Cattle handling videos and cookbook now wup!

Well I finally have video on my cattle handling site at http://www.naturalcattlehandling.com

here are two of them:

And this one of me taking 723 steers through a gate with only a deaf dog for help!






The Gourmet Cowboy cookbook is also finally available from amazon at

Gourmet Cowboy available soon

The lifestyle of the broke and cowboy somewhat limits the amount of time one has to work on outside projects. For instance, I am only four YEARS behind on a little project called The Gourmet Cowboy. That may sound a bit like an oxymoron, but that is what I am, a cowboy who also dabbles in gourmet cooking. However, after having the manuscript committed to disc for the last four years, it is finally being released. With recipes varying from quiches and soufflés` to soups and stews there is a little something there for every taste. The illustrations are a little different than the ordinary. Rather than simply having pictures of food, the illustrations give you a little taste of what life is like out past the paved roads. If the proof copy gets here tomorrow as planned it will be available on Amazon by the end of the week!!!

Meanwhile try this recipe on for size:

Hanging Tree Quiche

This is the breakfast that the hangman of Carson City, Nevada had every morning during his off season.
1 9 inch pie crust (see page 127)
6 strips bacon
8 oz jar oysters
8 oz whipped cream cheese
4 oz diced green chili
1/2 pt cream
4 eggs
1/2 c flour
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 410.
Cook and drain bacon. Brown oysters in bacon grease. While cooking bacon and oysters, melt cream cheese in a double boiler or microwave. Whip cream until stiff. Separate eggs and beat whites until stiff. Whip egg yolks until they are foamy then combine yolks, whites and cream in a large mixing bowl. When bacon and oysters are done and have been drained, mix with green chili and spread evenly over the bottom of the pie shell. With the mixer on low, SLOWLY add melted cheese, salt and finally the flour. Continue mixing until thoroughly blended, pour into the pie shell. Bake at 410 for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Serves 4.

Crossroads Gathering a Success

Patrica Golden's official report n the 2009 Crossroads gathering is up at http://www.cowboypoetry.com/gathers092.htm#Horn We are already getting ready for the 2010 gathering and accepting entertainers and judges. For more information go to http://www.texascrossroadscowboypoetry.org

Cowboy Poets Survived Little Bighorn

In 1957 the last surviving warrior to help annihilate Custer and the 7th Calvary at Little Big Horn died. This man, lived in a tepee during the time of the great cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, and helped annihilate the 7th Calvary with bows and arrows, also lived to see the atomic bomb, television and the beginnings of space travel. During the lifespan of this man and people born in the 1950’s, “necessities” have gone from food and shelter to laptop computers and Blackberry® phones. In this world of technological wonders and one stop shopping for clothes, computers and food, most have forgotten, or never learned where their food comes from. Forgotten is the fact that the word cowboy does not describe reckless bankers and politicians, but a man who makes his living in the saddle, taking care of cattle. Most people do not realize that cowboys are not mythical, or the fact that they not only survived the Battle of Little Bighorn, but that they still exist today.

The cowboy appears a bit different in these modern days. He is as likely to pack a cell phone as a six-gun, and there are some days he may pack both. Rather than a bedroll in back of the saddle, he will have specially designed saddlebags filled with several different kinds of pharmaceuticals so he can rope and doctor cattle in the pasture. Part cattleman, part horseman and part veterinarian, these modern day cowboy lead a lifestyle which span the centuries. They may spend weeks, or even months without seeing a paved road.

Rather than having help a phone call or text message away, these trans-centurions live in places where a response from 911 may take hours. This leads to a self reliance unmatched in modern day living, and, as laughter is the best medicine, a sense of humor that goes with it. While the rest of the world reads warnings to avoid serious injury while operating a computer, or listening to public service announcements telling golfers what to do in a thunderstorm, cowboys are roping yearling calves in the middle of prairie dog towns or dodging lightning strikes on their way to low ground.

