Snake Boots

Speaking of boots and snakes. Another purpose for the high leather of the boot shaft covering the lower leg is probably to prevent snake bites to that area of the person. I remember my dad coming home from irrigating one day with the fangs of a rattlesnake hanging from the folded down top of his boots.
A little old snakebite would not have killed my dad. As a matter of fact, he lived through one once without even going to the doctor. I played a part in this scenario, although unwittingly. As my kids always say, "There was never a dull moment with you around!" I was out riding one afternoon. I used to range the hills and valleys around our place at will, and usually alone. Sometimes my twin brother would ride with me. But that day I had been gone for many hours and my dad got worried about me. He struck out in his very old, dilapidated two-wheel drive pickup looking for me. When I got back home it was nearing dusk, and dad was still gone. My sister and her husband had begun to worry about him. So we jumped in their truck and started to follow his tracks. It was nearly dark when we found him.
His old pickup had quit him not even a mile from home and he was just sitting there by the truck. We gathered him up and went back home because it was too dark to do anything about his pickup by then. Dad was limping and his foot was starting to swell, but he told us he had started to walk home and stepped off in a gopher hole. Sounded plausible, because there were lots of holes in the area where he was.
His ankle swelled up like a football in a matter of hours, but he wouldn't even talk about going to a doctor. He wrapped it with an ace bandage, got a bigger lace-up shoe and went to work the next day. A couple nights later, he asked me to re-wrap it for him, probably because his leg was so swollen, he couldn't bend over! As I was wrapping it, I noticed two neat little puncture wounds just below his ankle bone, spaced about as far apart as those fangs I had seen hanging from his boot a few years earlier.
“You didn't fall in a hole, did you?” I accused.
“No, but shhhh. I don't want to go to the doctor!”
I knew he had been bitten by a rattlesnake. His leg was all purple and yellow by then, but I figured he had lived that long, there was no point in telling on him. He was a tough old bird.
I guess his fear and loathing of doctors supassed his fear of dying from a rattlesnake bite. His phobia went way back to his US Army days when he had to have hernia surgery. They did it with only a local anesthetic, so he was awake and he could see the blood hitting the sheet they had over him.
My dad was a cowboy. He was a good hand with a horse. As a child, he rode a horse to and from school. He had several brothers and they would all ride to school together, playing tricks on each other to see if they could get someone bucked off. He said they had to stop and open a gate and close it, so they all took turns getting off for the gate. Many times, he said, someone would ride over and place a short stick under the tail of the gate person's horse as he was getting back on. That would make the horse buck, and they all thought that was great fun.
My dad liked school so much, and he wanted to go to high school, but there was not one close enough for him to ride his horse to, so he went through the eighth grade twice, to learn all he could. Then he went to breaking horses for the US Cavalry. He lived near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and they would ride over to Fort Robinson in Nebraska and get unbroken colts from the Regiment there, trail them back to Fort Laramie, break them to ride, then trail them back to Fort Robinson. I think he told me they got $25.00 a horse, but that would buy a lot more back then. Sounds like fun to me.