Chapter 7
Nature may or may not abhor a vacuum, but empty ecological niches attract new species. The destruction of the buffalo left the grasslands of the North American interior available for other grazers, animals whose innards contained the microbes necessary to break down the cellulose of the grass stems and leaves into a form the gastric juices of the grazers could handle. Horses had shown their ability to match the buffaloes’ digestive feats, but horseflesh has never been honored in Euro-American cuisine. Beef was more to the taste of the newcomers, and so cattle became the replacement of (human) choice for the buffalo.
Yet the introduction of cattle to the Plains had to do less with anyone’s desire to see that grass not die uneaten than with the growing appetite of American capitalism. From the beginning, cattle husbandry on the Plains was a business, one driven by the same imperatives that governed the oil business and the steel business. The cattle business required inputs of capital and labor, it called for a matching of supply and demand, and it rewarded economies of scale and the application of technology. No single cattleman became as wealthy as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller, but a few built empires that would have given princes pause and that proved more durable than many of the corporate fiefdoms of the captains of non-animal industry.
———
CATTLE CROSSED THE Atlantic in the same Spanish ships that brought the horses, and they escaped into the wilds of the West about the same time the horses did. But they spread more slowly than the horses, largely because they didn’t seem such an improvement on the aboriginal status quo. Horses gave their adopters new powers; cattle simply put something different on the dinner plate. And humans being culinary conservatives, the difference rarely worked in the cattle’s favor. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, pork was the meat preferred by most Americans. Harriet Martineau, traveling across America in the 1830s, found pig flesh ubiquitous and inescapable. “In one house at Boston, where a numerous family lives in handsome style, and where I several times met large dinner parties, I never once saw an ounce of meat except ham,” she wrote. Elsewhere the theme was the same, with minor variations. “Throughout the South the traveler meets little else than pork, under all manner of disguises, and fowls.”1
Tastes shifted within decades. Most Americans who kept cattle did so for milk or draft, although the animals were often eventually eaten. But at the extreme southern edge of the Great Plains, where Texas meets Mexico, cattle were raised for beef and hides. For much of the century before the Civil War, feral cattle from northern Mexico roamed the broad valley of the Rio Grande. The mild winters and abundant grass allowed the herds to multiply almost unchecked. Mexican rancheros (ranchmen) and vaqueros(cowboys) learned to tend the cattle, rounding them up once or twice a year, branding them with the owners’ marks, selling or slaughtering some for their beef and hides, and turning the rest loose to graze and multiply the more. The acquisition of Texas by the United States brought this cattle culture to Anglo-America, but it never lost its Latin flavor. The Anglos, mostly from the American East and South, knew cows as creatures kept in pens and small pastures, few in number and often treated as family pets; they had never seen anything like the giant herds of Texas longhorns. But the Anglo Texans were fast learners, adopting the tools and techniques of the cattle culture from the Mexican Texans, or tejanos. The Anglos adopted the terminology, too. Rancho anglicized to “ranch,” la riata to “lariat,” vaquero to “buckaroo.”2
Not that the cattle noticed. They treated the Anglos with the same disdain they had always shown the Latinos. Keen of scent, wary of danger, rugged of constitution, the longhorns continued to thrive on the Rio Grande, and they spread up the coastal bend as the Americans and the Indians decimated the buffalo herds that had once dominated the Texas grasslands.
Before 1860 enterprising cattlemen occasionally attempted to transport Texas cattle to markets farther east. Small herds were driven to the Red River of Louisiana and shipped downstream to New Orleans. A few went by sea from Galveston to New Orleans, Mobile, and even Havana. One particularly ambitious individual gathered a herd of a thousand Texas steers and drove them all the way to Ohio. Some Texas cattle reached Chicago during the 1850s. Gold drew Texans to California in 1849 and after, and some trailed cattle there, only to discover that California, like Texas heir to the history and traditions of New Spain, had cattle enough for its own needs.
The impetus for the efforts to export cattle was the price difference between Texas and the various destinations. Cattle were almost free for the taking in Texas, the principal expense being the labor cost of rounding them up. In the East cattle commanded twenty to forty dollars per head. Simple arithmetic suggested that the man who could get a thousand head of Texas cattle to market in the East might nearly retire on the proceeds. One modest-sized herd transported to Chicago in 1856 was said to have netted its owners ten thousand dollars. The simultaneous continuing growth of the Texas herds and of the Eastern appetite for beef promised future profits greater still.3
The Civil War postponed the bounty. Secession cut Texas off from Northern markets, while the Union blockade and the capture of the Mississippi isolated Texas from Southern markets. With nowhere to go, the longhorns continued to multiply, till at war’s end they numbered perhaps five million.
