(harmonica playing) - Can you just say your name and tell me where you're from?

- Jim Holloway, I live at Faith, South Dakota.

- And when were you at the Diamond A?

- Well, I was born my, my folks working for Diamond A when I was born, and they stayed with them there until in the war time, '44 or something like that.

They left, pulled out, moved to other places.

We lived in town, and then '48 moved back down to Rudy Crick.

We was there till spring of '49, and bought our place there east Eagle Butte.

Then I and Leo, I think you as with me as we started building that fence at Rousseau?

I don't remember what year that was, though.

You and I and Leo and Fat Breman, I know what was going to get a Ford tractor in there to dig them post holes.

So Fat took me into Eagle Butte, I was gonna drive that home.

Got in there and got ready to drive it home, and Fat decided he'd pull it.

So we got to, I got to steer a Ford tractor, Brian Fat Breman running 40 miles an hour.

(chuckles) That was a white knuckle ride if there ever was one.

- Okay, let's move over to you, Shorty, and if you just say your name please, and where are you from.

- Shorty Deal, Fort Pierre, South Dakota.

- When were you working there?

- I started there '56 and worked till '50, the end of '58.

- [Brian] Did you have a particular job there, or did you kind of do whatever needed to be done?

- Whatever needed done, horseback, mostly.

- Okay, let's move over.

- Yeah, I'm Andy Fischer, I'm 88 years old, an old chunk of coal, and my grandson says, "Grandpa, you're getting too old to cut the mustard."

Anyhow, I live in south of Eagle Butte on the China River.

- [Brian] And when were you at the Diamond A?

- What was that now?

- [Brian] When were you at the Diamond A?

- I think it was '50, I'm not sure, '55 or '56.

- Yeah, well, you know, they say that old coal burns pretty hot.

(chuckling) Okay, Everett?

- I'm Everett Hunt, I live south of Eagle Butte, and I worked for the Diamond A, in the summer of '56 I started.

I worked for them in '57, and I think we a little in 1950, I was only in the summer.

In the winter time I would work during Christmas vacation so some of the other guys could go home for Christmas, and that was where I spent my time with them.

But the Diamond A was all around us where I grew up.

There was the Rudy Crick Camp to the north, Circle P Camp down on the river, and where I grew up, and so they was there all the time.

- We'll stay with you for a little bit.

Did your dad or your parents have, did they work at the Diamond A as well?

- My dad did, he worked for them back in the twenties.

He was at, there was two roundup wagons, because Mossman leased the entire reservation, Camp Mossman, and they said he run about 50,000 head of cattle, and that Eagle Butte was the dividing line.

A guy by the name of Hans Mortenson was on the east side, and a guy by the name of Tom Scoggins run the wagon on the west side, and that's where my dad was.

And one story, he told me that they had gathered about 1500 head of big steers.

He said four and five year old steers hadn't seen a man but once or twice in their life, and they trailed them up to Lantry, and were going to load them on the cars.

And there was a big dry lake bed, so they bedded them and night hawked them.

And he said, everything was going good and well, and the train, they could hear the train coming in.

And pretty soon here come a guy up over the hill with a motorcycle, and away went them steer.

He said, "We got them circled around, bedded down again, here he came again."

And Dad said that Tom Scoggins rode up to me and he said, "Jack, you stay right here.

If that son of a comes by here again, your job is to rope him."

(laughing) - Andy, let's go back to you for a second, Andy.

Were you also someone who just did what needed doing around the ranch or did you have a special job?

- Yeah, I just help with everything, yeah.

- Yeah, and did your parents or your dad work there?

- No, they never worked for the Diamond A.

- [Brian] How did you get connected with the Diamond A?

- I don't know, I quit school and I was looking for a job.

I went to work for Diamond A. I was getting like $5 a day, or a hundred and quarter a month.

I worked there on and off.

I went to the Army, come back and work for him again.

- Where were you in the service?

