by David Wolman
The sunshine and dry air at 6,000 feet were thought to be good for people with asthma and tuberculosis, attracting patients like the famous gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday. Other Wild West luminaries also passed through Cheyenne in her early years, including Calamity Jane, who was arrested in town twice, and Wild Bill Hickok, who played cards at the Gold Room and was married at the First Methodist Church, five months before he was murdered during a card game in Deadwood, South Dakota. Cody was there too, in 1870, and noted with approval “abundant opportunities for entertainment” like roulette and horse racing.
AS PIONEERS BEGAN SETTING down roots in the hard soil in and around Cheyenne, a handful of locals started dreaming big. Aside from Fort D. A. Russell, a U.S. Army base on the edge of town, and through traffic to the gold fields of the Black Hills, the local economy was anemic. Cheyenne had no mining, little timber, and sparse agriculture. In contrast, Denver, just a hundred miles south, was a thriving mining town: between 1870 and 1880, its population shot from about 5,000 to 36,000 people.
What Cheyenne did have was access to millions of acres of prairie, a virtual sea of grass open for grazing. Moreover, the bison that Lewis and Clark had described as “so numerous [they] darkened the whole plains” were well on their way to extermination. Farmers and ranchers killed bison for meat and to clear land for livestock and crops; tourists took potshots from moving trains; and soldiers killed bison to drive out the Native American tribes who depended on them for food and hides.
Most of the herds fell to the rifles of professional buffalo hunters. A single rifleman armed with one of the newest breech-loading long-range rifles made by Sharps or Remington could drop more than 100 animals in an hour and thousands in a single season. One hunter killed 1,142 bison in six weeks. Hunters often took only the animal’s tongue, if that, and left the rest to rot.
By the 1870s, the “hunt” had become an all-out slaughter. In 1873 alone, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reported shipping 250,000 buffalo robes, 1 million pounds of meat, and 2.7 million pounds of bones, to be processed into fertilizer in the East. In the words of one witness:
Could the southern buffalo range have been roofed over at that time it would have made one vast charnel-house. Putrifying carcasses, many of them with the hide still on, lay thickly scattered over thousands of square miles of the level prairie, poisoning the air and water and offending the sight. The remaining herds had become mere scattered bands, harried and driven hither and thither by the hunters, who now swarmed almost as thickly as the buffaloes.
The last shipment of buffalo robes went out from Dickinson, Dakota Territory, in 1884. Herds that once took six days to pass through were down to fewer than 500 animals.
In the meantime, the vast rangelands of Texas and Oklahoma were overflowing with longhorns. Descendants of animals first brought from Spain, these tough long-legged beasts could, as one historian put it, “walk to markets thousands of miles away, through swamps and deserts, through droughts sent by the devil himself.” Five hundred miles to the north, Cheyenne had both the sea of grass and the railway links—a combination even Denver couldn’t claim. All an enterprising rancher needed to do was get the cattle to Wyoming.
The first longhorn cattle drives left Texas in the late 1860s. Every summer, men on horseback guided tens of thousands of animals north. Like paniolo in Hawaii, these cowboys were professional descendants of vaqueros. They were honest men and escaped criminals, experienced Civil War soldiers, former slaves, and locals with nothing on their résumé besides riding and roping. Some came from the East, others from abroad. They faced biblical weather, armed conflict with Native Americans, and stampedes of half-ton animals with deadly horns, subsisting for weeks on coffee, biscuits, beans, and the occasional “slow elk,” or unclaimed cow.
Men working the cattle drives had a reputation for independence, wildness, and a particular moral code. As one Cheyenne newspaper put it:
You find in them a strange mixture of good nature and recklessness. You are as safe with them on the plains as with any class of men, so long as you do not impose on them. They will even deny themselves for your comfort, and imperil their lives for your safety. But impose upon them, or arouse their ire, and your life is of no more value in their esteem than that of a coyote. Morally, as a class, they are foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt. Usually harmless on the plains when sober, they are dreaded in towns.
