From Teddy Blue Abbott, “We Pointed Them North, Recollections of an Old Cowpuncher,” 1939
“If a storm came along and the cattle started running — you’d hear that low, rumbling noise along the ground and the men on herd wouldn’t need to come in and tell you, you’d know — then you’d jump for your horse and get out there in the lead, trying to head them and get them into a mill before they scattered to hell-and-gone.
The cowboys would attempt to make the cattle run in an ever-tightening circle until they could no longer move.
It was riding at a dead run in the dark, with cut banks and prairie dog holes all around you in a shallow grave…
One night it come up an awful storm. It took all four of us to hold the cattle and we didn’t hold them, and when morning come there was one man missing. We went back to look for him, and we found him among the prairie dog holes, beside his horse.
The horse’s ribs was scraped bare of hide, and all the rest of the horse and man was mashed into the ground as flat as a pancake. The only thing you could recognize was the handle of his six-shooter.
We tried to think the lightning hit him, and that was what we wrote his folks in Henrietta, Texas, but we couldn’t really believe it ourselves.
I’m afraid it wasn’t the lightning. I’m afraid his horse stepped into one of them holes and they both went down before the stampede.
The awful part of it was that we had milled them cattle over him all night, not knowing he was there. That was what we couldn’t get out of our minds. And after that, orders were given to sing when you were running with a stampede so the others would know where you were as long as they heard you singing, and if they didn’t hear you they would figure something happened.
After awhile, this grew to be a custom on the range, but you know, this was still a new business in the seventies and we was learning all the time.”
☆☆☆☆☆
IN GOD WE TRUST
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Wow, imagine the dangers and sadness they would live with all the time from things like that. I knew cattle spooked easy, but, even having lived next to a pasture full of Jerseys for several years, I never saw them run from a thunder and lightning storm. Maybe Longhorn are different, more high strung, because in the near the White Mountains, you can get some terrible storms. Those cowboys have to be ready for anything.
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Most cattle Ive been around has just hunkered down, standing with their butts to the wind & young in the middle. I have seen the desperation & panic during big lightening & flood prone areas.
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