June 15, 2018
You are reading “Our Past Is Present” from the Geary County
Historical Society.
Today’s
program includes two stories about "Ways Early Cowboys Dealt With Their Cook," who was sometimes referred to as “cookie”. Henry Young was a cowboy, who was
born in 1865 and left home to be a cowboy at the age of 25. He stated in an interview: “We had our own
cooky. “Dog Face” is the only name I
recall we had for him. He was a good
cook and made dandy sour-dough bread and was a good bean cook too. Lots of times he fixed us bean-hole
beans. That is, beans cooked in a
hole. “Dog Face” would dig a hole in the
ground, line the hole with stone, then build a fire in the hole and keep it
burning for several hours. Those stones
would get piping hot, then the hole was ready for the beans. He put the beans into an iron kettle with a
tight cover, set it in the hole and covered it with sand. There they would be left for several
hours. He seasoned the whistle-berries
with bacon and molasses. I am telling
you, those beans were fitting to eat.
Beef, beans, a few canned vegetables and dried fruit was the chief chuck
on which we lived. Half of the time we
ate the chuck sitting on our haunches behind the chuck wagon.”
Next we want
to share some Chuck Wagon Etiquette with you this morning. Here is a list of things to do and not to do
around Cookie:
No one eats
until Cookie calls. When Cookie
calls, everyone comes a runnin’.
Hungry
cowboys wait for no man. They fill their
plates, fill their bellies and then move on so stragglers can fill their
plates. Cowboys eat first and talk
later. It’s okay to eat with your
fingers – cause the food is clean.
Here’s one more: No running or
saddling a horse near the wagon. When
you ride off – always ride downwind from the wagon.
We are sure
the cowboys in Geary County know all of these rules. They make sense – even to us city folk.
And… that’s
today’s story on “Our Past Is Present” from the Geary County Historical
Society.
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