The Story of Bully

AUGUST, 1908

BY CHARLES D. STEWART

THAN this black Bully, I never knew an ox that was an abler near wheeler —never a one that could sit back with such bull-dogged determination and put the brakes on a string of wild, wrong-headed Texas steers. One would not think there could be so much will-power in a mortal body.

He was none of your gaunt, ungainly, ridge-back cattle; he lived comfortably in a roomy physique and had legs like posts at the four corners of himself. His neck was finely wrinkled and fissured with extra pelt, as if Nature had calculated on letting out the tucks, not knowing how big he might grow. He had a wealth of swinging dewlap that swept the flowers as he passed; it looked as if he were growing sole leather as a byproduct, an extraneous animal fruit of himself. In fact, for a steer, he was generously endowed with everything bovine; he looked the bull en bon point. Nature had put on his horns the rings of four summers.

With all his bench-legged solidity, he was not clumsy; he was perfectly muscled, from the end of his calfish nose to the tassel of his lion-like tapering tail. His seat of power seemed to be in his built-up neck; and it was because of this gristly mass of neck that he was called Bully; for even though he was a steer he had the mien and make of a sire of the herd. From that neck his ship-shape lines spread out expansively to his fourstomach middle, slid off over neat loins, and dwindled away in his tail. Withal he was wise and Juno-eyed—and guileless as a calf.

His hair lay sleek and short, — he was largely Spanish, — and that was a great satisfaction to me. I have seen the dust fly out of his yoke-mate, Brig, in a way that made me think I was beating a carpet, and so it was a comfort to observe that I had one ox that cleaned himself automatically and kept an ebon smoothness. For bovine nobility, general bullcomeliness, he would have stood out among a herd —but that might be said of any steer that is selected for a near wheeler.

On evenings when we had been breaking prairie far from home, and I was tired sitting on the iron seat, I would mount him and go home ox-back. Or I would go out in the morning and mount him en pasture, bring him home to the plough, and thence proceed leisurely across the open to the farm we were making. It is different from riding a broncho — less up and down and more round and round. It is, in truth, the nearest approach to motion in all directions at once. At every step of the rolling, weltering gait, your leg is softly compressed between his swinging paunch and that of his partner; thus you go along for miles, knee deep in ox. This feeling of the muscular labor of a ponderous bull makes it less like riding than transportation; like sitting atop a load of life.

He had a barrel-like body and a platform of a back; and I have thought, at such times, that he would have been fit for the cavalry — or rather the bullery — of an African king Certain of the Ethiopian potentates use the bull in battle; and I am sure that if he had ever tried this particular bayoneted steed, old Mushwush would not have parted with him for anything. For cavalry purposes he would have had to use Bully (after the African practice) with a cincture, using a girth to ride bareback. A horse has his pelt fairly well fastened to him, so that if you stick to his hide you stay on the horse; but a bull is loosely clothed in his. Therefore the results are entirely different. Hence the African practice; and it is my opinion that to have used Bully with perfect success in the cavalry it would have been necessary to use two cinctures — a girth fore and aft — to belt his hide on.

However, for straight traveling, without much evolution, a person who was a little used to ox-equitation found him a very good rocking-chair. A woman, I think, could have made out on him by sitting far forward and taking hold of a horn; but a man was more fit for him, being a sort of clothes-pin to his loose mantle.

The walnut beam of his yoke came down to Texas with some settler from the North, and was carved with Yankee care; and when I scraped down its ancient surface to the wine-colored wood, my near wheeler and his mate looked handsome in it. It was a well-modeled yoke, too; the rest of them labored against mere hacked-out timbers. Jeff Benson (the Texan to whom he previously belonged) had ornamented the yoke, in front of the eye-bolt, with a Lone Star of brass-headed tacks; and the ends of it were further decorated with tin tobacco tags by the same artist. It was a distinctive yoke, a fit recognition of his superiority; and it sat upon his neck as so much jewelry from which depended the trifle of a log chain.