- That was Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

I was in transportation.

- My folks worked for the Diamond A too.

They worked on it.

They lived on the Old Circle P Ranch on that Cheyenne River.

- Let me ask you too about the wintering the cattle.

Did you ever put up hay?

- Yeah, we put up hate Rudy Crick.

Just one year, didn't we?

1957 when we picked the bucker piles up, and water run out of them?

- Yeah, '57 was a real wet year, real open winter, '56 and seven, and it started raining in May.

- Yeah.

- It rained every day for 90 days.

Of course it was good for us.

We didn't have to stack hay very much.

- But you were, you were haying for both the cattle and feeding the horses?

- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I never will forget time we was haying at Rudy Crick.

His brother, Ray was quite a character.

I suppose we all were.

Anyway, one of the neighbors had his stack, and his stacker on his tractor and he left the hay basket by a stack.

We're going down the Circle P, here come Ray with one of them little tractors with a loader on it, scooped up that hay basket, and put it up on top of that guy's hay stack, and away he went.

(laughing) But if anybody asks me if anything stands out when I worked there, I would say old Bob Burrows, and I'd say Fat Breman too.

I would say Fat, he was a great guy to work for.

A lot of people didn't like him, but he would never ask you to do anything that he wouldn't do, and that's just the way he was, and he was good to us.

If you worked, he was good to you.

We would take, we'd quit on Saturday around noon, that was it, but he didn't want us in town until four or five o'clock in the afternoon, because he, you know, but so we had plenty of time to get ready and go to town.

- Sure.

- And then the 4th of July we always got a week off the fourth.

Probably would've taken us that long to sober up anyway.

(chuckling) - Jim, you were saying that your dad also worked on the ranch?

- My dad and uncle both did with Shorty.

They were at the farm when I was born working at the farm.

And I don't know who, when we moved from the farm to Rudy Crick, but I don't remember living at the farm, but I do remember living at Rudy Crick as little kid, and when the war come along, we was living at the 24.

There was a guy there working by the name of Sitka, John Sitka, Don Sitka.

And he was drafted and had to go to war, and when he left, he gave me a shirt.

(chuckling) You know, I was probably six years old, he was 19.

That shirt didn't fit very well.

(laughing) My mother kept it and I wore it.

- Well, I'd like to think that he came back, got back from him.

- Well, he come back, he got wounded over there.

He came back and he was at Fort Meade.

Excuse me, and I got to see him there.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You, you all know one another pretty well, I think.

Did you all work together at one time?

- Us three did, us three did.

- Yeah, and you talked about, I think maybe you talked about putting in a fence?

- Yeah, Leo and I don't remember who else, several of us built that fence cross there at Ridgeview.

- [Brian] I'm going to guess that it was a fairly long fence.

- Pardon me?

- [Brian] I'm going to guess that was a fairly long fence.

- Well, it took us near a month to build it, put in, dug the holes for the posts and set them.

I don't know how many times we had to dig that post hole digger out of the ground, but it was on a Ford tractor.

You know what that happened.

- I could tell a story about the Diamond A farm, one Jerry Till and Virginia.

They got to go to town every two or three weeks, and there was six of us stayed there upstairs, and when I got the cattle fed, we didn't have nothing to do but torment each other.

So Fat always bought everything in case lots, you know?

So we put pans of water on the stove, and we unsealed all of them cans, and switched them to other cans, and put them back in the boxes.

And Virginia would come to cook dinner and she'd open corn, and it'd beep apple pie mix.

(laughing) We never told her for a long, long time.

(laughing) - I'm going to hope that Virginia was a person of some patience.

- Yes, she was.

- Stored some of them boxes underneath that bed in the living room too.

(chuckling) They were still there when we went down there.

- It was kind of good to go to the farm.

We didn't like it, because we were away from a lot of our girlfriends and stuff, but she could cook, because if you had to eat his cooking or his cooking, or my cooking, you were glad to go down there.