The Confederate surrender reopened Northern markets to Texas cattle. As the national economy readjusted to peace, the price of beef soared. The Department of Agriculture cited three-year-old steers selling for $86 in Massachusetts, $69 in New York, $40 in Illinois, and $38 in Kansas. Texans returning from military service read the price quotes and calculated how to cash in.4
The first step was catching the cattle. “We didn’t call it round-up in those days,” Lee Moore remembered. “We called it cow-hunts.” Moore spoke for many in Texas drawn to the cattle business by the high Eastern prices. Some had grown cotton before the war, others corn. But with crop prices sagging, they turned to beef. At first they acted like the displaced farmers they were. “We had no wagon,” Moore recalled, referring to a mess wagon. “Every man carried his grub in a wallet”—a cloth sack—“behind his saddle, and his bed under his saddle.” They gathered the branded cattle and divided them among the owners, and they apportioned the unbranded cattle by various methods, including poker. “Yearlings at fifty cents a head and the top price for any class was $5 a head,” Moore explained, “so if anyone run out of cattle and had a little money he could get back in the game. For $10, say, he could get a stack of yearlings.” Moore was the youngster of the group and wasn’t allowed to gamble. But he received twenty-five cents a night for tending the fires that furnished the light the others played by and was permitted to convert his cash into cattle.5
Summer had singed the prairies in 1865 before sufficient cattle were gathered to send to market, and so the first big drive awaited the following spring. Whether the same idea occurred to several dozen cattle owners independently or they compared notes is unclear, but in the spring of 1866 scores of herds set out from Texas for the railheads to the north and east. The most popular destination was Sedalia, Missouri, at that time the terminus of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Some quarter million cattle began the journey and would have made their owners rich had they all arrived. But a series of misfortunes befell the cattle and the drovers who nudged them along. Creatures of the open plains, the cattle (and some of the drovers) became confused in the forests of the Ozarks. They wandered among the trees with no sense of direction. And even when the drovers regained their bearings, they discovered that their herding techniques—which in the open allowed a handful of men to control thousands of animals—failed amid the trunks and bushes. The forests, moreover, provided little sustenance to the animals, which grew hungrier and more ornery the farther they penetrated into the woods.
The humans along the route posed even greater impediments. The drovers discovered during that first season that range cattle and farmers don’t mix. The cornfields of the farmers struck the longhorns as the lushest fodder they had ever seen or smelled; when the animals helped themselves the farmers retaliated. Some shot the trespassers; others ran them off, provoking stampedes. The Missourians also worried that the Texas cattle brought Spanish, or Texas, fever, which would infect their own herds.
Lacking anything close to local sympathy, the drovers fell easy prey to larceny and personal violence. During the war Missouri had sheltered outlaws, deserters, and miscreants of other stripes; many remained there after the fighting ended. More than a few reckoned that the Texas herds must be worth something considerable if the drovers were risking all this trouble and effort, and they determined to claim a share of the portable prize. “A favorite scheme of the milder-mannered of these scoundrels to plunder the cattlemen was that of stampeding a herd at night,” a veteran of the trail recalled. “This was easily done, and having been done the rogues next morning would collect as many of the scattered cattle as they could, secrete them in an out-of-the-way place—much of the country being hilly and timbered—and then hunt up the owner and offer to help him, for an acceptable money consideration per head, in recovering his lost property. If the drover agreed to pay a price high enough to satisfy the pirates, they next day would return with many, if not all, of the missing cattle; but if not, the hold-ups would keep them, and later take them to the market and pocket the entire proceeds.”6
The 1866 drive proved a financial debacle and taught the Texans to keep clear of Missouri. But even though most of the pastoralist entrepreneurs lost money that season, the few cattle that did get to market commanded prices that convinced their owners and others to try again. The railroads continued to press west; by the spring of 1867 the Kansas Pacific had reached the plains of central Kansas. The herds that hit the trail that season were fewer and smaller than the previous year’s, totaling no more than seventy-five thousand. But they had much better luck getting through. They had to cope with the tribes who inhabited the Indian Territory north of Texas, and though these bands were less formidable than the Comanches and Kiowas who still roamed free, they weren’t uniformly above the same stampeding tricks the Missourians had employed the previous year. On the whole, however, the 1867 drive went well. The trail to Kansas kept to open country uninhabited as yet by farmers. Certain stretches compelled the cattle to go long periods without water, but here they showed the hardiness that made the cattlemen forgive their many faults.
———
ESSENTIAL TO THE success of the drive were the efforts of cattle buyers. Joseph McCoy traveled west from Illinois on the news the Texans were trying again. “The plan was to establish at some accessible point a depot or market to which a Texan drover could bring his stock unmolested,” McCoy explained. “It was to establish a market whereat the Southern drover and Northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing and both be undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves.” McCoy rode the Kansas Pacific to Junction City, Kansas, and tried to purchase property from one of the town’s leading businessmen for a stockyard and loading facility. “But an exorbitant price was asked,” McCoy recalled. “In fact a flat refusal to sell at any price was the final answer of the wide-awake Junctionite. So by that one act of donkey stupidity and avarice Junction City drove from her a trade which soon developed to many millions.” Solomon City, despite its name, was no wiser. “After one or two conferences with some of the leading citizens it became evident that they regarded such a thing as a cattle trade with stupid horror.” Salina treated McCoy as a “monster threatening calamity and pestilence.”
But Abilene possessed greater vision, largely because it possessed little else. “Abilene in 1867 was a very small, dead place, consisting of about one dozen log huts, low, small, rude affairs, four-fifths of which were covered with dirt for roofing,” McCoy recalled. “The business of the burg was conducted in two small rooms, mere log huts.” Yet Abilene’s very lack of amenities made it ideal for McCoy’s purposes. “The country was entirely unsettled, well watered, excellent grass.… It was the farthest point east at which a good depot for cattle business could have been made.”
McCoy purchased a tract and set to work building fences, a barn, and an office. The wood had to be imported from Missouri, as did a scales for the cattle. Meanwhile he dispatched word to the Texans as to where to bring their cattle. “A man well versed in the geography of the country and accustomed to life on the prairie was sent into southern Kansas and the Indian Territory with instructions to hunt up every straggling drove possible (and every drove was straggling, for they had not where to go), and tell them of Abilene and what was being done there toward making a market and outlet for Texas cattle.” The Texans greeted the news skeptically. “They were very suspicious that some trap was set, to be sprung on them. They were not ready to credit the proposition that the day of fair dealing had dawned for Texas drovers. Yet they turned their herds toward the point designated, and slowly and cautiously moved on northward, their minds constantly agitated with hope and fear alternately.”
By the hundreds and then the thousands the longhorns arrived. They filled McCoy’s stockyard and spilled beyond, until the Kansas Pacific built a special siding for the cattle cars. The first shipment, of twenty cars, headed east in early September, triggering a celebration in Abilene among the drovers and the gathered locals.
