Good people, here is the tall tale I told on stage for over 30 years. I originally got the tale from Jack Thorp's book Pardner Of The Wind. Mr. Thorp put out the first book of cowboy songs ever published in the USA in 1908. That was two years before John Lomax's book of cowboy songs came out in 1910.

THE GREAT TURTLE DRIVE (as adapted and told by Art Thieme -- after Jack Thorp)

Well, it had to be way over 100 years back. There was this fellow having dinner in a place in Kansas City. On the menu was turtle soup -- a very rare commodity out on the American frontier. He ordered himself a bowl of that turtle soup, spooned it down and enjoyed it quite a bit. THEN he got the bill.

After calming down and paying the huge $50.00 price tag on the one bowl of soup, he got to thinking about all the land terrapins out there on the prairie crawling around south of there. If he could gather a bunch of those turtles together he could make a tidy sum.

So this guy went out and hired a crew of fellows that he called Turtle Boys, and he sent them down to southern Texas -- where all the land terrapins roamed wild down there. He gave the boys gunny sacks, and they gathered together a big herd of about thirty thousand head o' turtle. It was an impressive sight; turtles just about as far as you could see. One fine summer day they got out there on the trail and headed 'em north -- the idea being to get 'em all the way to the railroad up near Abilene in Kansas. Truth be told, this was a pretty strange scheme. At the rate the land terrapins moved, about four or five feet per day, it would take them more than thirty years to get to market. But our entrepreneur was one of those Enron-Arthur Andersen, bank and stock market thief guys and, of course, he was blinded to the realities of his venture by all the dollar signs in his eyes.

Ya gotta kind of picture the details of it. They were riding along, hooting and a-hollering, just trying anything to get 'em to move out. Even shooting off their revolvers wasn't very effective. They fed them beans hoping it might sort of jet propel 'em along. (Bad idea.)

At night the turtle boys would be ridin' around the herd and singin' to 'em. Roping strays ya know. (It's not easy to rope a turtle. They just pull in their heads and legs and tail -- the rope just slips off.)

One amazing discovery was that the entire herd, all thirty thousand head o' land terrapins, had to be flipped over every night. The turtle boys had to dismount from their horses, walk over to the herd, and carefully, one by one, they had to flip over all the turtles onto their backs --- to keep 'em from stampeding. After a week or two of this, the turtle boys realized that the turtles' little legs waving around in the air all night tired them out so bad that the next day the animals could only make one or two feet at best. So they had to cut that out. It was all trial and error since a trail drive like this had never been done before.

One good thing that came out of all this was that while they were all bedded down for the night the females would lay eggs. Three weeks later they would hatch out into a secondary herd following the first herd. Our head man just got more and more dollar signs in his eyes. He had a picture in his mind of a whole long string of hurtle turds-------whew, I mean turtle herds -- all stretched out (as it were) all the way to the railhead up north in Abilene.

Well, eventually they got to the banks of the Red River -- that fabled stream that was infamous in the tales and songs of Texas. Sunning himself on the banks of the river was an impressive scholarly-looking mud turtle named Studs -- Studs Turtle. Now, he saw this thundering mass o' turtle flesh barreling down the bluff at him with their nostrils all flared and the steam pouring out -- and he got a little spooked! He jumped right into the river -- and swam away. But the land terrapins, being a few straws short of a bale, followed him into the river. Being land terrapins, of course they all sank like a rock -- and drowned.

Folks, as you might imagine (and I hope you are doing just that) this would've put a quick end to what has, through the years, come to be known as The Great Turtle Drive in the annals of western history. But the turtle boys, being quite resourceful wouldn't let it end there. They started digging these huge pits which they filled with red-hot coals. They pushed boulders into the pits and heated those up until they too were just glowing red hot with heat. Then, using small trees as levers, they pushed the hot rocks into the waters of the Red River. Slowly, the water started to heat up -- and then it started to seethe, boil, steam, and froth. For the next year at least, the Red River ran with turtle soup. Pure stuff. It kept the Indians fed through a very bad winter -- and everyone turned out pretty happy when it was all over.

A year later in that same restaurant in Kansas City, that same guy, this time having a nice bowl of beef stew, had another idea. He told his friend, "I just thought of something. If we could do it with turtles, maybe we should try it with COWS."

And that was the start of the cattle industry in the American West.

Yeah, all the singers of cowboy songs, and the reciters of cowboy poetry, and the lovers of cowboy movies, and the riders of all those bulls (both the mechanical kind and the real ones) -- also the Texans who toss the bull in all those bars -- they ALL owe this fellow a huge and heartfelt THANK YOU for providing them ALL with a subculture they could thrive and get rich and famous within. As my old uncle was so fond of saying, "Fame is proof of how gullible people can be!"

And if you are left wondering how I can sit here and tell this to you now, it's because I was there to see it as it all unfolded-----------and I have turtle recall!

Art Thieme
Peru, Illinois (Where our governors make our license plates!)