Hired Out for a Tough Hand

Jane Burnett was not even seven years old as she sat on her pony “huddled over the saddle horn, icicles hanging from the end of my nose,” positioned to turn a horse herd she had helped her daddy round up one winter morning in Montana. She knew then and there that she had “hired out as a tough hand.” The Burnett family ranch, where Jane first learned cowboy skills, had been settled by her grandfather, William Clinton Burnett,  and his brother W.P. (Perkins) in the 1880s. William “B