My great uncle was the one who put the turtle soup in the Horn and Hardarts. He was in a restaurant in Kansas City many years ago having a bowl of turtle soup.-- When the bill came the price was so high I---er---he just flipped out. But he got to thinkin' it over and he hired some turtle boys, gave 'em gunny sacks and sent 'em to southern Texas to gather together a herd of land terrapins, the idea being to drive the herd to the railhead at Abilene.

They started out O.K. but then the stuff hit the fan. At night they had to settle the herd riding around 'em and roping strays and singing to 'em. It's not easy to rope a turtle. They pull in their heads and little feet and the damn rope just slips off. Also, every night the whole 30,000 head o' turtle had to be FLIPPED OVER onto their backs----one by one---to keep 'em from stampeding. Waving their little legs in the air all night wiped 'em out so bad that they could only make about 3 yards the next day. Moving at that rate, it would've taken 'em 40 years to get to market.

But one good thing was that, as they moved, the females would lay eggs. The herd would move on and there would be a HUGE mass of eggs left in the valley. The first herd hadn't got to the horizon and a secondary herd hatched and followed behind. You could still see the dust kicked up by their little hooves---er--legs out there in the distance. My old uncle just had dollar signs in his eyes----. He had an image in his mind of a whole string of hurtle turds-----er---turtle herds----stretching all the way from Texas to the railhead. Well, it probably would've worked---

BUT !! They got to the banks of the Red River and sunning himself on the shore was a big old mud turtle named Studs---STUDS TURTLE. He saw this whole thundering mass of turtle flesh stampeding toward him and he got spooked. He dove into the river and all those land terrapins followed him-------but being land terrapins, they all drowned. That should've ended the GREAT TURTLE DRIVE as it has come to be known today. But those turtle boys were pretty resourceful. They dug huge pits and filled 'em with red hot coals. Then they pushed boulders into the pits and heated those to a red hot status. Then they pushed 'em into the Red River. The old river heated up slowly, and then it started to steam and froth and foam and boil. I'm here to tell you that the Red River ran turtle soup that day. Pure stuff. Kept the Indians through a tough winter. Everyone turned out pretty happy.

Naturally, there was a ton of turtle soup left over---really good stuff. Horn and Hardart came and bought all of it. Took it and slowly sold it in cans in their automats. It took 'em years to do it too.

So Joe Offer is right.

Thinking over the Great Turtle Drive and what had gone wrong, these same turtle boys said, "If we could try it with turtles, why the hell not with cows."

And that was the start of the cattle industry as we know it today. I always did wonder why that particular chapter of Western history is always left out of the history books !?!?

If you're wondering how I know all this, I have turtle recall.

END OF STORY

(Friends, I found the germ of this story in PARDNER OF THE WIND by Jack Thorp. Thorp was the first man to ever issue a book of cowboy songs in the USA. He did that in 1908---two years before John Lomax's book COWBOY SONGS in 1910. Then I added my own interpritation and told it on stage for 25 years. I recorded it in 1976 and again in 84. As was the custom in folk music for all of the years I was a participant, we always gave credit to our sources. A few years ago---1996, a storyteller named Steve Sanfield "wrote" a kid's book" called The Great Turtle Drive. It had wonderful illustrations by Dirk Zimmer---as you might well imagine. It sure would have---in the past---been the right thing to give credit to the source of the story and my roll in continuing the tradition. We were songcatchers then, not singer/songwriters, and the lineage was very important to us. In this new millenium, I guess, that's not the way things get done. It would've been the right thing to do though!!!-----------Get this book---if only for the illustrations.

Art Thieme