I love these postings. For 60 years I have been singing that first verse to everyone I could find (even in record shops, searching for the origin. My brothers and I used to play it on a 10" 78rpm record and an old windup phonograph abandoned out in the barn. Maybe that was the James Melton RCA version. The version from my memory also had the "saddle". Definitely had the "dog boy" (I couldn't hear an "s" on boys). And also used the "gathered."   Thus the version off that record that my memory keeps:

All day on the prairie in the saddle I ride
Without even a dog boy to trot by my side
A fire I must kindle with sticks gathered round
And boil my own coffee without being "drowned". (That's right, my 6 year old ears in the late 1940's heard it that way. I concede that the true word was "ground," but for 60 years I had it wrong--and maybe better?