Book Discussion: The Cowboy Way

[Front-Ranger]

I think I am gonna have to read that Roustabout Days next. Thank you also for the link to the pics! 

[moremojo]

(And, if you want to see a few heartbreaking pictures of Sage, go to www.dustylens.com/ghost_towns.htm --made my tears flow again.)

Those pictures (and captions) are so very haunting. So eerie and lonely...I'm at a loss for words...

Ennis...?

[Front-Ranger]

The Cowboy Way takes place on one ranch in Montana. Called Birch Creek Ranch, it's near Tucker. Tucker is a mountain, but it's not called Mount Tucker, just Tucker. "It is a lesser peak in an obscure range called the Big Belt Mountains, which is in turn a tiny section of that enormous upthrust of granite and dime-store romance called the Rocky Mountains." The author, David McCumber, talks down the mountain in whose shadow he worked but hastens to add that this flyspeck of a mountain changed his life.

So reminiscent of Brokenback Mountain! I saw it from the air and though it is a lovely mountain, it is overshadowed by the Cloud Peak Range to the east of it, a set of peaks so spectacular that the highway is named for them--the Cloud Peak Skyway. But, ahem, back to our story of The Cowboy Way.

[Oregondoggie]

Here's what Annie Proulx has to say about The Cowboy Way..."McCumber's clear, fine writing conveys the push of season, the intensity and danger of ranch work... There are hundreds, thousands of books about cowboys and their gear, the old West, the new West, cattlemen, and ranchers.  But of the real and gritty ground-level work of the contemporary ranch, there is only one and this is it."

Here is something echoed in Brokeback Mountain...

"I had to fix a flat on the Chevy retriever one morning... the wheel was the old split-rim variety and the tire was a tube type.  It was a bitch to break down and even harder to reassemble, but I'd just about finished it when (the boss) came in and found me kneeling by it, holding the air nozzle on while it inflated.

"You know, when I was in high school, a hired man at Dad's ranch ...had his head in front of a split-rim wheel while he aired it up, just like that, and I was given the job of CLEANING HIS BRAINS OFF THE WALL, he said."


 

[Front-Ranger]

Whoa, doggie, I haven't come to that part yet, scary and eerie!!

[Oregondoggie]

An' in another book there's more...

In Cowgirls, Women of the American West, by Teresa Jordan; Doubleday, 1982, the opening non-fiction paragraphs in the introduction pretty much parallel the beginning scene in Ennis' trailer...including a reference to a "wedge"..."Only her wedge of brunette hair betrays her sex."  And outside, the wind beats against the windows....

Later, if yur into singin' along with Ennis, Jordan provides the new version of "The Old Strawberry Roan"... maybe not the salty one, but pretty brusque and wry.

So I'm bettin' Annie had sopped up the whiskey from a lot of ole books about cowboyin' and sheep and stuff, by the time she wrote Brokeback Mountain. 

[Front-Ranger]

I think you're right, doggie. The two times I have heard Annie speak, she has cited tons of books, writings, photographs, paintings, and documentaries. She really knows how to do her research! In fact, I bought my copy of The Virginian at the Casper library, and it's an old old paperback that's had a lot of use. I like to fanticize that it came from her!!

[Front-Ranger]

Back to The Cowboy Way. Cowboys are busy through the long winters. Every morning they have to "check the drop" on the cows--that means to check on the position of the unborn calves and see how close the Mothers are to giving birth. That's what they call them--the mothers. The cows need help giving birth most of the time. The cowboys learn the telltale signs--going off by herself, walking around slowly, lowing, but sometimes it's as clear as a hoof or two sticking out. When it's time, two cowboys put the mother in a chute so she can't bite them, position themselves on either side, and one cowboy reaches in with a leather belt and puts it around the calf. They brace themselves against the mother's rump and pull the calf out. It's usually single digit weather, and the cowboys often swing the calf around by its hind legs to get it going, so to speak. But other times the calf must get up on its own, balance on its shaky new legs, find the teat, and begin to suck. If it can't do that, it's a goner. So, that is the major winter chore in the life of a cowboy.

[Front-Ranger]

The winter of 1886 was a hard one in the American West as chronicled in The Cowboy Way by David McCumber. It was presaged by a drought that summer, fall rains which did not come, and dire portents like a particularly shaggy coat on the range cattle and higher than normal piles of birches by the beaver ponds. After cold snowy spells in Devember and January, February was a nightmare, with night time lows averaging 27.5 degrees below zero.

At this time there were more than one million head of cattle at large on the ranges of Montana and thereabouts. Stockmen didn't feed their cattle hay in the winter at that time. There was no hay to feed them: no one had plowed up the range and planted it. The cattle were expected to forage for the winter, though with between two and six feet of snow on the ground, how they would do that was anybody's guess. When the chinook winds came in March to uncover the damage, the losses ranged from 40 to 95 percent. Carcasses littered the prairie. A young cowboy named Charlie Russell was speechless to explain it to Eastern absentee owners, so he sent a watercolor sketch instead: a lone emaciated cow, hunched against a fence. "Waiting for a Chinook" was also called "The Last of 5,000." That winter taught the stockmen that they could not leave the dogs to babysit the cows thru the winter, and the Western hay farming industry was born.