The American cowboy

With the lonely skies shoving down on these shoulders and the dust of a continent caking his throat, he left his brand on the frontier of our history. I squinted ahead into savagery, civilization dogging his heels, and we give him to you who can take him straight, the American cowboy. They was northern chions by the looks of him on the dodge from the reservation and raiding cow outfits as they went. When they come shoving by here, they stole some of Paxton's horses. And from the way Bill talked, he thought I'd order of stood him off or else followed him up and got the horses back.

How come Stringfeller he wants to know? How come you didn't follow them thieving red skins and find them? Well, I just plain told him. I said Mr. Paxton, I ain't lost no shine. Radio television, the University of Texas presents the American Cowboy, a series of programs reflecting the true place and picture of this significant historical figure, this unique folk here. The American Cowboy is produced and recorded by Radio Television, the University of Texas, under a grant from the National Educational Television and Radio Center, in cooperation with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Today, program 8, Indian Sign. Steve, hey Steve, what you doing, playing cowboys and Indians won't play?

If I could be a cowboy. We got too many cowboys already, you be an Indian. All who wants to be an old Indian, they're always getting wiped out. That's a trouble with this game, everybody keeps on yippin' to be cowboys. Nobody ever wants to be Indians. Please drop on the fledgling cowboys of today's America, and these are the sentiments you likely will overhear. Heat-big chief underdog and his red-skinned brothers are in grievously short supply. For the vanquish shine with little luster in a land teased on success. But listen to Teddy Blue Abbott and Charlie Russell in the pages of We Pointed Them North. From these notable old-time cowboys of an era that was real cow, you will hear a slightly different sentiment. Well, coming back up, dog Creek, I met Charlie Russell. I said, Charlie, I wish I'd been a Sue Indian a hundred years ago. He said, there's a pair of us.

They've been living in heaven for a thousand years, and we took it away from him for forty dollars a month. What was it like in a time and a place where even the cowboys could sometimes hanker to be Indians? Press the cowboy and Indian painter, Charles M. Russell. Read his answer in Trails Ploughed Under. Well, say here's an Indian forty years old. He's had the dust of the running herd in his nostrils, and the clatter of dew claws and hoofs are still fresh in his ears. When Uncle Sam pulls him down off a high-headed painted buffalo horse, and hook in his hands round the handle of a walking plow, tells him it's a good thing to push it along. Harmon is the hardest work on earth, and when Uncle Sam solves off a job like this to Mr. Engine, a gentleman that ain't ever raised nothing but hell in hair, it's no wonder he backs away from the proposition. And back away he did, four eyes attuned to clear simplicities.

The reaching stretch of distance, the tiny track of snail on leaf, the muddled, misery-clouded view of the white man's world, held no enticement. Do you see these papers? These many papers which I hold before you in my hand, each is a treaty between your government in Washington and my people, the Sue. The first was made in 1862, and by its terms, the Sue people were put west of the Mississippi. It was then promised to them that this land would be theirs for all time to come. You see, next in my hand another treaty, by which our reservation was in, these are the words of an Indian chief, a young man called John Grass, tall, fine-looking, and finally educated. He is speaking to a varied audience assembled before him at the Pine Ridge Indian Agency in northwestern northwestern. By which we were to have the Yellowstone River on the north, the Big Horn Mountains on the west, and a flat river on the south.

Once again, my people were promised that this land would be theirs for all time to come. And now you want the black hills. I have been to Carlisle. I have as good an education as a white man will give me, and I still do not understand these treaties. I would ask some of you gentlemen to tell me what these words mean for all time to come. I would ask you to teach me that. All exchange, actually, for all that the Indian had taught the white man, as Dr. Walter Prescott Webb tells us. The history of the white man in the Great Plains is the history of adjustments and modifications, of giving up old things that would no longer function for new things that would, of giving up an old way of life for a new way, in order that there might be a way. And from the Indian came the survival skills that made it possible to live, until that way was found.

From the Indian to the Indian Scout. And what they learned from the Indians about staying alive and doing well in this immense and implacable land, the Scouts passed on to the Cowboys. Whether you were tracking a two-footed enemy bent on destroying you, or a four-footed quarry bent on alluding you, the arts and the methods were the same. Seen sign, following sign, or cutting for sign, of Savage Comanche or Straying Cow, called for a high order of alert know-how, as J. Frank Dobey makes clear in the long horns. Ignacio Flores had been captured by Comanche as a boy and taught by them to trail. If he wanted to determine how old a trail not fresh was, he would spend a long time at certain places. He would look to see if a dewdrop had dried in the track. He would, at a sandy place, calculate on the age of a doodle bug hole. He would scrutinize the fine little marks made on bare ground by insects, some nocturnal and some diurnal.

