Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The best trail hands earned wages of five dollars a day, which meant that at the end of a drive they could pocket several hundred dollars in cash. They worked long hours. “We broke camp at daylight and were in the saddle until dark,” Goodnight said. “It was a rough, hard, adventurous life, but was not without its sunny side, and when everything moved smoothly the trip was an agreeable diversion from the monotony of the range.”

  Of course, things did not always move smoothly. There were rivers to cross, which involved either wading or swimming the herd. In the former case, the cattle could hit quicksand—a bottom so soft as not to bear their weight. Physics worked in the cattle’s favor; if they kept calm, they could float and be pulled out by ropes. But the cattle often panicked, and could become exhausted and drown. Swimming a stream entailed risks of its own, again involving panic, exhaustion and drowning. The cowboys waded and swam in the thick of the herds; danger to the cattle became danger to them. Ironically, drowning was a common cause of death on the prairies, hundreds of miles from the ocean and any large bodies of water. It didn’t help that many cowboys couldn’t swim.

  Snakes posed another danger, more to the cowboys than to the cattle. A prairie-dog hole could catch the hoof of a galloping horse, breaking the leg of the horse, which then had to be shot, and throwing the rider head over mane, at risk to the rider’s neck, spine and limbs. Summer storms brought lightning, besides torrential rain; on the open plains a man on horseback was the tallest thing around, and the likeliest to attract the thunderbolts.

  But the greatest danger was stampedes. “Nothing the cattlemen so feared as the stampede,” Charlie Goodnight recalled. The Texas longhorns, being skittish by temperament—their wariness was an evolutionary advantage—were particularly prone to bolting. Stampedes were most likely early in a drive, before the rhythm of the trail set in and the hierarchy of the herd developed. “Everybody was on the alert,” Goodnight said of the early days of the drive. “The men slept on the ground with the lariat wrapped around the wrist and with the horse so close that 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.”

  Despite the precautions, stampedes occurred. Often a nighttime storm was the trigger. “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 ever could 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 drovers did what they could. “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. Advantage was taken of level ground, and when the leaders were started toward moving in a circle, the victory practically had been won.”

  A stampede was a force of nature. “The heat developed by a large drove of cattle during a stampede was surprising,” Goodnight explained. “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.”

  Yet against this force the men and their mounts worked miracles. “In the excitement of a stampede a man was not himself, and his horse was not the horse of yesterday. Man and horse were one, and the combination accomplished feats that would be utterly impossible under ordinary circumstances.” Together the hands and horses choreographed a bovine ballet that shook the earth, singed the grass and threatened everything near with horrible, instant death, but usually ended without more than minor damage. “The stampede then gradually came to an end; the strain was removed; the cowboys were the happiest men on earth; and their shouts and laughter could be heard for miles over the prairie.”

  Cowboy guarding his herd. All is calm on this Texas day.

  THE COWBOY DEVELOPED OTHER SKILLS. HE COULD THROW A lariat around a running cow as easily as a city dweller tossed his wallet in a drawer. On his favorite pony he could cut a single cow from a herd in seconds. Cowboys sang to each other over the campfire; they also sang to the cattle, to calm them in the night and to keep them from stampeding.

  The men learned to live on the simplest fare. “Corn bread, mast-fed bacon and coffee constitute nine-tenths of their diet,” Joseph McCoy wrote. “Occasionally they have fresh beef and less often they have vegetables of any description. They do their own cooking in the rudest and fewest possible vessels, often not having a single plate or knife and fork other than their pocket knife, but gather round the camp kettle in true Indian style, and with a piece of bread in one hand proceed to fish up a piece of sow belly and dine sumptuously, not forgetting to stow away one or more quarts of the strongest coffee imaginable.”

  They took things as they came, the bad with the good. “The life of the cowboy is one of considerable daily danger and excitement,” McCoy observed. “It is hard and full of exposure, but is wild and free, and the young man who has long been a cowboy has but little taste for any other occupation.” The cowboy’s path was uncluttered. “He lives hard, works hard, has but few comforts and fewer necessities. He has but little, if any, taste for reading. He enjoys a coarse practical joke or a smutty story; loves danger but abhors labor of the common kind; never tires riding, never wants to walk, no matter how short the distance he desires to go. He would rather fight with pistols than pray; loves tobacco, liquor and women better than any other trinity. His life borders nearly upon that of an Indian.”

