Terry Tales

Branding Party

Branding calves is a harsh reality of life on a ranch. It’s necessary for a rancher to establish ownership of his or her livestock, whether they’re part of a permanent herd kept for breeding or intended for market. The owner’s brand provides authority to retrieve strays from a neighbor’s pasture, and it must pass inspection to finalize a livestock sale. All active brands are registered with the state and published in books that are used by cattle inspectors. But branding is only one part of working calves. There are also vaccinations, dehorning, and castration. It all has to be repeated for each new batch of calves, and it becomes a rite of passage for a young boy growing into manhood.

The 10-year old gofer and fire tender eventually grows big enough to wrestle calves. With maturity he may be trusted to handle a syringe or to scoop out horn buds. With age and experience, he may learn how to properly apply a hot iron. Eventually, he might even undertake operating on the bovine scrotum with a razor-sharp blade. These are all skills that will be needed some day on his own ranch.

There are definite trade-offs between the different jobs at branding time. Throwing a calf is hard work. It takes both physical strength and good technique. A cowboy has to lift, turn, and drop a struggling, kicking animal that weighs as much as he does. Then he gets to sit down in the muck and hold it still while it’s poked, burned, and cut. Those cute little baby calves are surprisingly strong and their hooves have sharp edges. Bumps and bruises are guaranteed. Pulled muscles and even broken bones are a possibility.

Dehorning or castration is less physically demanding, but not much cleaner. The blood stains your hands and little arterial spurts splash over your shirt, pants, and boots. The indignant calf bucks against the pain while the cowboy is wielding his sharp instruments. A syringe needle or knife blade can be almost as dangerous to the cowboy as it is to the calf when working on a struggling, kicking animal.

Handling a branding iron isn’t quite as dirty, but it still isn’t pleasant to burn a calf and hear it bellow in pain. The acrid smell of burning hair and flesh is enough to make even a seasoned cowboy gag. It always comes as a jarring shock, harsh in your throat even as it becomes a familiar odor. And the hiss of the red-hot iron burning into cowhide makes a clearly audible complement to the pained bawling of the hapless calf.

Branding takes a sure touch. The iron has to be hot enough to sear the hide quickly and the cowboy needs a deft hand. He has to stay with the calf as it squirms and pull off quickly if it breaks away from the wranglers. The brand must be clear enough to read, not smeared out into a vague blob. The worst mistake is to hold the iron on too long and burn a wound all the way through the hide. That can result in a dangerous infection.

I was six years old when my father, Gene Fisher, moved us onto the small ranch he bought from his parents. He didn’t have a lot of cattle at first, but even so, branding was too big a job for one man and a small boy. It was mainly a family affair in those early days. Uncle Art had a bad leg, but he’d show up and do as much he could. Uncle Roy was always there to ride and rope, and uncle Son would usually bring one or more of my cousins, Joe, Jim, and Jerry.

Uncle Son had a ranch near us and had been working cattle all his life. He had the most experience and Dad deferred to him when it came to castration. His sons were real cowboys who often competed in the local rodeos. Joe rode saddle broncs and Jim wrestled steers.

Uncle Son was the oldest of eight and my dad was the youngest. The 22-year age difference meant that Dad and his nephews were close to the same age. Uncle Son’s given name was actually Albert William, after his father, but he wasn’t a junior. My grandpa, Albert Farwell Fisher, always called him Son. His brothers grew up hearing that name so they also called him Son. And someone must have thought it was hilarious to teach his many nieces and nephews to call him uncle Son. The name stuck and that’s what all of us kids called him. I’d occasionally hear one of his friends call him ‘Ab’ and I’d wonder why. I was a teenager before I realized how his childhood nickname had grown into an inside family joke.

My dad didn’t ever have a big herd, only thirty or forty calves, but our day would start early anyway. Morning dew would wet my boots as I rode my mini bike into the fields to help haze the cattle toward the corral. Dad preferred to ride his horse, Snuffy, and Roy would saddle up his buckskin mare, Buck. It didn’t take very long for us to gather the small herd in the corral and separate the calves from their mothers. The anxious cows would bellow intermittently and the frightened calves would answer in kind. The noise made a loud accompaniment to our preparations, but it was only a warm-up for the terrified bawling to come.

