The
old west has always fascinated me. I know that the old western
movies is far away from how it really was back then, with the
gunfights and Indian wars. There are many old and great legends
from those days, like "The gunfight at the OK corall",
"The battle of Little Big Horn". And there are also
many famous characters like Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy
the kid, Geronimo, Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, The Earp brothers
and many more. But what we don't know so much about is the life
of the real cowboys. Most of their fights was not with their
fists or guns. It was in the saddle, riding under the hot broiling
prairie sun. Or endless miles trough rain and storms, fixing
the fence or finding lost calves. The life of the real American
cowboy wasn't as fun and glamorous as we know it from the movies.
In real life it was a hard and dirty work.
Many
people think that it was the cowboys who fought in the Indian
wars. But that's all wrong. A cowboy wasn't a soldier. He worked
with cows and bulls, in another word he worked with cattle's.
Most known are those cowboys who led big herd of cattle's over
the prairie from Texas in the south to various kinds of railway
stations up north. And then the cattle's were transported to
the big cities in the east.
It
was a long distant between the farms in Texas 100 years ago.
And many boy's probably thought that the life back home were
pretty boring. And when they heard the cowboys telling their
wild stories about the journey through the prairie, and about
the big cities up north, they probably dreamt about doing something
like that them self. Because the stories that the had been told
were exaggerated. In real life the cowboy work were very hard,
dangoures and tiresome.
There were no fence in the old west. The cattle's moved freely
around the big farms . And every spring and autumn the cowboys
had to gather the cattle's, which is a very hard work. The Texas-cattle's
could be pretty wild. The animal were powerful and had much
longer horns than the cows and bulls we are use to see to day.
After they had gathered the herd, they picked out those who
were supposed to be sold. All animals had to be marked, so everybody
could see who the owner were. The marking were made with a hot
iron, which burned of the the hair and left a mark on the skin.
The long journey over the prairie began in the spring. The herds
were very big. Often it could be up to 3 - 4000 animals. And
in the beginning the cowboys had a hard time to keep the animals
together because the cattle were a little worried. In a cowboy
- team there were about 15 - 20 men, and all of them except
for two, were suppose to keep the cattle in order. The other
two were a cook and a man who had the responsible for the horses.
They
had many horses with them. Every cowboy had several of horses
to change between, sometimes up to 5.The few hours a cowboy
got to sleep he rolled himself in to a blanket on the ground.
And incase of bad weather he put his saddle over his head to
protect his face. It was often hard to find a good and dry place
to sleep when it was raining, so the cowboys sometimes slept
three and three in a triangle with their head on each others
chest. They rode from early morning to late nights. A heard
could move up to 12 miles under that time. And that ment that
a journey from the middle of Texas to the railroad in Kansas
took about nine weeks - if they didn't came across any accidents
on the way.