Trips to town are only once or twice a month, and until the recent advent of satellite television, nights were void of any entertainment other than what they could produce on their own. Using their daily experiences as material, they create poems, songs and stories which are a richly entertaining look into how it is to live as a cowboy in the 21st century. As laughter is the best medicine, these poems, stories, and songs are full of self effacing humor that is dry as a west Texas wind yet are as philosophical as Socrates.
Out of this form of entertainment has come what is known as Cowboy Poetry Gatherings. February the 27th and 28th the first annual Texas Crossroads Cowboy Poetry Gathering will take place in Van Horn, Texas. This event is a venue for other gathering around the country to discover talent that is either completely new or known in a small region of the country. In order to facilitate this, the event will be broadcast live, in both audio and video formats, through Ralph’s Back Porch at http://www.ralphsbackporch.com

There will be a special no host get acquainted party at the Cattleman’s Steak House in Van Horn Thursday night, February 26th at 6:30 pm. The public is welcome.
Day sessions begin at 11:30 am both Friday and Saturday. Tickets for the Friday night dinner show are $20 and $10 for the Saturday night finals show. Call the Van Horn Convention center at locally at 432-283-2632 or toll free at 866-424-6939.

For more information visit us at http://www.texascrossroadscowboypoetry.org

Texas Crossroads Cowboy gathering

You can never tell what may happen in the life of a cowboy. Yesterday was one of those days. The farmer next door called because one of her cows didn't look right. I loaded up Catie and Dakota (so they could get off this place for a few minutes) and headed right over. Sure enough it was a vaginal prolapse. As the outfit I work for just runs steers I was missing a few needed items. Well farmer woman made a few calls and located what I would need and discovered her truck had locked itself with the keys in the ignition.
With the extra set of keys 120 miles away we broke into the truck using cowboy improvisation...a piece of wire and 10 foot of half inch pipe. We first hooked the latch to the back window with the wire to open it. The next step was to reach across the cab with the pipe and unlock the truck...
This kind of thing (and more) will be the subject of poems, stories, and songs at the 1st annual Texas Crossroads Cowboy Poetry gathering in Van Horn, Texas on April 27th and 28th. It is not only the first year for this gathering, but this is the first gathering of this kind. A cowboy talent show, the entertainers will be judged by representatives from at least three other gatherings which will be awarding invites to these gatherings as featured performers. Between the free performances, Friday night dinner show and the Saturday night finale this is going to be a fun weekend. If you can't make it, you will be able to listen at http://www.ralphsbackporch.com which will be straming live audio on the web! For more information visit http://www.texascrossroadscowboypoetry.org (and be sure to visit the sponsor page to get a room form one of our sponsors!)

A Million To One Odds (Times five)

This is the title story from my second book of the same name. It doesn't get anymore "cowboy" than this!

A Million-To-One Odds
(Times Five)

