Texas cowboy - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kirby F. Warnock is a 1974 graduate of Baylor University with a B.A. in history. His writings have appeared in Texas Monthly, Southwest Airlines Magazine and the Dallas Times Herald. He wrote and produced the PBS documentary Return To Giant, and currently is the editor of Big Bend Quarterly magazine.

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A Wild Night In Town

I left south Texas on the 2nd day of October 1915. I was accompanying the body of my father, who was killed on the streets of Mission on the first day of October. I accompanied his body to San Angelo.

He was buried in Christoval, Texas. I never did live in the lower Rio Grande Valley country anymore. I went to work on ranches out around Tom Green county and worked the winters of '15, '16, '17 and until the spring of '18 in that vicinity.

This country was all cow country at that time, very few sheep. I worked on two different ranches, good-size ranches, the Thompson Ranch and the Head of the River Ranch. Christoval was a little town ten or twelve miles away and usually I spent the weekends down around there. I broke a good many horses while working out on the Thompson ranch. After a horse had been ridden a few times, if he was a good-looking horse, I saved him to ride to Christoval over the weekend. Other boys who worked on ranches in that vicinity did the same thing, and therefore, most of the time we were all on "broncs" around Christoval.

I remember one trip I made I met a bunch of boys that worked in the southern part of Tom Green county. There were seven of us, and we were all on broncs except one boy, Paul Crawford. He was the only boy in the group that was on a gentle horse. H.C. Williams was in the group, Bill Brannon and Slim Peeples. Some of them worked on the Head of the River Ranch, some on the Brannon Ranch.

Anyway, we had been together on Sunday night, we had been to church. It was a beautiful night, and the moon was shining as bright as day. You could hear a man talk for a quarter of a mile. There wasn't a breath of air. We were sitting on our horses in the middle of the street about 12:30 in the morning. All of the horses had hackamores on except the gentle one.

The rest of them had never had a bit in their mouths.

Someone made the remark, "Well, it's getting late, let's go in." H.C. Williams had a .45 six shooter in his saddle pocket. I didn't know he had it, and neither did the others, but he reached back and got that thing and emptied it up in the air. You could hear that thing twenty miles away. It sounded like a cannon. Well, those colts took off, and us on them.

We finally were able to turn them toward the ranch, and by the time we got to the Concho River, they were going full speed. There was an old wooden bridge across this Concho River, and most every board on it was loose, and when we hit that bridge it sounded like a cyclone. The bad part of it, there was about 600 steers bedded down on the south end of this bridge. There were two men guarding this herd and about four or five cowboys asleep on the ground around the wagon.

Those cattle took off and you could hear fences pop and break as they went through them. You think we didn't get a good cussing? Anyway, we were afraid to stop to give them a hand because we knew the constable at Christoval would be after us. Sure enough, we got out about a mile south of the river and Paul Crawford, the only one among us who had any sense, said, "You boys better hide in this thicket and I'll try to throw them off."

He said, "Old Dennis [the constable] will be by here directly."

As he rode off, four or five men with shotguns passed us and caught him, just down from us, and said, "Paul, did you see that bunch go out of here?"

"Yes, sir," he said. "They were sure going."

"Could you tell who they were?"

"No, sir, I couldn't see them."

They lit out down the road and we dropped in behind them and finally wound up at the Head of the River Ranch and spent the night, afraid to leave. We knew those boys that owned the cattle and we knew that they were unhappy, but we got out of there and got to our ranches and none of us got caught. But we didn't come back into town for three months.