Welcome to the West as I see it

For whatever reason, the Fall season always makes me nostalgic. I find my thoughts often wander to memories of this time of year in place far away and a time long ago on a high mountain ranch where summer ended abruptly, usually just after Labor Day.

It was a big outfit by mountain-ranch standards that pastured 4,000 yearlings from spring until fall. The yearlings arrived small, waspy, and left fat and sassy.

Mental images remain of a long line of cattle trucks waiting their turn at the loading chute, dust boiling high above the pens as the cattle milled and the profile of a cowboy horseback looking like a picture postcard with the rising sun behind him and the dust forming a filter of light around him.

The sounds of the banging of the scale gate as each bunch passed through to be weighed or the final tally, a cowboy hollering at each bunch as he drove them down the alley and the deafening sound of cattle bawling that never stopped until the last truck pulled away.

It wasn’t history at the time. It was life. The stories told by my dad and granddad back then were their history. It was about life lived in a different era. An era when they still rode horses to a one-room school house, an era when babies were birthed at home and maybe the country doctor got there, but usually not.

It was a time when owning pair of shoes was almost a sign of wealth and a dime might mean the difference between eating or not.

Back then, a cowboy wasn’t an icon for what had been. He was what he was. Later he became that which is memorialized in stories in books and movies.

We in the West have a history that is a chapter about the immigration and emancipation of this country and yet a story unto itself for there is nothing else like it.

The best tell-it like-it-was stories are from the old guy sitting under the shade of his hat watching what he can no longer do.

He will tell you stories of cowherds so big you couldn’t recognize the cowboy on the other side. He recalls horses that bucked, horses hat could run the wind and horses that died in the line of duty. And he will be able to give the name of each of them.

He will detail cattle markets of that day and speak of a day’s wages that wouldn’t buy a up of coffee in today’s world. He will recall droughts, floods, and winters of record reaking cold and snow. He will share stories about great friends, fine men of character and heartbreaking losses.

He remembers the time before there were fences and cattle that ran on ranges the size of three counties. He watched the West be surveyed with a wheel that delivered an accuracy that still astounds men today. He was entertained with music and song by the campfire, or better yet, at the good-eats of an ice cream social.

Now when I write my stories of my childhood, my daughter tells me, “Mom I have learned more about your life from those stories than I ever knew before.”
Case and point. It is important to listen to the stories from those that went before us. It is equally as important to take the time to tell our stories. They are part of history that, for most of us, won’t get written in a book.

Save a piece of history and tell your story to someone.

Only in a small ranching community do you get a phone call like this.

“Two of your bulls got out and they are behind the Tasty Freeze and headed toward the swimming pool.”

Additionally, only in a small ranching community will you arrive to find half dozen or more helpful folks already fixing the fence, putting the bulls back through the gate into the pasture before returning to their coffee drinking at the corner gas station/coffee shop.

God Bless this country and those things that remain with the stamp of a Courier and Ives Americana– Western style.

I do know that in the majority of the good ole USA, people find it hard to believe there are still people who “live like that.” But it’s the truth.

We are at least one generation and maybe two into a world where it is a genuine belief the West is dead and can only be found in Hollywood or in a book.

Those people live in a concrete and asphalt world defined by Wall Street where travel by subway, train and taxi is the norm. If they own a pickup it is because its trendy– functional is not a factor.

The work-place fashion never includes a pair of five-buckle over shoes and the fine canvas duck wear by Carhart is unheard of. They actually think Powder River is just a place and Panhandle Slim probably is some guy who advertises for the tobacco company with that Marlboro guy.

Honest, cross my heart, it is the truth. I heard her say it. “I couldn’t finish the cookies I was baking until one of the chickens laid an egg.”

Not ever did the former domestic diva of daytime, Martha Stewart, ever tip-toe to the barn to check the nests in the haystack to see if she had one more very fresh egg to finish her baking project.

There are just some things that brand the rural kind of life unique, genuine and almost unbelievable unless you live there.

Calving season on the domestic front means the not so rare event of thawing out a half-frozen baby calf in the house bath tub filled with warm water. Another event not glorified in the halls of polite company.

Somehow we need to not let people forget there are places in our country where a big Saturday night event is watching a family movie on the television with popcorn and Kool-Aid for refreshments. Remember there are places where nuisance varmints are not gangs with guns and knives but black “kitties” with big white stripes down their backs and the occasional raccoon or possum.

The West isn’t dead and nobody knows it better than those that live in the West. We carry on day to day pretty much as we did decades ago. Fashion trends come and go, markets rise and fall, it rains or it doesn’t.

Constants are the cows need fed, the water pipeline needs fixed and Ma is still nagging about the hole in the floor where the snake keeps getting in.

Just try to tell her the West is dead!

©2007 Julie Carter

Recently, I was told the way to recognize a cowboy funeral is when you pull up to the church or funeral home, the parking lot is full of pickup trucks.

If times are good, they’ll be muddy, some will have hay loaded in the back and others will have a patient cowdog waiting for the return of his cowboy.

Most of the folks are dressed in Wranglers, boots and hats. A branding iron is likely to be standing by the door where they branded the casket – a final brand for the old cowboy.

