Texas Tales: Pranking a Tenderfoot
His was a humor with hair on its chest like the life he lived.
Ramon F. Adams
One of the outstanding traits of the cowboy, and one seemingly possess by all, was his quick wit and love of humor and rough pranks. Without his rich and unaffected humor and his ability to laugh at his troubles and strenuous work, it is doubtful if he could have withstood such a life of violent action as he followed. Not only was it vital as a source of relaxation and amusement, but it served as a sort of release from the strain and pressure piled upon due to his handling of dangerous animals.
That’s how cowboy historian Ramon F. Adams introduced his slim but sharp-witted volume The Cowboy and His Humor. Adams went on to say, “Every tenderfoot was fresh meat for the cowhand, and stringing a greener was the favorite sport of the cow country.”
True to the cowboy code of “stringing a greener,” Henry D. Steele became “fresh meat” for a group of cowhands on an 1882 drive from Texas to Kansas. By his own admission, he was the “tenderfoot” on this particular drive. He was hired as a wrangler by Marcus Allen “Mark” Withers, a twenty-year veteran of trailing cattle who made his first drive at the age of thirteen. Somewhere along the trail, however, Steele was made camp cook when Withers’s original cook, John Story, left the drive and went back to Texas. It’s unclear whether Steele finished the drive himself, since, as he said, “getting tired of that work [cooking], I quit the herd and returned home [to Texas].”
It speaks well that Steele hung up his spurs (at least for a time) because he didn’t want to be turned into a biscuit-shooter—generally a thankless job that brought little praise but plenty of profane complaints—and not because he was the object of an ongoing prank. There’s on old saying, “You can judge a man by the horse he rides.” Cowboys also judged a man by his ability to take a joke. Few things caused a man to lose respect in the eyes of a cowboy than to be a sour sport. Henry Steele proved to be a man who could take it not only because he didn’t quit the herd when he was strung along, but also because he tells the story of how he was made sport of—and laughed about it.
Early in the spring of 1882 I was employed by Mark Withers of Lockhart, to go up the trail with a herd to Kansas. Before starting on the trip I went to San Antonio and purchased a complete cowboy equipment, broad-brimmed hat, leggings, Colt’s pistol, scabbard, cartridges, and the usual trimmings.
We went down into McMullen County to get the cattle, and I was selected as horse-wrangler for the outfit. The cattle were bought from a man by the name of Martin. While we were at Tilden, George Hill came up with some of the boys and helped to gather the herd. I was pretty much of a “tenderfoot,” just a slip of a boy, and the hands told me this man Hill was a pretty tough character and would steal anything he could get his hands on, besides he might kill me if I didn’t watch him.
They loaded me up pretty well on this kind of information, and I really believed it. They would steal my matches, cartridges, cigarette papers and handkerchiefs, and tell me that Hill got them. I reached a time when I was deprived of almost everything I had and even had to skin prickly pears to get wrapping for my cigarettes, believing all the while that the fellow Hill had cleaned me up. Things were getting serious and I was desperate, and if Hill had made any kind of a break the consequences would probably have been disaster. At last Hill, who was full aware of the game that was being played on me, called me asides and told me that it was all a put-up job, and said it had been carried far enough. We all had a good laugh and from that time forward harmony reigned in camp.
In the spring of 1883, no longer a tenderfoot, Steele signed on as a hand with Richard Grafton Head to drive his herd to Ogallala, Nebraska. After the sell of the cattle, Steele agreed to drive them to Cheyenne, Wyoming for the new owner.
Whether he continued to cowboy is not known (at least I’ve not been able to track down additional history of Henry Steele, Texas cowboy). He concludes his story:
It has been just thirty-seven years since I went over the trail. I do not know what has become of the men who went with me on that trip [in 1883]. One of the hands, Charlie Hedgepeth, the negro, was hanged at Seguin by a mob some years ago. I saw Mark Withers at the Old Trail Drivers’ reunion in San Antonio in 1917.
Sources:
Ramon F. Adams, The Cowboy and His Humor (Austin: The Encino Press, 1968), 3, 43, 44.
Henry D. Steele, “Played Pranks on the Tenderfoot,” in The Trail Drivers of Texas, edited by J. Marvin Hunter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 137–39.
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Derrick
Really good story. I have been the target of many "Tenderfoot" pranks in my life and while they can be annoying they have also been very amusing. I really liked the phrase, "Stringing a greener." I think I will need to create a t-shirt for Sammie to post to Amazon Marketplace with that on it!