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25 DAY WORK COWBOYS IN THE DEPRESSION ERA by Len Ainsworth  Dust from the trail herds had long since settled, and the open range was also gone. But “day work” cowboys were needed for ranches large and small during the years between the last two world wars. They were needed for riding pasture fences, doctoring sheep and cattle in the screwworm season, moving livestock, and sometimes for running pumps when the windmills stopped turning as summer winds forgot to blow. They were needed in even larger numbers for roundups. Roundups were holdovers of the earlier days before fenced pastures , when men from various ranches gathered cattle and sorted them out according to brand and owner. Even after cattle were held in smaller enclosures numbers of cowboys were still necessary for gathering, branding and marking stock, and sorting out animals to be sold, separated, and moved. Some ranches still drove cattle to nearby markets or shipping facilities, and needed part-time help for the drives. Many ranches still had large pastures that required several riders to gather the livestock. But those ranches couldn’t afford to maintain a large crew at all times, so temporary help was needed. Hence, the “day work” cowboy was a fixture for several years throughout the west. This paper will focus on those itinerant workers, almost always men—sometimes as young as early teenagers—who worked for daily wages to perform those duties that were commonplace on the range. Many of the medium- to large-size ranches employed “steady men,” paid by the month, on call at most any time, and who worked year ’round. The first such employee was usually the “foreman,” who, in addition to his own work, directed the activities of all the other cowboys, whether “steady” or “day work” hands. Depending on the size of the ranch and the type of operation (cow/calf and feeder steer are two examples), additional steady men could be on monthly salaries as well. Some ranches were large enough for a full-time cook, but the foreman’s wife (more rarely the owner’s spouse) often performed that duty, even when the crew was swelled by day work hands. Before and during the Great Depression there were men who had often worked as cowboys as regular hands, but who no longer had steady jobs. The day of the “grub line” of the drifting cowboy on horseback was gone. Elmer Kelton aptly described those changing times of just a few years earlier in his novel about Hewey Callaway called The Good Old Boys. Many of the cowboys who earlier drifted from job to job on horseback could no longer do so easily, because of the fenced ranges. Many of those single men gravitated to small towns across the west where living was relatively cheap and part-time work was sometimes available. Married cowboys, often 26 On the Job: Legends and Language in Occupational Lore Elmer Kelton signing copies of The Good Old Boys approaching middle age, also chose to live in smaller towns in ranch country. The families chose the towns for schools, churches, and a bit more social life, as well as for job possibilities. This essay will focus on one of those small towns as being typical , and because I grew up there, lived there, and knew its people and many of the surrounding ranches. That community that still exists largely but not entirely on the ranching industry is Water Valley in Tom Green County, Texas. Twenty-some miles north and a little west of San Angelo, the community lies just east of the North Concho River. As “birds of a feather flock together,” so had a number of cowboys, former cowboys, and would-be cowboys gathered in that small town by the early 1930s. My dad was a common example: having quit a steady job after losing the privilege of running some stock on his own, he moved to the small village . Water Valley was a typical early 1900s West Texas village in which everyone knew everyone else, and there were various community and communal activities. Most men of working age were involved in supplying services to the surrounding ranches, whether as a storekeeper, windmill repairman, farmer raising feedstock , or a cowboy. The little town became well known across a broad swath of West Texas as a source of ranch hands, men who were “sure ’nuff cowboys.” The men who worked out of Water Valley had cowboyed far and wide, and former employers came...

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