Don Rowlison has served as curator of the Cottonwood Ranch Historic Site since 1985.

And before that was the state's public archeologist with the Kansas Historical Society.

But Don is also a noted cowboy historian educating people about the real lives of these old West icons.

Roll out.

You're burning daylight.

In his years of sharing about the history of the Old West in the high Plains one of the most popular of Don's programs about the Cowboys was one he called "Out of the Bedroll" Ah, we're at the Cottonwood Ranch State Historic Site.

John Fenton Pratt, the sheep man that had this place, would have would have let the cowboy's stay if they were passing through.

He was that generous.

But they always say that the cowboy dresses from the top down.

So I put on my hat first, and the hat was probably actually invented in maybe in Kansas in the 1850s.

Early 1860s, as John B Stetson, a hat maker out of Philadelphia, was heading across about where the Nebraska Kansas line is to the Denver area on the gold rush.

Well as he was crossing the plains, the hats at the time had a big high crown, you think of Abraham Lincoln, and real small brim.

Well he thought he could do something better.

So allegedly he molded a hat and went to the Denver area and sold it for $10 which was an unbelievable amount at the time.

Well, he didn't strike it rich in Colorado, so he went back to Philadelphia, where he came from and started making hats.

And it became the John B Stetson Hat Company.

The first hat he made, he called the Boss of the Plains.

And so in the 1860s and seventies, that was the most popular hat.

So the shirt is a white shirt and you think, well, gosh, this is isn't what we see in the 21st century of cowboy shirts, but those cowboys in the 19th century and even the farmers wore mostly white shirts or maybe a blue chambray shirt because the white shirts are white cotton Muslim.

And that was the cheapest you could get.

The cowboy wasn't making much money at a dollar a day.

He wasn't around a lot of times where he had to be clean.

And so a white shirt worked quite well.

But you noticed a button top button, my top button on this.

It was the style of the time in a Victorian era that men could not show any part of their chest so around ladies or mixed companies, they always had the top button buttoned.

Now, Levi Strauss started making jeans for the miners during the California gold rush, and he was making them out of denim, which was kind of a sail cloth.

And the first ones were mostly tan or brown, and later they became blue and there's buttons on the side for your galluses or suspenders.

More right called, and they aren't stretchy they are made of canvas.

At the time, most cowboys didn't wear a belt.

Some of the historians say the cowboys never wore suspenders because only farmers and miners wore suspenders.

The cowboys wore suspenders, too, but a lot of them avoided wearing a belt, as I thought at the time.

That if you had a tight belt on and riding a bucking horse, you'd get a hernia.

So most of them didn't.

So there were a lot of cowboys all over western Kansas and huge cattle ranches because cattle do quite well on this grassland and they still do.

A lot of cattle were shipped from eastern Kansas out here to utilize the pastures or the grassland, as well as the Texans had discovered it.

So a lot of cattle were driven up from Texas to utilize the grasslands the Great Western Cattle Trail was about three miles west of where the Cottonwood Ranch is across the Solomon River.

The early life, the cattle trail, some of these cattle herds were pastured up here for a season.

The price of cattle might not be good, so they would use the free grass on the public lands and fatten the cattle on the grass until the price got good and then drive into the shipping points, which the nearest one here was probably WaKeeney.

They first came up through by trailing the cattle north and south through the high plains.

And you trailed the cattle very slowly because you had only to go 12 to 15 miles a day because they had to have water every day.

And especially in western Kansas, the rivers were set up So it was called basically the ladder of rivers because there were rivers and streams about every 12 or 15 miles.

So that's why the cattle trails were very evident out here, especially on the Great Western Cattle Trail or the Texas trail.

So the cattle would get fat as you trailed.

You didn't hurry them one way or the other.

You kind of drifted them and let them graze as as long as they were heading in the same direction.

So the Texans saw the benefit of this grass out here and it was wide open for cattle.

