Songs of the Plains

It is certain there were many beautiful mornings for cowboys, not just one called Curly, who pranced their ponies across the Oklahoma landscape to see their best gal. But I sort of doubt that the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye. However, at the moment, to a love-struck cowboy, it may have seemed to be reaching right up to the sky. But what the heck, when those musical words were put to paper and belted forth on Broadway in New York City who cared?

Now, as far as the Plains Indians were concerned, they just wanted a home where the buffalo roams, and so did a lot of other folks as well, but minus the buffalo—and the Indians.

In fact, after a while, the Plains got so down right congested that there were many discouraging words. It got pretty wild with discouraging words flying in amongst the bullets in such places as Dodge City, Kansas. In such locals it wasn’t uncommon for some pore cowpoke, masquerading as a sieve leaking red juice, to be lamenting to his pals to bury him not on the lone prairie. Such situations were, more or less, and usually more, the common occurrence to be seen by anyone who walked out on the streets of Laredo down Texas way.

But not all was bullets and bad words out on the Plains. There was the case of Sweet Betsy from Pike County, Missouri. Betsy took off for the west across the wide prairie with her husband Ike, two yoke of cattle, an old yellow dog, and a Shanghai rooster—whatever that breed of bird might be. It seems I recall there was also a spotted hog a trailing along, too.

As the migration westward across the Plains continued there were, of course, those who once they reached Oregon Country, or where ever it was they were headed, couldn’t muster up the gumption to do much more than whine for someone to carry them back to Old Virginie.

But for the most part, those were the folks that started west later in the traveling season than what they ought to have and got caught in the snows of the mountains instead of crossing when its springtime in the Rockies.

Some of those poky folks didn’t make it out of those frigid mountains alive and just sort of numbly saw those ghost riders in the sky. But I guess it takes all kinds to settle a country and populate an area as vast and varied as the Great Plains.

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