This week we present the first of a two-part miniseries.
The Last Cowboy of Absaroka: Histories of the West
The Last Cowboy lives outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, in a cradle of the Bighorn Mountains, a few miles from the base of their eastern-facing slopes. The mountains crash down into the grasslands, the last eruption of the Continental Divide before it gives way to the Great Plains and all water runs to the Mississippi. It’s horse country, and, before the cowboys, it was the Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfeet who galloped across this great open land.
You run into the Cowboy on location. He wears Crocs, footwear which at the moment all of America seems to agree upon, and invites you out onto his wooden porch for coffee. You can’t be troubled much for details and the like, but if you have to say, he’s a sort of all-American cross of Mr. Incredible and Woody Harrelson, only older. He’s also an excellent storyteller.
Real Cowboys
It’s totally different today he says, and he means cowboys. It went from the old ones, to the moderates, to the crazy guys now, buckaroos with flat hats and horse whisperers. To define it would be impossible. When he first came out here, in the late ‘50s, it was the end of an era. There were some older men on the ranch, then, real cowboys…
What were they like?
They were single, had wonderful work habits, and when they said something, that’s what it was. They were terrific around horses as well as cattle and taught him how to rodeo, break horses, drink whiskey, and chase girls. When they went into town, they dressed impeccable: starched shirt, Levis, and Blucher boots, German made.
But a lot of ‘em were horrible drunks, he says. Why? Because their role models were horrible drunks. It goes back to the cattle drives. When you’ve been in a saddle six months, eating beans every day, what do you think’s going to happen? They get into town, and it’s whores and whiskey.
So what changed the cowboys? Two things ruined the West, he says, ATVs and cow dogs. After that, horses were out of jobs.
Spit and Polish Crap
Our Cowboy didn’t grow up out west. He came from a well-off family in Cleveland, Ohio. His father’s family came from England two generations back and his mother’s was poor Irish. Her father, his grandfather, had started working as an 11-year-old at U.S. Steel and Wire and worked his way all the way up to CEO. He founded 10 companies, one for each of his kids.
The Cowboy was one of six siblings, five of them boys, so sports were an emphasis. He played football and rode a bit but hated all the spit and polish crap of horse shows, getting up at four in the morning, making sure everything looked nice. He didn’t learn much at his poorly-run Catholic school, but he did read those old Will James westerns and was fascinated by Custer. He always wanted to be a cowboy.
He went out to Wyoming in ’57 at the age of fifteen, to work the summer at TP Dude Ranch in the foothills of the Bighorns. He was asthmatic as a child, so maybe someone thought the air would be good for him. He worked on that ranch for the next fourteen summers, sometimes staying into the fall semester of college for the hunting season. It took him four-and-a-half years to finish his two-year degree.
Good Hands Have Good Hands
The ranch had 130 head of horse and some real cowboys. They took horses young and broke them on the slopes of the Bighorns. It was where he learned everything. A lot of western learning, he says, is observation, people won’t talk to you very much. Hands are everything on a horse, he says, evidently making an exception, your hands go to their mouth, and the mouth goes to the brain. Good hands have good hands.
He can get 110% out of a horse if he wants to, but that should be illegal, and he only ever asks for 60-80%. Back east, you have to go around and around, but here you can just shoot over a mountain, and he gestures with his hand: up, up, and away.
He chuckles, remembering.
One time he was riding a hot one, so he turned her up the mountain, thinking she’d tire out. But she just kept on running, over the rise and down the other side, clear to the bottom, jumping draws from here to here. He indicates the width of the wide porch.
He’s never broken a bone breaking a horse, but it is tough country, and he has seen some broken bones.
One time, when he was guiding, he was encamped over in Dubois in the Wind River Range, somewhere between Shoshone Pass and Crescent Mountain. It was him, a cook, and their Wyoming senior senator, Malcolm Wallop, who was out hunting sheep. It was the mid-60s, somewhere in there. Malcolm had a Land Rover, one of the first four-wheel drives, but it still took 5 hours to drive in. Some places they had to wench their way through swamps; old logging roads, turn of the century.
