The sun is not yet up when Boots O’Neal starts his workday. As the 89-year-old cowboy readies his mount in the predawn quiet, he stuffs his hands into well-worn leather gloves. His dark chaps are decorated with fringe, a slight sheen on the right hip where his nylon rope has polished the leather over the years. He pulls down his silverbelly hat and grunts his way onto the saddle, planting his tall-topped boots in the stirrups. The horse he’s riding today is a dark sorrel named Cool. Together they wait, as the cowboy saying goes, just “cryin’ for daylight.”
This morning’s chore: Boots and three of his Stetsoned coworkers must round up some two dozen bulls scattered across a vast grazing pasture, drive them to a set of pens about a mile away, and load the one-ton beeves into a livestock trailer so they can be hauled to another division of the Four Sixes, the legendary West Texas ranch that sprawls across 260,000 acres. This devotion to his craft, coupled with the deep knowledge of ranching he’s accumulated over a stunningly long career—possibly longer than any cowpuncher alive—has propelled Boots to a level of fame practically unheard of for a working cowboy. He’s been inducted into just about every cowpoke hall of fame there is, and one could easily fill an entire Western art museum with nothing but paintings, sketches, and photographs of Boots.
Of course, part of his celebrity stems from the Four Sixes itself. Founded in 1870, when Samuel Burk Burnett purchased a hundred head of cattle marked with a “6666” brand (the origin of the brand is unknown), the Sixes is now one of the state’s most well-known ranches. It actually spans two disparate properties in the Panhandle and the Rolling Plains and is headquartered roughly halfway between Amarillo and Fort Worth, near Guthrie. This small community, population 151, made up almost entirely of ranch employees and their families, is where Boots has lived and worked for the past 32 years.
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