They did hard work for little pay, often for rich absentee landlords they never met. It was a job with countless ways to break a man, from dehydration to drowning, scalping to snake bite, trampling to tuberculosis. Yet to many, these challenges only added to the allure of running cattle, and helped shape the image of the American cowboy that would capture the imagination of the country and the world.
IF YOU HAD THE audacity and the manpower, there was money to be made in the Wyoming Territory. Once a cattle drive reached the northern plains, the Texas longhorns fattened up quickly on nutritious grasses. In the spring and fall, they were rounded up, sorted, branded, and loaded onto trains to distant markets. In 1865, cattle worth $4 a head in Texas could fetch ten times that in the Northeast. Wyoming ranchers who spent $1.50 to raise a steer could sell it for up to $60.
Cheyenne, at the intersection of trails and rails, became the center of a cattle boom that spanned Montana, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas. The industry fed a national appetite for meat that astonished Europeans. When the English novelist Anthony Trollope visited the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, he estimated that Americans ate twice as much beef as the English, and noted how the typical American child was “very particular that his beefsteak at breakfast shall be hot.”
A financial frenzy ensued, as investors from the East and Europe read books like James Brisbin’s The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains and bought up ranchlands wherever they could. “There is not the slightest amount of uncertainty in cattle raising,” proclaimed the German author of Cattle-Raising on the Plains of North America, predicting guaranteed profits of 156 percent over five years.
By 1885, the Wyoming Territory was home to as many as two million cattle. The Magic City of the Plains earned a new nickname, the “Holy City of the Cow,” and Cheyenne became by some estimates the wealthiest city its size in the world. It was one of the first cities in the United States to have electric streetlights, and boasted a working telephone exchange five years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the invention. Opulent houses complete with crystal chandeliers and hand-carved woodwork lined the downtown streets. There was even a polo field and a thousand-seat opera house.
Yet the gilded cattle town retained its rough edges. The wide streets still weren’t paved, and horse thieves were occasionally found hanging from the branches of a cottonwood. Not that the line between rich and bawdy was ever entirely clear: opposite the opera house and the Baptist church stood the two-story “House of Mirrors,” the most exclusive brothel in the state. Its guest list overlapped with that of the Cheyenne Club, a place for wealthy cattle barons to talk business over fine whiskey and Havana cigars. Above the main bar hung a painting of a prize bull by the famed Dutch artist Paulus Potter—with a bullet hole in it.
BUT BOOMS DON’T LAST. Thanks to bad luck, poor decisions, and changing demographics, Cheyenne’s financial bust was swift. For one thing, the city was too dependent on a single commodity. Then Mother Nature stepped in, as if hell-bent on killing cattle.
First, a scorching summer in 1886 left little grass available on rangelands that were already overgrazed. An army commander posted in northeastern Wyoming wrote, “The country is full of Texas cattle and there is not a blade of grass within 15 miles.” Then November rains soaked fields, which became sheets of ice during one of the most horrific winters on record. Deep snows and arctic temperatures started early and rarely abated. Even the piercing winds weren’t strong enough to uncover the grass and water the cattle needed to survive. Cows starved or froze to death by the thousan
ds, with dead cattle piling up against newly built barbed wire fences.
“We had wood and warmth, and grub to eat, but our hearts went out to the bawling, drifting and starving cattle,” recalled one cowboy. “Both day and night the cries for food were heard, but we were powerless to help them.”
No one who rode the range in the spring of 1887 ever forgot the sight of gullies filled with the dead. Along one fence in North Texas, cowboys skinned 250 carcasses per mile for thirty-five miles. The emaciated animals that survived stood in a daze, their ears still frozen, too feeble to walk. The “Big Die-Up” wiped out entire herds.
Yet the death knell for the giant ranches—and Cheyenne’s economic heyday—was the unstoppable influx of new settlers claiming land. From 1880 to 1890, Wyoming’s population grew by more than 300 percent. Homesteaders, farmers, and small-scale ranchers transformed the open range by fencing off smaller and smaller parcels.
