Village Horse Doctor (22 page)

I stayed in Fort Worth until we finished the milling of the hundred tons, which amounted to three boxcar loads. After it was sealed and turned over to the railroad, I drove back to Fort Stockton to be there to unload the feed when it arrived. The ranchers who were interested were all glad to receive the feed early and have it in their barns ready to use when the yellowweed symptoms would first begin to appear in their sheep.

’Most all the flocks had been put on feed a week to ten days before Christmas and apparently were doing all right, and I felt like it was safe for me to take off and go home to have Christmas with my folks. It was five hundred and thirty-five miles to Cumby, and took me a day to drive home. I stayed Christmas Day and drove back the third day, and the next morning several flocks of sheep were showing sickness.

Some flocks were not eating the medicated feed and were getting sick due to the absence of the medication in their daily diet of yellowweed. Other flocks were eating all the feed everyday that was given them and were getting progressively sicker. Then there were a few more sheep that got sick later but not seriously so.

The best thing that I could do at the time was to buy
fresh unmedicated feed and deliver it to the ranchers and take up all the medicated feed and haul it back to town. All the ranchers had to move their sheep off the yellowweed pastures. Everybody was kind and considerate and thoughtful of me, and I did not receive any abuse or bad publicity from the ranchers that were feeding the feed because they had seen the sheep the year before and were all willing to believe that something had gone wrong. However, the diehards and smart alecks were having quite a celebration at my expense up and down the streets and at the conversation places. Their capital remark was that they “knowed it wouldn’t work when they went to sure ’nuff usin’ it on ranches.”

After the feed was in storage in town, I began to take samples. The color varied from no medication to feed that was solid black with medicine and so hard that the sheep wouldn’t eat it and had gotten sick. The feed that had little or no medicine color to it didn’t contain enough medication and those sheep got sick. This left a few flocks where the drug content appeared to be all right, but they had slowly sickened too.

I ground, washed, and burned feed and determined that this great “magic electric eye” must have gotten sick on medicine and the entire hundred tons was badly out of proportion, and unless something could be done, my year’s supply of drugs and another yellowweed season was about to be lost. We had been reporting this condition to Mr. Buckingham by phone in San Angelo for two or three weeks, and he was dodging the issue and hadn’t brought himself to face the music and tell the mill and his superiors about the great “magic electric eye.”

During this time I had discovered another serious fault with fibrous cubed feed. When the drugs were compounded
into soybean or cottonseed protein meal and made into pellets, the protein meal released the medical properties in the stomach of the sheep, which counteracted the toxic substance from yellowweed as it first entered the animal’s digestive tract. Now, when the grain cube entered the sheep’s stomach, the grain and fiber swelled and reabsorbed the gastric juices and reabsorbed the medical properties and was passed on into the small intestine for digestion and thereby removed the medical properties from the stomach, which was the site of action where the toxic substance had to be neutralized. This explained why the sheep that were on fairly well-proportioned feed gradually sickened.

I got on the phone one night and jarred the Purina Company from St. Louis to Fort Worth to Mr. Buckingham. The next morning when I opened my office, Mr. Buckingham was in Fort Stockton. We loaded all the feed that was left from this “magic electric eye” mistake in two railroad cars and shipped it back to the mill at Fort Worth. All the cubes were reground into meal form and by some rare unbelievable circumstance, it was discovered that there were still some batch mixers in Purina’s plant that must have been overlooked in the beginning.

After the meal was all milled and completely remixed it was necessary to determine what the percentage of medical properties now amounted to. I gathered up samples of the meal and went to a laboratory in Fort Worth where I knew the technician; I felt sure he would help me find the proper content.

He suggested that we burn this meal in airtight drums in the absence of oxygen and thereby analyze the char, and at the same time we would do a wash-out flotation on some of the other meal. By these two and other processes we determined that the protein content was greatly diminished
from the original 20 per cent and that the drug content was in overabundance due to the fact that the sheep had eaten up the cubes that had contained very little medication, so I told the mill to add 27½ per cent of the total volume in soybean meal.

