BORN TO THE HORSE, Buzz Dolan broke his first bronc at the age of 10 and earned $2.50, a princely sum in the Depression. He's stayed at it ever since, and though he mostly trades stock along the Border now, he still gets in some time on young horses.

Border Trader Broke His First
Bronc As A Youngster Of Ten

By Colleen Schreiber

DEL RIO — Training horses, cowboying and trading cattle on the border have been Buzz Dolan's life, a life he dearly loves. He broke his first bronc when he was just 10 years old, for which he received $2.50, a considerable amount for the times, seeing how it was the Depression.

"That ran me for a long time," Dolan recalls.

Charles Monroe Dolan was born on the R.A. Brown ranch near Throckmorton. A family friend, Roy Barton, nicknamed him Buzz when he was three. Much to his liking, the name stuck.

His father was running the Brown outfit at the time. They stayed there until he was three or four.

His father was born in Water Valley and gained considerable experience working for several large outfits throughout West Texas. He and his brothers worked for Ward Cattle Company there, and he left the Ward outfit to go to the Brown Ranch. From there the elder Dolan moved his family to McCulloch County to run the old Sellman Ranch. They had 3500 head of black Angus cows.

Muley cattle, Buzz Dolan says, were always harder to work and the roundups took twice as long as when working horned cattle.

"Without horns, those black cattle would bunch up like a bunch of sheep," he explains. "The horned cows would stay spread out in a roundup and you could kind of keep the calves with them. Plus, all those black calves look the same and it’s real hard to pair them up. They’re good cattle, the Angus, but I never liked working them."

From the Sellmans, his father moved to north of Big Lake, where he leased a ranch. It was sheep country and Dolan ran about 1000 head of ewes.

Dolan says he wasn't much of a scholar; his mind was always on horses and cattle. In the winter of 1940-41, because he wasn't getting along too good in school, his father sent him and his older brother to the ranch to look after things. Buzz was 15.

"We were batching there in an old barn," Dolan recalls. It wasn't too good a place to stay. My brother stayed with me a week before he decided to go back home. He said he'd be back. That was in January and he didn’t come back until May."

Dolan didn't care much for sheep, or goats, for that matter.

"At least working cattle you could make a good pony," he remarks.

Dolan learned most of what he knows about horses from his father.

"He was one of the best horsemen I ever knew," Dolan says of his father. "He was a good teacher. He made us break these horses right. The main thing was getting them to handling good and getting them gentle. Dad would preach all the time to stay off a horse's head; ride him with a slack rein and keep him real light, where you just barely have to touch him with the reins and he would stop and turn around. If a horse has a good nose, he’ll usually have a good mouth. The main thing is not to pull on him, don't have a tight rein because that just kills his nose."

Dolan learned to break all his horses with a hackamore rather than a snaffle bit.

"To this day I don’t get along good with a snaffle bit. I still use a hackamore. It’s not that people don’t know how to use a hackamore. It’s just that they don’t use them much anymore. Things are different now," Dolan says. "They move at a faster pace. They want to get these horses started quick. They don’t take the time like we did; we had lots of time. We might ride a horse with a hackamore if he had a good nose for a year or two. It might take three to four years to make a good cutting horse. Dad had a lot of patience and he used that patience to make good horses."

As a youngster, Dolan would ride his horse to school.

"We kept quite a few mares and we broke horses for lots of our neighbors. I'd ride a bronc to school and tie one to his tail. I’d lope those colts during the dinner hour and then in the evening I would ride them some more," he says.

Back then people paid a horse-breaker according to how old the horse was. A two year-old, for example, would cost $2, a four year-old $4.

"A lot of outfits wouldn’t break a two year-old horse because a horse that young couldn’t take it. They were too young to make those long rides, so many were left 'til they were four years old or better," Dolan explains. "They'd be big and stout, but usually they would break quick because their minds are more developed. You could take one outside and go somewhere on him. A two year-old you kind of had to nurse him along, but those older horses in 30 days you could be doing a lot on them."

By 17 Dolan was in his prime, especially riding broncs.

"When you're a kid and you think you can do something, it helps a lot. I didn't think there were many ranch horses in the country that I couldn't ride. I had all the self-confidence in the world, maybe too much," he says.

Dolan says everyone has a different eye when it comes to horses, but he likes a horse that is deep in the heart girth. That shows power, he says. A slim neck usually indicates that they'll handle better, and of course he wants a good head. He also likes a long hip on a horse, another indication, he says, of speed and power.

