Audio
Interview with Jim Hester
Transcript
JH: As I said, I was a cowpuncher. In those days, if you was a cowpuncher, you had a pair of chaps, and a horse, and a sixshooter, and a big chew of tobacco, and you didn't care too much about--the main things that you cared about was the red light district in San Bernardino and the red light district at Red Mountain, and the rest of the world didn't mean too much. I'm really serious. It didn't
RC: Your dad in Colorado sold them to this ranch....
JH: Sold them to the ranch in Summit Valley, old Flores ranch in Summit Valley. My older brother and myself were told to bring these horses out here, a hundred head of horses. So we left in the early spring, I was just a punk kid. I was born in 1894 and this was 1910.
I was 14 years old, and my brother was 8 years older than I am. So we had a couple saddle horses and a lumber wagon and some bacon and beans and a little salt and pepper and baking powder and some coffee. Course dad had been back and forth across here several times driving cattle between Arizona, California, New Mexico and even up north, up to the northern part of the state and down to the Irvines in Orange County. He drove cattle down there. So he knew the area. So he drew a map and he says, Well, at a certain time of day you'll see two peaks of such and such a thing and that'll be such and such a thing, and there'll be a water hole about so and so, and you head for that". Well, this was all open country in those days, well practically all open country.
There were ranches across there but you didn't have freeways and railroads and fences to contend with. So we started for California with these horses and three and months a half/later we were here. Now a lot of people said, How'd you get by the Indians?" Well, that was no problem; we gained horses. We had more horses when we got here than we started with. And we didn't steal them. Now people wanted to know how those things happened. So while I'm giving you this information you might want to think about it to help you make a story because you probably don't hear this very often because most of those writers never rode a horse.
When you start out to move a bunch of horses like this, the first thing you want to have is a couple of good geldings. Stay away from your studs. Don't have studs in it but have a couple good geldings and a couple good mares you can use as sort of a lead horse. And have some horses that you can catch without too much effort and work with your horses a week or two or maybe a month before you start out. Know your water holes and head for your water holes every night and don’t push your stock till they get panicky. And if we did kill, which we did in a couple cases, Indians' horses, we'd give them two horses or three horses for the one we killed. And we had no trouble. Course we had little problems, wasn't as though it was all riding in the back end of a Rolls Royce. But there was no real trouble. And we come all the way across. That was in nineteen hundred and ten. "Well, they said, "How about long places?" Yes, we had long places.
We had 75 and 80 mile stretches without water. But when you get in a spot like that, first thing you knew what to do about it. And the second thing, you wouldn't try and get out in the middle of the sun and drive like a wild man when the sun was a hundred and ten degrees and up and push your stock through there. And another thing they said, "How many miles did you ride?" Well, we estimated to ride about 3,500 miles. Well, it isn't that far there. But we go back to what I said a little while ago. When you're moving livestock, you've got to follow water, you see. And we didn't have any freeways so you have to go through where you can go through.
So you have to know where to go. But you've got to follow the water. So I've been in this country in and out.
Now, we come out here and we brought these out here to the stock people. And that way we became acquainted. And I stayed out here and worked for them. And then I'd go back home. And then I'd come back out here. Now I didn't work twelve months a year for Swarthout. I didn't work twelve months a year for Black, because in the first place, a cowboy's job wherever he is, it's very rare that he works twelve months in the year for one outfit because their season is not that long. so you come out here and you work for an outfit three or four months and then you'd be--they call them drifters in motion pictures. We didn't call them that. I don't think we called them anything. We just went looking for another job. They call them drifters or saddle bums now. I don't remember that they called us a saddle bum or drifter or anything else.
Description
Mr. Hester discusses the cowboy experience and moving cattle through the Joshua Tree area when it was open range.
Credit
Ranger Reino Clark, Joshua Tree National Park, National Park Service
Date Created
02/08/1975
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