We remilled this mixture and shipped it back to Fort Stockton, but by this time the yellowweed was almost over and much of this feed lay in the barns on the ranches through the summer and turned rancid and was worthless by the following yellowweed season.

This was the most serious blow in time and finances that I had suffered in my years of research and even though I had a staunch following of believers, I had lost a year and had failed to gain any more support, and needless to say and without blame to them, had lost quite a few of those who had been interested the year before.

I was at the El Sinora Cattle Company one day later that summer doing surgery on some Hereford bulls’ eyes. We worked these bulls into heavy constructed cattle chutes that were intended to be used for branding, dehorning, and any other surgical operation that might be necessary. The gate on the end of the chute was made in such a manner that a cow’s or bull’s head could be stuck out at the top of the gate without the bull being able to get away. We would place a rope on the bull’s horns and sometimes shape a halter around his nose and a cow hand would pull his head which-ever direction was necessary for me to perform surgery on an eye.

During the day I noticed twenty three-year-old fillies in the corral next to the chutes where we were working the bulls. These were real nice fillies that had been selected to
keep as replacement mares that the ranch raised their cow horses from. I especially liked one filly and H. H. Matthews sold her to me for cash, and I told him I’d pick her up at a later date.

One afternoon when I wasn’t busy, I called Peeler Matthews, who was the foreman, and told him that if he could get the horses in the corral, I would bring my horse trailer and come get the one I had bought. This was all right with him, so I talked my friend Gid into going along and helping me with her. It was a short trip of only about twenty miles, and I explained that Peeler would have the horses in the corral and we would be back in the middle of the afternoon.

The horses were in the corral when we got there and Peeler roped the filly that I had bought from horseback. Gid quickly stepped up to Peeler on foot and took the rope off the saddlehorn and shook the filly some slack. Peeler sat on his horse and I sat on the fence and we both wondered what Gid was about to do.

He tossed the loose end of the lariat rope on the ground and walked up to the filly, apparently had quite a little conversation with her, reached up and pulled the lariat rope off over her head and dropped it on the ground. After he scratched her under the neck, he sat down in front of her, leaned back on her forelegs, and got pretty well acquainted with the “little dear,” as he called her. He put a hackamore on her and fastened it very loosely. Gid left the hackamore rope lying on the ground, walked around the filly, never taking his hands off her, spanked her on the flank, pulled her tail in a friendly sort of way, and finally got up on her back. He stretched out with his chin resting on her withers and crossed his boots over her rump.

He later dismounted by sliding off over her hindquarters and told his newfound friend that he would like for her to
go home with him. He put his arm over her shoulders, picked up the hackamore rope, and he and she walked out of the corral to the trailer.

While this was going on, a bunch of Mexican ranch hands had gathered around the corral fence. They neither spoke nor understood much English, but one of them asked Peeler Matthews “How he did it?” Peeler told them in Spanish that Gid could hypnotize a horse and that he could do it to a man the same way. As we started out toward the trailer, I noticed that all the Mexican cowboys had disappeared.

In the fall yellowweed was not making a vigorous growth because there were large areas that had not received any rain. However, there had been rain in the draws where there had been overflow and the yellowweed there was lush. A few of my prospective customers were not willing to take the bad results of the year before because of the mistake in the mixing of the feed and medicine as final, and we began to make plans to go back to batch-making the feed at the Minimax Mill at Lamesa and try to forget the nightmare of the magic eye.

I now had a source of supply established for the drugs that I needed. However, it was necessary to contact the wholesale drug refineries in the summer while raw drugs were available in order to have adequate supplies by fall. I had bought enough drugs to medicate another hundred tons of feed for several reasons. First, I felt that we would use another hundred tons of feed that year and, second, it was necessary to buy in this quantity to get the best possible prices on drugs.

