• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The next morning I returned to the National Stock Yards to see Stan’s cattle being auctioned. Keeping my fingers crossed that Stan’s beasts would achieve the target price of about a thousand dollars apiece, I took a seat at the edge of the auction ring. Surrounded by farmers, cowboys, cattlemen and dealers in jeans, plaid shirts, boots and stetsons, I waited for the action to begin while everyone else gabbled on mobile phones to their bosses and clients.

Having been to a cattle auction in British Columbia a few years before, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to repeating an experience I’d already had, but this one was brilliant. Physically, it wasn’t that different from the Canadian auction. In Canada the cattle were herded behind the auctioneer’s booth by cowgirls, who were extremely good at their job. In Oklahoma a couple of cowboys did the same job. But here the auctioneers’ patter was something else. It was like listening to bluegrass banjo music. I’ve seen and heard a lot of auctioneers in the flesh and on film, but none of them could hold a candle to the Oklahoma boys. It was as if they were speaking in tongues or in some strange cow language. I couldn’t understand a word, but it was absolutely smashing. The auctioneer would relate information about the cattle at such a rapid pace, yet so lyrically, that I felt I could listen to him all day.

‘One twenty-six Western, one twenty-five, one twenty-six Western, one twenty-five,’ I thought he said, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. Maybe that’s what I sounded like to English audiences when I first came down from Scotland?

My only concern was that I could lose a lot of money just by twitching at the wrong moment, so after a while I left and got back on the trike.

Driving along the interstate for a short stretch, I had to pull over because I was getting scared. The wind was blowing me towards the hard shoulder and I didn’t like it one little bit. So when I saw some billboards advertising the Cherokee Trading Post, I seized the opportunity to get off the road and investigate.

I mention everything that follows as a warning. If you decide to travel along Route 66, and you find yourself passing signs urging you to visit the buffalo at the Cherokee Trading Post, please take my advice. Don’t do it. By all means fill up with their petrol or buy something from the gift shop. I bought some key rings and badges for my grandchildren, and if that’s the sort of thing you’re after, it’s the place. But the buffalo will break your heart. And the campsite beside it will just make you feel like poor white trash.

I’d seen buffalo before and they were majestic, amazing animals with the most extraordinary eyes in huge, magnificent heads. But the pen at the Cherokee Trading Post was like a concentration camp for two miserable beasts that wandered around in their own shit, moth-eaten and ill behind double lines of barbed wire. Near the pen was a plastic buffalo with ‘In God We Trust’ painted on the side of it. To the side were a couple of the worst totem poles I’d ever seen. I hate it when people do that kind of thing in the name of ‘culture’. When they commercialise culture just to make a quick buck. It happens in Scotland, too, and this made me just as angry as when I see cartoons of Highlanders with kilts that are too short and big red noses. Where’s the pride in that?

Buffalo are magnificent creatures, genuine Indian culture is a splendid thing, and both of them deserve much better than what was on offer at the Cherokee Trading Post. Buy your petrol there, and maybe even a key ring, but then get straight back in your car or on your bike and head on down Route 66 without a backward glance.

I wish I’d done that.

Now, though, the end of Oklahoma was in sight. And ahead lay the mighty high plains of Texas.

10

You’ll See Amarillo …

Within a few miles of reaching the Lone Star State, the landscape started to look like Texas. I’d been rolling through the verdant hills