940s.
A given on most cattle farms until recently was the cowhorse. Usually quarter horses, these ranged from well-trained horses that were nearly as smart as a person and with a bond between horse and rider that was unbreakable, to what Granddad described as "convicts" horses that were barely worth owning. Our family tradition from what I can gather tended much more toward the latter than the former, I cannot remember too many horses I could be proud of, and in the stories my dad tells about his dads and granddads various horses, the words "stupid", "slow", and "crazy" pop up with too much regularity for me to claim my family has a history of owning fine saddle horses.
But at least my family was honest in its assessment of our "horsepower". It is much sadder to witness someone who believes their horse is top dollar, when in fact it is not. As a young fellow of about 12 I was amazed when my father gave me a nice bay gelding I named "Thunder". He was actually a pretty good horse, although he got fat as a toad in the summer, so fat I could barely ride him, and he had a terrible problem with gas. Unless you galloped most of the time you would ride in a haze of foul smelling methane gas on windless days, luckily those are rare in Kansas. Riding along on Thunder at the end of a string of about 150 of the neighbors cattle one day I was listening to someone who considered himself to be a true cowboy telling my grandfather how much his horse was worth, how he had been offered $4000 and turned it down(this in the days when $1000 would buy a heckuva horse). Grandpa listened intently, looked at the dumpy little mare with the tall gangly elephant eared cowboy astride her and said rather bluntly "I believe that is where two fools met". Grandpa was a very hard man to impress.
Thunder gave me my early personal exposure to "cowboying". Being raised in the heart of cattle country in a family with a very long tradition of running a sizeable cattle herd(granddad, his father and two brothers ran between 1500 and 2000 head a year through the '30s and '40s before the brothers went their own way in life) one would believe we would be skilled cowboys, we were not. First of all, none of us could rope, a prerequisite to being a cowboy. Apparently my great grandfather could rope, and in a tradition our family has assumed since he was going to live forever nobody else needed to learn how. Grandfather told of his father once roping a massive Holstein cow on the run, she was so big when she hit the end of the rope as the horse set its feet, the back saddle strap broke, launching my great grandfather skyward, landing 40 some feet ahead of the cow, knocking him unconscious. This was in the 1940s, as far as I know, only twice since has any member of my family actually roped something from the back of a horse..once in the mid 1970s dad managed to rope a big heifer and she promptly broke the rope when the horse set, and I once roped a calf, but he was standing still.
For most of the time I can remember, granddad had a horse named "Levi". I rode Levi only rarely, and always came away with the notion it would be easier to chase the cattle on foot. Generally, you had to spur Levi constantly to get him to move, but after about an hour or two of working cattle, Levi would get tired, bored or both and toss Grandpa off and go home. Many a day you could see my grandpa hoofing it on foot down the road, with spurs on, and come to the gate of the horse pasture and find Levi saddled, waiting patiently at the gate to get in. Most farmers would have sent Levi to the glue factory, but he actually stayed on the farm until he died at 33. Dad preferred horses with a little more fire. I can honestly say dad never owned a slow horse, it was a real thrill to take a gallop on the two I remember, Pepper and Gene, but it was a little hard to get them stopped. Pepper was the smartest horse we ever had, Gene the most expensive with the most volatile temper. Any little thing would set Gene off, he threw me twice, once I landed on one knee, spent over a year hobbling around after that, and the other time landed head first, it is a miracle I wasn't paralyzed.
Before dad bought Gene, he belonged to some neighbors who eventually sold out. These neighbors were great friends of ours and our two families hayed, silaged, and moved cattle together. Exactly 26 years ago in December of 1983 during a brutal cold snap, Grandpa decided to take about 200 head of steers to a feedlot, of course it couldn't wait until warmer weather. We set out one morning in temperatures of about 4F to gather these cattle from 4 different pastures and drive them about 3 miles to a set of pens, where the trucks would pick them up. Grandpa operated on the theory if you could get almost all the cattle, that was good enough but our neighbor "Butch" was a little harder to please, he felt a successful gathering ended up clearing all the cattle out of a pasture. In the farthest west pasture 2 out of 70 were determined to give us the slip. My uncle and Butch set off after one, Butch's hired man(on Gene) and I (on Thunder) took after the other. The snow had blown all the gullies and draws level, you could barely tell where they were. Gene, hard headed as ever, raced across the snowy landscape. Raymond saw a dip ahead and pulled back hard on the reins bellowing "whoa" as loud as he could, Gene charged forward, in typical Gene fashion, hitting the draw and going into the deep snow head first, Raymond was launched as if from a catapult and tumbled 30 or 40 feet ahead of Gene. As Gene clammered to get out of the deep drift an enraged Raymond got back on his feet, charged into the drift, rared back and punched Gene in the nose, exclaiming as he did "Dammit when I say whoa, I mean whoa". He remounted and screamed to me not to just sit there watching, to get after the steer, as if I could ever catch it now. The two of us tore down through some trees, where we found Butch and my uncle had roped the steer they were after, and thrown it and tied it down (Butch and Raymond actually could rope), Butch remounted and the three of us galloped up out of the draw after the remaining steer, to find grandpa standing on the hood of his pickup waving his arms back and forth and yelling "we've got enough, let those two go to hell".....
to be continued.