Eighty Miles to Water
The situation was serious, with only this encouragement: other herds had crossed this arid belt since the streams had dried up and our Circle Dots could walk with any herd that ever left Texas.
Andy Adams
The heyday of the open range and trail drives from the brushlands of South Texas to railheads in Kansas and ranches in Wyoming and Montana lasted less than twenty-five years, roughly from 1866–1890. On well-trod trails like the Chisholm, Western, and Goodnight-Loving, herds averaged fifteen miles a day and under experienced hands, cattle put on weight even if they walked 3,000 miles to their final destination.
Though cattle generally faired well along the trail, cowhands faced one hardship after another. George Duffield’s journal is a running commentary on the miseries he and his compañeros faced on the trail driving cattle from Texas to Iowa in 1866.
May 31: “Swimming Cattle is the order. We worked all day in the River & at dusk got the last Beefe over—& am now out of Texas—This day will long be remembered by me—There was one of our part Drowned to day (Mr Carr) & Several narrow escapes & I among the no.”
June 27: “My Back is Blistered badly from exposure while in the River & I with two others are Suffering very much[.] I was attacked by a Beefe in the River & had a very narrow escape from being hurt by Diving.”
August 12: “I was sick last night[,] had a chill & the cholic this morning—feel badly yet.”
Then on the sixteenth of August he recorded: “I got struck by a Horse (in the face) & have a very sore eye [and am] still troubled with the cholic.”
Every cowpuncher had to endure the dangers and dread of river crossings and deal with foul weather. It’s doubtful any cattle drive reached journey’s end without having stampeded—more than once. These were common hazards every cowboy had to handle. But not every drive had to cross long stretches of dry trail, where water was not to be found or had between creeks or rivers. For those who had to endure such arid lands, foreboding filled every soul. Thirsty cattle and horses became difficult to handle and were apt to turn back to their last known water source. Nor was it unusual for cattle to go (temporarily) blind.
Larry McMurtry wrote about this in Lonesome Dove. I suspect he got the idea from an early volume on living life on the back of a cowpony.
The cover story for the June 2010 edition of Texas Monthly was a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lonesome Dove. In the article, McMurtry admitted he had “echoed” the relationship between Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow F. Call on that of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving. McMurtry also confessed to lifting the epitaph Goodnight wrote for Bose Ikard, the cowhand and scout who was the model for Lonesome Dove’s Joshua Deets. McMurtry doesn’t say, but he undoubtedly read Ikard’s epitaph in J. Evetts Haley’s Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. But that’s not all. McMurtry further acknowledged, “I knew vaguely that I was paralleling part of [E.C.] Teddy Blue Abbott,” who wrote a highly popular trail driving memoir: We Pointed Them North.
McMurtry drew on other works for inspiration in crafting the story of Lonesome Dove. He likely came up with the name of Xavier Wanz, the owner of the Dry Bean saloon, from J Marvin Hunter’s The Trail Drivers of Texas. I’m convinced he came up with the episode of the Hat Creek Outfit crossing eighty barren miles from Andy Adams’s The Log of a Cowboy.
In Lonesome Dove, McMurtry writes, “All day he [Call] rode west, and the country around him grew more bleak . . . .” Upon his return to the outfit, he told Gus how far it was to the next water. Gus says, “It’s only your stubbornness kept us going this long. I guess it’ll be interesting to see if it can get us the next eighty miles.” The Hat Creek boys drove their cattle during the cool of the night, resting during the heat of the day. McMurtry threw in a sandstorm and by the time it blew itself out, “lack of water was beginning to tell on the horses, and the weaker cattle were barely stumbling along.” Then the cattle began to backtrack to their last known water, their eyes white with blindness. But when the cattle picked up the scent of water in front of them, they trotted toward it “like a blind army.”
Adams’s own eighty waterless miles wasn’t as dramatic, though it was just as grave. Adams wrote matter of factly, “Here was a new situation to be met, an eighty mile dry drive.” Unlike the Hat Creek outfit, which was the first to pass through that dry eighty miles with a herd, unsure they’d make it, Adams’s Circle Dot outfit was confident they’d make the their eighty miles since others had. He wrote, “The situation was serious, with only this encouragement: other herds had crossed this arid belt since the streams had dried up and our Circle Dots could walk with any herd that ever left Texas.” Like the Hat Creek crew, the Circle Dot crew drove their cattle in the cool of the night and rested in the heat of the day.
The eighty miles the Hat Creek outfit had to cross was completely devoid of moisture. That wasn’t the case for the Circle Dot outfit. Every morning dew covered the grass. And though “cattle will not graze freely in a heavy dew,” the Circle Dot herd was able to moisten their tongues, so that by the time they crossed thirty miles “neither horses nor cattle had been put to any extra exertion.”
But dewy grass wasn’t enough to slake the cattle’s thirst. They grew restless and began to show the want of water. Horses, especially, fared poorly. “Amongst our saddle horses the lack of water was more noticeable,” Adams wrote, “as a horse subsisting on grass alone weakens easily; and riding them made them all the more gaunt.” When the cattle finally smelled water, “the herd walked as only long-legged, thirsty Texas cattle can walk.”
As far as the men were concerned, “the longest dry drive of the trip had been successfully made, and we all felt jubilant. We stripped bridles and saddles from our tired horses, and unrolling our beds, were soon lost in well-earned sleep.”
The Hat Creek boys “spent most of the day sitting in a puddle” or “devoted [their] leisure to complicated games of mumblety-peg.”
Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 309, 315–17, 325.
George Duffield, “Driving Cattle from Texas to Iowa, 1866,” Annal of Iowa, vol. XIV, no. 4 (Des Moines, April 1924), 252, 255, 258.
Larry McMurtry, in John Spong, “True West,” Texas Monthly, vol. 38, issue 7 (June 2010), 130.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 683–4, 688, 691.
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I don't think many modern people would've lasted long on the trail...Those cattle men were a hardier breed! 🤠