Riding For The Brand: The Ballad Of Bob Fudge

The life of Bob Fudge tracks like a Jack Schaefer or Larry McMurtry novel. During the heyday of the big herds, he worked as a trail driver, pushing thousands of head of cattle and horses north from Texas to the ranches and reservations of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. He trailed through flooded rivers, waterless wastes, and stampeding longhorns and horses, and survived encounters with rustlers and hostile Comanches. In the decades following the end of the big drives, he stayed in the saddle, “riding for the brand” on the great northern ranges.

Robert George Fudge was born into a once-prosperous Lampasas County, Texas, family in 1862, during the early days of the Civil War. As he later told friend and author Jim Russell, who later published Fudge’s recollections, “After the war, my people were left quite poor, and it was hard to get a start in Texas for a number of years ….” In 1872, the family—10-year-old Bob, his parents, two brothers, a sister, two uncles and four aunts — loaded all their possessions into four ox-drawn wagons. Driving 1,000 steers and 200 thoroughbred horses, the sale of which was to jumpstart their new lives, they turned their oxen’s heads toward California. It would prove to be an unimaginably tragic journey, met with disaster almost from the start.

The country across which they traveled was lawless and largely unsettled, with both white and Comanche raiders preying upon travelers. No sooner did the family cross into New Mexico than a band of Comanches descended upon them, killing one of Fudge’s uncles and driving off the draft oxen and both herds, leaving the family with only four horses. Hitching them to two of their wagons, the Fudge party sought shelter in a small nearby settlement.

Their situation rapidly went from bad to worse. The town was rife with smallpox, and within days, the disease had taken Fudge’s father, sister, two aunts, and his remaining uncle. The others, including young Bob, became desperately ill but eventually recovered. “This left my poor mother,” Fudge recalled, “with us three little boys and one aunt ....” When she was able to travel, his resilient mother turned her much-reduced family around and returned to Lampasas. “I have admired the spirit, which carried my noble mother across that wild unsettled country without protection of any kind. ...”

Bob Fudge on horseback.

A Young Cowboy

The following spring, Fudge’s mother settled a homestead neighboring the 33 Ranch, which belonged to Judge Taylor, a local justice. The judge hired 12-year-old Bob as a working cowboy, paying him a man’s wage of $20 per month. “This was the beginning,” Fudge noted, “of my work with the big cow outfits.”

Within three years, Fudge was breaking horses for the Esridge Brothers of Burnet County. Along with two fellow cowboys, he broke 100 horses in the fall season, at the rate of three or four animals per day. “This horse breaking was hard, dangerous work,” he recalled. “The horses at that time were as wild as deer and some of them would pitch during their entire lives.” Apparently, the horses that initially fought the hardest were the first to give up: “One that would stand with his eyes half closed and pretend he didn’t see a thing was the one which would turn the world into rounds of glory. ...”

After delivering the Esridge mounts to stock contractors, Fudge went to work for the Higgins and Shanklin outfit, rebranding their “wet” horses — stock that had been stolen in Mexico and driven for sale across the Rio Grande. His bosses were putting together five herds comprising a total of 10,000 head of cattle for a northern drive, and Fudge helped with the sorting and branding.

“I can remember ... herds leaving for the north and my wanting to go with each herd that left. The love for adventure that took young cowboys north was calling me — and my turn was soon to come.” In May 1881, Fudge signed on as one of the drovers to deliver the last of the five herds to Hugo, Colorado.

XIT men on ferry at Fallon; at left on side of ferry, Ed Weisner, ferry owner; on horseback (left to right), L.D. McMakin, Bob Fudge, Dick Howden, and Newt Clendinen. 1904 – 1909.

Fudge would later recall in conversations with friend and biographer Jim Russell that at this time, conditions on the trail were primitive at best. “[I]n the way of equipment, we did not have much but a nickname and a good disposition. Those days the rainproof tarpaulin was unknown to us cowhands. ... [The cook’s] trials would madden a wooden Indian or a sweet-tempered saint. He had no tent to protect his reputation as a chef. He had nothing to work with but a couple of Dutch ovens and a sour dough barrel and a coffee pot — and for wood he sometimes had nothing but a few weeds and swear words to keep the fire hot. ...We were almost four months with this herd of cattle, day and night, so it was a carefree bunch of cowhands who started for the Sunny South that fall.”

