When Manning told him that Wes wanted to join the drive to Kansas, Columbus Carol was so pleased he nearly popped his buttons. He didn’t waste any time signing Wes on. He even made him boss of one of the two herds—the small one of twelve hundred head. Me and my brother Jim were in his crew. Manning was ramrodding the bigger herd, about twenty-five hundred head, and Gip and Joe were working with him.
Only me and a hand named Billy Roy Dixon were younger than Wes, who was still well shy of being eighteen. You might think there’d be some hard feeling among the older hands about working for one so young and who didn’t have any experience on the trail—and who would get paid one hundred fifty dollars a month when the regular hands like us were getting thirty and found. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The fact is, they were proud as banty roosters to have a man of Wes’s reputation for a ramrod, his young years be damned. “Wes Hardin, by God!” Big Ben Kelly said when he heard the news. “I’d like to see somebody just try and give this outfit trouble.” That’s how Columbus Carol felt about it. “That boy’s reputation,” he told Manning, “is gonna save me enough cows to cover his wages twenty times over.”
Manning told him that if the reputation didn’t do the job, Wes himself surely would. The day before him and Wes had got into a shooting contest in the draw behind Daddy’s house and Wes had outshot him every which way. That’s saying something, because Manning was one of the best pistol hands you’d ever hope to see, and I’m talking about a time when that part of Texas had more pistoleros than a hound’s got fleas. The Sandies was crawling with Taylors and Sutton Regulators, and there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t handy with a gun. But good as Manning was, he wasn’t no match for Wes. The whole family watched the contest, Jane Bowen too. She about broke her hands by clapping so hard every time Wes showed off with some extra-tricky shot. He’d look over and wink at her, and she’d smile and blush pretty as a sunrise.
Word got around fast to the other outfits that Wes had signed on with us, and trail bosses and cowhands from the camps scattered all around us came over to make his acquaintance. A few of them, like Fred Duderstadt, became his friends for life. What they were all hoping, of course, was that he’d keep rustler and Indian trouble off their cattle while he was keeping it off our own. Wes himself was looking to make all the friends he could. Even though Columbus and Manning had said he didn’t have to fret about the State Police while he was on the trail, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to have plenty of friends in front and back of him, both, as we made our way to Kansas.
He was likely thinking about Abilene too. The new marshal there was none other than James Butler Hickok —Wild Bill himself—who was sure to have papers on Wes. Columbus had told him not to worry about that either. He said he knew Bill real well and would square Wes with him as soon as we got to Abilene.
“He’s a fine fella,” Columbus said. “He’ll give us room to let off steam, you bet. Hell, he’s a good-time rascal hisself. Likes his whiskey and cards and fillies as much as the next man! You ain’t got to worry none about Hickok.”
Wes grinned and said he wasn’t a bit worried. “Fact is,” he said, “I’d like to have a look at them pearl- handled navies of his I’ve heard so much about.”
The afternoon before we left for Kansas we all went to the ranch to have dinner and say good-bye to Daddy and Momma. Annie Tenelle, who was Gip’s bride-to-be, was there, and of course so was Jane.
After a fine dinner of roast pork and yams, I took my dogs down to the creek to let them splash around and see what they might flush out of the reeds. As soon as we got there they spotted a rabbit and took off after it in the brush and that was the last I saw of them. So I just skipped rocks on the creek for a while before starting back to the house. Then I spotted Wes and Jane coming my way down the path, walking hand in hand. They hadn’t seen me, and I didn’t want to intrude on their privacy, so I slipped into the heavy bushes and stood real quiet to let them pass by unawares. As they ambled on by, I heard him talking low but couldn’t make out what he was saying. You should of seen her face. If there’s such a thing as a look of love, Jane Bowen sure had it then. They stopped on the path about ten feet beyond where I was and Wes pulled her gentle into his arms and kissed her. I can still see the way her hair shone in the late afternoon light coming through the trees. They stayed that way for a time, and I never moved a muscle nor took a deep breath. She whispered something and Wes chuckled low and tightened his hold on her and they kissed again. I don’t think I ought say any more about it. Except she surely did have pretty hair.
