Village Horse Doctor (19 page)

In
late November of my second year in Fort Stockton, yellowweed was lush and had enough size that I could begin to pull it and continue the experiment I had started my first winter but had been halted by the tough summer weed. I had started to go pull some yellowweed to feed the experimental sheep when an old man stopped me as I was gettin’ in my car. He happened to be one member of the welcoming committee that had told me the country didn’t need me when I arrived. He said he had a bull that was damn bad sick and for me to hurry up and follow him out to his ranch in my car. I said, “Surely you must be mistaken.”

He looked at me hard and bellowed out that he wasn’t no doctor, but he had enough sense to know when a bull was sick.

I said, “Well, it don’t seem possible when you told me that this was a healthy stock country. Besides that, I don’t believe that I can be worried about him because you told me that when there was a ‘die-out’ here, there was always enough left to restock the country.”

This made the old man holler and wave both hands and he told me that he didn’t want to lose no bull just because of some bull he put out once, and he would consider it a favor if I would come and doctor his bull.

I asked him, “Well, you sure that you want to spend money to have me doctor stock for you when you could do it just as good yourself?”

This would have made him mad only he was pleading by now and said, “I’ve done doctored the bull and he ain’t no better.”

For meanness, I said, “Do you suppose I’ve got to cure what’s the matter with him and what you done to him too?”

In desperation he said, “Hell, you can charge me double. Let’s go doctor the bull!”

The bull got all right after I treated him and the old hardhead may never have bragged on me but he, at least, shut up talkin’ about the country not needin’ me.

In the summer I had done a great deal of research on the therapeutic action of drugs that would be usable in feeds that I hoped would counteract the toxic effect of vegetation that grew in an alkali soil. By now, this research had begun to get expensive and it had taken a lot of the money I had earned in my general practice to carry on this project. However, sheep were more plentiful than money and I had no trouble getting plenty furnished me by those who were hopeful that the research would be successful.

The first sheep that I was feeding this second winter on still another formula died the sixteenth day from the beginning of the test, which was five days longer than one had lived up to this time. The last sheep to die in this group lived thirty-four days. This was the first sign of improvement since I had started working on the project about a year before, and this was the twenty-seventh medical preparation I had tried.

It had still been impossible for me to break the liquid of the fiber and extract anything harmful from the contents; however, I continued to grind weed and work with it, and the back of my office had a sickening sweet, fresh yellowweed smell that filled the air for months and months.

With the encouragement from the last group of sheep, I reworked that particular formula and started on another group of four sheep. In this group there was one half-breed Navaho sheep. He was older than the others and bigger and ate more weed than any of the other sheep. I pulled weed nearly all winter for this bunch of sheep and the first one died on the forty-third day. The other two died within sixty days, and the big old Navaho sheep got sick but refused to die and I turned him out in the spring.

This particular experiment caused quite a lot of conversation around and more than a few people drove over to the Posse grounds to see these sheep.

I was ready to start feeding sheep the third winter when Dow and I decided that we could have better water and feed arrangements in a corral at the Red House pasture south of the stock pens on the north side of Dow Puckett’s ranch. This was a handy place to get to from town and was real close to all the yellowweed that I needed to pull up and down the draw in the same pasture.

I had changed my formula several times by now, using some rabbits and guinea pigs to experiment with. This
particular formula was number forty-seven and was the last in a two-year period of experimentation. I had compounded the medical ingredients in my laboratory for all these experiments and this one I mixed into soybean meal and put it in a trough at the rate of one half pound of medicated feed per sheep per day.

Drugs cannot be used in a dry-feed mixture successfully unless they are all in fine powder form. Any variety of ground grain is included to let the drug elements sift to the bottom of the trough and will not afford a uniform dose of medication in the feed. However, heavy protein meals, such as cottonseed and soybean meal, are finely ground and are much heavier and still contain a small percentage of oils and this makes it possible to mix powdered drugs with meals into a stable proportion that will be reasonably equally mixed in the trough as the feed is eaten, thereby ensuring a uniform dose of medication.

I still had help from some of the ranchers around, and the days that I was too busy I would see them at coffee or pass them on the road and tell them that I needed weed for the sheep and ’most everyone was glad to help. When someone passing by saw them pulling weed, they’d hurrah ’em about Doc Green havin’ them on yellowweed too.

All four of these experimental sheep lived and thrived on a complete diet of yellowweed with the supplemental half pound of medicated feed. However, the yellowweed year was over and the big pasture demonstration experiment remained to be tried the coming fall and winter.

By now there were a good many ranchers who thought the research and formula showed promise and were very enthusiastic about the possibility of grazing yellowweed successfully. However, there were still a lot of skeptics who advanced the idea that you might be able to pull weed and keep sheep in a pen and make them live, but it would never
be successful to feed in the pasture where sheep could graze their own diet of yellowweed.

