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| (c) 2006 Michael Pettit |
Sam Cowden is horseback, on Hollywood--"best horse I ever owned." A neighbor strapped for cash sold Hollywood--best
horse he ever owned--to Sam because Sam would ride him right, give him a good home. And Hollywood has the best home a horse
might imagine--the Cowden Ranch, a fifty-thousand-acre family ranch near Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
Hollywood, a handsome sorrel gelding, is the horse Sam rides in rodeos, in team roping competitions, but he's more than
a performer. Hollywood's a working horse, and today Sam is using him to gather and sort cattle in Conchas, a seventy-five-hundred-acre
pasture on the northern part of the ranch. Early this morning Sam and a handful of cowboys left Cowden headquarters, trailering
their horses to the far reaches of Conchas, about five miles away, where they began their roundup.
Roundup and rodeo both derive from the Spanish verb rodear, "to surround" or "go around," and modern
rodeo--with its bronc and bull riding, its clowns and announcers, its team and calf roping in big arenas before cheering crowds
and television audiences--derives from the humble and solitary work of cowboys on horseback, like the roundup today.
It's beautiful country where Sam ranches--Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising snowcapped to the northwest, Conchas River
off to the north, and isolated mesas dotting the southeast, where the Llano Estacado, the fabled Staked Plains, stretch out
forever. It's beautiful, spare, open country, where the wind almost always blows, as it does this morning. Sam and the other
riders spread out around the pasture, keeping each other in sight as specks on the horizon, and everyone understands his place,
in the roundup and in the world. Land and sky and wind keep each cowboy honest.
As morning progresses, the cowboys sweep back and forth around the perimeter of the pasture in a tightening noose, picking
up cattle along the way, pushing them toward a water tank where they will rendezvous. The riders watch one another's distant
movements, and react accordingly, in concert, keeping space between them but allowing no cattle to slip through. Speech is
impossible; the only sounds are the wind and windblown bawling of cattle. Eventually, as the circle closes, riders can hear
one another whistling or yipping at the cows and pokey calves they drive ahead of them.
The cattle have been through this before--Sam brands his calves every spring, early in May--so they know the drill. They
know the tank where the roundup, or "gather," converges, if not its name--Big Red. There was once a windmill at
Big Red, but now water is pumped to metal storage and watering tanks where the cattle collect. When the gather is complete,
each cowboy arriving with his group of twenty to thirty head, it's time to sort the herd.
(c) 2006 University of Oklahoma Press
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