A drive’s success depended on discipline and

planning. According to Teddy Blue, 1 most Texas

herds numbered about 2,000 head with a trail boss

and about a dozen men in charge—though herds as

large as 15,000 were also driven north with far larger

escorts. The most experienced men rode “point” and

“swing,” at the head and sides of the long herd; the

least experienced brought up the rear, riding “drag”

and eating dust. At the end of the day, Teddy Blue

remembered, they “would go to the water

barrel. . . and rinse their mouths and cough and

spit up. . . black stuff. But you couldn’t get it up out

of your lungs.”

They had to learn to work as a team, keeping the

herd moving during the day, resting peacefully at

night. Twelve to fifteen miles a day was a good pace.

But such steady progress could be interrupted at

any time. A cowboy had to know how to gauge the

temperament of his cattle, how to chase down a stray

without alarming the rest of the herd, how to lasso a

steer using the horn of his saddle as a tying post. His

saddle was his most prized possession; it served as

his chair, his workbench, his pillow at night. Being

dragged to death was the most common death for a

cowboy, and so the most feared occurrence on the

trail was the nighttime stampede. As Teddy Blue

recalled, a sound, a smell, or simply the sudden

movement of a jittery cow could set off a whole herd.

If. . . the cattle started running—you’d hear that

low rumbling noise along the ground and the men

on herd wouldn’t need to come in and tell you, you’d

know—then you’d jump for your horse and get out

there in the lead, trying to head them and get them

into a m2ill before they scattered. It was riding at a

dead run in the dark, with cut banks and prairie dog

holes all around you, not knowing if the next jump

would land you in a shallow grave.

Most cowboys had guns, but rarely used them on

the trail. Some outfits made them keep their weapons

in the chuck wagon 3 to eliminate any chance of

gunplay. Charles Goodnight 4 was still more emphatic:

“Before starting on a trail drive, I made it a rule to

draw up an article of agreement, setting forth what

each man was to do. The main clause stipulated 5 that

if one shot another he was to be tried by the outfit

and hanged on the spot, if found guilty. I never had a

man shot on the trail.”

Regardless of its ultimate destination, every

herd had to ford a series of rivers—the Nueces, the

Guadalupe, the Brazos, the Wichita, the Red.

A big herd of longhorns swimming across a river,

Goodnight remembered, “looked like a million floating

rocking chairs,” and crossing those rivers one after

another, a cowboy recalled, was like climbing the

rungs of a long ladder reaching north.

“After you crossed the Red River and got out on

the open plains,” Teddy Blue remembered, “it was

sure a pretty sight to see them strung out for almost

a mile, the sun shining on their horns.” Initially, the

land immediately north of the Red River was Indian

territory, and some tribes charged tolls for herds

crossing their land—payable in money or beef. But

Teddy Blue remembered that the homesteaders,

now pouring onto the Plains by railroad, were far

more nettlesome:

There was no love lost between settlers and

cowboys on the trail. Those jay-hawkers would take

up a claim right where the herds watered and charge

us for water. They would plant a crop alongside the

trail and plow a furrow around it for a fence, and then

when the cattle got into their wheat or their garden

patch, they would come cussing and waving a shotgun

and yelling for damages. And the cattle had been

coming through there when they were still raising

punkins in Illinois.

The settlers’ hostility was entirely understandable.

The big herds ruined their crops, and they carried with

them a disease, spread by ticks and called “Texas fever,”

that devastated domestic livestock. Kansas

and other territories along the route soon established

quarantine lines, called “deadlines,” at the western

fringe of settlement, and insisted that trail drives not

cross them. Each year, as settlers continued to move in,

those deadlines moved farther west.

Sometimes, farmers tried to enforce their own,

as John Rumans, one of Charles Goodnight’s hands,

recalled:

Some men met us at the trail near Canyon City, and

said we couldn’t come in. There were fifteen or twenty

of them, and they were not going to let us cross the

Arkansas River. We didn’t even stop. .. . Old man

[Goodnight] had a shotgun loaded with buckshot and

led the way, saying: “John, get over on that point with

your Winchester and point these cattle in behind me.”

He slid his shotgun across the saddle in front of him

and we did the same with our Winchesters. He rode

right across, and as he rode up to them, he said: “I’ve

monkeyed as long as I want to with you,” and they fell

back to the sides, and went home after we had passed.

There were few diversions on the trail. Most trail

bosses banned liquor. Goodnight prohibited gambling,

too. Even the songs for which cowboys became famous

grew directly out of doing a job, remembered Teddy

Blue:

The singing was supposed to soothe [the cattle] and

it did; I don’t know why, unless it was that a sound

they was used to would keep them from spooking at

other noises. I know that if you wasn’t singing, any

little sound in the night—it might be just a horse

shaking himself—could make them leave the country;

but if you were singing, they wouldn’t notice it.

The two men on guard would circle around with

their horses on a walk, if it was a clear night and the

cattle was bedded down and quiet, and one man would

sing a verse of song, and his partner on the other side

of the herd would sing another verse; and you’d go

through a whole song that way.. . . “Bury Me Not on

the Lone Prairie” was a great song for awhile, but.

they sung it to death. It was a saying on the range that

even the horses nickered it and the coyotes howled it;

it got so they’d throw you in the creek if you sang it.

The number of cattle on the move was sometimes

staggering: once, Teddy Blue rode to the top of a

rise from which he could see seven herds strung out

behind him; eight more up ahead; and the dust from

an additional thirteen moving parallel to his. “All the

cattle in the world,” he remembered, “seemed to be

coming up from Texas.”

At last, the herds neared their destinations. After

months in the saddle—often wearing the same clothes

every day, eating nothing but biscuits and beef stew at

the chuck wagon, drinking only water and coffee, his

sole comparuons his fellow cowboys, his herd, and his

horse—the cowboy was about to be paid for his work,

and turned loose in town.

Equizzer