These fairy-like tracings that a hoof print had broken into are that were over the hoof print, told him much. The glazed track of a snail on a twig might for him be as accurately dated as the stamping on a letter. Of course, now, riding signs one of the jumps you take on when you take on cowwork, but it stands to reason some of the boys will be better at it than some of the others. Like a feather-eyes riding with one, staffed her some horse rustlers. We's trailing along pretty good, and I thought, when all of a sudden this feather just stops, stalks still and says, No use. Mars will go on back where we came from. Now, what makes you say that, the trail's plain this day? Well, that's it. It's too plain. Tells me they've saw us, and their horses is faster than our horses by a long shot. How'd he know? Well, sir, he'd seen where the horse prints of a walk went into the prints of a gallop, and he'd seen where the strides between their horse prints was longer than any our horses

could make, and he'd seen what a fool thing it would be to lose a good time chasing something he knew there and then you couldn't catch. The craft secrets of survival, in a land where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were no birthrights. For those things, the cowboy was beholden to the Indian, and maybe for something else, besides, a stirring of the ancient primeval instinct of self-preservation. For these intuitive warnings, these promptings of the subconscious mind, Charles Goodnight had great respect. During the night I was awakened from a sound sleep with a subconscious warning that the Indians were there and would endeavour to get our horses. I woke the man and told him to help me get the horses and get away as Indians were somewhere around. They just laughed.

When did you get Indian beer? How good night we thought you were such a fine engine fighter. Poor old Charlie, getting more like a mule every day, he dreams about Indians, and it plum scatters his wits. They ignored my advice and warning, and I took my men and horses and went about two miles away to a briar thicket, mean place to get into, with an opening blade in the middle, which I turned my horses loose and slept soundly until daylight, and I returned to the camp and it was not a horse left. Teacher Thief and Threat, the Indian was, in the life of the cowboy, a stealthy, noiseless agent of destruction, which Charles Russell describes in Trails Ploughed Under. Barefoot ponies on well-graced sod travel mighty silent, and the savages ain't doing no talking except with their hands. This is where sign talk comes in mighty handy.

In quiet weather the mumble of a dozen men will travel for miles, but with hand talk, a thousand engines might be within gunshot, and you'd never know it. The Indian was a barrier to the cowboy too, damming up his destiny, blocking the westward flow of men and materials into the seas of grass, and the Indian was a nuisance and annoyance, an economic pest to the hardworking cowmen, arduously driving their trailherds north. Six beaves, you come cross Kyover land, you're herds eat Kyover grass, for this you must give to my people six beaves. I'll give you two beaves, but not six, you understand? Two not enough, you give me six beaves, or I come with my young men tonight and stampede your cattle, you understand.

I understand this, when you come tonight you'd better be sure to bring a spade. Why spade? Well, do you see chief, the cook broke the handle of our spade yesterday. Now when you come to stampede my cattle, I aim to kill you, and unless you bring your own spade along, there ain't going to be no way on earth and I can see to bury you. And yet, and yet for all the shared fear and anger, distrust and bitterness, the American cowboy and the American Indian had for his adversary a hard firm core of respect, said the Indian of the cowboy. No one can and to shoot soldiers, kill soldiers with club, one can and to shoot cowboy. Said the cowboy of the Indian, while we were lying out there in the grass, half froze and waiting for hell to break loose out of that TP, a solenoid Indian go up a hill and pray to the sun.

They were just coming up, and the top of the hill was red with it, and we were down there shivering in the shadow. And he was way off on the hill, and he held up his arms and old, but did he talk to the great spirit about the wrongs the white man had done to his people. I never heard such a voice, it must have carried a couple of miles. I have noticed that what you see when you're cold and scared is what you remember, and that is a sight I will never forget. I am glad that I saw it, because nobody will ever see it again. Indian Sign. Radio Television, the University of Texas, has brought you program eight of the American cowboy. Today's broadcast is based on source materials from the Texas History Library at the Barker History Center, among them, Cow Country by Dale, Charles Goodnight by Haley.

The Great Plains by Webb, the Cowboy by Rollins, we pointed them north by Abbott and Smith. A bibliography is available on request. The American Cowboys produced and directed by Bill Burke from Scripps by Mary D. Benjamin, original music by Eleanor Page. The series is under the supervision of Robert F. Schenken with our C. Norris as associate producer. Our narrator is Horton Wayne Smith, Dan Lyingfield speaking. Indian Sign was produced and recorded by radio television at the University of Texas under a grant from the National Educational Television and Radio Center, and is being distributed by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the N.A.E.B. Radio Network.