One thing about cowboying for a living is that you never know what kind of circumstances you'll be working under, especially if you are working in country where winter is tough, and the ranchers are tough enough (or dumb enough) to do their calving when winter is at its hardest.
Besides fighting the elements, mad cows, and half-broke horses, it seems like the majority of these outfits also like to run on a skeleton crew. Consequently, one may get less sleep in a week than the average person gets in a night. This unique combination of fighting the elements and unruly animals, coupled with the ancient Chinese torture of sleep deprivation, can result
in things happening that normally wouldn't . . . sometimes those things even string together.
It began when the time came for me to have a change in scenery, and I called my friend Floyd to see if he knew of any openings. As it happened, he was looking for someone himself. He was running a little 900-cow outfit with no help, and calving season was fast approaching. Doubting
my sanity by agreeing to be half the crew, I headed on down. Once I got there, Floyd let me know he had found a guy who would feed a few days a week to take some of the strain off of us.
Since we would be splitting up the night shift, he said it wouldn't be too bad. Then, halfway through calving the heifers, the weather decided to take a change to the negative,like negative thirty-five degrees with fifty-mile-per-hour winds dropping the wind chill to somewhere around that of dry ice. This was also about the time the main cow herd was to start calving. Plan "A" was to calve them out in the hills. This shouldn't have been a bad plan. There were plenty of places a cow could calve out of the wind, and calving commenced with no problems. Then we lost three cows from prolapsed uteruses because they decided to see how much effort they could put into the calving process by pushing the calf out uphill. That caused Floyd to decide on plan "B," which meant we would bring the cows in closer, cut out the springers, the cows ready to calve in the next week or two, and calve them in the pens, like a bunch of heifers.
Now the weather was giving us a little bit of a break. It had warmed up into the positive teens, and winds had died down to between 20 and 30 miles per hour. It was dang near tropical, other than the spitting snow. Adding to the relaxed and romantic atmosphere of the task at hand was the fact we hadn't been getting much sleep because of the work/weather relationship. If Floyd and I had combined the total amount of sleep we had between us in the previous week, it might have amounted to as much as 9 hours, but just barely.
To make things a little easier on us we decided to let all of the pairs, cows and their calves, drop back since we would just be bringing them back into the same pasture. Floyd's wife Wallaby loaded their infant son into the pickup and stayed on the road at the bottom of the pasture. Her job was to fill out ear tags for the newborn calves and let the tags dry on the defroster so that the
ink would not freeze/fade and be totally unreadable at weaning time.
The first couple of calves went pretty easily. I was riding a colt, which was working well, and the mothers weren't too protective. The third one went a little differently though. This mother hit a lope down to the road. As we neared the road, I brought up my rope, and hung
the hondo on my spur. 'Bout a million-to-one odds on
that happening; I have never even heard of anyone doing that before. Of course the rope wouldn't come off, and every time I tried to reach down to take it off the colt started shying away. So I pulled up and stepped off.
I was riding a new custom-made saddle that fit me like a glove, except for the stirrup leathers. Now I've been handed the moniker of "No Legs" a couple of times because my
legs are so short, but the saddle maker musta figuredI'd get drunk and ten feet tall because the leathers had enough extra that I could let the stirrups out enough to fit some NBA basketball player. When I stepped off to remove the rope from my spur, my toe sorta hooked on the excess stirrup leather and pulled it into the stirrup, hanging my foot up.
So there I'm standing, my right spur in my rope and my left foot hung up in the stirrup when
the calf ran through the fence. Luckily the colt stood still while I untangled myself. About the time I got free of my miscomBOBulation, the calf was trying to get back through the fence.
As I turned to see if I could beat the cow to its calf, I tripped on my reins and dropped my rope. Scrambling through the snow, I managed to tackle the calf just as it came through the fence. With its mother pawin', bellerin'
and blowin’ snot in my face, I dragged the calf back to my colt, jerked down a piggin' string and tied it down.
Standing up to go give Wallaby the number, I tripped once again . . . this time as the belt on my chaps broke, and they fell to my knees. Needless to say, Wallaby was parked right where she could witness the whole chain of events. It took her several minutes to collect herself enough to be able to fill out the ear tag without bursting out in laughter again. It should have been embarrassing, but how can you be embarrassed when you manage to get your job done while at the same time entertaining someone so much without killing yourself?

