Lawrence
Jackson (19xx-19xx)
In his own words, he “had a hankering to roam” when he was 15 years
old. Black, broke and young, he left home in Denver to travel and work in
Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska and Colorado.
In March 1921 he was in Elko, Nevada looking for a job. For almost fifty
years he worked, off and on, for area ranches. Some of them were the big
ones in the heyday of the cattle business in Northern Nevada: Spanish Ranch,
Fred Gorham’s Double Square, Abel and Certner and John G. Taylor’s
outfits. He did an excellent job and made friends wherever he worked.
His story is not a narrative of a Black, but is an account of the West’s
famed Buckaroo. Not the fabled cowboy who drew his six gun with lightning
speed, but the honest-to-goodness rawhider who spent long muscle-bruising
days in a hard saddle and got his guts mixed up every morning before his
horse would settle down for a day's work.
The pay was bad and those leather pounders of the desert and sagebrush battled
everything nature could muster - broiling sun, freezing nights, wind, rain,
dust, snow and mud. Add to that burden, short rations, cantankerous animals
and off times, men who were meaner than the critters they herded. At the
first dim light of the day they were up to battle the elements, men and animals
for 16 to 18 hours, then crawl into their blankets. Only to do it all over
again the next day.
It is no wonder at all that a Buckaroo, when he finally made it to town after
months on the range, would often blow his season’s pay in one night
with much the same zeal he exhibited chasing cows.
Jay Fowler said Lawrence Jackson was the best Wrango he had been around.
While working for the IL, he had over 100 head of horses in the cavvy and
knew all of them by heart and could tell you about any one of them. If they
lost a shoe, he could tell you which horse and how many shoes he had lost.
Jay spent one winter batching with Jackson near Mountain City, Nevada, for
the IL and said he was one of the easiest men to get along with he had ever
been around.
One time Jay remembers while driving a thousand head of steers on the Chicken
Creek working for the IL, Jackson was driving a sled (it was in the winter
and the snow was deep) with a team of horses and one of the horses got tangled
up and fell on an embankment. When the Buckaroo came back to look for Jackson
cause he was late, they ask what they could do to help and Jackson said,
cut the harness off and so they did and the horse tumbled and rolled clear
to the bottom of the gully. They had to ride back down the road to the nearest
ranch and ride up the gully to get the horse and lead him all the way back
around the way they had come, so it held up the day's work for several hours.
Jay said Jackson was so mad he turned white. That was the only time he had
ever seen him so mad.
Lawrence Jackson was inducted into the Buckaroo Hall of Fame in September
1995.
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