Village Horse Doctor (8 page)

People who have never lived horseback and are not familiar with the big pastures in rough country would not understand the feeling that is developed among all members
of a ranch family for certain individual horses. During this epidemic I rarely, if ever, heard discussed the value in dollars of a horse that was sick. The conversation about an older horse would concern the “good he had done” in helping establish a ranch or in helping raise the kids. In talking about one of the younger horses that were hard from constant use, the stories would be about the bad spots he had carried his rider through in working stock and how much endurance he had in rough country.

One night I was treating a horse that was sick and staggering bad but had not been down on the ground. As I walked and staggered with him, trying to get a needle in his jugular vein, the old cowboy leadin’ him and holdin’ his head and talkin’ to him said, “Doc, I’ve dropped my rope into lots of wars on this old friend and we always won ’em, and we sure need to save him if we can.” This meant that he caught lots of fightin’ cattle and horses and brought them in and this horse was worth saving.

It was a common thing for a rider to leave the headquarters early in the morning and if in the late afternoon, he hadn’t gotten back, when word got out, the first conversation would be about the horse he was ridin’. If his wife or somebody spoke up and said he was on a certain old horse that was known to be trustworthy, there would be a feeling of reassurance that he just had had some trouble but would be in after a while.

In the event a rider was past due to come in and someone remarked that he was ridin’ a “green” horse (an inexperienced animal) or a horse that had a lot of endurance and was used for hard rides but was known not to be dependable in a tight, then whoever was around and whoever could be called easily would start lookin’ for the rider, who might be crippled or killed. Horses that had no affection for people
and were undependable would rarely come back to a headquarters and would usually be found grazin’ or at a water hole.

When I was doctor’n’ a horse, the story would come up about what he had done and who he had saved and they’d say, “Save him if you can!” Nobody in the ranch country ever insulted a good horse by talking about what it would cost to replace him and the telephone operators whose help was indispensable in this particular epidemic were mostly all girls and women with ranch background or were married to a cowboy and the general thought in treating horses was never about money but instead was to save the horse for the good he had done or for what he meant to somebody.

One night I was way below Sanderson on the Rio Grande River treating some horses and the ranch wife came to the corral and said, “We just talked to the telephone operators and they have gotten together and figured out that you haven’t been to bed in about nine days. They told me to tell you that so far as they know, your calls are sort of caught up, and I should put you to bed.”

This kind of concern was very touching, but I had more work lined up than they knew about, so I thanked the good woman and kept on doctorin’ horses. When I left the ranch and pulled out into the highway, I noticed several hot biscuits stuffed with venison steak layin’ in the seat of my car. During these several weeks, the ranchwomen in the country kept me fed by havin’ food ready at the most ungodly hours or by puttin’ it in the car so I could eat on the way.

By the end of the fifth week the epidemic slowed up and by then I had vaccinated (two injections) over four thousand horses and had treated three hundred and seventy-five active cases and had driven over thirteen thousand miles. Outside of the cavalry, there have never been this many
horses vaccinated or treated during the same length of time and over as wide a territory. This siege could not have been brought under control without the help of everyone who was interested in the horses of the great Southwest. The highly mechanized, direct-dialing telephone systems now in existence could have never performed the service to the ranch people and to me that those switchboard operators had, voluntarily and without any thought of gain or reward. Filling-station operators, café waitresses, druggists, and some few others all helped by taking and relaying messages.

FROM
the day that I first met Con Cunningham on the street he confronted me daily with questions about yellowweed and insisted that I try to learn something about the treatment of sheep affected by it. After the streak of good luck I had had with lechuguilla, more ranchers became insistent that I “try my hand” on yellowweed.

I had become considerably more interested in yellowweed than the ranchers realized, but I’d begun to hedge and not ask as many open questions and had also begun to ponder what the financial return would be if by research I could develop a satisfactory antidote or treatment for sheep grazing on yellowweed. There were no figures available and no estimates that were accurate as to how many thousands of acres of yellowweed were in the Trans-Pecos Region and no fairly accurate guess as to how many sheep were being partially grazed on yellowweed.

Ernie Hamilton represented a livestock loan company, and was an old sheepman who covered most of West Texas in his job. He told me he thought that some quantity of yellowweed was found in as many as ten counties in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. I had become well acquainted with the growth characteristics and appearance of the weed and decided that I would make my own personal survey to try to determine the territory that it covered.

The more I studied the weed the more I realized that it restricted itself to certain types of soil and terrain. In a good pasture next to a yellowweed growth, the soil and drainage might be such that the weed would not spread into it. It was rather inexplainable why it thrived on what was not necessarily the best soil.

I drove north from Fort Stockton and found an abundance of yellowweed nearly everywhere along the highway running from Fort Stockton to Pecos. But in a good part of this country there was barbed wire fence for cattle and no net
wire fences for sheep, which meant that the weed was not a problem in that part of the country. However, I found yellowweed as far north as Lovington, New Mexico, and scattered amounts of it almost everywhere in southern New Mexico, but some of the sheep in this particular country were under herd and were kept from the yellowweed ridges.

