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Old Yeller by Fred Gipson



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Author: Fred Gipson

Publisher: Perfection Learning

Publish Date: October 1, 1990

ISBN-10: 812416333

Pages: Pages

File Type: PDF, EPUB, MOBI

Language: English

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Book Preface

We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow, a color that we called “yeller” in those days. The other meant that when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark.

I remember like yesterday how he strayed in out of nowhere to our log cabin on Birdsong Creek. He made me so mad at first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks. That’s how much I’d come to think of the big yeller dog.

He came in the late 1860s, the best I remember. Anyhow, it was the year that Papa and a bunch of other Salt Licks settlers formed a “pool herd” of their little separate bunches of steers and trailed them to the new cattle market at Abilene, Kansas.

This was to get “cash money,” a thing that all Texans were short of in those years right after the Civil War. We lived then in a new country and a good one. As Papa pointed out the day the men talked over making the drive, we had plenty of grass, wood, and water. We had wild game for the killing, fertile ground for growing bread corn, and the Indians had been put onto reservations with the return of U.S. soldiers to the Texas forts.

“In fact,” Papa wound up, “all we lack having a tight tail-holt on the world is a little cash money. And we can get that at Abilene.”

Well, the idea sounded good, but some of the men still hesitated. Abilene was better than six hundred miles north of the Texas hill country we lived in. It would take months for the men to make the drive and ride back home. And all that time the womenfolks and children of Salt Licks would be left in a wild frontier settlement to make out the best they could.

Still, they needed money, and they realized that whatever a man does, he’s bound to take some risks. So they talked it over with each other and with their women and decided it was the thing to do. They told their folks what to do in case the Indians came off the reservation or the coons got to eating the corn or the bears got to killing too many hogs. Then they gathered their cattle, burned a trail brand on their hips, and pulled out on the long trail to Kansas


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