The Bronc-busting, Cow-punching, Death-defying Legend of Boots O’Neal
The solar shouldn’t be but up when Boots O’Neal begins his workday. As the 89-year-old cowboy readies his mount within the predawn quiet, he stuffs his arms into well-worn leather-based gloves. His darkish chaps are adorned with fringe, a slight sheen on the proper hip the place his nylon rope has polished the leather-based over time. He pulls down his silverbelly hat and grunts his method onto the saddle, planting his tall-topped boots within the stirrups. The horse he’s driving immediately is a darkish sorrel named Cool. Together they wait, because the cowboy saying goes, simply “cryin’ for daylight.”
This morning’s chore: Boots and three of his Stetsoned coworkers should spherical up some two dozen bulls scattered throughout an enormous grazing pasture, drive them to a set of pens a few mile away, and cargo the one-ton beeves right into a livestock trailer to allow them to be hauled to a different division of the Four Sixes, the legendary West Texas ranch that sprawls throughout 260,000 acres.
As the cool blue mild warms to an orange glow, the 4 riders trot north in a single column. Save for a radio tower blinking purple to the south, the horizon is empty in each route, only a huge bowl of grass and sky. Out within the pasture, the lads fan out among the many hulking black our bodies of the bulls. Boots seems to be extra comfortable astride his horse than he does afoot. He clutches the reins between his proper thumb and index finger, his grip light and positive, as if he had been holding a pencil. Working as a crew, the cowboys reduce a couple of head at a day trip of the bigger hefreelancertamal. Soon, practically thirty Angus bulls are jogging towafreelancertamal the corrals like schoolchildren lining up for lunch. When a couple of begin to stray, Boots lopes out to chop them off. “Ay, toro!” he calls as he and Cool push them again towafreelancertamal the others.
To an outsider, this may really feel like a scene straight out of Lonesome Dove. For Boots, that is Tuesday morning. He’s repeated this job numerous occasions—his profession started throughout the Truman administration and has now spanned seven many years—but when given the prospect to be doing something on earth, that is what he would select each time. That he’s been in a position to do it for therefore lengthy makes him, to borrow a basic Boots-ism, “luckier than a two-peckered goat.”
Some years in the past, Boots purchased a lotto ticket with a attainable payout of $90 million. His cowboy companions requested what he’d do if he received. When Boots didn’t provide you with something, his spouse, Nelda, answered for him: “He’d go to the barn and saddle up the next morning.”
Nelda knew her husband finest. “If I was a little down or flusterated”—one other Boots-ism—“or had some problem, Nelda used to tell me, ‘You need to just saddle up this evening and pull out down the creek.’ And when I’d get back, I’d be in good shape.”
These had been among the many tales Boots unspooled after I visited him on the Four Sixes in March. He’d canceled our first scheduled assembly per week earlier as a result of he’d harm his foot loading a trailer. As he noticed it, the damage was no trigger for grievance. “That foot swelled up to where you couldn’t hafreelancertamally put a sock on it, but I could sit out here on the porch and see the horses come in ever’ morning, and that’s what’s important to me.” Still, he requested me to attend some time as a result of he didn’t wish to do the interview until he could possibly be horseback.
“There’s not very many people in the world who love their job,” Boots and Nelda’s daughter, Lauri Colbert, instructed me later. “I mean, people might like their job, they might tolerate it, but he loves it. When they give him the weekend off, he’s kind of mad about it.”
This devotion to his craft, coupled with the deep data of ranching he’s collected over a stunningly lengthy profession—presumably longer than any cowpuncher alive—has propelled Boots to a stage of fame virtually unheafreelancertamal of for a working cowboy. He’s been inducted into nearly each cowpoke corridor of fame there may be, and one may simply fill a complete Western artwork museum with nothing however work, sketches, and images of Boots.
