Heritage

Of the Old Rock

Heritage

“To be you’ve got to be”

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            I awoke trying to remember where the reference to the little California vaquero might be.

            It had to be from the collected works of Arnold Rojas, but the thought of it wouldn’t leave me and I finally got up and staggered into the library to try to find it. That proved to be fruitless. I should have just stayed up and made coffee because the attempt at sleep once more was a tormented exercise.

What remains as I write this is the memory. The little weathered man was a Tejon cowboy and he and his wife were long past any suggestion of their best years. They had little in the way of material things, but they had each other and they shared a life of devotion and hard work. Each day he would venture forth in one of his two shirts, all white, and all mended and ironed by the loving hands of his wife. I don’t think he wore a tie although that would not have been out of the ordinary.

His tack was limited, but it, like his clothes, was tended and displayed care. I’ll suggest that the saddle was a Visalia with long tapaderos hanging down both sides. The bit is lost in memory, but it very likely was a Garcia or comparable. In his hands, it was probably a spade and may have had a cricket that those finished horses would roll and spin and make that noise that I have heard only in California.

Like so many of those old fellows who heard Henry Miller speak Spanish with a German accent, he was a reata man. He had learned to train horses to obey instantly his cued signal, subtle pressure from his knee, a touch of his spur, or the tilt of his body.

Indeed, he was the son of someone, but, more poignantly, he was the son of the American West.

Of the Old Rock

J. Frank Dobie wrote about the Texans.

Their kack was less shiny. The humidity had something to do with part of that as did the sand. Both are very hard on leather. They used grazer bits and silver was not nearly as prevalent.

“There wasn’t as much jewelry on those roosters.”

But, cowboys they were. The immensity of their universe still overwhelms the senses. What is almost universally understated was the cattle they tended. Those Texas cattle, animals that had adapted to the conditions of the heat, the insects, the brush, the thorns, and the unmitigated rawness of their surroundings were wild as deer. Dobie wrote in his Longhorns that a bawl of a calf in the brush country would be met with cows running to it from all directions to fend off any threat. Living in the jowls of screw worm conditions, those mothers would lick the worms from wounds. They would raise a calf.

Those who have dealt with feral cattle of today have some inkling of what they faced on a much grander scale. Castrating bulls was not just a market stimulus. It was a condition of survival.

They tied hard and fast. They used shorter ropes, and they sought a different type of horse. Perhaps they were more workmanlike, but, don’t kid yourself, they were horsemen.

Indeed, they were the sons of someone, but, just as poignantly, they were sons of

 the American West.

“To be you’ve got to be”

I didn’t spend nearly enough time with my uncle, Roy.

When he moved first to Montana and then to Idaho, he had suggested to me that I should come along. What if I had? I’d be a better horseman today if that had come to pass. The last time I saw him he was sitting in a wheelchair in a long, lonely hallway in a hospital. He had no idea who I was. His mind and his body were in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. He was robbed of everything that he had once been.

 Two years ago, I was with Dusty and I told him I wanted to visit the old Flying A headquarters. It was important to seek something of his memory, something solid, and something lasting. That was found in the footings of the loading chute at the corral. He had written his name in the concrete. There it was.

Roy Wilmeth, 1961

I traced the letters, letters he had scribed, with my index finger. Little snippets of memories whirled around in that moment with its sudden sensation. Things like he was never the first to arrive at anything. He would always make big belated grand entrance, and, with a big WHOOP and holler, his arrival was announced. His stud horses were treated no differently than any other horse. He’d take them to ropings and they’d behave like gentlemen. There are stories of him making the same sort of grand entrances at places like Hurley where match ropings would take place. He’d come roaring in there going a hundred miles an hour and his horses would be taking the curves or the stops in the same manner and dust storms that he did.

“They’ve gotta’ learn to do whatever they have to do!”

In that same sort of manner, he walked around me and sized me up after one of the long absences when Idaho was his home. By then, we were feeding cattle and his comment was, “To be you’ve got to be.”

Then he winked with those blue eyes, and I knew I had passed inspection.

Surely, I miss him, but I miss many men that together form the basis of a great heritage.  We have learned to love the craft of our lives to a point of excess. We are short, tall, young, and old, and we are the sons of men, but, just as poignantly, we are sons of the American West.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Comprendè?”