So they started moving in the cattle into the area.

And so they had ranches.

But even in the early days, in the mid 1800s, 1885, the cattle associations knew that this is going to be a short lived thing, that cattle grazing in the in the high plains was going to last not very long because they knew it would be settled very quickly.

A lot of cattlemen came up and established ranches here.

The cowboy, what he kind of desired out of his life is...

They were mostly young men.

The the cowboys on the trail drives the ones that works on the ranch and the probably the objective was as to work long enough so they could start their own herd.

And and then the goal was to have a ranch of their own.

And so they started out, uh, living in the bed rolls out here.

And the bedroll would be used because they had all their belongings and they weren't always people born to the saddle.

And out of Texas.

The cowboy was nothing more than a hired man on horseback.

A lot of the cowboys out here started young when they were 12 years old.

They might be herding cattle, and then they became cowboys that ranged a lot farther.

But there were a lot of cattle moving in and out.

And you had sales of cattle, maybe 60 to 100 miles away, and you would buy a whole herd.

So the cowboys were there to move the the herds of cattle from point A to point B to their home range.

Cowboy was very busy and they were always in big demand So I threw a whole lot of things out of my bedroll as I awakened because I slept with, I slept with my rope, uh, I might have more than one.

This is a Riata, this is made out of rawhide or un-tanned leather from a cow.

So the hair has been stripped off of it.

It hasn't been tanned, but it's been treated with things like tallow and stuff like that.

But I also might have another rope with me, which I would use maybe for a horse rope and stuff, but could rope anything with it.

This was made out of the century plant, mostly out of Central America.

So it's a shorter rope used for calves, not quite as often, but the cold and the humidity make a lot of difference on how well this rope is.

If it's hot and dry, it's very limp.

And when it's protected and dry and kept a constant temperature in my bedroll it works quite well.

So my boots, I'm missing my boots, so I'll dig in my bedroom and maybe find those.

Those are important.

So I slept with the spurs so I knew where they were.

Almost all cowboys wore spurs.

Now this looks like a very sharp rowl, as it's called.

It's a toothed wheel.

And you think, boy, that really punishes the horse.

But I can rub my hand across the top and it doesn't hurt my hand.

These were mostly used and the horse would get used to them just to cue the horse to do things and make it go faster and stuff.

But it kind of tickled them more than anything.

But a cowboy also had other things to put on.

He wore a bandana, the cowboy slang.

It was called a wipe, and they may be made from cheap material or salvage material like part of a flour or sugar sack, which flour and sugar came in cloth bags.

Or they could be stuff as fine as silk and they paid money for them.

They wanted them colorful and usually they wore them with the bib part down.

In the winter time especially, but also in the summer, You might sleep with your horses bridle because that was handy.

You don't see a saddle out here because my night horse, in case I had to do night guard duty in case of a stampede, was already saddled.

But I'd have my bridle So I knew where it was so I could catch any horse.

But also in the winter, if you were in your bed and it was cold, the bit which is steel that goes into the horse's mouth would freeze.

Cold morning, Quinn, you would hold your hand on this.

So you wouldn't freeze the horse's tongue.

Have you ever stuck your tongue on a cold pipe in a winter?

I haven't.

Okay, well, you can try it, but it'll freeze.

The lining of the tongue would stick to this, and it would pull the skin off the horse's tongue.

And with that, the horse couldn't eat.

You couldn't put the bridle in, it wouldn't control because it hurt so bad.

So you took care of that.

And as you came out of your sleeping bag, you could hold it in your hand to keep it warm until you got it into your horse's mouth.

This particular horse is a quarter horse of today, and he's actually much bigger than what they would have in the 19th century.

This horse probably weighs probably 1300 pounds.

The horses of cowboys rode were probably 900-950 pounds.

The normal cowboy was only about, you know, five feet six or so and weighed 120 pounds.

A smaller horse was very good for him, and the cattle were also lighter than we have today.

