In some parts of the country the cowboy carried a rifle in the holster under his leg, but this sometimes as much for the cow thief or rustler as for any game. The favourite arm of the cowboy was really the six-shooter, and with this weapon he rarely hesitated to attack any animal that came in his way. Very often cowboys killed mountain lions with their revolvers, sometimes shooting them out of trees where they had taken refuge. In a few instances the cowboy has ridden alongside and with his six-shooter killed the grizzly, cinnamon, or "range bear." Constantly inured to the dangers of the open range, and familiar with the sight of large game, there was no animal for which he had much fear or reverence. Really there were some small ones which he feared more than any large ones. The bite of the small plains polecat he dreaded above all things, for he knew that it was practically certain to result in hydrophobia and death. Many cowboys lost their lives in this way, being bitten by this animal when it had crawled into their blankets at night. At the least move of the sleeper the venomous creature would bite, and its bite was accounted almost certainly fatal. One United States army regiment stationed at an Arizona post lost thirteen men in one season through bites of the polecat.
The rattlesnake sometimes crawled into the cowboy's blankets at night, but this was a less dangerous affair, as the snake was apt to be chilled and stupid. Yet another creature much dreaded on the range was the centipede, which was also a night traveller. It is a tradition of the range that if a centipede crawls across a man's flesh the poison left by its hooked and penetrating feet will surely produce insanity. One instance comes to mind where a cowboy was so poisoned by a centipede, and who really became crazed, although he did not die.
The tarantula was still more poisonous than the centipede, but seems to have been less dreaded. It was a favourite amusement at a cow camp, where these hairy monsters abounded, to get a pair of them and set them fighting, which they were always ready to do, tearing off each other's legs with great gusto. A winner of many of these battles was sure to become a ranch pet, and was usually kept in a tin can with a board over the top, ready for action in case anybody came along with a tarantula which he thought could fight, and which he was disposed to back for a little money. The thought comes to mind now, with something of horrified regret, of a certain pet tarantula, a scarred warrior of many battles, which was forgotten and left thirteen years ago in a tin can back of a certain ranch house far out on the cattle range. A tarantula is a hardy animal, and can live long without food, but one must admit that thirteen years is a long time for even a tarantula to go without anything to eat, and it is probable that the pet of the camp has before now departed this life in a way not deserved by so redoubtable a warrior.
The cowboy was fond of any kind of hazard, any manner of fight, any contest of speed or skill or strength. Not much of a runner himself, he would back his favourite in a foot race. Wrestling and boxing were unknown upon the range, and it is well enough they were, as they might have led to more serious matters, whose result would have been a lessening of the visible supply of material for cowpunchers. The horse race was an ever-present and unfailing source of enjoyment for the cowboy, and if a ranch had a good quarter horse the whole outfit would, if necessary, "go broke" in backing it, as a matter of pride, against a horse from some other ranch or town. Sometimes the cowboys rode their own horses in such races, or sometimes they trusted to riders of lighter weight. No more inveterate gambler or horse racer ever existed than was the North American Indian, and sometimes a ranch outfit would "go after" an Indian village with some favourite running horse, and both parties would back their convictions to the extent of their worldly goods.
Small enough, we may be sure, were the amenities of ranch life, and rude enough were the conditions out on the far, unsettled country, where these rough, strong-natured men had no society but that of their fellow-workmen, and no amusements save such as lay at their hand in the rude surroundings of their employment. Though these amusements were always about, always possible, the life of the cowboy was by no means taken up in their pursuit. He was above all things a labouring man, with much to occupy his attention beside the demands of sport. The romance of the cowboy's life is best seen at a little distance from the cattle range. The visitor to the ranch has an enjoyable time, for his is the zest of novelty. The cowboy in turn cares little for the things whose freshness delights the man from the States. The cowboy longs to see a theatre, to have a trip to the city, to eat an oyster stew and all the green "garden truck" he can hold. To him it seems that all the great pleasures of life must lie out beyond the range, in the "settlements." The latter term usually meant for the cowboy, over the greater part of the cattle range, some squalid little cow town of the frontier, and ill-fitted enough was such a community to show the quality of civilization. It may be imagined what were the amusements of the cowboy when he left the range and visited the "settlements."
The end of the round-up or the drive, perhaps, found the men of a cow outfit at some such ragged, scattering little Western town. These men, reared in the free life of the open air, under circumstances of the utmost freedom of individual action, perhaps came off the drive or round-up after weeks or months of unusual restraint or hardship, and felt that the time had arrived for them to "celebrate." Each and all of powerful constitution, of superb physical health, and of all the daring and boldness inculcated by wild life amid wild surroundings, these men were ignorant of fear, ignorant of self-restraint, ignorant of life in any but the narrowest sense of the word. Their vices were few and strenuous. They were eager to practise such vices as they knew, and to learn as many more as they could in the brief time of their visit. Merely great, rude children, as wild and untamed and untaught as the herds they led, their first look at the "settlements" of the railroads seemed to them a glimpse of a wider world. The tinsel and tawdry glitter of it caught their eye as a bit of bright stuff attracts that of a babe. They sought to grasp that which they saw. They pursued to the uttermost such avenues of new experience as lay open before them, almost without exception avenues of vice. Virtue was almost unknown in the cow town of the "front" in the early days. Vice of the flaunting sort was the neighbour of every man. The church might be tolerated, the saloon and dance hall were regarded as necessities. Never in the wildest days of the wildest mining camps has there been a more dissolute or more desperate class of population than that which at times hung upon the edge of the cattle trail or of the cattle range and battened upon its earnings. The chapters of the tale of riotous crime which might be told would fill many books, and would make vivid reading enough, though hardly of a sort to the purpose here. It would be folly to attempt to idealize the cowpuncher in his relations with the early "settlements." He was the wildest of all the wild men of the West, and he rose rapidly into a reputation which, unjust and inaccurate as it is to-day, has clung to him ever since, so that people will have no other cowboy but him of the uncouth garb and the wild and desperate bearing, him who swears, shoots, carouses, and comports himself as a general "terror." This notion of the cowboy is grotesque in its injustice, but none the less it at one time had a certain foundation. There was a time when the name of "cowboy" was one with which to frighten children, and it carried with it everything of absolute disregard for law and order. In the early days of the drive, at the cow town it was a regular and comparatively innocent pastime to "shoot up the town." To shoot out the lights of a saloon was a simple occupation, and to compel a tenderfoot to dance to the tune of a revolver was looked upon as a legitimate and pleasing diversion such as any gentleman of the range might enjoy to his full satisfaction. If a cowboy wanted a drink, he shot a hole in a whisky barrel and helped himself. As the revolver was thus first in peace, so also it was first in war. All quarrels were arbitrated with the six-shooter, and it took slight cause to start a quarrel when the strong waters of the settlements were doing their work. Hardly a night passed without its "killing," though one never heard of a murder. In the town of Newton, Kan., one of the hardest of the hard cow towns of the early trail days, it is said that eleven men in one day "died with their boots on," as the euphonious expression goes. The coveted art of the six-shooter was an essential of a finished education in that country. The powerful excitements of vile liquor and viler women stirred into a malignant activity all the evil elements of untutored and rugged natures, and the results