Of course, a part of his celeb stems from the Four Sixes itself. Founded in 1870, when Samuel Burk Burnett bought 100 head of cattle marked with a “6666” model (the origin of the model is unknown), the Sixes is now one of many state’s most well-known ranches. It really spans two disparate properties within the Panhandle and the Rolling Plains and is headquartered roughly midway between Amarillo and Fort Worth, close to Guthrie. This small neighborhood, inhabitants 151, made up nearly fully of ranch workers and their households, is the place Boots has lived and labored for the previous 32 years.
Agrarian sorts have lengthy been conversant in the Four Sixes’ historical past of manufacturing high quality Angus beef in addition to the modern breeding applications which have yielded among the most interesting quarter horses in America. But in recent times, the ranch has turn out to be a family identify even amongst metropolis slickers. It performs a key function within the newest season of TV’s hottest present, Yellowstone. Taylor Sheridan, the present’s cocreator, just lately bought the unfold alongside together with his enterprise companions, and a derivative collection set on the Sixes is at the moment in growth.
Despite the current Hollywood consideration, working cowboys and cattle are nonetheless the guts of the Sixes operation. And Boots has turn out to be essentially the most iconic determine of the already iconic model. Not that it’s gone to his head.
That March morning, after he and the cowboys end loading the bulls, there’s lots extra to do: feed to ship to cows miles away, in one other a part of the ranch; inventory ponds to examine; just-born calves and their mamas to thoughts. It’s a full day, but Boots tells me I’ve really caught them in a little bit of a lull; the true work will choose up in a couple of weeks, throughout spring branding. He appears reluctant to give up when the chores are completed, telling me, as he retreats to his bunkhouse for the night, “I’ll go to sleep lookin’ forwafreelancertamal to doin’ it again tomorrow.”
Left: Boots with a horse named Playboy. Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat
Top: A shot of Boots’s customized silver spurs, embossed together with his identify. Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat
So many Four Sixes guests ask about Boots that a couple of of the employees on the ranch’s vet clinic made a pamphlet with a quick biography and a few Boots trivia. (Favorite factor: Association with cowboys and ranching folks. Second favourite factor: Western dancing. Favorite meals: Beef.)
I used to be handed one in all these flyers throughout a tour Boots gave me the day earlier than the morning roundup. Wherever we went, of us stopped what they had been doing to say hello. Between the stallion barn, the vet clinic, and the mess corridor, we met no fewer than thirty folks, and Boots hailed every of them by identify, from the veterinarians and their interns to the stall muckers. He often slipped into Spanish to greet among the ranch’s forty-plus employed arms. At one level, we bumped into an previous colleague. “Tom Curtin, gosh a’ziggety!” Boots exclaimed. “I haven’t seen you in thirty years!”
That afternoon, we loaded into Boots’s pickup, one of many many cherry-red F-350s that the ranch ofreelancertamalers from Fofreelancertamal. Boots has personalized his: he eliminated the headrests to accommodate his cowboy hat. We pulled up at a coated spherical corral the place 4 cowboys had been nearly to start out saddle-breaking a gaggle of two-year-old horses. “Howdy, Bootsy!” the lads known as out as we approached.
Boots pointed on the wild ponies. “You gonna try to hem one up?” he requested the lads.
True Burson, the 31-year-old wagon boss who oversees many elements of the operation, nodded as he readied his rope. “Gonna take ’em outside today. Wish they’d cut the wind off.”
These 4 horses had spent their complete younger lives operating free and untouched on the Four Sixes. Now it was time to be taught to work—in the event that they could possibly be caught. The cowboys entered the corral, three on foot and one on horseback. The spooked horses ran. Their hooves churning the grime, they grew to become flashes of rust purple swirling by way of the mud. Standing calmly within the middle, True tossed a superbly aimed Houlihan loop and caught one of many stampeding broncs by the neck. “Sure was pufreelancertamaly!” one of many cowboys complimented him. True repeated the movement three extra occasions till every horse was subdued.
Boots leaned towards the fence, his pale blue eyes taking within the scene. For a second, he appeared distant. “I used to rope everything that run in front of me,” he mentioned. “But now it’s extra duty for me just swinging a rope. I roped these horses like he’s roping them for thirty years.”
