Buckaroos and Mud Pups: The Early Days of Ranching in British Columbia

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

“Cowboys is noisy fellers with bow legs and brass stomachs that rides
hosses and hates any kind of work they can’t do on them.” In this
engaging account of ranching in British Columbia from its beginnings to
World War I, Ken Mather’s focus is on the men who marshalled the
herds. We follow the drovers from Oregon’s interior river valleys who,
pressed financially by cattle whose supply exceeded the demand of local
markets, sought to sell them on the hoof to the gold seekers who were
penetrating the interior of British Columbia in and after the summer of
1858. That required them to turn the old fur-trading routes bordering
the Columbia River into cattle trails, an exercise fraught with danger
from biting insects, precipitous pathways, precarious fords, poisonous
weeds, and angry Indians. After the gold rush subsided, some of the
drovers became roadside ranchers in British Columbia’s interior, only
to discover that in their case, too, supply soon exceeded the demands of
a small population, and they had to seek out markets in what was to
become Alberta and Saskatchewan. Then the construction of the Canadian
Pacific Railway created a voracious market for beef and prompted the
creation of a well-organized syndicate to fill it, thus establishing
conditions that, with the infusion of investment capital, led to the
formation of such vast ranches as the Gang and Douglas Lake from the
late 1880s to 1914.

All of this is just the evolutionary framework to explore the life of
the cowboy—to explain how an occupation that can be traced to the
vaqueros of 15th-century Andalusia could, in late-19th-century British
Columbia, include mud pups (English remittance men) and buckaroos (those
who broke wild horses to bit, bridle, and saddle). Mather describes the
origins and nature of their horses (cayuses), the tools of their trade
(saddles, ropes, whips, chaps, boots, and clothing), and their fun and
games (polo, the hunt, and racing). This profusely and well-illustrated
book introduces us to the real world of one who, in the words of Joe
Mora, when off his horse was “just a plain bowlegged human who smelled
very horsey at times, slept in his underwear and was subject to boils
and dyspepsia.” It’s a good read.