Cowboys in general are a strand of human unlike the common man. Born, not made.
Cal Ripken Jr. was Major League Baseball’s “Ironman,” earning the nickname after playing 2,632 consecutive games. Put those end-to-end and you’ve got more than seven years straight baseball. An astonishing stat and impressive feat only possible for someone cut from the toughest stock. No offense to Ripken, but that doesn’t hold a candle to Texas legend Boots O’Neal, who has been horseback and punching cows for three-quarters of a century.
At the age of 82, O’Neal awoke in the hospital with 12 broken ribs, a punctured lung, broken vertebrae and a bleeding brain after an accident on the ranch. Despite those and a lifetime of other broken body parts, the now-91-year-old cowboy shows no desire whatsoever to retire.
The average retirement age in America is 62, and the average age of death is 78. At a time in life when most folks his age are either dead or in a nursing home, O’Neal wakes up every morning, excited to saddle a horse and work cattle with cowboys two generations his junior. You just don’t find many people built like that anymore.
You’d think someone who has lived such a life would sport a face that resembles the leather of a saddle that’s been as many miles as they have. Instead, O’Neal’s is endearing — fixed with a perpetual and contagious smile.
Cowboys in general are a strand of human unlike the common man. Born, not made. From birth, it was obvious O’Neal fell into a category all his own. He grew up in the ’30s as one of eight children living in a home without running water. The bathroom was an outhouse, and the bath was a water-filled tub next to an open oven door. After a few of the siblings bathed, the water was thrown outside to calm the dust, and the process started over.
O’Neal was never much for school. He excelled at boxing but was mostly just excited to run off the bus and into the barn to saddle a horse, only coming in when his mother hung a white sheet on the clothesline. That was their version of a dinner bell. O’Neal only went to school through his freshman year, leaving home in August of ’49 at the age of 16 to cowboy for the JA making $90 per week. That job found him on the wagon, sleeping in a bedroll for six or seven months at a time — a lifestyle that fit O’Neal just fine.
According to O’Neal, a real cowboy is polite, smooth and speaks gentlemanly to ladies. He is also good under fire.
“What’s a cowboy? Well, they’re good people. Honest. They do what they say they’re going to do. If they tell you they’ll be there to help, they’ll be there, and they’ll stay to the end,” says Dusty Burson, 34, Manager of the Dixon Creek Ranch division of the Four Sixes Ranch.
If that statement made its way into Websters, it should be followed by, “Also see Boots O’Neal.”
After the JA, O’Neal continued ranching at various operations, including around 25 years at the Waggoner. All the while, racking up a collection of buckles and saddles from bronc riding in rodeos all over the country — word is he’s still pretty sticky. O’Neal married his late-wife, Nelda, and the pair had their only child, a daughter, Lauri Colbert. Despite being opposites, the couple was in love for 44 years until her passing. Colbert can only sum up her childhood with one word: idyllic.
As their family grew, so did O’Neal’s career. The ’50s found him in Korea with the Army, where he stared out into vast foreign valleys, wishing they were filled with 1,000 steers. After two years in the Army, he was back on the ranch working hard to become a Peace Officer and Brand Inspector at a time when cattle were still shipped by railroad. Along with the coveted title came a double salary, new clothes, a fancy truck and an expense account. But the novelty was quickly erased by jealousy each time business on a ranch forced him to watch cowboys ride away on horses while he sat in a truck headed back to the office.
“I just wanted to punch cows,” he says.
He gave back the job most in the industry would kill for and reclaimed his true love, working cattle from the back of a horse. He found the life of a cowboy asks a lot of a person, physically and emotionally.
“Even when I know tomorrow is going to be a bad deal, and they’re predicting snow, and the wind [is blowing] out of the north, and we’re going to ride straight into it in the morning,” O’Neal says. “I just look forward to getting out there and freezing my tail off.”
Burson offers a glimpse into the kind of cowboy O’Neal is.
“He wakes up thinking, ‘I’m going to be happy today,'” Burson says. “He doesn’t let circumstances dictate happiness.”
Burson was the one who found O’Neal alone in a pasture after the horse wreck that would have killed the average mortal. Even if it didn’t put him in the ground, the pain alone would cause a rational person to take a brush with death as a sign to hang it up. That’s just not O’Neal’s style.
“It’s who he is,” Colbert says of her father’s lifestyle. “The horse is just an extension of him. It’s his happy place, his therapy, his fun.”
O’Neal recalls being airlifted to the hospital and hearing the medics radio in that he wasn’t going to make it.
“He’s not afraid of dying,” says Joe Leathers, friend of O’Neal and manager of the Four Sixes. “He’s afraid of not living while he’s here. And living, to him, is being horseback.”
In 2022 at age 89, O’Neal, had another wreck while riding alone in a remote pasture. Something within him whispered to notify someone of his location and around the time he pulled his flip-phone out, the horse blew up, sending him flying. O’Neal woke sometime later with a broken leg. Unable to walk, he crawled 40 yards to his phone and called Leathers, who rushed him to the hospital in Childress, Texas.