While caring for the family operation, Dolan rode horses on the side and day worked when he could. Then when he was 16, he went to work for the Harris Ranch, breaking horses. Jones Webb was running the outfit.

There were three line camps and two men at headquarters. During a working they might have 16 or so additional hands day working. They ran Hereford cattle, some of which came off the Double Circle Ranch in northern Arizona.

Dolan has lots of horse stories, but one that stands out is the time he stepped up to the challenge to ride a particular bronc and rightfully won $800 but instead settled for a good steak dinner.

A couple of his friends were breaking some horses for Gene Linthicum. They called Dolan in for some assistance. The broncs were all four to eight year-olds.

"Gene was a good horseman. He played polo, and he was real particular about how his horses were broken. He’d hire a horse breaker and let them start these horses and he wouldn’t like the way they were riding them, so he would run them off and turn the horses back out. Those kind are worse than a raw bronc. They're a lot harder to straighten out.

"Some of these horses were in that string that day," Dolan remembers. "Most only had been riddent four or five saddles."

An oilman friend from Eastland stopped in one afternoon while they were in the bronc pen and threw down a bet that he could pick a horse Buzz couldn't ride.

"He always carried a lot of money, but that day he pulled out eight $100 bills," Dolan recalls. "We were working for $40 a month, and we’d never seen that much money before. We didn’t have $10 between us."

The cowboys called the bet. The oilman picked a big, stout, eight year-old dun mare. Carol McCutchen and Sid Eubanks were two of the cowboys on hand. Dolan borrowed McCutchen's bronc saddle, because all he had with him was his roping saddle.

The oilman stood in the middle of the round corral with the stakes held securely underfoot.

The old mare went to pitching. She pitched with her head almost on the ground, Dolan says. Before the oilman knew what was happening the mare was headed straight for the middle of the pen where he was standing. The wind was blowing at a pretty good clip, and when he scurried to get out of the way the eight $100 bills took flight. The other cowboys went to chasing them.

Despite the added chaos, Dolan managed to ride the bronc. The oilman was willing to pay up fair and square, but Dolan and the others decided it wasn't right to take his money since they never had money to put up to begin with. Instead, they settled for a good steak dinner.

Dolan was with Harris for three years before he was called into active duty with the army. He went to Italy as a replacement in the 10th Mountain Division of the ski troopers. He had 75 days on the front line as a first scout in his infantry platoon and was awarded the Bronze Star.

"I’d never seen a pair of skis. It was cold in those mountains, but we had good equipment and good clothes. I never got any skis."

His platoon was scheduled to go on to Japan, but while on a 30-day furlough in the states, they got word that the atomic bomb had been dropped and Japan had surrendered.

Dolan returned to Big Lake and began rodeoing. The talent was obviously in his genes, because his oldest brother, Wayne, he says, was a good bronc rider and another brother was a real good roper.

"He could rope anything," Dolan says of his brother. "He would come in from a drive and have a rabbit behind his saddle. He never had a rope strap on his saddle; he carried it in his hand all the time, even when he was on the broncs."

Dolan's passion was bronc riding, but he says there wasn't really anyone in the area who could teach him about riding broncs professionally, so he took up roping instead.

"I really wanted to be a good bronc rider. There’s nothing like getting tapped off right with a good bucking horse and riding him. It's just a good feeling," he says.

"There was a lot of difference between the rodeo broncs and the ranch horses," Dolan continues. "The rodeo horses might be better bucking horses, but the ranch horses might be harder to ride because you had to ride them all day, not just eight seconds, and they might be trying to buck you off any time of the day, or all day, for that matter."

One year he went to New York and Boston with Toots Mansfield.

"Back then you couldn’t jerk a calf down. They’d fine you. Toots had a good gray pony that could really run and he worked a lot of rope. He didn’t stop too hard and he didn’t jerk a calf down. I tied all my calves down but I didn’t win a nickel in either New York or Boston. There were eight of us out of 65 who tied them all down in New York."

He and Don McLaughlin won the team roping in Phoenix the year before and took home $1100 or $1200 apiece. That was in 1953, and the year before that he and Toots Mansfield split the calf roping at Phoenix. They both won a good saddle that year.

"I never won much, just enough to kind of keep me going," Dolan says. "Then when I got married I quit. I’d seen so many families started on the rodeo trail and it didn’t look good to me."

