Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today.

My guest is Sammy Root Compton, author of The Cowboy I Screwed Writing into the wind.

Sammy, thank you so much for being here today.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

I'm really excited to talk about this because this is a such a wonderful and fascinating and interesting story.

but can you just tell us, why you wanted to write this book?

Well, there has been so many articles written on my father throughout the years when he was alive and even after and so many chapters in books.

And there was never one complete story of his full life.

And one time in the 1950s, Willard Porter, who was a top rodeo rider, tried to do that and sent a rough draft of his life off to his publisher in New York.

And they wrote back to him and said that, this is a fascinating story.

Of course, dad wasn't even finished living at that time and went on to win world championships after that.

But he says we don't think we can publish this as nonfiction as we don't believe your readers would believe it was true.

If you want to resubmit it, it's fiction.

Maybe we should publish it.

And he says, I can't do that.

This is a true story about my my good friends life.

Well, over the years, my mother always tried to get somebody to write his life story, and unfortunately, they didn't have the time or something happen.

So then she started turning to me and she said, Sammy, you know your dad better than anybody because I shared his passion and, I said, mom, I wouldn't know where to begin.

I don't have any training on writing.

It never crossed my mind once that I could do this.

Well, then mom passes away.

Just about seven years ago, and over the, I had just recently moved to Purcell.

Didn't know too many people there.

And then Covid hit 2020.

And I thought, what on earth am I going to do with my time?

And I thought, I know I need to get all I have two stacks this tall of articles written on dead in My closet, and I thought, I need to get these all together in one manuscript just for my family.

So I started writing, and as I did, a couple of people that I was real friends with that had written some articles, wanted to read what I had written.

They were cowboys.

And I said that sent this to them, and they just both says this would make a fantastic book.

You keep on.

We can't wait till we get the next chapter.

So from there, that's when I got serious about maybe I could do this.

So it took lots of prayer and just, I don't know, one day all these thoughts just started coming to me.

This is, what I want to say.

This is how I the different chapters.

I want I want to make a chapter for each of these famous horses, and it developed from there.

It was a very inspirational thing, and I really can't believe I did it.

Well, you could never I would have never guessed.

But you hadn't written anything before because it's a wonderful book, a wonderful story, well told.

So kudos to you because that's that's inspiring.

Honestly, we can we can do things we we never thought we could.

Well, and as you get older, I thank you.

Thank what have I got to lose?

Exactly, exactly.

So you had all these articles.

Did you have to do other research or any interviews or things to, to put this?

dad had had a four hour taped interview with Professor Charles Townsend back in 1969.

Charles.

He was Charles Townsend, was also a part time rodeo announcer.

And, he had done a four hour taped interview on my father for Texas Tech University.

And they had this in their archives and still do at Texas Tech.

And I had obtained these tapes from Texas Tech and so on.

Those tapes, dad tells a lot about his early ranching days, but other than that, it was just from all these newspaper and magazine articles that I had accumulated and my knowledge of what dad had told me and my life with him after I was born.

So really not a lot of research.

I already had everything right at my.

You had the family archive?

Yes.

Well, I want to jump in and talk about his life because as you as you said in that anecdote, it is almost unbelievable.

the things he did, the place, he had a long life.

So he he certainly did and saw a lot over the course of his years.

can you tell us his early life?

Where was he born?

Where did he get his start?

He was born in 1894.

And in Mangum, the area what is now Mangum, Oklahoma.

At that particular time, it was in the in territory and it had become a state.

Yet it was Texas claimed it.

Well.

Two years after he was born, the U.S. Supreme Court passed it from Texas to Oklahoma.

So he then became an Okie.

And then, of course, it wasn't until 1907 that Oklahoma really became a state.

But he was born on his father's ranch.

From a little bitty kid.

All he wanted to do was carry a rope around in his hand and rope everything that moved.

And he always told his dad, I'm going to be the best roper and one day win the prestigious Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.

