They rode horses into saloons; they galloped with six-shooters blazing along the dirt streets. Most of them spent their pay; a few died. After the horror of the trail some drovers forswore the drive forever, but owners in Texas had no trouble putting together new crews. Some of these cattlemen, such as King Fisher and Shanghai Pierce, were as wild and tumultuous and dangerous as the surly longhorns they drove to market. But the majority were businessmen who came to get the Yankee dollar. They sold beef, drank whiskey, and made deals with Northern shippers and capitalists. They forged new ties. Webb exaggerated only a little when he asked: "Who can say that Abilene was less significant than Appomattox?"
For, on that ephemeral but immortal frontier, Texas replaced the cotton kingdom of the slave South with a cattle empire. In the West, for the first time in the 19th century, elements of North and South met and merged: The cowboy or the cowman, recognizable wherever he stood, was neither Yankee nor Southerner; he could be either, or both. The great majority of all Texans were then, and for decades remained, Southern farmers. But out beyond the 98th meridian the Plains sun burned through the fogs and lifted the burdens of Southern history. The Texas drovers set out to sell beef, but they recast the image of a state.
The Texans did not just ship cattle East through Chicago. Texas herds passed out of the historic triangle, north, northwest, and west. Round-barreled Texas cattle and Texas know-how passed across twelve Western states, from New Mexico to Montana. With the end of the Indians, the cattle business exploded. In 1876, the cattle frontier had barely arrived at the 100th meridian; five years later it had closed the High Plains and was established far beyond Texas, from New Mexico to the Cascades, and from the Panhandle to Alberta. Texas stocked the Western range, with stock and men. Some small modifications were made: a northern saddle could be distinguished from a Texas rig. But in the shadow of the Rockies, or on the semideserts of Oregon, cowmen were essentially the same.
This was because Texas shot not only a businesss but a form of culture across the American West. It was protean and adaptive, yet strangely uniform. The cow culture—and it was a genuine, if abortive culture—was the only Anglo-American process that adapted to, rather than developed and destroyed, the primeval land. The ranchers were nomadic, casting themselves out on the great sea of grass. They and their cattle moved from place to place. The cowmen built incredibly ugly ranch houses and raw corrals, and sometimes squalid shacks or sod huts that were as much forts as homes. But they built these miles apart, always out of sight of other human abodes, and otherwise they did not scar or modify the land. They used it, and perhaps loved it, much as the Indians had.
The range cattle were their buffalo; their spectacles and socializing acts were not the hunt, but the roundup, which was a form of hunt, and the cattle drive. Both required cooperation, and widely separated men came together briefly. In the early years, there seems to have been little concern for seizing strategic lands, such as riverbanks or water holes. In the developing culture a code worked out, which opened the range to all. In these years the land was not crowded, even by cattle, and the plainsmen looked upon the land something as sailors looked upon the sea, and gave as little thought to claiming its ownership.
Ironically, most of what was later looked upon by outsiders as Western lawlessness, came only when Eastern concepts and Eastern laws were forcibly imposed on the West. The Anglo-Saxon organic law was absurd as applied to water in the West, because it contained no useful precedents; it could not envision a land where rain fell only spottily, but surface water, wherever it happened to be, was needed by all. Anglo-American law thus gave full possession of all the water in a valley to whoever owned the surrounding land or riparian rights; it was centuries behind the pragmatism of the Hispanic-Mexican codes. This nonsense later led to bloodshed, but as most Western observers had little success in pointing out, the adherence to unworkable laws caused the violence in the first place.
The few years of the cowboys' West proved how quickly a new culture could germinate and explode. Of course, it was a transmittal direct from Mexico, but the adaptation and expansion were phenomenal. Cowmen came from everywhere, Scotland to New York. Many never got beyond the trail towns or the Eastern or British-owned cattle company's town offices, but others were as adaptive to the West as though they had been born in frontier Texas. The first wave learned the country's ways, rather than destroying the country to fit their own prejudicial judgments.