Dolan met his future wife at the Cheyenne rodeo. She was from Monroe Louisiana, but her mother had a ranch at Jackson Hole, Wyo. They were married in 1953, about a year after they met.

In 1954, the Dolans went to the Brown Ranch where his father had once worked.

"We trained lots of good calf and steer horses," Dolan recalls. "R.A. was one of the best men I ever knew. We were branding some colts there one day. We'd forefoot them in the round pen. I forefooted a good filly and she stuck her hind foot in my loop and fell and broke her neck. She died right away. It liked to have killed me, but R.A. just shrugged it off."

Most of their horses then were Hancock-bred and some were crossed with Blake mares.

"They could sure run and stop, which made for good calf horses," Dolan says.

When Dolan left the Brown's, R.A. gave him a black pony out of Begger Boy, out of Black Begger out of Black Gold who had won the Kentucky Derby.

After a short stint in Wyoming at his wife's family ranch, the Dolans moved to the Texas border, where Dolan began crossing cattle. They lived at Eagle Pass for 10 years and then moved to Del Rio, where they've lived since.

Dolan quickly became a large trader on the border. He bought cattle in Mexico, receiving most of them off the ranches. There were a lot of outifts where he received 1000 to 1200 calves every year.

"Back then we would just buy cattle, bring them to the border and sell them," Dolan says. "We knew more or less what would sell. We used to cross a lot of plain cattle. There was a market for them out west; Arizona and California took a world of those plain cattle," Dolan says. "But our market has changed now. Today we take orders. They want the better kind of cattle now, and because of that the plain cattle are sure suffering. They're sure hard to sell. It cuts down on the number of cattle we can cross."

Another change is that the Mexican permit system is no longer in use today.

"Used to, if we had 100 calves to cross, we would have to have 100 permits. The government issued them and they were a little tougher on the permits. They never issued enough permits," Dolan says. "Like for Coahuilla, they would issue about 85,000 permits in the fall but there were 100,000 calves that usually crossed."

Dolan didn't have many health problems in the cattle he crossed.

"I crossed thousands and thousands of cattle out of Durango and we never had to give a shot of penicillin," Dolan insists. "Most of your Mexican cattle are healthy as long as you stay off the coast."

The most cattle Dolan ever crossed was right around 20,000 head in one winter.

"That isn't a lot by some traders' standards, but it kept us busy," he says.

Dolan ranched for a number of years in Mexico in the state of Coahuilla.

"It was as good a country as you’d ever see," he says. He ran 500 cows on the two units that comprised the 42,000 acre ranch, a small outfit, he says, by Mexican standards.

One part of the ranch was in a big valley with "grama grass up to your stirrups. We never overstocked it. You can get in trouble if you overgraze grama grass," Dolan says. The dry stock and the steers were run on the rougher country.

Low overhead, particularly cheap labor, made it easier to turn a profit in Mexico.

"You could raise a calf over there pretty cheap. We never fed anything. We had good weather. It was a wonderful country."

Steer calves were sold in the U.S., but movement of heifers across the border was prohibited, so they were sold in Mexico.

Dolan sold that ranch in 1976 and bought another, but has since sold it as well. He hopes one day to go back.

Though he doesn't do as much business today as he once did, Dolan continues to actively trade on the border, mostly horses and roping and bulldogging steers. He rides almost every day and still rides some young horses.

There's no doubt, Dolan says, that he chose the right path. He's proud of his heritage and his cowboying way of life.

"Some of us cowpunchers don’t speak very good English but our English is ours," Dolan says. "A cowboy can understand another cowboy. No matter how it comes out, a cowboy understands it. These writers who try to romanticize the cowboy way of life might reword something and, well, that might make us sound like a dude, not a cowboy," Dolan says.

"Our language is a different language, and if the words are not used properly it just takes everything away from it."

"Some oldtimers might say there’s not any cowboys left," he continues, "that they’re all gone, but that’s not true. Our way of cowboying, the way I learned, is almost gone, but the cowboy himself will never be gone. There are a lot of good young cowboys, but it’s different. They work different now.

"We used to work with the wagon on big outfits with lots of men and lots of horses, but things are not necessarily worse, not necessarily better, just different.

"Cowboying is all I ever wanted to do," he concludes. "Maybe I didn't pick a very good way of making a living, but it's all I knew and all I wanted."