And that's where he got his start when he was 16 years old.

He, rope that his first rodeo against the older man.

And he won what you call a go around.

I don't know if the readers will or the viewers will understand, want to go around this, but it it's a turn.

All the contestants have one turn at performing, and then some rodeos have 2 or 3 go around, and they put them together to make an average.

Well, at 16 years old, he rope there and he went to go around and he was so excited, he threw his hands up in the air because he wanted to make sure the timers.

So the time to stop.

Well, this was the first time a cowboy had ever signaled for time to stop that way.

And that caught on.

And of course, is still used today in both calf roping and tie downstair roping.

And so that was the president of why you throw your hands up in the air.

I think that was my favorite thing to learn from this book.

I'm going to pull out that fun fact at many parties in my future, because it makes sense.

Certainly somebody had to do it first.

It was your dad.

Well, he quit school in the eighth grade, which a lot of boys did to go to work back in those days.

And he worked that first winter at the Millen Ranch.

he lived in a dugout by himself, and he said that was the coldest winter he ever spent.

And, you know, for a while, 16, 17 year old boy to be alone.

You know, that was something from there.

After that winter, he, saddled his horse and went to the Four Sixes to ask if he could get a job there.

Well, Tom Burnett, who ran the ranch, he had already heard of Ike's roping abilities, and he said, yeah, we will hire you, but it will be two weeks before we have any work for you.

And I thought, no, I need to get on to work now.

So he rode on to the Matador Ranch, a neighboring ranch.

Now, this ranch was a huge ranch.

the larger it was all fenced in pastures, but the largest pasture was 13 sections, and the smallest was 2 to 3 sections.

So.

And in those days, it was a chuckwagon.

See, on the cowboys went out with the chuck wagons.

They went out and work the cattle wherever the cattle was.

They didn't bring them into headquarters to put them in holding pans.

So dad got a job there, and he worked there about four years.

And in the book I tell of how ranch work was really done and some of the escapades that happened because the Cowboys, the Cowboys would sometimes be out there 5 or 6 months at a time and never come to town, you know, so they had to form their own entertainment.

And a lot of it was quite comical.

On.

From there he went to the Jay Ranch and worked there about a year, and then he got wind that, arose out in Arizona that they was hiring, cowboys to bring wild cattle down from the mountains, and you could rope all you wanted.

And, boy, he thought, that will suit me just fine.

So he boards a train with his horse and heads to Arizona.

And out there he worked for the, Shirakawa Ranch, and then later for the double circles.

That that part was so fascinating to me because, well, first of all, for somebody who wants to be a roper, I imagine that's kind of the dream job you're out there.

That's all you're doing is roping these wild cattle.

But it's also I.

So dangerous, by the way.

It was very dangerous.

And, you know, most cowboys have never roped wild cattle to bring them out.

And wild cattle, they they'll charge a horse.

And of course, wild being while they had never had their horns tipped and I mean, you know, they had gore horse, gore cowboy.

And even once after you got them roped, they'd want to bite you.

They'd want to get up in the saddle with a cowboy and injure you.

So you really had to know how to handle the cattle once they was caught.

And being up in those tall pine trees, it was hard to rope it one because they would hide while cattle would hide from you, and they'd get behind bushes and trees.

And you better be ready to rope if you could place one out, because you might just have a swing or two of your rope, and you better be able to catch them, or they'd be hidden again.

So yes, it was a very different way, but you learn to rope and to handle cattle up there.

I imagine this is probably why maybe he was the best, because this is like boot camp for roping.

You, right.

he also, right around this time, I believe, was drafted to to serve in world.

Yes.

One day the Cowboys were sitting around the campfire and, man, a cowboy rode up from their headquarters, which was 50 miles away, up into the mountains to find the cowboys.

And he had a letter for I. Rude from the U.S. Army government.

And dad had been drafted in what they call then the Great War.