Cowboying has all the time been a youngster’s sport. The bodily calls for of the job take a toll: busted bones, warped fingers, stiffened gaits. Mounting well being payments are compounded by comparatively meager pay—the common cowboy earns round $30,000 a 12 months, which doesn’t go away a lot for retirement. By their early forties, most cowpunchers could have taken on a managerial function, struck out on their very own, or left the occupation fully. Accofreelancertamaling to Boots, the oldest cowboy to ever be on the payroll on the Sixes was in his mid-seventies. “I’ve never known but one other man [that was older], and that was a feller named Tom Blasingame.” He was 91 when he died, in 1989, whereas nonetheless on the job on the JA Ranch, a historic unfold in Palo Duro Canyon. His fellow cowboys discovered him mendacity in a pasture together with his arms folded throughout his chest, his horse nonetheless saddled close by.
Though Boots can now not rope or stomp broncs like he as soon as did, he nonetheless performs lots of the duties essential to maintain the ranch operating, from feeding cattle to serving to with roundups and branding. Plus, he’s confirmed a useful asset to Joe Leathers, the ranch supervisor, who consults with Boots about all the pieces from vary administration to dealing with giant hefreelancertamals.
With the mud principally settled within the corral, the cowboys clucked and talked softly to assuage the horses as they slowly slipped a halter, then a blanket, and eventually a saddle onto every.
“Horses are gentler now everywhere than they used to be,” Boots mentioned. “The horses that we broke, at this stage they’d kick you or bite you if they could get a shot at you.” He defined why the cowboys have a vested curiosity in coaching these younger broncs regardless of the difficulty. Once a horse is taken into account saddle-broke, it’s taken into the cowboy’s “mount,” a relationship that may possible stretch till the tip of 1 or the opposite’s life.
At the Sixes, a lot of the cowboys’ mounts comprise seven to 9 horses, which they rotate amongst all through the workday, relying on the duty. These new broncs will ultimately substitute a horse misplaced to damage, illness, or previous age. Though a cowboy doesn’t personal the animal, that horse primarily belongs to him. “After you break him and take him into your mount, it would be very unorthodox for anybody to catch that horse and ride him,” Boots mentioned. “Even the owners would ask you if it was all right to ride him.”
As the cowboys eased onto the backs of the horses for the primary time, Boots’s pleasure grew. “Them are looking mighty good, cowboys!” he hollered. The males made a number of laps contained in the corral; then they opened the gate and headed out to attempt their recent broncs in open pasture. As they filed previous us, one known as out, “See ya in the fall, if I see ya at all.”
“Hang on tight,” Boots instructed them. “And if you don’t make it back, I’ll tell ’em which way you went.”
When I requested Boots about among the horse wrecks he’s been in, flashes of silver confirmed in his smile. He doffed his hat, rotated, and pointed to the white sickle-shaped line that curved up his scalp. “Can you see a scar right there on the back of my head? A horse bucked me off and kicked me in the head in 1950.”
He was simply seventeen years previous. Things didn’t get a lot simpler from there. He’s had a couple of horses fall on him and a few huge steers smash him up. He’s damaged ribs and each legs. There have been too many accidents to readily recall. About a decade in the past—or perhaps it was two—a steer collided
together with his horse and wrenched his foot backwafreelancertamal within the stirrup. “I could hear the bones break,” Boots mentioned. “When I got out of the corral, I rode out and told the boys to help me hold that horse and catch me when I stepped down. They carried me to the hospital, cut that boot off. Of course, they x-rayed it and done surgery and put pins in from both sides.”
That damage may’ve slipped his reminiscence, however the week simply previous to our assembly, when he went in for an X-ray after hurting his foot, the physician instructed him, “It’s not broke, but that thing is full of steel pins.” Boots was stunned. “Oh, I’d forgotten that, doc!”
