Village Horse Doctor (4 page)

I went to Guy Rochell’s ranch one morning, and he had lots of good help to rope and tie as many as three horses down at a time. Guy carried my bucket of solution with my instruments in it from one horse to the next, and I carried my sulfa powder in a bottle in my hip pocket. Everything worked real fast and none of these horses had any unusual problems and from ten thirty till noon we caught, castrated, and turned loose twenty-seven head of horses.

It was good, sunny, dry weather and fresh green feed had grown enough for horses to fill up on it. I knew from the luck we had in the surgery and the medication I used
that these horses would have to have gotten well without the slightest complication.

I was still new in the country and was hoping that my professional reputation was improving. I saw Guy Rochell standing in front of the Stockton Pharmacy talking with several other ranchers and thought that this would be a good time to get some complimentary remarks. As I walked up and shook hands, I said, “Mr. Rochell, how have the horses done? Did they swell any?”

Guy rared back and wrinkles formed over his nose, and in a complete expression of disgust and high tone of voice, he said, “Did they swell? Did they swell? They swelled the mares in another pasture.”

Not too long after this, Bud Calhoun called and wanted me to come out to his place and castrate a two-year-old colt that he was very fond of. His place was just north of town in the irrigation valley that was watered by the natural flow of Comanche Springs. Bud made a business of repairing windmills, pulling sucker rods, and doing whatever was necessary to keep water flowing in the big pastures of the ranch country, and this farm where he lived was not his full-time work.

When I drove up, he had one man who worked for him and a neighbor there to help with the horses. As I began to get my instruments ready, Bud wanted to have a little talk with me. He was glad that I was in the country and all that kind of polite stuff, but directly, he cocked his head to one side and squinted his eyes and asked, “Did you ever cut a horse before?”

We talked on as I was gettin’ ready for the operation, but I didn’t give him any assurance that I knew what I was doing or that the horse would live or anything of the sort, and against his better judgment, we went ahead with the
operation. We had plenty of rope, and the men helping were stout and didn’t know a whole lot about tying down a horse but were willing. The colt was halter-broke and it didn’t take long to get him on the ground.

I had him castrated in less time than it takes to put it on paper. When the men helping had all the rope off the horse, and I was about to get up off my knees and the colt made no effort to struggle or get up, I looked up over my shoulder at Bud. He looked awful pale and sick and you could tell he was sure enough worried about his pet horse. I cleared my throat and raised my voice right quick and asked, “Bud, what are you going to do with the hide?”

Just before I thought he might faint, I slapped the colt in the flank with my hat and squalled at him and kicked him real hard in the belly from the ground side, and he jumped up and ran off. Bud took a long breath and said, “Doc, you scared me. I don’t know whether you’re gonna do or not.”

I had met Dow Puckett soon after I came to Fort Stockton, and he, like many others, had me do some dentistry and also remove tumors from backs and shoulders, and other light surgery on their horses. Most of this practice was an accumulation of neglect because there had never been a veterinary doctor living in Fort Stockton and they were not accustomed to being able to get some of these better livestock practices performed.

One Sunday afternoon in the summer, the cowboys were gathered over at the Sheriff’s posse grounds for a calf roping. Lee Graves came into town with his horses, wife, and kids and had started to the roping. He had an awful bad jaw on him from a toothache, and it wouldn’t get any better. He didn’t want to miss that calf roping, so he stopped at the drugstore to see if he could get something to ease it.

Gallemore told him from the size of his jaw and looks
of his mouth that he ought to go to the dentist. He called Dr. Bailey at home but never got an answer and Gallemore said that he didn’t have anything strong enough to do him any good that he could give without a doctor’s prescription.

I had driven up in front of the drugstore and was gettin’ out of my car when Lee came out the front door. He was holding that jaw, and I guess he was wondering how he was going to stand the pain and not miss the calf roping. Then he saw me. We were good friends and I had done some practice for the Hoover Ranch, where he was a partner with his Uncle Arthur.

He said, “Doc, I’ve got a toothache big enough for a horse, and I want to go to the calf ropin’. The way it’s pumpin’ and jumpin’, it might affect my ropin’ and you know that I need to get even with some of the boys from the last ropin’. Have you got anything that you could give me to kind of ease the pain?”

He explained that he had tried to get the dentist and that he guessed he was gone from home. Well, I didn’t think Bailey was gone from home because I knew he didn’t answer the phone on Sunday. I was interested in the performance at the calf roping because I was going to go watch. So I said, “Sure, Lee, I’ll give you something ’cause I would consider it an emergency in the matter of tryin’ to steady a man’s hand who was going to a calf ropin’.”

I reached in the back of my car and found the pills I wanted him to have and handed him two of them. I said, “Now, Lee, take one of these now, and wait about an hour, and if it hasn’t quit hurtin’, you can take the other one.”