It later was referred to as World War One.

But, the letter was six months old.

And he was.

Yeah.

Well, they had first sent it to Mangum, Oklahoma, to his parents home to try to locate him, and they had no idea where he was.

They all they knew.

He was in Arizona, in the mountains somewhere, roping wild cattle.

And so from some way, the government tracked down to what outfit he worked for and was able to get it to headquarters.

Even the boss at headquarters didn't know for sure and what range of the mountains the Cowboys had their camp in, so it took them another two weeks to locate where Ike really was.

And, so anyway, he got the letter.

He immediately saddled his horse and rode down the track with spear as to report in, but they told him, well, by now the lot that we had you scheduled to ship out with has already left.

So just ride back up, go back to work.

Now that we know where you're at, we'll catch you in the next round.

Which is what they did.

And he eventually went off to World War One.

But I want to I don't want you to talk about his service over there too, because even his, his branch heard the the kind of work he did in the service was very unusual.

Yes.

of course, in World War One they use many, many horses and mules, both to pull their wagons, their artillery around.

Automotive, vehicles were just kind of coming into play.

But even the those automotive vehicles couldn't get through the muddy terrain.

Horses were better used.

There was 8 million horses that gave their lives in World War One.

But dad was assigned to the veterinarian division, and his job was to bring the injured horses back from the front lines so that I we can't go into it.

But that's a fascinating piece of history in and of itself.

So I hope people will read that part.

So he comes back, and this is, I think, kind of just go back to ranching.

But then this is I think about the time where he really starts getting into the rodeo circuit.

Yes.

can you talk about how he got started and how well he went back and went to work for the A's that that year after he was drafted.

And his boss was very supportive of his roping and would often send Ike off to the local rodeos and pay his entry fees.

Well, that really got I.

And Ike was winning real good.

And I got to thinking, you know, I really would like to get on and pursue my dream and quit the ranching jobs and go to full time competitive roping, which he did.

So his first rodeo that he heard of, where all the toughs of all over the Ropers were going to be, was at Tom Burnett's four six ranch.

So dad settled his horse and rode 150 miles to get to Tom's to, to Iowa Park, Texas.

And he got there the night before, and he didn't know exactly where the roping was going to be held.

So he bedded down with this horse in the wagon yard the next morning.

By the time he found out where the the roping was being held, the roping had already started.

And he handed Tom Burnett up and said, I sure would like to enter and and he said, well, Ike, there's this.

All the pups are here and there's been some good times, but if you really want to, okay, I'll let you go ahead and enter.

Well, they had goat roping three go around and three go around.

So calf roping well Ike won all three of the go around the calf roping.

Then it came time of the goat roping.

Excuse me.

Then it came time for the calf roping.

And he won the first to go around.

And on the last go around the the cat, he had rope the calf and it stumbled in some way.

He came up short handed.

The calf got out of the loop and somebody yelled, rope him again!

Rope him again.

And Ike, with a grin says, I didn't know you could rope if you're not good enough to catch him the first time.

And I don't even have a second rope.

And but that from that, when, he went back to around Pawhuska area and he won several rope things after that.

So that's where he really got his start at Tom Burnett's four six ranch.

And then from there, it was like he was for the next.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, for the next fort 40 plus years or more.

it was rodeo.

Rodeo and all over the United States.

Yes.

He had this kind of nomadic lifestyle where he wasn't tied down anywhere.

He.

Pardon the pun.

I didn't do that on purpose.

That he would.

Yeah.

He just go from rodeo to rodeo, just making a win.

Enough money to go to the next one.

Money never mattered to my dad.

It was who was the best roper.

And just to get to the next rodeo, he was passion that about it and was his entire life.

You know, it's, it's wonderful to have a passion for something like that.

I think to me, that's the mo.

That's the part of the story that resonated with me is that if you're passionate about something and you hone your skill, some people just find their place in this world.