Now we have 1200 pound cattle.

Most longhorns that they were using and driving were maybe 650 to 850 pounds.

Now this horse for a cowboy horse is very much out of shape, out of condition because he's way too fat.

But he isn't ridden enough.

Now the cowboy horses were not grained.

They were living on off the grass and they were being ridden often sometimes 30 miles a day, but only a half day at a time, and then they would have four to five days rest.

So every cowboy had six to ten horses to ride, especially on a trail drive, horses of different experience.

Some horses that were had a lot of experience.

They rode only occasionally.

Other horses that were younger can't take as much riding.

So they'd have been ridden less until they were trained enough.

But the horse is very important to the cowboy and also the Native Americans.

Before that, because of the horse, the Native Americans or the Plains Indians changed your culture sometimes within 30 years after they obtain the horse.

They were after the buffalo and and their horses were trained to chase the buffalo and going for the kill.

In fact, the Native Americans made excellent cowboys because they understood the horse and they understood bovines, which would be buffalo or cattle.

We always see in history books, or especially on movies, the conflict that the cowboys and Indians were really having.

That is basically untrue.

The military, the US Army fought the Indians.

The Cowboys saw more of a closeness to them because you think about this, the cowboy was, the early cowboy was a nomad on the trail.

The stuff he had, he carried in his bedroom.

He depended on the horse to it and point A to point B.

The Indian was the same way.

The Indian hunted their meat and a lot of it off horseback.

The cowboy moved their meat, the cattle by horseback.

They both had to train horses.

They enjoyed riding them, they enjoyed racing them.

They still had to take care of them in various ways.

And so there was more of a common thing.

The Indians loved horse races and betting.

Oh, so did the Cowboys.

The Indians sat around in a maybe in teepee and a fire and ate and went to sleep around it.

So did the Cowboys.

The Indians had ropes.

They knew how to use a rope and made mostly out of Buffalo hide in the early days.

The cowboys could rope and their's might be a riata made out of cowhide.

They took care of the horses by putting a blanket over their back.

So if they had saddles, it wouldn't rub.

But even if they were had no saddles, they had a blanket on there.

It's just the way people are.

If you're more comfortable, you perform better.

And so the Indians want to keep you comfortable also.

So you have this commonality in the two cultures of it was both a horse culture and its own way.

But notice my shirt.

Hey, there's no pockets on this, so how would I put stuff in my pockets?

So to make up for that the Cowboys wore vests.

The most of those were cast off from old suits.

But the thing with the vests, the primary purpose of them is they protected the shirt, they protect your body.

They kept you a little bit warmer in the winter, and you'd get used in the summer, but they have pockets, so you could put stuff in your pockets.

You could carry maybe a juice harp, you could carry chews of tobacco.

If you were a smoker, you would have a sack of tobacco and maybe Bull Durham papers.

But cowboys also are known for wearing chaps and there are a lot of different varieties of chaps.

And they are spelled CHAP and they aren't ch-UH-aps, you know, as a cowboy somebody say ch-UH-aps and you go, no, you know, their SHH-aps pronounced that you would chef made for a derivative of, oh, such things as the chaparral to keep the brush off them.

So they go and they tie in the front.

A lot of times there were big buckles, but they decided that wasn't very good because here's a small piece of leather that ties this front together.

Because with a bucking horse and you had a big belt across here with a buckle.

If you the horse bucked and you got the belt over the saddle horn, you can die.

These are made so that they will break if you get in a jam.

But with the chaps, the protection, I'm hitting myself hard, but I can hit it anywhere on my leg and it doesn't hurt.

So the leather with the boots and the leather with the chinks or the chaps is basically a leather armor that works quite well.

So there were a lot of cowboys and cowboy songs were very famous even during the trail driving era.

And probably the most common instrument used was the juice harp.

It's kind of a little key that twangs.

The harmonica.

