At age fifteen, Laban Samuel Records (1856-1940), the youngest
of twelve children, moved west with his family from Indiana to
Kansas. About sixty-six years later, writing in pencil on Big Chief
tablets, he remembered this move and his other western experiences
through the year 1892, when he settled with his wife and children
on the claim he had staked in the Cheyenne-Arapaho Run.
In the intervening years, Laban was a freighter with his brother
on the Santa Fe Trail and a cowpuncher in the Dodge City
stockyards. He first encountered Indians on the banks of the
Verdigris River in southern Kansas, learned the Osage language, and
become an agency cook at Pawhuska. Later he worked in the Cherokee
Outlet as a line rider for the T-5 and Spade ranches, eventually
becoming a foreman.
Because of Laban's firsthand knowledge of people and events, his
account adds a new perspective to several infamous episodes. For
example, he barely escaped the raid Dull Knife and other Cheyenne
warriors in 1878, and he knew the participants in the Medicine
Lodge bank robbery, the Talbot raid at Caldwell, and the
Potts-Franklin shootout on the T-5 Ranch.
In addition, Laban recounted many affectionate and often
humorous stories about Outlet ranchers such as Maj. Andrew Drumm,
Outlet cowpunchers such as Charlie Siringo, Texas trail drivers
such as "Shanghai" Pierce, and western writers such as Thomas
McNeal of the Medicine Lodge Cresset, Scott Cummings (the "Pilgrim
Bard"), and Pawnee Bill. But perhaps most memorable are Laban's
stories of every day cowboy life: herding cattle with his dog Shep,
riding his favorite horses, and surviving the rigors encountered by
everyone on the western range-tornadoes, rattlesnakes, cold and
snow, outlaws, and hard work.
Laban concludes, "The great open range that I know so well,
worked on so hard, and loved so much ... has] vanished, as have the
signs of the old cow trail." Perhaps so, but thanks to Ellen Jayne
Maris Wheeler's organization of these stories, and to Laban's
colorful and entertaining writing, the readers of Cherokee Outlet
Cowboy can still ride that range and see that old cow trail for
themselves.
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