[editorial staff, A Horseless Horsemen, Sunset, May 1914]

 

A Horseless Horseman

            "IN ten years from now the only market for horses will be the museum. In ten years from now I shall be forty-eight, which is too old to break into a new game in order to support a wife and child. So I'm giving up the truest sport and finest business in the world. I'm not going to trap another band of wild horses in the rugged mountains of Nevada. I've turned over my canvas corral traps and my paraphernalia. I've sold the home ranch and the saddle animals. Of course I couldn't sell the horse that carried me in so many wonderful runs—he went to Jack as a gift. I have shaken hands silently with the boys, and dumped the wife and the kid into the buckboard that is to take us a two days' ride to the railroad station. We're going to spend a while in Chicago and Washington—think of it! Won't it be a funny feeling, going to work without any spurs on? I don't feel half as sorry for myself, however, as for the grand old horse. What breeds was it they crossed to produce this automobile hybrid, anyway?"

            This extract from a private letter is the good-by of one of the most interesting young men of the West to what has been perhaps the West's most interesting trade. It is Charles "Pete" Barnum's swan song to horse-trapping.

            During the two generations in which the white man has been making slow conquest of Nevada the bands of unbranded mustangs have looked down from the peaks and snorted their contempt: even now the horses outnumber the humans. Until ten years ago the contempt was well grounded; for the mustang contrived to keep the cost of his capture above his market value. Then Pete Barnum came. He was looking for something in the Western outdoors big enough to claim the energy and enthusiasm of a pioneer born a little late. The unheard-of proposition of making wild horses pay by catching them wholesale seemed of sufficient size. After ten busy years, during which he has taken perhaps

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more than fifteen thousand wild horses from their ranges and committed them to farm labor in the middle Western states, Pete Barnum is brought face to face with the threatening fact that the world is preparing to drop the horse out of its list of requirements. So Pete says good-by. The farmers of the fertile little valleys of White Pine, Nye, Lander and Humboldt counties are getting out their rusty rifles and muttering maledictions on the pest that will now come down from the summits in the dark to feast on the lightly-fenced crops. The red, yellow, black and pinto stallions that keep the vigil from countless rocky lookouts will learn after a little time that their relentless enemy comes no more, and will trot off to the seraglios of mares with news that the great days are again upon the herds.

            Pete Barnum began in the Dakotas. His father was one of the most successful Indian agents the Government ever had—maybe because he didn't spend much time telling Lo the nice things the Government was going to do for him. The energy and acumen Pete carried when he broke out of college would have won his way in Wall street; but he was never in much danger. He felt that he would choke trying to do his work in a white collar quicker than a horse trying to pull a plow by a lasso. Barnum senior was a stern disciplinarian who made his son learn to walk before he would let him ride; but from the age of three the son had regarded the horse—from its back—as the most absorbingly interesting factor with which man had to do. After weighing many sections of the United States in the balances and finding them wanting, the collegian decided that Nevada offered the finest opportunity to an ambitious young man; and soon after he had headed off into the sage-brush he knew he was going to pioneer in what seemed to him the most wonderful business on earth.

            The wild bands were thickest in rough country that did not average a house in five hundred square miles. The horses were as nimble as goats and fleeter than deer. Stallions of marvelous sagacity led the bands; the weaker stallions went down to death in the battle for the fickle mares. Mustanging as a commercial possibility had no attractions because the settlers had found that roping a wild one usually meant running two good saddle horses to death.

            Pete Barnum took up his roost with the eagles among the peaks, carrying a bag of food, a canvas water bottle and a spyglass. He studied mustangs until he knew their ways, their tricks, and what they did when excited. He learned where and how they watered, and found that they would suffer with thirst for days rather than approach a desert water-hole that had the man-scent upon it. They moved back and forth across the ranges. He observed that they used the narrow defiles constantly—and then came his great idea.

            Barnum bought nearly all the brown canvas the Nevada stores contained. He sewed it into walls ten feet high that would make a circular corral a hundred feet in diameter when supported on light posts. Using lighter material, he made wings to extend out a mile from the gate of his corral. Then the walls and wings were cut up into sections, each section being a fair load for a pack-horse. The idea was to move the corral swiftly under cover of darkness and set it up in a mountain pass. Riders would begin twenty miles back and start the herds tearing across the country. The stallions would lead for the defile to get across the range. Before some of them knew it, they would be inside the canvas walls, which they could not tell from the brown unyielding rock that so often scraped their sides as they plunged along. It was a bully idea and after six months it worked. It did not work until Barnum and the crew of expert horsemen he gathered together had learned many unsuspected things about mustangs. But patience, persistence and the directing genius of Barnum finally had their reward. The Western mountains and valleys never saw such races with wild bands, such dexterous horsemanship, such wholesale undertakings as ensued. For ten years the wild horse situation has been pretty much at the mercy of Pete Barnum.

