It was a nearly womanless culture, nomadic, harsh, dangerous, essentially romantic. It had the same contempt for the dirt grubbers that Scythian and Cossack had, and Canadian tillers of the soil tended to look upon it with the same suspicion and fear and envy that tillers of the soil have always expressed toward the herdsmen. As we knew it, it had a lot of Confederate prejudices left in it, and it had the callousness and recklessness that a masculine life full of activity and adventure is sure to produce. I got it in my eyes like stardust almost as soon as we arrived in Whitemud, when the town staged its first stampede down in the western bend. Reno Dodds, known as Slivers, won the saddle bronc competition and set me up a model for my life. I would grow up to be about five feet six and weigh about a hundred and thirty pounds. I would be bowlegged and taciturn, with deep creases in my cheeks and a hide like stained saddle leather. I would be the quietest and most dangerous man around, best rider, best shot, the one who couldn’t be buffaloed. Men twice my size, beginning some brag or other, would catch my cold eye and begin to wilt, and when I had stared them into impotence I would turn my back contemptuous, hook onto my pony in one bowlegged arc, and ride off. I thought it tremendous that anyone as small and skinny as Slivers could be a top hand and a champion rider. I don’t think I could have survived without his example, and he was still on my mind years later when, sixteen years old and six feet tall and weighing a hundred and twenty-five pounds, I went every afternoon to the university gym and worked out on the weights for an hour and ran wind sprints around the track. If I couldn’t be big I could be hard.
We hung around the Lazy-S corrals a good deal that first year or two, and the cowpunchers, when they had no one else to pester, would egg us into what they called shit-fights, with green cow manure for snowballs; or they would put a surcingle around a calf and set us aboard. After my try I concluded that I would not do any more of it just at that time, and I limped to the fence and sat on the top rail nursing my sprains and bruises and smiling to keep from bawling out loud. From there I watched Spot Orullian, a Syrian boy a couple of years older than I, ride a wildly pitching whiteface calf clear around the corral and halfway around again, and get piled hard, and come up wiping the cow dung off himself, swearing like a pirate. They cheered him, he was a favorite at once, perhaps all the more because he had a big brown birthmark on his nose and so could be kidded. And I sat on the corral rail hunching my winglike shoulder-blades, smiling and smiling and smiling to conceal the black envy that I knew was just under the skin of my face. It was always boys like Spot Orullian who managed to be and do what I wanted to do and be.
Many things that those cowboys represented I would have done well to get over quickly, or never catch: the prejudice, the callousness, the destructive practical joking, the tendency to judge everyone by the same raw standard. Nevertheless, what they themselves most respected, and what as a boy I most yearned to grow up to, was as noble as it was limited. They honored courage, competence, self-reliance, and they honored them tacitly. They took them for granted. It was their absence, not their presence, that was cause for remark. Practicing comradeship in a rough and dangerous job, they lived a life calculated to make a man careless of everything except the few things he really valued.
In the fall of 1906 it must have seemed that the cowboy life was certain to last a good while, for the Canadian range still lay wide open, and stockmen from the western states had prospected it and laid large plans for moving bigger herds across the Line to escape the nesters and sheepmen who had already broken up the Montana ranges. Probably the entire country from Wood Mountain to the Alberta line would have been leased for grazing, at the favorable Canadian rate of a few cents an acre, if the winter of 1906-07 had not happened.
That winter has remained ever since, in the minds of all who went through it, as the true measure of catastrophe. Some might cite the winter of 1886-87, the year of the Big Die-Up on the American range, but that winter did not affect the Whitemud country, where cattle came in numbers only after 1887. Some who had punched cows in Alberta in the early days might cast a vote for the fatal Cochran drive of 1881, when 8000 out of 12,000 cattle died over by Lethbridge; and some would certainly, just as weather, mention the April blizzard of 1892, or the winter that followed it, or the big May blizzard of 1903. But after 1907 no one would seriously value those earlier disasters. The winter of 1906-07 was the real one, the year of the blue snow. After it, the leases that might have been taken up were allowed to lapse, the herds that might have been augmented were sold for what they would bring—fifteen to twenty dollars a head with suckling calves thrown in. Old cattlemen who had ridden every range from Texas north took a good long look around in the spring and decided to retire.