You could buy a harmonica for a nickel or a dime and the better quality with a dime or the quarter ones, but you're only making a dollar a day.

And so you got the cheap stuff.

Probably the most popular, if they had them was the violin.

Something that's kind of neat is Kansas is the only state that their state song is a cowboy song, "Home on the Range."

It was written in Kansas.

Not really as a cowboy song, but it was before the Cowboys were driving cattle and the Cowboys adopted it.

And so that was one of their favorite songs that they sang along the trail was "Home on the Range."

The Cowboys life wasn't easy.

Most of the Cowboys that were on the trail and on the roung up were young.

They're usually between the ages of 17, 22.

The older guys was the boss well, he was the boss, and usually the cook was a stove up cowboy that could cook, and he was a grouch, with the chuckwagon.

Most of the diet was bacon, beans, and biscuits, and this might be three, two and coffee three times a day.

You had the coffee and you liked it strong because a lot of people say, well, the coffee was so strong that would float to horseshoe or at least a horseshoe nail.

But these guys were getting coffee out of streams, out of buffalo wallows with water in them and all sorts of stuff that had little crawly things in.

They didn't filter it very well.

And so they wanted strong coffee to kind of kill the taste of it.

And they realized that you boiled the water that killed some of the germs even back then.

But even if you just boil the water out of a stream or out of some tepid pond or something, you still have the taste.

So the coffee was in there to cut it, cut this down so they liked coffee, strong coffee.

The biscuits were easy to make in a Dutch oven from the chuckwagon.

The cowboy didn't carry his cooking tools with him unless he was moving camp and had his bedroll.

The only thing the cowboy owned was for himself was basically the saddle in his bedroll.

In the early days, no stores in between on the trail.

So that's why you had the chuck wagon to carry your food in.

What really makes a chuckwagon is a chuck box in the back.

The chuck wagons that were in this area were just converted farm wagons.

But these are pretty unique because it folds down the back of it.

The end gate makes the table, so the cook had a countertop to prepare food on.

Up here are the cupboards and the drawers to keep things Cupboards, maybe for spices or maybe flour in a jar or a can that you didn't want to spill or even bags of coffee.

If it's in the spring time, you'd get prairie chicken eggs or if you were along a stream, try to find duck eggs, just to vary your meal about anything you could.

And then you had all sorts of rods in here for hooks to hang your pots and pans on over the fire.

Because you had the rod.

And if we watched the movies and stuff and always calling people to eat, we even have a triangle in here.

You go on the inside So the biscuits were easy to cook and they were sourdough biscuits.

Beans were around.

They would keep they did have a lot of protein in them and then bacon.

Because they say, well, all that beef, why in the heck would they eat bacon.

Because they say, well, all that beef, why in the heck would they eat bacon.

Well, there are a lot of cattle out there and, yeah, now and then you would buther them.

Also the beef would wouldn't last as long as the bacon would.

And so bacon, beans and biscuits and hot coffee day in and day out.

But anyway, the cowboy would get what was called scurvy, and that's the lack of vitamin C because he wasn't eating his vegetables.

And so even as a young man, he'd get scurvy and your teeth might get loose and maybe even fall out.

Canned tomatoes were great to divert scurvy.

And also they were an early form of Gatorade because canned tomatoes had a lot of salt in the juice.

The juice and the tomatoes have vitamin C, it would quench your thirst.

The other thing, maybe on a chuckwagon are these, they're on both sides of these deals that swing out there, cause you could hang a lantern on those rods on both sides.

Which would give you light in the early morning while you're fixing breakfast before the sun has come up.

Or if it's after dark or a storm, you hang the lanterns on those because there was a big sea of grass out here.

So the cowboys driving cattle or looking for strays would know where the chuckwagon was The cowboy's bedroll is everything you own was in this except for a saddle.

You had to pack all this stuff back into it because this was your suitcase.

You had no other place to put it.

This would be packed in for safety.

You'd want the the head part to keep the dry air.