We moved our two herds out in early March. Besides me and Jim, the hands in Wes’s crew were Alabama Bill Potter, Ollie Franks, Billy Roy Dunn, and Big Ben Kelly. Nameless Smith was the cook and Jeff Longtree was the wrangler. Except for Nameless we were a young and fairly inexperienced bunch. Only Nameless and Ollie and Big Ben had rode the trail before, and they seemed to get a good deal of pleasure from telling us about cowhands they’d seen killed by lightning and drowned in wild rivers and trampled to stewmeat in stampedes. Such tales were scarifying but made me proud to be a cowhand, if you know what I mean.
In ’71 the whole of the Chisholm Trail was one long and mighty river of cattle steadily flowing north. There was so many outfits moving steers to Kansas that year, the herds ran one right behind the other as far as you could see in either direction, even from up on a rise. Our little herd of twelve hundred head stretched nearly a mile from lead steers to stragglers. Manning’s herd, just ahead of ours, was average size and twice as long. Hell, I’ve seen herds belonging to Shanghai Pierce that stretched five miles! It was thousands and thousands of longhorns on the trail. You never saw nothing like it.
Nor heard nothing like it either. All them cows bawling and smacking horns, their joints cracking loud as wood. Horses snorting and blowing. Cowhands calling “Ho cattle, ho ho ho!” and cussing and hollering back and forth to each other. Wagons clattering and clanking and their tarps slapping against the frame rails. But mostly it was the sound of cows squalling and whining and rumbling the ground under you the whole day long. They raised a great thick cloud of dust a mile wide from one end of the trail to the other. Even if you wore your bandanna over your face—which you damn sure had to do when you rode drag if you didn’t want to choke to death—that evening you’d still be spitting mud and digging dirt out of your nose and ears. The whole world smelled of cowshit.
But damn, the nights were nice. The dust would settle and the stars would be so many and so bright and looking so close you thought you’d burn your fingers on them if you reached too high. At night the ground felt strange, it was so still. The cows were bedded down and resting easy, ripping long farts and groaning sad and low. You’d see the other outfits’ fires flickering like fallen stars all the way to the north and south ends of the world. You never got enough sleep, what with having to stand a guard shift every night—but hell, that didn’t matter. It was so peaceful and quiet while you were on watch, you felt like the world was all yours. If you had a good night pony he’d do most of the work, watching and pacing along your side of the herd and cutting back any restless steer that seemed of a mind to stray off. You didn’t have to do nothing but sit easy in the saddle and gaze up at the stars and sing soft to the cows. The night guard on the other side of the herd would be singing his own songs and pretty much in his own world too.
Nothing I’ve ever done since has let me feel so free and happy as those five, six years when I was trail driving—and that first time was the one I remember best, which is only natural, I guess, since it was all new to me. I saw buffalo for the first time and more antelope and turkey and such than I’d ever see so many of again. We didn’t lose any hands or cows in the river crossings, and we didn’t have even one stampede—things that happened more than once in drives I made in later years. But that first drive surely had its share of excitement, and the main reason was Wes.
We laid up just outside Fort Worth for a day. Fort Worth’s always been the sort of town to encourage a fella to have a high time, and that’s just what we did. When we pushed off again next day, Alabama Bill was sporting two black eyes and Ollie Franks had a big bite mark on his arm and Billy Roy was missing a front tooth. All of us was a good bit red in the eyes, but nobody’d got put in jail, and we were all feeling finely refreshed.
We were just shy of the Red River when as bad a hailstorm as ever I saw came pouring down on us. Some of the stones were big as chicken eggs and hit hard as rocks. There weren’t no trees to take shelter under, so we had to use our folded-up blankets to protect our heads. Everybody was yelping like dogs from getting hit on the arms and legs. The hailstones spooked the remuda bad, and horses scattered every which way. Once the storm passed we spent a couple of hours helping Jeff Longtree round them up. It was a wonder we only lost two of them jugheads. It was an even bigger wonder that only a couple of dozen cows broke away from the herd and we got them all back with not too much trouble. If the whole herd had stampeded, we’d of been hunting cows all over North Texas for a week. The worst casualties among the hands were Alabama Bill, who got a knuckle broke, and Wes, who had a knot like a walnut raised on his cheekbone. “Son,” Nameless Smith told him, “you don’t never want to look
It was a lucky thing we crossed the Red when we did. Three days after we went through it, the river all of a