The ranches that survived were primarily the hill ranches with shelter plus an access to bench or prairie hay land where winter feed could be cut. The net effect of the winter of 1906-07 was to make stock farmers out of ranchers. Almost as suddenly as the disappearance of the buffalo, it changed the way of life of the region. A great event, it had the force in the history of the Cypress Hills country that a defeat in war has upon a nation. When it was over, the protected Hills might harbor a few cowboys, and one or two of the big ranches such as the 76 might go on, but most of the prairie would be laid open to homesteading and another sort of frontier.
That new frontier, of which my family was a part, very soon squeezed out the Lazy-S. The hay lands in the bottoms were broken up into town lots, my father was growing potatoes where whitefaces had used to graze, the punchers were drifting off to Alberta. But while we had them around, we made the most of them, imitating their talk and their walk and their songs and their rough-handed jokes; admiring them for the way they tormented Mah Li; hanging around in the shade of the bunkhouse listening to Rusty, who was supposed to be the second son of an earl, play the mouth organ; watching the halfbreed Assiniboin braid leather or horsehair into halter ropes and hackamores. I heard some stories about the winter of 1906-07, but I never heard enough. Long afterward, digging in the middens where historians customarily dig, I found and read some more, some of them the reminiscences of men I knew. What they record is an ordeal by weather. The manner of recording is laconic, deceptively matter of fact. It does not give much idea of how it feels to ride sixty or eighty miles on a freezing and exhausted pony, or how cold thirty below is when a fifty-mile wind is driving it into your face, or how demoralizing it is to be lost in a freezing fog where north, south, east, west, even up and down, swim and shift before the slitted and frost-stuck eyes.
They do not tell their stories in Technicolor; they would not want to seem to adorn a tale or brag themselves up. The calluses of a life of hardship blunt their sensibilities to their own experience. If we want to know what it was like on the Whitemud River range during that winter when the hopes of a cattle empire died, we had better see it through the eyes of some tenderfoot, perhaps someone fresh from the old country, a boy without the wonder rubbed off him and with something to prove about himself. If in inventing this individual I put into him a little of Corky Jones, and some of the boy Rusty whose mouth organ used to sweeten the dusty summer shade of the Lazy-S bunkhouse, let it be admitted that I have also put into him something of myself, the me who sat on a corral bar wetting with spit my smarting skinned places, and wishing I was as tough as Spot Orullian.
2
Genesis
The summer of 1906 was very wet. It seemed to rain for weeks and the coulees ran knee deep and the Frenchman River was as high as a spring flood. The dirt roofs of the log houses of that day became so sodden that water dripped from them whether it rained or not. It stayed so wet that we had difficulty getting the hay in. The winter started early with a light snow on the 5th of November, followed by a terrific three-day blizzard that started on the 11th. From then till Christmas was a succession of bad storms. The range cattle were dying in December.
CORKY JONES AS AN OLD MAN
It seemed to the young Englishman that if anyone had been watc
hing from the bench he would have seen them like a print of Life on the Western Plains, or like a medieval procession. The sun was just rising, its dazzle not yet quite clear of the horizon, and flooding down the river valley whitened with the dust of snow, it gilded the yellow leaves that still clung to the willows, stretched the shadow of every bush and post, glazed the eastern faces of the log ranch buildings whose other side was braced with long blue shadows. And moving now, starting to roll, the outfit was strung out along the Mounted Police patrol trail. He was enclosed in it, moving with it, but in his excitement he saw it as it would look from outside and above, and it made him want to stand up in his stirrups and yell.