And it seems like he found what he was meant to do.

Yes.

But this was it was, Can you can you talk about, that there was a, rodeo or a presentation they put on in, in Europe, in England for some of the royals.

They had, tried a couple of rodeos over in England, and they had went on the second one that was produced by ship for and on the ship and that's he went over there.

But the English people thought it was too cruel.

They didn't take to it.

And so the rodeo went broke.

But yes.

And the while he was over there, though, he had a command performance before the Queen of England.

So it was an experience for him.

I can only imagine it's a different world.

Yeah, for both sides.

They probably couldn't believe what they were seeing.

And, our cowboys couldn't believe what they were seeing.

Exactly.

You know, I mean, the Englishmen were considered very superior horsemen and all.

Well, they decided that they they hadn't seen bronc riding and all this, like the cowboys were doing over there at that time.

And they thought, well, if those Americans can ride these broncs, we can do so.

A few of them came out and got in the bronc riding, and it was reported they was being carried off with stretchers right and left.

It was a different deal.

I mean, all you have to do is watch some, like dressage on the Olympics versus going to a rodeo.

It's very different, very different skills.

I also do want to talk about the, the, the record keeping because you mentioned this earlier, but there wasn't great record keeping because there weren't formal like associations.

Well, when dad first started rodeo, rodeo, there wasn't any organization.

And it wasn't until the I'm going to get this wrong here, if I quote a date, but I would say the, 1920s, mid 20s that they started trying to form an organization and finally it was called the Rodeo Association of America.

But they were a good ten years.

Even after they was formed, they couldn't get the rodeos across the United States to always send in the results.

So whoever was crowned world champion was not sometimes correct.

And it was during this period of time that dad won so many calf roping, and he and he had been going about every rodeo he could get to.

So he ought to know better than anybody.

But he always felt like if there had been an association that was operating and keeping records correct, that's when he should have won about three world championships in calf roping.

but he roped all three events in his lifetime calf roping, team roping, in steer roping.

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit because, again, we can't cover, unfortunately, his whole life story up to when he got married to when he met your mom, most people would think, maybe when you get married, you're going to settle down.

But that didn't stop him.

So what's unusual about this?

My father was 43 years old when he married for the first time, and my mother was only 19, 24 years difference in their ages.

But it worked for them.

She was a trooper and nothing changed.

I mean, he told her, it says you're now.

You're not going to have a home.

but I'll show you all over the United States and you'll get to see a lot of sights.

And she threw right in there, and and she did.

I have to say, I was also very impressed with your mother.

She was a trooper.

She was riding those trains, driving the car.

Back it up the trailer, dad.

And then didn't get his first car until he was 40 years old.

Now, other cowboys had had cars and trailers long before dad dad preferred, but it's always on the train and go the rodeo that way.

Or catch a ride with another cowboy friend, but he did not know how to drive until he was 40 years old and when he did, him and another cowboy friend was at Indianapolis.

And I don't have records, but I'm presuming dad probably had one.

Some because he had some money and thought it was about time to do my own car.

They went out to the Indianapolis Speedway, and Barton showed dad how to drive a car on the speedway, but he never really learned how to back it up.

So of course he he married three years later.

So a lot of the driving, he just let my mother do it.

But he knew how to drive.

But he never really knew how to back one up.

Very good.

Sure.

Well, and then even having children didn't really I mean, I guess a little bit we are going reach school age, but you're still on the rodeo circuit.

Well, after the fact, until we got into school age, we just camped out at the rodeos and, you know, but then once we got in school, well, dad had to get a some kind of a ranching job and we had to stay put.

And that was out in California because at that time, team roping was just starting to take place, and it hadn't spread across the rest of the United States.

So Arizona and California had team roping about every weekend.

And so that's where we chose to live.

And and then that come summertime or on weekends, it was going to rodeos.

You know, that was another part of the book I really did enjoy, because I tried to put myself in your shoes as a young child.