So anyway a guy comes into camp, an older gentleman, and says he’s gonna take the Land Rover. Like hell he is! But, the man says, his boy’s dying up the creek. His son’s horse was crossing a stream — and the boy (well, a man, he was 30 years old) had polio, no use for his legs, so the father had tied him into the saddle; they were going elk hunting — and the horse went in the stream and rolled, and, with the polio, the man’s hips weren’t formed right, like an eggshell, and it broke them all up.
We don’t get him to hospital, the man said, he’s gonna die, so off they go, our Cowboy driving. There’s no road; they’re in woods, timber, driving over logs. They go down the creek two miles, and he’s laying in a cabin on an old mattress. They pick him up and put him in the open bed of the Land Rover.
Meanwhile, another brother’s there, and he’s got a cast on his leg but from a truck wagon race in Cheyenne, and they’ve got two elk down to boot, so the father says to his 22-year-old boy with the cast: go get those elk and bag ‘em out and I’ll take the kid to town.
Then they’re off bushwhacking again in the Land Rover, and the boy’s screaming in pain with every bump on the road – and there’s nothing but bumps. The father breaks out a jug of whiskey and gives it to the kid and says drink this, figurin’ a painkiller. Now the Cowboy doesn’t think this is a good idea, it might put him in shock, and he says so. But the father says I know what I’m doing, so how can you argue with a man and his son you don’t even know?
Finally, they get on a gravel road and get to a ranch house where they call an ambulance, which is another 20 miles away… Well, the boy died when they got to hospital.
That was a big thing for me, the Cowboy says, that I played part – good or bad, smart or stupid.
Cowboy Polo
Back in the ‘60s, they started playing cowboy polo. Our Cowboy had a string of horses he’d ride down from the ranch to play chukkas in Big Horn, a distance of seven miles. When they’d finish, he’d let the horses loose and they knew where to go, back up into the mountains to the ranch. But he was clever. He’d leave beers on the way down at strategic points. Where? Just stuck ‘em in ditches where there was water.
In ’67 his soon-to-be wife worked at the ranch for the summer. She fell in love with the magical, cobalt-blue skies, she told me when she stepped outside to say hi – and him, evidently. They married in ’69. They moved back east, but he couldn’t stand it after he’d been out here, in the big country, the mountains. All the people back east. He waves a hand, exasperated but amused. It took them an hour and a half to drive 8 miles to go to the beach in Florida. All the geriatrics in the world!
But he managed and played low-goal polo for a few seasons down there. The best job in polo, he says: two goals and working for a big money guy who never shows up, who has really nice horses, trusts you to take care of everything. But the West was beckoning. In ’72 some former polo teammates asked him to manage a ranch back in Wyoming, and he never looked back.
He kept managing ranches and working as a hunting guide, but his real calling was training horses. He ended up selling 300 in his lifetime.
Before Barb Wire
At one time, the Cowboy says, Wyoming (which only became a state in 1890) was hardly on the map, just a place way out there. It was totally open, free grass, no fencing. There was limited fighting with Native Americans before the Civil War. What fighting there was happened with fur traders, companies from Canada, mountain men trapping out here.
Then the dominoes began to fall.
The infrastructure was already in place. The Bozeman Trail had been blazed to facilitate gold rush prospectors, connecting southern Wyoming to Montana and going right through Sheridan and Big Horn. Then America got the idea to hook up the railroad east to west, the Cowboy says, and bring the immigrants out and be one country. The railroad hooked up at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.
Meanwhile, during the Civil War, everyone had left Texas to fight for the Confederacy, and the cattle there multiplied, got wild; so when they got back they had to gather the wild cattle, break ‘em, herd ‘em, and trail ‘em up to the railheads to take ‘em east for meat – or bring ‘em up to Wyoming for the free grass.
