Village Horse Doctor (21 page)

There were almost enough crystals to fill a No. 10 horse capsule. These empty capsules were of gelatin substance and would not cause a chemical reaction, so I filled a capsule, put it in my vest pocket, got in my car, and drove to the airport at Midland, and sent it to a laboratory in New York City where I knew an old laboratory technician who I knew could identify the contents of the capsule. Two days later I received an airmail special-delivery letter identifying the properties contained in the crystals from yellowweed.

This, to my certain knowledge, was the first time that the substance had ever been isolated and identified. This was
valuable information and could I have found it earlier would have greatly shortened the time, expense, and trouble I had spent evolving the formula that I was feeding to the experimental sheep. However, by the trial-and-error process, I already had developed the right formula and I made no changes after I knew what the toxic substance was.

For the next several weeks the only development was fat sheep. At the end of sixty days, the weed had begun to diminish and other vegetation had started to grow, so I cut these sheep off of feed and left them for forty-four days more and none became sick. They continued to gain weight, which brought up the argument of the possibility that a long period of medication might develop some immunity to continued grazing on yellowweed. For the last month there was little or no additional gain in the sheep and they were still fat, but the weed began to dry up, so we decided to ship them to market.

George Baker from the
Fort Stockton Pioneer
newspaper, who also had ranching interests, went out with us to round up the sheep when we decided to ship them. George gathered his own story from the fat sheep which were rounded up from the hills and draws that were a solid blanket of yellow since the weed had matured, toughened, and was in full bloom. The fat sheep were proof that yellowweed was a nutritious plant and that the medical formula had neutralized its ill effects and caused the weed to be looked at in a different light by those who owned yellowweed pastures. Although the war was over, technical materials were still hard to get and George did not have the film to take pictures of these sheep; but he gave a very accurate write-up in the
Fort Stockton Pioneer
.

Oscar Cain had half a carload and let us ship this bunch of fat yellowweed sheep in the top deck of his railroad car. He was shipping a different class of sheep from the experimental
sheep, and even though they did not get mixed, if they had done so it would have been easy to separate them.

The sheep averaged 93½ pounds and averaged $11.01 a head and fifty-six of the better sheep brought 13¢ a pound, which was the top price for fat sheep the day and the week that they went to Fort Worth.

There had been some speculation around town and among people who knew about the experiment as to whether such a prolonged period of medication would affect the flavor and quality of the mutton from these sheep. There was also some doubts as to the flavor of the mutton that had grazed on yellowweed for this length of time.

When I brought these sheep to town to ship them, I cut out a big, aged, fat mutton. This one was probably the fattest sheep in the bunch. I asked my friend Marcus if he would like to have a fat sheep barbecue for his and my friends over at the goat ropin’ next Saturday night at M. R. Gonzalez’s Rancho Grande. He said that they would “shore be much obliged,” so I told him to go up to the stock pens and butcher that mutton and all I wanted him to bring me was the liver.

Early the next morning before it got hot, Marcus came to the office with the liver wrapped up in brown paper and told me that was the fattest mutton he had ever butchered in all his life. I cut a little piece off the liver and did some laboratory testing on it for the possible accumulation of drugs. An excess of any prolonged medication that is harmful will sometimes be stored in the liver. However, the laboratory analysis showed no presence of any foreign substance. I wrapped the liver and put it in refrigeration until Marcus had the big barbecue at the goat ropin’.

I went to the goat ropin’ next Saturday night and had a little barbecue and watched the crowd that had eaten the
mutton for a little while and went back to the office and went to sleep.

The next day I took the liver up to Mrs. Carthuren’s Café early in the morning and asked her to cook it and smother it in onions, and I would bring some friends up for dinner. About eleven o’clock I went to look around for loafers that I didn’t feel would go home for dinner. I saw Boog Crisman and Snakey Price sittin’ down in front of the pool hall. I walked up and told them that I was feeling pretty big-hearted that day and was tired of eatin’ by myself, so I was invitin’ them to Mrs. Carthuren’s Café for dinner. Of course, it didn’t take any argument to get this done. Before we got up to the café, I had picked up three more takers.

I was takin’ a chance that they would order liver, and I had told Mrs. Carthuren not to let on if they didn’t, just to feed them whatever they wanted. As we came in and lined up on one side of the counter, I said, “Mrs. Carthuren, that smells like some of your good liver and onions, and if it is, just bring me a bait of it.” All the boys followed suit and said they would like some of that too.