This mention of Jeff reminds me of a tug of war that Bully was engaged in by the man who trained him —for it was Jeff that caught him wild and made an ox of him. Jeff was rather argumentative in a dry way and patriotic to his own “string” — he was a tall, wiry, typical Texan, which is possibly sufficient description. He had, I might add, a slight brisket under his chin (like an ox), he chewed the cud, and spat, and Nature in her wisdom had gifted him with big hearty eloquence in certain words that oxen consider their favorite epithets. He was one of the race that seems to have been specially provided to “ bust ” the soil and blaze the way for culture.

Jeff, being bound with his string for a certain location on the prairie designated by four surveyors’ stakes, — the boundaries of the farm he was to make, — came past the Colonel’s place where Bill Pierce was putting on an addition of a few acres.

“ Bet you he can.”

“ Bet you he can’t.”

“ Bet you a dollar and a quarter he can.”

The point was, whether Jeff’s wheeler or Bill’s wheeler could hold back the hardest. A bull, for various reasons, can and will pull still more in a contrary direction than he can or will pull forward. It is due to peculiarities of his structure, and to mechanical reasons incident to his sitting back on all fours; and furthermore, and not a bit less, to his natural disposition. The full extent of his strength and will-power can only be seen when he chooses to make himself a Sitting Bull. And so it came to the test. First it was to be seen whether Jeff, with his whip and other persuasion, could make Pierce’s oxen drag Pierce’s wheelers. Then Jeff’s wheelers were to be put in their place and show whether they could hold back the same string, against Pierce’s efforts.

Pierce had a fairly well-broken off wheeler, but his main dependence, as is usual, was the near wheeler, one Scot by name. Although I had a partiality for Bully, I must say that Scot was a very good ox — as worthy a foe as Bully could have met. Of the wheelers in that particular neighborhood, Scot had the reputation of being the determinedest. Mis indurated bull neck was worn bare up to the roots of his horns with his dutiful woing. He was a tawny, tousled, roughish sort of a Carlyle of an ox; his hair seemed to be as perverse as himself. He had a horn that was not quite straight on his head — but it was becoming and looked well on him as being the natural offshoot of a perverse brain. But it is no wonder he was stubborn. Having had to do much breakingin tough wire-grass, where a long and powerful string of raw, newly recruited cattle was needed, he had been used to hard fighting to bring them to a standstill at the end of every furrow. In this educated function of holding back with such odds against him he had learned that he had to pitch in mightily or be dragged; and this experience had made him a live dog. To see this Texas steer throw himself back with his mind made up, and stick to the task even when he was being pulled along stiff-legged, would be a revelation to any one whose notions of cattle arc based on the cow in ordinary. He was none of your meek and gentle kine. Scot was older at the business than Bully, but Jeff did not care for that; he unhooked his cattle, took out his wheelers, and renewed the challenge.

I have long thought that I ought to put this tug of war fully on record, as something having a basic bearing upon the winning of our new country — something very universal and fundamental and already passed unrecorded into the artes perditæ — especially as it would have to be done by one who has firsthand experience. But it is a delicate task to undertake, and l do not know even how to make excuse; but possibly the world will understand after I have told more about the ways of Bully. I have heard some very good deep-sea swearing; but, as history would show, the art of ox-driving has required the world’s most eminent profanists. It cannot all be told. But it all had to be done, even in Puritan New England; and I doubt if there is a Yankee left who could put a fid in a chain.

Suffice it to say that Bill took the bet; Jeff examined his cracker and stood off at good lash-length from the string; Bill stood at the left rear corner of the outfit to attend to his wheeler’s state of mind, and then the contest began. Jeff’s whip uncoiled its serpentine length and hit vacant space so hard that it fractured the atmosphere; the string started to move. Bill said “Wo!” and Scot squatted. The yoke slid up behind his ears; he threw up his head and caught the beam at the base of his horns and he laid back “ for keeps,” his stout legs braced and set. Jeff plied his art on the cattle ahead; Bill commanded his ox to “ wo,” and the chain stood stiff as a crowbar.

