July/August 1997

Cowboy lingo
colorful and descriptive

 by Earl Cox

Clouds of dust kicked up by thousands of hooves. Bellering cows and calves. Cowboys cursing at recalcitrant heifers.

Cattle drives of the 1800s were long and tedious, hard on man and beast. Endless days started with the trail bosses' pre-dawn call of, "Saddle up, we're burnin' daylight!" (Wasting daylight hours when there's work to be done.)

Sometimes only the prospect of a hot meal at the end of an exhausting day kept the cowboy in the saddle. Socializing was possible only around the evening cook fire, where a tenderfoot might require an interpreter to translate the colorful slang with which the drover described his daily fare.

Opportunities still exist in the west for city dwellers willing to pay for the privilege of herding heifers on a working cattle ranch. For anyone contemplating such a summer vacation, a lexicon of cowboy lingo might come in handy.

Arbuckle's: Coffee.

The Arbuckle brothers of Pittsburgh were the first wholesalers to ship roasted coffee in sacks, a staple of cowhand meals. The Arbuckles also had a large horse ranch near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Their roasted coffee beans in one-pound brightly colored bags was such a success, it was said the range cow business should have honored the Arbuckle brothers by erecting a monument to them somewhere on the High Plains.

Calf slobber: Meringue pie topping.

Canned cow: Evaporated milk.

Cowboys were fond of quoting a verse about canned milk:

No teats to pull, no hay to pitch.

Jes' punch a hole in the sonofabitch.

Cookie: The camp cook. (Also called bean master, belly cheater, dough wrangler, gut robber.)

The trail cook was undisputed master of the 60-foot area surrounding the chuck wagon and was noted for being surly and ill-tempered. Although his working conditions may have given him many reasons for grumbling, he was proud of his work and usually faithful to the outfit. One of the old west adages was "Never argue with a skunk, a mule or a wagon cook."

Cow grease: Butter.

Dough gods: Blobs of sourdough fried in hot grease.

Hen fruit: Eggs.

Makin's (or heifer dust): Sack of tobacco, usually Bull Durham.

Pimp sticks: Store-bought cigarettes.

Prairie coal: Cowchips or dried cow manure, used to build cook fires in treeless areas.

Sheltered young women from the east homesteading on the plains often had trouble with the cowchip aspect of frontier living. At first they picked up the chips with two sticks. Then they gravitated to using a rag. Eventually they could be out of the bread dough, into the chips, and back to the bread dough without so much as a dust of the hands. An example of familiarity breeding contempt, or perhaps just realism.

Prairie oysters: Fried calf gonads. Also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters.

Saddle blankets: Pancakes.

Sonofabitch stew: A stew utilizing all parts of a beef except the beller.

No one knows who originated this concoction and origin of the name has been legendary. The stew was probably born out of necessity because when an animal was butchered the flesh would not be ready to cook for at least a day, even by cow camp standards. The various organs --- heart, tongue, sweetbreads, liver, brains --- could be cooked while the meat was still warm. To feed the entire crew, the cook combined the organs to create a hearty dish.

Sow belly: Salt pork.

Spotted pup: Rice pudding with raisins.

Swamper: Cook's helper, dishwasher.

The down-to-earth language of the cowboy has become almost as obsolete as the chuck wagon that served his meals, but many of these terms can still be heard in conversations between oldtimers of the old west.