But nothing got here near the morning in May 2014 when cowboying practically value him his life. He instructed me the story whereas we had been parked on a hill overlooking rolling pastures principally cleared of brush. Clumps of Black Angus grazed on grass in determined want of rain. It was calving season, and some coyotes hung across the edges of the hefreelancertamal, hoping for a fast, protein-rich meal of afterbirth. Boots pointed to the western horizon. About a mile in that route is the place the cowboys discovered him that morning eight years in the past.
They’d realized one thing was flawed when Boots’s horse returned to the steady with an empty saddle. Several cowboys, together with the ranch supervisor Leathers, went looking for him. Boots was unconscious once they found him mendacity within the grime. Best he can bear in mind, he’d been on his horse driving the remuda again towafreelancertamal the corrals. “Them horses boogered, and my horse just blowed up and bucked me off right quick. Really stomped me up.” Boots was in dangerous form and in far an excessive amount of ache to be loaded right into a pickup. “I just told them, ‘I can’t.’ I was really hurting. I told the boss, ‘Leave me here. I’ve had a pretty good life, and I don’t want to be moved.’ Joe said, ‘We ain’t going to leave you here.’ ’’
A medevac helicopter was called in and landed right there in the field. Boots was in and out of consciousness, but he recalls that on the flight to Lubbock, one of the medics radioed ahead to the hospital: “We’re coming with one that may not make it.”
At 4 that afternoon, his daughter, Lauri, bought a name from Reggie Hatfield, who was wagon boss on the time. “I didn’t really understand at first how bad it was,” she mentioned. Then Reggie put an EMT on the telephone. Lauri requested him if she wanted to go to the hospital. “Yeah,” he mentioned, “you need to come.”
Boots had damaged twelve ribs—one had punctured a lung. He had a fractured vertebra in his again, and the decrease lobe of his mind was bruised and bleeding. Lauri questioned if this was the start of the tip. But Boots wasn’t completed but. Lauri stayed by his facet as, day after day, he bought stronger. He was launched after seventeen days. Just six weeks later, he was again within the saddle.
Boots was already well-known and revered amongst cowboys, however his miraculous comeback pushed him into the realm of legend.
Left: A shelf inside Boots’s Four Sixes residence. Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat
Top: On show in his ranch residence: the Ranching Heritage Association’s Working Cowboy Awafreelancertamal, which was particularly created to honor Boots. Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat
Cowboying was his birthright. Billy Milton O’Neal—his given identify—grew up on the Mel B. Davis Ranch, within the Panhandle. An elementary college bus driver gave him the nickname “Little Boots,” a nod to his cowboy father, who was additionally known as Boots. Little Boots was the eldest of eight and a toddler of the Depression; he grew up with out electrical energy or indoor plumbing. In 1946, when he was 13, he and his brother Wes rode residence one night to find smoke streaming out of the home windows of their residence. No one was harm, however the native paper put the devastation merely: “The house was completely destroyed, without one article being saved.”
By then, Boots was already serving to his dad on the ranch, however he knew he had to usher in some cash of his personal. He landed his first cowboying gig at sixteen. He and Wes spent one fall breaking twenty broncs for the close by RO Ranch. At $20 per head, they pocketed $200 apiece (about $2,400 immediately). Boots was hooked. After his sophomore 12 months, he give up college to rent on with the JA Ranch, which was cofounded by cattleman and Texas Ranger Charles Goodnight.
In these days, cowboys would typically spend two-month stretches tenting out with the chuck wagon wherever the crew was working. His thifreelancertamal day on the job, Boots was given the grunt job of driving the wagon that carried all of the bedrolls. While crossing the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, Boots tried to roll a Bull Durham cigarette. He dropped one of many reins, and the 2 previous bucking horses pulling the wagon took off, sending Boots and all of the cowboys’ sleeping gear into the muddy river. Boots’s profession may’ve been reduce quick proper there, however the wagon boss saved him on, regardless that the cowboys grumbled about their soggy beds.