  Occasionally cowboys advanced to become ranch owners. McCoy cited William Perryman, who began his career tending his father’s stock, with the agreement that he could keep for himself every third calf born. “In a few years he was able to buy out his father’s stock and then set out exclusively for himself,” McCoy noted. “He has now been ranching for seventeen years and has acquired a fortune of princely magnitude. His ranches aggregate fully twenty-five thousand acres of land, all under fence, of which he cultivates but few acres, only sufficient for the necessities of his own house and one or two fancy saddle horses kept for his own private use. The balance of his lands are devoted to grazing. His stock of cattle numbers twenty-five thousand head, and annual increase varies from four to five thousand.”

  But most cowboys had no such ambition. They took their pay at the end of the drive and did more or less what Joe Meek and the fur trappers did at the annual rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. “When the herd is sold and delivered to the purchaser, a day of rejoicing to the cowboy has come, for then he can go free and have a jolly time,” Joseph McCoy said. “And it is a jolly time they have. Straightway after settling with their employers the barber shop is visited, and three to six months’ growth of hair is shorn off, their long-grown, sunburnt beard set in due shape and properly blacked. Next a clothing store of the Israelitish style”—peddlers were often Jews or presumed to be—“is gone through, and the cowboy emerges a new man, in outward
appearance, everything being new, not excepting the hat and boots.” The well-dressed cowboy went out on the town. “The bar-room, the theatre, the gambling-room, the bawdy house, the dance house, each and all come in for their full share of attention.”

  Fun included fighting. “In any of these places an affront or a slight, real or imaginary, is cause sufficient for him to unlimber one or more ‘mountain howitzers’”—heavy revolvers—“invariably found strapped to his person, and proceed to deal out death in unbroken doses to such as may be in range of his pistols. Whether real friends or enemies, no matter; his anger and bad whisky urge him on to deeds of blood and death.”

  The gunfights of Abilene and other cattle towns became legendary. As often happened with the West, especially in matters relating to cowboys, the legend outran the reality. Street life in the West was less lethal than in such notorious Eastern neighborhoods as New York’s Five Points. And rarely did Western gunfights assume the stylized form depicted by novelists and, later, filmmakers, in which two antagonists faced each other on a dusty street, and victory went to the one with the quicker draw. The most famous of all the gunfights, at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, didn’t take place at the O.K. Corral but in an unnamed empty lot, and there was nothing stylized or orderly about it. Dozens of shots were fired in a spasm of close-range violence. Three men died in the brawl; the other six walked away. The story almost died, too; not till decades later did it travel much beyond the West, reaching the national consciousness only when a breathless biographer included it in his life of Wyatt Earp, one of the survivors.

  JOSEPH MCCOY WAS PROUD OF ABILENE AND ITS PROSPERITY. Yet he was hardly uncritical of some of the people the town attracted. “At frontier towns where are centered many cattle and, as a result, considerable business is transacted, and many strangers congregate, there are always to be found a number of bad characters, both male and female, of the very worst class in the universe, such as have fallen below the level of the lowest type of the brute creation,” McCoy said. “Men who live a soulless, aimless life, dependent upon the turn of a card for the means of living. They wear out a purposeless life, ever looking blear-eyed and dissipated, to whom life, from various causes, has long since become worse than a total blank; beings in the form of man whose outward appearance would betoken gentlemen but whose heart-strings are but a wisp of base sounding chords, upon which the touch of the higher and purer life have long since ceased to be felt.” These were the bad men: the gamblers, gunfighters and renegades.

  The bad women were even more dangerous. “When the darkness of the night is come to shroud their orgies from public gaze, these miserable beings gather into the halls of the dance house and ‘trip the fantastic toe’ to wretched music, ground out of dilapidated instruments by beings fully as degraded as the most vile.” Yet the ladies of the night were catnip to the cowboys. “In this vortex of dissipation the average cowboy plunges with great delight. Few more wild, reckless scenes of abandoned debauchery can be seen on the civilized earth than a dance hall in full blast in one of the many frontier towns.”

