Memories burn deep for 106-year-old cowboy

When Boss Winter's childhood home was built in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt had just completed his second term as president and the Ford Model T was 2 years old. Texas was still horse country. Farmers plowed fields with horses, and ranchers worked cattle on horseback. Boss was 5 and already riding a pony when his father, uncle and grandfather built the family home with field stones for the foundation and 1-by-12-inch planks to frame the three-room house. Boss can't remember a time when he wasn't on a horse. Now 106, he doesn't have much left but memories. "He grew up in a Texas without electricity, without paved roads, without any of the modern conveniences. Life was hard," said Dr. Light Cummins, a professor at Austin College in Sherman and an expert in Texas history. "And his life is a window into another era of the great cattle-range industry that disappeared from Texas." Boss has survived the state's worst droughts, including the Dust Bowl of the 1930s that devastated the Great Plains. For decades, he eked out a living farming his plot, working cattle for other ranchers and earning a reputation as a reliable cowboy. "You found a lot of people like him, who often had their own small plots of land, but they also hired out as cowboys on the big ranches," Cummins said. "It really created individuals who in many respects are passing from the scene. They lived on their own hard work, they lived on their own resilience, they lived on their own toughness, and they lived in a very hostile environment."...more