Hot Iron - Part I of III

Baboquiveri Mountains

Note to the reader: The stories posted to this blog are true. It is hard for many folks in contmporary America to realize that even in 1978 this was a much different country. It was a better place. Pockets of the Old West with its codes and values remained. There were far fewer cops and lawyers meddling in people's lives. Out in cow country, problems were settled among the participants without the interference of government bureaucrats and social engineers. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

My thanks to my close friend LB for her editorial assistance.






If Creation is God's handiwork, cruelty is the province of Satan. The unspeakable barbarity committed by mankind, individually and collectively, has left history awash in death, blood, misery and suffering. It is one of the great mysteries that the magnificence of the human mind granted by the Creator is so often used to devise ways to inflict suffering, pain, and agony upon fellow humans. Usually unnoticed and ignored by everyday folks is the gratuitous and ceremonial cruelty inflicted upon the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the denizens of the deep and watery places. The butchery inflicted upon sentient beings is justified in the name of economic efficiency, superstition, and sport.

Cowboying is tedious, hard and often hazardous work. Most things in cow country are bigger, stronger, and faster than the cowboy. The horse he rides and the cattle he works can be explosively dangerous. When a one to two thousand pound animal collides with a human, the winner is unanimously predictable. Some of the cruelty exacted against cattle and horses by cowboys is pure revenge for the bumps, bruises, broken bones and peeled hide that is the inevitable result of working with livestock. The infliction of cruelty for the sake of cruelty upon an animal makes an unequivocal statement about the brutish and brutal character of the perpetrator.

1978 found Far Rider attending Phoenix College and struggling to make ends meet. In early April, Alfred Haught, owner of the Triangle K Ranch in Pleasant Valley, Arizona site of the Pleasant Valley War in the late 1880s, and for whom he had worked, called him and told him about an outfit down in southern Arizona that was looking for riders for spring roundup. Spring gather coincided with Spring Break and Far Rider was able to work it out with his professors to take an extra week off so that he could finish roundup. Cowboys that still followed the old Code of the West did not hire on and then quit in the middle of the work. Living below the poverty line, a cowboy had his word and his saddle and precious little else. He could not afford to have either one of them in poor condition. Far Rider contacted the owner of the outfit and hired on.

The ranch was a hard-scrabble cow-calf and steer operation spread out over several hundred square miles of the tough, dry country that was the Sonoran Desert. The only way cattle could be worked and gathered in the desolate country was by men on horseback. Cactus, greasewood, palo verde and desert grasses grew profusely across a rugged landscape cut by deep arroyos, rocky canyons and steep broken hills that struggled westward towards the Baboquiveri Mountains. The country was hotter than the hinges of hell in the summer but spring was merely warm with daytime temperatures hovering near the ninety degree mark in mid-afternoon. A dozen other day-work cowboys had been hired to help out and along with the boss and two permanent hands the crew was filled out. Sleeping quarters were typical which meant they weren't fit for white men with any sense of hygiene. His dog, Chance, was not allowed indoors and over a number of years and outfits he had grown accustomed to taking his comfort curling up with the dog in the back of his pickup for the night

A cowboy was something Far Rider had never really wanted to be. He wanted to work horses in rough country and work as a cowhand provided the saddle time and experience not available in a show barn. The 1970s saw irreversible changes affecting the traditional role of the American cowboy. More work was done in a pickup and a cowboy was expected to do maintenance chores more like a common field hand. The handwriting was on the wall for a way of life that had captured the imagination of the world for over a century. No other icon in the young Republic’s history had so defined the American character of independence, self-reliance, freedom and rectitude.

The skill set of the working cowboy began to deteriorate as the competent and prescient ones adapted to the changing world and moved on to other occupations. The caliber and character of the cowboys he met and worked with were not the same as the men he had known growing up in northern Nevada and the mountains of east central Idaho. Wannabes and riff raff began to infiltrate the ranks of a once proud and honorable trade.

Never a top hand but considered competent and a good hand, was the best he could manage and as far as his aspirations took him. Roping was part of the trade, but unlike most cowboys, he didn’t care to know more about it than was necessary to get the job done efficiently. Ranch roping is unlike calf or steer roping competitions. Range cattle require a gentler approach to avoid injuring them. Turning the stock upside down or crippling horses in the process will get a cowboy sent down the road in short order. Heading steers was easier for him by far than neck-roping calves. When it came to roping calves he threw enough loops that eventually something would run into it. If he didn't rim fire his horse and get bucked off the job was a success. He could, however, throw a hoolihan loop for catching remuda horses. This rare skill got him noticed along with his ability to start young horses. If the place had colts to start, he usually got the job. It suited him just fine as it beat hell out of looking at the messy southern end of northbound cattle and it often paid a bit more.

During brandings, the job of roping and dragging calves to the fire was reserved for the older and most experienced cowboys. Day workers and younger cowboys made up the ground crews. Ground crew work is hot, physically demanding and beats the daylights out of a cowboy's body. Tasks include handling sorting gates, flanking and throwing calves, branding, administering inoculations, ear marking, dehorning, castrating and dressing the wounds inflicted during the process. It is hard on cattle and it is hard on cowboys.

Every crew has its own personality. Some run like clockwork while others are staffed by sullen, unpleasant and crude fellows. Like a police or a military unit, the crews reflected the caliber of the leadership or lack thereof. Poor crews are often marked by cliquish behavior where new hands are belittled and not helped to understand the particulars of working a new outfit, sometimes to the point where new guys would get hurt. This was viewed as a source of amusement by the rest of the hands. Far Rider despised such attitudes. Similarly, he detested those cowboys that liked to “rope and choke” cattle for pleasure and that treated their horses like tools to be used and tossed aside when they were no longer able to meet the rigors of range work.

That spring, roundup proceeded with grueling and monotonous regularity. The horses were grained and saddled by four a.m. and by five the riders were mounted and moving out a full two hours before the sun was up. The crew was one of those where there was not much personal interaction except among those that had worked together before. Far Rider didn't know any of the other hands and, as was his nature, kept to himself. He was ignored by the regulars except when work demanded communication. Before the roundup ended, there would be physical violence prompted by what little communication there was.

Far Rider
See to your weapons and stand to your horses