Indian Journal-July 30, 1885
In Kansas, during the days when the cattle-growing excitement ran high there lived the most reckless, dare-devil set of young men, writes a Texas correspondent to the Pittsburg Dispatch, I have ever met. There were no old men among them. A man of 40 was looked upon as a patriarch, one who was entitled to be candidate for admission to the home of the aged and infirm. These young men rode up and down the Texas cattle-trail from Trinity River to the Republican.
When in Texas, to gather their herds, they rode furiously; they hunted panthers; they coursed loafer wolves; they ate mavericks almost without number, and on the round-up they were the most reckless of all the hard-riding men that gathered on the southern ranges.
When they returned to Kansas with their cattle they had many stories about the skill of the Texas cowboys tailing steers-that is, riding alongside a running steer and grasping his elevated tail, and by giving it a powerful lifting jerk, throwing the steer heels over head, much to his discomfiture and subsequent rage. I smiled incredulously.
The young man offered to perform the trick. We got into a wagon and drove to where my herd was grazing. The cattle were just off the trail, and were not strong. My friend contemptuously said there was no need of his mounting one of the herders' ponies to "tail" those steers; he could do it on foot. The herders gathered around to see the spectacle. The young man jumped from the wagon and ran swiftly to a steer, which he grasped firmly by the tail. Then, looking confidently at us, he gave the tail a savage jerk. There was some hitch in the performance. The steer did not turn a somersault.
He looked around, and seeing a man fastened to his tail, bellowed with intense rage, and turned to impale him on his long, high-polished horns. My acquaintance, still grasping the steer's tail tightly, ran round and round. The steer kicked and bellowed and turned faster and faster after him. The entire herd gathered, and stood in a vast circle, looking at the gruesome spectacle. Soon the tail-pulling young man called for help. We could not have helped him if his life depended on it.
The herders had laughed until they could hardly sit in their saddles. I held on to the sides of the wagon-box to keep from falling out. Bareheaded, with his long hair streaming behind him and incessant calls for aid pouring out of his mouth, and an occasional howl at the contracting circle of cattle that were becoming excited, to give variety to the vociferous uproar, my friend sped round and round. And the steer, with many bellows and intense rage, chased his tail, and the two-legged animal that had presumptuously fastened on to it.
Finally I recovered my strength and drove the wagon close to the revolving pair. My friend loosened his grasp on the tail and jumped in. Before he was fairly in the wagon we were galloping over the prairie with the enraged steer in hot pursuit. Five of the herders quickly roped the steer, and one of the funniest scenes I ever saw on the range was at an end. Afterward my friend mounted a pony and readily "tailed" that steer with great satisfaction to himself and damage to the animal and my pocket.
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