John Branch - The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West

ALSO BY JOHN BRANCH

Boy on Ice

Copyright 2018 by John Branch

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Production manager: Anna Oler

JACKET DESIGN BY PETE GARCEAU

JACKET PHOTOGRAPH JOSH HANER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

ISBN: 978-0-393-29234-3

ISBN: 978-0-393-29235-0 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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To Charlie Waters,
a newspaperman of the West,
who always loved a good cowboy story
and encouraged me to tell this one.

Contents

PART ONE
Branding Day

PART TWO
King of the Rodeo

PART THREE
Cowbells in the Fog

PART FOUR
Blood and Tradition

C ODY WAS STILL A BOY then, all of five years old, alone on a horse crossing the rising waters of the Virgin River. The warm, lingering days of late spring melted the deep snowpack in the mountains on the other side of Zion National Park. Miles downstream, there between Hurricane and La Verkin, the ebb and flow came on delay. The water rose in the late afternoon, crested overnight, and fell a bit by dawn.

The boys father, Bill Wright, knew the rhythm of the river as well as anyone. He was the water boss in Hurricane, which the locals pronounced her-uh-kin for reasons no one quite remembered. For nearly ten miles upstream, there was a dirt ditch carved into the side of the canyon wall. It flowed with water siphoned from the river and diverted through a settling pond to feed the farms and ranches in the valley, filled with fields of hay, wheat, and alfalfa.

Part of Bills job, beyond opening the valves to ration the water, was to ride the canal on horseback every day. Rocks sometimes fell from the canyon cliffs and clogged the flow, or the steep bank of the ditch gave way from erosion and gravity and let the precious water spill out before it could do any good downstream. Bill rode up the canal, looking for problems, then rode back down the river toward town. It could be a dangerous ride. Twice, he had lost horses over the edge to missteps. The second started to tumble as Bill was on it. Bill leapt off, lucky not to get his mud-crusted boots caught in the stirrups, and landed in the dirt just as the horse fell to its death far below.

The runoff made spring the most dangerous season, and this particular one thirty-some years ago was rougher than others. For weeks, the meltwater had rushed fast and risen high with the falling sun. By the time Bill made his way back down the river toward home, right around dark, it teased the banks. There were always places where the contours of the river required that it be crossed, but when the water was especially high it would swim the horses, lifting them off their feet and carrying them downstream until their hooves felt the muddy bottom again and they regained their footing. For a rider accustomed to the cadence of a horses gait and the comfortable solidity of its support, it was a disconcerting and unwelcome sensation, like when a driver loses control on a sheet of black ice and helplessly hopes for the feeling of the Earths grip again.

There was an especially tricky crossing point near the Pah Tempe Hot Springs, not far from town, where Bill knew that the spring runoff sometimes got too deep for horses. They had to drift down and across the river for twenty feet or so until they could touch bottom again on the far side.

Cody was not yet in school, so he came with his father. He had been riding horses before he walkedfirst on Bills lap, where he fell asleep, nuzzled between his father and the horn of the saddle. By the age of three, he was riding horses alone outside the corral. He mostly rode a gentle little gray mare called Paleface. Its face and legs were white.

You need to stay with your horse, no matter what happens in the water, Bill told Cody as they approached the crossing. You cling to your horse.

It was deep into dusk when the horses moved into the river, the water rising higher against their legs with every step. Bill felt his horse drift, its feet paddling invisibly for traction and then binding to the hidden bank. But Codys horse caught a pocket in the rushing water and was swept into the current. It was quickly turned face-first downstream, water up to its neck, feet adrift invisibly under the surface, the boy clinging to its rein and trying to steer it back to solid ground.

Cody! Bill screamed as Cody and Paleface floated past. His heart racing, his mind panicked, Bill spun his horse around and spurred it back into the deep water. He hoped to catch up to Cody and Paleface and snare his son from the horses back, but Bills horse was quickly caught in the same current. There was no way to gain ground. The river had them all. Bill could barely see Cody ahead as he slipped downstream in the deepening shadows. The boy disappeared with every dip in the rivers urgent tumble, then bobbed back into view where it slowed, rising and falling like a boat on an ocean swell.

Hang on! Bill shouted.

Cody fell out of sight again, as if the river poured into a hole, before he and Paleface rose again on the face of a high rapid. But the face was too steep and the churn too heavy. The horse and boy hit the crest of the wave and tumbled backward into the rushing water, then disappeared. A few beats later, Bill and his horse did the same.

Bill was underwater, off his horse, tumbling in the current. When his head popped back into the air, he still had hold of a rein and his horse had found footing. They pulled themselves to the rivers edge. Bill, scared and soaked, desperately scanned the banks and the water, now dark as ink, for silhouettes in the flat light of dusk. The rushing river bent out of sight, and Cody and Paleface were nowhere. Bill climbed back atop his dripping horse and raced it down the shallows of one side of the river. The fathers eyes searched for breaks in the waters reflection and scanned boulders to make sure they werent a motionless boy or horse. He looked downstream, and then upstream, and downstream again. For a few moments, he didnt know what to do or where to go. He felt a wave of sickness.

Dad!

Bill swore he heard a little voice through the hopelessness of dark.

Dad!

Cody stood wet and trembling on the bank nearby. His hat and one boot were missing. Bills insides collapsed in relief.

I woulda come and found you sooner, Cody said, but my horse wouldnt go.

Paleface was on its belly, legs splayed across a sandbar, as if dropped from the sky. The pony had tumbled through the water and made it to the riverbank, a little boy clinging hard to its back, just as the father had told him to do.

I about lost your boy in the river tonight, Bill told Evelyn as he carried Cody into the house, wrapped in a blanket from the back of the truck. She drew her son a bath, and he fell asleep in the warm water. For a long time, now and again, the boy would be startled awake by the nightmares, he and his horse lost in a rushing river, unable to find his father. Even now, decades later, a grown man with a family of his own, Cody didnt like to talk about it much.