Several different methods were used in trying to live with yellowweed and graze sheep on it. Some pastures that were good with the exception of a certain yellowweed-infested hill or ridge could be used by fencing off the yellowweed and leaving that part of the pasture idle. In many cases these fenced-off yellowweed traps might amount to as much as two or three thousand acres.

Another practice followed by ranchers who had pastures that were partially free of yellowweed was to rotate the sheep. Instead of having the proper number of sheep in each pasture, they would concentrate all of them into one yellowweed pasture and let them eat the yellowweed down the ground; with so many sheep none of them would get enough to make them sick, and this took about three days. Then the sheep would be scattered back into the regular pasture for a week or so and then all back into the yellowweed pasture. This procedure would go on all winter, which meant lots of ridin’, herdin’, handlin’, and chousin’ during the winter months. The theory behind this was that if they ate the weed up for enough years that it wouldn’t seed, and some thought that they would kill it out and get rid of it.

There was another practice that was far more expensive and this was used on ranches that had nothing but yellowweed. The sheep would be turned into a yellowweed pasture for several days, and at the first signs of sickness they would be put in a corral on alfalfa hay and fed a full ration until the yellowweed was fed out of them. This was an extremely costly and not too satisfactory method, but it was another way to survive the yellowweed season.

Drugs that I had needed for these limited group experiments had been fairly easy to purchase in the small quantities, but now it was necessary that I arrange for enough
drugs to feed seventy-five to one hundred sheep for as long as sixty days or more.

The meal mixtures were far better than grain mixtures, but the final perfection of dosage would have to be accomplished by the pelleting of these mixtures into sheep-size pellets. This brought me to the decision to have the feed for the pasture experiment run through a pellet machine at some feed mill, in order to make sure that each sheep would get its proper dose. When I began to contact the drug companies for these medications and ask for some of them in quantities of a hundred pounds, I discovered that there had never been such an extensive use of any of these elements, and quantity procurements would pose a real problem.

I bought up all the quantity stocks that I could find for my next year’s experiment and by early fall had enough medication to process 1,400 pounds of medicated feed. I didn’t have equipment and there was no one available in my territory to compound a medical formula for 1,400 pounds of feed, so Dow Puckett and I went out to his ranch headquarters to use a small hand-turned concrete mixer to mix these drugs.

The mixing of this formula in such quantities was going to be a pretty messy job, because the coarse animal charcoal continues to break and give off dust that goes deep into clothes fibers and deeper into skin and under fingernails and works around to the back side of your eyeballs, and so we put on some old clothes and began mixing. As Dow was turning the crank on the mixer and I was breaking up any lumps or clods in the drum with my hand, we were both getting a good coat of charcoal dust and powdered medicine over us and I asked, “Dow, do you feel like you are about to go down in medical history with Dr. Lister and Pasteur?”

Dow laughed real big and said, “I think when this is over
we can go into town disguised as misplaced coal miners and nobody would recognize us.”

A few cranks and another coat of dust later he said, “Since I’m turning the crank, I’ll be Henry Ford. He made the most money. You be Pasteur.”

This kind of conversation kept the day’s mixing from turning into real work. It turned out that by the time we had finished sackin’ and loadin’ the mixture in my car that Dow’s description of us was far more accurate than either of us being put into medical history.

Soybean or cottonseed meal was very scarce and at that time of year the new crop of seed had not come in and I was having trouble finding any. H. H. Matthews, superintendent of the El Sinora Cattle Company, operated a three-hundred-section ranch. It was strictly a cow ranch and Mr. Matthews was not interested in sheep, but he was interested in the country and his fellow ranchmen and was glad to see the research being done. I had done some practice for the El Sinora and our business relations had been pleasant.

The El Sinora had two or three tons of soybean meal that by some mistake had been delivered to them with a carload of soybean cake, and Mr. Matthews agreed to sell as much of this meal as I wanted, on the condition that I
NOT
pay for it with cash but that I had to practice it out on the El Sinora as they needed me. He explained that the El Sinora Cattle Company, whose bookkeeping office was in San Antonio, had no arrangements to buy and sell feed, but it would be all right for me to render statements marked paid for my services until such feed had been worked out.

Several months before this, my friend Gid Reding had built a solid concrete building. One side of the building was partitioned off for my office and there was a partition separating my laboratory from the front office. Gid opened a whisky store on the other side of this new building, and
with a whisky store and a horse doctor in the same building, the native cowboys immediately named it
THE MEDICAL ARTS
.

It was in the front office of the Medical Arts that I moved out the furniture and covered the floor with building paper, pulled off my boots and in my bare feet on the floor mixed and compounded drugs with 1,400 pounds of soybean meal, using a garden rake and a stove shovel. By raking and shoveling it up against one wall and working it back on the floor against the other wall, I was using the same principle of shoveling and raking as would be used by a druggist compounding powders with a spatula.

While I was mixing this feed, Scuddy, the plumber from next door, stopped by, stuck his head in, watched me a minute, and said, “Doc, I’ll turn the water on that if you want to make a loblolly while you’re playing.”