            Buyers from Salt Lake and St. Louis were ready to snap up the catch at ten dollars a head when delivered at the railroad: but how, when he had his corral full of charging, maddened animals that had never known restraint or the proximity of man, was the trapper to transport his prizes across fifty or a hundred and fifty miles of rough country to the railroad? That was big problem No. 2. An old Mexican method was to rope every horse and wire his

[1099]

Charles "Pete" Barnum. picturesque Nevadan, who says good-by to the trade of wild-horse-trapping because "in ten years from now the only market for horses will be the museum'

nostrils so that he could barely breathe—so that he could not get breath for running. That was inhuman, and if crudely done the horse got away or else suffocated. With distance to cover, hobbles were impracticable. The right way was found after much experimenting. The right way was to throw the mustang and double up one foreleg and tie it snugly. When the band had all been tied thus they were started out on three legs. It was not difficult to move them in the desired direction. After a few hours of steady going a horse would weary and drop behind. He was promptly roped, thrown and the tie-rope removed. The trapper found that the very fact that a horse dropped back meant that he surrendered. Invariably the animal

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given the use of his leg would not abuse the confidence—at least nor that day, though it might be necessary to tie him again for a few miles when the herd started on next morning. Barnum built corrals with wide open gates around some of the favorite water-holes. After a time the horses ceased to fear the fence and approached the spring for the daily drink. At intervals Barnum would rise up out of the ground and close the gate with a herd within. Some famous catches have been made at the water traps at Cockalorum and Fish creek.

            A harvest of three wild ones a day during the trapping season paid the expenses of the outfit. Barnum maintained an average of ten a day. In twelve hours' work Pete and his chief lieutenant unaided once captured fifty-four stallions and mares and seventeen colts.             On another day when the outfit was working out of Antelope valley they got seventy-three prizes in three runs. On one occasion a buyer arrived and wanted a carload—thirty head—in a hurry. By 4 o'clock in the afternoon Pete had forty-nine head in the corral.

            "If you could only get eleven more we could start for the railroad in the morning with two carloads instead of one" said the buyer.

            Barnum called for a fresh horse and rode steadily for an hour to Cockalorum water trap. By sunset he had captured seventeen fine ones that came into the trap in two bands. Horses to fill two cars were started out of the mountains in the morning.

            As full of hazard and hardship as the business was, it became routine. Men like Pete Barnum and his hard-riding crew needed occasionally a change of adventure to satisfy the soul hunger of men of their ilk. They got it in chasing the outlaws. The outlaws were wonderful stallions of great intelligence and almost endless endurance that could not be trapped. They were prizes indeed because, once they were captured and taught to wear a saddle, they made the finest of all mounts. Sometimes Barnum would overtake a stallion after chasing him and his band of lively mares off and on for three or four years. Some of the outlaw stallions were famous through several counties. Many men had tried to hang a rope upon them. Barnum's method was to chase an outlaw with relays of riders, after shrewdly figuring the course the horse would take. The capture was big news on the range. These splendid stallions sometimes sold for $500 or $700 on account of their saddle gait and appearance.

            For three summers Pete took his diversion at the heels of the Yellow King. The horse eluded capture. Finally a two-weeks' campaign was planned. At its end one of the men, Hank Connors, sent his rope over the head of the exhausted horse. The Yellow King had a spurt left in him. He leaped half through the loop. The rawhide closed around his muscular barrel and when he lunged it gave way. Connors, maddened at the escape of the prize, whipped out his gun and stopped the fleeing Yellow King with a bullet. Almost at the same moment Connors' horse, going at high speed, put a hoof in a badger-hole and turned a somersault. When Barnum and the others came up Connors lay dead within a hundred yards of the dead Yellow King.

            "What had we better do first?" asked the foreman.

            "The first thing you will do," answered Barnum who sat his saddle regarding the field of double tragedy, "is to bury that grand old horse. I wouldn't care very much if you left that coward of a man to the coyotes."

            Pete Barnum is one of those outdoor men whose absolute squareness is a birthright. What he can't win in fair warfare he is glad to see go its merry way. He would as soon shoot a man as a horse.

            One of Pete's men once came upon the Boss holding a rifle in his hands and looking down from a pass upon two half-breeds crawling toward a band of horses. The Indians were slayers who got a dollar apiece for hides.

            "What's worrying you so?" the man asked.

            "I am trying to make up my mind," Barnum replied, "whether it is my duty to aim high and scare off those mustangs or to aim low and try to pot one of those dirty Indian murderers."

            Several years ago the foresters reported to the Secretary of Agriculture that the fifteen thousand horses in the Toyiabe forest reserve were taking the grazing away from the stockmen and injuring the young trees. A recommendation was made that a troop of cavalry be sent to hunt down and

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exterminate the horses. Barnum filed a protest against the slaughter. The reply was made to him that there was no other way to get rid of the bands because of the extreme roughness of the country and the wildness of the horses.

            "Give me six months to see what I can do" begged Barnum. He was given that time. He proved that he could catch Toyiabe horses, and he was in a fair way to save most of them from the soldiers' rifles when matters demanding his entire attention forced him to abandon the undertaking.

            About last Fourth of July the king of the horse-catchers climbed up a peak with his glasses to see what the valleys on either side contained in the way of herds. He came riding down the pathless mountain with a strange look on his smooth face.

            "I've seen a ghost" he confessed. "It was off there in Antelope, and it was flying along at thirty miles an hour in spite of the fact that there is only a shadow of a road. It had a red body and shimmering rubber wheels. One of the wild herds saw it and you'd have thought every horse in the bunch had swallowed a ton of loco weed. They all went plumb crazy. No wonder; I guess they know their finish when they see it. Do a little thinking, boys, and you'll be as wise about the future as the horses. You can all take a holiday today. We won't go out with the trap. I'll ride down to the cabin to see the wife and Baby Bill. Maybe they have been the only white woman and kid in these mountains about long enough. Next summer, boys, maybe you'll go horse-trapping alone. I won't be with you—but my heart will!"

R. S.