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FIREWATER: An Indian pidgin English term for booze. In the Indian trade, it was often pure alcohol cut with the water of the closest creek and seasoned with tobacco, red chilies, and whatever else pleased the fancy of the trader, according to report even snake heads. The term came from a custom developed by Indians trading with the Canadian fur men. The alcohol was customarily diluted, often with water from the nearest creek. The Indians, knowing that, would spit the first mouthful of booze on the fire. If it flamed, they'd trade for it; if it put some of the fire out, they wouldn't.
Booze (along with death, sex, food, and other central preoccupations) appears to have set the Westerner's imagination aflame. Other names for it include aguardiente, base burner, boilermaker and his helper, brave maker, Brigham Young cocktail, bug juice, bumblebee whiskey, cactus juice, choc, coffin varnish, conversation fluid, corn, cowboy cocktail, dehorn, drunk water, dust cutter, dynamite, forty rod, fool's water (a term of Indian English), gut warmer, honeydew, hooch, Indian whiskey, irrigation, jag, jig juice, joy-water, Kansas sheep dip, lamp oil, leopard sweat, lightning, lightning flash, mescal, mountain dew, neck oil, nose paint, Pass brandy, Pass whiskey, pine top, pop skull, prairie dew, red disturbance, redeye (and hundred-yard redeye), red ink, rookus juice, salteur liquor, scamper juice, scorpion Bible, sheepherder's delight, shinny, snake-head whiskey, snake poison, stagger soup, station drink, strong water, strychnine, sudden death, tanglefoot, Taos lightning, tarantula juice, tiswin, tongue oil, tonsil paint, tonsil varnish, tornado juice, trade whiskey, valley tan, white mule, and wild mare's milk. (For the effects of all this hooch, see ROOSTERED.)
STUFFING DUDES: This is the time-honored practice of having a little fun with greeners by telling them tall tales. It comes naturally in the West, where half of what's real is so crazy or spectacular that dudes can hardly believe what they're seeing. So the old-timers string them along with stories like this one from David Lavender's fine memoir One Man's West: When a greenhorn ventured that it was cold, often a safe conversational opening, an old hand replied,
"I wouldn't say so. Now when it gets so that a man rides along whistlin' to himself and the whistle don't make any noise on account of freezing solid and fallin' to the ground as fast as it comes out, then it is cold. You'll notice it in the spring," he said. "The woods sound like a steam calliope loose and the stops tied downall them frozen whistles thawin' out and poppin' off. It spooks the mules considerable and the first few days. For a fact," he said, solemn as an owl.
A tall tale is also called a yarn, windy, stringer, corral dust, and in the Pacific Northwest a Northwester. To tell one is to string a whizzer, stretch the blanket, load, and among loggers to build a high line
CASH IN YOUR CHIPS: Also cash in your checks or just plain cash in. (1) To quit a game of poker or faro, at which time the player trades his chips for money. (2) Figuratively, to die. Thus American Humorist in 1888 asks, "Do you and each of you solemnly swear that you will... cling to each other through life till death calls upon you to cash in your earthly checks?"
Western language has a cornucopia of expressions for dying. You may ride an old paint with your face to the West, hang up your saddle (or sack your saddle), cross the great divide, go to the last roundup, and go south. If you die, your friends will send your saddle home in a feed sack. Cheyennes go to the Milky Way, and Blackfeet go to the sandhills. Anglos also pass in their chips (or checks), go belly up, take the big jump, bite the dust (or ground), buck out, finish their circles, land in a shallow grave, get a halo gratis, get sawdust in their beards, go over the jump, go over the range, go up, go up in smoke, have no-breakfast-forever, ride the long trail, shake hands with St. Peter, turn their toes to the daisies, and so on. Mountain men come, lose their hair, go under, or go beaver.
CALICO QUEEN: One of the many terms for prostitute. The Westerner is fecund with names of things that interest him, so he has or had many expressions for the woman for sale: ceiling expert, chippy, crib girl, Cyprian, dance-hall girl, frail denizen, frail sister, girl of the line, girl of the night, horizontal worker, hurdy-gurdy girl, inmate of a house of ill fame, margarita, nymph du pave, nymph du prairie, painted cat, soiled dove, sport, sporting woman, and woman of evil name and fame. In the 1870s and '80s, newspaper editors needed to talk about such matters, and propriety led to creativity.
BRANDING: Burning the brand into the hides of newborn calves or other new stock. Branding is done in the spring, when the calves are new and small. In the old style the cow-calf pairs were rounded up and the calves roped, branded (usually on the left hip), and earmarked and the males castrated (cut).
These days branding hasn't changed much. Calves may be trapped by a calf table instead of a rope, and they usually get a vaccination along with their other treatments; but they're still castrated and burned with a hot iron. Some ranchers, however, use liquid nitrogen to "freeze" a brand.
Stewart Edward White gives a picturesque description of the traditional way of branding in Arizona Nights:
Homer leaned forward and threw [his rope] ... Immediately, and without waiting to ascertain the result of the maneuver, the horse turned and began methodically ... to walk toward the branding fire. Homer wrapped the rope twice or thrice about the horn.... Nobody paid any attention to the calf.
The latter had been caught by two hind legs. As the rope tightened, he was suddenly upset, and before he could realize that something disagreeable was happening, he was sliding majestically along on his belly. Behind him followed his anxious mother, her head swinging from side to side.
Near the fire the horse stopped. The two "bull-doggers" immediately pounced upon the victim. It was promptly flopped over on its right side. One knelt on its head and twisted back its foreleg in a sort of hammer-lock; the other seized one hind foot, pressed his boot heel against the other hind leg close to the body, and sat down behind the animal. Thus the calf was unable to struggle... Then one or the other threw off the rope...
"Hot iron!" yelled one of the bull-doggers.
"Marker!" yelled the other. Immediately two men ran forward. The brander pressed the iron smoothly against the flank. A smoke and the smell of scorching hair arose. Perhaps the calf blatted a little as the heat scorched. In a brief moment it was over.
When the calf had been earmarked and castrated (the latter unmentioned by White), "The calf sprang up, was appropriated and smelled over by his worried mother, and the two departed into the herd to talk it over."
What White described was the Texas method, using one mounted roper; in what is called the Mexican or California method, two mounted ropers fell the calf and hold it with their ropes during branding. These ropers are called the catch hands.
The branding chute is a narrowing chute that ends in a calf table that clamps the steer tight for branding; the branding corral is a pen where branding is done; and branding season is the time for branding calves, not long after they're born in the spring. The branding crew is the men and women who do the branding. On family outfits these days, the branding crew will be made up of hands from several ranches and will move from ranch to ranch, generally on consecutive weekends.
The branding fire is a fire for heating branding irons. Now a branding heater fueled by propane is often used in lieu of open fires, and some outfits have electric branding irons.
(The terms brand, brand inspector, and branding iron are dealt with in separate definitions.)
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