Hitch Ranch Wagon Traveling
Overland To Amarillo Cookoff

By David Bowser

SANFORD, Texas — Rick Furnish sits on the spring seat of the Hitch Ranch chuckwagon and eyes the gray sky, then faces his mules into the wind as he heads for Amarillo.

A week before, the mercury in the thermometer soared to over 100 degrees, setting new records for temperatures so early in June in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles. Today, the black duster Furnish wears feels good. The temperature barely reaches 70 degrees and a blustery south wind makes it seem much colder, especially with the threat of rain.

Furnish left the Hitch Ranch near Guymon, Okla., early Saturday morning. By Saturday night, he and Bart Nickols pitched camp north of Palo Duro Feedyard, south of Gruver, Texas, not far from the state-erected stone marking Zulu Station, a buffalo hunter's camp that eventually became a trading post and stage stop on the Dodge City to Tascosa trail.

Sunday night, they pulled the chuckwagon into Big Creek Ranch just north of Lake Meredith. He plans on taking most of Monday to go around the lake in rough Canadian River breaks and pitch camp at the Alibates Ranch.

Tuesday, the schedule calls for a run on into Amarillo for the Cowboy Roundup USA and World Championship Chuckwagon Cookoff this weekend (June 12-14). About halfway between Lake Meredith and the Tri-State Fairgrounds in Amarillo, they will pick up a small herd of Texas Longhorns and drive them into town.

Carl Cooper, a Gruver native who works for the ranch, is entered in the chuckwagon cook-off. He built the chuck box on the back of the wagon.

"He's a pretty good cook," Furnish says of Cooper. "He cooks for us when we brand and stuff at home. He won the chili cookoff one time down at Terlingua."

Furnish says he helped cook once — just once.

"That's not going to happen again," he says, shaking his head.

He says he's just there to take the chuckwagon to Amarillo, not to put it to use.

Furnish is the third generation to work at the Hitch Ranch. His father, Cotton Furnish, went to work there in 1948. Rick was born in 1951. Now his sons, Jacob, 18, and Jordan, 14, are the fourth generation to work the ranch.

"They're good people to work for," Rick Furnish says of the Hitch family. "It's like family."

His dad managed the ranch. Now Rick manages it.

After graduating from high school in Guymon, Okla., Rick Furnish rodeoed for a while before earning a degree from Panhandle State University in Goodwell, Okla.

"I rodeoed for them for four years," he says.

But the Hitch Ranch is home.

"I rodeoed all over the United States," he says, "but I never could find another place I liked better."

Once a bronc and a bull rider and team roper, when he was offered a job at the Hitch Ranch, he was ready to come home.

It was at the ranch where he got involved with the chuckwagon and mules.

"The mules we have are kind of bronky," Furnish says. "Nobody drives mules enough anymore to keep them broke or even get them broke. Back when they drove them every day it was different. We drive ours some around the ranch, but not enough. Mules are a little different. I'd never been around mules much."

Furnish's father helped him with the mules. Whenever they'd try to run off, his father would tell him there's no sense getting mad at the mules. That's just the way mules are.

"He said, 'If you don't like the way they're acting, you need to get rid of your mules, 'cause they're just mules,'" Furnish says. "They're different animals. They're smart animals. They never forget. If they mess up one time and they get by with it, they remember that."

And he's had his run-ins with them.

"We stopped at Morse to pick up my boy today," Furnish says. "I stepped off on the wheel and had the brake set. The mule saw me and jumped and jerked the wheel out from under me. I fell and dropped the lines. It spooked them and off they run. But Bart had them snubbed, so he got them circled."

They ran the mules up on a gravel pile and got them stopped.

"We got everything straightened out, and we started over again," Furnish says. "The white mule belongs to my father-in-law and the red mule belongs to the ranch.

"We thought about getting horses, but those old big horses, they're so expensive to keep and you can't ride them. No more than we use them, these mules are broke to both pack and ride. Maybe in a year or so, they might work. Some days, I wonder."

In addition to the chuckwagon, Furnish and rancher Paul Hitch are partners on an undercut surrey.

"We've got a nice buggy horse to pull it with," Furnish says. "It's a lot of fun."

Furnish worries about the heritage from which spring the chuckwagon and surrey with the fringe on the top.

"If somebody doesn't pursue some of this stuff, it's going to be lost," he says. "It'll be a lost art. There'll be a few people know about it, but not enough to carry it on. That's one of the reasons we did this. We talked about doing this last year, but we didn't get around to it.

"I asked my boys this year, 'You still want to do it?' They said yeah. It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun. It's something I don't care about doing again, but it will be a good story to tell. It'll be a good story for them to tell their grandkids."

Furnish says he has no regrets about driving the wagon and mules to Amarillo instead of loading them up on a truck and shipping them. It'll take four days to cover the more than 120 miles from the Hitch Ranch to Amarillo. Furnish is trying to make around 30 miles a day.

"What we tried to do on the front end is go longer because we don't have to pull many hills," Furnish says. "From here on, we're in canyons, so we're going to have to go shorter."

But there were a couple of long hills going into the marker for Zulu Station south of Gruver.

"They were puffing a little bit coming up some of them," Furnish says of his mules, Taco and Sancho.

Furnish says he has an outrider up front on this trip because his mules are still skittish.

"He helps keep them snubbed," Furnish says. "I don't mind 'em running off so bad, but I don't want them to run off on the highway in traffic. Some of those semi's come rolling by at 70 miles an hour, they'd make short work of my mules, and I don't want to be there to watch it."

Although parts of the wagon were taken from previous wagons, it is essentially a new vehicle.

"A friend of mine gave me the old running gear," Furnish says. "It had an old, dilapidated box on it."

They sent the wheels off to a wheelwright in South Dakota, Hanson Wheel Works. They ordered the cypress boards from Hanson, too. The top sideboard is a full inch thick and a full 12 inches tall. The bottom sideboard is an inch thick and 14 inches tall. It has to be that way for the iron fittings. None of the boards have a blemish, including knot holes. They also built the seat out of the same wood.

"We opted for a hand brake instead of a foot brake," Furnish says. "I like the hand brake better. If you get to bouncing around, it's hard to get your foot on it. With a hand brake, you can push on it with your arm and stabilize yourself."

The cowhide slung underneath the wagon, known as a possum belly, is for carrying firewood and cow chips.

Furnish says he always thought of the cook as the choreographer of the cattle drive.

"He's the one that designated where camp would be," Furnish says. "He had to get up and make breakfast, break camp and go to where he was going to set up camp the next night. They just drove the cattle to him. The cook's the one that decided where camp was going to be and how far they were going to go. The cowboys just followed the wagon."