The Pastures of Beyond

 

 

THE
PASTURES
            OF
BEYOND

 

Also by Dayton O. Hyde

Fiction

One Summer in Montana

The Major, the Poacher, and the Wonderful One Trout River

 

Nonfiction

Sandy

Yamsi

The Last Free Man

Raising Waterfowl in Captivity

Don Coyote

 

For Children

The Brand of a Boy

Cranes in My Corral

Strange Companions

Island of the Loons

Thunder Down the Track

The Bells of Lake Superior

Mr. Beans

 

THE
PASTURES
            OF
BEYOND

 

AN OLD COWBOY

LOOKS BACK

AT THE

OLD WEST

 

 

Dayton O. Hyde

 

 

 

 

Arcade Publishing • New York

 

Copyright © 2005, 2011 by Dayton O. Hyde

 

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in

any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except

in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should

be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street,

11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

 

Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales

promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes.

Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details,

contact the Special Sales Department,

Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or

[email protected]
.

 

Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of

Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

 

Chapter 22 appeared under the title “The Appy Mare” in
Thunder of

the Mustangs
, produced by Tehabi Books and published

by Sierra Club Books in 1997.

 

Visit our website at
www.arcadepub.com
.

 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

 

ISBN: 978-1-61145-328-7

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

 

 

This book is dedicated to

Slim Pickens, Mel Lambert,

Montie Montana, Dick Blue,

and every other cowboy

that forked a bronc or threw a loop.

 

 

THE
PASTURES
            OF
BEYOND

Prologue

T
HIS IS THE STORY OF A
W
EST THAT IS ALMOST GONE
, a story of ranches, cattle, horses, Indians, cowhands, and rodeos, and of a kid from Michigan who ran away from home at thirteen to be a cowboy in Oregon. These days I need a stump to help get me on a horse, and the bad ones I rode get tougher with every telling. These are stories that you won't read anywhere else, and if they have a certain value, it is because I was there when they happened and even remember what too many have forgotten, how the West sounded and how it smelled.

Walk down any eastern Oregon street, and amongst a pollution of Californians you'll rub elbows with descendants of men I once knew, and you'll likely tread on the faded footsteps of men better than yourself because they lived at a time better than ours. Sometimes my memory fades, and I feel like a cowboy whose rope is too short and his horse too slow to catch the critter he's chasing. But there are times when I smell the heady odor of crushed sage under the hooves of a moving trail herd, and hear the snores of sleeping cowboys in their bedrolls, or the contented munching of tired horses, eyes-deep in a manger of timothy hay. My mind clears; the shadows on the mossy walls of my memory become vivid once more.

I'd best start by telling you about Homer Smith, because more than any cowboy I ever knew, he represents what I miss the most, leather-hided, strawberry-nosed, bull-voiced, ham-fisted, broad-shouldered, mule-skinning, yarn-spinning characters who made life hell or sometimes fun for those about them.

“God damn yuh, kid,” he told me one day as he was about to die, “I like yuh!” After all the fights he'd won in barrooms, he was about to lose the big one. We hugged for the first time ever and turned away to hide our tears. Maybe I owe it to Homer to say a few words about him here, while I can see the twinkle in his sun-washed blue eyes, and see him standing bowlegged in the doorway of my memories. Here was a man who grew up in no man's mold, and God help the man even twice his size who called him a liar.

He'd been my uncle's foreman once on the old BarY, and came back years later, when I had bought the ranch from my uncle, to work for the kid he'd once tormented. He could lose tools faster than any cowboy I ever hired. Issue him a brand-new pair of fencing pliers or some side-cutters for cutting baling wire, and they would be missing before the end of the first day. Lost accidentally, or maybe chucked in meanness or frustration into the brush. The old cowboy always had an excuse. It was never his fault.

“Hadn't been fer thet damn old bay hoss, Tune, I'd still have them tools. Had 'em in my saddlebags when he bowed his old noggin and bucked me off fair and square. I spent all afternoon followin' his tracks back to the home corral. Could hev built you lots of fence hadn't been fer thet hoss. Them tools er bound to show up someday.”

The old man was right. Show up they did, but it was fifty-three years later when I happened upon some of Homer's lost tools. I was checking fence in my pickup truck down on the Calimus Butte Ranch when I ran over a rusty hay hook and blew a tire. Climbing out of the vehicle in a blue funk, I kicked some rusty fencing pliers out of the dirt along with an old hammer. Long ago Homer and I had mended that piece of fence together. Both tools were rusted almost beyond recognition, and Homer, of course, was long in his grave.

I keep the pliers in a drawer in the ranch kitchen as a link to my past, a tool no one has wanted to borrow, handy for cracking nuts at Christmastime and not much else. But sometimes I take them out and sit before the woodstove, holding them in my hands just for memories of times back before World War II, when something terrible happened to the West I loved, and it was never the same again.

