Penning and Working Wild Ones
Where the Teton River comes out of the Rockies in northern Montana, there’s a high ridge to the north with a scattered growth of low, twisted cedar dotting it, and beyond that ridge in a wide, treeless flat, a stone foundation for a house, some long, low log-stables and the last of a set of pole-corrals. This is all that marks the site of the old Hoy place, a ranch with a history.
When I first rode up to the Hoy place, one windy spring day in 1920, it seemed to be the most dismal, God-forsaken spot I’d ever known. And when, 20 years later, I picked up a few threads of its founder’s history, I found that the atmosphere one sensed about the spot had more than a little basis in fact.
But aside from the depressing atmosphere that seemed to hang over the long-abandoned Hoy place, its picturesqueness appealed to the artist in my make-up. Charlie Russel or Frederick Remington might have drawn or painted it without moving as much as a single log or adding a human figure. The one thing that appealed most to my imagination, though, was the weather-whitened snubbing-post that still stood in the center of one of the weed-choked pole-corrals, a post that showed a beaver-like depression where countless smoking catch-ropes had left their searing marks.
Unfortunately, such inanimate objects cannot talk; but I am convinced that within that wind-swept, weed-grown corral, more colorful action of a dangerous sort had taken place than all the artists or writers on earth could possible imagine in a dozen lifetimes.
Whether an outfit runs cattle, horses, or both, corrals are necessary in the handling of range stock. Just as necessary as the varied types of wrenches and pliers to be found in the average mechanic’s tool kit, like such tools, they come in different sizes, each one for a particular purpose.
Ride up to any small ranch in most any Western state, and unless it is just a line camp, you’ll find at least three corrals of different sizes, and almost always connected. There will be a fairly large one into which a considerable number of horses or cattle can be driven, and a smaller one into which whatever stock is to be used or worked on can be cut out of or separated from the larger bunch. Usually, opening off of the second or smaller corral, there is a still smaller bronc pen where the “green ones” are topped out for their first few saddlings.
There may be, and usually are, many other corrals, chutes and wings of all sizes and descriptions, according to the size of the outfit and its particular needs, but the three first mentioned are a must.
Such corrals, regardless of size, may differ in the materials used in their building according to local custom, the type of country in which the outfit is located or the practical needs of the day in which they were built. A period that, in some cases, may have long ago become out-dated.
If located near mountains or broken country where timber grows, they are usually built of poles. If near a prairie river of any size, they may be constructed of logs, but at the present time most modern ranches (especially in prairie country) use planks and posts. In any locality where oil has been discovered, especially in parts of Oklahoma and Texas, corrals may be seen built of cast-off iron pipe of various sizes. Occasionally some very old ranch will have rock corrals, and along the Mexican border and in old Mexico, pens of adobe construction were once commonplace.
Originally corrals were built with a two-fold purpose in mind, to both confine stock and protect it from Indians and other raiders. As an example, along the old stage routes through Arizona and New Mexico where adobe was commonly available, the crumbled, rain-washed outlines of immense corrals that amounted to fortresses may occasionally still be seen — high-walled corrals that once measured as much as 200 feet across, and anywhere from 500 to 800 in length, near the sites of former stage stations.
The adobe or stone corral is slow to build, even with peon labor, and very hot on the men and livestock who may use them. Such solid construction will naturally cut off a considerable part of any breeze that happens to be stirring. Practically a fortress in war and a welcome wind-break in the colder months, the corral of adobe or stone amounts to a bake-oven during the dry periods so natural to the states along the southern border. For these reasons, most early day corrals were of logs or posts, built in either the cabin-wall, rail-fence manner or in the upright-picket or stockade pattern. The latter was easier to build where either labor or material was limited, since it called for little other than the digging of a trench into which poles or posts could be set upright and tamped into place. It was also possible to use shorter, smaller poles of uneven lengths. This type of corral may still be found in more remote semi-desert sections of many Western states where native timber is of a scrubby variety.
Each country where stock growing amounts to an industry has usually developed at least one unique type of corral. For instance, the overlapping cabin-wall or rail-fence sort that is common to Western America (and the prairie provinces of Canada), in which smooth straight poles or peeled logs of considerable length are generally used, was not known in Mexico. Many Mexican rancheros, by combining necessity and opportunity, planted or intentionally made use of grouped varieties of giant cactus. By trimming off the inner arms or branches and adding a gate, there was produced as serviceable a corral as any known. It would renew itself from one year to another and increase its own strength as it grew. In parts of South America, especially on the Argentine Pampas where timber was once almost impossible to find, bundles of thorny brush were piled and confined between rows of evenly-spaced, somewhat crooked posts.
The old time cowman’d tools and methods, that necessity helped him to fashion, were such foolproof propositions that very few improvements have been added. As a result, the corral, the bronc pen and the snubbing post have remained the three fundamentals for handling livestock under range conditions down to comparatively recent times. But in spite of all that, corrals and their layout have undergone a few simple additions (often unnoticed) as the cow business changed from one generation to another.
Up to 100 years ago most corrals were round or oval, regardless of size. Seemingly it was the accepted way among the broad-gaged, free-living people of that day to disregard the rigidly exact or square-cornered checkerboard layout, possibly because the curse of a range of hills, or the meandering of a watercourse served to mark the boundaries of their unsurveyed holdings.
The first corral was undoubtably a trap in which to catch wild horses or cattle. Eventually it was discovered that by extending wings out from the gate, fewer animals were able to break away and a great deal of extra running, either on foot or on horseback, was saved. From that unrecorded date, however, corrals underwent practically no change until right after the Civil War when Texas cowmen, faced with finding and moving their expanding herds to new ranges and larger, more distant markets, commenced to use the branding chute.