Cowmen came from everywhere, not only because the beef business was booming, but because something in its way of life called strongly to certain breeds of men; however obscured in romanticism and mythology this became, a core of truth remained. The new frontier culture that Texas blazed into America held a barbaric exhilaration; it affected some Americans as much as the transmittal of the horse exalted the grubbing mountain Comanches, more than one hundred years before.
Owners and capitalists might make quick fortunes on open range and free grass, while cowhands worked for $10 per month. But still they came, Scot financier and runaway farmboy, and both settled comfortably and grandly into the West.
The cowmen lived off different beasts and held by different totems—not the antelope, or the wasp, or the bear, but circle dots and flying Ls, the sacred brands; but their society, in its great years, was as atomistic as the Indian. Their endless horizons were as culturally limited as the Kiowa's, yet their adaptations said something about the innate nature of the animal, man. They created the second American enterprise that became more than a business, and a way of life.
The terms used to describe the cattle explosion were always kingdom or empire, never the cattle business or the cattle industry. The home of the American cattle industry, in these years, never moved West.
In 1880, Texas and the Plains states and territories that Texas seeded produced only 28 percent of Americans' beef. Thousands of small farms and acreages in the East collectively marketed more meat. The East had its industry; the West its kingdoms. But the West, in a few short years, left its imprint forever on the American mind, because the West did its small business with sheer grandeur.
The cattleman was not an economic unit, but a man. His work—and it was work, not play—was arduous, danger-filled, and dirty. But he rode and roamed, and thus in his own cultural trap enjoyed great freedom; he fought for his own, and thus emblazoned living legends. Only a tiny handful ever sought this last frontier, but that handful captured the imagination of most men.
The cattle culture was logical; in 1870 there was hardly any other possible adaptation to the arid lands. The appurtenances of that culture—the horse, the pistol, wild cattle, the boots, chaps, big hats, and dust-catching kerchiefs or bandannas—were logical, too. They were necessary tools of a trade. But because, in their time and place, they seemed romantic to outsiders, they were to become as stylized, and eventually meaningless, as toreros' garb. Just as Spanish bullfighters adopted and clung to a degenerate form of 18th-century gentlemen's dress, thousands of Americans would someday dress as cowboys, unconsciously hoping to assume the role of Western hero. They would wear cowboy boots while driving their automobiles to drugstores, and never quite know the reason why.
What happened in the Texas, and American, West was a small but powerful process of natural selection. This was a harsh land, and its pressing realities were hot and cruel. There was little real fat, either material or psychological. Inner convictions, developed in more rarified civilizations, could not stand unless they were practical. Logic was only logic in the West if it visibly worked. The man who held to a preconceived attitude toward Indians, and could not learn the Comanche reality, often saw his family killed; or he himself died in his own homestead's ashes. A little-noted but obvious fact of the long Texas frontier was that some men lived and some families prospered on the edge of Comanchería, while many others failed and chance was not the major determining factor. Eternal vigilance, eternal hardness, was the price of success.
Observers wrote how old Rip Ford, weather
ed but not withered in his last years, squinted carefully down both sides of a San Antonio street—the famous, careful Southwestern stare, evaluating the men, the weather, the lay of the land—before he emerged into the sun. A Charles Goodnight could move early onto the far edge of nowhere, and hold his new range against all comers. Some men could not.
The successful cowman did not pray for rain so much as study the ways of the land, and learn when and in what cycles the rain would fall. Such men survived. Others, in whom wishful thinking was forever dominant, could not.
