Memories of Old Montana

I first met Charlie Russell in the fall of the year 1888. He was night herding beef cattle on the Judith Basin and Moccasin Range roundup. Charlie was very modest and never clai...

A few years after my marriage we settled on a squatter’s right on the head of Kicking Horse Creek in the Sweet Grass Hills in Montana. The land was unsurveyed at that time and o...

In 1892 I went to Wyoming and broke horses there for a couple of years. Then I heard of the Cripple Creek gold stampede in Colorado. I sold my rig and went to Cripple Creek and...

When I was a kid, an old Indian told me a story about the badger and coyote and said they hunted together as partners. I had a very good chance to test that story when I was liv...

In the spring of 1887 I went to work for the “RL” outfit located on the Musselshell River in Montana. The outfit belonged to the Ryan Brothers of Kansas City. They run about 25,...

In the year of 1886 Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux tribe got permission from the agent at Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota to make a visit to the Crow Agency in Montana to...

A few years after the big outfits moved their herds to the Milk River country, cattle got very thick along the Canadian line and as there was no fences anywhere the cattle would...

In the days that I write of there were very few women folks in the country and a less number of girls, but there was one family who had one girl of about seventeen years and I t...

In 1879 my folks came across the plains from Fort Pierre to the Black Hills and the first town we came to, of any size, was Scooptown and from there to Deadwood was mostly mount...

In the year of 1885 I got my first job as a real cowboy. I went to work for the “7D” outfit on the Belle Fouche River in the Black Hills night herding horses on the roundup. The...

I was born in the year 1869 in Manchester, Iowa. My father served in the Civil War and during that service contracted consumption and was discharged from the army and came home...

For a good many years there was a section of the country along the Canadian border and the Milk River that the cattlemen thought was no good for cattle—but in the late eighties...

Fred Reid was one of the old time deer and elk hunters in the early days of Montana. He told me the first bear he ever killed when he was a young boy, that he was so scared he d...

One time we went from the DHS ranch at Rocky Ridge close to the main range of the Rocky Mountains to the ranch the outfit owned at Malta, which was in the eastern part of Montan...

The old man that run the DHS that I worked several years for was the finest old-tune cow boss I ever knew. Jim Spurgeon was his name. He always looked tough and hard and was abo...

Several people not familiar with horses have asked me what a bronco-buster means, and they seem to think all cowboys are bronco riders, which is not so. I sometimes talk to an o...

Most of the big Montana cow outfits moved their herds north of the Missouri River between 1888 and 1894. The point of crossing on the Missouri was an old steamboat landing calle...

In the days of open range, everybody had great freedom. A cowboy could change countries every spring if he wanted to and they were always drifting from one range to another—not...

This incident I write about was known as the Johnson County War in Wyoming in the years of 1893 and 1894, and I presume some of the old-timers of today remember those days when...

As I grow older there are rather strange thoughts come to my mind about cowboys and cow people. I have mingled with most all classes of the human race and I have some very true...