in
stage-driver, has no superiors anywhere for his own work; and they are
fine fellows, these iron-nerved reinsmen and rough-riders.

When Buffalo Bill took his cowboys to Europe they made a practice in
England, France, Germany, and Italy of offering to break and ride, in
their own fashion, any horse given them. They were frequently given
spoiled animals from the cavalry services in the different countries
through which they passed, animals with which the trained horse-breakers
of the European armies could do nothing; and yet in almost all cases the
cowpunchers and bronco-busters with Buffalo Bill mastered these beasts
as readily as they did their own western horses. At their own work of
mastering and riding rough horses they could not be matched by their
more civilized rivals; but I have great doubts whether they in turn
would not have been beaten if they had essayed kinds of horsemanship
utterly alien to their past experience, such as riding mettled
thoroughbreds in a steeple-chase, or the like. Other things being equal
(which, however, they generally are not), a bad, big horse fed on oats
offers a rather more difficult problem than a bad little horse fed on
grass. After Buffalo Bill's men had returned, I occasionally heard it
said that they had tried cross-country riding in England, and had shown
themselves pre-eminently skilful thereat, doing better than the English
fox-hunters, but this I take the liberty to disbelieve. I was in England
at the time, hunted occasionally myself, and was with many of the men
who were all the time riding in the most famous hunts; men, too, who
were greatly impressed with the exhibitions of rough riding then being
given by Buffalo Bill and his men, and who talked of them much; and yet
I never, at the time, heard of an instance in which one of the cowboys
rode to hounds with any marked success.[*] In the same way I have
sometimes in New York or London heard of men who, it was alleged,
had been out West and proved better riders than the bronco-busters
themselves, just as I have heard of similar men who were able to go
out hunting in the Rockies or on the plains and get more game than the
western hunters; but in the course of a long experience in the West I
have yet to see any of these men, whether from the eastern States or
from Europe, actually show such superiority or perform such feats.

[*] It is however, quite possible, now that Buffalo Bill's
company has crossed the water