- That was a question that I was gonna ask a lot about had Virginia been able to make it, but in terms of you know, who did the cooking and how that was, was that a lot of, did you have a dining hall, or did they come up with a wagon and cook wherever you were?

- Not really, well, I stayed a lot of time at Ridgeview Camp, and then the Loveland Camp, and whoever came in first would do the cooking.

Then the other one was to do the dishes.

The cook was never supposed to do the dishes.

It was always somebody else.

And I was at Loveland with Leo, and I was at Ridgeview with Leo, and Leo couldn't boil water.

(laughing) He's not here to defend himself, but he couldn't.

But that's how, you know.

Well, at that Ridgeview Camp, we lived in a grainery, wasn't it?

- Yeah.

(indistinct) - There was mice in there, too.

- You sleep at night, a mouse run over your face.

- But they didn't eat much.

(laughing) - If old Bob could get them to run over you again, he would.

- All we really had was a refrigerator and a stove.

- We didn't have refrigerator, Shorty.

- I thought we had a gas refrigerator - No, we just had a stove, gas stove.

- We didn't have a refrigerator.

- No refrigerator at Ridgeview.

- If we did have any steak or something, we cooked it up and ate it right away, because we had no way of keeping it.

- Got damn little meat.

- Yeah, very little, yeah.

- Did you guys have anything like regular hours where you say, "Okay, we're up at 5:30 and then you know, the chickens are in bed and we're going to bed," or did you just work whenever you had to work?

- We was usually up around four and five.

(indistinct) - Brandon was always up, of course, Fat, he'd come down there from Eagle Butte at three o'clock in the morning and wanted you up, so sometimes we'd never go to bed, we'd just take off.

God, he thought we were putting in a long day.

- Walk all the way through town.

- Yeah.

- Like everybody else.

- Yeah, and sometimes we'd get over the hill into a crick or something, and we'd lay down and sleep for awhile, nobody knew but us.

- Go out and saddle the horses, tie them to the fence, and when he'd come up, we just got in from riding.

- Yeah.

(chuckling) - Now all of you guys have had a fair amount of time in the saddle, I guess, but as it is, you know, was there a kind of a shift over to where you were using more motor vehicles, and if that was the case, or you always just were in the saddle?

- No, we never had a horse trailer to haul our horses from Ridgeview to- - There wasn't anything to pull a horse trailer anyway.

- From Ridgeview to down to the farm is what, 23 miles?

- Yeah.

- We'd ride down there and gather, and trail them up to Ridgeview, or Mossman, and put them in what they call the beef masters.

But we did it on horseback, and there was no, there was no horse trailers or nothing.

- Everett, did you have a favorite job, or something that you, that you really enjoyed?

- I enjoyed all of it, tell you the truth.

I worked with great guys, and we had a lot of fun.

We tormented one another, but we worked.

- Yeah, we worked hard, but we had fun working.

- But we played hard too.

- I could tell you a story about Everett.

We was working cattle over at, I think it was at Peterson Trail that time.

Maybe you remember, we, remember your dad made that, he called it hokey-pokey?

I used to pour on old Brahman's gray tail all the time, they'd get bucked off.

Anyhow, we had a big old Brahman heifer in the shoot, and I poured some on her back, and Everett was the clown out there.

He just barely made the fence and dived over.

He looked there, he said, "What's wrong with her?"

(chuckling) - Yep, if some of youse don't know what we're talking about, hokey-pokey, it's high-life, they call it too, and then them old guys would put it on a horse, in a lot of them rodeos, they just about turned inside out.

Well, I knew what it was, it was, the technical name for is carbon disulfide.

And I was telling them when I was in high school, I was in a, I took chemistry, and where'd they put me?

In charge of all the chemicals.

So what did I spot?

I spot the can of carbon disulfide.

And they said, "Well, you got to order some chemicals."

I ordered two bottles of that.