Mrs. Carthuren was a little bitty woman who ran a real nice small café and her cooking was always good. She served up huge plates of liver and onions, hot rolls, French-fried potatoes, and iced tea. Some of the boys had seconds on the liver and bragged on the cookin’. Since it was summer and in the heat of the day, we all scattered to take our siesta. Now, I already knew that that meat didn’t hurt the bunch over at the Rancho Grande ropin’, and I was too tough for that liver to hurt me even if it was bad.

Along in the late afternoon, my dinner time friends began to come out into the shade and gather at the coffee grounds. By the time I had made it around and visited with all of them, they were still braggin’ about what a good dinner we
had and that was the best liver they ever “et.” I gently broke the news to them that the liver was from a yellowweed sheep. None of them showed any signs of turning pale and all of them laughed and commented that they believed all sheep ought to have yellowweed and Doc Green’s feed before they was butchered. We had a big laugh and decided that we had settled the question, and there was no doubt that yellowweed affected the meat of a sheep unless it made it better.

The spring crop of yellowweed had gotten tough, but the hot summer sun had stopped the growth of other vegetation. Old sheep will eat tough weed before lambs will and I was trying to get all the evidence during this grazing year. We turned a second flock of sheep in the same pasture, one hundred and twenty Rommeldale ewes.

They were grazed and fed on the same medication for thirty days and then were taken off the feed for seven days. During this period of seven days, one died and twenty-seven became sick in varying degrees. The sick sheep were put on medicated feed, and after three days all but one recovered. They were left on feed sixty days before the weed completely played out for the season.

I
had bought up all the available drugs to compound this 1,400 pounds of feed that had been fed successfully to the last flock of sheep. There was a good healthy interest among the ranchers, and a number of them wanted to feed some of the medicated feed to their sheep the coming winter if we had sufficient early rainfall to make yellowweed.

I felt that the last experimental sheep had compiled enough proof and evidence that there would be a demand for some medicated feed to be fed on a commercial basis, and it was way past time for me to begin to get some of the money back for the several years of research. I was aware that the drugs were an expensive additive to the cost of feed, and I knew that I had to go to the original source of supply to buy quantities for later-date shipments in order for the drug-refining companies to be able to give me the best possible price.

In late summer we began to get some good rains that assured an early yellowweed crop that fall. Through correspondence with the larger drug houses, I had been told that in order to get the drugs that had to be shipped by water from other points of the world, I would have to go to New York City to establish priority through the proper channels for cargo space for a low freight bearing raw-drug material.

After my summer practice had begun to slack off and before the fall rush began, I got my business in order and drove to New York City for the sole purpose of arranging for raw-drug-bearing materials to be shipped by water freight to the processors in New York who would extract and refine the drug substances. The major drug supplier was perfectly willing to cooperate in securing and refining these drugs from their original source in the tropical islands. However, I was asking for more of these drugs than there had ever been any common demand for, and the drug
company said that they would have to have a marginal cash advance before they would be interested in stocking items that heretofore had only been on demand in nominal quantities. I called Dow Puckett, and he wired me the cash needed to make the contract final. This took a matter of two or three days, and I turned around and started back to the Far Southwest.

In the fall yellowweed was making its appearance in sufficient quantities for everybody to know that it would be a yellowweed year and it would be impossible to run sheep in many of the pastures unless they were fed yellowweed feed.

Feed mills had begun to take a different attitude toward my research and the story of the success with last year’s sheep had been widespread, and I began to make arrangements for the milling of this feed. Olin Childs, the Purina feed dealer in Fort Stockton, and Mr. Buckingham, the district representative who lived in San Angelo, contacted me about having this medication compounded into their grain-cube feed instead of putting it into soybean or cottonseed protein meals. There would be as much as $20 a ton difference in the cost of the feed stuff that went into the finished product, and several of the ranchers who were more interested in the medication than they were in the feed supplement were very much in favor of putting it in grain cubes and saving the difference per ton.

Between the ranchers and the Purina Company we agreed to buy a hundred tons of grain-cube feed medicated with my formula. The New York drug firms delivered as per their contract in ample time for me to compound the drugs and haul them by truck to Fort Worth where Purina’s mill operation was based.

I wanted the drug mixed with the grain feeds in a batch mixer 2,000 pounds at a time, but Purina had installed
some highly scientific and expensive automatic mixing equipment that was described as having a “magic electric eye.” The drugs could be mixed with the feed as it moved through various chutes on the way to the cubing machine, which would put the final finish on the feed. I didn’t like this idea and didn’t necessarily approve the proposal, but their argument was that this continuous flow with the “magic electric eye” would be the only way that the mill could handle it. They assured me that there was not the slightest possibility of error in the milling with this “magic electric eye” controlling the flow of the various ingredients.