Songs of the Cowboys (1908)/The Texas Cow-boy

Come all you Texas cow-boys
And warning take of me
Don't go out in Montana
For wealth or liberty
But stay home here in Texas
Where they work the year around
And where you'll not get consumption
From sleeping on the ground.

Mortana is too cold for me,
And the winters are too long
Before the round-ups have begun,
Your money is all gone
For in Montana the boys get work
But six months in the year
And they charge for things three prices
In that land so bleak and drear.

This thin old hen-skin bedding
'Twas not enough to shield my form
For I almost freeze to death,
Whene'er there comes a storm.
I've an outfit on the Mussleshell
Which I expect I'll never see
Unless by chance I'm sent
To represent this A R and P T.

​All along these bad lands,
And down upon the dry
Where the cañons have no bottoms
And the mountains reach the sky
Your chuck is bread and bacon
And coffee black as ink
And hard old alkali water
Thats scarcely fit to drink.

They'll wake you in the morning
Before the break of day
And send you out on circle,
Full twenty miles away.
With a "Tenderfoot" to lead you
Who never knows the way
You're pegging in the best of luck
If you get two meals a day.

I've been over in Colorado
And down upon the Platte
Where the cow-boys work in pastures
And the cattle all are fat
Where they ride silver mounted saddles
And spurs and leggin's too
And their horses are all Normans
And only fit to plow.

​Yes I've traveled lots of country,
Arizona's hills of sand
Down through the Indian Nation
Plum to the Rio Grande
Montana is the bad-land
The worst I've ever seen
Where the cow-boys are all tenderfeet
And the dogies are all lean.