I just finished reading for the second time one of the most enjoyable books I have ever found about the life of a cowboy back in “the good ol’ days”. Dakota Cowboy, My Life in the Old Days, by Ike blasingame, is a non-fiction documentary of Ike’s own life as a bronc buster and rough-string rider for the Matador Land and Cattle Company from 1904 to around 1912. The setting is in South Dakota, where Matador and several other major cattle concerns had set up huge ranching operations on lands leased from the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indian Reservations, through cooperation between the Indian Tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ike takes us through all aspects of ranch operations, the lives of cowboys, their bosses, their horses, the land, and the cattle that gave them their livelihood.

I found myself completely engrossed in Blasingame’s way of describing and explaining things from a cowboy’s perspective, providing a window to the past, framed in cowboy common sense and frankness, that is largely closed nowadays, in our time of extreme opinions and political correctness. I learned the origins of some of the idiomatic expressions we use today, but think little of.

For instance, we’ve all heard the expression, “That really chaps my hide!” Take a minute and read Ike’s delivery of how a cowboy’s hide got “chapped”.

“Cowboys made a worthy attempt to be manly, to act in accordance with what was right, no matter their surroundings – mud, wind, rain, heat, or fine summer sunshine. There was little rough talk, other than simple swearing which seemed more a part of that way of life than disrespect and offensiveness. Obscenity was frowned upon. Any indecent act was met with stern disapproval. Improper talk about women or lewd jokes had little part in the regular everyday busy life these men lived. And the man who persisted in overstepping these rules was punished, not by arrest or by going to jail, but by the cowboys’ law which governed such breaches of decency and order.

If a man didn’t believe his ideas and deportment could be changed, it took but one or two trips to a good-sized bedroll over which he found himself stretched so that the seat of his britches were good and tight. A pair of heavy leather chaps held by the belt and wielded by a big-fisted cowpuncher in a way which brought the bottom of the leggings smartly down across the offender’s posterior a dozen times usually corrected any such false ideas. To be offensive enough to be “chapped” was a painful experience that no one relished.”

Reading about the sheer size of many of the old ranches was fascinating to me. For instance, according to Blasingame, Matador’s range lease on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations comprised about forty-eight square miles. In addition, outside the reservation Matador and several other large operations shared, by gentleman’s agreement, the free range to the west of the reservation boundaries.  Matador also held a sizable range lease north of the Canadian border. In its heyday, the Matador ran nearly sixty thousand head of cattle.

Despite the size of the Matador cattle operation, Blasingame keeps things simple by taking us with him through his daily tasks of breaking broncs, hunting wolves, managing and rounding up cattle, and moving them across the Missouri river to Evarts, South Dakota for shipment to market by train. He describes operations of the range wagons (the true home of the cowboy), the various levels of management and the divisions of their respective duties, as well as the daily chores expected of each cowboy.

I particularly enjoyed Blasingame’s chapter on horses. He talked about the “rough string” and why these horses were under his particular care. He spoke affectionately about those horses that worked as hard as he did, and somewhat critically of those that had to be “watched” all the time, so as to head them off when they got ornery. It was interesting to me how Blasingame would give each horse its due credit and praise for the work it could perform well, despite its ill temper or how difficult it was to ride. Take this excerpt from the chapter on The Rough Broncs:

“Spokane had a reputation as a hard-bucking horse. He was a slim blood-bay, weighing 1050 pounds. He had good shoulders, high hips, and was probably a good deal thoroughbred. He had been handled some and didn’t fight saddling; in fact, if a man could ride him until he had his buck over with, he worked willingly. But there was the pinch! Spokane saved himself for furious, hell-to-set pitching after a rider mounted. It was sport for him, and he had thrown more cowboys than had ever ridden him farther than three jumps. Spokane’s reputation followed him when Dode shipped him to South Dakota and came north himself as manager. Dode liked the horse.

“I want to see what our South Dakota bronc rider can make of him,” he said, preparing to leave Texas, and from the time that Spokane snorted down the chute, filled his belly and ran free a few weeks on rich grass, he was primed to jar the gutfat off the best of riders. He was one of the really snaky ones to come to the Dakota outfit.

Brown knew that Dode had brought Spokane along for me to ride, and he was present the day Dode pointed to the horse and said, “If a man can stay on him, that bronc has the makings of a top cow horse.”

Since I could ride my horses wherever I wanted to while training them, Brown saddled up, too, and went around with me considerable, looking at the new range and getting acquainted with it. He got quite friendly, and jogging along he continually preached “hell-roaring Spokane” to me. He declared the horse was one of the worst buckers ever when he cut loose with all he had, and hinted that even Dode was skeptical about my being able to rode him. The more Brown talked about Spokane, the more I wanted to get a rope on the salty cuss and see for myself how tough he really was. I had found few horses that were hard for me to handle – still, I also knew that “for every man, there’s a horse he cannot ride.”

In Dakota Cowboy ,Ike Blasingame paints a truly vivid picture in words of the life of the cowboy in the Dakotas during the era of the great cattle empires. But not only that, he provides a much greater backdrop against which the picture is viewed than most stories of the “old west.” Blasingame expands his treatise to include a broad range of ranching topics, from cattle management, to horses,  the weather and seasons, to the interaction among the various ranching empires, and even their inter-relationships between the federal government and the Native American peoples from whom these ranching empires leased their range. As informative and factual as these details were, however, they never overcame his descriptions of the cowboys he knew and the stories from their daily lives on the range. More than once I found myself chuckling out loud as I read Blasingame’s relation of one story or another of some cowboy prank or his way of describing some noteworthy occurrence he recalled.

As a reader and student of old west literature,  Blasingame gave me a clearer  and broader understanding of the life of a cowboy than any other source I have found. It was a fascinating read for me, both times. One of the best and most enjoyable books about “the good ol’ days” I have ever encountered.

I highly recommend it.

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