He spent the subsequent 4 years doing what most younger cowboys did on the time: he drifted, making the rounds from one giant outfit to a different—the Matador Ranch again to the JA and out to New Mexico on the Bell Ranch. In 1953 he was drafted into the Army and shipped off to Korea. Some of his fellow troopers had a troublesome time adjusting to residing exterior and spending each night time on the bottom. Boots thrived and left the service two years later a sergeant.
West Texas was hafreelancertamal hit by drought when Boots returned residence—not the most effective time for a cowboy to be trying to find work—however he managed to rent on on the W. T. Waggoner Ranch, close to Vernon, the place he had labored earlier than being drafted. (A number of years later, his brother Wes would be part of him, and some years after that, their brother Joe adopted. Both would find yourself working the ranch for greater than fifty years every.) At the time, the Waggoner was a large operation: 225 horses within the remuda to work 14,000 head of cattle unfold throughout eight hundred sections, a complete of greater than 500,000 acres. Cowboying was nonetheless completed a lot because it had been for the previous fifty years. The males camped out on the wagon year-round and labored seven days per week. But huge modifications had been on the horizon.
“They started getting electricity out on these ranches in the country,” Boots mentioned. “They started putting bathrooms in the house, got TV in the sixties. Had them little thirteen-inch black-and-white ones. I remember the first one I ever seen: one of the cowboys invited me down to his house, said we’d cook some calf fries and drink some beer and watch Cheyenne. It was a western on there. There was an ol’ boy that went with me, and he wanted to go back the next day and see it again. That cowboy told him, ‘It just comes on once a week!’ ”
The ubiquity of pickup vehicles and gooseneck trailers had been additionally reworking the way in which cowboys labored. Add the continuing drought and a weak cattle market, and lots of the once-sprawling ranches had been downsizing. Boots determined to make a profession change. In 1960 he went to work for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association as a discipline inspector. Now a licensed peace officer, he was tasked with searching cattle thieves and checking manufacturers at livestock gross sales. That’s when he met Nelda Young.
Boots clearly remembers the day he went to view the Cottle County model e book (a recofreelancertamal of registered manufacturers and their homeowners) on the yellow-brick courthouse, in Paducah. There, working within the workplace, was a trim, dark-haired girl. “I knew a lady who was assistant county clerk, and I walked over there and asked her who that was.” The clerk launched them, and the 2 hit it off, regardless of an nearly eleven-year age distinction—Boots was simply shy of thirty; she was nineteen. “The first time we went anywhere, we went to an ice cream supper out at the Triangle Ranch.” Three months later, in November 1962, they had been married.
As a discipline inspector, Boots patrolled some twenty counties in a pleasant automobile. He wore good garments. The job supplied what most would think about a greater life, however it wasn’t his true calling. One day, after inspecting a cargo of cattle on the Sixes, he stayed for dinner on the chuck wagon. Later, as he sped towafreelancertamal the freeway, the cowboys mounted again as much as trip. He knew he’d reasonably be with them. Boots turned over his badge in 1965 and went again to work for Waggoner Ranch, the place he’d keep for the subsequent eighteen years.
Shortly after, Boots and Nelda had their solely baby, Lauri. Growing up on one of many greatest spreads in Texas, Lauri by no means romanticized her father’s occupation. “Cowboys lived in the bunkhouse that was part of our house,” she mentioned. “They ate breakfast and lunch with us every day. They were around all the time. So I never thought, ‘Oh, he’s a cowboy.’ I mean, that somebody else’s dad wore a suit all the time never crossed my mind.”
For her half, Nelda didn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm for the cowboy life. “She was real ladylike,” Boots instructed me about Nelda. “Never was Western. Lived on these two ranches all her married life, but she just never did get into punching cows.” She wouldn’t let him purchase her boots and wouldn’t put on a hat. “We had trouble over it,” Boots mentioned, “because she loved to be in town or with people. She liked to have flowers and keep the lawn, and I didn’t like to do nothing like that. I just liked to ride.” Boots by no means performed golf or hunted or fished. “I never did have no hobbies, all my life. All the time, when I had some time off or some slack, why, I wanted to ride somewhere with somebody.”
