Most of the time when you hear that things are done the cowboy way, you might think that they were done with force, in a brash manner that gave no care to the method, only the results. In some cases, this might be right, but often times the cowboy way of doing things is a method that requires thought, strategy and a little ingenuity to get the job done. Most cowboys I know are handy with more than just a rope. They can weld, fix most things and usually able to find creative solutions to problems with the limited amount of materials they might have on hand.
Plumbing is a trade that most cowboys can easily relate to. Crap runs downhill, so does water. Many cowboys have had their fair share of plumbing issues. Most of them come in the dead of winter when the cows knock the float off the tank and it needs to be fixed before it makes a skating rink for critters to slip and fall on. I’ve plumbed in the overflow to many a tank, cut ditches so that water would flow out of flooded corral pens and had to shimmy into a crawlspace a time or two when a leaky pipe needed fixed under the house. Sometimes the fixes were simple, other times they required a little creativity. Baling wire and fence staples make pretty nifty pipe hangers when you are in a pinch and plastic antifreeze jugs can double as a float for a tank when the hardware store is more than an hours drive away.
Anything can become a fence in a pinch. Pickups, guardrail along the highway, flatbed trailers and the occasional side of a building have all been used as makeshift corrals when bovine are on the loose. I once saw a video where an escaped cow was corralled by carts at a Walmart until she could be loaded on a trailer. Wherever there are cows, there’s bound to be cowboys. I once roped an escaped show steer at the county fair and had him snubbed to the rail of a fence until the owner got there with a halter to catch him again. Friends of mine received a police escort to get a set of portable pens into to the city when a semi overturned and had traffic blocked off.
There are times when cowboy ingenuity makes even the most brilliant of engineer say, how did they manage to make that work? Ever had to jump start a car battery with a piece of barbed wire because you didn’t have jumper cables? We once blew a tire on a trailer headed home from the sale barn with a load of cows. It was about the time we went looking for the jack that we remembered it was at home in the garage. A couple of pieces of firewood from the gas station later, we had the trailer lifted high enough to pull the flat tire off and put the spare back on.
The next time that life throws you a curve ball and you have a problem, look at it with your cowboy glasses and see if there is a simple solution at hand. Duct tape and WD-40 fix most problems, baling twine takes care of the rest. That’s all for this time, remember to keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God bless.