Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Government agents repeatedly told Joseph that he and his people had to move to the reservation. Joseph replied, equally often, that they would not. Finally came General Oliver Howard, who summoned Joseph to the reservation for a talk. He said he had many soldiers at his back, and would soon have more. “The country belongs to the government,” Howard told Joseph. “And I intend to make you go upon the reservation.”

  Joseph responded, “We are all sprung from a woman, although we are unlike in many things. We can not be made over again. You are as you were made, and as you were made you can remain. We are just as we were made by the Great Spirit, and you can not change us. Then why should children of one mother and one father quarrel? Why should one try to cheat the other? I do not believe that the Great Spirit Chief gave one kind of men the right to tell another kind of men what they must do.”

  “You deny my authority, do you?” demanded Howard. “You want to dictate to me, do you?” Howard grew angry. “The law says you shall go upon the reservation to live, and I want you to do so. But you persist in disobeying the law. If you do not move, I will take the matter into my own hand, and make you suffer for your disobedience.”

  A Nez Perce who had accompanied Joseph answered Howard. “Are you the Great Spirit? Did you make the world? Did you make the sun? Did you make the rivers for us to drink? Did you make the grass to grow? Did you make all these things, that you talk to us as though we were boys? If you did, then you have the right to talk to us as you do.”

  “You are an impudent fellow,” Howard said. “I will put you in the guard house.” He ordered him arrested.

  The others in Joseph’s party looked to him to stop the arrest. “I counseled them to submit,” Joseph recalled. “I knew if we resisted that all the white men present, including General Howard, would be killed in a moment, and we would be blamed.”

  The council broke up that day, with no violence. Howard returned twenty-four hours later with an ultimatum. Joseph had thirty days to move his people and their belongings to the reservation. “If you are not here in that time, I shall consider that you want to fight, and will send my soldiers to drive you on.”

  Joseph concluded from this that Howard had already decided on war. It would be physically impossible to round up all the band’s cattle and horses, cross the melt-swollen Snake River, and reach the reservation in thirty days. “I am sure that he began to prepare for war at once,” Joseph said.

  JOSEPH RETURNED TO HIS PEOPLE. HE CALLED A COUNCIL. HE said he didn’t want war. Some of the young men did want war, in revenge for Nez Perce slain by whites in the past. While the council was meeting, a party of the young men, led by one whose father had been killed by whites, rode into a white settlement and killed four people. The leader of the party came back to the council and denounced those who still sought peace. “Why do you sit here like women?” he said. “The war has begun already.”

  Joseph realized that his hand had been forced. “I knew that their acts would involve all my people,” he recounted. “I saw that war could not then be prevented.”

  But it was a war unlike any other in the history of the American West. Joseph recognized that he couldn’t stand against Howard and the army; his people would be destroyed. Instead, he and the chiefs of some allied bands determined to conduct a fighting retreat into the mountains, and through the mountains to the buffalo country of the Great Plains.

  The Nez Perce withdrew from Wallowa; the soldiers followed. The Nez Perce doubled back and ambushed the soldiers, killing a few, slowing their progress, and then resuming the retreat. The Nez Perce crossed the Salmon River, intending for Howard to follow. When he did, the Indians got behind him and cut his supply lines. The Nez Perce knew the terrain better than Howard and the soldiers did; in the few pitched battles, the soldiers almost always came off worse. Scanty ammunition imposed discipline on the Nez Perce warriors. “When an Indian fights, he only shoots to kill,” Joseph said. “But soldiers shoot at random.” The Nez Perce held themselves to a higher standard than the soldiers and other tribes. “None of the soldiers were scalped,” Joseph explained. “We do not believe in scalping, nor in killing wounded men. Soldiers do not kill many Indians unless they are wounded and left upon the battlefield. Then they kill Indians.”