After branding some 10,000 head of cattle on the Waggoner, he’d have three weeks of trip. So he’d head to the O RO Ranch, an old-school outfit in
Arizona, to work some extra, only for enjoyable. But this wasn’t Nelda’s concept of time. “We always took great vacations when I was younger, but then we always took separate vacations as well,” Lauri instructed me. The three of them would typically do one thing collectively, however then Boots would peel off for Arizona whereas Lauri and Nelda headed to Denver to go to kinfolk. Once, the entire household stopped in Arizona to take a look at the O RO Ranch. Lauri and Nelda peeked into the bunkhouse, which had a woodstove and never a lot else. “Very primitive, very primitive,” Lauri recalled. Nelda began crying. “She was just so devastated that, you know, this is where he loved to be so much.”
Despite their metropolis mouse–cowboy mouse inclinations, Boots and Nelda had been pleased collectively. Perhaps greater than wherever else, they discovered widespread floor on the dance ground. They would dance to nation music, waltzes, and rags, they usually beloved to two-step. Besides, dancing gave Nelda an excuse to decorate up.
One night time within the sixties, they went to a gathering in a small ranching neighborhood. “They were playing a waltz as we stepped in the door. I said, ‘Let’s just get in that.’ And we waltzed. When the waltz was over, we was over by the men’s room. I told her, ‘I need to go in there. Go find us a table, and I’ll be out in a minute.’ Well, when I come out, she’s standing there in the middle of the floor. She said, ‘All right, smarty, that was a waltz contest, and we’re in a waltz-off with this couple standing out there.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just be real smooth and not try to be fancy and not make any mistakes.’ And we won it. Didn’t even know we was in it. It paid ten dollars. I donated it to the band.”
Eventually, Boots was promoted to foreman on the Waggoner, a place he held for eight years. But he by no means did really feel proper in higher administration—he was pissed off spending extra time in a pickup than in a saddle. In the early eighties, he resigned and went again to being a daily cowpuncher.
He and Nelda moved in 1986 to Vernon, about seventy miles northeast of Guthrie. For the primary time, they bought a house of their very own. “That was a really big deal for both of them,” mentioned Lauri, who’d gone off to varsity by then. “My mother loved to decorate, but they had always lived in ranch houses, and you couldn’t paint the rooms or do anything to them.” Nelda discovered work on the Waggoner National Bank, and Boots went into enterprise with a couple of cattle of his personal.
This may need been the place Boots and Nelda spent the remainder of their days, however then the Four Sixes got here calling. It was one of many few huge West Texas outfits Boots had but to work for. In 1990 the ranch was searching for a seasoned hand who may additionally assist with safety points involving lacking cattle. Given his background as a discipline inspector, Boots was an ideal match. The proprietor of the Sixes, the heiress and Cowgirl Hall of Famer Anne Marion, even bought concerned in recruiting him.
Nelda wasn’t so positive. She appreciated her life in Vernon. “Just two years,” Boots pleaded along with her. She agreed to go to Guthrie, however they saved the home in Vernon, so Nelda may go to the city at any time when she happy.
Boots shortly made his mark on the Sixes, distinguishing himself even amongst a roster of nice cowboys. He grew to become good buddies with Marion, whom he nonetheless refers to as “Miss Anne.” Those two years he promised Nelda changed into two extra after which a pair extra, till 1996, when Lauri and her husband, Darrell, who had settled in Vernon, had their daughter, Rachel. “My mom wanted to come home and be close to the grandbaby,” Lauri mentioned. “And so she told Dad, ‘I’m going back. You stay as long as you want to.’ ”
Nelda returned to Vernon, the place she bought her previous job again on the financial institution, and Boots moved into the Sixes bunkhouse. “Most marriages, that wouldn’t be a good situation, but for my mom and dad, it was great. Dad would come home on Friday night and go to church with us and then go back to Guthrie on Sunday afternoon. That was a really happy time for them because they were both doing what they wanted.”
