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33My Adventures in the West
by Joseph Wegley 1867 - 1946It was a common way of speaking in the east, when I was a boy, that parts of the west were so healthy that it was necessary to kill someone to start a graveyard. Well, this saying came true to a large extent in the town of Mingeville, Montana which is now Wibeaux. In 1890, there were three graves in the cemetery – one of a girl killed by a horse, another a man killed by a horse, and the third a man who was shot. No other deaths have occurred there at that time.
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One day, while on a round-up, the boss, Billy Longfellow, said, “Joe, let’s go and get some beef.” We went out to the herd, located a good fat maverick, which means a great big calf almost a year old. Billy took down his rope, but missed. I started after him with my role but before I got to throw my rope, the calf ran through the rope corral and ran into the mess kitchen. She fell right into the mess wagon or, as they cowboys called it, the cook’s kitchen.
Well, a comical cowboy was sitting on a bed. He jumped up, grabbed an axe and knocked the calf in the head and cut its throat and said, “I’ll show you would-be cowboys how to a calf. If you fellows had to rope your meat, you would starve to death.”
One spring on the cow round-up, we were camped on Cedar Creek which was forty miles above Glendive. Our beds, of course, were on the ground. Well, in the night, a boy by the name of Al Pratt happened to lay his arm outside his bed into water. He gave the alarm. In a few minutes we all grabbed our beds and threw them into the wagon. We got our night horses, and one boy tied his rope to the wagon pole so as to drag the wagon to higher ground. Ten minutes later, there were four feet of water where we had been camped. There had been a water spout up the creek which caused the flood.
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In riding, it was a common occurrence for a man to get thrown or fall off a horse, and occasionally one would get his shoulder dislocated. In such cases, one of the boys would pull off a boot, put the heel under the boy’s arm near the shoulder, and shove the elbow down. The joint would snap back, and the man would go on riding. There was a fraternal spirit among cowboys toward one another, even men we knew were dodging justice, and could be depended on to aid and assist even at the risk of his life. Any cowboy got along as long as he behaved himself, and attended to his own business. The cause of the boys being wild and reckless was that they were all young, with no old heads to act as governors or balance wheels, and it was necessary to be honest owing to the unwritten law of the range.
In conclusion of my experience on the range I will say, my object was mostly to get the lowdown on western reckless life, which I got, and which ceased about 1900. It will be almost history as far as coming from first hand information hence I wrote this story for the benefit of my own family or others who are interested in the early days of the range which I believe will be more popular in fifty years from now than at present which is 1936.
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The End