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March, 1955 - Milwaukee Road Archive

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I·<br />

As shipper Irvin Smith (right) holds a horse steady, Brand Inspector Hilton Hess, brand<br />

book in hand, begins the search for an identifying mark. Every horse must be checked<br />

for the owner's "iron", if any. A "slick" one belongs to the finder.<br />

sorting, weighing and loading. Clutching<br />

his fat brand book, he stationed<br />

himself in one end of the alleyway while<br />

the hands cut out two or three to see if<br />

they were the LBar of Smith, the Lazy­<br />

S-Bar of Monk Ward or were "slick".<br />

Every horse in the bunch had to go<br />

through his close scrutiny and if they<br />

carried another brand, the two shippers<br />

had to be ready with bills of sale showing<br />

that the purchase was a legitimate<br />

one.<br />

Some roans were either so honkey<br />

(mad) or spookie (frightened) they<br />

bolted past the guard of cowpokes who<br />

tried to block the alleyway. Once horses<br />

got away, it was up to Tony LaFountain<br />

and his mount, Popcorn, to hustle them<br />

back to the inspector.<br />

"Didn't get kicked or bit," Hess said<br />

later, "but I nearly got run down."<br />

The boys opened gates and shooed<br />

and whistled the inspected horses into<br />

various pens, sorting them according to<br />

type, weight and for saddle possibilities.<br />

Last minute decisions by the owners<br />

saved a few from the glue factory. Some<br />

didn't make the grade, of course. There<br />

was the six;-year old that Vernon Smith<br />

mounted and tested via the barebackand-neck<br />

rein method. Thumbs went<br />

down after a IS-minute trial. Another<br />

big black was whisked off the loading<br />

chute at the last possible moment by the<br />

elder Smith who thought it might make<br />

good riding material.<br />

By afternoon, the weighing process<br />

was in full swing. Three horses were<br />

crowded onto the scales at a time with<br />

Monk Ward or Margie Smith tallying<br />

the total and dividing by three. The<br />

plan was to load an average of 20 horses<br />

to a freight car, although some animals<br />

were so obviously outsize that only 18<br />

could be moved comfortably into that<br />

Flapping his sweaty<br />

·Stetson and shouting<br />

the classic epithet,<br />

one cowboy shoos<br />

four horses from the<br />

pen to the alleyway<br />

where the brand inspector<br />

waits to determine<br />

ownership.<br />

space.<br />

Once 20 were toted, the boys shuttled<br />

them down the narrow alleyway and<br />

opened the chute to the railroad car.<br />

Trouble broke loose as the horses began<br />

to sense they were indeed part of the<br />

last roundup. Dozens of onlookers,<br />

parked on the fences, added their ruckus<br />

to the din sent up by the wranglers<br />

doing the herding on the ground. When<br />

voices failed, butts of ropes and whips<br />

usually made the horses "git in thah".<br />

Side-doors rattled shut and everything<br />

suddenly simmered down to dead silence,<br />

broken only by the curses on the other<br />

side of the corral where horses were<br />

being shunted into a truck.<br />

As the "fence-sitters" began milling<br />

towards town, one grizzled veteran of<br />

many roundups paraphrased Charlie<br />

Russell's pal, Rawhide Rawlins. In 1925<br />

Rawhide told the artist: "I read in the<br />

papers a while back where there's 70,000<br />

wild hosses on the ranges of Montana.<br />

They say these animals are a menace to<br />

stockmen. . . . Mebbe this is right.<br />

"But for thousands of years the hoss<br />

furnished all transportation on land for<br />

man an' broke all the ground for their<br />

farmin'. He has helped build every<br />

railroad in the world. Even now he<br />

builds the roads for the automobile that<br />

has made him nearly useless, an' I'm<br />

here to tell these machine-lovers that it<br />

will take a million years for the gas<br />

wagon to catch up with the hoss in what<br />

he's done for man."<br />

6 The <strong>Milwaukee</strong> <strong>Road</strong> Magazine

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