At 19 years of age, Fudge was now an experienced cowhand. The following spring, he signed with the Blocker Brothers to drive a herd of 2,000 steers north to the Little Big Horn River in Montana. He was one of a 12-man trail crew, consisting of 10 cowboys, a horse wrangler, and a cook.

During the period of the great cattle drives, legendary Texas cattlemen John R. and Abner P. (“Ab”) Blocker sent more herds north than any other cow men. Fudge described Ab as “the best ‘trail boss’ that had ever brought cattle up the trail”; and while “Brother Johnnie,” as Ab called him, was responsible for the business end, both were exceptional cowboys. “I have seen many good ropers in the south, and in the north,” Fudge recalled, “but these Blockers were the best men with a rope I have ever known.” The herd that Fudge drove was only one of six or eight that the Blockers sent north in that year alone. He was riding for the best in the trail-driving business.

At length, they came to Doan’s Crossing, on the Red River, and the last chance for drovers to get mail and supplies before entering Indian Territory. Although it was little more than an adobe supply depot, Doan’s store was well-known to every man who “pointed them north.” Described as “the trail’s last, lonely Texas outpost,” it stood at the edge of Indian Territory — modern-day Oklahoma. “[W]hen we crossed this river,” Fudge recollected, “we were at the very end of the world. ...”

The drovers were told to be alert to the presence of Comanches who “still thought they owned this country, as we were soon to find out.” The Comanches at this time were using poison arrows, made by “milking” a rattlesnake into a buffalo’s or cow’s liver until it was filled with venom, and then dipping their arrowheads in the organ. “They took great care of their poisoned arrows,” Fudge noted, “and prized them next to their horses.”

At one point, the drovers were indeed confronted by a band of warriors, demanding 100 of their best cattle, to be cut from the front of the herd. “They said that we were in their territory and that the white man had killed all their buffalo and they were going to have good beef in return.” After a tense negotiation, during which they were offered some stock from the drags — mainly crippled and footsore beasts — the Indians galloped off, whereupon the cowboys corralled all their horses and prepared for an attack. “We threw our bedrolls on the ground and everything that we thought would stop a bullet or an arrow or protect ever a part of our bodies.”

The Indians returned shortly and, to the crew’s relief, accepted the trail boss’ offer. The men were soon to find out how fortunate they had been. A few days later, an Army patrol entered their camp and informed them that this same band had recently come upon a five-man crew driving some 500 horses. They slaughtered the men and took the stock. “Sure enough, that evening we saw the blood of those men on the rocks where the soldiers told us to look.”

Aside from Indian attack, there was no shortage of ways in which a cowboy could die on the trail. Contrary to Hollywood portrayals of the great cattle drives, gunplay did not factor significantly in the deaths of drovers. A cowboy could perish from stampede, blood poisoning (as happened to pioneer cattleman Oliver Loving and his fictitious Lonesome Dove counterpart, Gus McCrae), pneumonia from passing cold nights on the wet ground, and being thrown by or dragged behind his horse. Lightning strikes claimed a fair number of drovers, as fellow Texas trail driver Edward C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott attested in We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. “Lots of cowpunchers were killed by lightning, and that is history. I was knocked off my horse by it twice.” Cowboys also faced the prospect of a lingering death resulting from intimate contact with “soiled doves” who sold their favors in the various cow towns.

One of the more common causes of death among both men and horses was drowning. The Long Trail was laced with rivers, all of which had to be crossed. As Fudge noted, the crew had to “log” the chuck wagon whenever they came to a “swimming river.” This entailed tying two or three 16-foot logs to each side, after securing the wagon box to the frame. The crew would then tie their ropes to the wagon and haul it across. Although it could take a full day, it was a vital operation. “We could not let the flour and provisions get away[,] wet or dry,” Fudge wrote. “It was either protect that chuck wagon or not eat — and every cowboy knew it!”

The movies often portray both cattle and crew steadily swimming from bank to bank without incident; in fact, the process was frequently hazardous. Quicksand was a hidden peril. And when a river ran fast and high, it could turn hundreds of cows downstream, sweeping cowboys and horses along with them.

