Save a piece of history
Cowgirl Sass And Savvy

By Julie Carter

For whatever reason, the fall season always makes me nostalgic.

I find my thoughts often wander to memories of this time of year in a place far away and a time long ago on a high mountain ranch where summer ended abruptly, usually just after Labor Day.

It was a big outfit by mountain-ranch standards that pastured 4,000 yearlings from spring until fall. The yearlings arrived small, waspy, and left fat and sassy.

Mental images re-main of a long line of cattle trucks waiting their turn at the loading chute, dust boiling high above the pens as the cattle milled, and the profile of a cowboy horseback looking like a picture postcard with the rising sun behind him and the dust forming a filter of light around him.

The sounds of the banging of the scale gate as each bunch passed through to be weighed for the final tally, a cowboy hollering at each bunch as he drove them down the alley and the deafening sound of cattle bawling that never stopped until the last truck pulled away.

It wasn't history at the time. It was life. The stories told by my dad and granddad back then were their history. It was about life lived in a different era. An era when they still rode horses to a one-room school house, an era when babies were birthed at home and maybe the country doctor got there, but usually not.

It was a time when owning a pair of shoes was almost a sign of wealth and a dime might mean the difference between eating or not.

Back then, a cowboy wasn't an icon for what had been. He was what he was. Later he became that which is memorialized in stories, in books and movies.

We in the West have a history that is a chapter about the immigration and emancipation of this country and yet a story unto itself for there is nothing else like it.

The best tell-it-like-it-was stories are from the old guy sitting under the shade of his hat watching what he can no longer do. He will tell you stories of cow herds so big you couldn't recognize the cowboy on the other side. He recalls horses that bucked, horses that could run like the wind and horses that died in the line of duty.

He will detail cattle markets of that day and speak of a day's wages that wouldn't buy a cup of coffee in today's world. He will recall droughts, floods, and winters of record-breaking cold and snow. He will share stories about great friends, fine men of character and heartbreaking losses.

He remembers the time before there were fences and cattle that ran on ranges the size of three counties. He watched the West be surveyed with a wheel that delivered an accuracy that still astounds men today. He was entertained with music and song by the campfire, or better yet, at the good-eats of an ice cream social.

Now when I write my stories of my childhood, my daughter tells me, "Mom I have learned more about your life from those stories than I ever knew before."

Case and point. It is important to listen to the stories from those that went before us. It is equally as important to take the time to tell our stories. They are part of history that, for most of us, won't get written in a book.

Tell your story to someone and save a piece of history.

Taking off from Julie's story, I would like to make a place here where people can tell their story and save a "piece of history". If you have a fond rembrance of country life, be it about Mom, Dad, a horse, cow, tractor, gathering, branding harvesting, hunting, etc. email it to me and I will post it. I doesn't have to be professionally written, can be as short as a paragraph (for example, see Panhandle Poet's comment here)or as long as it takes to tell the story, but please contribute and help us "save a piece of history" and have a good time doing it.

I've been saving all the articles I've posted about ranching and country living. They will be transferred to disc and will be added to my official papers at the NMSU library. I will do the same with these stories.