At each outburst from Jeff the chain wavered forward, and still harder Scot held back, twelve hundred pounds of solid resolution. He balked like a bulldog on Ihe chain. Sometimes it would seem that Jeff had him coming—but Scot would not. Always, with some new summoning of will-power, some inward do or die, he would get a hold with his hoofs and bring them all to mere dead endeavor. But presently he began to slip — ten feet — twenty feet, still struggling for a chance to come back again with all fours set. He nearly did it; and then there seemed to blow up a storm of language. Jeff’s eloquence rolled forth like thunder, and played along his length of leather lightning; it created havoc on the backs of the cattle like a summer storm on a shingle roof, Scot fought like mad. He went along a little farther, partly dragged and partly walking stiff-legged as he struggled to come back on his haunches; and Jeff kept driving oxen with a crack at every outburst. Scot came forward a step at a time and a slide at a time, till he had been brought a hundred feet or more. Jeff shut himself off and smiled peacefully; he caught the cracker in his hand and looked perfectly content and harmless.

“ Ye can’t do that — not with my Bully,” he said.

Bully was more leisurely (all “ staggy” steers are) in his ways of going at things. He lagged slightly in his progress, and as the beam slid up his neck he threw his head up slightly in the usual way and inclined ponderously backward for the tug of war. He always held his head slightly sidewise, for some reason, catching the beam on only one horn; and he looked forth at you with the one-eyed unconcern of a Cyclops in the confidence of his power. While Bill did his best ahead, Jeff kept addressing his own ox in a subdued and private tone of “ Wo, Bully.” You have to address a near wheeler personally if you want him to do his best.

Despite all the power the cattle were exerting, there was no motion to show it. There were only the yokes sunk deeper in their worn, scrawny necks, the horizontal chain, and the fixed position of the sitting bull. Jeff’s feelings, to judge by his looks, went up and down like a thermometer as the chain began to show signs of going forward or back. He stood with bent knees and watched; and as Bill broke forth worse than ever, he laid one hand on his ox and said very confidentially, “ Wo-o-o-o, Bully.” Suddenly (and to Jeff it must have sounded like the rending and tearing of Destiny) Bully got one leg out of the furrow where he was braced, and the wire-grass went ripping through the cleft of his hoof. They were dragging the whole mettlesome mass of him. They seemed to have him overcome, despite the mechanical brace of his short, thick legs. But only for a few feet; he gave his head an impatient toss, planted himself anew, and came back like the everlasting buttress of his bull determination. The harassed cattle were now straining forward as if they would choke themselves on the bows; they took steps without advancing; they veered from side to side as if the leaders were trying for an easier opening through the atmosphere. Bill threw out his lithe bull-whip and started to pull out of there; they made Bully plough a furrow with each of his four hoofs. Jeff put his whipstock in front of the wheeler’s nose and spoke to him personally — and again Bully woed. This time he brought his hoof back into the furrow, got all fours rooted into the upturned sward, and sat back as in a lockjaw of his whole physique. And there he stuck. His whole welterweight of ox was now in action and he was not to be budged. Jeff let the string pull against Irresistible Force for a while longer, not to have any argument about it; and then he claimed the victory. He had won. Of course there was a technical argument about this and that point of the art; and it was still going till Jeff was so far on his way again that his voice would not carry back.

This victory became part of Bully’s pedigree; Jeff submitted it verbally to any one who talked ox.

In common with other staggy, philosophic wheelers, Bully had another ability that surpasseth human wisdom. On dry, hot days, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he would suddenly “wo” on his own authority, and having brought them all to a stop he would drop in the furrow. Without any ceremony whatever, he would stop them and plump down on the prairie like a big frog in a pond. The idea of taking a rest seemed to strike him in the head with the force of a sledge hammer and fell him to earth; and then he would deliberately start chewing the cud. When he did this you could not make any impression or have any influence with him until the appointed time had come. While you mauled his staunch carcass, or put your boot-heel into his strong ribs, or prodded him with the whipstock, he would ruminate in holy quiet, looking out upon the world with a mild and gentle eye. You might torture his body if you would; you could not affect his inner spirit. He had retired within himself for a season; he had duties with his digestion. In this posture he had a distended Falstaffian paunch and an air according : — “ Shall I not take mine ease in my furrow ? ” He seemed to have taken in his feelings where they would he out of harm’s way; and I have thought sometimes that he might be one of those who believe in faith. It was strange — but it must be remembered that a much-used ox is inured to hard usage and abuse.