By the time Fudge’s crew reached the Arkansas River across from Dodge City, they had already forded several rivers without major mishap. Now, as the herd approached the river, several townspeople came out to watch the crossing.

“We generally picked a big powerful horse for our swimming horse, as we called them,” he recalled. “I was a powerful swimmer those days and was not afraid of any river. At that time I weighed under one hundred sixty pounds and was six feet, three inches tall and could swim like a muskrat.” He sat astride a big roan, and all went well until he was about 50 yards from the opposite bank. At this juncture, “the lead cattle got scared of the people who had come to see them swim. I kept trying to push them to the shore but before I could get out of the way I was surrounded with scared, mad, swimming cattle. They soon became so tightly pressed together that they got my horse under them. I let my horse go and grabbed horns, tails or necks — anything to keep the cattle from getting me under them. ... I was an extra good swimmer, but I will never know how I made that bank. ... My horse was drowned.”

Despite Dodge City’s reputation as “King of the Cowtowns,” Fudge was unimpressed. “This place, Dodge ... was beyond question the most lawless, most vile place at that time in creation.” Still, it was a welcome diversion from trail driving, and the crew — in the words of Ab Blocker as reported by Frontier Time Magazine —“planted dollars where they did the least good and yielded the most fun.”

At the same time some of the crew were in town, Texas cattleman, saloon owner, and all-around scoundrel Prentice “Print” Olive was shot and killed by a young cowboy whom he had bullied. The youth then galloped to Fudge’s camp, where “the boss gave him one of our best horses and one of our men … gave him a six-shooter and a belt of cartridges. ... His cowboy heart was with the youngster.” Apparently, the drovers thought as little of Print Olive as did his killer.

As Fudge and the crew continued north, they reached a barren, waterless stretch between rivers. They drove the cattle after sunset, to spare them the brutal heat of the day. Still, for three brutal days, both cowboys and animals suffered. As an old man looking back, in Fudge’s memory it was “[t]he worst suffering I have ever seen in my seventy years with cattle was on this drive from the Cheyenne to the Powder River. This suffering cannot be told in words. ... At night [their] groans and the grinding of their teeth was the most horrible thing I have ever listened to.”

Upwards of 200 cattle died of thirst before the herd reached Powder River —“and a tired sore bunch it was.” Water was abundant now, and after leaving the river, the Big Horn Mountains came into view. The drovers crossed the Tongue River, and then the Little Big Horn, finally delivering their cattle to a ranch some 10 miles from the site of the battlefield where Custer and most of his men had fallen just eight years before.

Fudge had successfully completed his first trail drive to Montana. “It was,” he recollected, “considered a fine trip at that time. Few trail herds had gone farther north.”

The rancher who had contracted with the Blockers then delivered the cattle to the Flathead Indian Reservation. Fudge drew his pay and, along with his fellow drovers, rode down the Tongue to Miles City. Then turning his horse south, “I went home to my mother that fall in Lampasas County. ... I was quite a seasoned cowboy by this time. I had gone through the old school for cowboys, which was going up the trail from Texas to Montana.”

XIT cowboys holding copies of Bystander.

In 1884, Fudge hired on for a short drive, to Charles Goodnight’s far-famed J A Ranch in Palo Duro Canyon. Here, he first saw a pasture girded with barbed wire. As he ruefully noted, “Glidden had just introduced the barbed wire in Texas about this time — the wire that in less than fifty years has fenced and cross-fenced the west from Mexico to Canada.”

The following year, he signed on to drive a herd of 800 horses to the Pine Bluffs of Southern Wyoming. “This was the wildest trip I ever made up the trail,” he commented, sarcastically adding, “If a man is looking for romance I would advise a trip up the trail from Texas to Wyoming with a horse herd. These horses stampeded night and day. We could run with them in the daytime, but at night all we could do was hope for the best.... It was usually flirting with death to run in the lead of those horses at night.” Because horses that had been broken were more tractable and easier to drive than unbroken broncs, “I and another [cowboy] broke horses all the way up with this herd.”