The split-rail corral was perhaps 100 feet by 40 feet and it was divided into two pens of roughly equal size. The posts were big and solid, 12 inches or more in diameter and planted deep to withstand the pressure of pushing cattle. The rails were made by splitting 10-foot pieces of 6-inch lodgepole pine lengthwise. The flat side of the rail would butt up to the post and a 60D spike would be hammered in to fasten them together.

One of my fond childhood memories is ‘tightrope’ walking on the top rail of the corral. The upper edge was somewhat rounded by wear, but still sharp enough to make balancing a tricky thing. We’d alternate resting on top of the posts with wobbly dashes across each rail. It was a real accomplishment to make it all the way around the corral without falling off.

For a few years we built a small fire at one end of the corral to heat the irons. But a simple wood fire is barely hot enough for branding, and it took a lot of fiddling to keep the flames going. Later on, Dad bought a torch nozzle with a hose that connected to a propane tank. The torch was propped up to spray flames into a 30-gallon metal barrel set on its side. The barrel helped to contain the heat and keep the irons glowing cherry-red. And, with propane, the flames could be adjusted ‘just so’ or even turned off completely if we took a break.

By mid-morning, the branding crew would assemble and find their places. Uncle Roy would drop a rope on a calf and drag it toward the branding fire. Jerry and Jim would wrestle it to the ground and try to hold it still as uncle Art jabbed a syringe of blackleg vaccine into the calf’s neck. Joe would use the dehorning tool to scoop out the horn buds, and uncle Son would do the more delicate job of castration. I ran errands and mostly just watched the grown men work.

Uncle Son had a shallow pan of milky-white disinfectant to hold his instruments between calves. He used a razor-sharp folding knife and a cruel-looking tool that we called the masculator. Uncle Son would expertly slice the tip of the calf’s scrotum and squeeze the testicles out into the open. Then he used the masculator, really just a large pair of stainless-steel pliers, to crush the connecting tissue and sever the testes in a single stroke. The crushed tissue bled less than a clean cut. The calves’ testes were usually tossed, Mom had no interest in cooking them. If anyone did have a hankering for ‘oysters’, then uncle Son would drop the golf-ball sized nuggets into a jar for later. And, as the day wore on, the white disinfectant turned bright pink.

Dad usually worked the irons since they were his calves. He’d registered his ‘seven lazy-seven bar’ brand with the State of Montana shortly after buying the ranch in 1963. It took two irons to complete the brand. The seven was applied upright and on its side (lazy), and then a short bar finished the job.

The final step, before releasing the stunned and hurting calf, was a liberal application of blue sulfur powder to both the scrotal incision and the horn wounds. The powder would help to stop the bleeding and also served as a disinfectant.

As time passed, Art couldn’t get around anymore, my cousins moved on to ranch work in eastern Montana or Wyoming, and friends or neighbors took their place. A branding party was a social event and we’d make a day of it. Mom would make lunch, and there’d be beer and maybe ‘oysters’ afterward. Sometimes the drinking would last long into the night. And, of course, we’d return the favor when our neighbors needed extra help. The only constant hand was uncle Roy, who was almost always there for branding or putting up hay.

In later years, a lot of ‘barstool’ cowboys showed up and the drinking sometimes got out of hand. Dad stopped having the big parties after he built a chute to hold the calves and I got old enough to do a full share of the work. It’s both easier and safer to work calves with a chute. The two of us and uncle Roy were enough if we didn’t have to throw the critters and hold them down.

A chute is a kind of cage with a head stock at the front end and one side on hinges. A calf (or cow) thinks it can walk on through, but the head stock catches its neck and prevents it from going forward or back. Then the hinged side squeezes it firmly and holds it still for branding. Dad used a hacksaw, arc welder, and angle grinder to build his chute out of steel pipes. He worked it out mostly by trial and error over several weeks. There were a lot of skeptics, but the end result worked very well for many years.