So I always had a big supply.

(chuckling) And we'd catch dogs at noon, and get them in the car, and doctor them up, kick them out, you know?

And they think they're a mad dog.

Boy, just yip, yip, yip, and slide their whole butt.

(chuckling) But we did that to his brother's horse, Ray.

We didn't tell him that.

(laughing) He was bigger than us, he'd kick the heck out of us.

But I doctored his horse up.

- Must've settled him down and come home with a snake.

- Yeah, he did.

(chuckling) But that's what hokey-pokey they called it, or high-life.

- You know, I was wondering about that in terms of, you know, way back in the day, they did probably didn't use antibiotics at all, and probably not that many chemicals, so did you kind of see that changing as time went on?

Because I know that, you know, there's a lot of different veterinary practices now that are relatively new.

Was that a transition that you saw?

- Yeah, well I've only thing we ever give the calves when we'd brand them was blackleg, wasn't it?

That was the only one shot I can remember, giving them blackleg.

- Blackleg, yeah.

- And now, you know, you're giving them everything, but back then, I think it was only blackleg, and then penicillin came out, and- - There were some of them places when calves were born out on the prairie, they never got touched til branding time.

- Yeah.

Yeah, you didn't, you know, that's just the way it was.

- Yeah, I was just wondering if you guys had seen a lot of change in terms of cattle handling?

- Oh yeah, definitely changed, yeah.

Oh, it's changed tremendously.

- And the cattle are quite a lot gentler today than they was then, I think.

- Oh yeah, yep.

- No, we didn't use to test them.

Now they test them all.

(laughing) - I know that the Diamond A had a bunch of Brahman cross cows.

What'd you say they had 800 of them?

- Yeah, about 800.

- And we were at Mossman, and I think they shipped up about 800 at steers out of New Mexico, and we're going to move him to that beef pasture there at Mossman, and then pen them, and vaccinate them for pinkeye.

And them big Brahman cross steers would jump from one pen to the other in them stockyards there.

- Was that when they drived out in New Mexico?

- Must've been, because they drived out and shipped all them yearlings up?

- Because Leo and I gathered them, and in the rehabbers were coming in then, and so we had to move them from down at Lovelet up to Mossman.

And Fat Breman told Leo, "Now you tell them guys to get their cattle out of there."

And because he didn't want them when we were vaccinating working them yearlings.

He didn't want them being there bothering us.

And this one guy didn't, or none of them did.

They were going to wait until we had them gathered.

And Fat, he took to this one guy with a bullwhip, and told him, "You get your you know what out of here."

Run him plum out of the corral, because we were trying to vaccinate them steers, there he was in the way.

- Say with 800 Brahman cross cows, we got done working them, and Fat had Jim and me count them on the way out the gate.

The last one, Jimmy poked it with a working stick, and it kicked him, and knocked him, cooled him, knocked him plum out.

He laid there a while, he come to, and Fat said, "Well, how many was there?"

Jimmy said, "I don't know."

(chuckling) He remembered it after a while.

- We moved a bunch of cows from Ridgeview to the farm one night, Leo, and Jimmy, and I and who else was in on it?

Yeah, we drove cows all night.

It was hot, so we waited until dark, and them old cows knew they was going to the river anyway, so we trailed them down there in the dark that night.

- Them old Brahman cows would drop them ears, pick up their calf, and they'd just line out.

A horse would have to trot a lot of times to keep up with it, and they were great mothers, but then they'd always have their calf.

- They would hide their calves.

- Yeah, but they knew where they were, and they had dropped them ears, and away they'd go.

God, they'd line out.

It was kind of, kind of great, because you know, they'd just string up for, heck, a mile.

You'd probably have three or 400 head.

They'd be all strung out.

- There really isn't any of that line left out in the country is there, the Brahmans?

- Not areas in the south country.

- Okay.

- But not up in here.

- [Brian] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- In the desert country, Nevada out there.