Leading the lithograph procession went the five hounds—the four Russian wolfhounds and the thing its owner called a staghound, a dog as big as a calf and with a head like a lioness. Across the bottoms in the morning cold they cut loose and ran for the love of running; within seconds they were out of sight among the willows by the ford. Behind them rode Schulz, the wolfer; as new to the outfit as the Englishman himself; and after him his fifteen-year-old son driving a packhorse; and after them old Jesse in the wagon pulled by a team of hairy-footed Clydesdale stallions. Then the horse herd, seventy or eighty saddle horses in a flow of dark tossing motion across the flat, and then the riders, two and two.
They carried no lances or pennons, the sun found no armor from which to strike light, but in the incandescence of being nineteen, and full of health, and assaulted in all his senses by the realization of everything splendid he had ever imagined, the English boy knew that no more romantic procession had ever set forth. The Crusades could not have thrilled him more. Though they went, and he with them, like an illumination in an old manuscript, they had their own authentic color. Among the bays and blacks and browns and buckskins and roans of the horse herd was one bright piebald; in substitution for slashed doublets and shining silks they offered two pairs of woolly goatskin chaps and Ed Spurlock’s red mackinaw.
Only a week in that country, the Englishman with practically no urging would have started running with the dogs. It rattled the brains in his head like seeds in a pod to think where he was—here, in Saskatchewan, not merely on the way to the great lone land, or on its edge, but in it, and going deeper. He had lived a dream in which everything went right. Within an hour of the time he stepped off the train in Maple Creek, hesitant and a little scared, he had learned that all the big cattle outfits using the open range east of the Cypress Hills were shorthanded. Within two hours, he had found a ride with Joe Renaud, the mail driver. Within twelve, he was sleeping in the T-Down bunkhouse, an authentic cowboy. Within a week here he went, part of a company bound for adventure, on the late fall roundup to gather and bring in to feeding stations the calves that could not be expected to winter on the range.
He was face to shining face with everything new. Names he had heard here knocked and clanged in his mind—places where anything could happen, and from the sound of them, had happened—Jumbo’s Butte, Fifty-Mile, Pinto Horse Butte, Horse Camp Coulee, the War Holes. He blew his exultant breath out between his pony’s ears, and when he breathed in again he felt the cold at the root of every bared tooth. He noticed that the horses felt as he did: though they had been on the roundup and then on the long drive to Montana and then on the long drive back, and had been worked steadily since May, they were full of run; they joined him in snorting smoke.
The column turned down toward the river, and looking back the Englishman saw Molly Henry, the foreman’s wife, hugging her elbows by the ranch-house door. He waved; her hand lifted. He and Ed Spurlock were the last in the line, and he saw how they would look to her, his new sheepskin and Spurlock’s red mackinaw just disappearing into the willows. He thought it a lonesome piece of luck for a girl married only three weeks to be left now, with no help except a crippled handy man and no company except the Mountie on his weekly patrol from Eastend, and no woman nearer than twenty-five miles. To Spurlock, jogging beside him with his mittened hands stacked on the horn, he said with feeling, “I’m certainly glad it’s not me being left behind!”
Spurlock glanced sideward with restless brown eyes; he said nothing; his expression did not change.
The Englishman grew aware, under Spurlock’s glance, that he was posting to his pony’s jogtrot. As if stretching muscles he pushed down hard into the unfamiliarly long stirrups, shoved back against the cantle, leaned a little and stacked his hands casually on the horn in imitation of Spurlock’s. As soon as he had them there he felt that he seemed to be hanging on to ease the jolt of sitting the trot, and he took his hands away again. With a complex sense of being green, young, red-headed, and British—all potentially shameful—but at the same time strong, bold, high-spirited, and ready for anything, he appraised Spurlock’s taciturnity and adjusted his seat in the big strange saddle and threw at random into the air a look that was cocky, self-conscious, and ingratiating all at once.