The partying was premature. Eastern consumers resisted the western meat as tough and stringy, and the first shipments from Abilene went begging. One cargo that couldn’t find a buyer at Chicago was forwarded to Albany, where the nine hundred head were sold for less than the cost of their transport. Even so, almost one thousand cars of cattle made the journey that season, and both sellers and buyers were sufficiently encouraged to repeat the process the following season. The number of cattle shipped from Abilene grew from 35,000 in 1867 to 75,000 in 1868, before exploding to 350,000 in 1869 and 700,000 in 1871.7
By then Abilene had become the model of the western cow town. “Perhaps no point or village of its size ever had been so thoroughly advertised or had acquired such wide-spread fame,” McCoy declared with self-satisfaction but no little accuracy. “One at a distance would suppose from the many reports that it was a large town or city of many thousand inhabitants, instead of a small village of a few hundred denizens.… No point in the West of five times its resident population did one-half the amount of business that was done at Abilene.” The cattle commerce eventually totaled some three million dollars a year, which in turn supported the surrounding economy far beyond its ordinary means. Farmers in Dickinson County sold milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, pork, and chicken to cowhands hungry for anything but beef. Cattle buyers and the less thrifty of the hands put up at the Drovers’ Cottage, a hotel run by Mrs. Lou Gore, who won a reputation as the Florence Nightingale of the plains. “Many a sick and wearied drover has she nursed and tenderly cared for until health was restored, or in the event of death soothed their dying moments,” McCoy explained. “Many western drovers, rough, uncouth men such as nature and the wild frontier produces, will ever hear the name of Mrs. Lou Gore mentioned only with emotions of the kindest respect and tenderest memory and feelings near akin to the holy passion that binds earth to heaven.”
Occasionally Mrs. Gore had to summon qualities more akin to Wyatt Earp’s. Famous as Abilene was for its cattle, it was even more notorious for its debauchery and violence. The railroad divided the town into two quite distinct districts. “North side of the tracks you are in Kansas, and hear sober and profitable conversation on the subject of the weather, the price of the land, and the crops,” a Topeka correspondent recorded. “When you cross to the south side you are in Texas, and talk about cattle.… Nine out of ten men you meet are directly or indirectly interested in the cattle trade; five at least out of every ten are Texans.” The heart of the Texas district was Texas Street, crowded with saloons and dance halls. The “Alamo” held pride of place among these resorts. It served the best liquor in the greatest variety and quantity, and even exposed the cowboys to art. “Paintings, in remote but lascivious imitation of Titian, Tintoretto or Veronese, exhibiting nude women relaxed in beauty prostrate, seduced the Alamo’s sporting life,” a chronicler of the local culture related. Another observer described a typical evening at the Alamo:
Here, in a well lighted room opening on the street, the “boys” gather in crowds round the tables, to play or to watch others; a bartender, with a countenance like a youthful divinity student, fabricates wonderful drinks, while the music of a piano and a violin from a raised recess enlivens the scene, and “soothes the savage breasts” of those who retire torn and lacerated from an unfortunate combat with the “tiger.” The games most affected are faro and monte, the latter being greatly patronized by the Mexicans of Abilene, who sit with perfectly unmoved countenances and play for hours at a stretch.
Though the Mexicans took their losses with outward indifference, many of the Anglos did not. The booze brought out the touchiness in the average cowboy. “An affront or a slight, real or imaginary, is cause sufficient for him to unlimber one or more ‘mountain howitzers’ invariably strapped to his person, and proceed to deal out death in unbroken doses to such as may be in range of his pistols,” Joseph McCoy explained. “Whether real friends or enemies, no matter—his anger and bad whisky urge him on to deeds of blood and death.”8
McCoy didn’t blame the cowboys. Abilene attracted low-lifes—card sharps, confidence men, pimps—who preyed on the cowboys’ unsophistication and sudden cash. Moreover, after months on the trail, they were bored beyond bearing. “The time drags dull at camp or herd ground. There is nothing new or exciting occurring to break the monotony of daily routine events.” Any diversion was welcome, the more exciting, even dangerous, the better.
Most of the cowboys survived their encounter with Abilene. “After a few days of frolic and debauchery, the cowboy is ready, in company with his comrades, to start back to Texas, often not having one dollar left of his summer’s wages,” McCoy said. And those who didn’t live to leave perhaps didn’t deserve to. “By far the larger portion killed are of that class that can be spared without detriment to the good morals and respectability of humanity.”9
SOME KANSANS FELT the same way about Abilene generally and weren’t sorry when its moment of celebrity passed. The railroad continued to press west, making a rendezvous point even farther out on the plains possible. Such a more distant connection became necessary from the fact that farmers, following the railroad, filled in the territory south of Abilene and refused to let the Texas drovers cross their land. Though the cattlemen disliked to admit it, and many perhaps didn’t even realize it, theirs was an intrinsically marginal existence, confined to the moving border between the empty range lands to the west and the populated farm districts to the east. As the farmers crept west, the cattlemen had no choice but to move on ahead of them.
