As I grow older there are rather strange thoughts come to my mind about cowboys and cow people. I have mingled with most all classes of the human race and I have some very true and sincere friends among all classes—but I don’t believe there is any other people in the world that was as intimate and friendly on short acquaintance as the old time cowboy and cowman.

They would fight among themselves and some of them would steal from each other but let one of them get in a tough spot and his clan would come to his rescue when everybody else had throwed him down, I was on a roundup on the Moccasin range in Montana in the year 1888 and a small rancher lost a milk cow. He had come to the round up to ride with us for a few days to try to find his cow. The next morning we left camp about daylight and hadn’t went a mile from camp when his horse fell and broke the man’s leg above the knee. We got the bedwagon and fixed some blankets in it the best we could and drove him 20 miles to a doctor. The boys raised three hundred dollars for that fellow ... and none of them had ever seen him before that day he came to camp.

There was an old-time cowboy and cowman—lived at Gilroy, California, that I knew for twenty years. His name was Ed Wi............