It was a dry fall and even in the lush places ranchers were slow to start feeding and were hoping against hope that maybe yellowweed wouldn’t be as early as usual. When sheep started getting sick in December, I began mixing
drugs at Fort Stockton, where I had them stored, and I hauled the compounded drugs by trailer and pickup load one hundred and forty-five miles to Lamesa. A pickup load of drugs would medicate about a truckload of feed, and the mill would deliver it back to me in Fort Stockton.

This was a long, slow process, but every flock of sheep on feed were doing good and I was on the road back to regaining the confidence in the project that I had before the feed mistake of the previous year. Very few sheep on the medicated feed got sick, but the lack of winter and spring rains caused the weed to play out, and some of the flocks did not have to be fed over as long a period of time since the yellowweed season was cut short.

This left me with about 70 per cent of the newly purchased drugs on hand. I had lost $9,000 in drugs and feed the year of the magic-eye mistake, and now I had several thousand dollars’ worth of drugs on hand at the end of the season and the old-time desert ranchers had begun looking at the sky and talking about drouth.

I was walking through the lobby of the hotel headed for the dining room one day, and there were two or three loafers in the lobby who were opposed to anybody doing good, and one of them said to the other, “Between the failures of yellowweed and the drouth, this season will just about bury old Doc.”

Beco Price, an old-time cowboy, was sittin’ across from them with his back to the wall and I heard him say, “They’d better bury him face down or he’s liable to claw out.”

There were still some occasional rains east of the Pecos River in the Ozona and Sonora country, but west of the Pecos was now in a drouth. Ranch people by nature are optimists and spirits were still high, and when dry weather was mentioned, somebody would chime out, “It always has rained, and it will rain again by the time that we ‘have to
have it.’ ” However, the old men who had ranched the country for a lifetime knew that a drouth in the Trans-Pecos Region of Texas didn’t necessarily have to be broken when the young people and newcomers thought it “had to be.”

The following winter there was no sign of any weeds, good or bad, and the old vegetation had mostly been eaten up by the cattle and sheep. It was the general hope of all ranchers to hang on until it rained, and the first attempt at staying was made by buying alfalfa hay to feed during that winter. As baby lambs were born in the spring and as the days got hotter and the nights got shorter and the lambs got smaller, the first movement of livestock started.

Many ranchers went east of the Pecos River where it was still raining and leased pastures and shipped off of their desert ranches. ’Most everyone began to sell off the old and the cull end of their cattle, sheep, and horses. I had mares and colts and young unbroken horses pastured out with ranchers all over the country, and occasionally there would be a little thunder cloud come up and rain somewhere on a half section of land. It got to be a common joke around town that “it rained on Doc Green’s horses,” because I had some stock in any direction.

Ranchers are a hardy breed, but there were other winters without winter weeds and other springs without grass coming, and between feed bills, short wool clips, and the lack of lamb and calf crops, the Trans-Pecos Region had less livestock, more broke ranchers, no use for medicated yellowweed, and less need for the services of the village horse doctor.

Yellowweed had been a threat to the ranching of sheep west of the Pecos River ever since man stocked the country. It will always be the principal killer of sheep in the Trans-Pecos Region, and I doubt seriously that there will ever be
a magic wand that you can wave from the top of a windmill or a miracle spray that will eliminate yellowweed.

In my earliest research, I planted the seeds of yellowweed in a flower box and moved the box several times through the years and pulled the weed from it, never letting one plant seed for twenty-three years. The yellowweed seed bed lays in the alkaline soils of the desert region, immune to any chemical reaction, and under sparse rainfall, 5 per cent of it will last for more than thirty years. Since one yellowweed plant can make as many as forty thousand seed, I can never believe that drouth will endure long enough or any man-made preparation will ever destroy the yellowweed seed bed of the Trans-Pecos Region of Texas and will always be a problem.