In 1892 I went to Wyoming and broke horses there for a couple of years. Then I heard of the Cripple Creek gold stampede in Colorado. I sold my rig and went to Cripple Creek and it looked like everybody in the world went there. There was two railroads in there and every passenger coach would be loaded with people. The roads were lined with people of every description—some walking, some riding donkeys and some with wagons.
About every other house there was a saloon and gambling house. Of course, there wasn’t work for everybody and lots of them were broke when they landed there—that was in the month of November and shortly after the weather turned bitter cold. I have seen men lay down on the floor to sleep in those saloons which kept open day and night, and when the house man started to clean up in the morning he would find dead men under the tables and on benches. The altitude was very high. Those people had no place to sleep—and nearly all of them contracted mountain fever and that went into pneumonia and they would sometimes die in a few hours after taking sick.
New Year’s night in 1894 was sure a wild night in Cripple Creek. Every man that filed on a mining claim prior to that time had to have one hundred dollars’ worth of work done in order to hold it by law and, of course, there was the usual contention when people are crazy for gold, some claiming the required amount of work was not done—and others claiming they had fulfilled the requirements of the law. The results were that every man owning a claim was on his ground at midnight with a gun to protect what he thought was his property.
I was in a good spot that night to get a view of the Big Mountain around Cripple Creek, and the lanterns moving around from claim to claim looked like a bunch of stars. There was reported nine men killed that night over claims and I didn’t hear of one arrest.
I had a little money when I landed in Cripple Creek but soon lost it all gambling and then took down with mountain fever. An old prospector took me into his cabin and he took sick, too. We were both broke and had nothing to eat but a half sack of potatoes, but had plenty of wood and kept warm. We took turns, when one was a little better than the other, going out and gathering mountain sage and making tea out of it—and I am sure it saved our lives, as it broke the fever. When I got a little better I made a little money to buy food, gathering that sage and selling it to sick people.
When I got a little stronger I got twenty dollars for digging an assessment hole on a fellow’s claim, so I got in a poker game with that and won about a hundred dollars. I will never forget that night. People were being help up every night—sometimes hit on the head—sometimes killed, and the amount of money didn’t mean anything, as some of them birds would hold you up for five dollars.
This night when I had won that money quite a crowd gathered around me in the gambling house. I didn’t know any of them but bought a drink for everybody and thought I would slip away. There was one big tough-looking guy persisted in shaking hands with me and gave me some kind of a sign that I did not understand, so I was rather nervous when I got out of there.
I had to walk about a mile to my cabin following an old mining ditch. I had got about half way home when I saw a man’s head raise up out of the ditch just in front of me. That sure scared me. I turned the other way, back towards town. The farther I went the more scared I was ... and the faster I ran. I think even if a jack rabbit had seen me he would have admired my speed, and I didn’t stop until I got into town where there was light. I could not get a room in town, so sat in a chair all night in one of the gambling houses. I kept my hand on that hundred dollars and sweat with fear.
A few nights afterwards I was going home late. I had to go by a lot of wagons—a freighting outfit. Just as I got opposite the wagons I saw a man in the dark coming towards me. I had a gun that night so I got it in my hand and backed up against one of the wagons. This fellow came up about twenty feet from me and stopped—neither of us spoke for several minutes (but seemed to me to be an hour)—finally he said, “Hey, there.” I said, “Hello.” He said, “What are you doing here?” I thought quick and said, “I am working for the man that owns this outfit,” and said to him also, “Who are you?” He said, “I am the night marshal.” I believe I would have kissed him if he had been close to me because I sure had him sized up as a hold-up.
I stayed around there a few days longer and hung onto the hundred dollars, but decided it was no place for a moneyed man, so took the train for Denver and lived quite respectable for awhile until I was pretty near broke and started for Montana. I rode box cars the most of the way and saved my little money to eat on.
When I got to Helena I heard Charlie Russell was in Cascade and as I was badly in need of money, I headed for there and found him batching in a cabin with plenty grub—and he sure looked good to me.
After my experience in Cripple Creek I decided that I belonged back on the range among the cows, and wrote to the foreman of the DHS outfit at Shelby, Montana, for a job. I had known him several years before and he told me to come on, he would give me work. So after being outfitted by Charlie, which meant everything a cowboy needed, including some money, I went to Shelby.
