![]() "Even in the daytime those deep coulees could open up all at once in front of you, before you had a chance to see where you were going, and at night it was something awful if you'd stop and think about it, which none of them ever did. They were good in the brush and wet weather, but in fine weather were left in the wagon." A few had a big buffalo robe to rollup in, but if they ever got good and wet you never had time to dry them, so they were not popular, All had a pair of bullhide chaps, or leggings they called them then. Lay on your saddle blanket and cover up with a coat was about the only bed used on the Texas trail at first. Most of them had an army coat with cape, which was a slicker and blanket, too. Their clothes and saddles were all homemade. ![]() For dress they wore wide-brimmed beaver hats, black or brown with a low crown, fancy shirts, high-heeled boots and sometimes a vest. Most all of them were Southerners, and they were a wild, reckless bunch. They used to brag that they could go anyplace a cow could and a stand anything a horse could. And I say, that is the way those first trail hands were raised. That was before the name roundup was invented, and before they had anything so civilized as mess wagons. In the early days in Texas, in the sixties, then they gathered their cattle, they used to pack what they needed on a horse and go out for weeks on a cow hunt they called it then. They never kicked, because those boys was raised under just the same conditions as there was on the trail - corn meal and bacon for grub, dirt floors in the houses and no luxuries. They had no tents, no tarps and damn few slickers. They had only three or four horses to the man, mostly with sore backs, because the old-time saddle ate both ways, the horse's back and the cowboy's pistol pocket. They had very little grub and they usually ran out of that and lived off of straight beef. Work oxen were used instead of horses to pull the wagon, and if one played out, they could rope a steer and yoke him up. It was a new business and had to develop. Those first tail outfits in the seventies were sure tough. From that time on the big drives were made every year, and the cowboy was born. In 1867 the town of Abilene was founded at the end of the Kansas Pacific Railroad and that was when the trail really started. In 1866 the first Teas herds crossed the Red River. So they trailed them out, across hundreds of miles of wild country thick with Indians. Here was all these cheap, long-horned steers overrunning Texas here was the rest of the country crying for beef - and no railroads to get them out. By the time the war was over they was down to four dollars a head - when you could find a buyer. They had multiplied and run wild while the men was away fighting for the Confederacy, especially down in the southern part, between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. "There were worlds of cattle in Texas after the Civil War. Below are excerpts from his memoirs, WE POINTED THEM NORTH: RECOLLECTIONS OF A COWPUNCHER. ![]() His memoirs of cowboy life - from the dangerous trail drives to the off-season shenanigans in town - was published in 1939. Nothing could have changed me after that." Teddy Blue worked on the range throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The experience, Abbott said later, "made a cowboy out of me. Teddy Blue, only 10 years old, was allowed to help herd them to Nebraska in hopes that the open air would improve his frail health. ![]() Teddy Blue's father decided to try his luck in the booming business and bought cattle from Texas. The Abbotts settled in Lincoln, Nebraska - a time when the region was overrun with Texas cattle and cowboys heading north on trail drives. "Teddy Blue" Abbott was born in Cranwich, England in 1860, and was brought to the West by his parents as a boy. ![]()
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