Cowboyese (or learning the cowboy lingo)

NOT ONLY IS COWBOY LIFE different, the
language we use is different. If you are going to follow
this blog, then you are going to need to learn "cowboyese."
For example, when I told a city friendof mine I had to
gather cattle from a two-section trap,he wanted to know
if it hurt the cattle to hold them ina trap.
After explaining to him that a two-section trap
was merely a small, two-section pasture (a section
being one square mile, or 640 acres), I decided that I had
better add an introduction to this book, so that
amateurs could acquire some literacy in Cowboyese.
The first things I do in the morning are put on my
chinks, take my twine, and toss a hoolihand to catch
the horse I'm riding for the day. I put a hack on his
head, throw on my wood, and head out to work. In
other words, I put on a short style of chaps, which are
called chinks. Then I shake out my rope and throw an
overhand loop to catch my horse. I put a hackamore
on his head, saddle him, and ride off to work.
The hackamore is a braided leather or rawhide
noseband which I use in the winter and often on green
horses. No, horses don't come in that color, but they
are referred to as green if they haven't been ridden
much. Referring to your saddle as your wood comes
from the days when all saddles were built on a wooden
frame, or tree, and then covered with leather. When
asked "What type of wood you sit," a typical reply would
tell the maker, the kind of tree, the size of the horn,
the height of the cantle, and how the saddle is rigged,
or cinched down to the horse. I ride a Swanke on a
Wade tree with a three-and-a-half by four horn, a five-
inch cantle, and a three-quarter flat plate rigging.
Cowboys, or buckaroos, refer to their rope as twine
or whatever material it is made of, usually nylon or
poly. The hoolihand is an almost forgotten loop which
was used by the Spanish Vaqueros (pronounced "bah-
KAIR-ohs"), from which derives the term buckaroo.
Usually thrown from the ground, the hoolihand floats
through the air and settles gently over the horse's neck.
You may be wondering, "Why can't a cowboy just
walk out and catch a horse like I do mine?" In a word,
safety. With twenty or more horses in the pen, you can't
just walk out with a bucket of grain to attract a horse.
All the other horses would fight with the one you want
over the grain, and you would be more likely to catch a
stray hoof than your horse. Once a horse is broken to
being roped, it will walk up the rope to the roper,
sometimes without the loop being closed around its
neck.
The hoolihand may also be thrown from horseback,
and if a cow is on the fight, it may be thrown with a
twist of the wrist (the hoolihand, not the cow) to catch
the irritated bovine on either side of you. You can even
catch the cow behind you, if she decides that she should
be the pursuer and you the pursued (not an acceptable
bovine trait).
After getting a loop on an animal, you must jerk your
slack so the loop closes and take your dallies, or wraps,
around the saddle horn, in order to keep both your rope
and the animal you've caught. Another name for a dally
is a rinky. When doctoring calves, you will often tie
your rope to the horn, which is called roping hard and
fast. In the southwest, especially Texas and New
Mexico, roping hard and fast was the method of choice
for a lot of the old-timers. They figured that when they
caught something, either they had it or it had them,
which makes for some interesting wrecks.
Just as you can choose whether to rope an animal
on the run or toss a hoolihand before it gets going fast,
and just as you choose whether to dally or tie off hard
and fast, you can choose to wrap your horn with rubber
or to rope slick, which means that you wrap your horn
with mule hide. Personally, I prefer roping slick because
it allows me to slip rope to a cow, relieving some of the
jerk to both the cow and my horse. When roping larger
stock, the rope can actually get hot enough to smoke,
which kinda burns the sinuses, but it beats having
your horse jerked down on top of you.
There can be other repercussions from wrapping with
rubber. The last time I roped with it back in '77, I had
roped a steer and got into one of those predicaments
where I needed to make a CED (Calculated Emergency
Dismount). If I had been roping slick, the rope would
have burned off the horn, and that would have been
the end of it. Instead, when I hit the ground, the rope
bit into the rubber, and, adding injury to insult, dragged
the errant steer over me before the rope popped off,
sounding like a rifle shot.
The most roping a person does in a single day is
during branding season; that is, if you are lucky enough
to be roping instead of being on the ground crew. Not
that the ground crew is all that bad if you're running
irons (branding), cutting (castrating), dehorning, or
