By Bill Peck

From the 1900's until about 1960, livestock shipping corrals stood beside the railroad tracks at most small towns in Arizona. Made of creosoted timbers and plank fences, one could get a good look at all of the local cowboy gentry at shipping time They sat on the top board of the fence which was laid flat for walking purposes.

It was also a perch for the Arizona State Livestock Sanitary Board's inspector, who in our area, was Thad Delk. It looked much like a ball game as the cattle were herded past the inspector on the fence. Thad was a pretty good drinking man as were the others and a bottle made its way back and forth among the participants as they called out each brand. 

If a brand didn't look right to Thad, the order was to rope and shave the critter for a better look. Some strange cattle from distant places showed up occasionally at shipping time. Nobody questioned Thad's opinion on the brands. There wasn't enough whiskey in Yavapai County to skewer his vision or corrupt his decisions. Thad drove an old green Nash to his brand inspections. One day he drove over the edge of the Bagdad Road into a canyon and was killed. I guess he took a short cut to the bar. 

Loading the cattle into the slat-sided boxcars usually didn't get underway until near dark. The whole day had been spent separating the stock into different pens of calves, steers, heifers and cows. The hands were tired and not a little drunk by this time and tempers got short. After a meal of beans and beef the first stock were prodded up the chute into the waiting cars. It was necessary to get in the cars with them and twist tails, kick and whoop, to crowd them into the back so the maximum number could be crowded in. This sometimes got interesting when some testy critter decided that it had been shoved around enough. It was here that I acquired my vocabulary. 

It burns in my memory the long streams of the dusty herds approaching the stockyards from the various ranches. Cattle ranching was the sole commerce besides the mines at that time and the source of our sustenance. Yearlong accounts were settled at the stores and new ones were started. Rarely was the there much slack in between. 

Trucks were just starting to appear. Mostly, the roads were too steep and crooked for them to function. One night about midnight, a trucker woke me up asking where he could find a loading chute to off-load his cargo of mostly downed cows which littered the truck bed like corpses, which indeed some of them were. It was one of those really dry years in the '50s when everybody was out of feed and cattle were worth nothing. These unfortunate cows had endured the ride all the way from Burro Creek to Hillside, a distance of 35 miles over hell's worst road and obviously some weren't going any farther. 

I directed the driver to the "T Ranch", which was just out of town and volunteered to help him unload. The original dirt road to Bagdad was being replaced and the road was all torn up causing us to miss the turn off. I recall that the generator was out on the truck and we were running without lights, since at that time of night traffic was unlikely. 

We were turning around and diagonal across the road when here come a car at about 40mph, which was crowding the limits of the road. Its lights didn't pick us up in time to stop so it swerved only to hit the rear wheels on the trailer. I opened my door to see what happened when the car came whizzing back from the bounce off of the tires, nearly clipping me and the door. They bounced at least fifty feet but miraculously the man and woman suffered no more than bloody noses and a broken windshield. If they had had airbags they would have likely died. 

Our whole operation was doomed from the start. We arrived at the T Ranch to discover nobody was home but the dogs. This created the additional problem of spotting the truck at the chute from on top of the load while watching one's legs and the seat of one's pants. Also, you had to watch out for the cows whose modesty had been violated from being prodded with an electric hotshot in its most tender places that they didn't skewer you with it's horns. We finally got all the cows up except one that was dead, and into the corral. All in all, it took most of the night, for which I received a cigarette. 

Anyway, wages were low and one didn't work cattle for the money, only to eat. Cowboys got scarcer until they were mostly gone, the real ones. More and more trucks appeared, as did pickups. Then came the horse trailers. Then the fifth wheel trailers.

Today they haul horses much like city people walk their dogs--and drive cattle! They wouldn't know how! 

By the end of the sixties the shipping pens along the railroad tracks were gone. So were the cattle cars. No more were the vehicles that my father, as an apprentice telegraph operator in North Dakota on the Northern Pacific R.R., loaded buffalo into, only to witness the boards fly off as the buffalo kicked them to pieces. I often wondered how those cowboys ever got the buffalo that far. They mustn't have worn boots or they couldn't have run that fast. I bet they didn't haul their horses in pickups. They tell me these were the good old days, but I wouldn't know. At least I don't have to outrun a buffalo! 

(Bill Peck is a long time resident of Hillside, Arizona and frequent author of Days Past articles.) 

 

Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(ra138ph). Reuse only by permission.
Cattle ranching was a major commerce of early Prescott. This photograph was taken in 1900.