Hunting with Hounds. 383 



" With regard to saddles, here it is a moot question 

 which is the better, yours or ours, for buck-jumpers. Car- 

 ver's boys rode in their own saddles against our Victorians 

 in theirs, all on Australian buckers, and honors seemed 

 easy. Each was good in his own style, but the horses 

 were not what I should call really good buckers, such as 

 you might get on a back station, and so there was nothing 

 in the show that could unseat the cowboys. It is only 

 back in the bush that you can get a really good bucker. 

 I have often seen one of them put both man and saddle 

 off." 



This last is a feat I have myself seen performed in the 

 West. I suppose the amount of it is that both the Amer- 

 ican and the Australian rough riders are, for their own 

 work, just as good as men possibly can be. 



One spring I had to leave the East in the midst of the 

 hunting season, to join a round-up in the cattle country of 

 western Dakota, and it was curious to compare the totally 

 different styles of riding of the cowboys and the cross- 

 country men. A stock-saddle weighs thirty or forty 

 pounds instead of ten or fifteen, and needs an utterly dif- 

 ferent 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 depends 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 perform- 

 ance of a hundred other feats of reckless and daring 

 horsemanship, the cowboy is absolutely unequalled ; and 