The Texans rerouted their trails, meeting the railroad at Ellsworth and eventually at Dodge City. Abilene reverted to its previous subdued condition, like any number of other boom towns in the West. “Four fifths of her business houses became vacant,” Joseph McCoy recalled sadly. “Rents fell to a trifle. Many of the leading hotels and business houses were either closed or taken down and moved to other points. Property became unsalable. The luxuriant sunflower sprang up thick and flourished in the main streets, while the inhabitants, such as could not get away, passed their time sadly contemplating their ruin.”10
But the industry thrived. The best of the drovers made careers of their craft. Borrowing money for six or eight months, they purchased herds in Texas and trailed them north. To prevent losses they marked each of their steers with a trail brand, administered with a red-hot iron as the cattle crowded through a chute built for the purpose. The drovers hired trail hands, who supplied their own saddles and bedrolls but rode horses belonging to the drovers. A junior member of the outfit was designated the wrangler, with responsibility for the horses, collectively called the remuda. A hired cook completed the division of labor. The cowboys collected salaries, typically twenty-five to forty dollars a month, depending on experience, although the best hands could make as much as five dollars a day. The cook received a bit more than most of the hands; the trail boss—the supervisor of the whole outfit—earned well over a hundred dollars a month.11
After a few years of practice, the drovers knew what they were about. They spent the first several days of each drive breaking the cattle to the rhythm of the trail. They let the herd find its leaders and only slowly directed it north. (This practice wasn’t universal. Some drovers, believing cattle were least manageable on their home range, pushed the herds hard at first to get them away from familiar territory.) Charles Goodnight remembered the first ten days of any drive as the critical period, as that was when a herd was most likely to stampede. “If we succeeded in holding the herd together for that length of time we seldom experienced trouble from stampedes farther along the trail,” he said. But those ten days could be extremely trying.
The men slept on the ground with the lariat wrapped around the wrist and with the horse so close he could be mounted at a bound. Sometimes the demands were so urgent that a man’s boots would not be taken off his feet for an entire week. The nerves of the men usually became wrought up to such a tension that it was a standing rule that no man was to be touched by another when he was asleep until after he had been spoken to. The man who suddenly aroused a sleeper was liable to be shot, as all were thoroughly armed and understood the instant use of the revolver or the rifle.12
The men could do their work admirably only to have their efforts frustrated by a single steer spooked in the night.
The herd of 2,500 or 3,000 cattle might be lying on the bed-ground in the most perfect peace and security, with everything as quiet as a graveyard, when, in a second and without the slightest warning to the eye or ear of man, every animal would be on its feet, and the earth would tremble as the herd swept off through the darkness. The experience was one of the most thrilling a man could ever know. Every person in camp would be up and away. No one, not even the most experienced trailman, could, at the beginning of the stampede, guess the direction of the flight. The course appeared to be at random, for the cattle would plunge headlong against any obstacle and down any precipice that stood in their way.
The task of the men was to gain control of the herd and gradually turn the cattle until they were moving in a circle. Then, although they might break each other’s horns off and crush one another badly, the great danger was past. A well-trained night-horse needed but little guidance, and knew that if the herd came his way, all that he had to do was to lead. The speed of the herd was terrific, but the position at the head of the stampede was just what the trailman desired, for there he was in a position to start the herd to turning.…
The heat developed by a large drove of cattle during a stampede was surprising. The faces of men riding on the leeward side of the herd would be almost blistered, as if they had been struck by a blast from a furnace; and the odor given off by the clashing horns and hoofs was nearly overpowering.13
Days on the trail began before dawn for the cook, who fed the nighthawks coming in and the rest of the crew heading out. The herd ambled north, grazing as it went. Gradually the cowboys prodded the animals, till all two or three thousand were striding along at about three miles an hour. Cattle and men broke at noon. The cattle grazed; the men dined on leftovers from the night before. All loafed for an hour or two. The march resumed by midafternoon and continued for a few hours till the herd again overtook the chuck wagon, which generally stopped by a stream. Goodnight recalled that clever drovers kept the cattle from water till evening. “The last half of the day’s travel was accomplished much easier than the first half, for the cattle would be growing thirsty and becoming eager to get to water.” The men ate in shifts, with those finished or not yet fed watering the cattle. Supper was typically beef, biscuits, and coffee. The cattle grazed before being bedded down for the night. The trail boss was happy if the herd had made fifteen miles since the last night’s camp.14
The top hands rode “point,” guiding the herd with the help of the lead animals, to whom they bonded almost as partners. Less senior or experienced cowboys rode “swing” and “flank,” coaxing strays back into the main line of march. The newcomers rode “drag,” coaxing the weary and reluctant and eating the dust of ten thousand hooves.
Periodically the herd encountered a river. The lay of the plains between Texas and Kansas is such that rivers run from west to east, requiring northbound travelers to find ways across. The herds that left early in the spring could expect the lushest grasses en route but also the highest water. The cattle could swim but had to be persuaded. Low water was no guarantee of hazardless crossing. Recurrent floods and droughts left the streambeds filled with unconsolidated sediment, which turned to quicksand as the first cattle trampled through. The terror that afflicted an animal caught by the sucking sand could spread among the other animals in seconds, triggering mass panic that mixed drownings with elements of a stampede.
Worse than the stretches where the crossings were too frequent were those where the crossings weren’t frequent enough—where the herd had to travel for days between water. “Dry drives” tested the patience of the cattle and the mettle of the men. Andy Adams remembered the climax of an especially brutal march. Three days and two nights had passed since the last stream. “Holding the herd this third night required all hands. Only a few men at a time were allowed to go into camp and eat, for the herd refused even to lie down. What few cattle attempted to rest were prevented by the more restless ones. By spells they would mill, until riders were sent through the herd at a break-neck pace to break up the groups.”
The men prayed for cooler weather, but dawn came still and sultry. By nine the air almost sizzled. The cattle grew more frantic till they couldn’t be governed at all. “The lead cattle turned back several times, wandering aimlessly in any direction, and it was with considerable difficulty that the herd could be held on the trail,” Adams said. “The rear overtook the lead, and the cattle gradually lost all semblance of a trail herd.” With great effort the riders reconstructed the herd, stringing the animals out along the trail. But as soon as they relaxed, the confusion set in again.
