Cowboy tales - horses and snakes top the list

By Julie Carter

There are some very fine stories that never make the history books.

Storytellers keep Native Americans' legends through the generations. It's the job of a gifted tribe member to be the keeper of the stories and to pass them on to the next generation from the many generations that came before.

Cowboys do much the same thing. The Native American storyteller will have a name like Grandmother Two Bears or Old Father Story Teller, the cowboy will simply be named Ben, Joe or Charlie. But if they were to be in a tribe somewhere, they might be named something like Man with Crooked Legs or Hitch In Get Along.

Old cowboys tend to be shorter than they were in their youth, a bit bow-legged and they waddle when they walk because their parts don't move like they should. The days of the long-legged strolling stride left when arthritis arrived.

What they no longer have in athletic ability, they have maintained with humor and the passing of the legends, otherwise known as cowboy wild and wooly tales.

The number of topics from the old days when cowboys were king is endless.

Always, things were bigger, better and wilder "back then." They may not be able to give you their wife's full name accurately and certainly the date of her birth, but they can name every single ill-headed horse they ever rode in a 50-year period.

Guaranteed, they can name the horse in every story of every wild and woolly wreck they ever had that involved a rope and cow.

And for some reason, each horse will either be the best he ever rode, or the sorriest. Recall has managed to sort out the possibility of any mediocre saddle horses from days gone by.

Another topic that will bring on the windy stories is snakes. There are generations of big ugly diamondbacks that slithered into a bedroll, traveled up a catch rope to meet the roper or fell out of a tree on an unsuspecting cowboy.

Snakes, in their mystical ability to strike fear in the hearts of all men, garner a corner of cowboy history all by themselves. Ask any bowlegged cowboy-booted hombre you run into for his best snake story. I promise you he'll have at least one.

Then there are the "goin' to town" stories. Not so long ago cowboys went to town only occasionally and that trip involved buying some groceries and other supplies.

On that same sojourn, they might eat a steak at the local restaurant, spring a few bucks for a haircut and spend some time at the local watering hole imbibing in some cool spring-water beverages.

One of my favorite cowboy storytellers had a great tale that involved both a trip to town and a horse.

During one of those supply trips to town, he decided a cool one was in order. No sense tying up outside; he just rode the green-broke colt into the bar.

Things were going seemingly well until, suddenly, the jukebox music stopped. When the place got quiet, the horse got wide-eyed and made every attempt to get to somewhere else.

In doing so, he fell over onto the pool table breaking his rider's foot. For decades, the cowboy blamed the jukebox for his injury that kept him gimpy the rest of his life.

Cowboys in the last half of the last century lived a kind of cowboy way that, for the most part, has faded from the landscape.

The new West is continually inspired by their stories.

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