John C. Budd was born in 1878 to a pioneer family which was beginning a new life on the banks of North Piney Creek, near Big Piney, where his father Daniel B. Budd had settled after trailing a herd of cattle from Nevada.
John and his five siblings grew up as many pioneer children did: doing whatever possible to help the family survive. That included becoming a cowboy. In his own words: “I started riding horses as soon as I was weaned and by the time I was ten years old I was a real cowboy and one of the gang; at least I thought so.”
During the 1880s and 1890s, the Piney Country and Upper Green River Valley was just the place for a young cowboy to learn the ropes. The vast country from Fontenelle to the Upper Green became an attractive, untapped area for grazing cattle. Its reputation for ungrazed, unsettled country with good reliable water drew both big cattle outfits and settlers with smaller herds of cattle.
There were no formally organized associations yet, but there were loose agreements among cattle owners to logically manage the cattle. In the winter, most of the cattle were east of the Green River, and they were grazed west of the river the rest of the year.
In the spring, cattle had to be dispersed into different drainages. In John’s words, “In early spring here in the Piney country, the ranchers would turn all their bulls out together and hire cowboys to take care of them until the July Roundup went out.”
As John recalled, “Packing to go on roundup in those days didn’t take much time. We took an extra change of clothes, a few extra socks, and rolled them up in the bedroll. The bedroll consisted of wool blankets, and a heavy homemade wool quilt which was wrapped in a piece of canvas or ‘bed tarp.’”
For other gear, John said, “A cowboy had to have a pair of boots, a J.B. Stetson hat, and a pair of chaps; most of them carried a slicker rolled up back of the saddle.”
The roundup took weeks. The crews began down on LaBarge Creek and worked north. Each ranch owner would take a turn at being or providing a foreman and was obligated to send a rider for every 250 head of cattle, furnish riders with extra horses and a work team for the mess wagon and the bed wagon, and share in the expense of the chuck wagon and salary for the cook. Usually, the crew would be 25-30 cowboys riding on each roundup. The cavvy (herd) of horses was a big one with 8 to 10 horses per cowboy.
Once the summer roundup was concluded the cowboys took a short break before they started gathering the animals that would be sold for beef. As this gather occurred, the cowboys were involved in “the serious business of night herding,” John recalled.
“Each rider would take a two- or three-hour shift as night herder to keep them from straying back with the other cattle. At sunup we’d move south, part of us driving the beef herd and part of us gathering more cattle to be added to the herd,” he said.
These animals were driven to the railroad for shipment to market. This drive usually lasted six to eight days, and again the cowboys had a wagon for food and beds.
John told his daughter Helen, “The Green River valley developed quite a reputation for its quality beef. Each cowboy took pride in that reputation. His life was a hard one for he had to be in the saddle all day, every day, from sunup until sundown, regardless of the weather.… For those of us who enjoyed working out in the open, riding horses and working with cattle, there just wasn’t anything equal to being a cowboy on those early roundups.”
In the early 1890s, Roundup Associations began to form in a more structured way in Western Wyoming. The Big Piney Roundup Association was one of the early Associations. When John was still in his 20s, he began to participate in the formation of that association, serving as president, secretary, and foreman at various times during the years. He was certainly qualified, having spent his youth cowboying in the vast area the Association covered.
John liked to point out to his younger friends that when he was a young cowboy, he had ridden the length of present-day Sublette County and never encountered a fence. The country covered ranged from Fontenelle and LaBarge Creek in the south to Fall River Basin near Bondurant, the Black Buttes in the upper Green, and country on the west side of Fremont Lake.
In 1895, John filed for a patent on land in the Meadow Canyon drainage, a long valley watered by small springs. He continued to cowboy for the Association. In 1905, he married Lula McGinnis, daughter of another pioneer family living near Midway. Together they gradually added land and began to accumulate cattle of their own.
John was part of the notorious conflicts between the sheep men and the cattlemen. He wrote, “For several years we had quite a lot of trouble over the range and as a result, a lot of sheep and several sheep wagons were destroyed. When the Forest Reserve was established, it helped a lot, but the sheep men couldn’t seem to keep their word and this caused a lot of trouble. But with all of this, there were never any men killed over it in the Piney country.”
As the range became more settled, and later more fenced, the reliance on grazing associations lessened in the Piney country. John shared a large, fenced BLM allotment with seven other ranchers. He remained active until he was in his 80s when a smashed knee made horseback work painful; then he and Lula began doing the camp cooking, making Dutch oven meals for all the cowboys.
A kind of a monument to him, which he built in 1905, is a huge, beautiful barn, still standing on the Budd Ranch. It was built to accommodate 14 big draft horses and had a tack room big enough to store all the harnesses required to hitch those big horses to wagons or haying equipment. The hoses were used to dig miles and miles of ditches and clear hundreds of acres of brush to make way for hay meadows.
John loved good horses and good cattle and was immensely proud of the Registered Hereford business his son Joe developed.
John C. Budd will join the ranks of some of Wyoming’s greatest cowboys when he is inducted into the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame Oct. 12.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
