Cowhand School

That hallowed American folk hero, the lean cowboy with six-gun at hip, swinging smoothly into the saddle--somehow he never had to go to school to learn that stuff. Today's cowboy is more likely to shift gears than spur a pony, and the all-round hand who can do something more useful than strum a guitar is getting so scarce that the Federal Government is trying to train up-to-date cowboys in classes.

The Mountain States Ranch School, Inc., stretches over 12,000 acres of six ranches in southeastern Wyoming's rolling Centennial Valley, 20 miles west of Laramie. Snow-capped mountains fringe the sky to the west. Brown trout leap to the hook in the Little Laramie River, just outside classrooms in a rustic old building on the V-Bar Ranch. The 39 students live in a log bunkhouse that once served as a station on the stagecoach line. Supported by funds from Rancher Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, the school pays each student $15 a week, charges no tuition or board.

Like Spaghetti. Pretty soft? Instructor Robert Hatch, 34, who holds an M.A. in animal nutrition from the University of Nebraska, showed just how easy the courses are one day recently when he outlined eight ways to dehorn calves, using wall charts of cattle anatomy. Caustic paste on a calf's horn buttons will work, he said, but it can cause sores on the mother cow's udder after nursing. Various gouges and electric burners are also effective, but Hatch advocated a saw. "There may be lots of bleeding," he told students. "If there is, you can clamp the artery. Pull it out and take hold of it. It looks like a piece of spaghetti." Outside, the students went to work on eight calves. "Careful there now," Field Instructor John Kennedy coached. "Start your saw back a little more--that's right--in the hair."

Later, an icy wind swirled dust into a branding pen. Students rassled struggling calves to the ground, shoved a tube with a medical pellet down their throats, rammed a needle into their shoulders to vaccinate against blackleg and hemorrhagic septicemia, slashed their ears with the ranch identifying mark, burned a brand into their hips. Male calves were castrated, their testes dumped into a bucket to be served, fried in fat, as a dinner treat. Two ways to castrate male lambs had already been demonstrated: by knife, and by cowboy's teeth. Instructor Ernie Anderson, wearing blood-spattered Levi's, grinned proudly. "The boys are doing fine, just fine--they're going to make real fine cowboys," he said.

Scared to Death of Denver. There are no ballads around the campfire or courtin' down by the ol' corral at Mountain States--but plenty of lectures and field work on irrigation, fertilization, livestock feeding, machinery repair, artificial insemination. The boys, ranging in age from 14 to 25, spend an intense year studying at the school. The project was proposed to Washington by Karl Schakel, a businessman and engineer who bought a ranch in the valley in 1962, and George Grouse, a schoolteacher who turned to ranching more than 20 years ago "because I had to earn some money and I couldn't do it teaching." At least part of their motive was to head off the setting up of a Job Corps camp in the Centennial Valley by establishing a poverty-war project more useful to Wyoming's special needs. All of the students have completed eighth grade, but few have ever been inside a high school. One of the best students, John Gallen-beck, 18, son of a Dixon, Wyo. (pop. 125) mechanic, recalls that "I was in Denver once--and it like to scared me to death. I wouldn't want to go there again."

Not surprisingly, the boys take greatest pride in their horsemanship. They learn to handle an unbroken bronc by riding a barrel bounced on suspension cables by classmates. The $15 a week is more money than most have ever earned, and, while they spent it mainly on Cokes and candy at first, they now save it to buy their own horse and tack. Officials of the school are glad the kids are eager about horses but confess, in whispers, that it's all for show. Horses aren't much use these days, except on dude ranches.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.