West of Fort Stockton and all of Pecos County was yellowweed country. The Davis Mountains regions didn’t furnish any yellowweed of importance, but I found several hundred sections of scattered weed in Culberson County and even in parts of Hudspeth County. To the south of Fort Stockton, in the southern part of Pecos County there was very little yellowweed and hardly any in Terrell and Brewster counties. There was lots of yellowweed east and slightly north of Fort Stockton all the way to McCamey and plenty in Upton and Crane counties, but most of that land was not being pastured with sheep.

My final analysis showed that Fort Stockton and Pecos County was for sure the capital of the yellowweed range in the West. Another peculiar finding was that very little yellowweed grew east of the Pecos River in the Edwards Plateau. In later years I transplanted some yellowweed that failed to make seed in that part of the country. With this information at hand and knowing that there were as many as a hundred thousand sheep subjected to the possibility of yellowweed poisoning, I decided to begin research on the weed.

One morning I met Dow Puckett in front of the hotel and told him that I had some ideas that I would like to experiment with on some sheep. I would put them in a small pen and feed them yellowweed, keeping them off any other feed.

Dow said, “I think that’s fine, Doctor. I’ve got a number of sheep that will die from yellowweed before the winter’s
over anyway, so I’ll bring you some of them. How many do you want at a time?”

I thought for a minute and said, “Until I find out how much weed they will eat per day, I think I would like to have four to put in the first pen; that will make percentages easier to figure both in my formulas and in the days of weed and days of death.”

Dow laughed and said, “I don’t think you’ll learn much from four dead sheep, and I’ll be willing to furnish you more as you need them.”

The next day he brought the sheep in a pickup. The old Sheriff’s posse barn was across Comanche Creek from town. I built panel pens on the outside of the barn, where we kept these yellowweed sheep.

The next day Doug Adams saw me at Dee Walker’s filling station and said, “Doc, I heard that you and some sheep are eating yellowweed.”

I said, “That’s right and from what I’ve begun to learn from yellowweed, I may get sicker on it than they will before this is over.”

He laughed and said, “I’ve been on and off it all my life, and I can promise you that it won’t improve your health or your pocketbook.”

As I started to leave, he said, “If you kill off all of Dow’s sheep, I think I’ve got some to spare that the weed wouldn’t be foreign to.”

Not long after that, Ernie Hamilton was making his rounds for the loan company. These sheep had been on weed for several days and one was already showing signs of sickness and was beginning to vomit some weed. Ernie looked them over, gave me some encouragin’ speech and said, “As much as feed bills and death loss have cost the loan company, I’ll tell some of my customers that we’ll give ’em credit if they give you some sheep.”

I said, “Ernie, it may make it awful hard for your customers to keep up their head count if this research lasts as long as some think it will.”

I pulled yellowweed every day up and down the bar ditches and in various pastures where it was lush and tender and I fed these sheep an exclusive diet of fresh yellowweed.

My practice had become real good and when I was too busy to pull yellowweed, Dow Puckett, Harrison Dyke, or somebody else would and feed these experimental sheep. Everyone was interested in what I was doing and it was the subject of conversation whenever I stopped for even a minute around the drugstore or filling station.

None of the first several medications that I administered to these sheep, whether by injection or dry powder mixed in feed or liquid medicine given by mouth, seemed to be of any particular value, and each bunch of experimental sheep would show yellowweed sickness from the fifth to the seventh day of the test. Without exception, by the eleventh day in a number of tests the first sheep would die.

Many times when I would be discussing yellowweed there would be talk about whether certain parts of the plant might be more poisonous than others. In one flock of experimental sheep I noticed that a big ewe lamb was especially fond of the blooms and would eat all of them off the fresh weed before she ate any of the stalk or leaves. An old Navajo sheep that I had fed several different ways preferred the dry stalk of last year’s growth. Another ewe lamb would nibble the fresh leaves off the stalk and refuse to eat the tougher parts of the plant. I fed these three sheep separate a full diet of their choice part of the weed, and they all developed sickness within a few hours of each other. During this same period of time, I had fed the fresh pulled roots to rabbits and they developed the sickness at
the same time that other rabbits got sick on the whole weed, so there was no part of the weed that did not contain the toxic substance and in equal proportions to the rest of the weed.

With one exception, by the twenty-first day, they were all dead. However, regardless of their state of sickness, they never ceased to eat fresh pulled yellowweed and would do so eagerly. In several instances they would prefer fresh yellowweed to alfalfa hay when both were put in the feeder at the same time.

The first of the formulas that I used were products of modern medicine and in many instances were hypodermic injections known to have desirable effects in the treatment of some other toxic conditions. All of these were completely worthless and caused me to turn my attention to some of the very old drugs of botanical origin that I had either used or knew to have been used for large livestock that were sick in other desert regions of the world.