It was on one of my annual visits to the ranch that Red, whose welcome
always seemed a little warmer than that of the others, finally took me
back to the beginning. My friendship with the outfit did not begin
until some years after the fight at Buckskin, and, while I was familiar
with that affair and with the history of the outfit from that time on, I
had never seemed to make much headway back of that encounter. And I
must confess that if I had depended upon the rest of the outfit for
enlightenment I should have learned very little of its earlier exploits.
A more secretive and bashful crowd, when it came to their own
achievements, would be hard to find. But Red, the big, smiling,
under-foreman, at last completely thawed and during the last few weeks
of my stay, told me story after story about the earlier days of the
ranch and the parts played by each member of the outfit. Names that I
had heard mentioned casually now meant something to me; the characters
stepped out of the obscurity of the past to act their parts again. To
my mind's eye came Jimmy Price, even more mischievous than Johnny
Nelson; "Butch" Lynch and Charley James, who erred in judgment; the
coming and going of Sammy Porter, and why "You-Bet" Somes never arrived;
and others who did their best, or worst, and went their way. The tales
will follow, as closely as possible, in chronological order. Between
some of them the interval is short; between others, long; the less
interesting stories that should fill those gaps may well be omitted.
It was in the '70s, when the buffalo were fast disappearing from the
state, and the hunters were beginning to turn to other ways of earning a
living, that Buck Peters stopped his wagon on the banks of Snake Creek
and built himself a sod dugout in the heart of a country forbidding and
full of perils. It was said that he was only the agent for an eastern
syndicate that, carried away by the prospects of the cattle industry,
bought a "ranch," which later was found to be entirely strange to
cattle. As a matter of fact there were no cows within three hundred
miles of it, and there never had been. Somehow the syndicate got in
touch with Buck and sent him out to look things over and make a report
to them. This he did, and in his report he stated that the "ranch" was
split in two parts by about forty square miles of public land, which he
recommended that he be allowed to buy according to his judgment. When
everything was settled the syndicate found that they owned the west, and
best, bank of an unfailing river and both banks of an unfailing creek
for a distance of about thirty miles. The strip was not very wide then,
but it did not need to be, for it cut off the back-lying range from
water and rendered it useless to anyone but his employers. Westward
there was no water to amount to anything for one hundred miles. When
this had been digested thoroughly by the syndicate it caused Buck's next
pay check to be twice the size of the first.
He managed to live through the winter, and the following spring a herd
of about two thousand or more poor cattle was delivered to him, and he
noticed at once that fully half of them were unbranded; but mavericks
were cows, and in those days it was not questionable to brand them.
Persuading two members of the drive outfit to work for him he settled
down to face the work and perils of ranching in a wild country. One of
these two men, George Travis, did not work long; the other was the man
who told me these tales. Red went back with the drive outfit, but in
Buck's wagon, to return in four weeks with it heaped full of
necessities, and to find that troubles already had begun. Buck's trust
was not misplaced. It was during Red's absence that Bill Cassidy, later
to be known by a more descriptive name, appeared upon the scene and
played his cards.