Tough Men

This is from Chapter XV, Managing A Trail Herd of the book, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. As I read this book I am really impressed by these men.

“It was a rough, hard, adventurous life, but was not without its sunny side, and when everything  moved smoothly the trip was an agreeable diversion from the monotony of the range. But things did not always go smoothly. The stampede was especially guarded against during the first ten days or so of the drive. The cattle were nervous and easily frightened, and the slightest noise might startle them into running. Hence everybody was on the alert, and if we succeeded in holding the herd together the first two weeks, we seldom experienced  trouble from the stampede farther along the trail. The men slept on the ground with their horses staked nearby. Sometimes the demands were so urgent that our boots were not taken off for an entire week. Nerves became so tense that it was a stranding rule that no man was to be touched by another when asleep until after he had been spoken to. The man who suddenly aroused a sleeper was liable to be shot, as all were thoroughly armed and understood the instant use of revolver and rifle.”  Charles Goodnight


The psychology of a stampeding herd was difficult to fathom . . . Night after night they have been known to run, taking fright at ‘something,’ as we on the range say, which was apparently nothing, yet ‘something’ to subtle for the sophisticated sense of man. Often three thousand steers have been dozing in peace with the night riders circling around them at an easy gait. Then ‘something happened,’ and with unbelievable suddenness, as quick as the flash of a wakeful eye and as unexpected as the flush of a covey of hidden quail...the cattle were up together and gone. A moment, a second, an instant ago they slept in peace, comfortably scattered and headed to every point in the compass. And yet they rose, they flashed to their feet, apparently all headed in the same direction, and in impenetrable but perfectly co-ordinated mass, they stampeded.
At that electric instant the horse was keener than the man above him. Through his flesh ran a tremor of excitement, his ears came up, his eyes flashed, and his breath came quick as he instantly calculated the course of the herd. And before the man could think that gentle, dozing horse had whirled, sprung, and charged into the night as a part of that wild race.
Charles Goodnight – “In the excitement of a stampede a man was not himself, and his horse was not the horse of yesterday. Man and horse were one, and the combination accomplished feats that would be utterly impossible under ordinary circumstances.”


[The method of curbing a stampede was to turn the cows into a circle.] “They invariably circled to the right. If any old trail driver ever knew of a herd milling to the left, I would like to hear from him.” Goodnight


After the stampede was over and the herd was gathered, the hands laughed, joked, and enjoyed it in retrospect. [an old-timer told of a terrible stampede years earlier] “In the darkness the herd headed for a sixty-foot bluff and poured over the top like hell after a preacher. I was ridin’ on their fetlocks when my night horse – and God, he was a good one – went over the top with them. And I was still a-settin’ in the saddle like a reg’lar hand when he hit on his all-fours and bogged three feet deep in solid rock.”


Goodnight had a feeling that a herd of cattle tends to attract electricity until enough rain has fallen to wet it. Lighting struck one of his herds on the Platte, and killed ‘a big old black steer that was bad to stampede,’ an ‘act of God’ for which Goodnight was grateful. At the same time it knocked down Tom Brannon, the worst swearer the driver ever had on the trail, ‘and he didn’t swear any more for two months.’


“If a man is struck by lightning and is not killed, wet him and stretch him out, and ten to one he’ll come to and get well.” Charles Goodnight


[concerning] the electrical displays of the High Plains country, when men were struck and ‘turned black as ______ in five minutes time,’ when horses were killed and bridle bits melted in their mouths, conchos from their saddles, and shoes from their hoofs; when the lighting struck the earth ‘and rolled along the ground in balls of fire’


In such storms, often accompanied by terrific winds, the horse beneath the cowboy was more comforting than plenty of life insurance, because as the old cowman said: ‘A horse will stand on the ground when the wind is so strong that it will blow a wagon away. I have been on horses and have seen everything in camp blown away, but never a horse went down.’


These were tough men. And this doesn’t even tell the half of it!