Western Horizon Drive

A trail herd could go from grazing to a dead run in a second. Thunder did it most often, but so could a lightning flash, a jackrabbit, a rattle of tin at the chuck wagon or a horse shaking its saddle. Once the leaders bolted, the rest went with them, and a stampede at night could scatter cattle over miles of country.

Cowboys did not try to stop a running herd head-on. Riders raced up alongside the leaders and pressed them to one side, bending the front of the run until the herd was chasing its own tail in a great circle. Trail hands called it milling, and once the cattle were turning on themselves, they soon ran out of steam.

It was the most dangerous work on the drive. A horse that stepped into a prairie dog hole at full speed in the dark could throw its rider under the herd, and more than one trail hand was buried beside the trail after a night like that.

The painting puts us at the front of the herd. Longhorns in red, brown and speckled white crowd forward, horns tossing, while a rider on a dark bay gallops alongside with a rope in his hand. Another rider follows through the dust, and the sky runs from storm gray down to a thin band of orange at the horizon.