Bunch Grass

Bunch Grass

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bunch Grass, by Horace Annesley
Vachell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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Title: Bunch Grass A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch
Author: Horace Annesley Vachell
Release Date: December 3, 2003 [EBook #10372]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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GRASS ***

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BUNCH GRASS
A CHRONICLE OF LIFE ON A CATTLE RANCH
BY HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL
AUTHOR OF "BROTHERS" "THE HILL" ETC. ETC.

1913

TO MY BROTHER
ARTHUR HONYWOOD VACHELL
I DEDICATE
THIS BOOK

FOREWORD
The author of Bunch Grass ventures to hope that this book will not be
altogether regarded as mere flotsam and jetsam of English and
American magazines. The stories, it will be found, have a certain
continuity, and may challenge interest as apart from incident because
an attempt has been made to reproduce atmosphere, the atmosphere of
a country that has changed almost beyond recognition in three decades.
The author went to a wild California cow-country just thirty years ago,
and remained there seventeen years, during which period the land from
such pastoral uses as cattle and sheep-raising became subdivided into
innumerable small holdings. He beheld a new country in the making,
and the passing of the pioneer who settled vital differences with a pistol.
During those years some noted outlaws ranged at large in the county
here spoken of as San Lorenzo. The Dalton gang of train robbers lived
and died (some with their boots on) not far from the village entitled
Paradise. Stage coaches were robbed frequently. Every large rancher
suffered much at the hands of cattle and horse thieves. The writer has
talked to Frank James, the most famous of Western desperados; he has
enjoyed the acquaintance of Judge Lynch, who hanged two men from a
bridge within half-a-mile of the ranch-house; he remembers the
Chinese Riots; he has witnessed many a fight between the hungry
squatter and the old settler with no title to the leagues over which his
herds roamed, and so, in a modest way, he may claim to be a historian,
not forgetting that the original signification of the word was a narrator

of fables founded upon facts.
Apologies are tendered for the dialect to be found in these pages. There
is no Californian dialect. At the time of the discovery of gold, the state
was flooded with men from all parts of the world, and dialects became
inextricably mixed. Not even Bret Harte was able to reproduce the talk
of children whose fathers may have come from Kentucky or
Massachusetts, and their mothers from Louisiana.
Re-reading these chapters, with a more or less critical detachment, and
leaving them--good, bad and indifferent--as they were originally
printed, one is forced to the conclusion that sentiment--which would
seem to arouse what is most hostile in the cultivated dweller in
cities--is an all-pervading essence in primitive communities, colouring
and discolouring every phase of life and thought. One instance among a
thousand will suffice. Stage coaches, in the writer's county, used to be
held up, single-handed, by a highwayman, known as Black Bart. All
the foothill folk pleaded in extenuation of the robber that he wrote a
copy of verses, embalming his adventure, which he used to pin to the
nearest tree. Black Bart would have been shot on sight had he presented
his doggerel to any self-respecting Western editor; nevertheless the
sentiment that inspired a bandit to set forth his misdeeds in execrable
rhyme transformed him from a criminal into a popular hero! The
virtues that counted in the foothills during the eighties were generosity,
courage, and that amazing power of recuperation which enables a man
to begin life again and again, undaunted by the bludgeonings of
misfortune. Some of the stories in this volume are obviously the work
of an apprentice, but they have been included because, however faulty
in technique, they do serve to illustrate a past that can never come back,
and men and women who were outwardly crude and illiterate but at
core kind and chivalrous, and nearly always humorously
unconventional. The bunch grass, so beloved by the patriarchal
pioneers, has been ploughed up and destroyed; the unwritten law of
Judge Lynch will soon become an oral tradition; but the Land of
Yesterday blooms afresh as the Golden State of To-day--and
Tomorrow.

* * * * *

CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. ALETHEA-BELLE
II. THE DUMBLES
III. PAP SPOONER
IV. GLORIANA
V. BUMBLEPUPPY
VI. JASPERSON'S BEST GIRL
VII. FIFTEEN FAT STEERS
VIII. AN EXPERIMENT
IX. UNCLE