Village Horse Doctor (20 page)

I got a lot of this kind of good-natured native help.

By now it was early fall, and I was anxious to get this feed ready far in advance of the time I would start using it. I naturally assumed that any feed mill would be glad to run this mixture through their pellet machine for me and compress it into one-half-inch sheep-size pellets. Early the next Monday morning I hooked on my horse trailer and loaded this sacked mixture and started to San Angelo, one hundred and sixty-five miles to the cottonseed oil mill.

The manager of the mill thought they could do this little chore for me, but it would be late in the afternoon before there would be a break in the cow-size cottonseed cake that they were running. When they changed to a half-inch die, they would run my pellets for me. I backed up to the dock and unloaded my meal and mixture and planned to spend the day around San Angelo and haul my finished feed back that night.

I went back late that afternoon to discover that the manager
didn’t have a whole lot to do with running the mill, and the mill superintendent had refused to have anything to do with the stinkin’ stuff. So, I loaded it in my trailer and drove to Ballinger, to another cottonseed mill. They listened to my story and said their customers didn’t have much yellowweed and were not interested in wasting much time trying to clean up their bins and other equipment after having had that there medicine in it.

By this time I had between three and four years’ worth of research invested in this forty-seventh formula and that included many weary nights of laboratory work and lots of hours of pulling yellowweed together and all the post-mortems and so forth, so I wasn’t about to be discouraged by being turned down a few times by mill operators.

I drove from Ballinger over to Abilene to a mill owned by the Paymaster Milling Company. The mill was running on a twenty-four-hour shift and it was late in the night, so I curled up in my car and went to sleep to wait for the office staff to show up for work the next morning.

The manager of the mill was there about seven thirty, and I told him my story about all the research and experimentation that had been done on this formula and explained to him the reasons for wanting it made into pellet form. He was just a little short of polite and told me that they were making cow-size cottonseed cake that they knew cattle would eat and was already sold and waiting to be milled and delivered, and he wasn’t going to break into that kind of a money-makin’ arrangement to mess with some kind of medicated “mix-up.” I had had a bad night’s rest in my car and hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I gave him a fair cussin’ and drove off.

I had a few more mild refusals from mixed-feed mills that made grain cubes, and the third day after I left home, I drove back and unhooked the trailerload of feed in front
of my office, still not processed, and began to ponder the expense and trouble of having to buy a pellet machine of my own.

This trailerload had been sitting in front of my office for several days when Johnny Clark, a feed salesman for the Minimax Feed Mill in Lamesa, Texas, came by to visit me. Johnny was a very aggressive salesman and was interested in the welfare of his territory and the possibility for a new business. He told me that he would take it up with the management at their mill and call me.

He knew that I left early and rode hard, and the next morning he called me before daylight and told me that he had discussed the matter with Roscoe Holton, the general manager for the Higginbotham interests, who owned the Minimax Mill. John must have done a good job of presenting my case because his instructions were to tell me that they would cooperate to the fullest extent and that I should bring in at my convenience whatever I had that needed milling.

I left the next morning with my load of feed. We unloaded and started milling before noon. It turned out that this was not going to be so simple since the holes on the die of the pellet machine were tapered, and as the feed was pushed in from the inside of the die, the pellet was formed by the feed passing through the tapered hole under pressure. The drugs in the presence of heat and pressure caused the pellets to be much harder. In fact, so much harder that it was doubtful that sheep could eat them.

Johnny, Roscoe, and even the mill foreman worried and discussed this situation and decided to use an old die that had been discarded because the taper had been cut out by too much use. This turned out to be ideal because this minimum amount of taper made a pellet of the right firmness.

We spent all day changing dies and regrinding pellets until we had all the feed in pellet form, and about dark we loaded it on to my trailer. Minimax Mill refused to take any pay for their services, apologized for the delay, and expressed their willingness to continue with whatever I needed to have done. I drove home feeling better about the situation and stored this feed for the yellowweed season.