Fudge saw Montana again in ’86. He began by helping to “put up”— sort and brand — five herds, each comprised of 2500 two- and three-year-old longhorns, all to be sold on the northern ranges. The work was hard; without branding chutes, it took two strong men to wrestle each animal to the ground. To assemble herds totaling some 12,500 cattle, contracts had to be taken with ranchers from a number of neighboring Texas counties, after which the five herds were each pointed north up the trail.

By this time, the flow of westering immigrants had increased significantly, and the drovers encountered considerably more settlers than on previous drives. According to Fudge, relations were not always cordial. “As to hospitality, those settlers were of a mixed temperament. Some of them would come out foaming mad when a trail herd would start across their little homesteads of one hundred and sixty acres, while others would invite us to bed our herds on their land. These latter wanted the cow chips to burn. ... None of them were what we call hospitable.”

Ab Blocker himself was more colorful in describing the “sodbusters”: “That was a pretty hard set of people there at the time,” he was quoted as saying in The Trail Drivers of Texas. “Every man you saw had a pistol and Winchester and the children at the houses we passed were cutting their teeth on cartridge shells.”

This time, the drive took Fudge and the herd north of the Yellowstone, across the newly laid tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad. “We had more trouble getting that herd across that track,” he recollected, “than we had in swimming the Yellowstone River.” This time, the herd was delivered to a rancher who had contracted with the federal government to deliver the cows to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Fudge returned again to Texas, and the following spring, he married and settled into a sedentary life. He built a home and a small ranch, from which he bought and sold cattle. Life was idyllic for the next seven years, whereupon his wife died. “In my great sorrow, I took to the wild trail life once more.” He left his property with his brother, and his only child — a son — with his in-laws. “[T]aking only a cowboy outfit and the heaviest heart a cowboy ever had, I left for the XIT outfit which was in the Panhandle of Texas.”

The XIT was, in a word, vast. It was built in 1885 by a Chicago land and investment company, on 3 million acres acquired from the Texas state government, at a cost of more than 1 dollar per acre. It bordered New Mexico to the west and Indian Territory to the north. By the time Bob Fudge hired on in 1894, the ranch ran around 150,000 cattle. The managers were strict: They banned drinking, gambling, and stock abuse on the ranch, and were not above hiring professional gunmen to “discourage” fence cutters and rustlers.

Stock theft was an all-too-common problem among cattlemen at this time, and the Texas ranchers generally employed range inspectors — “trail cutters,” as they were called — to inspect each herd south of the Red River and cut out any brand that did not belong. “These trail cutters were men with a lot of nerve ... ,” Fudge commented. “They all carried a Winchester on their saddles and a Colt .44 or .45 at their hip ... and were furnished with some of the best horses in Texas.”

One of Fudge’s first assignments was to ride into Indian Territory, to reclaim some XIT horses that had been spotted at a rustlers’ cow outfit there. Saddling a good horse, he rode to the ranch, and alone, confronted some 15 hard cases. They coldly assured him they had seen no XIT stock, and Fudge left without further discussion. That night, half a dozen or so of the rustlers followed his trail with mayhem in mind. Anticipating this, he had camped several yards off the trail and, pistol in hand, watched as they passed and returned. “My gun was cocked at the first sound of them coming back, and I wiggled my trigger finger to be sure that it wasn’t scared stiff too. ... I decided not to sell out ‘cheap’ and if those outlaws had discovered me or my horse, they would have found my decision to be quite final.”

At daybreak, anxious to put as much distance as possible between the rustlers and himself, Fudge rode 25 miles before stopping for water. When he finally arrived at the XIT headquarters, “I went to the manager and told my story. While he was measuring me with his eyes, I told him if he wanted those horses to go get them himself.” To Fudge’s recollection, no further effort was made to retrieve them.

Shortly after Fudge signed onto the XIT, the owners started a small ranch in Montana. It was a wise initial investment. The northern ranges were ideal for raising cattle, and the rich grasses added hundreds of pounds to each of what Fudge called “the poor, broken-hearted little fellows” who left Texas, significantly increasing their market value.

