A Cowboy Looks Back

The cowboy way of life is as vivid in Julian Baker’s mind today as it was when he started cowboying at age 13.

Cowboying was a hands-on ranching education with sleeping accommodations bunk-house style or under the stars in a bedroll. A cowboy’s day often began between 3 and 4 a.m. and didn’t end until well after dusk. Before hitting the hay there were evening chores and supper to eat.

“That’s the way we lived back in those days,” Baker said. “We didn’t know any different – it’s just what you did.” Baker’s uncle came to the Carlsbad area in 1906. The rest of his father’s family came in 1909, in covered wagons from Bandera County, Texas.

Baker was born in Pecos, TX, in 1926. His parents had a ranch in Ochoa and the family drove to Carlsbad to shop, often spending the night with his mother’s folks. The 70-mile trip took half a day in the Model “T” pickup,” he explained.

“My dad bought a saddle the year I was born from a man named Kilpatrick who was the saddle maker in Carlsbad. It was one of the first cushioned-seat saddles made,” he said proudly, noting his son Jim now has the saddle.

Toughness goes hand-in-hand with cowboys, and Baker portrayed a certain level of that same toughness beginning at age 3. “I stubbed my toe and fell and knocked my jaw out of joint. My mother just knocked it back,” he said, explaining that long rides to reach medical help were often the impetus for parents doing whatever needed to be done.

During the summer of 1939, Baker, then 13, began working for a rancher in Andrews, Shortly thereafter, he quit school to cowboy full-time for a whopping $1 a day wage.

“I bought my first pair of leather chaps at Lovington when I was 15. They last all your life, and I still have them.”

“I got a lot of education there,” Baker said of his first job as a cowboy.

And part of the education included being thrown from a horse many times. He explained one way he learned to break a horse was to use a hackamore and then stake them out on a wagon wheel and log and leave them for two days. The idea was to get the horses to run, stumble, fall and finally give in to rope training so the cowboys could break them for riding.

“I took my share of the spills, but I didn’t get hurt too bad,” Baker said.

While breaking horses in Loco Hills, some horses went “plum crazy after eating loco weed and would stagger and couldn’t see,” he said, explaining that there wasn’t much that could be done other than tie a dried cow hide to the loco horse and “let him run himself to death.”

“Where we went to break those horses we called it baching because we had to do our own cooking,” he said. “You get out like that, you have to learn to survive.”

In the early 1940s, Baker helped move 500 head of cattle 40 miles to the Caprock. A cook was hired for the chuckwagon. Another wagon hauled baby calves, and the cowboys slept on the ground. Mutton was on the menu and Baker wanted no part of that.

“I drank coffee and ate biscuits and molasses for a week. I couldn’t eat that mutton,” he said remembering the strong smell and taste.

“Soon after that, I took my saddle and bedroll and caught a train to Monahans, Texas. We cowboys moved around quite a bit in those days,” he added.

Baker got the wind knocked out of him after roping a wild feral hog that broke the cinch on his saddle and sent him flying through the air. “I went flying off my saddle and (the hog) hung that saddle up in the tree,” baker said, noting he’ll never forget that hog and how tough and bad it tasted.

In 1942, he went to work on the Cowden Ranch, where he stayed about eight years doing stray man work. That meant his boss hired him out to work for neighboring ranchers. He worked for Tom Woods at the Bar-V-Bar Ranch, John Lusk at the Rail Ranch, Will Fenton at a small ranch 20 miles outside of Carlsbad, and Green London at the CJ (A.J. Crawford and Johnson) Ranch.

Baker recalled unpleasant conditions back then with the wind and dust blowing 50 mph at times. During the 1930s and 1940s, cowboys had to deal with blowflies that infected bleeding calves after castration and branding.

“They would blow their eggs, and the worms killed a lot of cattle – those worms would eat them up and you had to doctor all summer long,” Baker said, adding that Texas and New Mexico teamed up to eradicate the flies by sterilization in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and subsequently made a deal with Mexico to do the same a certain distance from the border.

“I doctored so many worms back then I got worms in my lariat rope”, he said with a chuckle.

Baker recalled a time in the mid-1940s when so much rain fell that the sunflowers grew “as high as a man on a horse” and they had to flush the cattle and calves out of the sunflowers, he explained.

He spent two years in the Army, from 1946-48. He met Pat Bayne in the fall of 1948 at a Legion Hut dance in Carlsbad. During those days, cowboys came to town once a month for a haircut, clean clothes and some needed socializing.

“Back in them days, you wore your britches until they stood up,” he said chuckling. “When it came a month’s time, we were ready to come to town – no matter what.”

He and Pat dated once a month for a few months and then married in 1949. His cowboying experience and marital status brought more money when he went to work for the Snyder Ranch as a straw boss. Average wage for a single cowboy was $35 a month. He was paid $65 plus room and board.

“As a straw boss, you’re out there making sure everything gets done. I had experience, knew how to handle the men, knew the country and cattle and how to work them,” he said.

The money wasn’t enough for a family to live on, so he quit full-time cowboying to make soot out of natural gas. He then went to work for El Paso Natural Gas and continued cowboying on weekends. He retired as superintendent after 35 years. He and Pat bought a small place in Comanche County, Texas, and raised cattle and hay for the next six or eight years before moving to Carlsbad in 1990.

“I didn’t do anything else like that. I really did just retire. I was so bowlegged from cowboying I could hardly walk,” he said, explaining he wore out his first pair of knee replacements and had another pair.

Cowboying was a way of life that suited Baker for nearly four decades. It provided him a sense of freedom in the great outdoors; and no matter how alone he was out there under the stars, he never felt lonely.

“I never knew nothing different, and that’s just the way we lived back in those days,” Baker said.

From the Carlsbad Current-Argus, June 2007.

Sent in by Roxie Swain.