The cattle congregated into a mass of unmanageable animals, milling and lowing in their fever and thirst. The milling only intensified their sufferings from the heat, and the outfit split and quartered them again and again, in the hope that this unfortunate outbreak might be checked. No sooner was the milling stopped than they would surge hither and yon, sometimes half a mile, as ungovernable as the waves of an ocean.… We threw our ropes in their faces, and when this failed, we resorted to shooting. But in defiance of the fusillade and the smoke they walked sullenly through the line of horsemen across their front. Six-shooters were discharged so close to the leaders’ faces as to singe their hair. Yet, under a noonday sun, they disregarded this and every other device to turn them, and passed wholly out of our control. In a number of instances wild steers deliberately walked against our horses. And then, for the first time, a fact dawned on us that chilled the marrow in our bones—the herd was going blind!
The trail boss of Adams’s outfit saw no alternative to going back to the latest water, despite the added mileage and time it would entail. “It’s a good thing that they are strong,” he said. “Five or six days without water will hardly kill any.” Nor did it. But the experience brought to mind the remark of Phil Sheridan that if he owned hell and Texas, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell. “For if this isn’t Billy hell,” the boss said, “I’d like to know what you call it.”15
ON HIS BUFFALO HUNT in western Dakota Territory, after days spent seeking the suddenly scarce beast among the broken plains and blocked valleys of the badlands, Theodore Roosevelt devoted evenings to discussions with resident Gregor Lang. Gregor’s son Lincoln eavesdropped from the attic of the Lang cabin and recalled hearing Roosevelt congratulate his father, an immigrant from Scotland, on being one of fifteen children. “The first essential of human progress is the perpetuation of the human race, and I admire the men who are not afraid to propagate their kind as far as they may,” Roosevelt said. Roosevelt was recently married but had no children yet; he assured Lang he intended to have several at least.
The two men spoke on other subjects. Politics fascinated both. Gregor had named Lincoln for the Great Emancipator; Roosevelt was taking time from his work as a New York assemblyman. He told Lang how he combated the forces of corruption in Albany and how good men must battle their ilk on the larger stage of national politics. He doubtless dropped that he had just published a book on the maritime aspects of the War of 1812 and that his historical research revealed a contemporary need for a stronger American navy.16
They spoke of Dakota and of how men made a living there. Roosevelt had come to this part of the frontier to experience the dying moment of a passing age, when a hunter might bag the largest animal in North America. But he had come, as well, to reconnoiter the dawn of a new age, when cattle were filling the niche vacated by the buffalo. For the past few years papers in the West and around the country had reported tremendous opportunities for investors in the cattle business. “Cotton was once crowned king,” a livestock journal observed, “but grass is now.… If grass is King, the Rocky Mountain region is its throne and fortunate indeed are those who possess it.” A U.S. army officer named James Brisbin, who spent the dozen years after the Civil War on service in various parts of the West, devoted an entire book to what he called The Beef Bonanza. “In the whole world there are but five great natural grazing areas,” Brisbin wrote in 1881. Four were the steppe of Central Asia, the veldt of South Africa, the pampas of South America, and the outback of Australia. The fifth was “the boundless plains of the United States,” comprising “1,650,000 square miles with over a billion acres.” Americans had never appreciated the potential of this region, Brisbin said. They called it the Great American Desert. But it was no more a natural desert than the other four pastoral zones. “The day will come when the government will derive more taxes from the grazing country than the best agricultural regions. These arid plains, so long considered worthless, are the natural meat-producing lands of the nation, and in a few years 30,000,000 people will draw their beef from them.”17
Potential investors received detailed advice on how their money would multiply. In a widely reprinted article entitled “How Cattlemen Grow Rich,” the Breeder’s Gazette explained:
A good sized steer when it is fit for the butcher market will bring from $45 to $60. The same animal at birth was worth but $5.00. He has run on the plains and cropped the grass from the public domain for four or five years, and now, with scarcely any expense to his owner, is worth forty dollars more than when he started on his pilgrimage. A thousand of these animals are kept nearly as cheaply as a single one, so with a thousand as a starter and with an investment of but $5,000 in the start, in four years the stock raiser has made from $40,000 to $45,000. Allow $5,000 for his current expenses which he has been going on and he still has $35,000 and even $45,000 for a net profit. That is all there is of the problem and that is why our cattlemen grow rich.18
The news spread across America and beyond the Atlantic. British newspapers sent correspondents to cover the cattle boom. The Economist of London in 1883 described the “remarkable success” of one cattle company organized in 1880, “which paid a dividend at the rate of 19½ per cent twelve months ago, and had recently declared a second, at nearly 28 per cent.” Even Parliament got into the act, dispatching two members to America on a fact-finding tour. They reported with sober astonishment a typical return in the cattle industry of 33 percent per annum.19
Other Europeans entered the industry, as Roosevelt learned at first hand in Dakota. Across the Little Missouri River from the town of Little Missouri, the Northern Pacific rail stop where Roosevelt had alighted to commence his hunt, Antoine de Vallombrosa, the marquis de Morès and a relative of French kings, was building the headquarters of what he hoped would be an empire of beef. Stockyards had been constructed; an abattoir was going up. An entire town, named Medora for his wife (who nonetheless hadn’t yet seen fit to join him in Dakota), was being laid out. De Morès intended to capitalize on recent innovations in rail technology, in particular the development of refrigerator cars. The cold cars allowed the decentralization of butchering and obviated sending whole steers east. The bones and entrails could stay in Dakota—along with the processor’s profits, de Morès hoped.20
Roosevelt could see the de Morès empire abuilding. He heard from locals how the marquis anticipated sinking millions of dollars into the project. He had read the literature of the cattle boom with its testaments of doubled money in two or three years. His own wallet was heavy from an inheritance that had made him one of the wealthiest undergraduates at Harvard in the late 1870s and that still sought gainful employment. Politics was a pastime for Roosevelt, for now at least. A Republican reformer in a legislature dominated by Democrats and spoilsmen, he could tell that his future in Albany had limits. Besides, at twenty-four he wanted to strike out in a different direction from his urban upbringing. He had long read and reveled in the exploits of frontiersmen; as a sickly child he had dreamed of doing what they did: of riding horseback across the open West, sleeping under the stars, relying on courage and wit to win what the land had to give.