I must say, however, that I seldom disagreed with him. How could any one differ with him — to his face ? His eyes were murkily blue; and looking into his honest face I could only wonder how it was, anyway, that a black Spanish bull could see his way to be so obliging. He was indeed innocent to be so unsophisticated of his great strength; his obedience was a flattery. You could buy his affection for a mere corn nubbin, which he would reduce in his mill of a mouth, — husk, kernel, and cob; and all the time he would regard things with a doe-like eye and the tears standing out on his nose. Jeff, when he had him, was seldom disgruntled by this habit; he regarded it as a mark of brains in the steer; and being himself a philosopher, he would take a chew, following the wheeler’s example, and loaf on the seat. When the time was fulfilled, Bully would arise voluntarily, and then he would be good for any amount of balk and battle. I think it would have gone hard with any other ox that tried to do that. But Bully had to have his sacred rest; and it is never good policy to have a falling out with your wheeler.

In a cold blow — a dry norther — an ox is the best of all walking companions. A dry norther is a sunny, sweaty day in Texas, and then a change that makes you feel as if somebody had suddenly stepped into the north and left the door open. It remains clear and sunny; the cold is entirely in the wind; and so, on the south side of anything it is as warm as ever. You can take your choice of climate; a walk around a haystack is like circumnavigating the globe. It usually catches you when you are out on the shelterless prairie with your coat (if you have one) at the other end of a long furrow; and with the sweat upon you, you shiver and chatter. Here is where you take to the lee-side of your wheeler and walk along with him, stooping down in complete refuge from the cold. I have often been glad that an ox is not a long-legged, highup horse that the wind can blow through. He is not only a windbreak but a whole broadside of animal warmth; he is both cosiness and company; he is a perfect breastwork as you stalk against Boreas, with your hand resting on his tough neck or grasping his warm horn. Nowhere, in mere walled warmth or kitchen comfort, is there this same sense of refuge and shelter — of contrast between the warmth within and the cold without; it contains the secret of human gratitude.

And here, by way of apology, I must remark that this closeness of mine to the wheeler — this unavoidable relation of “brother to the ox ” — must be my excuse for writing in this vein of bestial intimacy. Even now I can feel the cold wind whisking past the edge of his dewlap that hung down like a thick curtain —• his portiere if you please. For half a day at a time I have gone back and forth hugging Bully, cold on the up furrow and warm on the down, till finally the sun, all too slowly, went down like a big red wafer and set its seal upon the day.

More and more every year we are becoming a nation of travelers. To those who would travel for both pleasure and profit I can say a good word for ploughing. It recommends itself to people in whatever circumstances, and for deeply founded reasons. When a man travels for pleasure he is likely to put himself at the task of enjoyment; when he is traveling to a destination, his journey is all a wait — his business with the landscape is to leave it behind; and I think it will be generally admitted that the culminating pleasure of a trip is in the arrival. Travels are more useful in the reminiscence, the fond memory, than in the actual experience. Now, in ploughing prairie with a sulky, you have the greatest of all human privileges, to loaf at work; and your outfit comes at every step to the object of your going. Your journey is all arrival. It does not break in upon one’s time at all; it exhilarates the cogitations like fishing or whittling; and by covering the ground so many times a man becomes thoughtful and thorough. It, more than anything else, makes thinking quite respectable, giving it that seeming remove from idleness that keeps the neighbors from talking; it cultivates the gift of remembering; it is altogether the best mode of travel.

In the choice of motive power, allow me to suggest the ox. The horse leans forward to pull, and even helps himself along by bobbing his head; he jerks a load out of a hard place by plunging bodily against the collar, stopping and lunging again; he strains through a hard place and then starts suddenly forward at his release; he works himself into a lather; and you, if you are the right kind of a person, cannot help feeling for him and assisting him with inward stress and strain.

The ox does not bob a horn. He simply journeys, and the load goes along. When he comes to a tough place his pasterns do not bend down; he does not squat to pull; he does not pinch along on the toes of his shoes; he seldom blows, and he does not know how to sweat. He does not exert himself at a patch of woven soil and then hurry up when he is past it. The chain becomes stiffer and the yoke sits solider to his neck, and that is all; there is no sign of effort. The earth may grit its teeth and crunch as it swallows the plough, but the ox stalks on his way. With the share deep or shallow, or lifted entirely and hanging from the axle, —whether he is ploughing earth or air, —it makes no difference to him. His most ponderous task is still himself, and he heeds no incidentals.