The wagon had crushed through the thin ice at the ford, and the horses waded into the broken wake and stood knee deep, bobbing away ice-pans with their noses, plunging their muzzles to suck strongly. Here and there one pulled its nose out and stood with a thoughtful, puckered, tasting expression at the comers of its dripping lips; they looked as if the water had made their teeth ache.
Then Slippers and Little Horn and Ray Henry rode in and hazed them across, and Buck and Panguingue and Spurlock and the Englishman picked up the stragglers. The cold sound of splashing became a drumming and thudding on the bank. Above and ahead, the wagon was just tilting out of sight over the dugway edge. They took the herd up after it in a rush, and burst out onto the great glittering plain.
It was tremendous, it was like a plunge over a cliff. The sun looked them straight in the eyes, the earth dazzled them. Over and under and around, above, below, behind, before, the Englishman felt the unfamiliar element, a cleanness like the blade of a knife, a distance without limits, a horizon that did not bound the world but only suggested endless space beyond. Shading his eyes with his hand while his pony rocked into a lope, he saw all ahead of him the disk of the white and yellow world, the bowl of the colorless sky unbearable with light. Squatting on the horizon right under the searchlight sun were a pair of low mounds, one far off, one nearer. The closer one must be Jumbo’s Butte, the far one Stonepile. They were the only breaks he saw in the plains except when, twisting backward, he found the Cypress Hills arched across the west, showing in coulees and ravines the faded white and gold of aspen, the black of jackpines. By the time they had ridden five minutes the river valley out of which they had risen was almost invisible, sunk below the level of sight.
The wolfer and his son were already far ahead, the dogs only running specks out on the shining plain. Jesse and the pilot wagon were leading the rest of them on a beeline toward Jumbo’s Butte, and as the Englishman settled down and breathed out his excitement and relaxed to the shuffle of his pony he watched the broad wheels drop and jolt into holes and burnouts and old Jesse lurch and sway on the high seat, and he let his back ache with sympathy. Then he saw Jesse’s teeth flash in his face as he turned to shout something at Ray Henry riding beside the wagon, and he decided that sympathy was wasted. Jesse had been a bullwhacker with supply trains between Fort Benton and the Montana mining camps in the early days, he had known these plains when the buffalo were still shaking them, he had been jolting his kidneys loose across country like this for thirty years. If he had wanted another kind of job he could have had it. The Englishman admired him as a man who did well what he was hired to do. He believed old Jesse to be skilled, resourceful, humorous, close-mouthed, a character. Briefly he contemplated growing a mustache and trying to train it like Jesse’s into a silky oxbow.
The saddle horses followed along smartly after the pilot wagon, and there was hardly any need to herd them, but the boys were fanned out in a wide semicircle, riding, as if by preference, each by himself. And among them—this was the wonder, this was what made him want to raise his face and ki-yi in pur
e happiness —rode Lionel Cullen, by now known as Rusty, the least of eight (as he admitted without real humility) but willing, and never more pleased with himself. That morning in early November, 1906, he would not have traded places with Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
He wanted to see everything, miss nothing, forget nothing. To make sure that he would not forget what happened to him and what he saw, he had begun a journal on the train coming west from Montreal, and every evening since then he had written in it seriously with posterity looking over his shoulder. He watched every minute of every day for the vivid and the wonderful, and he kept an alert eye on himself for the changes that were certain to occur. He had the feeling that there would be a test of some sort, that he would enter manhood—or cowboyhood, manhood in Saskatchewan terms—as one would enter a house. For the moment he was a tenderfoot, a greenhorn, on probation, under scrutiny. But at some moment there would be a door to open, or to force, and inside would be the self-assurance that he respected and envied in Jesse, Slippers, or Little Horn, the calm confidence of a top hand.
As they moved like the scattered shadow of a cloud across the face of the plain he knew practically nothing except how to sit a horse, and even that he knew in a fashion to get him laughed at. But he was prepared to serve an apprenticeship, he would prove himself as and when he must. And in the pocket of his flannel shirt he had a notebook and two pencils, ready for anything.