  Howard’s force got help from a separate column coming from the east, under John Gibbon. Gibbon caught the Nez Perce off guard and inflicted the heaviest losses of the campaign: thirty warriors killed and fifty women and children. The Nez Perce changed direction, angling north into the Yellowstone basin.

  En route they came upon isolated white settlements. “We captured one white man and two white women,” Joseph recalled. “We released them at the end of three days. They were treated kindly. The women were not insulted. Can the white soldiers tell me of one time when Indian women were taken prisoners, and held three days and then released without being insulted?” They captured two white men several days later. “One of them stole a horse and escaped. We gave the other a poor horse and told him he was free.”

  A third column intercepted them, under Samuel Sturgis. The warriors fought the new soldiers to a standstill while the women and children were moved out of reach.

  Finally a fourth column—which, like each of the others, alone outnumbered the Nez Perce fighters—engaged them. This one was led by Nelson Miles, the captor of Crazy Horse. Another pitched battle followed, ending in a truce offer by Miles to Joseph.

  Joseph weighed the offer. His people were hungry and weary. They had traveled over a thousand miles. The original plan, to find refuge on the plains, had been thwarted by the appearance of Sturgis and Miles. Joseph considered crossing into Canada and linking up with Sitting Bull and other Lakotas who had refused to join Crazy Horse on the Sioux reservation.

  But winter was coming, and the Nez Perce were not a people of the plains. One reason, besides its surpassing beauty, that Joseph and his people were so attached to the Wallowa Valley was that the mountains that encircled it protected them from winter winds like those that raked the plains.

  Joseph could have left the women, children and wounded behind and dashed across the border, now only forty miles away. “I knew that we were near Sitting Bull’s camp in King George’s land,” he said. But he wouldn’t leave the defenseless to the mercy of the soldiers. “We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering while in the hands of white men.”

  Nelson Miles had made a pledge to Joseph. “If you will come out and give up your arms, I will spare your lives and send you to your reservation.”

  Joseph thought Miles an honorable man. “General Miles had promised that we might return to our own country with what stock we had left. I thought we could start again. I believed General Miles, or I never would have surrendered.”

  Joseph returned to the truce tent. He handed his rifle to Miles. “It is cold and we have no blankets,” he said. “The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

  VII

  THE MIDDLE BORDER

  42

  ABILENE

  NO IMAGE IN AMERICAN HISTORY HAS BEEN SO POWERFUL— so evocative not simply of romance and adventure but of what it means to be American—as that of the cowboy. Astride his horse, etched against a lonely horizon, the cowboy epitomizes individualism, integrity, strength. The cowboy guards his herd; he guards his nation’s identity.

  Strikingly, given its power and persistence, the image of the cowboy was rooted in a specific time and place, and in a peculiar set of circumstances. Cattle came to America with the Spanish, in the same ships as the horses, and they escaped into the wild at about the same time the horses did. Yet while horses revolutionized the lives of some of the nat
ive peoples, cattle had almost no effect on them. Horses gave the natives something they didn’t have: increased mobility. Cattle merely duplicated something they did have: meat. Cattle were no improvement over buffalo. Cattle meat didn’t taste better than buffalo meat, to the Indians. If anything, cattle were a poor substitute for buffalo, lacking the buffalo’s hardiness and exquisite adaptation to the rigorous environment of the Great Plains.

  But cattle caught on in Mexico, south of the buffalo’s range. And they gradually spread north. They reached the plains of south Texas by the early nineteenth century. Those that had gone wild acquired some of the buffalo’s hardiness. The longhorns of Texas weren’t much to look at, from a butcher’s perspective, being mostly bone and muscle—and of course those horns. Their meat was tough. But so was their constitution. They could thrive on withered grass and scrub that would starve the domestic breeds of cattle common in the East. They could roam many miles from water and find their way back. No predator daunted them. And they multiplied. And multiplied. By the beginning of the Civil War, millions made Texas their home.

