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Characters

Liberty Belle

Well-known member
Hey Tap – interesting and intriguing thread. Oh, and welcome back. Real glad to have you. I didn’t realize that was you I replied to about the Kraft Springs fire. I got too busy and hadn’t been keeping up with all the different posts so I missed your homecoming.

Got a another Coon Dog story. Several years ago my two oldest boys and Coon Dog's second to the youngest brother were wrestling at the regional tournament in Fort Pierre. I invited his mama to ride down with me and stopped at her house in Buffalo about 4:00 in the morning to pick her up. Coon Dog had wandered in during the night and decided to ride along and watch Troy and boys. He loaded his warbag in the back of my van, helped his mom load her stuff, and away we went out into the night.

We watched wrestling all day and that evening as we were getting ready to load up and head home, Coon Dog was nowhere to be found. We asked around and one of the Buffalo fans had seen him while he was taking his warbag out of my van. He had decided to hitchhike over to his uncle’s buffalo ranch and, without a word to his mother or anyone, just hit the road with his thumb in the air. Mona just grinned and shook her head and we came home without him. Just used to him, I guess.

My older sons used to visit him at his residence in the Short Pines, mainly to test if his “white lightening” was fit to drink. On more than one occasion, they dined on the stew he kept on the back of his cook stove that they were fairly certain contained the choicest morsels from the dead horse laying outside his back door.

My number two son worked with Coon Dog as a securtiy guard at the Buffalo Chip for a couple years, back when they packed shooting irons and were horseback. When the management disarmed the guards and took away their horses, they both quit.

With these stories we’ve told, I’m fairly certain that the folks reading these would never recognize the target of our tales if they met him. Coon Dog is probably the most intelligent guy I’ve ever met and to look at him reminds a lot of folks of Gus in the movie Lonesome Dove, only he’s younger and much better looking. He’s a historian beyond compare, an absolutely hilarious writer (remember the “Harding Hardtimes”?), and a natural musician that can play anything on any instrument.

Oh yes – Homer!! He was a definite character, although not in the same class with Coon Dog. Marilee told me that Homer was the reason she got caller ID on her telephone… and then she would break down and answer anyway because she was afraid he might be having trouble or something. And she would always be sorry she did.
 

Tap

Well-known member
Yeah, Liberty Belle, I agree with your summation of Coon Dog. He is a one of a kind.

Didn't he pull the same disappearing act over in Europe a few years ago, at his baby sisters wedding, or something like that? I remember him disappearing anyway.

When he tended bar he sure had some good one liners. Like, "that so and so would cut her kids throat if she thought a fifty cent piece would hit the floor". Or someone would ask him if he was ever going to get them a drink, and he would say, "naw, I think I'll just sit over here and stink". :shock: Had a lot of good laughs around him.

When there was a big fire over in the West Short Pines in '88, big Gary thought Coon Dog probably ought to be the fire marsall as he probably has shot a deer behind pretty near ever tree up there. :wink: :lol:
 

Angus Cattle Shower

Well-known member
If you want a charactor, you gotta see my bus driver bernie.
Bernie lives down the road from us, and he thinks that knows what he's doung, so one day he is supposedly sitting at home, and the phone rings. He answers it and he gets into his truck with his trusty .410 gague shotgun and some shells. Someone had a cat problem, and they phoned him up. Bernie put adish of milk in the middle of the yard, and any cat tha came to it he shot. He said that if they were stupid enough to come up to a guy with a gun, the had to be taken out of the gene pool anyways. He told this to me and my buddy, who is a few years older, and my buddy gets on to the bus th enext day, and said, "thanks a lot. I did what you did, and then I got into trouble, and when I told Dad what you said, he laughed and told me to tell you how you got so smart??!!" And Bernie just had a good chuckle over that.
 

S CO rancher

Well-known member
Many years ago we were heading out one early AM to start a fairly significant range move. The sun was just about to break over the mountains. There were 8 of us ranging from roping hot shot kids to grizzled old timers. We put one kid in the front of the line because he was always throwing a loop at our horse's legs, then laughing when our horse took exception to it. He was riding along roping bushes, trees, ant hills, when an antelope that must have really been sleeping hard jumped from under a bush right under his horse. Without thinking he threw the loop and caught that antelope right around the chest and threw a dally. The next 60 seconds was a blur of antelope, horse and man that I was trying to stay out of since I was right behind him. When the dust settled and we sat there looking at the three of them literally tied together immovably in a neat bundle on the ground, he just looked up at us and very seriously said 'I think I had better rethink my thoughts.' Once we stopped laughing it took 10 minutes dodging antelope hoofs to untie the bundle, especially since he would not let us cut his new rope.

25 years later he has that rope mounted on the wall, still with antelope hair embedded in it, to remind him every day to rethink his thoughts.
 

Jinglebob

Well-known member
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Now that's a good un'!

Quite a few years ago, there a bunch of us who thru' all of our saddle horse together and took a chuckwagon and a bed wagon, and trailed the whole bunch over to a small village, for an entry in a 4th of July parade.

We had horses taking runs at each other, most of the morning, until they all got it sorted out. We were going along a hiway, when another fellers favorite horse, stopped to take a bite of grass and wasn't moving when I rode up on him, to move him along. I just absentmindedly threw a loop at his butt, and that got him moving. Only problem, my loop kind of stuck in his tail!
I dally'd up, thinking it would make the rope drop off as it wasn't tighened down or anything. But that did make it tighten down around his tail, and the race was on.

Do you know how much a horse can pull with his tail? I turned loose, just before he jerked my horse down, thinking that would be better, but oh no, it just scared him and we had a whirling mass of spooked horses, going everywhere!

Just so happened that we had a whole bunch of traffic show up about then to top it off. We finally got this tail roped horse and a couple of others hemmed up in a tight corner of two fence lines and the feller who owned the horse, got off his saddle horse and walked up to his tail roped horse, while pulling his jacknife out.

He got ahold of the rope, looked right at me and without saying a word, reached as far as he could towards the middle of the rope and cut it in two. He got the rope off and never said a bad word to me.

I've still got at least one chunk of that rope whee I see it pretty often. It reminds me that ropes can be dangerous!

Oh and I haven't thrown any more loops at horses tails, I didn't want to catch, either. :wink:
 

theHiredMansWife

Well-known member
My husband tried the antelope ropin' trick when he was in high school. He was out checking heavies one March morning and stirred up some antelope. Decided he would try to rope one, or bulldog it, or something. He wasn't picky. So he kicked his horse up and off they went. Over the hill, through the Niobrara river (which is more of a creek in Sioux county) up the next hill, his horse running flat out, gaining on the antelope they'd picked out. But he started to rethink his thoughts before he either threw his loop, or baled off his horse.

'What the heck am I gonna do when I catch it?!'

That horse stayed up at grandpa-in-law's while the lesser half was in college, though, and Grandpa would run coyotes down on him.
(He's 25 this year and still needs to be reined in to about 3rd gear.)
 

cowsense

Well-known member
There's gotta be a slug of character stories out there. We had a local rancher; a lifetime bachelor who thrived on hard work and even harder play when the occasion presented. When I got to know him his horses were all turned out in retirement but he still claimed (even in his eighties) that he could "JUMP HIGHER,DIVE DEEPER and COME OUT WETTER THAN ANY OTHER SOB THAT LIVED ON THE CREEK"!
 

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