In the beginning, the Montana satellite ranch relied on the massive Texas spread for its stock, and Fudge soon found himself driving yet another herd of XIT cattle north. “The trail which we travelled down Little Powder River went across the land which I own now,” he later reflected. “As we grazed these two thousand steers down that river in ’94, I never dreamed that someday I would have a comfortable home along that trail. All I wanted in those days was a job with a big cow outfit.”

This time, Fudge rode the train back to Texas in comparative comfort. In 1895, he signed on for his sixth and final drive, trailing another XIT herd north to the Yellowstone. He was now 33 and considered old for a trail driver. “When this herd was turned loose, I knew that I had made my last trip up the trail from Texas to Montana. The settlements were getting bigger and hard to get through ... and the cattle companies were talking of shipping cattle from the south which they did. ... The railroads had taken the trail.”

Camp. XIT Cowboys at supper beside Hungry Creek Springs.

Rather than returning again to Texas, Fudge chose to make his home on the northern ranges. “I had fallen in love with this Montana country that summer.” He would ride for the northern XIT brand for the next 15 years, working as line rider, “rep” (roundup brand representative), wagon boss, assistant range manager, and all-around cowboy. His duties took him as far north as Canada and as far south as northern Wyoming.

Meanwhile, the approaching new century was bringing major changes to the western cattle business. Most significantly, cattle were now being shipped north on trains in a fraction of the time it had taken on the old trail drives, with minimal loss of stock. But there were still herds to gather and dangerous rivers to cross. During one crossing, even with a bridge and ferry now in place on the Yellowstone, Bob’s crew lost some 100 head of cattle. On another occasion, when denied use of the ferry, he had to swim his horse across the ice- and slush-filled Big Missouri, emerging with “my clothes ... frozen as stiff as though they were made of pine lumber.”

The remainder of Fudge’s life was a solitary one. He never remarried, later telling friend and author Jim Russell that “he would never find a woman who could take the place of the girl he had married in Texas in the ’80s.” In 1897, Fudge received word that his young son, whom he had left with his late wife’s parents in Texas, had died. “When I read that sad letter, I was entirely broken up. I quit work for a while — the last link of my little home was gone.”

Ultimately, Fudge’s job with the XIT ended. By 1910, the owners had sold off its cattle holdings, including its northern ranches. “My home with them had been in the saddle over that vast country for so many years, but the loss of the company’s operations was like losing a home to me.” He later rode for a smaller outfit near Biddle, Montana, herding imported shaggy, resilient Scottish “Highlander” cattle. In the 12 years he rode for this ranch, “I never hitched a team to a wagon,” he recalled, “or did any kind of work but ride.”

Telephones and cars had been introduced into the northern ranges. By 1915, telephones were commonplace, and one in 23 Montanans owned an automobile. Fudge told the classic story of riding in his boss’ new automobile on the way to town, when a light snow turned into a blizzard. The car mired in the mud, whereupon a team of horses was brought along to extricate it.

Fudge spent the last nine years of his life living alone on his small ranch on Little Powder River, along with a small herd of cattle and his fine horses. “There was never any class of people,” he once told Jim Russell, “who loved their horses more than the average cowboy.” Russell, who knew and worked with Fudge for 20 years and would pen his biography, Bob Fudge, Texas Trail Driver: Montana-Wyoming Cowboy 1862 – 1933, wrote, “He never got away from the habit of always having a saddle horse under him.”

In 1933 — less than a year after relating his experiences to Jim Russell, and after having lived most of his often-perilous life in the saddle — Bob Fudge died as the result of a fall, while he was afoot. He was 71. Perhaps the most fitting epitaph can be drawn from the final words of his memoirs: “[I]f I were a young man and the West was a free, open world as it was in my youth, I would ask no better life than the one I have lived.”

XIT cowboys seated beneath tarp.

C&I talked with singer-songwriter Ian Tyson about "Bob Fudge" and the West.