He is out for a stroll; he does not allow work to interfere with the even tenor of his way. His tendons are rigged to his outstanding rump-bones like so much spar and tackle, and he goes along by interior leverage; inside his old-woman hulk is the necessary enginework, and he will neither go slower for this thing nor faster for that. There is much about him besides his disposition that is self-contained; he is the antithesis of the automobile. To ride on his back is a cure for the indigestion; to ride behind him is a rest for the mind; a course of ox is an antidote for the ills of the times.

The steadiness of ox-ploughing is like sailing the prairie — out of sight of wood and water, and the earth curling up before your prow. A streak of wire-grass giving way bitterly beneath you gives the machine a tremor that imbues you with a sense of power — like an engine below decks. You are on a seat of the mighty. The yellow medlarks hurry along in your wake, keeping close to the opening furrow, steadfast as porpoises. The breeze, tempered by an ocean of flowering prairie, cocks the brim of your sombrero as you sail along, close to the wind. You sit on your seat and have a general disposition to let the world revolve.

I could, if I had a mind, write an excellent tribute to the ox, but all he needs is a record of facts. In the matter of primal motive power, it was he that founded this United States. In the two great transmigrations of our people westward, what jeopardy of life and limb has instantly rested on his sturdy neck — over the Alleghanies, over the Rockies, over the deathful desert, over the steep Sierras. In that great outpouring from New England that began about 1817, the ox, as usual, pulled forward and held back mightily on the mountain-side and laid down his bones for humanity. It was he who took our multitudinous ancestor from his old onion farm at Wethersfield and hauled him with his household to the Little Miami; and there he again assumed the role of prairie “ buster,” opening up the more generous bosom of nature. Again, in the days of ’49, he took up the trail; and the history of that exodus was writ across the continent in the bones of oxen. Where is deeper reading than this — the bones of two or three yoke lying where they fell, and across their skeleton necks the heavy beams all strung along on a chain that would move a freight train. It stands for departed strength in a fight to the finish. It means that the motive power ran out of water.

And having twice subdivided our people, cutting them almost entirely off from each other in the railroadless days, the ox did his part, along with horse and mule, to bring them together again. In 1863, on the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, they began a memorable work. On the mountain-sides of California a thousand axes began to swing and there was a roaring of twenty-five saw-mills — a reaping and threshing of trees. The mountain groaned as it brought forth a railroad. The oxen strained down the mountain-side with logs for the ties; they kept the Chinamen supplied with rails and ties a hundred miles in advance.

Eighteen months after this, eighteen thousand men (mostly soldiers) arrived at Omaha with three thousand teams. They were starting the other end of the railroad; and the two halves would finally match the ends of their rails in Utah. Omaha was not connected by railroad with any other place; they could not haul supplies with locomotives; but Chicago was building towards it. Ahead of them was a stretch of a thousand miles with but one tree upon it; and then the plains again. The teams brought material and locomotives from one or two hundred miles; they hauled the first locomotives to the starting-place and set them on their feet, as it were; and then ransacked six states and territories for more material. Right here the ox, as a long-haul machine, handed over his task to the locomotive forever. When the ox once has the machinery of “ civilization ” a-going he is needed no more; he is turned loose and forgotten. Nevertheless it was he that started the country, for he is the father of having and hauling. Tribute! The ox would not know what to make of such a thing. You may work him all day and then kick him out to graze all night; you may use him to found society and then kick him out of history. It is only left for us to try to realize the history of our country, even as seen through the medium of an animal. All hail, say I, the traction engine of our forefathers, the four-stomached, short-levered, grassconsuming, self-supporting ox.

