This is quite a notorious story on the Arizona Strip because it involves liquor. As far as I can remember, all the cowboys liked to drink alcohol. Oh, boy, they’d drink home brewed, they’d drink lemon extract and vanilla extract. The freighters couldn’t get it in there fast enough. The stores would sell out right away. That’s a fact.

So they built this little saloon and it was right on the Arizona-Utah line four miles south of Kanab and four miles north of Fredonia about seven or eight rods to the west of the present highway. It was just kind...

Well, I’ll tell you one more funny little story. We had these roundups in the spring in which all the cowmen in the country joined. It was necessary because it was a common drive and the territory was tremendous. We started up under the red ledges up there at Kanab and went all the way over to the Paria. We would drive these cattle, but they had been driven year after year so all you had to do was dash up to a bunch of them and hit your chaps with your quirt and let out a few war whoops...

Well, you know, I had seen these little owls for so long riding in that area that whenever I did I would respect their nests, and I would turn my horse out around them, and naturally you would, and everytime I would do that they would look at me. And they’d look at me here in front and as I went along they’d turn their heads and keep lookin’ at me.

So one day I thought I’d do this for an experiment. I rode toward this little ground owl and when he saw me, why he put his head up...

This’n’s a wild cowboy story. No one will believe this. Those cowboys in Kanab had nothing to do. They didn’t have a saloon, you know, because their wives would go down there and roll it back into Arizona. So they’d set around and whittle. I’m not kidding you, there was three or four inches of shavings all over everywhere up and down that main street. These men would sit around the post office, most of them waiting for the stage; we didn’t have automobiles, we had a stagecoach pulled by four horses, and on a buckboard because it was five...

This story’s funny, I think. I roped a bay, a two-year-old stallion down at Nail’s Crossing on the Kanab Gorge on the Kanab Creek. It was the first mustang I’d ever roped. And he was a fine, deep-chested horse with one white front foot and a white star in his forehead, fine pointed ears and broad between the eyes. I turned him out in the winter range in Nail’s Gulch with the rest of our horses for the year and then went and got him in the spring and brought him in. I snubbed him to a cord and he...

Now we’re talking about horses, I’ll tell you about another good horse that I had. This was the first palomino horse to be brought into Kanab. He had thrown a cowboy over at the rodeo in Cedar City and jumped on him and killed him. I think the cowboy’s name was Bullock. Of course, the cattlemen turned this palomino back on the range. They had all that west range out toward Lund that they turned their horses out on in the wintertime, and summertime too, while they were in the herds with the mares and the colts and that. And...

I’ll tell you another story that happened the next year. I was at Cedar City. I went down to the horse roundup again at the same corrals and I spotted a stallion that was about two-and-one-half years old, or at least two, a sorrel stallion and he looked like he’d make a good saddle horse. And so I found out who his owner was and gave him twenty-five dollars for him. And, like old Pal, his hide was full of ticks. And it took me two days working after school hours before I could find them all and dig them...

I’m going to tell you a story about an act in the animal kingdom that no one in my acquaintance has ever seen.

In the area of northern Arizona and southern Utah, there’s millions of acres of land that were used for grazing purposes only by sheepmen and cattlemen. And, naturally, in such a great area there developed, finally, through the years, many wild herds of horses. Some areas yet they still exist and men, in order to preserve the range crop for cattle and sheep, have gone out and shot these wild mustangs, as they are called. But I...

This is a story about the commotion that took place in a little wickiup village in the confines of the city of Kanab, and at this time I happened to be marshal, and I was supposed to keep peace. Two Piute papooses ran frantically and got me and they says, “Oh, come quick, Marshal. Heap trouble down to our village.”

So I ran with them down to the creek bottom where they was camped and when I got there there was quite a ruckus. Old Mose had married his brother’s wife, which is permissible in the Piute tribe. After the...

Well, now, this puts us back a few years prior to the time when the last chief of the Piutes in that area, old Quagance, died. He had got ill, had pneumonia, and they put him in the hospital. But Doc Farrel said he was doing fine and would have been back with his tribe in just a few days.

However, two nights after he went in the hospital, some Indians stole him. I know this personally because his son, Alec, that I rode with a great deal said, “When Dr. Farrel was asleep we stole Quagance and we took...

I knew Butch Cassidy’s brother, Bill Parker,⁴ and Bill Parker told me that when the sheriff got the drop on Butch when he went to visit his home in Circle Valley, Cassidy said, “I’ll come with you, sheriff, but just give me a chance to kiss my mother goodbye.” Her picture was hanging on the wall across the room and the sheriff said, “Go ahead.” So Cassidy went over there and acted like he was going to kiss that picture and he put his hand around back of the picture and got his six-shooter and had the drop on the...

