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BUNCH GRASS

A CHRONICLE OF LIFE ON A CATTLE RANCH


BY HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL

AUTHOR OF "BROTHERS" "THE HILL" ETC. ETC.

1913




TO MY BROTHER

ARTHUR HONYWOOD VACHELL

I DEDICATE

THIS BOOK




FOREWORD

The author of _Bunch Grass_ ventures to hope that this book will
not be altogether regarded as mere flotsam and jetsam of English and
American magazines. The stories, it will be found, have a certain
continuity, and may challenge interest as apart from incident because
an attempt has been made to reproduce atmosphere, the atmosphere of a
country that has changed almost beyond recognition in three decades.
The author went to a wild California cow-country just thirty years
ago, and remained there seventeen years, during which period the land
from such pastoral uses as cattle and sheep-raising became subdivided
into innumerable small holdings. He beheld a new country in the
making, and the passing of the pioneer who settled vital differences
with a pistol. During those years some noted outlaws ranged at large
in the county here spoken of as San Lorenzo. The Dalton gang of train
robbers lived and died (some with their boots on) not far from the
village entitled Paradise. Stage coaches were robbed frequently. Every
large rancher suffered much at the hands of cattle and horse thieves.
The writer has talked to Frank James, the most famous of Western
desperados; he has enjoyed the acquaintance of Judge Lynch, who hanged
two men from a bridge within half-a-mile of the ranch-house; he
remembers the Chinese Riots; he has witnessed many a fight between the
hungry squatter and the old settler with no title to the leagues over
which his herds roamed, and so, in a modest way, he may claim to be a
historian, not forgetting that the original signification of the word
was a narrator of fables founded upon facts.

Apologies are tendered for the dialect to be found in these pages.
There is no Californian dialect. At the time of the discovery of gold,
the state was flooded with men from all parts of the world, and
dialects became inextricably mixed. Not even Bret Harte was able to
reproduce the talk of children whose fathers may have come from
Kentucky or Massachusetts, and their mothers from Louisiana.

Re-reading these chapters, with a more or less critical detachment,
and leaving them--good, bad and indifferent--as they were originally
printed, one is forced to the conclusion that sentiment--which would
seem to arouse what is most hostile in the cultivated dweller in
cities--is an all-pervading essence in primitive communities,
colouring and discolouring every phase of life and thought. One
instance among a thousand will suffice. Stage coaches, in the writer's
county, used to be held up, single-handed, by a highwayman, known as
Black Bart. All the foothill folk pleaded in extenuation of the robber
that he wrote a copy of verses, embalming his adventure, which he used
to pin to the nearest tree. Black Bart would have been shot on sight
had he presented his doggerel to any self-respecting Western editor;
nevertheless the sentiment that inspired a bandit to set forth his
misdeeds in execrable rhyme transformed him from a criminal into a
popular hero! The virtues that counted in the foothills during the
eighties were generosity, courage, and that amazing power of
recuperation which enables a man to begin life again and again,
undaunted by the bludgeonings of misfortune. Some of the stories in
this volume are obviously the work of an apprentice, but they have
been included because, however faulty in technique, they do serve to
illustrate a past that can never come back, and men and women who were
outwardly crude and illiterate but at core kind and chivalrous, and
nearly always humorously unconventional. The bunch grass, so beloved
by the patriarchal pioneers, has been ploughed up and destroyed; the
unwritten law of Judge Lynch will soon become an oral tradition; but
the Land of Yesterday blooms afresh as the Golden State of To-day--and
Tomorrow.


*       *       *       *       *




CONTENTS

CHAP.

I.   ALETHEA-BELLE

II.   THE DUMBLES

III.   PAP SPOONER

IV.   GLORIANA

V.   BUMBLEPUPPY

VI.   JASPERSON'S BEST GIRL

VII.   FIFTEEN FAT STEERS

VIII.   AN EXPERIMENT

IX.   UNCLE <DW61>'S LILY

X.   WILKINS AND HIS DINAH

XI.   A POISONED SPRING

XII.   THE BABE

XIII.   THE BARON

XIV.   JIM'S PUP

XV.   MARY

XVI.   OLD MAN BOBO'S MANDY

XVII.   MINTIE

XVIII.   ONE WHO DIED

XIX.   A RAGAMUFFIN OF THE FOOTHILLS

XX.   DENNIS

*       *       *       *       *




I

ALETHEA-BELLE


In the early eighties, when my brother Ajax and I were raising cattle
in the foothills of Southern California, our ranch-house was used as a
stopping-place by the teamsters hauling freight across the Coast
Range; and after the boom began, while the village of Paradise was
evolving itself out of rough timber, we were obliged to furnish all
comers with board and lodging. Hardly a day passed without some
"prairie schooner" (the canvas-covered wagon of the squatter) creaking
into our corral; and the quiet gulches and canons where Ajax and I had
shot quail and deer began to re-echo to the shouts of the children of
the rough folk from the mid-West and Missouri. These "Pikers," so
called, settled thickly upon the sage-brush hills to the south and
east of us, and took up all the land they could claim from the
Government. Before spring was over, we were asked to lend an old
_adobe_ building to the village fathers, to be used as a
schoolhouse, until the schoolhouse proper was built. At that time a
New England family of the name of Spafford was working for us. Mrs.
Spafford, having two children of her own, tried to enlist our
sympathies.

"I'm kinder sick," she told us, "of cookin' an' teachin'; an' the hot
weather's comin' on, too. You'd oughter let 'em hev that old
_adobe_."

"But who will teach the children?" we asked.

"We've fixed that," said Mrs. Spafford. "'Tain't everyone as'd want to
come into this wilderness, but my auntie's cousin, Alethea-Belle
Buchanan, is willin' to take the job."

"Is she able?" we asked doubtfully.

"She's her father's daughter," Mrs. Spafford replied. "Abram Buchanan
was as fine an' brave a man as ever preached the Gospel. An' clever,
too. My sakes, he never done but one foolish thing, and that was when
he merried his wife."

"Tell us about her," said that inveterate gossip, Ajax.

Mrs. Spafford sniffed.

"I seen her once--that was once too much fer me. One o' them
lackadaisical, wear-a-wrapper-in-the-mornin', soft, pulpy Southerners.
Pretty--yes, in a spindlin', pink an' white soon-washed-out pattern,
but without backbone. I've no patience with sech."

"Her daughter won't be able to halter-break these wild colts."

"Didn't I say that Alethea-Belle took after her father? She must hev
consid'able snap an' nerve, fer she's put in the last year, sence
Abram died, sellin' books in this State."

"A book agent?"

"Yes, sir, a book agent."

If Mrs. Spafford had said road agent, which means highwayman in
California, we could not have been more surprised. A successful book
agent must have the hide of a rhinoceros, the guile of a serpent, the
obstinacy of a mule, and the persuasive notes of a nightingale.

"If Miss Buchanan has been a book agent, she'll do," said Ajax.

*       *       *       *       *

She arrived at Paradise on the ramshackle old stage-coach late one
Saturday afternoon. Ajax and I carried her small hair-trunk into the
ranch-house; Mrs. Spafford received her. We retreated to the corrals.

"She'll never, never do," said Ajax.

"Never," said I.

Alethea-Belle Buchanan looked about eighteen; and her face was white
as the dust that lay thick upon her grey linen cloak. Under