- Yeah, I suppose that you all had some experience of moving cattle onto rail cars?

- Yeah, that's quite an experience.

If you had the right kind of horse, you could do it pretty good.

That horse had push them up in there, but most of the time you had to do it afoot, but it was quite a lot of work, but I never did not enjoy it.

It was always kind of fun too.

You'd make fun out of it someplace.

- Well, that had to be a key to work, I would think, just getting some fun out of it.

I was again, you know, talking with young Bob, and he was telling me that he went on that Lantry drive, which maybe there was more than one, but he said he went on this drive in 1934, I think.

Did any of you do a drive like that where you were moving cattle some distance, or were they more confined so that you know, not confined, but there wasn't any need to drive them a very long distance, I guess when you guys were there.

- Oh, yeah, yeah.

- Oh, there was?

- Well, from Ridgeview to down to the farm is 23 miles.

- 25 miles, yeah.

- And we'd take them down in the fall, and bring them back in the spring.

And then there was other pastures over there at Mossman where we had some, and then there at Ridgeview, but taking them down to the farm was the longest one, and that was like 27 miles.

- How long did that take you?

- You know, when we had them Brahman cattle, it didn't take very long.

Yeah, we leave about three in the morning, four, and then get down there around noon.

And of course they, some of them had been up and down there would be, so they knew where they're going.

They'd just line out and go.

- Yeah, a few of them Brahmans weren't mothered up yet.

Took them plum to Ridgeville, and some of them headed back plum to the Diamond A, to the bottom down there.

Then it's on the way back again next day, they'd come back up by themself.

- You know, I probably am going to think of some other things to ask you guys about, but at this point I'd kinda like to start with Darby if he's got something that he wants to ask you guys to talk about a little bit.

- Well, I just, how many of you guys trailed cattle to a rail head or did you truck them, or how did you did cattle out of there?

- There was no trucks.

- Well, what was the places you went?

- Well, there were several places that trailed them to the ridge and the railroad, Mossman or Rousseau or whichever.

- So they had rail at Mossman?

- Yeah.

- They're a good set of rails at Mossman.

There was a railroad track at Ridgeview.

- Ridgeview, Mossman.

- I don't remember loading any at Ridgeview, but I'm sure they did.

- Yeah we did right there at the camp, and then Lafonte has a rail where they came in there too.

- One time at Ridgeview, we just getting ready to brand, we had five, 600 head in the corral, and Roy Heart, I think was the boss there, and I seen this train a coming.

I said, "Roy, you got that train honks the horn before he gets to Ridgeview."

"No, he won't, he sees all these cows here he won't."

Sure as hell he honked the horn.

The cows laid the south side of that corral flat as a pancake.

They run for five miles.

Then we got to saddle up and took us a week, so we never did find them all.

Yeah, he was looking for a gun.

(chuckling) - Did you guys get in on building any of the corrals you were working?

- Oh yeah, we'd build all the corrals all one winter down there at the Diamond A farm.

We'd put water or kerosene or what was it?

In the holes and saw it out, and dig some more the next day.

- So that really was part of the transition from the only way they did it for you guys.

You guys used corrals.

- Yeah, there wasn't, years ago when they run the wagon where they gathered them, they'd have 15, 20, 30 cowboys.

There was only four or five of us back, you know, for coming over.

- Sometimes that was too many.

- And sometimes you'd get some that to get in your way.

Yeah.

- Andy, you gotta tell us a little bit about the old officer's quarters down at Fort Bennett.

Did you tell me it was everybody thought it was haunted?

- Yeah, oh yeah.

Yeah, nobody stayed there alone very long at night.

There was ghosts and everything in there.

You stayed alone, well, you're not very alone.

- If you was sleeping downstairs, you would swear to Christ there was somebody upstairs walking around.

- You could hear him walking, and you heard the doors open and shut.

- You get upstairs, then they're downstairs.

So it I suppose you was playing cat and mouse with them.