He turned and went into the drugstore to get a drink of water, and as he came back out, he said, “I sure thank you, Doc. If I win enough at the ropin’, I’ll cut you in.”

Lee was riding a stud and like all cowboys at the roping, he was sitting at the back of the chutes on his horse waiting
for his turn. This stud reached over and nipped a mare or two standing around him and before the other rider could stop her, she kicked that stud in the belly three or four times right quick.

About then they called Lee’s name to rope and he broke out from behind the chutes and fitted the rope as pretty as you please so that they took up right behind the ears of that calf. As he stepped down on the ground, his leg went out from under him and he couldn’t get up.

When the other cowboys carried him off the ground, I asked, “Lee, what’s the matter?”

He said, “I took both of them pills at the same time and I was so numb that I didn’t know that that mare broke my leg until I stepped off the stud to rope my calf.”

During
the time I had been in Fort Stockton, one of the other constant questions was, “What do you know about alkali?” This was the local name for livestock that were poisoned by eating goldenrod in the wintertime.

If veterinary science and research in a hundred years or more on the North American continent hadn’t approached, much less solved, some of these many poisonous weeds, there was no use in me hedging or alibiing as to my lack of knowledge, and I began to answer, “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.” Goldenrod poisoning was another one of these neglected unknowns.

I was sittin’ in the drugstore one day when Dr. Moore
came in. He was a fine old family doctor who had come to the Trans-Pecos Region as a young man at the start of the First World War and was a bad tubercular, but the dry regions of the Southwest had caused him to be able to live a long, normal, useful life.

As we sat at the fountain, I brought up the subject of alkali. Dr. Moore related several experiences in his practice as an M.D. where people had become poisoned from drinking the milk from cows that were being pastured along the Pecos River and had access to goldenrod.

The earliest case history was that of two women who had died of poisoning near Grand Falls, Texas, and a kinsman had been accused of poisoning these old women for their wealth and was tried and convicted of the crime. In later years, Dr. Moore moved into the country and treated a family of five that had the same kind of symptoms and were poisoned. One of the family died before the milk of the cow was suspected as being the source of poisoning.

He told me of a number of cases where people had gotten alkali poisoning from drinking milk. He also said that for the last good many years, it was common knowledge that the poisoning was from grazing on goldenrod after the frost had caused it to be palatable to livestock.

I answered several calls that winter for alkalied cattle and horses. There were no symptoms in any of these cases of gastrointestinal disturbance. The weed was digestible and whatever the toxic substances were, they entered the blood stream. In the case of cows and mares that were giving milk, the grown animal would throw the toxic substance off in the milk and the calves and colts would die. Grown dry cows, steers, and bulls, when they had eaten goldenrod for several days, would appear normal until they were driven, moved, or hauled or in some manner exercised and excited, at which time they would develop an extreme
nervousness and would become stiff and go into severe riggers and quiver and shake and lie down. Very few, if any, would recover without careful treatment. There were some, however, that were saved by keeping them quiet and carrying them feed and water; over a long period of time, it seemed that they eliminated the toxic substance from their systems, but, for the most part, the mortality rate was extremely high.

I did post-mortems on a number of cattle, some sheep, and lots of horses during the winter and found very little or no evidence in the organs of anything that would have caused death. There were several big horse ranches along the Pecos River that ran thousands of brood mares. They generally expected to lose a lot of them in the winter and had almost resigned themselves to this being one of the hazards of ranching along the Pecos River.

Old Man Garner had a horse ranch on the Pecos River running north from Girvin, and he ran his horses open range. He rarely knew how many he had and wasn’t too concerned about losing horses because of goldenrod since they were awfully cheap at the time.

I asked him about letting me know when one of his mares died because I would like to do a post-mortem on her as soon as possible.

“Doc,” he said, “seems like you’re tryin’ to help the country, and me and them old mares ain’t helpin’ it much at the price they’d bring. Why don’t you come out whenever you’ve got the time and get a saddle horse at the ranch headquarters that’s been on good feed and won’t have no goldenrod in him and ride up and down the river. Then, anywhere you find a band of them mares, just jump ’em and run ’em till one falls dead and do whatever you want to her while she’s still warm. Most any mare that you run and cause to drop dead is gonna die before winter’s over anyway,
so you just come back and hunt mares till you find out somethin’. I won’t charge you nothin’ and you don’t charge me nothin’. Don’t that seem like a fair proposition?”

Early in the mornings I would go out and saddle a good horse at the ranch headquarters. I’d take the small instruments I needed to do a post-mortem and put them in the pockets on my saddle that I could buckle down tight so there would be no danger of losing them. Then I tied the larger instruments to my saddle with the saddle strings.