Rains had been good that summer and I began looking around for a yellowweed pasture that would be free of any desirable vegetation. J. Harrison Dycke had a ranch about six miles north of Fort Stockton and he, Dow Puckett, Doug Adams, Concho Cunningham, Ernie Hamilton, and I drove out and went over most of the ranch and picked out a four-hundred-acre block that in their opinion was the solidest growth of yellowweed on the ranch—or on earth, for that matter.

Harrison had helped me pull yellowweed several times for the other experimental sheep and was glad to cooperate in every way possible to help me to run this pasture test. He fenced off the four-hundred-acre plot from the rest of the ranch. This plot contained one big long water trough where the sheep would have to water, and this would make them easier to observe.

This was range country, about three thousand feet elevation, and this particular pasture was rolling country covered with low-growing, scrubby, black brush and greasewood, with a few mesquite trees in the draws. The only grass in the pasture was tough bunch grass, commonly referred to as burro grass, which sheep seldom eat except in the early summer when tender shoots come out close to the ground. Yellowweed covered all the slopes and the upper end of the draws and grew up to the shade of some catclaw bushes that were on the ridge.

Dow Puckett furnished seventy-five head of cut-back
lambs that were of too small and inferior quality to sell with the usual lamb crop. We took particular pains to tatoo a number in the ear of each one of these sheep in case I needed to keep individual records as to their sickness and recovery. I kept them in a lot a few days to be sure they knew how to eat feed before we put them on the yellowweed pasture.

Range livestock that have been grazed on grass and browse all their life and have never learned to eat domestically produced feeds have to be confined a few days with feed before them in a trough. After they get hungry enough to smell around, a few start eating; then the rest of them will catch on plenty fast. The best way to teach sheep to eat grain or milled feed products such as pellets is to use alfalfa hay and mix the other feed in the trough with it. Since sheep are natural green-feeders, they will take to the alfalfa first and gradually learn to eat the other forms of feed. It is always necessary to know that the sheep are all eating, and if necessary, take out the noneaters before they are put in the pasture on poisonous weeds. Otherwise, they would not be getting their dose of medication with each day’s feed.

When I had them switched off alfalfa and they were all eating the medicated pellets, it was time to move them to the yellowweed pasture. The other fellows who were interested and had been helping me with their pickups and trailers helped me haul these sheep by the railroad’s stock pen and unload them and weigh them. The average weight of this seventy-five head was 63⅘ pounds. Then we reloaded them and took them out to the yellowweed pasture and unloaded them at the water trough.

Any flock of sheep or other livestock will “walk out” the new pasture that they have been moved to and get acquainted with it the first few days and nights, so the next
morning these sheep were well scattered. They hadn’t learned to come to call and I rounded them up horseback and brought them close to the water trough and poured the medicated soybean half-inch pellets on the ground. I sat around on my horse and made sure that they all ate feed.

In just a few days these sheep all came to call and were filling up on the lush tender yellowweed and were eating their daily protein supplement with the medicine in it. By the eleventh day everybody who knew about the experiment was looking for some sick sheep. There were no signs of sickness and all the sheep were staying full on fresh yellowweed and all were coming to their daily feed and medication.

By the twentieth day the talk around coffee had begun to take on a different tone and the common remark that “Maybe Doc’s found something” sounded good to my ears. However, the diehards and fogies were saying “just give ’em time—they’ll get sick ’fore long.”

By the thirtieth day no sheep were sick and I began to have visitors go out with me in the mornings when I fed. It was the general opinion of those who had seen the sheep when I first put them out there that they were gaining weight on a solid diet of yellowweed plus the protein and medication. A half pound of protein feed per day will not fatten a sheep but is only a supplementary winter feeding, so this began to focus the attention on the fact that yellowweed was a nutritious plant, and when the toxic effects were counteracted, it was a green winter weed that could be used to a great advantage in the overall operation of a sheep ranch in the weed-infested country.