There’s a lot of things that people don’t know about cowboys. They don’t know that cowboys can tell the weather by their boots. You know, when there’s low and high pressure, your boots tell your feet. You can tell by the way they act on your feet whether it’s going to storm–rain or snow. Cowboys can always tell that except me. I can tell the day after the storm....

To become a good cowboy in certain areas, there’s ten rules that you’ve got to comply with before you get your silver spurs.

1. Handle a lariat correctly on foot or on horseback.

2. Rope an unbroken horse within the corral and break it to lead.

3. Saddle a horse correctly. Also, properly set and cinch a pack saddle. See, after a horse is saddled, after you’ve pulled it up and shaped it up nice and straight, you should take hold of the horse’s hackamore rope or his bridle reins and walk him a little ways before mounting him. Then he won’t buck....

In the little town of Kanab, four miles from the Arizona Strip, most of the men were cattlemen or sheepmen, but the cattlemen distinguished themselves by their brand and their earmark to identify their stock on the range. There were quite a number of cattlemen, so naturally, each man had to have a brand, and I’ll recall for you some of the famous brands which were known in that country.

In 1870 Brigham Young called a work mission to build the Windsor Castle at Pipe Springs, Arizona. This castle ẃas built around the spring of delicious water that comes out...

The following are“songs I was requested to sing by the cowboys as we sat around the campfire after a long day’s work. If my brother, Dave, was present, he would accompany on the harmonica.”Rider records the following as being the setting for these songs: the cowboys would be sitting around a campfire and they could“hear in the silent night the hooting of an owl, the crying of coyotes and if you listened carefully, you would hear the listing of the wind in the forest.

“One of the most popular songs that I was asked to sing around...

Since, in my early youth, I was a cowboy eager for the thrills associated with wild mustangs, the lariat, wild, renegade long ears, and bawling, pouncing calves–campfire stories during these years found me an eager listener. I heard at first hand about lost men in the forest who, according to these stories, never traveled in a straight line but wandered about on the arc of a circle. This behavior of rational men seemed rather unreal as I had never had the experience of being lost. The stories also told of lost persons who, instead of getting panicky when they...

This following’s a story I’ve never told before; I’d made a promise at gunpoint not to. In the year 1909, I think I was eighteen years old, in fact I know I was, I was a cowboy riding for the Bar Z Cattle Company, also called the Grand Canyon Cattle Company, which was the biggest cattle company in Arizona. At the time, they had for their cattle range the entire Kaibab Forest and also the great House Rock Valley as their winter range, a domain forty-five miles long and forty-five miles wide, triangular, which they jealously preserved, and no outside...

Zane Grey entered into the picture during the trial of Jim Emett by the Bar Z Cattle Company²⁶which I mentioned previously. And Emett told me Grey had come from Ohio. His father had sent him from Ohio with a letter and $500 in cash to an old fraternity pal of his from the university who was now the presiding judge in Flagstaff, Arizona, and who presided at this trial of Jim Emett. And Zane Grey’s father said in this letter, “The doctors here say that my son, Zane, has tuberculosis and won’t last, only probably three months, maybe not...

After the horses had all been turned into the Bar Z, there was one stallion that the Navajos couldn’t capture. And he was a black one and he was a beautiful horse. He was up on the mesa above Soap Creek. There’s quite a mesa there, runs from there to Lee’s Ferry and all of Emett’s horses were raised there and they ranged up on this mesa. And this horse was too good for the cowboys. He could outrun any of them and he got away, so they couldn’t bring him in to be sold to the Bar Z outfit....

After Emett had left the ferry, I returned. My instructions were to remain at the ferry until replaced and I didn’t know how long that would be but I hoped not too long. I wouldn’t sleep near the old dwellings there, John D. Lee’s cabin or the old two-story driftwood home that Emett had built for his family. I went out in the orchard a little ways away and threw my bedroll down there.

I was sound asleep one night when I was awakened by voices calling intermittently from the direction of the ferry, about a quarter of a mile...

One of the greatest experiences of my life was making the acquaintance of our great President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt. This episode was entirely unexpected and it happened on the Kaibab Forest in Arizona many years ago, in 1913. Alec Indian, who was a Piute Indian and one of the greatest cowboys I ever rode with or ever became acquainted with, was my partner this particular day. We were camped at VT Park on the Kaibab and we were assigned to ride the forest, bring in all the cattle that we could find, drive them into Park Lake,...

