176 HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



thirty or forty pounds instead of ten or fifteen 

 and needs an utterly different seat from that 

 adopted in the East. A cowboy rides with 

 very long stirrups, sitting forked well down 

 between his high pommel and cantle, and de- 

 pends upon balance as well as on the grip of 

 his thighs. In cutting out a steer from a herd, 

 in breaking a vicious wild horse, in sitting a 

 bucking bronco, in stopping a night stampede 

 of many hundred maddened animals, or in the 

 performance of a hundred other feats of reck- 

 less and daring horsemanship, the cowboy is 

 absolutely unequalled ; and when he has his 

 own horse gear he sits his animal with the 

 ease of a centaur. Yet he is quite helpless 

 the first time he gets astride one of the small 

 eastern saddles. One summer, while pur- 

 chasing cattle in Iowa, one of my ranch fore- 

 men had to get on an ordinary saddle to 

 ride out of town and see a bunch of steers. 

 He is perhaps the best rider on the ranch, 

 and will without hesitation mount and master 

 beasts that I doubt if the boldest rider in one 

 of our eastern hunts would care to tackle ; 

 yet his uneasiness on the new saddle was 

 fairly comical. At first he did not dare to 

 trot, and the least plunge of the horse bid 

 fair to unseat him, nor did he begin to get 

 accustomed to the situation until the very end 

 of the journey. In fact, the two kinds of 

 riding are so very different that a man only 

 accustomed to one, feels almost as ill at ease 

 when he first tries the other as if he had never 

 sat on a horse's back before. It is rather 



