The Outfit: A Cowboy’s Primer (Cowboy definitions)

The first rodeos were roundups held by Spaniards for the purpose of joining all the cows with all the herd sires to assure the best calf crop. Geography sometimes kept cows and bulls apart too long. These rodeos took several weeks and often involved several brands when fences did not exist.

When families of the owners of the brands began enjoying these meetings, rodeos evolved into gatherings of people. In the cattle country of the United States rodeos were no longer for cattle breeding. They were for celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, holidays and centennials. At rodeos the man showed the prowess they had developed in their husbandry of cattle in contests of roping and horsemanship. Women showed off their best sewing and cooking and their babies. In the evenings the men and women danced to fiddle music while the young and the lonely courted.

When a cowboy speaks of “the Company,” he means the owners of any outfit. To the cowboy, the company is the entity in the outfit that understands and decides on all money matters, the machinery of which the cowboy absolutely refuses to understand, The company’s money matters may never reasonably be wed with a cowboy’s husbandry of the bovine. Most of the time the cowboy sees and performs his husbandry with no regard for money, and the company cannot understand why he does. The company does understand that this difference is why a cowboy does not have an outfit of his own.

A cowpuncher probably gets as much sun as any living being. The sun warms the backs of his hands and his cheeks. It warms his breast through his shirt. A cowpuncher partners with the sun raising cattle. He glad to see it come up in the morning and usually has enough work to do so that he is not always happy to see it go down in the evening.

A Nevada cowboy is called buckaroo. He is like the wild horse. A buckaroo will leave bed, board, wife, possessions, his good sense, and any instinct of self-preservation to go after the wild horse or the wild cow. He prefers commoner livestock than professional livestock breeders would like to see running free. Because of this preference, the livestock breeders look down on the buckaroo. The breeders say, justly, that it costs as much to raise a cold-blooded animal as it does to raise a purebred. They are sure only purebred livestock is worth money, since it is what they sell.

The buckaroo believes mustang blood is necessary in stock that is to thrive in Nevada. A human must have some of it too, called buckaroo, if he is to make a living in Nevada. The buckaroo, like the vaquero, believes in the saying, “Mejor saber el terreno, que ser el mejor vaquero,”–better know the country than know all there is to know about cowboying. The point being it is possible to know terrain, never possible to know all about cowboying.

On an outfit a wet cow is a cow with a suckling calf by her side, A dry cow is a cow that doesn’t have a calf this year. A barren cow does well in her production of beef but does not, has not, will not give birth to a calf.

A dogie is a motherless calf, a calf that has been unmothered by drought, disease, or distress and left to shift for himself. Most dogies, if they do not suffer the same misfortune that orphaned them, stay alive if they are lucky enough to get their mother’s first milk. This vital potion she made for him while she was making him, to give him resistance to the diseases that assault him in the first waking days of his warm, vulnerable life. After a Dogie has been of milk a few days, he loses his taste for it and goes on trying to make a living by grazing, as he is born with a set of teeth. Some dogies, however, learn to steal milk. They wait and when a mother is nursing her own calf, they slip in and steal a tit. The mother is bound to nurse her own calf and this obligation often keeps her from effectively fighting off a small, persistent, rogue of a dogie. Young cows in artificial surroundings have been known to drop a calf and never turn to look at him and walk right on without even knowing the smell of him, caring as little for their offspring as they would for their other droppings. These calves are orphaned so small that they lack the strength, the will, and the answers they need to stay alive. They are little fellows yearning for a father or a mother or a school, Cowboys hope to find them before something gets them, as yearning will keep them alive only a little while.

All the parade and fairground fellows can wear straw hats and fine boots and silver trophy buckles, talking big and taking the rides in front of all the people, but those shows do not make them cowboys. Deceiving the people who want to be deceived by a big hat and a pair of boots does not make them cowboys.

Having a young dedication of mind and body that fan, professions have in caring for the bovine so it is able to provide tasty protein for man, is being a cowboy. Doing it at a pace measured by the shod steps of the equine animal and disdaining any other conveyance is cowboy. Using natural tools of flesh and blood, leather and hemp and hair, in any country hot or cold, open or brushy, wild or tame, with verve; by himself with no audience, no ticket sale, and no background music, not even a just wage, is cowboy.

A cowboy would be a fool to do it for the money. He would be a fool to do it for the right to wear the big hat and pair of boots. He does it to care gently for the lives of the tough, smart bovines in country where the bovine, the mule deer and the wild horse use the same trails and he does it so people can eat beef steak which, he believes, is why the bovine is on the mother earth.

When ranchers began outfitting themselves, they built edifices to house cowboys called bunkhouses. When a cowboy was at headquarters, he had she her and was expected to unroll his bed in a bunk and was not obliged to sleep on the ground for a while. He had a warm place in which to rest. He had card games and hot water. He had hot meals and a place to write his letters. He had social demands on his person.

The word leppie is from the Mexican lepe, meaning a stunted calf, a calf that has been deprived of his early nourishment. Maybe his mother didn’t make enough milk, though cows that don’t seem to give more than a teacup full raise big strong calves. Some cows give a lot of milk but their calves don’t thrive. These cows might make too much milk for a little feller to be able to get his mouth over the swollen teat. Some cows might take to loco weed or sustain some other shock to their systems that dry up their mother juices. Certainly no calf’s sire ever knew him.

All a cowboy needs in order to get a job are his bed and saddle, a pair of spurs, a pair of leggings, a good pair of boots, a good hat, a good brush jacket, a warm jacket, gloves, bridles, various bits and hackamores for different horses in his string saddle blanket and slicker, beside all the clothing he periodically gets torn off his back and bun. His outfit, if it is complete and satisfies him, only costs about a thousand dollars and takes him as few as ten years to accumulate. His outfit is perishable and expendable in his work of assuming life and death responsibility over hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cattle, and he never looks well dressed and he never has any money except for his other most vital essentials, whiskey and cigarettes.

A remuda is the herd of horses being used by the cowboys on an outfit. A horse takes on his identity as a flesh and blood unit of an outfit when he begins the work of men and becomes a member of a remuda. The ideal remuda is composed of geldings only. Studs and mares fulminate trouble in a remuda because of the demands of their state as procreators in which their efficiency and trustworthiness to man can be stopped by natural forces such as phases of the moon. For geldings, the bachelor horses, man has arranged a life of work. Geldings have been altered to respond placidly to a society of horses doing man’s work. In Spanish, remuda also means a change of horses, a relay, a relief, The Mexican saying is ‘el caballo revolcado es caballo remudado” – a horse that has a good place to roll is a relieved and rested horse.