Uncle Roy bought his own land and began to build up a herd of beef cattle in the early seventies. His eighty acres was mostly level, but rose slightly toward the northwest. He pulled a trailer onto the highest corner of the property and built a barn and a small corral about forty yards below the house. Once he was established as a rancher, there were two branding parties every spring. Roy was an accomplished drinking man. He knew a lot of bar flies in addition to his cowboy friends. Both groups would usually show up for branding and the party of 1973 was a real classic.

Uncle Roy had borrowed (or rented) a chute for the day, so it was relatively easy to work the calves. There were only a few of us actually engaged in branding, and at least a dozen loafers watching and drinking beer. My job at the time was to push the calves into the chute. I was just barely big enough for the job, but no one from the group of drunks offered to help. It wasn’t too difficult to get a calf separated in the small corral and start it up the narrow passage to the chute, but they usually balked at the chute itself. My ‘go to’ maneuver was to twist the calf’s tail into a tight curl and use it as leverage to lift and push. The method worked well, but it had a nasty downside.

A frightened calf, with its tail in a painful twist, will usually empty its bowels as it hops into the chute. It didn’t take long for me to be literally covered in rank green manure. I’d made sure to wear ragged old clothes, of course, and I remember that my mom tossed them out that night rather than contaminate her washing machine.

By the time all the calves were branded, the party was in full swing up at Roy’s trailer. Their noise almost drowned out the piteous bawling from the still indignant calves. I washed myself off to some extent with a garden hose, but I was still pretty ripe. It was late afternoon, still warm outside, and the beer was running low. The hard-core drinkers were unwilling to leave the party, or maybe they were afraid of getting a DUI, so I was ‘volunteered’ to make a beer run.

Uncle Roy dialed up Hubert Rinke, owner of the Club Bar, and put in an order to go. I’d completed my Drivers Ed course a few weeks earlier, but didn’t yet have my driver’s license. Roy didn’t care about such a small detail; he just tossed me the keys to his pickup and sent me on my way. I felt like a real big shot as I backed the big four-wheel drive truck up to the front door of the bar. I pretended not to notice how Hubert wrinkled his nose as we loaded six cases of beer into the bed of the pickup. He didn’t make any comments, just shook his head at the filthy kid with manure in his hair. He didn’t ask me for ID either. The beer was being charged to my uncle, so it wasn’t really like selling it to a minor. I can’t help but smile at the memory of my 15-year old self, reeking of cow shit, delivering a truckload of beer without a driver’s license. And I couldn’t have been more proud!

Hubert wasn’t just a bartender; he was a next-door neighbor to my parents and grandparents for many years. He tagged my dad with the nickname Horsehair. Amateur boxing was a big thing when my dad was growing up. Dad was a small kid who fought in a few local matches as a lightweight. Hubert compared his style to a professional boxer, Light Horse Harry, and that morphed into Horsehair.

I was also a small kid, so Hubert decided to call me Horsehair as well. I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t really mind, either. And that nickname came into play when Hubert remodeled his bar and paved the parking lot. A new curb was poured in front of the building, and us kids wanted to put our names in the cement. Virgil and Marty wrote their own names, but Hubert insisted that I use my nickname. So, if you visit the Club Bar in Ronan and notice Horsehair scrawled in the curb outside the front door, that’s me.

1973 was quite a party, but the next year turned out to be an even bigger bash. Cattle prices were up at the time so Roy leased a couple of hundred acres from Gerrold Leighton. The Leighton place had a corral large enough to hold a rodeo, with several small pens at one side. It was nearly new, built on the site of a smaller corral, and the old poles and posts were stacked in the center, awaiting disposal.

