Rootin Tootin Cowgirl

I have told you before that my daddy was my mentor in so many things. One of the things he gave me a love of cowboy shows. I’m talking about the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry, Roy Rodgers and King of the Texas Rangers. Some sang, some had a girl but all of them lived by a code. They lived by the Code of the West. The code of the west was never written although Mr. Ramon Adams in his book “The Cowman and His Code of Ethics” spelled it out pretty well. John Wayne one of the greatest Cowboys said “A Man’s gotta have a code or a creed to live by no matter what his job.”

Now if you ever watched Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans or King of the Texas Rangers you would know they had a creed in which they lived by. I remember Saturday afternoons as a kid lying on the huge leather hassock that we inherited from my grandmother. It was one of the few times besides Christmas that we were allowed in the living room. We would turn on the big Zenith black and white television and watch these cowboys rescue the girl and save the farm. They would track down cattle rustlers and bring in horse thieves. I would lose myself in those Saturday afternoon serials and there was always a cliffhanger.

Then my sister Matilda and I would put on our red cowboy boots, grab our white cowboy hats, we were the good guys, and run out to saddle up our trusty steeds. Here is where I would love to tell you I had a beautiful palomino just like Roy Rodgers’ horse Trigger. Sadly, I only had a stick horse. Mine was made from a broom stick. I would gallop and ride all over the neighborhood. Matilda and I would strap on our six guns and set our hats on tight and ride into the fray. We were the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Gene Autry and Smiley Burnett, Poncho and Cisco we were Matilda and Gladys. Yes I was always the comic sidekick, what do you expect she was bigger and older than me. She would wrestle the cattle rustlers, track down the horse thieves and of course would always be the hero of the day. Like Don Quixote she would battle windmills or in our case the bird bath. We would ride the range and move our cattle who in was really a wiener dog and a boxer.

One afternoon our adventures took us to the creek. The creek was located directly behind our house. There was a very steep bank to the creek one that could not be ascended or descended without the aide of a rope. The trail boss and I descended to the creek with thoughts of crossing our homemade plank bridges to the other side in order to play in the big empty field. We could ride our herd much better over there. We started across the first bridge when all of a sudden the villain appeared. He too wanted to cross the bridge only he was headed right at the two of us. Now both of us were brave cowgirls. We knew how to handle ourselves in the presence of pure evil. We looked that snake in the eye and screamed bloody murder. Then we ran, as fast as our little red cowgirl boots would carry us up that creek bank without the aide of the rope. We didn’t stop until we got into the house still screaming bloody murder. That water moccasin probably did the same thing. He probably slithered back to his home screaming his snake scream at the top of his serpentine lungs.

We decided that our backyard was wild enough to roam through. We didn’t visit the bridges of Cedar Creek for a long, long time. We did however catch many a horse thief and foil a number of cattle rustlers.