The farther the herd moved from settled areas, the rougher the life on the trail–and the rougher the relations among the men. One new hand learned just how rough his comrades could be in ridding themselves of an unwanted hand. B.D. Lindsey, 18, joined a drive moving up the Chisholm Trail by lying about his experience in handling cattle. Although his scheme was soon found out, his willingness to work and learn won him a place on the crew anyway. Another green hand was not so welcome. At 30 years and 230 pounds, the cowboys thought him too old and heavy for trail work, and they soon devised a plan to run him off. Lindsey and his older co-worker were each told that one was spreading lies about the other, and soon an open animosity sprang up between the two. One night near Fort Worth, Lindsey was standing night guard when he recognized the older man’s figure striding toward him. As he approached, the man boldly announced that he’d had enough of Lindsey’s spreading lies about him, and that he would shut the boy’s mouth for good. Lindsey had been warned this was coming, and he deliberately drew his large Navy Colt revolver and leveled it at the big man’s gut. He fired six times at point-blank range; the muzzle flash ignited the man’s clothes and the surrounding prairie grass. Apparently unhurt, the man turned and ran for the camp, leaving a trail of wispy smoke in his wake. At camp he collected his pay and stomped off toward Fort Worth to begin his journey home. Only later did the men tell Lindsey that they had removed the slugs from the rounds in the Colt’s cylinder, and that the whole feud had been drummed up and was their creation. After that, Lindsey and the other men got along famously.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Every morning before dawn the last night watch woke up the cook as they left the camp. He worked the wrangler, who with the cook shared the drive’s housekeeping duties. While the cook started a fire with the fuels he had–sometimes wood, sometimes cow or buffalo chips–the wrangler saddled a horse and rode out to round up the remuda, the herd of 70 or 80 horses used by the drive’s dozen-man crew. The cow ponies were more wild than tame, and the best cutting and night horses were mustangs. (Cutting meant intercepting an animal an separating it from a group.) These wild horses were becoming hard to find in Texas in the 1870s, but every cowboy managed to find one or two for his string. As the drive moved onto the trail every morning, each man would point out the horse he wanted from his string and the wrangler or perhaps a more skilled roper would lasso and hold the animal while it was saddled. A horse you could walk up to and saddle was a horse easily stolen.

By dawn the cook had breakfast ready. As the cowboys rose from their bedrolls, they put on their hats and boots–in that order–and straggled over to the chuck wagon for their morning coffee. Invariably the coffee was the same, the cook throwing a fistful of Arbuckles Roasted into a pot of boiling water. According to trail tradition, occasionally the cook threw a horseshoe into the pot. If the horseshoe sank, it was said, the coffee wasn’t ready yet.

During the early years of the trail, the men often came across vast herds of American bison, or buffalo. ‘As far as the eye could see,’ on man recalled, ‘over the plains there was a solid mass of buffalo.’ Both the steers and the cowboys’ horses could smell a buffalo herd long before the men could, and the Longhorns became spooky around them. The trail boss often sent a scout ahead to locate and drive off buffalo herds in the area. If the cattle stampeded and got mixed with the buffalo herd, there would be little hope of cutting them out again.

Faced with seemingly endless numbers of these animals, the cowboys made great sport of hunting buffalo when they had the chance. By the mid-1870s, however, the professional buffalo hunters had all but exterminated the big herds from the southern plains, and even a lone bison bull became a rare sight along the Chisholm Trail. The animals lived on in the cowboys’ language; arriving at the end of a trail drive, the men compared their dirty, unshorn and ragged appearance to that of the buffalo–’wild and wooly.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to