That must have been to you.

It was normal, but it was almost like a fairytale.

You're just roaming around the country going to all these wonderful place and.

Right.

I just I loved it, because I like the rodeo, like, I like I went into barrel racing at a young age, and then later in life, I got into training and showing quarter horses.

I just loved that life.

And it didn't bother me to travel around.

But my brother, as he got older, he wished we could settle down so he could play little League baseball.

So to a different two kids growing up in the same family, it happened so often.

You know, one has interests and one does.

And but yeah, he always wish we have settle him or.

But it didn't bother me at all.

I do want to also talk about his your dad's horses too, because he had several horses that were, maybe just as well known as he was at the time.

That's true.

dad was a very good roping horse trainer, and he was known for his training and his ability with these horses.

And two of his horses have been in the installed in, several Hall of Fame throughout the United States.

Baldy is probably the most famous horse of all time roping horse, and he's been put in the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

And also, I was back to Lexington, Kentucky, several years ago to the Museum of the horse.

And there was a plaque on the wall, the greatest roping horse of all time, Baldy, owned and trained by crew.

He had another horse, a steer roping horse called bullet, who was, put in the Hall of Fame at the Pro Rodeo Cowboy Association.

But, not only those two horses, but there was several other horses that yes, they they each have chapters in here.

So if you're interested in the horse part, there's a lot for you in this book.

we have jump ahead a little more because we're, we're running short.

But, I want to talk kind of his legendary status towards the end of his life because he was doing this up until his 60s and 70s.

Yeah, he was 77 the last time he wrote at Cheyenne, Wyoming.

But like I said, dad was three time world champion Steer Roper in 1941, 1947 and again in 1953, for which this is the buckle he won in 1953.

He's on record as the oldest cowboy to this day to ever win a world title at the age of 59. he he's legendary around the ranches.

They still tell stories.

So yeah, he and his horses.

So.

And he was the first of them, right.

The first living cowboy to be inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

That's correct.

Which just they they kind of I think there was like a petition to change the rules because he needs to be in there.

They didn't want to wait for him to pass.

Right.

And, and he did live until until the 80s, right?

I mean, he lived to be 90, almost 91 and amazing again, I'm sorry we couldn't cover it more, but I hope people will read the book because you say the beginning.

It's unbelievable life which sets the bar high.

So I'm going into this book thinking how unbelievable can it be?

But then you read these stories and, well, what's so unbelievable to think he was never injured.

He never had a broken bone in his body through all these escapades on the ranches and the wild cattle and the war and that's one of the it's it's it's a miracle.

It's completely it's just so fascinating.

Well, like I said, we are unfortunately running short on time.

So on our final like three minutes or so, can you just tell us what you want people to take away from this book and from your dad's story?

I wrote the book mainly because I wanted to preserve the history of three different things, one of course being my father, his full life story, and how his contribution to rodeos and even ranching, played into his life.

Number two, I wanted to write it for the history of the day to day working cowboy.

What they really did on a few of these ranches.

And number three, for the history of the formation of rodeo and how it came to be.

So that's really what why I, what I want people to take away from the book.

Plus it's quite comical.

I mean, dad was a character.

He was a fun loving person and people enjoyed being around him.

And there's lots of amusing things he did.

Oh yes, he it comes across.

He had a big personality.

He had some famous cowboy friends like Slim Pickens and knew Will Rogers and Gina.

I mean, it's like a it's a life, you know, it's just such a full, rich life in here.

And if I can tell you a compliment, I think you really did do a really good job of capturing that.

That cowboy culture on the ranches, and then the rodeo culture, because I felt like I was really kind of in there learning about it.

Well, thank you.

That means a lot, I appreciate that.

Well, thank you so much for for coming here today and for talking about this book.

I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today.

The book again is The Cowboy Ike Rude by Sammy Rude Compton.

Thank you so much for joining us and I will see you again soon.