How Old Cowboys Fed Their Horses for FREE With These 5 Wild Plants

The hay ran out in February, snow packed three feet against the barn door, and a string of horses stood a hundred miles from the nearest sack of grain. One broke cowhand kept every head alive without spending a dime, reading feed off ground most folks walk right over. It starts with cottonwood along the creek bottoms, tender twigs and inner bark with enough sugar to keep a gut working. Then prickly pear, each pad close to 85% water, singed over a low fire until the spines and hair-like glochids burn clean off. Locoweed is the trap, staying green when everything else goes brown and carrying a toxin that poisons the nervous system, so a good hand moved the herd off it before they got the habit. Cattail shoots and the starchy root pulled from the mud fed a tired horse, and pigweed, the wild amaranth folks hoe out of their gardens, put protein and shine back on a worn-down coat. The one the trail hands guarded was mesquite, long tan pods near 30% sugar with protein running 11 to 17%, cracked in a hollow stump or ground to a coarse meal and doled out a couple pounds at a time. None of it worked alone. Too much of any single plant meant colic or the founder that cripples the feet, so the old hands mixed a little of a lot, grass and hay underneath it all, and watched every horse close. The plants still grow the same creek bottoms and marsh edges they always did. What got lost was the eye to read them.