Cattle kingpins fought back. They hired out-of-state muscle to cut down fences and protect their herds from rustling, or so they claimed. Six cattlemen lynched two homesteaders in south central Wyoming in 1889. Two years later, a man named Nate Champion drew the hatred of big cattlemen throughout the region when he became an informal spokesman for small-time local ranchers.
The first attempt on Champion’s life ended with one would-be assassin dead and two witnesses who were later murdered before they could testify. Champion planned to testify against his attackers, but five months later a group of fifty-two armed men stormed into the town of Buffalo in Johnson County to shut Champion up for good.
The posse of Wyoming ranchers and gunmen all the way from Texas cornered Champion at a ranch south of town, where he and a friend fought them off for an entire day. Champion kept a journal during the siege, its entries a record of increasing desperation:
Me and Nick Ray was getting breakfast when the attack took place.
Nick is shot but not dead yet.
Nick is dead. He died about 9 o’clock.
Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone with me so we could watch all sides at once.
Well they have just got through shelling the house like hail. I hear them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive.
The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.
Champion sprinted out shooting as the cabin went up in flames. He was cut down in seconds. One of his murderers pinned a note to his corpse: “Cattle Thieves, Beware!”
Two days later hundreds of enraged locals retaliated against the hired guns who had hunted Champion. After a three-day standoff, army troops from nearby Fort McKinney arrived and took the invaders into custody, but the perpetrators were politically well connected, and the Johnson County War ended without any charges filed.
Still, the reign of the cattle barons was ending, the huge ranches steadily replaced by smaller ones or farm fields of buckwheat, potatoes, and corn. As the turn of the century drew near, Cheyenne slipped into depression. Stores closed and mansions stood empty. As one Union Pacific agent put it, “Times were hard and Cheyenne practically dead.” The city needed an economic infusion of some kind, something that would simultaneously leverage the railroad, the local cowboy talent, and the energy that had made it, at least briefly, the cattle capital of the West.
Cheyenne needed a rodeo.
5
An Attractive and Novel Program
ONE DAY IN THE summer of 1897, Frederick Angier was sitting on a fence near the train tracks in Cheyenne, watching a group of cowboys try to coax a horse onto a rail car. The animal was having none of it, and the skirmish raised a cloud of dust and noise.
Angier was riveted, then inspired. As a traveling passenger agent for the Union Pacific Railroad, it was his job to look for ways to fill more seats. People would pay to see this kind of muscular drama, Angier thought. Small rodeos had begun cropping up around the region, showcasing the practical skills and athleticism that were still very much part of daily life in the West. But they were all local affairs. Host a big rodeo, a truly one-of-a-kind event, Angier reasoned, and people would not just pay to see it—they would travel to see it.
Just the year before, spectators had journeyed all the way to Athens, Greece, to watch athletes from fourteen countries compete in the first modern Olympic Games. Angier thought of the railway bringing visitors from both coasts, as well as from Denver and points south. There was even a decent marketing hook: 1897 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first train into Cheyenne.
Rodeo came from the Spanish word for roundup, and in the days of New Spain it meant just that: seasonal gatherings for the purpose of branding calves, separating mixed herds, and getting animals ready for market. As ranching culture made its way to the United States, cowboys also embraced the vaqueros’ tradition of friendly competition. In their downtime, cowboys held races and competed at tasks like cutting cows out of a herd, roping calves, and subduing stubborn horses.
The ends of cattle drives brought men from different outfits together in the nearest cow town. Drinking and visiting brothels were part of the equation, of course, but so were informal contests pitting men from rival ranches against one another. Whether to settle a bet, back up a boast, or just pass the time, sporting rivalry became part of the cowboy life.
The first impromptu contests happened in local corrals, with only ranch hands and maybe a few people from the surrounding area for an audience. As crowds started to grow, rodeos moved to larger stockyard corrals with more space for action and audiences.