For the purpose of the philosopher, the thinker, ox-driving is all it should be; it is equal to the fishing of the Clevelandean school of meditation. There is little interruption of one’s train of thought; and while all such practices make call for their vices, as lying and swearing, this needs only an idle vociferation that means little and comes as a matter of habit. And in the absence of line or bridle, there is naught to do but sit on the seat through long, slow furrows and keep on in one’s way of thinking; there is none of the distraction of newspapers and books and lectures to keep one from thinking. Of the two primitive vocations, sheep-herding was the school of the prophet. But prairie busting with a sulky plough is the natural chair of philosophy. The former is productive of the expansive, vacuous speculations, the iteration of the metaphysical, mystical Baa (sometimes spelled B. A.); but the latter, on the substantial iron seat, is the natural ruminator of definite human fact. When a man has long been in an attitude of thought, as if he were chewing the end of things and digesting the world at leisure, the world, no doubt, has a right to ask him what he has thought. In view of this it has often seemed to me that some one should print the main points of the Bovine Philosophy. It includes the fundamental principles of things as seen by our American form of the Man with the Ho.

I shall begin by reminding the world of the three stages of society — the pastoral, the agricultural, and the metropolitan, with especial reference to the United States. In the first stage, the cowman and the sheep-man occupy the land in a nomadic way, and fight each other for what they call their rights, the cowman objecting to the sheep because they crop grass too close, and cut it up with their sharp hoofs, thus spoiling the range. The “ cowboy ” is usually the aggressor, calling the other the Locust of the West; and in their fights the shepherd is often, to the surprise of many, the better man. He can fight with a fanatic frenzy peculiar to those who lead the life of the prophet.

The cowboy has been much misrepresented as a “ character; ” the genuine ones are seriously engaged in a trade which takes some time to learn, and it is a matter of business with them. Even more of a character than these men is the wild cow with her strange notions. Never having had occasion to think otherwise, she has an idea that man and horse are one animal — she believes in centaurs, and considers them proper. One time I dismounted in mid-range to my own legs, and was observed of a cow with a calf. She saw me do it. Imagine her feelings to see her centaur divide itself into two parts and act like that! She immediately felt it her duty to kill off such a miscarriage of nature; and while she would run from me on four legs she now ran at me. I clapped myself on my horse again just in time to avoid a horn; and she kept brandishing at me as I loped away. Such is the truly wild cow; she can run like a horse, and will fight upon occasion; and she can dodge a great deal easier than a horse. This is where the cowboy’s hardest riding comes in, for it is his business to outdodge her — to drive her where he wishes her to be. In the quintessence of his calling he is the artful dodger of the plains; and from this comes the peculiarity of his longstirrup riding, and all that makes his menage really different from that of other horsemen.

In this stage of affairs there comes trailing over the horizon a Jeff Benson, his bull-whip in his hand, his chain clanking against the tongue of his plough-carriage. He is “ full of strange oaths;” he threatens his chain-gang at regular intervals; he cracks his whip explosively and then subsides on his seat as peaceful as any fisherman. A gentleman fly-caster cannot surpass him with the pole and line, for though he casts no flies he can reach out and knock a fly off the ear of his near leader. He is come to make a farm for a German; and from this time the nomads must prepare themselves to civilize or move back. And what is the new ploughman driving ? A string of those very cattle of the plains.

This first of all ploughmen never appears with horses — always with cattle. This is in the nature of things. In the natural state of things, where there are as yet no corn and oats, the horse has stunted endurance but not muscular weight. As the draught horse is not only bred, but more truly made, out of corn and oats, he may be said to be created by the ox. The horse finds enough nourishment, strength, in the grass, to get himself. and rides nimbly over it, and that is all that is needed of him. But the ox has four stomachs — a large, economic digestive plant. He can do the heavy work; and, because he has this thoroughness with what he eats, he can even lie down in the furrow at noon and eat the dinner he has brought along in his anatomical lunch-basket. He is no trouble, no expense, has more power, and he does not pull things to pieces with sudden jerks. And so he is the one who does the work in the cornless, oatless state of affairs. Once he has done that tough task with the woven sward, conditions are changed, and he does not get the benefit of the series of crops he has started. The horse can keep the fallow field in order. The horse and the mule are preferred by a more adroit civilization; and so they come to eat his oats and be wliat he has made them. The streets of Chicago used to be filled with oxen. And where are the oxen now?