Burson visited O’Neal shortly after and recalled the nurse asking why he kept lifting his left leg up in the air. It was to keep the mobility of toeing a stirrup.
“That’s how bad he wants to be a cowboy when he grows up,” Burson says.
Burson’s brother brought a horse to the hospital during the extended stay just to brighten O’Neal’s spirits. Several weeks later, the cowboy was back in the saddle.
Leathers insists the thing that separates O’Neal from the rest is a combination of his innate cowboy ability, an insatiable desire to keep learning about cattle and country, and a genuine love of the craft.
“When he’s getting ready to go to bed, he’s wishing it was time to get up and go to work,” Colbert says.
Somehow O’Neal managed to miss the big one despite a body that’s been broken and bruised. Even with luck, longevity like his doesn’t just happen. The “nutrition” offered on the chuckwagon isn’t exactly the blueprint for the FDA, consisting mostly of peanut butter and syrup sandwiches for breakfast, biscuits, gravy, potatoes and some form of beef for everything else. And when asked about exercise, O’Neal response was nothing more than a chuckle.
“I’ve never been short on sleep,” O’Neal says of what he considers to be the holy grail to his success.
For as far back as he can remember, even when he was young, O’Neal turned in early to ensure no less than 8 or 9 hours of rest.
“It takes me longer to rest than it does to get tired,” O’Neal says of his current state.
It’s obvious, though, after meeting him that modesty is one of his many virtues.
“Well, hey there Bootsy, what are you up to?” one of the other cowboy’s children asks at breakfast.
“Oh, just playing cowboy,” O’Neal replies.
It’s clear he is a friend to all, a stranger to no one and the man everyone aspires to emulate.
“If you need somebody in a leadership role, he can step right in,” Leathers says. “Then when we fill that position, he’s more than happy to go back to the bunkhouse and punch cows. That’s a rare trait to have in somebody with such knowledge and ability.”
O’Neal’s ego is nonexistent. He will insist on things he just can’t do, then he slips into his saddle and proves himself wrong.
“It takes a whole crew to keep me going,” O’Neal says, humbly.
Perhaps his current days aren’t spent aboard wild broncs, but he always gets the job done with grace and his expertise couldn’t be matched anywhere in the world — ironic for a guy who has never considered himself very smart. What O’Neal has can’t be taught. He’s got a PhD in punching cows.
“It’s amazing what all he’s got stored up inside him that someone ought to have recorded,” Burson says.
If you think about the human condition and what we’re all after, professional happiness is at the top of the list. Everyone wants to spend their waking hours doing something they love. Even harder than finding that happiness is hanging onto it. Somehow, O’Neal has managed to do both at one of the most physically demanding jobs on the planet.
Maybe the “how?” doesn’t really matter. Maybe O’Neal is really just the inspiration we all need to become the best versions of ourselves at whatever we do and whatever we love.
The iconic Four Sixes has been his home for the past 27 years. Panhandle, Texas, is the closest town to their northern division. The town sign fittingly reads, “People of Pride and Purpose.”
He wants to work, although he doesn’t even consider what he does to be work. His “vacations” are spent punching cows on a different ranch, and on a rare day off, he doesn’t look forward to a hobby. Instead, he’ll watch a rodeo on television or sit in a chair outside his bunkhouse apartment to watch the remuda come in. The sight of 50 horses all running together is one that most people will never get to see, O’Neal says.
O’Neal has taken the beatings the cowboy life brings and asked for more. He’s seen more acres and taught more skills than most can imagine in a lifetime. He’s been inducted into every Hall of Fame a cowpuncher could be and it somehow still doesn’t seem enough of an honor. He’s a national treasure and exceptional human being, and we should all strive to accomplish in our lives what he has in his.
“He’s a cowboy, but he wants to be one tomorrow, too,” Burson says.
We were just about done talking when O’Neal’s story abruptly paused, and a mischievous smile came on his face. His attention fixed on one of the guys in a nearby corral working a young horse that was fixing to blow. The grin stayed as he reminisced.
“I rode a lot of bucking horses in years past,” O’Neal says. “I could get on a horse like that — just gather that thing up — and he’d be 3 feet in the air when I got that right stirrup.”
O’Neal is a Christian man, but if he believed in reincarnation, he says he’d want to come back as a bucking horse.
At 91 years, he recalls precisely how good his life has been and he isn’t scared of the inevitable. In a very matter of fact way, he spoke about his funeral, being burring in the cemetery on the Four Sixes, and the speech that will be given by his friend Joe Leathers.
When asked what he hopes Leathers will say, O’Neal paused, then responded with a distant stare, “He was an honorable man. Done what he said he would. And didn’t mistreat his horses.”
This article was written by Rob Hammer and was originally published in the August 2024 issue of Western Horseman.