A bronco busting contest held in Deer Trail, Colorado, on the Fourth of July in 1869 may have been the first organized rodeo in the United States. Men from the Campstool, Hashknife, and Mill Iron Ranches took turns seeing how long they could stay in the saddle. An Englishman named Emilnie Gardenshire took the honors on a horse named Montana Blizzard. He earned the title of “Champion Bronco Buster of the Plains” and a new suit of clothes.
In 1872, a spectator event dubbed the “Old Glory Blowout” was held at a racetrack in North Platte, Nebraska, also on the Fourth of July. It included calf roping and buffalo riding, and coincided with Nebraska’s last great open-range roundup. A decade later, a group of cowboys at a saloon in Pecos, Texas, decided to hold their own competition. Local ranchers put up $40 for the winners in steer roping and bronco busting. The Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott, Arizona, on the Fourth of July 1888, was the first to invite competitors and charge an admission fee. The festivities included fireworks, bicycle races, and greased pig catching.
It’s no coincidence that all these early events were held on the same date. At the time, the Fourth of July was one of the most important public holidays of the year. More than a celebration of the young country’s birthday, it was a day for Americans in communities of all sizes, from New England to the western frontier, to feel like they were part of the entity called the United States. The recent trauma of the Civil War only made the holiday more meaningful, a way to reaffirm a sense of union. As Prescott’s newspaper put it:
The patriotic demonstration of 112 years ago, when old Independence Bell sent forth its peal to herald the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, was scarcely less enthusiastic than was the demonstration yesterday of the citizens of this section, away out here on the so-called borderlines of civilization.
One of the first documented rodeo events in Wyoming, then still a territory, took place at a huge ranch near Casper owned by the Swan Land and Cattle Company. Also known as the Two-Bar, the ranch once managed holdings larger than the state of Connecticut. In the early 1880s, the Swan cowboys put on a show for Scottish and English landowners, some of whom had traveled from Europe to watch the men race horses, ride steers, and challenge Native Americans in tug-of-war. Local legend says that Butch Cassidy, still a law-abiding cowhand at the time, gave a demonstration of marksmanship with a pistol.
Angier ran his rodeo idea past the editor of
the Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader, who knew as well as anyone that Cheyenne needed something to fill the hole left by the cratering cattle market. Other cities had agricultural festivals—northern Colorado alone had a Pickle Day, a Potato Day, and a Corn Roast—and Denver’s pioneer-themed Festival of Mountain and Plain was an enviable success. Even Lander, Wyoming, had staged a public horse race, and that town barely had five hundred people.
Cheyenne didn’t have squat. As one local businessman put it: “We can’t have a crop show. We don’t raise anything in Cheyenne except hell.”
But the once Holy City of the Cow did have advantages: top cowpunchers, a rough-and-tumble reputation, and the railway. Cheyenne had already hosted an exhibition of Texas-style steer riding on the Fourth of July 1872, and the following year a bronco-riding contest kicked up dust on Sixteenth Street. “There was quite a crowd and some quiet swearing,” reported the Daily Leader, while also noting that the middle of downtown might not be the best place for future roughriding events: “Suppose one of these broncos should run up the side of a brick building to the roof, or up a telegraph pole to the cross-bars and insulators, would the rider keep his seat? These broncos are liable to do these things: we have known them to do worse.”
There was legitimate concern that bronco riding was too violent for widespread appeal. In May 1897, a “Wild West exhibition” at the Cheyenne territorial fairgrounds had to be halted after a number of competitors were hurt. (The crowd was small, the papers noted, “owing to a general dislike of such sport.”) The following weekend a group of Wyoming cowboys put on another amateur show in town that ended in tragedy. One rider was bucked so hard he did a full somersault in midair and landed on his back. He hurt his hip and spine so badly that he eventually died.
But prominent Cheyenne businessmen liked Angier’s rodeo idea and put out a call for donations to hold a major summertime event. They raised $562, including one contribution of 25 cents. A newspaper editorial in late August announced that Cheyenne Frontier Days would be held September 23—less than one month away.