The Modern Cowboy: Second Edition

Author’s Note

xiii Author’s Note It’s almost impossible to make a general statement about cowboys or ranching without getting into an argument with someone. It seems that everyone involved in the cattle business has his own way of doing things. Cowboying in the Texas Panhandle isn’t exactly the same as cowboying in California; it’s not even the same as cowboying in East Texas. Differences among cowboys arise from history, tradition, weather, and terrain, to name a few. Wherever they live, cowboys figure out their own solutions to their own particular set of problems and adapt their tools and techniques to the situations they face. And of course, being cowboys, they will add a little something of their own, out of sheer orneriness if they can’t find a better reason. The perfect book on modern cowboying would deal with cowboys in all parts of the country, from the Texas Gulf coast to the mountains of Montana, from Florida to Oregon. It would describe cowboys of the swamp, forest, mountains, desert, brush, coast, and plains. This isn’t the perfect book. I’m writing out of my own experience as a working cowboy in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. I’ve never followed a chuck wagon on a giant ranch, roped horses out of a remuda, chased cattle down a mountain slope, or worked cowdogs in heavy brush. There are a lot of things I haven’t done and don’t know. There’s no disgrace in this, because you can’t possibly know everything about everything. The only disgrace would come in trying to convince a trusting reader that you did, or thought you did. In the following pages when I dare to make general statements and say, “Cowboys do this” or “Cowboys think that,” the reader should be aware that I’m speaking of cowboys I have known in places where I have lived and worked, and that another writer in another part of the country might see his subject somewhat differently. The first edition of this book was published in 1981, more than twenty years ago. I began writing it in 1978, while I was employed as xiv — Author’s Note a cowboy on one of the Barby family ranches on the Beaver River in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Part of my arrangement with the owners, John and May Little, was that I be allowed to devote the early morning hours to my writing. Already, in those early years, I was following the same discipline I follow today, writing four hours every morning, seven days a week. Mr. Little and I closed in a small corner of his woodshop with two-by-four stud walls and plywood, and it was inside this little cubical that I began typing out the first draft of The Modern Cowboy on a SmithCorona portable typewriter. I was thirty-five years old and had a wife and two small children. I was making $550 a month, plus beef and a trailer house, which placed me in the average range of cowboy wages at the time. It was barely enough to support a family and we had the same problem that deviled every other cowboy I knew: too much month and not enough money. We drove a 1973 Ford Pinto, the cheapest car you could buy at that time, and our rough ranch roads kept the Pinto in a constant state of disrepair. When possible, I added to our income by selling articles on ranch-related subjects to The Cattleman, Livestock Weekly, and Western Horseman, which served as my apprenticeship as a writer and also helped us buy shocks and springs for the beleaguered Pinto. I loved my work as a cowboy and took pride in the skills I had learned, yet by the time I typed the first sentence of this book, I had begun to suspect that my days on horseback were drawing to a close. Sooner or later, my career would be ended by some momentous event (an injury to me or the Pinto, a sudden dive in the cattle market), or else we would slide along until, one day, we awoke to the fact that we were broke and that I would have to find another line of work. This is a common theme in the saga of the American cowboy and it was very much on my mind when I started writing the book. While I still had the chance, while the details of my life as a...