In those days an owner of horses or cattle might use one iron or brand on everything he owned, though the custom of claiming several different brands was commonplace. However, when the business of trailing herds of considerable size for a thousand miles or more made it profitable for a number of small owners to either throw in together or sell to a professional cattle buyer who made a business of shaping up a herd and trailing them to market with his own trail crew, the need for a common brand to cover the temporary ownership of many different brands in one particular herd developed, and the result was the “road brand.”
Up to that time, the animal was roped for branding, whether in the open or in a corral. This was done by two ropers, working in pairs just as in the present day popular rodeo event called team roping. However, when from one to two thousand cattle has to be re-branded at one time with a road brand, team roping proved to be much too slow. As a result, the wing that up to then extended from a corral to turn a herd was doubled to serve as a very narrow lane in which a number of cattle of all sizes could be crowded and branded while still on their feet. As a result, the branding chute, which has since become so commonplace on any Western ranch, came into being.
It was not until the Texas trail herds met the railroad on the plains of western Kansas that the stock car and the stockyards became a recognized part of the cow business. Cattlemen became familiar with the railroad pens, covering acres of land, joined to one another and built parallel to the railroad tracks. The square-cornered manner of construction, more practical as well as convenient for this use, began to become common.
Since that day, the invention of the barbed wire has added still another (handy, though questionable) material for the construction of corrals; while the over head and the squeeze gate have been unobtrusively added to the branding chutes.
Any corral, by its very nature, is bound to become the setting for a considerable amount of home-talent excitement during the years of its use, but for concentrated action, the smallest of all, the bronc pen, will head the list a hundred times over and then some!
Few bronc pens, intentionally built for that purpose alone, are over 40 to 50 feet in diameter. Many were smaller since the two points of advantage are lost if it is too large. The first point is to save the bronc man as much footwork as possible, and in order to do so, the horse should never be at more than an easy rope’s length from the center of the pen. The second, and more important point, is that such a corral is built small in order to keep a horse from really getting started when he decides to come apart during the first few saddlings.
A horse can buck in a small corral, of course. Some, who are natural spinners, can “do it all” on a spot the size of a bed blanket. The average young and unbroken horse, however, whose whole life up to that particular day has been spent in the open, will be forced to either stop or change directions after a very few jumps. Each such stop or change of direction offers a chance for his rider to pull his head up, the main point being the sooner the horse gets the idea of answering a pull on the hackamore rein, the quicker he will be headed along the road to becoming a gentle horse.
A small square corral may, of necessity, be used as a bronc pen, but there is no point in intentionally building one of that shape for such a purpose. In fact, such amounts to a definite liability, since each corner offers an inducement for the horse to dodge and change direction; where, on the other hand, the small round corral tends to create a smoother variety of action and direction in the horse’s movements.
The bronc pen that is built for that purpose usually has an out-sloping wall. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, a hot-headed, stampeding horse cannot run against such a surface with the same force that he’d normally smash into a flat, upright wall. And, what is more important, it isn’t possible to bump a rider’s foot or knee when that same horse either bucks or runs during his first few saddlings.
Round pens are also commonly built with high walls, since it is a generally accepted fact among Western horsemen of any considerable experience with range stock that a wild horse can go out over the top of any fence he can stick his head over. The walls are also very often solid. That is, there are a few spaces or loopholed left between the parts used in its building, principally because the bronc man wants the horse’s undivided attention, and the fewer distractions offered by a flapping shirt or a running dog, the better for all concerned.
When a shift in conditions, call it progress, causes a noticeable change in the tools, the working methods or even the dress of the members of any given profession, the older, less-adaptable followers of that particular trade automatically become oldtimers. Among the oldtimers of the early trail-herd days, men who regarded running wild cattle as the only natural way of building up a herd, some held a certain contempt for those who made use of a snubbing post. But nothing could have been more natural. Undoubtably the first of our unnamed, unrecorded ancestors to ever tie onto a wild horse snubbed him to a tree until he’d managed to gentle him enough for handling, and their use became an art.
Many bronc men of long experience can play a rope on a snubbing post with the smooth, unhurried self-confidence of an old-style dallymen and like the art of taking the de-la vueltas, it has its dangers.
Snubbing posts may, within limits, vary in size and height, but those who are most expert in using them like them low, sometimes as short as three to four feet since, at that height, the slack of a throw rope can be flipped over the top as easily as taking the turns around a saddle horn. The taller the post, the harder to use and the more danger to the roper’s hands and fingers when forced to reach around it.
A snubbing post is seldom found in a small bronc pen because at such close quarters, it becomes something to run into; and, if short, a dangerous object for either a horse or rider to land on.
If a snubbing post is in use, you will usually find it in the next larger corral adjoining the bronc pen. There, once a man has made his throw and catch, he can, with its help, keep himself from being dragged around unnecessarily. Also this same rope and post will convince the unbroken horse that he can’t have everything his own way, which up to that particular moment he’s pretty apt to have taken for granted. In the hands of a man who knows his business, the snubbing post more than doubles his own weight on the end of a rope and will go a long way in helping to make a believer out of most any head-strong horse, regardless of his age, type or mental makeup.
The snubbing post, like many an old fashioned tool, is still a very useful article, and like others that were mothered by necessity, is not apt to be improved on.
This article was originally published in the April 1949 issue of Western Horseman.
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