We crossed the broad Pecos, forded the Nueces. Swum The Guadalupe. we followed the Brazos: Red River runs rusty. the Wichita clear. But it was down by the Brazos I courted my dear.
- The Rivers of Texas (Traditional)
The life of Bob Fudge tracks like a Jack Schaefer or Larry McMurtry novel. During the heyday of the big herds, he worked as a trail driver, pushing thousands of head of cattle and horses north from Texas to the ranches and reservations of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. He trailed through flooded rivers, waterless wastes, and stampeding longhorns and horses, and survived encounters with rustlers and hostile Comanches. In the decades following the end of the big drives, he stayed in the saddle, “riding for the brand” on the great northern ranges.
Robert George Fudge was born into a once-prosperous Lampasas County, Texas, family in 1862, during the early days of the Civil War. As he later told friend and author Jim Russell, who later published Fudge’s recollections, “After the war, my people were left quite poor, and it was hard to get a start in Texas for a number of years ….” In 1872, the family—10-year-old Bob, his parents, two brothers, a sister, two uncles and four aunts — loaded all their possessions into four ox-drawn wagons. Driving 1,000 steers and 200 thoroughbred horses, the sale of which was to jumpstart their new lives, they turned their oxen’s heads toward California. It would prove to be an unimaginably tragic journey, met with disaster almost from the start.
The country across which they traveled was lawless and largely unsettled, with both white and Comanche raiders preying upon travelers. No sooner did the family cross into New Mexico than a band of Comanches descended upon them, killing one of Fudge’s uncles and driving off the draft oxen and both herds, leaving the family with only four horses. Hitching them to two of their wagons, the Fudge party sought shelter in a small nearby settlement.
Their situation rapidly went from bad to worse. The town was rife with smallpox, and within days, the disease had taken Fudge’s father, sister, two aunts, and his remaining uncle. The others, including young Bob, became desperately ill but eventually recovered. “This left my poor mother,” Fudge recalled, “with us three little boys and one aunt ….” When she was able to travel, his resilient mother turned her much-reduced family around and returned to Lampasas. “I have admired the spirit, which carried my noble mother across that wild unsettled country without protection of any kind. …”