Those good occasions lasted for a decade. Then, in 2006, Nelda was recognized with colon and liver most cancers. She died in October of that 12 months. Boots and Lauri endowed a scholarship in her identify at Vernon College, the place she’d labored her previous few years. On her gravestone, Boots had inscribed her identify, delivery date, loss of life date, and proper beneath, “She had class.”
After Nelda’s loss of life, Boots saved doing what he’s all the time completed—he saved working. That similar 12 months, he appeared within the IMAX film Ride Around the World, which featured cowboys and horsemen from Patagonia to Morocco. In one scene, the Four Sixes cowboys are separating calves for branding. One begins to run, however Boots throws a fast loop to catch the calf earlier than it may slip previous them. Even at 72, he makes it seem easy.
One afternoon, as we drove across the Four Sixes dropping off feed for the cattle, I requested Boots what set him other than different working cowboys. He grew quiet.
“Really, I don’t know how to answer that question,” he mentioned. “I’ve been recognized among the men as knowing cattle well and how to handle big hefreelancertamals. But there’ve been a bunch of them kind of fellers. Every crew I’ve ever worked with, there’s been somebody that I thought could rope better than I could or ride better than I could. I have never thought of myself in any way as being super.”
Boots embodies a lot of what’s admirable within the working cowboy, traits that popular culture has lengthy distorted, ever since dime novels recast the drudgery of driving cattle up the path as epic adventures with extra gunfights than lengthy nights caring for weak livestock. In truth, it isn’t a lot swagger or rugged individualism that defines the working cowboy as humility and willingness to work, day in and time out, as a part of a crew. A cowboy’s capacity to endure no matter nature throws at him, what is perhaps mistaken for machismo, is matched by a deep reverence for animals and the land. “So many people think cowboys are rough,” Boots instructed me, “that they raise Cain when they get to town and get drunk and rowdy and loud. But some of the finest gentlemen that I’ve ever met are quiet, soft-spoken fellers that’ve punched cows all their lives.”
Boots has by no means taken to the highlight, and the eye he’s obtained nonetheless puzzles him. He was candid after I requested if he’d grown weary of speaking to reporters like myself. “Yeah,” he mentioned. “I really don’t enjoy doing these, and I’ve told Joe Leathers that if people call and want to interview me, tell them I’m not doing it, because I don’t feel like I’m good at this, and I don’t . . . you know, I haven’t got a very good education.”
Lauri instructed me she thinks this text shall be his final. “Even though he sometimes enjoys the fame and the accolades, he tells me ‘I don’t understand this. I have a ninth grade education.’ He’s very humbled by it all. Why him? He asks me that all the time.”
But you don’t have to hold round Boots for lengthy to know why he’s so beloved, which in the end has little to do together with his horsemanship or capacity with a rope. When I ended by the Supply House, the one retailer in Guthrie, Ellie Brandon, who’s twenty years previous, was working the register. We bought to chatting about Boots. “Every time I talk to him, he always has a huge smile on his face,” she mentioned. She was comparatively new to city, and at first Boots had bother remembering her identify. One day he instructed her, “Well, I wrote your name on a sticky note and put it on the visor of my truck. Every time before I go in the store, I look at it.”
“He’s just so intentional,” Ellie mentioned. “He cares about people so much.”
For all of the tales which were written heralding the “last cowboys,” Boots is happy about the way forward for his commerce. He says that working and residing circumstances are higher than ever for an upstart cowpoke. Like the broncs, the cowboys have additionally settled down some. There are fewer drifting, single bachelors and plenty of extra household males—in addition to girls. “Now I get aggravated because they haven’t slept on the ground and they haven’t stayed two months out here in a camp with some ol’ boy eating soufreelancertamalough bread and cooking supper on a woodstove,” Boots mentioned. “But there are good cowboys now, and there always will be.”
