Chuck Wagon Tales

Chuck Wagon Tales The True Story of an Early Arizona Hold-up As Told by Little Bob

BY WILL C. BARNES THE fall steer roundup on the Long H range was about finished. The Long H “chuckwagon” was parked under a huge juiper tree. Its wide spreading branches sheltered not only the big wagon but served as a roof to about fifteen cowboys who, at night, rolled their camp beds out on the ground beneath it.

The nights were getting cool and frosty. The two boys on the first guard shivered as they climbed onto their ponies and rode off to the herd bedded down about a thousand yards from the camp. The rest of the crew was seated about the huge fire the cook had built up after the supper dishes were put away. It was a good time for a story. “Little Bob” Morris the wagon boss had been on the Long H range for many years, as far back as 1886 when the outfit turned loose the first of a herd of more than five thousand wild and woolly long horn cows, shipped into northern Arizona from the overstocked ranges of the Pecos country in western Texas.

Little Bob was full of stories of the early days in the cow business. “Tell us that yarn you spun once when we were waiting for stock cars at the Holbrook stock yards” It was Andy, the Horse Wrangler, speaking. “That one about the old doctor from Washington who went to the Hopi snake dance with you and then up to Springerville where he had a son living in the White Mountains.

Little Bob always enjoyed telling his stories. He stuffed a big load of Bull Durham into his old pipe then pulled his camp bed roll nearer the fire for an easy seat and began.

“It was in August 1887,” he said, “I was fixing up to make the trip to the Hopi Indian Snake dance. Always comes off in August you know. Over at the railroad station I met up with a fine old feller, a doctor who lived back in Washington D. C. The railroad agent tells him I was figuring on goin' to the dance. The old man he sez he was out here specially to see the dance ceremony, him bein' specially interested in snakes. So we made a deal to go up to Hopi to-gether.

“He tells me his name was Yarrow. Doctor H. C. Yarrow. Says he was a practicing surgeon back yonder in Wash ington, had been a surgeon in the army durin' the civil war, was then a professor of biology in the big George Wash ington University. He was apparently an all round scientist like we don't see out thisaway very often.

“Says his hobby was snakes, snakes of all kinds but specially rattlers. He naturally hankered, so he said, to see how the Hopis handled their snakes without gittin' bit. Sort of did'nt believe what he'd heerd about them Indians.

“In them days it was a three day's hard old grind in a buckboard or wagon out to the Hopi villages, acrost about a hundred miles of the sandiest country you ever seen. Absolutely uninhabited ceptin' here and there an occasional Navajo sheep camp; every inch of the road bein' through the Navajo Indian reservation.

“We had to camp nights, of course, an' the old feller was a first class hand about camp, ready to help at anything. Water is powerful skeerce up on the re servation and Dr. Yarrow sort of curled up the second night when, our water keg bein' plumb empty, we stopped at a Navajo sheep camp near a shallow well in a sandy wash. The well wcren't more than ten feet deep an' not more than a foot of water in it at that. It was sided up with rough hewed cottonwood logs and a Navajo kid about ten years old climbed down in to it an, standin' bare legged in the water, filled a bucket with the stuff that was left in the bottom after waterin' about five hundred long legged, bare bellied Navajo sheep from it.

“The kid filled the bucket and we pulled it up with a rope and filled the keg with the stuff. We had to strain every drop we used in camp at that, an' the doctor was sure we would both git some terrible disease from usin' it. Not so many folks went to the Snake dance in them days. The doctor and I were two of the five white men there to see it. Last year, 1933 there were over three hundred white people on hand. “Back from the dance the doctor went on up to the town of Springerville near (Continued on Page 23)