So that would be in the inside.

So you'd start up the head and roll this up and you can see how big it is.

Now would that fit on the back of a 900 pound horse.

Oh, it would on the back of the saddle, but you couldn't climb on because as you mounted the saddle you'd have to throw your leg clear over and it weighs with all the stuff in it, probably around 70 pounds.

And the horse couldn't carry it because it's carrying the saddle that probably weighed 35 pounds, it's carrying a cowboy that the younger guys at that time were smaller than we are now and probably weighed 120-130 pounds, was skinny because he wasn't eating well and it just didn't work.

So that's where the bed rolls were carried in the back of the chuck wagons, or they might have a separate one if they had a big crew called the bed wagon.

The thing is, you were supposed to roll it up and get it as close to the wagon as you could so the cook or his swamper, his helper could load it up in the wagon.

After three times that you didn't do that and left it out in a mess, the cook could take a rope and say with the top part, put a knot in this, tie a rope on it and drag it to the next camp, which might be 12 miles away.

But the cowboy couldn't do anything about it because he was the one that both rules.

So if he could, he'd have to go back and and and find all of the stuff that was in it if he could.

So you can see the size of this.

It is heavy.

Because all your stuff you own except what you're wearing and your saddle is in there.

These guys were young, low pay, and most of their cowboying stuff, especially on the trail drives is primarily for adventure.

And you can compare that with the custom combiners of today that start in in the South and work their way north.

And there's a lot of young people, high school kids, college kids out to see the world and they're getting paid for it, but they have to work to do it.

The same with the cowboy.

But the cowboy was nothing more than a hired man on horseback.

There were cowboys from Mexico, there were African-Americans that were cowboys there were cowboys out of Texas that grew up on the ranch.

There were people from foreign countries.

The English here at the Cottonwood Ranch were not cowboys.

They were city people and sailors.

But they learned how to herd sheep.

They could ride.

Another Englishman around here by the name of Frank Brandrum, was a very good cowboy, a very good horseman.

But he didn't do the cowboy full time.

There was another family of Pratts that lived nearby.

They came from England, too, and they had a family of cowboys.

They were fat stock dealers over in England.

So they knew about cattle a little bit, and they were even importing from Ireland to England to run their butcher shop or your meat shop.

Those Pratts, a lot of them were cowboys.

One of them even went out on the open range around eastern Colorado.

And worked on the big ranches there.

But they were all stockman.

They moved cattle back and forth in Kansas.

There's nothing for them to move 100 cattle and in the 1930s, the last cattle drive from the Studley area went to the Flint Hills of Kansas, about 250 miles away, because during the dirty thirties there was no grass here but there was more down there.

So the Pratts and others by the name of Conard went on a trail drive and moved those cattle 250 miles to the Flint Hills of Kansas for the grass down there so they could stay alive as a stockman.

There are still cowboys out in western Kansas.

In fact, quite a few of them, but a lot of them aren't on the open ranges as they were in a late 19th century the turn of the century up until the 1920s.

Today there's a lot of cowboys at work in feedlots.

There are still cowboys on ranches, but the open range is dead.

There aren't the lengthy cattle drives because they haul them on trucks now.

Cowboys are still in the feedlots, they still have the culture, they're still a horseback culture, primarily.

They still are very proud of their saddles.

They still dress in the so-called uniform of the cowboy because we know that they were functional clothing just adapted to the cattle country and they're still cowboys.

And so they were chaps, they wear brimmed hats because they're out in the weather.

They have heavy coats, they take care of the horses and take care of the most time their gear, because they still work with the cattle in a less confined way.

They might not ride 40 miles a day, but they probably ride 20 miles a day, but in a smaller area.

So the cowboys are still around in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, all through the Great Plains.

So from that there are a lot of cowboys around.

There are still cowboys today and will probably be cowboys in the future.

Some have changed in different ways and some traditions have stayed the same