COWBOY PROWESS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 65, 14 September 1933, Page 7

COWBOY PROWESS

PEOPLE OF THE RANCHES

WILD WEEK AT LAKESIDE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) . VANCOUVEE, July 17,

The people of the backblocks have a habit, at this time of year, of going native in their own. way. In the Cariboo district of British Columbia, noted for its gold as veil as its cattle, ranchers and settlers from, a, radius of a hundred miles' set up a big tented city beside a lake and hold an inipro!.vised' stampede. Organisers have already rounded up from the ranges wild horses whose only purpose is to kill their riders if they can. The trail to and from the lake is crowded and dusty with Indian caravans and cow punchers in their now chaps, scarlet silk shirts, and ten-gallon hats. Hundreds of fires bum by the shore. Dinner is cooked in the old ranch style. Men arc served lirst. A thousand horses aro tethered about; wild cattle bawl in the corrals. I

At the proving ground the population sits on a six-foot rail fence —Indians, whites,'rich rancher, and poor cow hand, all together—as a guy in a buckskin coat hollers the names of the riders through a megaphone. They know the game, these wild horses. Put a saddlo on them and they go mad. No feigned 'madness/ like their semicivilised fellows at tho city stampedes, with their tame Indians and blank cartridges. It's a real stampede to see a black devil, that will never be broken, enlarge into tho fouce, smash it into kindling, leave his rider in a crumpled heap and make for the shelter of the range.

For a week it goes on, with races aud dancing and junketing, aud the hundred and one shows that the cow punchers devise to show their'prowess. Then in tho dawn they striko their tents, and arc off to tho next stampede, or back to the routine work of the ranch.

A British deep-sea fisherman docs not. spend 30 Mays ashore out of oGo, most of Britain's lisli being caught over 1000 miles from home. - It is stated that some trawler skippers make i'3ooo a year.