Cowboy Wisdom (6 page)

Get everything off ’em, split ’em open, and fry ’em in hot fat in a skillet until they are done good; then put salt on ’em
and serve ’em up hot.

—C
HARLES
W
ILLEY
Valentine, Nebraska 1877

1 cup cooked, mashed pinto beans

1 cup sugar

3 egg yolks, beaten

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon nutmeg

Combine ingredients and place in uncooked pie crust. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until set. Make meringue with leftover
egg whites; spread on pie and brown in oven.

—adapted from
Cowpoke’s Cookbook
by A
CE
R
EID
Draggin’s Ranch, Kerrville, Texas 1969

This is a good substitute for pudding or pie
.

3 cups of water

2 cups of sugar

2 pinches of cinnamon or nutmeg

1 cup of vinegar

2 tablespoons of flour

First, put the water and vinegar together and bring to a boil. Mix the sugar and flour together and stir this mixture into
the boiling liquid until it is thoroughly dissolved. Let cook for fifteen minutes and then add the spice. Have a dough ready,
like a biscuit dough prepared with baking powder. Break it off by the tablespoonful and drop the pieces in the simmering liquid.
When the dumplings are done serve them right off on tin plates while they’re still hot.

—F
AY
W
ARD
Norfolk, Nebraska 1958

Eat yer meat and save the skin.

Turn up yer plates, and let’s begin.

Amen.

Look out teeth! Look out gums!

Look out belly! Har she comes!

Amen.

That’s the bread, that’s the meat.

Now, by Joe, let’s eat.

Amen.

Take one pound of jamoka coffee and wet it good with water. Boil it over a hot fire for thirty minutes, then pitch a horse-shoe
in. If the shoe sinks, put in more coffee.

—A
NONYMOUS

A
cowboy gets hungry enough, he’ll go for his gun—and shoot fish.

—L
AWRENCE
C
UBBIT
Laramie, Wyoming 1938

T
his is the kind of thing you learn in the music business that can come in handy in lots of different situations.

Cats are kind of slick when you get them out of the water and they have skin instead of scales like most fish, and you can
work yourself to death on a five-pound catfish just trying to hold on to him and skin him at the same time. They also have
sharp little barbs beneath their gills. So you want to get the cat under control so you can work with it.

1. Find a stump
. The best way to skin a catfish is to find a stump and drive a nail through his head and into the stump. That’ll stop the
wiggling. Once you put the nail in his head, you pretty much took care of the old boy.

2. Use your knife to cut around his neck
. You really want a good, sharp cut, so the skin comes off easy. But don’t cut his head clear off, because if you cut his
head off now, you’ve lost the use of your nail.

3. Take your pliers and start skinning
. Now you see why you have to nail him to a stump. Otherwise, you can’t hardly hold him. Trying to keep hold of a catfish
while you work is a miserable way to try to skin one. You’re trying to pull his skin off and he’s falling on the ground all
the time. You really need a stump and a nail.

4. Gut him
. Turn him over onto his belly. I usually start cutting him from the bottom and work my way toward his head, but you can do
it either way. You just put your knife in there and rip the belly up as you go along. It’s kind of like cutting a piece of
cloth—once you get started, it just goes on up. Then reach your fingers in there and gut him—everything comes out. It’s almost
like it was meant to be that way; there’s very little attachment there. My gutting rule of thumb is, if it looks like something
you don’t want to cat, take it out.

Once you do that,
then
you cut the head off. Now, you’ve got a good, clean catfish.

—C
HARLES
D
ANIELS
Lebanon, Tennessee 1993

—W
ILLIAM
S
AVAGE
in
The Cowboy Hero
1979

I
’ve got a good saddle blanket an’ I used it fo’ a bed all the way up heah, an’ besides, if the weather’s nice, that’s bed
enough, an’ if it’s stormin’, any damn’ fool knows he ought to be out with the cattle, an’ cou’se he wants his slicker.

—J
OHNNIE
R
IX
near Big Creek, Wyoming c. 1887

• A saddle
  
• A blanket
  
• A bridle
  
• A rope
  
• A bit
  
• A hackamore, and
  
• A smaller bosal.
  

• A set of ropes for different purposes—for catching and branding calves, for roping bigger stock, all that kind of stuff.

• A good bed roll. Now, a bed roll serves two functions. First, it’s where you do your sleeping. Second, it also acts as your
suitcase. See, you just roll up your clothes inside of it, and tie it all up with a couple of straps or pieces of rope. Now,
the bedroll itself is made out of a big piece of canvas. It’s longer than it is wide. Find yourself a little mattress, like
one of those army-type mattresses, and you wrap the mattress up in the canvas.

• Blankets and some old flannel sheets.

They did it the same way a hundred years ago—only the mattress was an old bag stuffed with straw that they had to change from
time to time.

When you roll up your bedroll in the morning, it may be a good two feet around in diameter with all your clothes and everything
in there—well, you can’t take this big bedroll with you on your horse, so you put it on the chuck wagon until you need it
again at the end of the day.

• A “possible” bag, in which you’ve got everything for whatever might possibly happen: reloading equipment for your gun, a knife,
and a bit of grub that’ll keep you a few days if you ever need it.

—M
IKE
G
ERBER
Elko, Nevada 1994

E
very cowboy carries a rope [and] when he is not using it, he keeps it tied to the right-hand side of the pommel of his saddle.
In some places this rope is called a lasso. The spaniards called it
la reata
, which the cowboys shortened to “lariat.” [It] may be made of hemp or maguey, or of four strands of rawhide would together;
it is often sixty feet long. The rawhide lariat must be handled with care; for, if a horse steps on it and breaks one of the
strands, the lariat is weakened.

To lasso an animal the cowboy holds most of the rope in his left hand while he whirls the looped end at the animal. Then he
takes a “dally,” or twist around his saddlehorn, to hold the roped animal. With a short rope he does not take dallies, but
keeps one end tied to the saddlehorn.

—S
ANFORD
T
OUSEY
New York City 1937

T
he ordinary length of a lasso is forty feet, though I frequently use one seventy-two feet in length. It is also fine exercise,
the spinning of the rope bringing almost every muscle of the body into play. That it is light and can easily be carried, and
the many things you can do with it make it an ideal article for all kinds of sports.

—C
APTAIN
G
EORGE
A
SH
London, England 1923

E
very male person should have at least one rifle gun.

—A
NONYMOUS
Advice from an emigrant guidebook c. 1870