The Western selection was natural, but arbitrary, according to the needs of the land. No man who could not ride well fitted this country; he was a horseman, or he left. The society, atomistic as it was, could not tolerate physical cowardice; bravery was required. The coward not only died his personal thousand deaths, but he got better men killed as well. Again, the nature of the land worked strongly; timid men did not move into Indian country, nor did they ride mustangs and chouse longhorned cows. The syndrome of physical courage was a natural result. The Westerner could "ride the river" with some men; with others he could not. He saw no reason to tolerate the failures. Nature, and this land, did not tolerate its own. It was intellectually impossible for the Westerner to adopt a sense of the sacredness of life, because the evidence of his senses and his reason proved there was no such thing. On the Pleistocene Plains, nothing, neither man nor beast, had any inherent right to life. Some died, some survived.
The Indians were pests, and were removed, like cougars and range wolves. The buffalo was useless and stupid, in cowmen's eyes, and they welcomed their demise. Thus a definite Western psychology evolved, sometimes miscalled rugged individualism. The Westerner was brave and generous among peers, immensely adaptive to new ways and artifacts, anything that would help him live on the harsh frontier, but contemptuous to the edge of cruelty of ineptitude, and suspicious to hostility and beyond of unproved or undemonstrable ideas. The Westerner was as atomistic and self-reliant as the Indian, but in many ways almost as tribal, which was not understood. The same land called both breeds forth, and the land itself was dominant over man. No man could make it rain, though many tried, and no man, emulating Canute, could halt a blizzard howling across the wild frontier.
Nor could any man withdraw into his own empire of the mind. Such structures require an intricate civilization, far removed from the immediate realities of the soil. Thus the best-adapted Westerner was keenly intelligent and observant but at the same time highly unintellectual. Table talk, as writer after American writer has recorded, was of crops and cattle, markets and weather, never some remote realm of ideas.
This culture emphasized manhood, and it showed true feudal strains. The owner-cowman, the range boss, did not direct from his office, in the formative years, but from horseback. No wall of class or caste separated the wealthy cowman from his riders; he was more often than not a man who rose from their own mass. He was tougher, smarter, more capable of thinking or handling cows and men. Because of this origin, and this prejudice, a spartan atmosphere surrounded, even the great and wealthy indigenous empires of the West. In Wyoming and other places, European and Eastern owners drank superb whiskey in local clubs, and enjoyed the amenities of wealthy, transplanted investors. In west Texas, and this was lasting, immensely respected and powerful cattle barons did not live any differently from the bunkhouse hands.
Their big houses were spare and without beauty; their sons learned to ride and shoot and curse like men, or were held in a certain, unspoken contempt. Just as a certain breed continually flowed to the frontier, the frontier continually threw its own detritus back. Some were men and women who could not live this life.
The life was peculiarly destructive of women, eternally the conservators of civilization. Few countries where men are men can be happy abodes for women. Good women, however, were partners and enjoyed immense respect, and not only because they were so few. But because they were rare, all women had a status beyond that in the East. No man respected a prostitute or dance hall girl, despite much romantic and anachronistic fictional maundering in later years, but a capable whore was a much more valuable commodity here than in the crowded, industrial, slum-town world, and thus enjoyed greater consideration.
Two things were remarkable historically in this ephemeral West. One was the evident early feudality. The cattle "baron" was a baron in the original sense of the European word: a man, not an aristocrat, who got things done, not from on high, but among men and at their head. With a water hole in danger, or free grass encroached upon by some farmer or "range hog," or if someone disparaged the totem of the brand, cowhands were known to ride at the cowman's back. American history will never be entirely expunged of the cow outfit: owner, men, and boys, clattering into town, or assembling on some disputed range. The tribe of sheepmen inspired horror beyond the destruction of cattle graze. Men who could not work from horseback, farmer or merchant, were regarded by the cowman with expansive contempt. The cow tribe came from many disparate parts and points, but it quickly fused into a tribe. Cowboys, from the Canadian to Canada, were one clan.
