March, 1955 - Milwaukee Road Archive

I·
As shipper Irvin Smith (right) holds a horse steady, Brand Inspector Hilton Hess, brand
book in hand, begins the search for an identifying mark. Every horse must be checked
for the owner's "iron", if any. A "slick" one belongs to the finder.
sorting, weighing and loading. Clutching
his fat brand book, he stationed
himself in one end of the alleyway while
the hands cut out two or three to see if
they were the LBar of Smith, the Lazy­
S-Bar of Monk Ward or were "slick".
Every horse in the bunch had to go
through his close scrutiny and if they
carried another brand, the two shippers
had to be ready with bills of sale showing
that the purchase was a legitimate
one.
Some roans were either so honkey
(mad) or spookie (frightened) they
bolted past the guard of cowpokes who
tried to block the alleyway. Once horses
got away, it was up to Tony LaFountain
and his mount, Popcorn, to hustle them
back to the inspector.
"Didn't get kicked or bit," Hess said
later, "but I nearly got run down."
The boys opened gates and shooed
and whistled the inspected horses into
various pens, sorting them according to
type, weight and for saddle possibilities.
Last minute decisions by the owners
saved a few from the glue factory. Some
didn't make the grade, of course. There
was the six;-year old that Vernon Smith
mounted and tested via the barebackand-neck
rein method. Thumbs went
down after a IS-minute trial. Another
big black was whisked off the loading
chute at the last possible moment by the
elder Smith who thought it might make
good riding material.
By afternoon, the weighing process
was in full swing. Three horses were
crowded onto the scales at a time with
Monk Ward or Margie Smith tallying
the total and dividing by three. The
plan was to load an average of 20 horses
to a freight car, although some animals
were so obviously outsize that only 18
could be moved comfortably into that
Flapping his sweaty
·Stetson and shouting
the classic epithet,
one cowboy shoos
four horses from the
pen to the alleyway
where the brand inspector
waits to determine
ownership.
space.
Once 20 were toted, the boys shuttled
them down the narrow alleyway and
opened the chute to the railroad car.
Trouble broke loose as the horses began
to sense they were indeed part of the
last roundup. Dozens of onlookers,
parked on the fences, added their ruckus
to the din sent up by the wranglers
doing the herding on the ground. When
voices failed, butts of ropes and whips
usually made the horses "git in thah".
Side-doors rattled shut and everything
suddenly simmered down to dead silence,
broken only by the curses on the other
side of the corral where horses were
being shunted into a truck.
As the "fence-sitters" began milling
towards town, one grizzled veteran of
many roundups paraphrased Charlie
Russell's pal, Rawhide Rawlins. In 1925
Rawhide told the artist: "I read in the
papers a while back where there's 70,000
wild hosses on the ranges of Montana.
They say these animals are a menace to
stockmen. . . . Mebbe this is right.
"But for thousands of years the hoss
furnished all transportation on land for
man an' broke all the ground for their
farmin'. He has helped build every
railroad in the world. Even now he
builds the roads for the automobile that
has made him nearly useless, an' I'm
here to tell these machine-lovers that it
will take a million years for the gas
wagon to catch up with the hoss in what
he's done for man."
6 The Milwaukee Road Magazine