Well, she's all cut and dried now, the trails are all gone. I been to Yellowstone Park in an automobile ... But I can still see 'em swimmin', Boys, I can still hear 'em runnin' — Yes, I came off the trail when cowboys was king. ~ "Bob Fudge," by Ian Tyson

Even more than the biography of Bob Fudge, Ian Tyson’s song about him brought the old cowboy world to life for generations far removed from the days of the cattle-drive trails. In 2002, the multiple award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter, author, artist, rancher, and working cowboy released his ballad “Bob Fudge,” inspired, he said, while introducing the song in concert, after reading — and loving — the book, which someone had given him. Twenty years later, on December 29, 2022, Tyson died at age 89. We talked with him last year — when, despite ill health, he was still ranching in Alberta and living in his cedar log ranch house — about his much-loved ballad, cowboying, and the modern and historic West.

C&I: Do you come from a ranching family?

Ian Tyson: My father was an immigrant from the U.K. When he was young, he had illusions about being a cowboy and worked as a ranch hand here in Alberta. He didn’t last too long at it, though; the work was too hard. However, when World War I came along, his father, who was fairly well off, bought him a commission in the army, and it changed his life. He was a real hero and went on to win several medals. After the war, my father sold insurance for a living and played polo for sport. He was a reckless rider and always kept “hobby” horses.

C&I: What led you to become a cowboy?

Tyson: I’ve always loved horses, and like my dad, I was always a reckless rider. When I was young, I went to riding broncs, and I was pretty good at it. Then I ended up going to art college, which pretty much put an end to my rodeoing.

C&I: Do you have a favorite breed of horse?

Tyson: I love quarter horses, and those are the ones I’ve bred. But I love them all!

C&I: If you could have met Bob Fudge, what would you have wanted to know from him?

Tyson: Everything! But mostly about the horses. He loved his horses. It’s a lasting bond between man and animal that’s unexplainable. I do wish I could have met him.

C&I: Do you recall where you were when you wrote “Bob Fudge”?

Tyson: I remember writing it in the truck. We were driving through Nevada, and my daughter, Adelita, was at the wheel.

C&I: Have you heard Colter Wall’s version of the song?

Tyson: No, I haven’t, but he’s definitely becoming popular in that underground milieu. I’ve heard him on recordings.

C&I: Of the many cowboy songs you’ve written, do you have a favorite?

Tyson: I would have to say that would be a song I wrote some years back, called “Fifty Years Ago.”

C&I: Many of your songs, such as “Bob Fudge,” tell of the historic West. Would you like to have lived in the old trail-herding days?

Tyson: Well, yes and no. It’s hard to get a handle on that one. You can make a strong case for idealizing the old days, making them sound heroic. But the fact is, it was a hard life.

C&I: Are there any modern-day writers of Old West fiction whose work you like?

Tyson: I don’t share the historical views of many of today’s writers, unless the work is well-written and accurate. I like Larry McMurtry’s writing very much; he came from a ranching family in North Texas, as I recall. He was one of those whose craft I admire, but the list isn’t very long. I’ve cowboyed myself, and I’ve been around so long and read so much, that I know a good deal about [the history of the West], and I’m pretty hard to impress.

C&I: In the States, both the gear and the approach to cowboying in the Southwest differ greatly from the Buckaroo style in the California/Great Basin region. Are there differences in the way Canadian cowboys work as well?

Tyson: Yes, there are differences that most people aren’t much aware of. Here in Canada, the east side of the Rockies features one school of cowboying, and the west side another. As in the States, the rules are different. But as with cowboys on both sides of the [U.S.-Canadian] border, there’s still a great deal of overlap. No one way is better than another. If I had to use one word to recommend to any working cowboy, that word would be eclectic. Cowboys on both sides of the Rockies should always try to stay eclectic in their work.

C&I: Do you see the role of the modern-day cowboy changing?

Tyson: I do. It’s dying out here in Alberta, which is the heart of it in Canada. It saddens me, but it’s fading away. Oh, the stores still sell a lot of cowboy hats and boots, but it’s pretty much over, although a lot of people don’t like to hear that.

Lyrics used by permission from the estate of Ian Tyson. You can hear Ian Tyson singing "Bob Fudge," from his album All the Good 'Uns, Vol 2, on YouTube.

The book Bob Fudge: Texas Trail Driver, Montana — Wyoming Cowboy 1862 – 1933 is available from Four Horsemen LLC, bobfudge.com, 620.224.7054.

This article appeared in our May/June 2023 issue, which is available now on newsstands and through our C&I Shop.