After the cowboy, the steer has a new master. For this new master, tied on behind, to make him go in any general direction is comparatively easy, seeing that the steer is still a dodger. Jeff can throw his whip out this side or that and regulate the course. But to stop a steer — that is the question! The cowboy has to trip him up with the lasso — throw him bodily. And to perform with him the parallel furrows of the field — that is still another question. Of course, if the ox were obedient he would stop when you told him or pulled on a rope. He would have to be thoroughly domesticated for that; and a new country can hardly halt civilization until a whole army of steers are somehow tamed and educated. Here was a problem in animal psychology and practical politics for the ox-driver to solve. The solution of it is that a bull is “ bull-headed,” and can hold back powerfully; and so one animal that has been trained according to his nature will serve to handle a whole string.

Let us follow Jeff to work. He is ploughing “ around ” a field, putting a furrow down one side of a strip, crossing over and coming up the other side; and so on till his furrows meet in the middle and he is done. At the end of a furrow his wheeler holds back and makes himself an immovable pivot, while the string is whipped around to cross over to the other furrow; and having arrived exactly at it the wheeler sits back again, and they are brought around accurately in the furrow. It is as if he had a corner of his team firmly fastened until such time as the other end was pushed around just right. Without the sitting back of the wheeler, the whip could only accomplish an erratic scrawl with the plough. But with this restraint upon them the driver has time to do fine work. Thus in ox-driving, as in the other arts, success does not depend merely upon power, but also upon restraint.

It is the near or left wheeler that is the principal pivot, because in this country we plough around land to the left, not to the right as they do in England. We rebelled against their way of ploughing.

Thus your primitive team is founded with one word, “ wo;” and that understood by but one ox. The ox-language now begins to grow. After hard experience the leaders begin to observe that when the word is spoken they are whipped around to the left; and then, anticipating the lash, they hurry to the left of their own accord. You take them at their word, and soon are addressing them direct. The word “wo,” that formerly meant “ stop,” has now changed its meaning by usage and means “ turn to the left.”

You want your other wheeler to hold back also in emergency, and especially in turning to the right on a road; and for him to stop you have a word with a different vowel sound — “ back.” He knows that for his own. Finally the leaders learn that this means to turn to the right; and it comes to be their word for right. Thus it is that in a new part of the country, as in Texas a quarter of a century ago, there were “wo-back” oxen —and the English language seemed to be contradicting itself. Leaders would hurry to the left or right at the words “wo” or “back.” And then they learned their names — and a more general and vociferous “ wo ” would bring them all to a stop without the work of the wheeler. But you were ploughing from the first. Like all earlier languages, it was one of fewer words and more inflections.

Here “gee” and “haw” become of interest, together with the usual “wo” and “back,” which we all understand the meaning of. To the dictionary, “gee” and “haw” — terms we inherited from England — are a mystery in their origin. It is said that possibly “gee” comes from “gee-off,” meaning to go away, as the leaders do when they turn. But that is simply saying that “gee" means“gee”—hardly an explanation. The fact is that it came to us from times so remote that the origin is lost. Now the clue to this could never he had by watching “gee-haw” oxen, for a very good reason. They are domesticated oxen; and domesticated oxen are broken one at a time by putting a young steer in a team and having him hauled about till he knows the whole vocabulary, by force. It is simply handed down from ox to ox. The Texas team I knew understood ordinary English in a way different from its meaning; and the oxen of British lineage understand an English that we do not know the original meaning of at all.

This seems to explain the mystery of “gee” and “haw.” Were they not the words addressed to the near wheelers away back in the beginnings of England ? Does not “haw” sound like “ho,” from the lantern-jawed dialect of an English yeoman? To a primitive team, as we have seen, “ho” would come to mean left, when used in their wild state. And as “haw” means left, to everybody, I think it was originally only “ho.” “Gee” might have been “ gee-ap ” — a corruption of “ get up ” as spoken to the near wheeler, just as you had them whipped around.

However, I do not know anything about it — I am simply trying to help the dictionary out of its difficulty, it not having had enough experience with oxen. I know nothing about oxen except in the primitive state, when nothing was inherited from former generations; and it is this I am telling about particularly. And such was the genesis of bread and butter; for before the cow furnished butter she had to provide the bread to put it on. So endeth the Bovine Philosophy.