  As the cattle spread, so did a cattle culture. The Spanish had taught the Mexicans to tend cattle; the Mexicans taught the Texans. The cowboy was initially the vaquero. His hat was the sombrero; his rope la reata, or lariat; his leggings chaparejos, or chaps. Many of the first cowboys in American Texas were in fact Mexicans, often from families that had been in Texas since Spanish times.

  Until the Civil War, Texas cattle were largely unknown in the rest of the United States. Indeed, beef cattle of any sort weren’t common. Americans were pork eaters. Pigs, being omnivores, were more versatile than cows. They could be raised on the smallest farms and fed nearly anything. Americans knew cattle as dairy animals, valued for their milk. Beef was a by-product rather than the purpose of raising the cows.

  The Civil War changed things. Armies have to be fed, and soldiers don’t get to be picky. Texas cattle became a mainstay of the Confederate army. An industry developed gathering Texas cattle and sending them off to the front.

  But two years into the war, the Union capture of Vicksburg cut off the cattle from their market. The cattle in Texas continued to multiply, until by the end of the war there were so many cattle in Texas that they could be had almost for the taking.

  Something else multiplied during the war: the Northern appetite. The war stimulated the Northern economy, creating jobs in emerging industries in booming cities. The jobs drew armies of workers from American farms and from foreign countries, and like soldiers in the field, they couldn’t feed themselves. And they couldn’t be picky. Most came preferring pork, but if someone could put beef on their tables at modest cost, they would add steak to their culinary repertoire.

  JOSEPH MCCOY AIMED TO BE THAT SOMEONE. ILLINOISAN BY birth, McCoy made his living in the stock market—the original stock market, in which cattle and other animal stock were sold. He began monitoring prices in Chicago stockyards as a young adult, and he watched the prices rise during the Civil War. He meanwhile observed the blockade on Texas cattle during the war’s last two years, and at war’s end he noted an enormous price disparity between cattle on the range in Texas and those at a stockyard’s gate in Chicago. A cow in Texas cost two or three dollars; that same cow in Chicago could fetch thirty or forty. The profit potential made McCoy’s mouth water.

  All he had to do was get that Texas cow to Chicago. By this time trains regularly transported livestock, but no trains reached the cattle regions of Texas. Small herds of cattle—and pigs and other animals—had been driven from place to place in America for centuries, afoot over ordinary roads. But McCoy aimed to move cattle in great herds, of thousands. These were far too many for roads. And far too many for the neighbors living along those roads. Cattle had to eat, and if driven through regions inhabited by farmers, they would eat the farmers’ crops. The farmers wouldn’t stand for it.

  The only way to move Texas cattle en masse to the East was to drive them north, up the Great Plains. There were few farms on the plains, and plenty of grass. The plains were a natural highway for cattle, just as they had been for buffalo. The buffalo were diminishing, under the multiple pressures upon them. The highway was sufficiently clear and getting clearer.

  Joseph McCoy monitored not only cattle prices but the progress of railroad construction. The Kansas Pacific was working its way west from Kansas City; in 1867 its trains ran as far as Salina, well out on the plains. McCoy’s plan was to make some Kansas town the link between the cattle range and the slaughterhouse. “In short, it was to establish a market whereat the Southern drover and Northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing,” he explained afterward.

  He traveled to Kansas City in the spring of 1867 and bought a ticket on the Kansas Pacific. He rode the line to Junction City and spoke to one of the town’s leading businessmen. He had learned that a Texas herd was coming north, its destination yet undetermined. McCoy proposed to make Junction City that destination. He would purchase a plot of ground large enough to gather the Texas herd and prepare it for loading on the train. Junction City would become the hub of the Western plains.

  The Junction City man was unimpressed. He responded in a way that stung and puzzled McCoy. “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.” McCoy still shook his head years later. “So by that one act of donkey stupidity and avarice, Junction City drove from her a trade which soon developed to many millions.”

