from "Buckaroos"

This is a string of stories about a land of empire ranches: the IL and the Whitehorse, the MC and the ZX and Peter French’s great P Ranch. History in that country is partly the story of those ranches and cattle and the great horsemen, but it is more accurately focused on getting the work done, feeding cattle from a creaking hay wagon while snow blows level to the ground in late January.

My education in such realities began with men like Ross Dollarhide, who lived to see ninety years and died in bed, having endured. The MC, where I was raised, was like a feudal kingdom in those days, not many neighbors you ever encountered, nobody around for the most part but our family and the people who worked for them. Our world was utterly centered on horses and cattle in those years before the end of World War II, 1945, when everybody went to pickup trucks and tractors. We lost the farm, an old man told me, when we went to the goddamned tractors.

That desert country in southeastern Oregon and northern Nevada still is an enclave of unsettled territory, lava-rock and sagebrush flats, fault-block mountains, and swampy land-locked valleys echoing with the calls of white pelicans and sandhill cranes and Canada geese and thousands of ducks like the green-winged teal and the redheads and canvasbacks nobody sees so often anymore. Amid such empty distances expansive personalities are commonplace.

Children grew up addicted to running their horses, as I did, a manifestation of spirit that adults claimed to see as a disease (even if they themselves once in a while staged a race). A horse, I was told, was not a toy.

My cousins and I grew up understanding that horses were creatures with their own complex sensibilities, which could not only be broken (that name for training) but spoiled—ruined—by cheap-shit frivolity such as pointless galloping—a boy coming heedlessly along a country road with his horse in a lather.

But we were the children of the people who owned the ranches and could sometimes get away with things, so I listened to what I was told but galloped anyway, down long secret lanes through the willows and sloughs, before sunup in the endlessness of midsummer, on my way to visit the hay camps where the old men in the round corrals were lassoing their buck-rake teams.

Then, in 1940, the summer I turned eight years old, an older cousin and I were deemed big enough to be useful and sent to ride with my grandfather’s crew of buckaroos on the sea of desert east of the ranch, where our family summered their thousands of mother cows.

What a thing it was to be a child, watching those men step onto a spooky stocking-footed traveling horse in the light of early morning and knowing you were expected to keep up for the rest of the day. My cousin and I weren’t much use that summer and most of the next (I was learning things like, never cry). But we grew and toughened as boys will. By 1943 we were, we thought, almost cowhands. We learned to shoe our own horses and braid rawhide on rainy days and to travel for hours like grown-ups, at a long trot. We were near the end of secret galloping; we were becoming little men.

Ross Dollarhide was wagon boss for the MC buckaroo outfit. He was in charge of the riders, a cook, chuck wagon, and sixty-five or seventy head of horses in the remuda while looking after the Hereford cows and their calves that my grandfather was summering in the desert. And maybe 500 head of bulls, purebreds, from places like Wyoming and Montana, shipped in on the railroad. There was no chance of inbreeding.

Dollarhide was as nearly as old as my grandfather, and he was my main example of how to live like a man in the world. He’d been a legend since he rode into the Whitehorse Ranch on a fat-tired bicycle the summer he was sixteen, around 1900, and announced he was looking for work, riding rough horses if there was a choice. According to legend, the old hands grinned and put him up on some Roman-nosed gray stud nobody had even thought about trying to ride. We know the rest: that devil horse bucked down to a stalled and sweaty, bloody-mouthed froth—even rode to death in some versions of the fireside tale—and young Dollarhide was triumphant as the old-timers shook their heads and smiled.

“We got one,” they would say. “A real one.” He was a real one to us kids, all those years later, for sure. We all believed some version of that story. Dollarhide was a great horseman, and he had earned and deserved any esteem the world might grant. We rode out each morning behind a legendary man, and we knew it. At least I did, when I was thirteen.


You had to stay playful to survive. That was another thing we were taught, by clear example, watching the men around us, in whom a certain childish recklessness (at least in the best of them, the finest hands) had never died.

Then one burning afternoon that playfulness got us crossways. There for a moment we left that buckaroo crew afoot, without horses, like fools.