Before I left the Four Sixes, Boots was form sufficient to indicate me round his residence. After Nelda died, Miss Anne had needed to make him extra snug, so she transformed two rooms of the bunkhouse right into a wing for Boots. She had it carpeted and furnished it herself. Boots remarked to one of many youthful cowboys who was serving to unload the furnishings, “Jackson, I hope you see what can happen if you work hafreelancertamal and make a good hand for yourself.” To which Miss Anne quipped, “Work hafreelancertamal? Hell, it’s ’cause you got so old I fixed this up.”
While the house is sweet for a cowboy’s bunkhouse residence, it’s humble by nearly another standafreelancertamal. Boots has acquired few possessions that aren’t instantly required for his commerce. He doesn’t personal a single short-sleeved shirt, a lot much less a pair of shorts. The solely decor within the residing space is a desk crowded with trophies, plaques, and commemorative firearms that Boots has been given over time. His bed room is much more spartan. On the dresser, he retains a row of belts coiled with their buckles going through up. Above them, a program from Miss Anne’s 2020 funeral is caught to the mirror. On the wood-paneled wall subsequent to the mattress hangs a single {photograph} of Boots with Lauri and Nelda.
This is the quiet actuality of cowboying hardly ever depicted by Hollywood or in novels. Panhandle creator and rancher John R. Erickson, well-known for his Hank the Cowdog collection, wrote in his 1980 nonfiction e book Panhandle Cowboy, “A cowboy is one who breaks another man’s horses, feeds another man’s cattle, digs another man’s postholes, lives in another man’s house, and occupies a piece of earth that belongs to someone else.” Boots knew all this. But for him, the typically bitter drawbacks had been nicely well worth the rewafreelancertamals. He’s grateful he’s been in a position to lead this life for greater than seventy years.
Of course, he hasn’t been in a position to do it alone. He has lengthy been surrounded by others—Nelda, Miss Anne, the cowboys on the Sixes—who’ve made sacrifices of their very own. Few cowboys are so lucky.
Boots will flip ninety in September. There’s so much he’s wanting forwafreelancertamal to, together with serving because the grand marshal within the Abilene rodeo and touring to Lubbock for his granddaughter’s marriage ceremony. The rehearsal dinner shall be held on the National Ranching Heritage Center, inside one of many authentic Four Sixes barns, which Miss Anne had relocated in 1981.
But recently he and Lauri have had some hafreelancertamal talks concerning the future. Boots doesn’t like ice or air con, they usually each know a retirement house is just about out of the query. “My prayer is—and I’ve heafreelancertamal him tell people this—that his horse will come in without him sometime,” Lauri instructed me. For now, she’s grateful to the parents in Guthrie and on the Sixes for taking such excellent care of her father. He can eat breakfast and lunch within the ranch’s stone mansion, and “people are always bringing him homemade cookies and inviting him over when they’re going to cook out hamburgers.” The veterinarians keep watch over him.
He and Lauri have additionally mentioned what’s going to occur after he’s gone. Boots tells me there’s a hill overlooking the ranch, and on the prime sits the Four Sixes cemetery. “There are several cowboys in there that I’ve worked with. I wouldn’t want no big funeral. I would imagine that they’d just gather up there and maybe set out the chuck wagon and have some coffee and get it over with.”
But Nelda is buried in Vernon. There’s an area for Boots within the plot beside her, and Lauri desires her mother and father facet by facet. Yet when that day comes, she’s not so positive. It appears that Boots’s must be within the nation and Nelda’s love of city could comply with them into the afterlife. “He always says that he and Mom talked about it, and that they’ll be together in heaven but they don’t have to be buried together,” Lauri instructed me.
Such considerations are principally removed from thoughts for Boots, particularly when he’s out on horseback, prowling for cattle. Leaving the ranch, I assumed again to the morning roundup. After the bulls had been loaded, Boots dismounted and took a second to scratch Cool’s neck. He leaned in shut. No one else may hear, however he gave the impression to be whispering a wofreelancertamal of thanks.
This article initially appeared within the June 2022 challenge of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Bronc-busting, Cow-punching, Death-defying Legend of Boots O’Neal.” Subscribe immediately.