- Yeah, my brother, Willie he seen this guy standing right by his bed one night.

It scared the hell out of him, so he got his pistol and put it under the pillow.

Day or two later, that same guy showed up again.

He was too scared.

Stood right by his bed again.

He said he was too scared to grab his gun.

I said, "Well, how do you know that?

I think he was just dreaming."

He says, no, he said he smoked my little pipe, a little pipe over there, and he smoked a little pipe, it was still warm.

- Well that house, they moved it off in the bottom, and the guy that got it, him and another guy they were drinking and one went, passed out, and the other one did too and here, they thought they was only there by themselves, one of them, and hear or they met head on, and they said they ran for a half mile before they slowed down.

They thought there was a ghost after them.

That was the story they told me, and I can believe it.

I stayed down there alone, and I swear to Christ somebody was upstairs.

So the next night I went downstairs.

and then the- - Well, it scared Jimmy so bad one night, he crawled in, run downstairs and crawled in bed with Fat and Eva.

- Is that right?

(laughing) - So Fat Breman was the foreman when you guys all worked there?

- Yeah.

- How long had he been the foreman?

- I think he, didn't he starting around '49, '50, somewhere in there?

I would say around '49, because he was in World War II.

and he came back, he worked for them, and then I think he took over like '49, or something like that, and then he, until they sold it then.

- Did you guys get to meet Williams, the owner at the time?

- I've seen him a couple of times.

- I seen him, I met him once at Ridgeview, you know, old Bob Rose, he was cooking for him, cooked a great big bowl of soup of some kind, and they all got done eating and they said how good it was, and Rose, he reached over, there was a big spoon on the dish dish rag.

He said, "I wondered where the dish rag was."

He had cooked the dish rag in the soup.

(chuckling) - So first of all, these guys are my friends, and I'm proud that I know them.

I guess my question guys, I love horses and whatever.

Tell me the worst one you had to ride, and the best ones.

- Well, there was a horse by the name of Goat I had.

And if you got next to a dam, he walked right over to the dam and lay down in the middle of it.

He did that twice to me I had to a walk home.

And there was another one I think they called Slick, a good horse that would have winned a suicide race if we were to put him in it.

He could catch any other horse on the ranch is how fast and, you know, powerful he was.

- I know, Everett, my dad bought horses from your dad that become a good bucking horses, so you had to grow up on kind of (indistinct) horses, didn't you?

- Oh, yeah.

We had, you know, rode whatever we had.

I think one of the best horses we had there for the Diamond A day was an old horse we called Bar Ten Brownie.

He was 27 years old, and that little sun of a gun would still buck with you.

You know, but he was a hell of a cow horse, but he'd buck with you.

And Bob Rose said he thought he was around 25 years old.

- But roped a lot off him, you'd cut off him, rope off him.

- But he liked to buck.

- [Shorty] Yeah.

- Yeah, see that Bar Ten, you know how that came about.

Well, the Bar Ten belonged to Hans Mortenson's wife, and she was an enrolled member of the tribe, and the horse has belonged to the Diamond A, but if they had that Bar Ten brand on them, they didn't have to pay taxes on them, and that's how they had them horses.

- And a lot of them would buck, because we owned a lot of them that would buck.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I got bucked off a few times.

- I did too, almost landed on my head.

(chuckling) - A lot of the Diamond A's horses came from the King Ranch them blind back red bucks, and (indistinct) all had line backs.

A lot of them came from that he bought up a bunch of mares and studs from the King Ranch in Texas.

- Who did?

- Williams did, and they had them there.

- That was going to be my question related to this one, is just, you know, where the, did you have a line of horses that had just been at the Diamond A, or were you getting horses moved in and out from different places?

- They had that mare bunch, I know that, and I don't know when it was that everybody's stoled off in the Diamond A, cattle and horses.