All the talk, when folks are talking, is about grass and rain and this time of year, mention will be made of calf prices and shipping dates.

In circles over a meal served to family and friends, wonderful stories will be told about the cowboy they’d come to honor and lay to rest.

This week, we lost an icon of the true West – cowboy, rancher, husband, father, grandfather and pioneer.

Wayne Withers proved just how tough he was right to the end, against all odds.

He was 95 when he made the crossover to the big corral up yonder, and for 73 of those years, he’d been teasing and loving his bride, Annie.

I sat with the couple just before their 70th anniversary, and the love between them could have swallowed me up.

They verbally sparred over the stories they told me about an era of hard times that forged their grit and character.

“Do you want to know about the girls I danced with or the broncs I rode?” he would say with a twinkle in his eyes.

Their life’s tale exposed the heartbreak of living in a country where the government took not one, but two ranches from them to create what we know today as the White Sands Missile Range.

Wayne was 5 years old when his dad left him and his brothers alone, ages 7 and 10, to tend 700 head of cattle and a herd of horses while he went in search of a new ranch.

By the time he was 11, Wayne had already hired out on a couple of different wagons and worked cattle for other people.

He recalled during one of his $1-a-day jobs down by Three Rivers, he got drug by a horse. He was so skinned up and sore, the only place he could sit that didn’t hurt was in the kitchen sink. He took his meals there.

Wayne was in a small plane crash in 1955 and scored a broken leg that laid him up for a year.

His dad, who had a legendary streak of orneriness, was good about putting the boys on horses that would buck. “We’d be leaving out at three in the morning and I’ll tell ya, it’s a trick to ride a bucking horse you can’t see in the dark,” Wayne recalled.

And then there was dancing. Next to riding bucking horses, Wayne loved to dance.

He and Annie danced for 60 years. They met at a dance and country dances were their passion for all of those years.

To them, dancing made all the hard times worth living.

When we catch up with Wayne in Heaven, he will, no doubt, be telling stories about horses that bucked, pretty girls that danced and “it was darn sure worth a 9-mile ride to a dance, stay until 2 a.m. and then ride back home, ready to work.”

Adios Wayne. When your tales are retold, it will always be with the memory of you with that big grin that just never did hide how ornery you were.

And Wayne, you left the world a better place having been in it.

©2007 Julie Carter

Wayne and Annie Withers on their wedding day 1934

With their first child

His pickup and trailer rig speak of a cheap, well, okay, frugal cowboy who makes do with what he has.

Last spring, Dan the team roper upgraded to a 1993 model.

Being the giving kind of guy he is, Dan donated his old truck, that he’d paid $600 for to a friend who was in great need of it. Together they got it painted and overhauled and it was a gem.

Dan’s new truck, the ‘93, came with chrome wheels. The friend with the old truck, in an effort to save Dan’s reputation, offered to trade him the plain rims off the old truck for those chrome ones.

The horse trailer, a single-axle one-horse, is one you have to see to believe.
“Houston red” in color, as it was described to me, apparently denotes the rust because that’s what it is front to back, top to bottom. It does have new reflector tape on it in lieu of lights.

Held together with baling wire, literally, you have to admire the horse brave enough to get in it. When I first saw it, I thought it was a “just go down the road to the neighbors’ to practice roping” trailer.

I soon learned it was the main rig that travels to the major roping events.
I’m real surprised some of those ultra-fancy Texas arenas would let it in the parking lot. I’d not be surprised if they asked him to park in the back, which wouldn’t matter to Dan.

His rig doesn’t identify his roping ability.

Dan has his money allocated to specific categories – this much for Copenhagen, this much for beer, this much for horse feed. Whatever is left over is all his.
One time he had been saving for a pair of new boots. The pair he was wearing had been resoled a couple of times and were at their life’s end, held together, more or less, with duct tape.

It had been a while since he’d shopped for boots and he soon realized his available cash fund, all $45 of it, wasn’t going to cover the cost of new boots off the shelf at the Western store.

The weekly horse sale in Stephenville afforded him the opportunity to take a day off from his ranch job. On the way, he stopped at an on-going flea market at the edge of town.

Sure enough, there was a man with a stack of new boots in boxes.

Dan approached him and asked, “You have any size 13 double-E boots?” Both he and the man with boots were relieved to find one another. Dan tried on the right boot and it was perfect. The man priced them at $30 and an elated
Dan immediately began planning what to do with his leftover money.

He grabbed the boots, paid the man and left quickly before anyone could change their mind.

When he got to the horse sale, he decided to put his new boots on. The right one fit like a glove, but the left one, turned out to be a size 11.

At this point, Dan had to decide if he wanted to go with one new boot and one old, or stay with both the old ones. His pride and being tired of walking on gravel dictated that one old and one new would work just fine.

It was a couple of weeks before Dan could get back down to the flea market and could get settled up with the right size boots. After he finally had both boots the same size, they lasted quite well and he’s just now starting to think about duct tape.

Dan’s Rig: “ONE more payment and it’s mine.”

Julie Carter ©2007