A Cowboy and a Good Horse: West Texas

The sun is in my eyes when I first meet the horse wrangler, which might be why he doesn’t fit my vision of the mythic American cowboy. For one thing, he wears a brace on his right knee. Also, he tells me his name is Dennis, not Sam or Slim. On the other hand, there’s a well-used lariat clove-hitched to his horse’s saddle, a dusty, black felt Stetson pulled low to protect his already sun-damaged skin, and leather-gloved hands hold the reins like they’d grown there.

I’m out for an early morning hike in the hills of West Texas, twenty crow-flying miles from the Rio Grande and when I meet a bona fide horse-wrangler I know I’m having a good day. Even if I need to take a second to adjust my assessment of his true cowboy-ness. Dennis rides up and catches me with a smile on my face. He allows that he’s heading up into the hills, wrangling horses for riders later that morning.

 “I’m one of your riders,” I tell him. 

“Praise be,” Dennis replies. 

Reaching out for the velvety nose of his horse I ask, “Who’s this fellow?” Dennis introduces me to David (which he pronounces “Daveed”), then points to a white-washed building on the hill above the road. A mausoleum for the ranch’s first owner (if you don’t count the Native American tribes and Mexican settlers who lived in the area before the border crossed them, heading south) the little adobe structure overlooks the homestead of Cibolo Creek Ranch where I’m staying for a couple of days with friends after hiking in Big Bend National Park. 

“Good views from up there, if you’ve a mind to hike before you sit a horse for a few hours,” Dennis suggests and we part ways for a bit as he rides David further into the hills.

If you’ve heard of Cibolo Creek Ranch but can’t recall why, it’s probably because Antonin Scalia died there in one of the pond-side rooms. Conspiracies cropped up afterward, but it’s hard to support fantasy intrigues when an unused CPAP machine is found on the guy’s bedside table and he appears peaceful, though dead. Political beliefs aside, I’d say Justice Scalia picked a pretty good place to pass away in this isolated part of Texas, far from reporters and lawyers and people who don’t understand or appreciate solitude. I don’t know if he rode horses with Dennis the horse wrangler, but I’ve seen a photograph of the Justice from New Jersey wearing a cowboy hat, so I’ll speculate that he bought into the cowboy myth, at least during his visit to the ranch. It’s hard not to romanticize the great expanse of West Texas. I know I do, probably because I didn’t have to grow up there and decide whether to stay home or seek my life somewhere else. I can’t see myself as a cowgirl or a cowboy’s wife. Most of the conversations I’ve had with West Texans have taken place in Austin or thereabouts. That’s because those folks left the isolation and small towns of their birth for something bigger or with more opportunities. Today, though, I get to ride and romanticize to my heart’s delight, pretending I belong here for a few hours.

Skid is a buckskin, and catches my eye the moment I step out of the adobe to see him hitched to a rail. Dennis has saddled three horses and with a practiced eye, assigns one to each of us. Skid is my boy and patient enough not to ripple a muscle when Dennis positions a wooden step to help me get my boot into the saddle without splitting my pants up the backside. My cousin mounts a small sorrel horse called Stumpy and a friend rides a paint whose name I can’t recall but seems a good horse just the same. To be honest, I hadn’t a clue that paint and sorrel described horse types and only knew buckskin because I once saw Dale Evans’ horse, Buttermilk (or rather his hide stretched over a plaster frame) at the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. Another guest of the ranch — an honest-to-Roy Rogers horse trader — leans his folded arms on the corral’s fence and rests a spit-shined, hand-tooled boot on the lowest rail as he watches us settle into the saddles.  Later at dinner, he’ll ask me, “Was that buckskin a good horse?” He sure was. “I thought so,” he’ll nod, and his wife will whisper over a glass of whiskey, “My husband knows horses.”

I know next to nothing about horses, but Dennis plays it cool and laconic, like a real cowboy should. He doesn’t crack wise about the cowboy boots I’m wearing, which have rarely rested in a pair of horse stirrups but spent enough time on city sidewalks to need re-soling — twice — and they know how to dance a Texas Two-Step. I’ve got on the pair of jeans I packed in with my hiking clothes and a few layers against the winter morning chill that will burn off by midday. Dennis wears a faded denim jacket and standard bootcut jeans. With a silky, kelly-green scarf around his neck he looks like he may have plans later to do a little two-stepping at the Lost Horse Saloon in Marfa. As he slips his own boot into David’s left stirrup, I realize his scarf matches the green leather inlays of his boot tops.

We ride single-file for the next few hours, our horses trailing behind Dennis, stopping occasionally when he pulls up to show us Native American red-painted pictographs at the base of a cliff, plants native to West Texas, and an old movie set for The Three Burials of Mequiades Estrada, in which Tommy Lee Jones plays a ranch hand.

Dennis is living the American Dream, if your dream is about being a cowboy. Cowboys are a quintessential American icon and the image has sold everything from guns to jeans (“Snug, the way the working cowboy wants ‘em”) convincing generations of kids to “Come to where the flavor is” and light up a cigarette in the wide open spaces of the West. To describe somebody as a cowboy nowadays is to say he is reckless. If a buddy suggests you “cowboy up” it’s time to stop whining and get to work. The enduring cowboy iconography might be a bit grandiose if you consider that the golden age of the American cowboy era lasted only twenty years and was over in 1886, casualty of barbed wire, an invention which ended the free-ranging cattle drives that began after the Civil War. 

Cowboy life isn’t all romance and mythos. Dennis goes home to his wife each night and probably bathes regularly, but cowboys on cattle drives worked hard for low pay. They ate a lot of dust along with a steady diet of biscuits, white gravy and boiled coffee. No one on the drive changed clothes until the cattle reached the stockyards, when the cowboys got paid and could afford a bath and a new shirt. Cowboying was dangerous. Cattle-thieving outlaws were a persistent threat and stampeding cattle could kill a man. Even modern cowboys, helping run ranches from Texas to Montana, face hazards. Dennis explains that the brace on his right knee helps stabilize a joint that got trapped between his horse and a steer. His silver horseshoe mustache twists as he contemplates his alternative: an entirely new knee-joint that would keep him off a horse longer than he would prefer. He shakes off the notion and with a gloved hand, sweeps the overlapping hills stretching to the horizon.

In late spring, Dennis says, the rains will replenish the buff and biscuit hills. Cacti will bloom and this part of West Texas will be green— “the green of Ireland.” I’ve put a lot of miles on Ireland’s narrow lanes and I know that green, a hue that soothes the parched spirit. Scanning the acres before us, it’s hard for me to imagine the sepia panorama transformed into a spring-green ocean of prairie grass, but I find this mid-winter landscape soothing in its own way. Dried yucca and spiny ocotillo stand out in the sere grassland. Hawks ascend into a sky so blue it seems counterfeit. 

Our line of four horses turns toward the ranch’s adobe, where lunch awaits us all.  Skid’s haunches swing as he chooses his own path, proceeding slowly downhill. There is no rush. The sun is warm on our backs. My jeans smell of dust and hay and horse sweat. It’s been a good day in the company of a genuine cowboy and a good horse.

Dennis tells one last story as we lead our horses across Cibolo Creek to the shade of the adobe: he loves to drive a gig along the long, looping roads in his part of Texas with his wife beside him. I picture the pair of them in a small carriage drawn by a single horse as the sun waltzes with the horizon. They are wearing silky green scarves to complement their boot tops and a matching pair of Stetsons. Dennis is a romantic cowboy after all. Would we want him any other way?