And a lot of them, one guy I know of came back, and went to work for the Diamond A, told them he had gathered their horses, and he did, and then two years later he had 50 head of horses.

(chuckling) You know what I'm talking about too.

- I mean, my point was a lot of them horses, you know, I've heard stories as young about a lot of them horses were pretty nasty that you had to ride, because you guys never got to own any horses when you worked for the Diamond A, did you?

- We had, Shorty, you had yours there.

- Yeah.

- And Ray had his there, and I didn't have any of ours.

We had a couple, and then not for very long, but rode their horses most of the time.

- We started with you, Jim, and we'll we'll end with you, and it really is just to ask you if there's anything else that you want to add.

- I need to tell a story that Leo would have told.

- Oh.

- The buck that Kool-Aid.

We used to get water, drinking water on the dell.

We'd strain it, and well, Bob Rose got bucket of water that time, and they brought it in, and there was the moss in there.

So Leo, he goes down to the dam, catching a couple of frogs, and put them in there.

And Fat Breman was the first one in, boy he drank a cup.

Second cup, a frog stuck his head up, and Rose caught hell that that.

(chuckling) - Was that young Bob or old Bob?

- Old Bob.

- Old Bob.

Do you guys still have the saddles you rode when you were younger?

- I still got one.

- Yeah, I still got up, (indistinct) mine.

- I don't have mine.

- We ride the four-wheeler now.

- Still got your saddle, Jim?

- No.

I got parted with it when I went to California, somewhere along the line.

- Well, we had a lot of fun with old Bob Rose when we worked there.

He'd work just as hard as we did, and he was always playing a trick on us.

- Yeah.

- You had to just do it back to him.

I know I was sitting in front of the door one day, and he poured water down the back of my pants.

I said okay, so anyway, I had him figured out, and he'd cook, and I do, we'd wash I always do wash, help wash dishes, and he'd, soon as he get done eating, he'd go to the outhouse, and then I timed it.

About the time I figured he was outside the door, I opened the door, and I threw the dishwater on him.

Hollered, "Watch out, Bob!"

"You son of a bitch, hollering watch out when you throw the water on me?"

I got even with him.

- He'd go to this outhouse, it was quite a ways from the bunk house.

Every once in a while, he didn't make it all the way over there.

So he had this winter underwear in his room.

He had a slit back there, I sewed that shut.

(laughing) A time or two he made it, but pretty soon he didn't make it.

I said, "Uh-oh."

He made a (indistinct).

He was walking kind of stiff legged, he was cussing me for doing it.

- You know I've had this idea that cowboys have a little reputation for fighting now and again, and it makes sense to me entirely.

(laughing) - Eddie nailed his shoes to the floor while he was sleeping.

He'd always get up in the morning and then yawn, and then he'd stick his feet in them, and he stood up, "Whoa."

(chuckling) Tipped over.

- Well I myself, I enjoyed working there, and we worked hard, we played hard, and we worked around good guys, good people.

And for Fat and Rose, they were good people to work with and work for.

- What were you gonna say?

- Dad was branding inspector in the early fifties, and my mother and I went with him to Ridgeview for him to look at some cattle.

Anyway, we went into the house, and that was one of them old graineries turned into a house there at Ridgeview, and old Bob had the coffee pot on the back of the stove.

Well, they decided he ought to make coffee, open it up and it was dirty, so she went to throw it out, and there's a dish rag in the bottom.

She throwed it out, washed the pot out, put fresh water in, and made coffee.

A while later Bob come in, and his coffee pot was cleaned, and had coffee in it, and he said, "You ruined my coffee pot.

You ruined my God damn coffee pot."

- He would never throw the grounds out.

- Hell, no.

Needed to get that much grounds in there before.

- Cowboy coffee.

- Just cook them over and over.

Made better coffee that way.

(chuckling) - All right, I think we'll stop rolling now, (harmonica playing) and I wanna thank you guys for sitting down to share this.

- Thank you.

- Thanks.