On the spot, with the same impulsiveness that was causing many others to take the plunge, Roosevelt determined to be a ranchman. He asked Gregor Lang to be his partner. “That is exceedingly kind of you, Mr. Roosevelt,” Lang replied. “And I am more than sorry that I cannot see my way clear to accept. But Pender”—his current employer—“is depending on me to carry this undertaking through and I do not feel that I can disappoint him.”
Roosevelt asked Lang if he could recommend anyone. Lang mentioned Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Both were good men, he said. Roosevelt asked to meet them. They explained that they too were obligated. Roosevelt offered to buy out their current contracts and pay them more than they were now making. They said that they’d have to ride to Minnesota to clear the idea with their employer, but they liked it.
Roosevelt drafted a check for fourteen thousand dollars. This would purchase the small herd they were managing for the Minnesotan, allow them to buy a few hundred more cattle, and cover start-up expenses for the Roosevelt operation. They asked if he wanted a receipt. He said if he doubted their honesty he wouldn’t have made them his partners. Years later Merrifield still marveled at the moment. “We were sitting on a log up at what we called Cannonball Creek,” he said. “He handed us a check for fourteen thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He didn’t have a scratch of a pen for it.” Ferris added, “All the security he had for his money was our honesty.”21
LIKE OTHER ASPECTS of American business, the cattle industry evolved continually during the decades after the Civil War. The drives from Texas to Kansas lasted about fifteen years, till the railroads arrived at the cattle regions of Texas. By then the business was shifting north. The longhorns flourished in south Texas, with its warm winters and twelvemonth grass-growing season, but more than a few cattlemen wondered whether the longhorns might be able to survive winters on the northern Plains. In 1866 an adventurous soul drove six hundred longhorns from Dallas to Montana’s Gallatin Valley. They thrived there, learning to paw through the typically light snow to the bunch grass blanched by the first frost. Like the buffalo they turned their tails to the arctic blasts of winter and slowly drifted downwind.
The news spread quickly. And even while the drives to Kansas continued, drives to Colorado, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana grew larger and more numerous. The drives differed in certain respects. Those to the railheads—that is, to the dinner tables of the East—comprised chiefly steers, which fattened more readily and fought less frequently than uncastrated bulls. Those to the northern Plains—that is, to the ranches of prospective cattle barons—included mostly cows and bulls. (Drives from Texas to Indian reservations of the North, under contract with the War Department, constituted an exception to the latter rule, as the animals were for slaughter rather than propagation.)
Before long a rush mentality surrounded the northern drives, not unlike that which had characterized the gold rush to California. In both cases a piece of the public domain—gold in California, grass on the plains—was up for grabs. Early arrivals claimed the choicest locations and expected the highest profits. Unlike gold, grass was a renewable resource—but only up to a point. The scant rainfall on the plains limited the growth of grass and therefore the number of cattle any particular parcel could support. The person who got there first put his cattle on the range and preempted others.
But for a time there seemed enough for all. James Brisbin, the Beef Bonanza author, printed a letter he identified as having been written by a “gentleman of means” in the West to his brother in the East. Possibly Brisbin fabricated the letter—the practice was common in promotional literature of the era—but even so it conveyed the essentials of the cattle business as perceived by potential investors:
Dear Brother—I have bought a cattle ranch, and as you have long wished to engage in business out West, I do not know of a better thing you can do than raise cattle. As you have no knowledge or experience in breeding, I will tell you what I think, with proper care, we can make out of it. The ranch is twenty-two miles from a railroad, and contains 720 acres of land, 600 acres of which is hay or grassland, and 120 acres good timber. The meadow will cut annually 2½ tons of hay to the acre, and there is a living stream on the land. The timber is heavy and will furnish logs for stables, corrals, and fuel for many years to come. The hills in the vicinity afford the best grazing, and we can have a range ten miles in extent.