The favorable result that we had gotten so far on this range experiment had caused people from far and near to be encouraging in their conversation when they were talking to me, and I heard numerous good reports from all
phases of the ranching industry, including the bankers and loan companies, who were glad that there was a possibility of relief for yellowweed shrinkage and death loss in the near future. I hoped I at least had the good wishes of other research personnel in the Southwest until Mr. Damron, who was superintendent of the State and Federal Sonora Experiment Station, came to Fort Stockton to be one of the speakers at a 4-H all-day short course that was held in Rooney Park.

Tom Bond, a native of Sonora, had previously worked with Mr. Damron at the Sonora Experiment Station but had moved to Pecos County and was ranching west of town. He was helping the boys stage this day program. I went by in the afternoon to pay him my respects and visit for a few minutes during a break in the program and learned that several people had already told Mr. Damron about the yellowweed experiment. In my presence, Tom Bond volunteered that he had seen the sheep on the weed several times and had never seen any signs of sickness. He offered to take Mr. Damron out and show him the sheep; the pasture was only a few miles away and it would have been convenient after the program was over. However, Mr. Damron took a very negative attitude and said he wasn’t interested in the experiment. This was somewhat of a shock to me, but at the time I only gave it passing notice and went on tending to my practice and my research.

I had ground several hundred pounds of fresh yellowweed in my laboratory through the years that I had been researching the weed and had developed the habit of waking up at about two o’clock in the morning—at that hour my mind was clear and there was no outside interference. This is when I would test the pulp and juices with various sorts of chemical combinations and use processes of crystallization on the liquids that I had extracted, none of which had
as yet yielded any inkling as to the toxic substance of the weed. At the same time, it seemed, from the progress of the sheep on test, that by trial and error this forty-seventh formula was performing beautifully, but I still didn’t have positive knowledge as to the toxic substance.

This particular morning I had filtered out 500 cc.’s of yellowweed juice using a porcelain filter and very fine filter paper. About daylight, Henry Scruggs from the West-Pyle Cattle Company pounded on my door and hollered at me to open up. When I opened the door, the office reeked with the sickening smell of yellowweed and he said, “Doc, you’ve been on that yellowweed so much I can smell it on your breath.”

He had a stud that had been bitten over the nose by a rattlesnake and this kind of a call put me under pressure to get there before the swelling smothered the horse. In my rush to leave the office, I reached over and dropped a glass stopper in the 500-cc. vial of greenish liquid.

A trip to the West-Pyle Company was about one hundred and twenty miles round trip, and if you did any work or any visiting, the call would usually use up half a day. By the time I got back to town, the drugstores had taken several other calls for me, and I was kept busy for about three days and nights and didn’t have time to pay any attention to my research.

I waked up about two o’clock on the fourth night after Scruggs had come by for me, and I thought I would throw out the old dried yellowweed that I had last ground and clean up my laboratory. After all the many attempts that I had made to work the liquid extract from yellowweed, I had never attempted to bottle and leave it for any period of time. To my surprise, the solids from the liquid of the yellowweed had gently settled to the bottom of the vial.

There was more than a half inch in depth of crystalline
substance that, at room temperature and without any effort on my part, had dropped out from the liquid substance. I very carefully poured off the liquid in another vial and then, by adding a small amount of triple-distilled water to the crystals, I very gently agitated the crystal away from the bottom of the vial and poured them into a porcelain onyx-lined crystallization dish. I placed this dish about two feet away from the heat element of a dehydration lamp. When it was thoroughly dry, it was an off-white color with a very faint greenish tinge.

After I had worked with yellowweed these years, I had lost some of my caution about toxic substances, and without giving a thought to the possible toxic content of the dried crystals, I dampened my finger and took a fair taste of it in my mouth. Some pharmacists can identify as many as four or five hundred botanical drugs by smell and taste, and a laboratory technician can ofttimes identify one hundred or more substances by the same method. In my life’s experiences in the livestock business and practice of veterinary medicine, I had eaten about every kind of vegetable substance that cattle, sheep, or horses would eat, but this was a new one, and I had no taste experience that compared with these crystals.