Wild Cody Bill: A Horseman From The Start

As a child growing up in Markham and West Columbia in the neighboring Southeast Texas counties of Matagorda and Brazoria, I never had to look beyond the parameters of my own yard and home to find worthy heroes. My father Rex Gupton was a rough and tough cowboy who donned a metal hard hat and steel-toed boots when going off to work at the refinery a few miles down the highway from our modest, rented Markham home. My mother, Verna Giesler Gupton, had been a talented athlete who played softball well into her adult years. My big brother Cody, three years my senior, always set the bar a bit too high for his younger brother to compete with him in several areas I simply was not very good at. Cody Gupton excelled in Little League baseball, where he was an all-star catcher who also pitched for his Cardinals team in West Columbia. I never got out of the minor leagues. He was a starting quarterback in junior high, freshman and junior varsity football who backed up the extremely gifted former Roughnecks quarterback Troy Williams for two seasons on the varsity at Columbia High School. I never advanced beyond being a backup on the Roughnecks' jayvee team. Cody was a better swimmer than me, a faster runner, superior guitarist, better joke teller and all around entertainer. But the one arena he excelled in as a teenager and young man that I, to this day that finds the two of us in our fifties now, have the most respect and adoration for my big brother has to be his lengthy rodeo career. "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" is a Willie Nelson song that we, as the three surviving children following the 2001 death of Rex Gupton, had played at the closing of our father's funeral. It was a fitting farewell tune for one great old cowboy, our Daddy. And his first-born child followed in his father's bootsteps as well as any child has ever done. My brother Cody, who today is the foreman of the Nash Ranch outside of East Columbia, is pictured below as a baby sprawled out on a pillow and blanket with his father and mother's horse standing watch over him in the background. It is as if you can see that horse staring out at Rex and Verna's baby boy and thinking, "Hurry up kid. Grow up so the two of us can enjoy countless hours of riding across the open range and spend large chunks of our time together." Or, perhaps the ol' boy just has gas!

Cody Gupton, pictured above riding Big John at the Simonton rodeo in 1976, won many saddles, buckles and other awards in his career as a bull rider, saddle bronc rider and bareback bronc rider in numerous rodeos across the great state of Texas and well beyond its borders. He participated in many youth rodeos as a teenager. The love of the rodeo arena was something my brother just had in his blood. Surprisingly, after riding in hundreds of competitive rodeos over many years, Cody was forced to put his rodeo career in mothballs when a riding accident on the Nash Ranch resulted in a broken neck that sent him to the next phase of his rodeo life. Cody spent months recovering in Houston's Hermann Hospital from a serious neck injury that, luckily, spared my brother a life of paralysis and despair. He was thrown from a horse he rode all of the time while working as a ranch hand sometime around 1980. He landed awkwardly on his head after the horse threw him, but Cody did not know just how severe his neck injury was until after being driven from the ranch into West Columbia where Dr. J.C. Burns gave him the prognosis that his neck was broken. Dr. Burns and a couple of his nurses have told me many times that a man with that severe of a neck fracture should never have been able to walk into the West Columbia doctor's office under his own power.

But Cody survived the broken neck and eventually returned to the employment of Smoky Davis at the Roundup Rodeo Arena in Simonton, Texas, where he would work as a rodeo judge and truck driver, hauling Smoky Davis's rodeo stock all over Texas and adjoining states. Cody simply loved the rodeo life and found it very difficult to walk away from it. But, following his marriage to Andrea, Cody left Simonton in his rearview mirror and returned to the Nash Ranch near his hometown of West Columbia. He worked his way up from a ranch hand under Shorty Kleine and Glenn Yauch to eventually becoming Shorty's replacement as the large cattle ranch's foreman and overseer. I have always admired my big brother, from the earliest days of our childhood when I would want to follow him around everywhere Cody went to more recent years when I have observed him living his life under a set of rules that he himself applied. Cody has pretty much been his own boss most of his life and has always been able to remain entrenched in a world of cattle and horses. From his earlier rodeo days throughout the many years Cody has toiled in freezing cold and broiling sunshine, rarely complaining about the difficult task the responsibilities of his chosen line of work presents him, my big brother remains one of my biggest heroes even today. I salute you, Cody Bill, and wish you many, many more years of good health and prosperity. You were truly one of the cutest little boys ever, as these pictures from my mother's old photo collection attest. Keep fighting the good fight, brother!

Before Cody Bill was old enough to sit astride a real horse, his rocking horses did the trick for the little cowboy. In the photo above where he is wearing his cowboy hat, Cody embarks at a very early age (the date on the back of the photo is February 1956) on the road to riding bucking broncs. This wild pony was tagged "Butt-Butt" by my big brother when he was just a little tyke. I assume he was trying to say "Buck, Buck" to the wooden horse when he would entertain our parents and their friends and family members who would gather around to cheer Cody Bill on as he entertained his earliest thoughts of one day becoming a rodeo contestant. "Butt-Butt" was handed down to me several years later when my big brother advanced to riding real horses and I inherited "Butt-Butt." The other photo above is of Samuel Cody Gupton sitting atop his first rocking horse. My brother was named after our grandfather and uncle and great-grandfather, Samuel Morris Gupton (my Dad's father) and Samuel Doc Gupton (the name of both my father's youngest brother and their grandfather) respectively. "Cody" was a name that both of our parents liked a lot. Our mother would always call my brother "Cody Bill," more than likely after famed hero of the Old West, Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody and his wife Andrea named their only child after our father. Their son, my nephew, is named Rex Layne Gupton and he is now 20 years old. The "Layne" portion of my nephew's name is in honor of the late Layne Frost, a rodeo cowboy who was killed riding a bull in the rodeo arena. The motion picture "8 Seconds" is about the life of Layne Frost.

Our father's horse Lun was a fixture in the lives of all of the five members of my immediate family, from the early childhoods of my older brother Cody, my younger sister Kelli and myself. Lun, pictured in all of the photos above, lived a very long life for a horse and is deserving of some kind of monument on our family's property. He lived in several pastures my father leased in Lun's lifetime, but my fondest memories of him all involve his lengthy stay at our Gupton Lane home, grazing his equine life away with his female companion Sugar in the little pasture that adjoins the residences of my parents, my father's parents Buff and Eula Gupton, and Daddy's uncle and aunt, Phil and Margaret Gupton. Directly above this caption is a photo of my big brother Cody sitting atop Lun's broad back with the reins held by first our father Rex in the lower photo and then our grandfather Buff Gupton in the photo above that. All of these photos were taken long before I made my grand entrance into the world in January 1957. My mother Verna Gupton penciled in the date "May 1956" on the backs of the photos above.