The writer (perhaps Brisbin) reiterated the capitalist arithmetic of cattle procreation. “You can put in $2,500, and I will duplicate it and add $1,000 for bulls. For $5,000 we can get 400 head of Texas cows to start with, and I will add a sufficient number of Durham bulls to breed them.… At the end of one year the cows would have 400 calves, each worth $7.00. I count full yield, for in cross-breeding there is not one cow in a hundred barren.… Our first year’s profit is 400 calves, $7.00 each, $2,800.” From there the profits expanded exponentially. The second year would yield $4,800, the third year $6,800, the fourth $10,200, the fifth $14,600.22
In the face of such numbers, investors would have been fools not to take advantage of this unique and wasting opportunity. Or so concluded the many who poured money into cattle and made Cheyenne the reincarnation of San Francisco at the height of the gold rush or Virginia City in the salad days of the Comstock Lode. “Sixteenth Street is a young Wall Street,” one observer wrote of Wyoming’s territorial capital. “Millions are talked of as lightly as nickels, and all kinds of people are dabbling in steers.… Large transactions are made every day in which the buyer does not see a hoof of his purchase and very likely does not use more than one half of the purchase money in the trade before he has sold and made an enormous margin in the deal.” Lawyers appeared to be particularly susceptible. “The chief justice of the Supreme Court has recently succumbed to the contagion and gone out to purchase a $40,000 herd.… A Cheyenne man who don’t pretend to know a maverick from a mandamus has made a neat little margin of $15,000 this summer in small transactions and hasn’t seen a cow yet that he has bought and sold.”23
“HURRAH!” Theodore Roosevelt scrawled to his wife, Alice. “The luck has turned at last. I will bring you home the head of a great buffalo bull.” This was supposed to be the good news. Alice may have interpreted it differently, as her tastes in interior decorating ran more to proper Bostonian (she grew up in Chestnut Hill) than Dakota primitive. The announcement of their new wall decoration prefaced Roosevelt’s announcement of his investment in cattle ranching. “The more I have looked into the matter—weighing and balancing everything, pro and con, as carefully as I knew how—the more convinced I became that there was a great chance to make a great deal of money, very safely, in the cattle business. Accordingly I have decided to go into it, very cautiously at first, and, if I come out well the first year, much more heavily as time goes on.” He was less confident than this sentence made him sound. “Neither Uncle Jim nor, I am afraid, even Uncle Jimmie”—his financial advisers, after the death of his father—“will approve of the step I have taken,” he conceded. But he was taking it anyway.24
Roosevelt’s stake bought him a cattle ranch called the Chimney Butte, subsequently supplemented by a second place, the Elkhorn. But precisely what the two ranches included was problematic. Neither included any land to speak of. Roosevelt built a cabin on the Elkhorn place, on the bank of the Little Missouri. No one was likely to evict him, though he couldn’t have shown a title to the plot on which it stood. But the land on which his cattle grazed was federal property, part of the public domain of the United States. When Roosevelt bought his two ranches he acquired cattle and the presumption of grazing rights. For the moment the presumption was reasonable, as western Dakota remained sparsely populated by people and cattle.
But the situation soon changed. Though Roosevelt didn’t make any money his first year, neither did he lose much, and he decided to increase his play. In part his decision reflected personal circumstances. Roosevelt fell in love with the West at first exposure. The frontier life suited his temperament and made him feel like the man he had always wanted to be. He rode the range, shared grub with cowboys, tangled with outlaws. “I have been having a glorious time here,” he wrote his sister Anna. “I feel as absolutely free as a man could feel.” The personal element intensified when Alice suddenly and unexpectedly died in childbirth. Roosevelt was bereft, and in his grief he found solace in the loneliness of the great West. “One day I would canter hour after hour over the level green grass, or through miles of wild rose thickets, all in bloom,” he told Anna. “On the next I would be amidst the savage desolation of the Bad Lands, with their dreary plateaus, fantastically shaped buttes, and deep, winding canyons.”
Roosevelt’s decision to extend his investment also reflected the economics of cattle ranching. The range of western Dakota began to fill up as newcomers—other Roosevelts, so to speak—moved in. Roosevelt’s only claim to the range was priority, and if he didn’t put cattle on all the land around the Elkhorn and Chimney Butte, someone else would. “I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business,” he informed Anna—who besides being his confidante was the acting mother of his and Alice’s daughter, also named Alice.25
For a time Roosevelt did make ranching his regular business. “I have been three weeks on the roundup and have worked as hard as any of the cowboys,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, a recent acquaintance. “But I have enjoyed it greatly. Yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle—from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m.—having a half hour each for dinner and tea. I can now do cowboy work pretty well.”26
Cowboy work on the roundup consisted of gathering all the cattle from a large portion of the range. Cowboys from several ranches took part; the cattle were sorted by brand, and calves were branded to match their mothers. At the autumn roundup, after a summer of fleshing out, those animals bound for slaughter were culled from the herd and shipped off. The rest were released to resume their feral ways.
Cowboy work also involved defending one’s turf—that is, one’s claim to the public turf. As Roosevelt expanded his herd his animals encroached on territory over which the marquis de Morès asserted control. Roosevelt thought the French aristocrat’s claims excessive and said so. De Morès sent a gang of gunmen to Roosevelt’s ranch. Roosevelt was gone, but the leader, a reputed killer named Paddock, told Roosevelt’s foreman that his boss’s cattle were trespassing on the marquis’s territory. Roosevelt might purchase grazing rights from the marquis; if he chose not to, he’d better move his cattle.
Roosevelt refused to be intimidated. On his return (from a successful grizzly bear hunt), he rode directly to Paddock’s place. He pounded on the door and demanded that Paddock come out. Paddock, observing Roosevelt’s pistol and rifle and noting his determined air, declined to press his earlier threat. He said there had been a misunderstanding; he meant no harm.
Roosevelt’s moral victory in this instance deepened his belief that forceful action in a righteous cause would carry the day. But it did nothing to solve the underlying problem of the range. In fact, by encouraging him to continue expanding his herd, it exacerbated the problem, which was that the carrying capacity of the range was limited but the ambitions and hopes of the cattlemen—collectively if not necessarily individually—were unlimited. Not owning the land, the cattlemen had little incentive to protect or improve it. On the contrary, they had every incentive to extract as much value from it as they could, lest others do so first.
Most of the ranchers recognized the problem; some sought to solve it. They formed livestock associations that wrote rules for the use and conservation of the range. Roosevelt organized one such group, the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, whose members were so impressed by his political skills that they charged him to draft a constitution for the group. At an early meeting the members discussed measures for preventing disease, for branding strays, for foiling rustlers, for improving the herds by importing high-quality bulls. In the words of the Bad Lands Cowboy, the new local newspaper, “the utmost harmony and unanimity prevailed.”27
But agreeable though the members might be among themselves, they couldn’t bar outsiders elbowing onto the range. Some employed the intimidation de Morès attempted against Roosevelt, only more effectively. Others managed to have their actions confirmed in law, as when the Wyoming territorial legislature granted control of the range to the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. Yet despite their efforts, the cattle population continued to swell.
