Wyoming History: The Adventures Of Sam Cremer, The Unluckiest Cowboy In The West

By all accounts, Sam Cremer was a top cowboy in Wyoming in the early 1900s and a good hand on a roundup wagon. He also was unlucky—really unlucky. His friend and fellow bronc stomper Harry Webb wrote that Cremer “could get himself in more uncalled-for trouble than a pack of kids around a hornet’s nest.”

Born in 1884 in Agency, Iowa, Cremer moved with his family to Douglas, Wyoming, at age 11. By the time he was 21, the hard-luck cowboy had moved to the Bighorn Basin to tame the Wild West. Webb, who left the Embar Ranch in 1910 to ride for Buffalo Bill and later became an author, wrote about riding with Cremer in a short story titled “Embar Ranch.” Webb said his goal was to be like Cremer—a “fixture” at the Embar.

The M-Bar was one of the largest outfits in Wyoming, with ranches extending over 100 miles and 135,000 Hereford cattle. A good “bronc-stomper” was always in demand. “The hours with a roundup wagon ain’t any longer but there’s sure a hell of a lot more of ’em!” Cremer would say.

One fall, Cremer developed an unbearable itch. Finding a can labeled “sheep dip,” he reasoned, “if it’s good for sheep it ought to be good for a human man.” He stripped and sloshed the remedy all over himself. Half an hour later, he was a howling maniac. His fists were drawn tight against his chest, and his leg muscles contracted so hard his heels nearly touched his neck. Another cowboy read the label: “Nicotine. Warning! For use in dipping vats only! Add contents of this can to not less than 5,000 gallons of water.” Cremer had used half a gallon straight. The cowboys rushed to heat water and near-cooked him for two hours, finally straightening his limbs. They later discovered lice “as large as fat horse-ticks” down the seams of his underwear.

After recovering, Cremer joined Webb breaking broncs. The first horse he rode came uncorked and went over a 20-foot cutbank into Owl Creek. When Webb reached him, Cremer was crawling among the rocks. “Are you hurt, Sam?” Webb yelled. “Not hurt, but I lost my Bull Durham among these damn rocks somewhere,” Cremer said. His right arm was broken at the elbow, and he had a bad bruise on his temple. He was back working in a month.

Cremer’s end at the Embar came when he got tired of eating in the rain. The cook, “Slippery Sloud,” came at him with a butcher knife. Cremer yanked out his .45 and pulled the trigger. The bullet ricocheted off the knife and blew a hole through a kettle of beef. Cremer emptied his gun into the pot. One cowhand lost the tip of an ear. “Scratch ’er out for me, George, I’m quitting!” Cremer said.

Despite swearing he was hanging up his spurs, Cremer spent the next half century in the Bighorn Basin wrangling cattle. At the LU Sheep Co., he spent 35 years as cattle foreman, vice president, a director, and a stockholder. He died in Thermopolis at age 92—a cowboy to the end. Webb remembered him as “the best side-kick any cowpuncher could wish for.”