vaccinating, but if you are flanking (wrestling), it is kind
of a young man’s job. If the ropers are good, they
approach the calves at a walk, catch a calf by its heels,
and drag it out at a walk. When the calf nears the
branding area, it is a simple matter for one of the
flankers to pick up the rope and roll the calf onto the
proper side and for the other flanker to drop down on
the front of the calf. Then the roper gives the first flanker
some slack so that he can sit down to hold the back
end and remove the rope, enabling the roper to go back
in for another calf.
It isn't always that easy, though. I had the misfortune
to work for a short time in an area where they really
farmer down when they cowboy up. They don't bother
to pull the cows (or bulls) off the calves before they
start branding. They're under the impression that the
faster you move, the faster you get to the beer, so they
head into the pen at a trot, spinning their twine. This
is enough to get you grounded in most places, but these
farmers think it is perfectly OK to drag out calves roped
by one leg above the hock. In fact, this is a good way to
injure calves or people and will get your rope cut in
most places. I once watched a calf outrun its flankers
and roper. I spotted it just in time to warn the guy I
was flanking with, but I was a little slow and found my
neck encircled by a rope which had a 1200-pound horse
on one end and a 150-pound calf on the other. I really
had to scramble for a second and ended up looking
like I'd barely escaped the hangman's noose.
I also worked in a place where they didn't use ropers.
Instead, the flankers just waded into the calves. One
flanker would grab a calf's head and the other its tail
in order to "walk" it out to the branding area before
flanking it down. About the only way any of us could
gain any body fat was to eat a bucket of lard.
Some outfits rely on mechanical means of moving
cattle rather than on horses. I worked for one rancher
who was an ex-crop duster and an absolute genius
with an airplane. He would fly directly at cattle with
his landing gear inches above the sage before pulling
into a vertical climb. Making a graceful fall to the side
in a hammerhead stall, he would plummet straight
down to the cattle before rising straight back up again.
Sometimes he would repeat this maneuver three or four
times in the same place.
Of course, a few cows wouldn't be the least bit
impressed by these aerobatics and would simply bolt
into the brush. Once they were "brushed up," or hidden
in the brush, it would be up to me bring them out with
my dogs. This is always an interesting task, for
sometimes you come out of the brush with more cattle
than you expected. Once I rode through a pasture on
the road without seeing a single cow. I rode back
through the pasture in the brush with my two dogs
working on either side of me, again without seeing a
single cow. Yet, when I emerged from the brush, rather
than having the hundred head I was looking for, I had
over three hundred. Needless to say, there was
something slightly amiss.
Then there are times we must play veterinarian. This
can be frustrating because there are always cattle
reluctant to go down the alley into the squeeze chute.
The aptly-named chute squeezes the entire body of the
cow, except for the head, which sticks out the front so
that it can swing around and flatten some cowboy's
face for not paying attention. When a cow refuses to go
down the alley, it is likely to get hit with a hot shot.
This instrument is similar to a stun gun on low batteries
and provides the errant cow an incentive to go forward
into the chute. While some people think this is an
inhumane way to treat cattle, I had a friend who used
to delight in showing that it is not. To demonstrate, he
would shock himself on the underside of the wrist and
laugh as his fingers went into spasms for a few seconds.
As all good veterinary doctors, we must be able to
give our patients their medication. I have yet to see the
cow who will simply pick up a glass of water and take
her bolus, or pill, like an aspirin. Instead, you must
use a balling gun loaded with one to three pills, each
of which may be up to two inches long. Holding the
cow by the lip, you insert the gun in her mouth and
push it down her throat, making sure you are directing
the pill to her stomach and not her lungs. You depress
the plunger to fire the pills at a point in her throat
which, usually, causes her to swallow them rather than
spit them out.
I hope this lesson in cowboyese has left you a little
less confused than a computer manual, preparing you
to become informed and enlightened as well as
humorified whenever you hear anyone speaking cowboyese.
If you like this explanation as to our unique little language,
you will like the books I have at http://www.2lazy4u.us