Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City

Feedlot Cowboy

Feedlot Cowboy I set the alarm on my cell phone for 3:45 a.m., but anticipation had me up and throwing hay to the horses half an hour before that. Bill Hommertzheim, manager of the southwestern Kansas feedlot where I planned to spend the day as a pen rider, had told me to report for work at 6:30 sharp, and since the ranch was every bit of a hundred miles away, I knew I’d have to get an early start if I was going to make it on time. While the horses ate, I checked over the saddles and other tack I had loaded onto the flatbed of the ranch truck the evening before. I was nervous in that way one gets when hurrying to make a flight at a far-off airport. Had I left myself enough time? What if I forgot something or had a flat tire? Beneath this veneer of nervousness, however , I felt a deeper layer of raw excitement for what I was about to do, together with a kind of smug satisfaction that it was I and no one else who had come up with the idea. Half an hour later, I had entered a thick fog on the correction line between Dodge City and Cimarron. The blacktop was narrow and unmarked. Within ten seconds of entering the full thickness of the fog, I could see maybe a hundred feet in front of me. I had to downshift from fifth to third just to keep the truck out of the ditch. Leaning over the truck’s steering wheel, I rubbed at the inside of the filthy windshield with a shop rag, hoping to work some kind of miracle. At the rate I was going, I would reach the feedlot at 7:00 a.m. or later, thus proving to Bill and whatever help he had assembled there that I wasn’t even capable of showing up to work on time, let alone riding pens and scouting cattle for disease or other trouble. The idea had come to me a few days before, when my family and I were headed west from Kansas City on one of our frequent 1 7 8 ❍ O f H o r s e s , Ca t t l e , a n d Me n visits to the cattle ranch my parents owned northeast of Dodge City . Somewhere near Emporia, we happened to drive past a big commercial feedlot—one of those massive, open-air animal feeding operations (“AFO” is the industry acronym) where tens of thousands of head of cattle are fed a steady diet of corn and antibiotics in the months before they are shipped to slaughter. “God, what’s that smell?!” my teenage daughter said, fanning the air in front of her nose with the paperback she was reading . My son, all of ten, looked out his window and asked, in that way he still had that assumed I possessed the answers to everything , who those men were and what they were doing out there. “What men?” I asked. “Those.” He pointed out the window. “Are they cowboys?” I craned my head to see what he was talking about. Here and there amid the acres of penned cattle, a few solitary figures with wide-brimmed straw hats could be seen moving about on horseback. “Pen riders,” I told him. “Feedlot cowboys.” “Are they real cowboys?” “I don’t know. I guess that depends on what you think a real cowboy is.” Here the boy sighed, impatient with the wishy-washiness of the answer. “Come on, Dad. Just tell me. Are they real or not?” “All right, they’re real,” I said. “No question about it. Satisfied?” “Yes,” he answered, his attention already shifting from the feedlot to the gunfire and explosions taking place on his Gameboy. I thought that would be the end of it, but as we continued on our way, I lingered over the question. What was a real cowboy —especially in this day and age? What qualified a person to be called by the name? Was it a question of clothes, attitude, allegiance to some idea or other? Surely a mastery of horses came into the equation somewhere. Cattle, too, obviously. After all, historically speaking, wasn’t the herding and safe delivery of cattle the cowboy’s whole reason for existing? Gradually, a 1 7 9 ❍ Feed l o t...