But the fraught concept of all this “free grass” was about to be put to the sword.
Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act encouraged westward migration: settle on land of up to 160 acres, work it for five years, and it was yours. With this, immigrants began to trickle west on the railroads and up the Bozeman Trail. Then came the invention of barbed wire in 1874 — technology — and the trickle became a flood. The barbed wire prevented cattle from destroying crops, delineated property, and protected from Native Americans.
It also fenced off lands that Native Americans had held sacred for millennia. Private land ownership was antithetical to their culture and beliefs, not to mention nonsensical. In Tecumseh’s words:
Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the great spirit make them all for the use of his children?
Or Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux:
A long time ago my father told me what his father had told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man who dreamed that a strange race would weave a web all around the Lakotas. He said, “You shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land.” Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
But the settlers came, and after they came, the Cowboy says, they had to bring in the army to protect them.
Custer was like 9/11
After the Civil War, General Sherman (of Sherman’s March) became the highest ranking officer in the US Army. General Sheridan, who also subscribed to scorched-earth tactics, was put in charge of the Indian Wars. Hence: Sheridan, Wyoming. Their Native American policy might be summed up in Sheridan’s own words: “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” That held true for a long time, the Cowboy says.
The US Army vastly misunderstood and underestimated the Plains Indians. They had no respect for Indian fighting ability — the Indians who practiced war games all the time, whose boys could ride like the wind when ten years old, who could shoot an arrow or gun under the neck of a horse at a full gallop. Meanwhile, these immigrant troopers from Ireland, their asses were so sore they couldn’t hold a gun let alone shoot it.
He used to try and shoot varmints horseback with .30-30 Winchester, the Cowboy says, to demonstrate. (What’s a varmint? A rock dog. Oh?) You sit on a horse with a rifle and the horse’s breathing and your rifle’s going like this. He moves his hand up and down slightly, miming it. You better get off and shoot.
The army thought, Oh, Civil War battles with 100,000 men on either side, why should we worry about 8,000 Indians? They didn’t know, he says, the Indians kicked their butts.
Then came Custer. The Battle of Bighorn or the Battle of the Greasy Grass, fought in 1876 between a coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho and a cavalry regiment of the US Army, signified the end of Native American dominance over the US government.1 The Indians won, the Cowboy says, but because they won, it was like 9/11.
It became a question of campaigning in wintertime, he says, when the Indians weren’t mobile. In the winter the men just cared about keeping their feet dry and the women did the cooking and the horses were turned out. It was horrible what we did (see map below of battles). They were slaughtered in their villages, then put in reservations.
What’s the situation like today in Wyoming?
When he first came here, Sheridan was very anti-Indian – Indians would go to the rodeo and set up hundreds of tipis, get drunk, shoot off guns, shootings, muggings, and murders. Whites? No, Indian on Indian. The Sheridan cops only needed a fraction of an excuse. For example, he says, when an Indian’s tired he doesn’t care where he sits, just sits down on the curb. Well, guess what? Cops come along, throw him in jail as a vagrant.
There are two reservations an hour north: Crow and Cheyenne. A big one in the middle of Wyoming: the Wind River with the Shoshone and Arapaho. Threw them together, and they were arch enemies! Typical government.
What could be done differently?
Do away with the reservation system. The law is a joke. The FBI has total jurisdiction on the reservations, and they do stuff you never find out about. They should be living on the reservation, so they know, but they’re in Billings. The poverty is terrible, crime terrible, education terrible. They never should’ve started it. In my opinion, the Cowboy says, anyone who makes it off a reservation is a hero-type American, like Jim Thorpe.
You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be contented to be penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
- Chief Joseph, Nez Percé
A lesson plan for the TEACHERS among you: https://thebrintonmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Lesson-Plan-Standing-Bear-Muslin-1.pdf