by Jo Baeza An old cowboy named Ray Tankersley once told me he calculated that one woman used as much water as 100 cows. How he came to that conclusion I'm not sure, but he assured me he'd "studied on it."
It's true that women use a lot of water from the time they get up in the morning till the time they go to bed, but ranch women use less than others.
When I got married and moved to a ranch in 1956, we had to haul water in buckets from the windmill pipe to the house. Once we put in running water, there was no stopping me. I took a shower every day, washed dishes after every meal, used water to cook for two or three cowboys, put water out every morning for the ranch dogs, cats and chickens.
It took a lot of water to irrigate my kitchen garden in the summer and more water to clean and cook vegetables. The milk cans and bottles had to be scalded with hot water every day.
Our dishwater and wash water, known these days as "gray water," ran out in the yard to water grass and trees. Our sewage went into a cesspool that was blasted out of sandstone rock by Sam Yellowhair using a mysterious substance he called "blue mud."(I went to town to do the laundry when he was blasting.)
The cesspool didn't get a lot of use, as the men were out on the range most of the day and contributed their biodegradable waste to the environment.
When we'd go to town, we'd stop every so often to pick up parts alongside the road. You'd be surprised how much flies off a car or pickup bouncing over a rutted dirt road.
The cowboy's creative eye sees opportunity in what looks like a piece of junk to most people. Everything from mufflers to nuts and bolts went to the shop to be transformed into something useful by a skillful welder or put into a box of spare parts.
Ranchers who had an allotment on the national forest could usually find discarded tools after a forest fire. More than one shovel or pulaski or canteen in the back of a rancher's pickup truck has a "U.S." on it. He figures he paid his taxes. In fact, some of the eating utensils at our West Camp were stamped "U.S." and looked as if they might have been used by the cavalry in the Apache wars.
Many of the early day Forest Service personnel were cowboys whose terminology stuck. Most ranger stations still have a "boneyard" out back full of used parts that might come in handy some day.
To ranchers, the boneyard is the place where dead animals are left. In Arizona, the coyotes and ravens clean up a carcass in no time and the sun bleaches the bones. Nothing is wasted in nature.
Food scraps and peelings were thrown out to the chickens from whence came eggs and occasional Sunday dinners. Manure from the corrals was put on a mulch pile with ashes from the fireplace and any organic material that happened to be lying around. The chickens, ducks, geese and guineas provided pest control without pesticides, and the cats took care of rodents in the barn. The cow dogs kept predators and salesmen away from the house.
One of the words used often around a cow camp was "splice." When you lived an hour or more from town, you didn't run to the hardware store every time you ran out of something. You spliced it. If a horse broke a rein, you spliced the leather. Even if one rein was shorter than the other, you could get back to camp.
Saddle leathers came in handy, too. Like a mountain man's fringed buckskin shirt, a cowboy's saddle leathers were used to patch stirrups and all kinds of things.
Cowboys still carry fence pliers most everywhere they go horseback. If they come across a fence the antelope have pulled up, they can splice the fence even if they don't have any baling wire handy. Fence pliers can be used to cut or tighten wire or pound in staples. The rules for conservation were simple - keep your eyes open for anything useful, and don't throw anything away. The upshot of that was most old-time ranches looked more like junk yards than like South Fork or the Ponderosa, but they didn't have to get federal bailouts to stay in business.
With no television, cellular devices or Xboxes for distraction, the old-time cowboy spent his after-dinner time in the bunk house carving wood, hand-tooling leather or braiding horsehair reins, headstalls and quirts. He patched his boots until they wore out. When they wore out, he kept the old boots for leather.
If he had the means, he might draw or paint. Almost all cowpunchers were storytellers and many amused themselves by singing, playing guitar or making up poetry.
Books and magazines were read over and over. Writing was an arduous labor for most cowboys, but they wrote letters when needed, usually with a pencil on a lined tablet.
It's been along time since women stayed up mending socks and clothing after everyone else went to bed, but they did. When they didn't have mending to do, they would knit, crochet or quilt. Cowboys knew how to sew, mend and cook as well as a woman.
It's been a long time since kids routinely wore "hand-me-downs," but that was the practice in most families. Maybe this "economic downturn" will have an upside. A lot of people today are hearing, for the first time, the old expression familiar to ranch families: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
And don't forget your fence pliers.
*Reach the reporter at jobaeza@wmonline.com
Posted with permission of the author and the White Mountain Independent.
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