Here’s a little snapshot into the life of an 11-year-old in Brownwood back in 1877 that can make you think. This boy was doing the job of a man at that age, rounding up livestock, driving the animals to market. It didn’t seem to harm him any, and might even have done him some good. Listless, depressed teenagers weren’t really a thing then like they are now. The description of his work, months spent herding a pack of pigs across open country, is a pretty impressive, and probably healthy, activity for a kid.

“Driving hogs is not so hard as some folks reckon. The animals can’t be rushed, but will move forward taking their own time. At night, hogs will bed down and give no trouble. If something scares a hog or a number of the animals, just those scared will get excited, but soon will settle down,” cowboy Charles W Holden told interviewer Sheldon Gauthier sometime in the late 1930s.

Holden was an early resident of Brown County, arriving here with his family in 1873. In 1877, at the ripe old age of 11, he took a job with the Coggin Ranch, and was assigned to help drive a herd of pigs from Brown County to Fort Worth. That was a different world. Can you imagine an 11-year-old today doing such a thing?

Holden described the job to Gauthier: “The hogs were ranged on the Jim Ned Creek and the critters found their own living on the creek bottoms of that section. The hogs were always rolling fat from feeding on the pecans and acorns that grew in abundance in those bottoms. I have seen pecans so thick on the ground that one could rake the nuts, with a rake, by the bushels. Hogs feeding on pecan nuts made the finest of tasting meat. The hogs were sold in the Fort Worth market and the first driving of critters that I did was helping to drive 600 hogs from Brownwood to Fort Worth. We went into the bottoms and herded out 650 critters of the proper size and drove the animals to Brownwood.”

““It took us close to 30 days to make the distance of, approximately, 125 miles. We never pushed the animals, but just let the critters take their own time. Two of us walked at the front, on either side of the herd, to keep it pointed in the proper direction, and the other fellow stayed in the rear to poke a hog that became tired and lie down, then we would wait until they had their rest out, before going on. The distance covered in a day was from three to five miles,” Holden explained.

I can’t think of a better adventure for a young man than traveling across Texas with a herd of pigs for a month. You learn a lot about life by working with animals. Maybe you learn more that way than sitting in a room all day listening to people talk. Outside, you learn how to be a part of the land, not just a visitor, and how to take care of yourself and handle problems. A kid could try out an idea on his own, fail and learn until it’s right. It’s hard to picture now, but maybe we tend to baby our kids more than is good for them. They end up bored and restless, something I imagine Charles Holden never was.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com