Hoodlum "Elected" Chuckwagon
Cook First Thing One Morning

By David Bowser

ROARING SPRINGS, Texas — Wild Horse Warren stands in the shade of the fly at the chuckwagon watching Robert Thornton make sourdough biscuits at the Matador Cowboy Reunion. It was Warren who made Thornton a cook.

"I woke up one morning and saw the sun," Warren says of a day at the wagon more than 50 years ago, "and I knew we'd overslept."

The cook had gotten drunk the night before. There was no breakfast on the campfire, and there had been no call before dawn.

"I said, 'Robert, get up and get breakfast,'" Warren recalls.

Then he told Thornton to send lunch where the hands would be at noon.

"Horse, I ain't no cook," Thornton protested.

"Well, you'd better get started, 'cause you ain't got long to learn," Warren countered.

"I was born on the Matadors at Ballard Camp in 1927," says Thornton. "I was four years old when we moved to Dickens County, four miles east of Dickens.

Thornton's father had been with Matador ranch manager M.J. Reilly in Montana.

"Then we moved down here," Thornton says. "He worked Dickens Camp until death in 1945. They called him Big Thornton. His name was Luther."

Thornton's world was the Matador Ranch from as far back as he can remember.

"When I was a kid, about all we had to do was ride horses," Thornton says. "Back during the war, I stayed at Croton Camp between school terms. Everybody was in the service, and they were short of help. I drew my first check in '39 when I was 12 years old. In 1944, I went to Matador and went to work for the headquarters on a windmill truck. Later, I went to the wagon as a hoodlum, then turned chuckwagon cook."

Thornton's memory of being elected cook isn't exactly like that of Warren's, but it's close enough.

"Wild Horse Warren was wagon boss, and I was running the hoodlum wagon," Thornton says. "One morning the cook quit. Wild Horse turned to me and said, 'Robert, we'll see you at dinner.' I said, 'I don't know how to cook.' He said, 'You have four hours to learn.' Plus, I had to haul the wagon 13 miles.

"That's when I started cooking. I'd never made sourdough biscuits in my life, but I made them that day. I've been making them ever since. I've never had any recipes. I've never made any recipes. I never went by recipes."

The menu was simple in those days.

"Meat and beans was the biggest part of the noon meal," Thornton says. "We got to where we had steak and eggs, biscuits for breakfast. Sourdough biscuits three times a day. That's all the bread you had. Wasn't no going to the store and buying a loaf of bread."

The Matadors ran two wagons in those days.

"We were lucky," Thornton says. "We had a stove under our tent. I didn't really learn to cook on Dutch ovens until about five years ago. When I moved from Dallas back to Dickens, I learned how to cook with a Dutch oven."

Thornton went into the army in 1954. They assigned him a job as cook.

"It was less than a week after I got in," he says. "I didn't even take basic training. I got to Fort Bliss, and they said, 'We're short of cooks.' They sent me down to the mess hall one night, and I thought, 'What'd I do now to get put on KP?' They said, 'According to your record, you're a cook and you put in for a truck driver. We need cooks.' That's where I stayed."

He stayed in the service for nearly 10 years.

"When I got out, I moved to Arlington, Texas, and went to work for Wyatt's Cafeteria," Thornton says. "I retired from there and moved back to Dickens."

Saturday morning at the annual Matador Cowboy Reunion he's at the business end of the wagon cutting out sourdough biscuits and putting them in a Dutch oven.