  The cowboys had dreamed of this on many lonely nights on the trail, and they were not to be denied. “The cowboy enters the dance with a peculiar zest, not stopping to divest himself of his sombrero, spurs, or pistols, but just as he dismounts off of his cow pony, so he goes into the dance.” The dancing cowboy made quite a figure. “With the front of his sombrero lifted at an angle of full forty-five degrees; his huge spurs jingling at every step or motion; his revolvers flapping up and down like a retreating sheep’s tail; his eyes lit up with excitement, liquor and lust; he plunges in and ‘hoes it down’ at a terrible rate, in the most approved yet awkward country style, often swinging his partner clear off the floor for an entire circle, then ‘balance all’ with an occasional demoniacal yell, near akin to the war whoop of the savage Indian.”

  Periodically the “waltz to the bar” was called. The cowboy was expected to treat his partner to whiskey, and of course drink some himself. By this means the bars made their money and the dancing women earned their keep. No self-respecting cowboy, pockets full of cash, declined. The more he danced, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the less careful of his money he became. McCoy could have mentioned the other ways certain working women of Abilene separated the cowboys from their money, but he left that topic to his readers’ imaginations.

  “Such is the manner in which the cowboy spends his hard-earned dollars,” McCoy concluded. “After a few days of frolic and debauchery, the cowboy is ready, in company with his comrades, to start back to Texas, often having not one dollar left of his summer wages.” Yet he took back memories of high living that would last the year.

  Some took back softer memories as well. Mrs. Lou Gore owned and managed the Drovers’ Cottage, a hotel for cowboys. She looked after them when their drinking made them ill or their fighting plugged them with bullets. “She was the Florence Nightingale to relieve them,” McCoy said. “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 with all the kind offices that a true sister only so well understands how to perform. 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 kindest respect and tenderest memory.”

  Drovers’ Cottage, Abilene. A pillow and a bed were most welcome after months on the trail.

  43

  HARD LESSON

  THE ERA OF THE CATTLE DRIVES FROM TEXAS TO KANSAS was remarkably brief. It lasted less than a decade, ending when railroads reached the plains of Texas. Cowboys still rounded up cattle and drove them to the railheads, but these were now mere days from the cattle’s home range rather than months.

  The exception was a particular kind of drive, of cattle meant not for market but for stocking new ranges. The Texas longhorns were surprisingly resilient; though creatures of the scorching plains of south Texas, they could survive the bone-chilling winters of the northern plains, as the cattlemen discovered when cows driven north to the railroad didn’t find buyers. The animals weren’t worth driving back to Texas, and so were simply left to fend for themselves through the winter. Not only did they survive, they reproduced. In doing so they suggested to cattlemen that there was a whole new realm to be added to the cattle kingdom. Conveniently for the cattlemen, the longhorns showed their cold-resistance just as the buffalo hunters were completing the near-extermination of the previously dominant species. No sooner had the ecological niche opened than it began to be refilled.

  One of those who helped in the filling was Theodore Roosevelt, who bought his Dakota ranch and became a cattleman at just this time. There were many others. In the early 1880s a boom mentality seized the range-cattle industry, a mentality not unlike that of the California gold rush. The range was finite, and those who arrived first could choose the best spots—near the railroad, with good water and streamside timber for building.

  The cattle rush had its Sam Brannans: the boosters who shouted of the fortunes to be made on the range. James Brisbin had spent the dozen years after the Civil War on duty in the West as an officer in the army; he guessed that he could improve his pay by writing and selling a book called The Beef Bonanza. Brisbin concocted a letter, as from one brother to another, with the former urging the latter to come west and make a fortune in beef, just as he had. “Dear Brother,” he wrote, “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 y
ears to come. The hills in the vicinity afford the best grazing, and we can have a range ten miles in extent.”

  Brisbin’s alter ego made a specific proposal. “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.” The Durhams added meat to the bony frames of the Texas longhorns. “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.” Already the money would be rolling in. “Our first year’s profit is 400 calves, $7.00 each, $2,800.” Addition became multiplication: the second year would yield $4,800; the third year $6,800; the fourth $10,200; the fifth $14,600. The writer would sell his share over time to the younger brother. “What business on earth is there that can equal this?” he asked. “You have often said you wished me to put you into a good business and show you how to make some money, and now, sir, I think I have pointed you out the way to a fortune, and the good wife too. In eleven years you can, by care, be at the head of a blooded-stock farm worth $100,000, and very soon afterwards its sole owner.”