The first sign of trouble was a drop in beef prices, which lost 50 percent between the spring of 1882 and the summer of 1886. Leveraged investors, who had hoped to profit on margin, now found their levers kicking them in the teeth. Roosevelt had sunk eighty thousand dollars into his cattle operation by the end of 1886 and had yet to turn a profit. Two partners he had recruited grew discouraged and pulled back.
Roosevelt might have retrenched, too, had he not been distracted. In the autumn of 1885 he encountered a childhood sweetheart whom he had thrown over for Alice. The flame rekindled and they engaged to be married. But because Roosevelt disapproved of second marriages, he insisted on a quiet ceremony—overseas. He and Edith Carow traveled to England in the autumn of 1886; they were married in London in December.
The newlyweds were honeymooning on the Continent when Roosevelt learned of the larger consequence of the overstocking. The summer and fall of 1886 had been dry on the northern Plains, and the cattle entered the winter thinner than usual. Ranchers with experience—a comparative term where even the longest-tenured cattlemen had operated less than a decade—expected snows and cold snaps before Christmas but nothing extended or severe till after New Year’s Day. This year the first snows came in early November, and not as the tentative flakes of previous autumns but as a full-blown blizzard. Within hours the temperature fell to forty below zero. Humans were caught without their cold-weather stores; the cattle were still growing their winter coats. After several days the snow stopped falling and the wind diminished, but the warm Chinook wind that usually followed early storms never came. The snow kept the cattle from finding grass; already weak from the drought, they lost more weight and insulation. Further storms drove survivors into coulees and canyons, any places where they could escape the killing wind. But the quiet zones were precisely the spots where the snowdrifts accumulated, and the cattle were buried under four feet, six feet, twelve feet of icy powder.
So severe was the weather that the cowboys and other humans huddled indoors, happy to keep warm—and knowing, in any event, that there was nothing they could do. The range cattle business was premised on the ability of the cattle to fend for themselves during the winter. No one had built barns to shelter the animals from the cold; few harvested hay for winter feed.
Not till spring was the extent of the destruction known. With cruel irony, the same warm winds that finally lifted human hopes brought the bad news in a fashion that stunned even the hardiest spirits. “In the latter part of March came the Chinook wind, harbinger of spring, releasing for the first time the iron grip that had been upon us,” Lincoln Lang remembered. “At last, it seemed, the wrath of Nature had been appeased.” The melting proceeded, appallingly.
A few days later such a grim freshet was pouring down the river valley as no man had ever seen before or ever would again. For days on end, tearing down with the grinding ice cakes, went Death’s cattle roundup of the upper Little Missouri country. In countless valleys, gulches, washouts, and coulees, the animals had vainly sought shelter from the relentless “Northern Furies” on their trail. Now their carcasses were being spewed forth in untold thousands by the rushing waters, to be carried away on the crest of the foaming, turgid flood rushing down the valley.
With them went our hopes. One had only to stand by the river bank for a few minutes and watch the grim procession ceaselessly going down, to realize the depth of the tragedy that had been enacted within the past few months.28
THE TERRIBLE WINTER of 1886–87 cured Roosevelt of his illusions about cattle ranching. “I am bluer than indigo,” he wrote Anna, after returning to America and surveying the damage. “It is even worse than I feared.… I am planning how to get out.”29
Many others had the same idea. As with most speculative bubbles, the same collective mania that had prompted thousands to buy simultaneously now prompted thousands to sell. Under different circumstances the massive die-off of cattle might have boosted beef prices, but with everyone rushing to get out they remained depressed. Roosevelt was rich enough to write off his eighty-thousand-dollar loss to a hard lesson in the school of capitalist experience, although he did have to scale back his living standard and begin looking for alternative employment. Many others were wholly ruined. Cattle companies failed by the score, bringing down banks in Wyoming and other ranching regions. The financial effects rippled across the country, and even to Britain and the European continent. The marquis de Morès fled to France.
Those who stuck it out changed their modus operandi. First to go—not surprisingly—was the idea that cattle could survive the winter unassisted. They needed shelter and especially hay. Growing hay required fencing the land (to keep the cattle out during the growing season). But fencing public land was frowned upon by both the land’s official custodians and the neighbors, who saw no reason to allow one person to control what belonged to all. Early efforts to fence the public domain—using the cheap barbed wire recently developed by Joseph Glidden and others—triggered range wars that started with wire cutters and escalated to six-shooters and rifles. The biggest cattle barons could get away with the practice for a time; Charles Goodnight was reported to have run 250 miles of fence across the Texas Panhandle in 1884. In the more remote areas the illegal fencing persisted for decades. But eventually most ranchers came to the realization that in order to fence land permanently they had to purchase it.30
The need to purchase land altered the economics of ranching dramatically. No longer did the business appeal to the speculator interested in quick profits. Money could still be made in cattle; the growing population of the East had to be fed, and refrigeration was allowing American beef to be marketed abroad. But profits would be earned rather than conjured. The cost of land was only the start, for investment in land made other investments prudent. Ranchers with fenced land could segregate their herds from their neighbors’, giving them incentive to improve those herds with imported bulls, which ought to be barned in winter and otherwise pampered, at least by comparison with run-of-the-range longhorns. The coddling extended to the offspring of the bulls, and it prompted a general devotion to details quite at odds with the carefree approach of the early days.
The transition didn’t occur easily. Those closest to the work often had the greatest difficulty adjusting. “Cowboys don’t have as soft a time as they did,” one lamented.
I remember when we sat around the fire the winter through and didn’t do a lick of work for five or six months of the year, except to chop a little wood to build a fire to keep warm by. Now we go on the general roundup, then the calf roundup, then comes haying—something that the old-time cowboy never dreamed of—then the beef roundup and the fall calf roundup and gathering bulls and weak cows, and after all this, a winter of feeding hay. I tell you, times have changed.31