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Show The Survey's Findings 43 Spurs are a teaching tool on a young horse, knowing where and when to spur 'em, at the right time. For instance, if you want to turn a cow, and if you just touch him in a tender spot, say in the shoulder, with the spurs - if you touch him in the right shoulder and rein him to the left at the same time, and you do that enough times, when a cow is making the right move, pretty soon he knows when that cow turns to go, he'd better move or he's gonna get jabbed. It's a reminder. The rider and horse must work together. A "good hand" is firm but never cruel with his animals. The Grouse Creek cowboy's gear-the tools of his trade-marks his connection with buckaroo tradition (Nevada buckaroo gear is treated from a folklife perspective in Marshall and Ahlborn 1980 and Fleischhauer 1985). The saddle is arguably the most important tool, and Grouse Creek cowboys share with their Great Basin brethren a preference for a saddle rigged to a single, centrally located cinch. Like its Nevada counterpart, this general type comes with many variations-"center-fire" and "five-eighths" rigs, flank cinches for the effect of a double rig, swelled forks, three-quarters pommel, and so on. But the relative absence of the full double-rig saddle familiar to Texas and the Southwest is diagnostic. Grouse Creek saddles have the stout horns associated with the preference for dallying (wrapping) the riata, in contrast to the Southwest's customary hard-and-fast tying of the lariat. Stirrups tend to be open, although Max Tanner's rig exhibits the buckaroo style of boxed or California-type stirrups, which he covers with leather taps in the winter. The preferred reins are made of braided rawhide and include a romal (a whip attached at the end of the reins). Most cowboys prefer a spade bit with spoon rollers, though when starting a colt a snaffle bit is used. Grouse Creek cowboys generally use hackamores to break horses. The hackamore consists of a bosal or braided rawhide noseband, a headstall of one sort of another (the system of straps that goes over the upper portion of the horse's head), and the horsehair macardy that forms the reins and lead rope. Most cowboys use a forty-five-foot nylon rope for dallying. Rawhide riatas were once common, as were seagrass ropes. The Betteridge family used to be famous for its rawhide and horsehair braiding, but now only Wallace, 82 and living in nearby Mon-tello, continues the craft, making much-sought-after riatas and bosals. As in Nevada, Grouse Creek cowboys have either shotgun chaps, leather leggings which go all around the leg and are zipped on, or chinks, short leather chaps. Bat-wing chaps, popular in the valley during the early 1900s, are now seen again with increasing frequency. In recent years Nevada and other parts of the Great Basin have experienced a revival of interest in the ideal of a classic buckaroo type. No better symbol of this revival exists than the recent adoption of "old-time" cowboy gear: wide-brimmed hats, colorful bandannas or "wild-rags," and jingle-bob spurs. These innovations have not made |