MILLING WITH THE NIGHT HERD 



and vital connection with the cattle and sheep indus- 

 try of the West. 



The life on these cattle boats with their congested, 

 seasick, stench-reeking, bellowing, bovine cargo and 

 the dangerous work of cleaning out, bedding down, 

 tending, feeding, watering, and removing carcasses of 

 cattle that had died on the voyage — often in a heavy 

 seaway and storm — naturally did not appeal to the 

 landsman of the western interior. Besides the few at- 

 tendant cowhands, who had come as far as the Chica- 

 go stockyards, most of them had hit the trail back 

 West. So the stevedores were generally picked up 

 somewhere along that attractive mudhole of Boston, 

 Atlantic Avenue. 



The red-blooded youths whose homes were on or 

 near the stern and rock-bound coast of Massachusetts, 

 many of them descendants of the hardy Yankee skip- 

 pers or the seafaring folk of the North and South 

 Shores and "The Cape," shipped on Gloucester and 

 Boston fishermen for the dangerous cruising on the 

 "Georges" and Grand Banks. They were the progeny 

 of those sailormen who taught Britain on the sea in 

 1812, and the Dey of Algiers in 1815 to respect the 

 American marine; whose clipper ships outsailed the 

 craft of every nation, flinging our flag from their mast- 

 heads in every port of the globe, and whose clumsy 

 whalers out of the ports from Cape Cod to Cape Ann 

 outsailed and out-whaled the combined whaling fleets 

 of the world. It is not to be wondered at that the 

 Massachusetts school and college lad with such a heri- 

 tage chose during his summer vacation to take his 

 Odyssey as nursemaid to a lot of wild, seasick, long- 

 horned steers, and all for only his keep on the way over 

 with a five-dollar bill on arrival and a free passage back. 



123 