I worked for the DHS outfit the first time in 1889 for only one season. They were one of the pioneer cow outfits of Montana and was owned by Granville Stuart and Reese Anderson, and were located near Fort Maginnis and ranged on Flat Willow country in the year of 1887. They moved all their cattle north of the Missouri River on what was known as the Little Rocky Range. They swam this big herd across the Missouri River at an old steamboat landing called Rocky Point.
The cowboys had a dance while I was in Shelby that I believe there is a record of in the files of some of the old newspapers of that day.
There was an opera troupe on their way to Spokane, Washington. For some reason they were sidetracked at Shelby and as they were from New York, some of the ladies had never seen a cowboy, so they said (I guess they thought cowboys eat grass and were only half human). Anyway, some of them left the train and went to the hotel where the dance was going on and mingled with the crowd and as those cowboys were very easy for a lady to get acquainted with and as there was considerable liquor consumed, the dance was a great success and the ladies found the boys much nicer than they had anticipated and invited some of them over to their train.
Now the male population of the troupe did not take to the cowboys too well and finally ordered them out of the car which, of course, insulted the boys and a fight started. But some of these fellows in the troupe were good boxers and the cowboys didn’t have a chance in a fist fight, so they brought their guns into the play. They didn’t shoot anyone but made the car very smoky, and the troupe quit the car and most of them scattered out in the sagebrush, Shelby being a little cow town on the Great Northern Railroad.
It seems that the worst thing that happened was one of the cowboys shot a lantern out of a brakeman’s hand. So in a few days there was railroad officials around there, thick as flies, but they couldn’t get any information and there wasn’t a cowboy in fifty miles of Shelby. The railroad sent several detectives there at different times but the population of the town was all in sympathy with the cowboys and nobody knew any cowboy’s name that attended the dance. So they could not get any evidence and didn’t know where to find anyone to arrest, and had to drop the matter.
My old boss was one of the leaders in that mix-up and he, of course, made a couple of days ride away from Shelby. It happened he stayed a few days in a locality where there was considerable stock rustling going on and he didn’t go to that part of the country very often, so his presence there created quite a commotion and fear among those fellows living there, as they thought he was after them. But the old man was simply dodging the railroad officials and was more frightened than they were.
At that time the DHS ran two outfits—one at Shelby and one at Malta on Milk River about two hundred miles apart. Those big outfits in the course of a few years all accumulated quite a few spoiled horses for different reasons, sometimes from bad breaking and sometimes on account of putting strange riders on them so often, sometimes from getting away when they were half broke, and maybe not finding them for a year. They would then be harder to handle than a green bronc and would buck a few riders off. They would get pretty tough and the average cowboy could not ride them. So the boss would hire a bronc fighter to ride the rough string. A strange thing about it was that most of those kind of horses were the best ones in the bunch when they were thoroughly broke.
The DHS had accumulated about twenty head of those kind of horses. So the boss sent me to Malta to ride some of those horses. They also hired another fellow to help me. The only name I ever knew for him was “Red Neck Davis” and he was a good bronc fighter.
The outfit was getting ready to go on the spring roundup and we went to their horse ranch on Milk River and gathered all the saddle horses—maybe two hundred head—and there was quite a lot of those horses needed touching up before we went to work on the roundup. The first day Red Neck and I caught two of the worst horses in the outfit. The boss had put two men to help us and herd for us (they are called pick-up men nowadays).
One of the cowboys had put his bedding out to air that day and had a nice woolen blanket laid on a pile of poles on the ground. When I mounted my first horse, he went up in the air and landed right in the middle of that blanket, and the poles being hard all four of his feet went through it. I believe the blanket belonged to the fellow that was herding for me, so I laid the blame on him.
Shortly after Red Neck mounted his horse, a big buckskin. He had quite an old man herding for him and rather cranky. He caught the best horse in his string that morning, one he was sure was gentle so he could pick up Red’s horse if he stampeded. As soon as Red hit the saddle the buckskin went in the air and let a roar out of him like a lion, which scared the old man’s horse and he stampeded. We were only about fifty feet from Milk River and it was time of high water, and into it he went and swam across. The old man was sure wet............