My name is Bob Fudge
I was born in Texas
Lampasas County
Back during the war
So begins the ballad titled “Bob Fudge,” by legendary cowboy singer and songwriter Ian Tyson. His subject, born in 1862, was raised in Texas and, for a brief time, California.
Back in Texas by age 12, Fudge went to work on the 33 Ranch. At 15 he hired on at the Wineglass, where he helped round up five trail herds, and went north to Colorado with one of them in May.
When he got his growth, it was significant—he stood well over six feet tall and weighed in at 250 pounds, a big man among his peers.
Fudge kept to the trail for the next several years, until marrying and settling down in Texas in 1887. But seven years later his wife died and he went back on the cattle trails, driving several herds north for the Blocker brothers and others for the XIT Ranch.
I headed north
To ride for the Blockers
They were contractin’ herds
On the Montana range
In his memoirs, Fudge said of one such drive, “As we traveled north day after day, when the weather was fine there wasn’t a man in our outfit that would have traded places with a king.”
No Life For Royalty
But life on the trail wasn’t always fit for royalty. River crossings were often dangerous, as was this encounter with the Arkansas River near Dodge City when Fudge and his mount were upset by panicked cattle.
He wrote: “My clothes were filled with sand and mud until I could hardly carry them on land. But I swam about forty or fifty yards with them. My horse was drowned. He floated down the river about half a mile and lodged on an island. The boys got a canoe and went over and got my saddle. I put it on another horse as soon as the horses were coralled that evening.”
And it wasn’t always cattle that Fudge escorted on the trails. He wrote of one adventure herding horses: “In the spring of 1885 I went up the trail to Wyoming with a herd of horses. There were 800 of them. . . . There was only eight of us came up with these horses, a cook and horse wrangler who kept the gentle horses separate from the main herd, and six cowboys.
“This was the wildest trip I ever made up the trail. If a man is looking for romance, I advise a trip up the trail from Texas to Wyoming with a horse herd,” he added.
The story continued: “Those horses stampeded night and day. We could run with them in the daytime but at night all we could do was hope for the best, with our hearts beating like the tramp of a regiment of soldiers. . . . Finally, after over two months, we got those horses to Wyoming.”
“Horses travel several times as fast as cattle and we didn’t expect to be nearly as long on the trail with this horse herd,” Fudge wrote. “I thought, how lucky Bob Fudge was to be safely inside his hide.”
Trailing Cattle North
But it was mostly cattle on the drives, and Fudge followed herds north from Texas to Montana many times, and eventually stayed on the northern plains with the XIT Ranch, which moved tens of thousands of cattle to grazing grounds in Montana.
In his song, Ian Tyson attributes these thoughts to the Texas cowboy:
When I first saw Montana
I knew I would love her
I would ride her great plains
’Til the end of my days
Roundups on the northern plains were big operations, requiring cowboy crews and outfits—“wagons”—from the larger ranches, and “reps”—cowboys representing the smaller ranches.
J.K. Marsh, a cowboy for the CK Ranch, wrote about the XIT in Montana, where Fudge served as a wagon boss on the roundups.
“Bob Fudge was a big man, he weighed around 250 in the winter and around 230 in the summer but was very light and easy on horses. He was a real cowman but had trouble running a wagon for when anything went wrong he could not help but say something to the man when they both were mad—and most cowboys were very touchy,” Marsh said.
But there was more to Bob Fudge. He was also handy and helpful, as reported by L.A. Huffman, who went along on a roundup, keeping a diary and making photographs.
“July 20th 04 Camped with XIT boys near the Hat ranch which is on Timber Creek near the Dry,” Huffman wrote. “Got bogged in the deep crossing near mouth of Timber this morning. Charley Morris, Bob Fudge and Johnnie Woodruff happened along and found me in the water getting the team out after unhooking them. The boys hooked on the hind ex [axle] with 3 lariats to their saddle horns and made 3 or 4 hard pulls breaking some good grass ropes before we got it out.”
Fudge worked for other ranches besides the XIT over the years, and in 1908 took up a homestead, leased other property, and established a ranch of his own on the Powder River near Biddle, Montana.
In 1913, he moved his ranch operations farther south on the Powder River to Campbell County, Wyoming.
I came off of the trails
When cowboys was king
My name is Bob Fudge
I died in Montana
So ends Ian Tyson’s song about Bob Fudge. But here, Tyson got it wrong.
According to the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, into which Fudge was inducted in 2008, “The old cowboy was 71 years old in the fall of 1932, when he broke his hip. He was taken to the Gillette, Wyoming, hospital, where he died on November 6, 1932.”
R. B. Miller can be reached at WriterRodMiller@gmail.com