Just at daybreak one bright morning in June while we were rolling our beds, making ready to move the four-horse chuck wagon from the mountainside camp at Ackley to Sagehen Spring, my cousin and I were detailed to help the wrango boy move the seventy some odd saddle horses in the MC remuda. Once we’d turned them out of the willow corral at Ackley they’d be ours as we herded them twenty miles down country across the alkaline flats to the fenced-in field where the wet-weather creek at Sagehen got lost in tall brush. There wasn’t much at Sagehen, no sign of a house, just a hog-wire corral and field built of rusty barbed wire and crooked juniper posts. That corral was a small target in a vast territory (nowadays there’s a highway just south of Sagehen Spring; in those days there were almost no internal-combustion engines in that country). We were to take it easy. What we were to do was graze the herd on Ackley Mountain through the morning and then ease them on down to Sagehen in the late afternoon.

It was clear: if we got those horses running with their heads, and lost control of them, there wasn’t a fence to turn them within fifty miles. An old hand, Merle Dodson, went along, to keep an eye on us.

What is there to say about Merle Dodson? He was known as “Tarzan,” a barroom tag given him because he was, according to my father when I asked him years later, close to animal if he was drinking. He was huge-handed and barrel-chested, stronger than he knew, impossible to wound, nobody to fight as strangers had found out any number of times, but he was always willing and happy to be entertained.

“That damned Tarz,” people would say. “If he ain’t something, you tell me, what is?” What he was on this day was full of vinegar when we eased our drifty grazing herd of bay horses, all of them geldings, over the crest of Ackley Mountain to encounter the mustangs who were also drifting along in their shaggy spotted-horse way.

There were maybe twenty or so mustangs, mares and colts, a half-dozen branded geldings that had got away from some ranch or another in the long-ago past, and no doubt a stud horse even if I don’t recall any such creature. What I recall is the way we let them drift into the remuda and mix, the way we fell in after them; I recall running horses.

“We’re mustanging,” Tarz Dodson whispered. Something like that. It was his plan. It frightened us, but we never thought of refusing.

Besides, if I learned something that day, which is the point of this story, it had nothing to do with caution, but rather with the splendor of running with the wind. That was the lesson of the summer.

We were going to ease our great herd of horses along the road slow as we could through the afternoon, then stir them into a long run just at the end, and turn them into the corral at Sagehen Spring before they came to have any sense of what was happening. We were going to have those mustangs inside fences before they realized they had been trapped. We were going to own those mustangs. That was Tarz Dodson’s idea; the whole buckaroo crew could turn some money on the side. It wasn’t a plan my grandfather would have endorsed.

I have no idea what those remnant animals were worth at that time. Their herds grew during World War II, when their natural predators, young cowhands, were off to war. After the war they were cleaned out of that country, run with airplanes and rounded up in swirling herds; most of them eventually shot and processed into chicken feed.

We brought it off, my cousin and I and the MC wrango boy and Tarz Dodson; we got the mustangs folded into our herd, running with the remuda. At Sagehen we circled the entire herd moving in a great sweep through the afternoon while somebody got the corral gate open. It was about then when I realized something was very wrong.

The chuck-wagon tent was up, and everybody on the crew had turned their horses loose into the field. Our horses were it; lose the herd and everybody but us was afoot, which was no joke in that wide open country; sure as hell not in a buckaroo outfit. Old Man Dollarhide was out front of that chuck-wagon tent with a coffee cup in his hand, studying our act like an old eagle contemplating a final kill.

We hit that corral gate perfectly. Those mustangs circled maybe twice, then went out the other side, scattering hog-wire. They circled the field a time or two and went right on through that fence like ghosts with the MC remuda following. The running horses were flowering out into freedom and starting to spill off in all directions, and there was nothing we could do because we were still back trying to get through the corral gate.

What I remember is some man took my horse, leaping up into my short-legged saddle, and another took my cousin’s horse. What had seemed like play was abruptly ended. Hours later they came back driving a remnant of the remuda before them. This was serious, a disgrace; the story would get out; the MC buckaroo crew would be the laughing stock of the country.

What I remember is standing around the cook fire like a fool. Tarz Dodson was fired and rode off into the night with his bedroll behind his saddle. But what matters most to me is the feeling I took from those moments as that herd of running horses turned in their sweep toward the corral at Sagehen—a sense of triumphant release. No more the child.

Maybe I got my ass whipped, but I don’t think so. I don’t think those men ever touched me. They taught me to never give a major shit about small change, an operative principle in my good moments ever since. I had been along on a big ride, and I was part of a story that would be told and laughed about in country taverns for years, even by Dollarhide and Tarz Dodson. In that if nothing else, I was like those men who were, at least occasionally, the real item.

From The Next Rodeo. Copyright 2007 by William Kittredge.  All rights reserved.