10 More Old Cowboy Supplies You Can't Buy Anymore

A tin of saddle soap with the lid dented from years of thumbs. A mineral block doing far more than salt ever did. Rope dressing, hoof black, harness oil, and one brick the label just called dressing. They left the catalogs one at a time, never recalled and never banned, just quietly gone, and nobody noticed until the afternoon the shelf came up empty. Real neatsfoot oil starts as marrow fat boiled out of cattle shin bones, thin and straw colored, and it soaks into dry leather without leaving the hide limp. What sits on the shelf now is mostly mineral oil and petroleum, cut down until the word compound is the most honest thing left on the front of the bottle. Pine tar hoof dressing went the same way: cod liver oil, a little turpentine, sometimes beeswax melted in, brushed along the wall and the coronary band. Petroleum distillates replaced the fish oil, the tar dropped to a token amount, and a hoof that should have been dressed gets sealed instead, which is how spring mud grows a soft wall and a tender sole. Take a fresh roll of wrap out to the pens on a 20 degree morning and it stiffens at the edge before it comes off the roll. The soap tin still has a blank lid and no name anywhere on it. The amber liniment bottle still shows the same horse, but two ingredients were pulled, one because selling it now takes a paper trail and one because the paperwork cost more than the bottle was worth, and men who used it for 30 years never bought a second one. Even the mineral block changed: iodine, selenium, copper, zinc, cobalt and a little phosphorus traded for cheaper fillers and molasses, with dull coats and cows cycling back late showing up by March. Rope used to come off the shelf already dressed, manila run through pine tar thinned with coal oil, and it stayed supple and stayed on the outside of the water. A bare manila line soaks up water like a wick, swells, stiffens and slickens right when a hand needs it to hold, and a wet rope jammed in a cinch ring is everything downstream of that jam being a horse. The coal tar disinfectant came in two bottles that looked alike on a dim shelf, and treating the strong one like the weak one burned a fresh cut back a week. A flat inner tube on a barn nail cut into bands gave cinch guards, a tank float gasket, rope whipping and a band that held a slicker roll all day in rain, and tubeless radials took that too. All of it left between about 1968 and 1985 under the same four pressures landing on the same small manufacturers: consolidation, liability insurance, cheap substitutes, and a re-registration rule no small house could pay for. The one supply that never came in a printed tin is tallow and pine tar worked together in a bucket, and what came home from that shelf all those years was less a material than somebody's judgment about timing, temperature and amount when to stop, which is the part no label ever carried.