Except, of course, one were to view the matter curiously, poetically. On this matter one might write a volume of history and speculation. The ox, Johnsonian as he is, has never had his Boswell. Clothes have had their philosophy in Carlyle, but not the cow. No seer has arisen to expound the original laborsaver of this steel-armed, reciprocal, thrust-and-pull, wheel-filled whirl and grind of to-day.

Because of woman’s first desire, man received the curse; and having her he had so much that he had to live on one spot. At that it was necessary for him to set to work; and he soon looked about for a way to put the work on other shoulders. Consider him sitting tired and discouraged by his first garden-patch, viewing the stream as so much power running to waste, and the beasts so much more muscular than he. And then his mighty resolve as he threw down the spade and decided to labor by proxy. See him as he views the woof and warp of the sward while woman waits hopefully for him to produce society out of the clay. Imagine him in his first inexperienced essays with the bull — what wrecks and wrestlings with the wild bull! I can see, myself, how they ran away with him across a whole township of Eden, and finally left him sitting in the hoof-marked muck of a distant watering-hole. There they had spilled him.

And whilst they stand peacefully and lave their bellies in the drink, he sits there and takes thought. He studies out the bull’s little weaknesses; and lo, he conceives the idea of the wheeler. I can see the satisfaction come out on his face to sun itself. Straightway he comes forth with the full-rigged team; and he goes and performs the engraved field. He can back and tack and do all evolutions — with whip and wheeler it is like paddle and rudder; there is no runaway now. He can plough with never an idle scribble or scrawl on the face of nature. He thinks he has circumvented the curse; he has taken Bos from his meditations and become boss himself. This was the beginning of motive power; and when it came to hauling stone and timber for his first dam or windmill, then was the ox his true helpmeet.

But it is no wonder that the ox has not had his life written. The three stages of society are more or less permanent, and he is used only at the beginning of one; his appearance is but momentary when he gives the new order of things its first shove.

This Bully owed his fine form, and his position among his fellows, to a piece of good fortune that befell him in infancy. When he was a calf he was missed in the spring round-up. Thus he was spared the branding, the weaning, and all that befalls a young bull who is not fine enough in breeding to become a sire of the herd. His mother was a black Spanish cow that had got up into that part of Texas from Mexico; and I think she must have been related to heroes of the bull-ring, for Bully looked the part exactly. His father was half Durham, and so he got his short symmetrical horns. Having been missed in the spring round-up, he took all advantage of a most affectionate mother. She let him nuzzle at her far beyond the usual time; and so, on a mingled diet of milk and grass, he filled out with the full physique of a bull. When the riders found him out, in the fall, he was still following his mother about; and it was a fine sight to see a neat black cow with so flourishing a child. He was almost as big as she, and just as strong; it was hard work to upset him by horn and jaw to brand him. He was evidently intended for a near wheeler. Jeff took hold of him as soon as he was used to the yoke.

Even in a story of civilization, it is necessary, I suppose, to tell what became of the hero. In the course of time he fell into the hands of a man who had no more work for him; and seeing that he was becoming older and tougher every day he was hurried away to Chicago. There they put him through the system — hair for plaster, horn for the Japanese to carve, soles for shoes and the high heels of beauty, combs for ladies’ hair, fertilizer, imitation butter, Iily-of-the-valley soap, more gew-gaws than Tittle Buttercup ever peddled. No doubt some of his tough hide became harness; and some of that worn-out harness is still hinges on corncribs, after so many years.

In Chicago there was an old Judas bull that was trained to lead the herds across the Bridge of Sighs. I have seen him, and I have thought how the near wheeler, in all the innocence and honesty of his heart, followed the crowd across that stilted runway. Inside there is a stall; and above the stall is a board on which a man stands with a sledge —at just the right height for the sledge to come down right on the star in the middle of each forehead. All day the man works, as if he were breaking stone or driving railroad spikes; and he fells herd after herd. I do not wish to be tragic; but standing before that stall I have felt like writing on it, “Here fell Bully, the father of his country.” It must be remembered that I knew him well, Horatio. They made beef of him — and used the rest for the by-product. But I’ll wager “ a dollar and a quarter ” they never conquered that callous bull neck of his. They never made charity soup out of that.