Daily Distraction

Loved it!! The part where the cowboy is using a lint remover had me rollin!

Watched it 5 years ago and more relevant today than then.

Thanks Aye!

Love it! A welcome moment of humor. Won’t need to go to “I can has cheezburgers” for a cat laugh today.

In 1978, we went to western CO and met this old retired guy, Arch Runion. He was sent out to CO for his health back in the early 1900s. One of the stories he heard was about herding cats in the plains west of Ridgeway CO. It seems that NY City had a major infestation of rats that were overwhelming the population. The Mayor of NY found out that the mayor of Naturita, CO had an overwhelming number of tom cats. The mayors made a deal to ship the tom cats to NY City for $1 each plus the freight costs on the railroad.

The problem was how to get the tom cats to the railroad at Placerville, CO. Since most of the people living in western Colorado were cowboys, they decided to do what thy knew best. The decided to drive the tom cats to the railroad like cattle. Since the whole trip was only about 40 miles, this seemed to be a common sense thing to do.

The first 3 days they covered the 20 miles to Norwood and the tom cats were fat and sassy. The herd of cats were able to catch the mice and rabbits that flushed ahead of the drive. When the cowboys got to Norwood, there was a telegraph message waiting for them. The Mayor of NY would only take the tom cats if they were neutered.

Well, that presented a little difficulty since there were almost 10,000 cats in this herd. So, like cowboys, they gathered in the local saloon to discuss it. Being cowboys, that didn’t seem to be much of a problem. After all, they neutered cattle every day. They only needed to develop the procedure. Some of the cowboys gathered up a few of the strays and proceeded to experiment. It seems the best process was to pick up the cat, stuff his front paws and front feet into a pair of cowboy boots and remove the offending cat parts with a sharp jack knife. The drovers figured they could neuter the tom cats in a jiffy at the rail yard in Placerville. The process worked so well and the plan seemed so good, they celebrated with more beer.

They made several mistakes. First, they let the experimental cats rejoin the herd and second, they drank too much. Part of the train followed the rim of a very brushy canyon, As they got near the canyon, the cats stampeded into the brush and were never seen again. The cowboys shrugged their shoulders and returned to Norwood pondering what they could have done with their riches.

I am not sure how true this story is, but Archie swore he heard it first hand from one of the drovers. Anyway, it sounded much more believable than the story about the lost Spanish gold in the Little Cimarron River area. LOL