We really didn’t need all that space for branding. The calves were separated into a pen at one end and the irons were set up just outside its gate. The group included several real cowboys that year and it was soon decided that a chute wasn’t necessary. We’d work calves the old-fashioned way. Some big, burly guy would wade into the calf pen and grab the closest animal by a hind leg. Then he’d drag it out into the main corral where a second cowboy would grab a front leg. They’d wrestle it over on its side and then drop onto the ground and pin it down for the man with the irons.

The guy at the rear would slide under the calf’s hind legs in an upright sitting position. He’d hook his boot heels on the calf’s lower leg and pull back on the upper leg with both hands. The stance looked like a rower pulling an oar, and the calf was nearly helpless with its hind legs splayed apart. Meanwhile, the man at the front knelt on the calf’s neck and front legs to immobilize that end. He’d twist the calf’s upper leg with a motion similar to putting an armlock on a human.

The calf throwing became sort of a competition, the cowboys dragging them out as quickly as the irons could be reheated and the work proceeded as well as I ever saw it done. By sundown, the calves were back with their mothers and a fairly large group of men were drinking their well-earned beer around the corral.

Ray Staples was too old to wrestle calves, but he brought along a brown paper bag with a mixture of flour and spices. He also had an old iron griddle that was soon propped up over the remnants of the branding fire. Ray skinned the rocky mountain oysters that he’d been gathering all day, dropped them into his bag to be coated with breading, and then fried them up on the griddle. Come and get ‘em!

Some cowboys were eager to partake and some had to be dared into it, but eventually we all ate at least one. Drinking a few beers helped to get them down. The flavor wasn’t bad, a bit like meatballs, but chewy. The trick was to get one that was cooked all the way through without being too crisply burnt on the outside. The quality definitely went down along with the quantity of beer that went down Ray.

As the sky darkened, the night got colder, but no one wanted to leave. It seemed like everyone had a six-pack or even a case of beer in their car and the party just kept getting wilder. There were lots of tall tales, raunchy jokes, and even some songs. All at the top of our voices, of course. The noise easily carried for half a mile on a still night in the countryside. I’m sure Gerrold and his family could hear it all quite plainly up at the house.

Dad grabbed his propane torch and decided to warm things up. He lit the nozzle and thrust it into the pile of wood left over from the old corral. It was a big pile, loosely stacked, and plenty dry. It went up like fireworks. The resulting blaze certainly warmed the night, with an intense heat that drove everyone back at least fifteen feet from the blaze. Flames leaped up thirty feet or more and a column of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the sky. Sparks and ash drifted downwind. It was quite a sight, clearly visible from Gerrold’s living room window.

Gerrold wasn’t much of a drinker and he was not amused by the rowdy drunks who were carrying on in his new corral. He definitely wasn’t amused to get a visit from the volunteer fire department. Fortunately, nothing else ignited and both the drunks and the fire died down on their own. The firemen stayed for a beer, of course, to keep everyone safe and make sure that the fire didn’t spread.

Uncle Roy decided not to repeat the big branding party at Leighton’s. Mostly because Gerrold refused him the use of the big corral again. So, the next year he rented a calf table and the two of us worked several dozen calves in a misty rain on one long, hard Sunday. A calf table is a small, portable chute that can rotate a calf over on its side for better access to its ‘jewels’. It’s almost comical to compare that day to the previous year’s blowout. Two men with the proper equipment accomplished as much in twelve hours as a big crew working an afternoon with their bare hands. And uncle Roy saved the expense of all that beer! Still, I think the camaraderie and excitement of the big bash was more fun. It certainly makes a better story.

That cool spring day in 1975 was my last branding party. After that I was away at college, dealing with a very different kind of BS. Dad and uncle Roy had to handle the branding by themselves. A crash in beef prices wiped out uncle Roy’s ranching operation a couple of years later. My dad continued to raise beef for another fifteen years, but marriage, work, and kids kept me from ever really getting back to ranch work. I never did graduate to branding or castration, and I don’t regret it. I wasn’t meant to be a cowboy. I have good memories of those branding parties, along with mental images that I’d rather forget, and I definitely don’t miss being covered with calf shit!