By Julie Carter
There is an old phrase used by the cowboy set that says "roping for short pay," which basically means long hours of hard work for not a lot of money.
Since roping was and is just a small part of the job to be done, short pay wages covered all the work that needed done. It was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be the case for doing the work of a cowboy.
I broke into the world of a paying cowboy job when I was 15. My brother and I hired on for a summer of riding pastures checking yearlings on a high mountain Colorado ranch, which also happened to be our home.
Since I was the oldest, I got preferential pay of 50 cents more a day than my 13 year old brother. I was reaping in a big $5.50 a day while he had to settle for $5. In my mind, that made me the "girl" in charge. He fell for that most of the time.
About 4000 yearlings arrived in May from a much lower altitude. The ranch pastures ranged in altitude from 7,500-9,500 feet or higher in some spots that those critters managed to climb.
At that altitude, cattle often develop what is called Brisket Disease, Mountain Disease, or High Altitude Disease. The animal will develop edema in the brisket, along the neck to the jaw or the underline of the belly before it dies. Early detection is the only hope of saving them.
A daily check and count of every single animal was necessary and an accounting of the dead was a must for the record books. That was our job — to look at and count each one in all of the pastures we were assigned, bring in the sick, and cut the brand off anything we found dead.
We would leave early, often with a sandwich rolled up in our jacket on the back of our saddles, and hope to be in sometime in the afternoon before the late day rain showers.
We took turns opening gates as long as were we getting along. It wasn't uncommon to say "we'll meet back at this gate in an hour" and whoever got there first would go through the gate and wait on the other side, refusing to dismount and open the gate again for the late arriver. Excellent fodder for a teen shouting match.
Looking back, I'm thinking our short pay was probably due to two things. Economics of the times was one. I think Dad was managing the ranch for about $550 a month and raising four kids on that.
The other, I surmise, was our youthful unreliability. We got the job done — eventually. However, the days were interspersed with opportunities to go for a swim in a pond if it was hot or sometimes a good old fashioned horse race if we were sure no one could see us racing. This was a forbidden by our dad but then, surely he wouldn't know.
About every other day there would be a knock-down-drag-out fight between my brother and I. It would start over his constant playing with his rope, roping everything that didn't move instead doing the job. I'd then refuse to give him the head count we'd accumulated since he was busy playing and he knew, and so did I, that if Dad asked him he'd be in trouble.
Fortunately, I rode very fast horses. It saved my life on more than one occasion.
Julie can be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com
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