Monday, February 23, 2009

Mountain cowboy just ‘says stuff’

Like most ranch kids of my generation I learned to assess a situation and figure out a solution. We were sent off on a horse to check on salt, look for cattle or cow sign, fix up old fences, roll up barbed wire, and attend to any number of other chores. We grew up on the back of a horse and we grew up thinking. Just like the men, when a kid rode into the ranch in the evening, he was expected to give an articulate report of what he had seen and done that day. We said things. I was raised pretty wild by modern standards, but I came to respect my dad’s teaching modus operandi. Dad and my Granddad Floyd before him, taught kind of like Mother Nature with the test coming first and the lesson afterward. After I was grown, I asked Dad if he wasn’t ever concerned that I might get hurt when I was young. He smiled and told me, “I figured if you lived through it, you’d be a man.” I made it and I thank God every day that I was born into a ranching family at a time when I could fall into the culture of the old-time Arizona cowboys. I grew up a mountain cowboy and made my living in the cattle industry in the same manner as my ancestors until I was 58 years old. And, like Official Arizona State Historian Marshal Trimble says, “If you can cowboy in the Mogollon Rim Country of Arizona, you can cowboy anywhere.”...Jinx Pyle in the Payson Roundup

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Horray!! I love Jinx Pyle, we should start a Jinx Pyle fan club. He is a former GLGA member who moved to AZ his historic homeland and I hadn't heard from him much since he left. So it is great to see he has a colum we can keep up with him by reading.