TOLD by the PIONEERS - Washington Secretary of State

Told by the Pioneers
the buyer was pleased, but I knew what they had been through, ~nd
said I would hate to eat any of them.
Driving cattle on the range kept a person mad all the time. Fighting
through the sage brush with two men driving 1,500 head of cattle,
each with a different idea of direction, from Sprague to Coulee, was
hard on the temper. The madder I got the more I che,ved. The more
tobacco I chewed, the sicker it made me. 'With three men we drove
twenty horses with the herd. Some of these were trained and others
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were broken as we went along.
The cattle fed on the table lands in summer and in the Coulee in
winter. They would drift south, almost into Idaho. In the summer
we would round them up, 5,000 to 6,000 a day, brand the calves, and
then turn them loose. There were Philip :McIntee and Dan Paul, who
were ('attlemen and took part in the summer roundup. Dan was a
smooth man, whom everybody liked. He died a bachelor, leaving a
$268,000 estate.
. In the winter the boys in the Coulee went around to each other's
cabins and gambled with their summer earnings. The money went
around and around, first one had it then another. Ther rode twenty
miles in sub-zero weather to dance all night and would ride all next
day to reach home. On one occasion, at Julius Johnson's cabin, near
Almira, there were sixty cowboys and three women. A handkerchief
tied to a cowboy's arm would designate him as a lady.
Joe Smith had a bunch of girls, four of them, and enough to run a
square dance. The only difficulty was their father could buy only two
pairs of shoes at a time, and the girls had to take turns wearing them.
The boys would have liked to furnish the shoes in order to permit the
girls to dance but did not have the courage to make the offer.
Joe B. Smith raised a big family and married off his daughters. He
had a little saw mill, using the spring at the mouth of the Coulee for
power. He learned to be a rubbing doctor, and people paid him a dollar
for a rub. He claimed to have some special power in his hands.
McCarthy came throug'h the country buying' up m-er:- sorrel horse
he could see, paying $150, or $125 for an animal ordinarily worth $25.
Along in the fall the bank at Roslyn was robbed. All the men rode
sorrel horses. The brand was traced to McCarthY's ranch in Eastern
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Oregon. The robbers missed the miners' payroll by thirty minutes,
as it had not been taken to the bank at the usual time.
When I first walked into the Coulee, I looked down from the table
land onto the little bench, now Coulee City. It was filled with whitetailed
deer. Big mule deer would line up like soldiers and look at ODe
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