Partly it was Social Security that robbed the ranches of their old cowboys, enabling them to spend their final years in town instead of doing chores on the ranches they knew so well. Partly it was wartime industry with its big payrolls that lured them to cities and left them forever dissatisfied with ranch wages. Maybe some of them never went back to the farm after they saw Paree. Somehow, the old storytellers never came back to the old outfits, but frittered away their days in querulous company in some nursing home. Bereft of history and colorful tales by men whose vivid stories matched the turbulence of their lives, the ranches became pieces of real estate, nothing more.

We should have recorded the stories before those old cowboys took their last ride. So many adventures! So much of the history of the old, true West died with them and can never happen again. Ern Morgan, Fred Joy, Oliver Little, Buck Williams, Homer Smith, Al Shadley, Ernest and Etta Paddock, Mamie Farnsworth, Frank Emery, Orrie Summers, Buster Griffin, Tommy Jackson, Ash Morrow, Slim Pickens, Mel Lambert, all long dead, out riding the pastures of beyond. A list of names out of my personal past, men and women who lived lives, loved and were loved, drank whiskey like water, fought bare-fisted, and grubbed sagebrush by lantern light on land that, a half century or more later, is farmed by a stranger, unaware, uncaring even, of the richness that is history.

The traces are still there to find. But the story of the land lies fading fast in the piles of rusty cans and milk of magnesia and whiskey bottles in the dumps, in the tortured trees grown up between cast-iron spokes of old mower wheels, in bent drift pins which once firmed the logs of wild horse corrals, in the names of certain fields, or hills, or springs. In stories once told around a bunkhouse stove to kids who pretended not to listen. Without the stories that went with them, the heaps of old iron are just that, heaps of old iron.

We all have our memories, our own stories to tell, that stand only a feeble heartbeat from being lost forever, relegated to the dumps of old baby carriages and the rusting fenders of vintage cars that took us to church or witnessed the loss of our virginity. The stranger in the bar has his own list of folks who made up his personal history. I can only tell mine. As a writer I feel a responsibility to those whose lives touched my youth. Many of them were buried without an obituary, but these men and women deserve our thanks and our prayers. Important folk, for they shaped a West that was and will never be again.

These are the stories of old Indians I knew, old cowboys I knew, and old horses I knew. All gone now, traveling the great green ranges of heaven. This is partly my own story — of a lonesome kid, maybe the only one in history to run away from Marquette, Michigan, to ride saddle broncs and fight Brahma bulls in rodeos, who was lucky enough to grow up on one of the great cattle ranches of the West.

Book One

Chapter One

M
Y LIFE AS A COWBOY STARTED
amidst the thick upper foliage of a horse chestnut tree in Marquette, Michigan. I was a thirteen-year-old beanpole of a boy given to tree sitting and watching birds. I had been up that tree for several hours, watching a robin build a nest, when my full bladder told me I had better hurry home. But not wanting to disturb the robin, who seemed to be in the process of laying her first egg, I put the privacy of my treetop bower to good use and watched as a golden stream trickled groundward from leaf to leaf. As fate would have it, at that moment my mother was walking under the tree, heading up Spruce Street with her bridge group.

What really hurt my feelings was that of all the boys in the neighborhood, my mother knew exactly who was up that tree. The chorus of screams frightened the poor robin off the nest, and as the ladies rushed up the street to tend to their bonnets, I hit the ground running. Half an hour later I was hidden in a freight car just leaving town on a westward track.

I could have toughed it out, of course, and bared my behind to my father's leather slipper, but in my pocket was a crumpled letter. It was from my rancher uncle in far-off Oregon, who had written that he could step off the front porch of his ranch house and scoop up enough trout in a dishpan from the stream to feed his crew. If that were not enticement enough, his cowboys had just captured thirty wild horses and were breaking them to ride.

I felt no guilt at leaving home. For seventeen years my father had been bedridden with multiple sclerosis, and I had long been dreaming about relieving my parents' burdens by fending for myself. No matter now that I had neither spare clothes nor money, nor had I ever been more than sixty miles from home. I had yet to ride a horse, but at that moment I was already a cowboy.

By the time the steam locomotive had sounded its lonesome whistle at several crossings, however, I was so homesick and hungry that I was ready to jump off the first time the train slowed. My fate was decided by an old hobo named Gus, who, smelling of rancid sweat and cheap wine, threw his bedroll into my car at the next town, followed by a gunnysack that proved to be full of blackened pots, coffee, and dried beans. Nursing a hangover, he didn't talk much. For much of the trip I huddled near the open door, hypnotized by the rise and fall of telephone cables between the poles. Gus left me at a hobo camp under a trestle near Spokane, but not before he had lectured me on the dangers of rattlesnakes, booze, and young girls, and seen me safe from yard dicks on a Southern Pacific freight train headed south for Oregon.