I must tell you the story of my saddle horse, Hammie, Yellow Hammie. He was a yellow gelding, weighed about 1,000 pounds, and was trained to be a very fine cattle horse. He was a big, strong one. And I rode him one day when the cowboys in our outfit were gathering the east points of the Kaibab. They are the points that face and overlook the House Rock Valley country from North Canyon to Point Imperial of the Grand Canyon. And it’s necessary every fall, after the first heavy snow, to gather these points to take the cattle off,...

The whole bunch of us were riding on the Kaibab, gathering cattle for the sale in the fall at Pipe Springs. All the Kanab men that had cattle were riding with us, plus the Bar Z men. All together we gathered this whole mountain. And we struck some wild ones out here a little ways. They went down off of these ridges. And I caught a big, tremendous steer, the biggest steer that was ever seen on the mountain here. Golly, he was a whale. I forget how old he was now, quite old, but he was a big fellow,...

There was approximately 60,000 head of cattle on the Kaibab Forest in 1908 and ’09, 150 to 200 saddle horses and ten cowhands, cowboys, experts all of them, to herd and move and wean the calves and, generally speaking, to drift the cattle from the winter to the summer ranges on the Kaibab and to brand the calves and to gather the steers in the fall of the year and to drift them off the Kaibab to the nearest railroad, which is Lund, Utah, a 175-mile drift from Jacob’s Lake.

But every year (since the Kaibab Forest, or the southern...

Uncle Jim Owens, who was the government trapper, trapped cougars, or mountain lions as they’re called, on the Kaibab Forest in order to preserve the deer population.⁴¹He trained his dogs to trace and to tree these lions and after they were treed, it was an easy matter to shoot them and to skin them. He got twenty-five dollars a head for them, bounty from the state of Arizona; twenty-five dollars each, whether they were adults or kittens, it didn’t make any difference. All he was required to take for evidence to get his pay was the paws with the...

Now I want to tell you some buffalo stories. Buffalo Jones, who owned a buffalo herd, drifted those buffalo from Lund, Utah, in short, daily drifts to Jacob’s Lake.⁴⁴ And I was there at Jacob’s Lake the night the buffalo were corralled there in the Bar Z corrals. Buffalo Jones, as he was called, went out into the corral to look at the condition of these buffalo, and especially to inspect their hooves and so forth, to see whether he should continue on because the buffalo had become quite lame.

Well, I had never seen a live buffalo before, but...

I had further experiences with the buffalo. Their range was the House Rock Valley. But one time I saw a lone bull up toward Crane Lake on the Kaibab. This was unusual and I wondered what he was doing up there. He was in a little swale and there was a little lake there. I thought, “Oh, boy, I’ll go down and just take a good look at him.” I pulled off into this little valley where he was and, boy, he come at me like a bullet. The horse I was riding was named Dart and sometime prior to...

Later I had quite a bit of experience with the buffalos, these buffalo herds. Along in about 1908 or ’09 or ’10 or ’11 or ’12, in that area, when I was associated with the buffalo, it was our duty as cowboys to brand the calves that were born to this herd. And I have gone down the rope after my good friend, Alec Indian, had roped one of these little, young buffalo calves, to see just how easy it was to handle a buffalo calf, to see whether he had more strength or more agility or was more vicious...

Incidentally, one of these buffalo cows became crossed with a white-faced Hereford Bar Z bull and the result was a “cattalo” which was quite notorious in the country. I also branded and castrated this cattalo, and years later the cowboys took him up to Jacob’s Lake and they built a pen for him and fed him hay and Highpockets charged fifty cents apiece for tourists to see this white-spotted buffalo. He was just like a buffalo and cow, half cow and half buffalo. He was tall, really tall, and he created quite a sensation among the tourists there because they’d...

When I was eight years old, I was confirmed a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixty years later, I can vividly remember that confirmation and the promise that by keeping the commandments of God, I would always have a still, small voice to guide me and to protect me throughout my lifetime. This narrative reveals three instances, there have been many, in which this promise was literally fulfilled in my behalf.

I have always been an admirer of nature and the works of God in our universe and have humbly tried to understand them. I...

This is a story about prospecting without a mule. As the owner and operator of a garage business in Kanab, Utah, in 1923, I became acquainted with all of the stockmen who had automobiles, some of whom had pickup trucks. On one occasion, I equipped one of my customer’s trucks with a Moore transmission. This was a Ford car but with this transmission it gave it four speeds forward and it would climb almost anywhere a wagon had traveled. My customer’s name was Nephi Johnson, a good friend who had been a cowboy south of the Grand Canyon in Arizona...