The other factor was how quickly this culture developed its own psychology and codes, not yet codified into laws, and how these lasted beyond the reality of their time. The imprint was immense in Texas, although the scattered cowmen never materially affected the lives of the vast majority of people in the state. It was a society of the young, because old men did not go West; and the young were more changeable and adaptive, while at the same time more tribal, and more inclined to be philosophical conservatives about fundamental things. Children's society, with its directness and its cruelties, was untrammeled, and so was the society of the West. The cowboy, as one observer wrote, was ready to sing, to ride, or shoot, at the slightest provocation.
Love was subordinated, though sexual gratification was not, a characteristic of young society. The horse and pistol were admired; "they filled the eye and purpose." They were a symbology of direct, uncomplicated action to satisfy the soul. The horse elevated men and increased their sphere of action; the pistol, a weapon, toy, and tool, increased men's democracy and individual sense of power and worth. "God made some men big and some men small, but Sam Colt made them all equal," the significant Texas proverb ran. The armed society was not necessarily democratic or free, except among the peer group, but it was imbued with the sense of being both.
It was a special social complex, in which men gave or took no orders except from the recognized leader. It was largely lawless, because in the explosive turbulence of the rapid advance across the Plains, law and the instruments of law could not keep pace. When 100 men lived in an area of 1,000 square miles, formal structures disappeared. But the West, in the great years, was not criminal, and this was to be a fact much misunderstood. Much of the so-called lawlessness of west Texas was a result of Eastern laws that made no sense in the milieu beyond the 98th and 100th meridians. Men had to make their own codes, because there was no authority otherwise to make them; and many of the codes of the crowded, organized counties to the East were in the West absurd. Police did not exist; and what courts there were frequently dispensed what few Westerners regarded as justice.
Theodore Roosevelt, who spent much time in the West, called the code of the West "a square deal," in other words, fair play. This was innate in the Anglo-Celtic nature; fair play was an Anglo-Saxon concept. Under fair play no man could bushwhack another, shoot an unarmed man, or shoot an enemy in the back. He could call a play, thus giving all a fair chance in ensuing duels or war. Some men were better shots, or faster, than others, but the code of the West did not call for equality, only for equal opportunity. All men had the right to defend themselves. His survival, as Webb said, imposed upon the Westerner certain obligations: courage, skill, and the ability to kill in self-defense. If he was too inept or bloodless to develop these, that was, in Texan eyes, his own tough luck.
Breaking of the code brought punishment, but not at law. The man who shot Robert Neighbors was
not brought to formal justice, because formal justice could not, in Texas hearts, have given him what he deserved. The man who might shoot an Indian or a Mexican, even on dubious grounds, was not a criminal, because these were not social crimes. Nor could any man who did not live the reality of the bloody trail properly call them so; crime involves psychology as well as moral codes. The West evolved a different, but a very real, code of murder. Killing in an unpremeditated quarrel, or in a called fair fight, was not murder but an incident. It did not strike at the roots of society, and was tolerable. A hundred years later, the criminal codes of the state of Texas regarded casual killing as a relatively minor crime, drawing two to twenty years. The usual punishment set the killer in a fair fight free in two years or less. The penalties for burglary or robbery were more severe.
Crimes against property involved two kinds: horse theft and cattle rustling. There was almost no other kind of property in the West to steal, and petty thievery violated all social codes. In a horse-symbol society, and one in which the horse frequently meant the difference for survival, horse theft logically had to be punished by death. Cattle-stealing was less important, especially during the years when the price of beef on the hoof in Texas was low. In fact, some of the viciousness that centered on cattle-rustling in later years came because of the mildness of the law and public attitudes. Cattlemen who were being robbed blind and who saw juries deal leniently with cow-thieves, much as later juries dealt with drunk-driving and for the same reasons, were powerfully stimulated to take the law into their own hands, through cattlemen's associations, range detectives, or otherwise.
One distinction often misunderstood was between a branded cow and its unbranded maverick, or calf. An unbranded calf for many years was regarded as public property in Texas; most cattlemen gathered in any they came across and rarely considered themselves thieves for doing so.
Lone Star Page 82