  He returned to Kansas City. He pitched his project to the president of the Kansas Pacific, hoping that the backing of the railroad would change the minds of men like the one who had turned him down in Junction City. McCoy explained that the cattle trade could become a handsome addition to the business of the railroad. The president was no more impressed than the Junction City man had been. He dismissed McCoy’s scheme as chimerical.

  McCoy traipsed to the office of the Missouri Pacific, which traversed Missouri. What would that railroad charge to ship cattle if McCoy could get them to the Missouri border? The immaculately attired Missouri Pacific president took one look at McCoy’s dress—“rough, stodgy, unblacked boots, a slouch hat, seedy coat, soiled shirt, and unmentionables that had seen better days twelve months previous,” McCoy admitted—and concluded that he wasn’t worth his time. “Get out of this office,” the president said, “and let me not be troubled with any more of your style.”

  McCoy’s confidence was shaken. Were his critics right? Was his plan that implausible? He made one last attempt. And, finally, he found his partner, in the modest Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. The company would furnish the cattle cars McCoy needed; he would ship the cattle on the cars, via the Kansas Pacific.

  McCoy bought another ticket on the Kansas Pacific. He headed back out on the prairie, looking again for the place where the range cattle and the iron horse could meet. Abilene lay west of Junction City, farther from civilization. It wasn’t much to look at. “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,” was how McCoy described it. “The business of the burg was conducted in two small rooms, mere log huts. And of course the inevitable saloon, also in a log hut.”

  The residents were more picturesque than the buildings. “The proprietor of the saloon was a corpulent, jolly, good-souled, congenial old man of the backwoods pattern, who in his younger days loved to fish and hunt and enjoyed the life of the frontiersman. For his amusement a colony of pet prairie dogs were located on his lots, and often the old gentleman might be seen feeding his pets.” He sold prairie dogs to tourists riding the train.

  But Abilene had what McCoy was looking for. The grasslands surrounding the town on all sides formed one great pasture. Reliable creeks supplied water. It was more than a hundred miles from the farm settlements. And it was on the railroad.

  McCoy sent word to the drovers on the trail that Abilene would welcom
e them, and he threw himself into making his promise true. “From Hannibal, Missouri, came the pine lumber, and from Lenape, Kansas, came the hard wood, and work began in earnest and with energy,” he recalled. “In sixty days from July 1st a shipping yard that would accommodate three thousand cattle, a large pair of Fairbank’s scales”—to weigh the animals—“a barn and an office were completed, and a good three story hotel was well on the way toward completion.”

  Meanwhile McCoy sent word to Northern buyers that Abilene would be the great market of the West. Thousands of cattle would be available for purchase.

  His gamble paid off. The first herd arrived and was sold for a good price. Word flashed back down the trail, and a second herd followed the first. Then a third, and a fourth. By the end of the season some thirty-five thousand cattle had boarded railcars at Abilene for the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago and cities farther east.

  THE CATTLE INDUSTRY WASN’T MUCH DIFFERENT, CONCEPTUALLY, from the trades in beaver pelts and buffalo hides. In each case profit required connecting a Western resource to consumers in distant cities. Joseph McCoy, probably without drawing the parallel, intended to become the John Jacob Astor of cattle.

  And Charles Goodnight would be John McLoughlin. Goodnight was a gatherer of cattle, an organizer of trail drives from Texas to Kansas. With practice he got his part of the business down to a science. “The ordinary trail-herd in the years following the Civil War numbered about 3,000 head of cattle,” Goodnight recalled. “The outfit consisted of sixteen or eighteen men, each of whom had two good horses; a mess-wagon, drawn by four mules, which were driven by the cook; and a horse-wrangler, who had charge of the horse-herd.” Goodnight had made a name as a Texas Ranger; his reputation helped him recruit the best trail hands. “We aimed to have as many experienced men as possible with our outfit,” he said. “After a few years, there had been developed on the trail a class of men that could be depended upon anywhere.”