Cowboys & Indians. That was one of my 2 favorite games to play when I was a little boy. Here is a picture of me (at the front of the horse) with my mom and 2 cousins. This was taken when we were visiting my cousins on their farm in western Oklahoma:

I had a couple of sets of cowboy clothes, but my most favorite was when I dressed like Hop-A-Long Cassidy. I had so much fun making up different games. Sometimes I would make a whole town out in our yard by placing sticks on the ground to outline the different stores in the town. Then I would ride down the “street” of my “town” on my stick horse and pretend I was the sheriff of the town. Or maybe I would be chasing the bad guys and have a shoot-out on “main street” with my two cap pistols that I always wore.

On one particular occasion my friend and I were playing like were out rounding up some cows and driving them to town to sell. At that time my family and I lived on an Army post in Puerto Rico, and the housing area that we lived in was right next to a huge field that grew grass over 6 feet tall ! In that field were also some real cows just eating the grass.

Well since we were cowboys; and since we were supposed to be rounding up cows to take to town to sell … You guessed it. My friend and I decided we would go after the real cows and see if we could make them go where we wanted them to go.

As soon as we got into the field where the cows were they started to run through the tall, tall grass. And off we went, chasing right after them. Boy what fun we were having! However, the cows were much faster than we were and pretty soon they were so far ahead of us in the grass that we couldn’t even see them anymore.

As you probably know, real cowboys know how to track animals pretty good and we thought we could easily follow these cows…especially since they bent the grass over wherever they went. So off we ran after them as fast as we could.

Now, when you’re running through tall, tall grass as fast as you can, you really can’t see very far ahead. All of a sudden I burst through some of that grass and standing right in front of me was one of those cows with it’s back to me and I almost ran right into its rear end.

About that time the cow lifted its tail way up high and started going to the bathroom right before my face. “YUCK !”, I yelled and jumped backwards just in time for the cow to barely miss me. My friend started laughing so hard he could hardly stand up.

Well, we decided right then that we didn’t want to bring those cows to our “town” as much as we thought we did. Beside, I knew my mom probably didn’t want me to anyway.