by Annie Proulx
Another British hunter-cattleman of note in the 1880s was Moreton Frewen, an uncle of Winston Churchill, and, despite ideas that ranged from brilliant to farcical, apparently something of an extreme ass. He cut a wide swath in Wyoming, building a log castle north of Casper where he entertained titled and wealthy friends from abroad. Among his friends was Sir Maurice de Bunsen who shot a milk cow under the impression it was a wizened bison, and the Honorable Gilbert Leigh, a member of Parliament, who went out hunting alone and somehow galloped off a cliff to his death. Frewen was loathed by the locals, and after the vicious winter of 1886–1887, was among the cattlemen who went under.
Under the terrific killing pressure the game began to dwindle. The near extinction of some species is an ugly story embedded in our history. Today the human effect on wildlife numbers is a popular subject of scientific study. There is continuing controversy about the cause of the extinction of the woolly mammoth (and other megafauna) around the time humans arrived in North America. Briefly (passing over the complex details of evidence and rival theories), for some it was climate change—a warming period—that modified the ecosystem in ways unfavorable for the vegetation that nurtured mammoths and horses. Evidence from the examination of exhumed dung from these giant animals shows a precipitous drop in the percentages of spores of the fungus Sporormiella after 10,800 B.P., indicating a change in climate and a long decline that ended in extinction.4 Others believe that incoming human predators from the west, expert hunters who took advantage of the animals’ naïveté, were major players in the inevitable depletion of mammoth stocks. While a more arid climate may have been the operative factor, it is difficult to ignore how rapidly human hunters can decimate animal populations. We have the example of Wyoming: this was an incredibly rich hunting ground with more than a hundred thousand pronghorn when whites, with their technologically superior weapons for mass killing, came into the country in numbers in the 1860s. By 1910 the nascent Game and Fish Department counted only seven thousand pronghorn antelope in the state.5
The beaver had been pretty much trapped out by the 1840s, following the invention of the steel trap in 1823, although the older historical thinking believed the collapse of the beaver trade was linked to a change in men’s hat fashions, styles that no longer needed the soft beaver underfur for making glossy felt. In fact, the underfur was no longer available in quantity, for beaver populations had precipitously declined, a hard fact noted by old trappers who remembered the glory days when the animals were so numerous a man could whack them dead with a stick. The great bison herds began to decline around the same time, and although their slaughter by hide hunters was immense, the major collapse had its root in the introduction of cattle diseases with trail herds beginning to make the trek from Texas to Montana and Saskatchewan.6
Gradually a distaste for the rampant taking of horns and heads by foreign “sportsmen” grew. In 1875 the Wyoming legislature, perhaps fearing there would be nothing left for them to shoot, passed a wildlife law setting a big-game season of August 15 to January 15. The vote was prefaced by Governor John Thayer’s reproving report “that one party alone had killed more than 100 elk in the mountains east of the Seminoe district that year” taking “only the teeth and hides, leaving the meat to rot.”7 The legislation also prohibited waste—but only on paper. Hunters did as they pleased.
Seton-Karr and his guns traveled back and forth between the British Isles and North America countless times, always first-class on the great steamers of the day; he was a platinum-card member of the nineteenth-century equivalent of the jet set. In a sense, big-game hunting was more his life’s work than were his political career or the duties of running the family estate.
As an Oxford undergraduate he spent the vacation months shooting in Norway, and on his first day on Hitteren island “surprised a golden eagle within 40 yards, as he rose from lunching on a dead sheep. A charge of No. 6 shot up the feathers and brought him wounded to the ground, and we slew him with a stone.”8 On another of those joyful days, he wrote, “I once shot a cock capercaillie, a stag, and a white-tailed eagle with three consecutive shots of a single Henry express rifle, all within the space of ten minutes or less.”9 He might have been content to hunt red deer in Norway and Scotland for the rest of his life but for an accidental glimpse of a tremendous set of antlers.
In 1876, freshly graduated from Oxford, and walking down London’s Strand, he saw a formidable set of elk (wapiti) antlers in a gunmaker’s shop window. On fire with curiosity he inquired and found the animal had been shot by “Mr. Otho Shaw, who had recently returned from a hunting expedition to Wyoming, whence he had brought some good wapiti heads. From him I obtained an introduction to the western ranchman, Frank Earnest by name, who had accompanied him as hunter and guide.”10 Captain Otho Shaw, the same age and class as Seton-Karr, had just that year acquired Arrowe Hall, a mansion in the Elizabethan style with 450 acres of woods and fields. Shaw’s name, along with Henry Seton-Karr’s, appears many times in Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game.11
A few months later twenty-three-year-old Seton-Karr arrived in Rawlins, Wyoming, with his friend Thomas Bate, and the pair made their way to Frank Earnest’s ranch “in the valley of the North Platte, about twenty miles south of Fort Steele.” Over the next four months scores of elk, grizzly bears, bison, antelope, mule deer and mountain sheep of the Medicine Bow and Sierra Madre ranges, the Rattlesnakes and Bates Hole fell before Seton-Karr’s rifle. He took few chances with Wyoming grizzly bears, but trapped them and then shot them. A photograph shows the twelve-point elk with fifty-eight-inch antlers he shot in the Medicine Bows. Even so young, he knew he was in a place incredibly rich in wildlife, and looking back over thirty years later when the game had all been shot out and the elk and bighorn herds driven down by domestic sheep and beef cows, he wrote nostalgically:
At the present time [1904] this country is a huge sheep and cattle ranch. The river-meadows and streams are for the most part wire-fenced. Flock-masters, with their herds and traveling wagons, pass over it to and fro, from summer to winter range, and the wild green pastures of the seventies are now a thing of the past, eaten up, trodden down, and periodically desolated by the thousands of domestic sheep that have largely added to the wealth of Wyoming, but have, on the other hand, ruined a large part of the state . . . as a game-preserve and a hunting-ground. . . . But in the days of which I write Wyoming was a hunter’s paradise.12
He came back to Carbon County and the North Platte again and again, first to hunt and fish and, finally, when the bison were gone and most of the biggest heads hung on the walls of estates in the British Isles, to vaguely oversee the cattle ranch that became his in 1883.
Frank and Bonaparte “Boney” Earnest were two Canadian brothers who had come from Toronto to Wyoming Territory to trap, guide and fight in the Indian wars. They eventually took up cattle ranching. Seton-Karr liked and trusted Frank Earnest but apparently had suspicions about Boney Earnest’s probity. After seven years of hunting acquaintance, Seton-Karr bought the Earnest ranch, renamed it Sand Creek Land and Cattle Company, and hired Frank as manager. Together they purchased two thousand Utah cows to run on the open range. The ranch pastures extended seventy miles north from the North Platte River, the first of the big ranches in this part of Wyoming. The brand was in the form of a pick, and no one called the ranch the Sand Creek outfit—it was known to all by the brand, the Pick Ranch. Today the old log ranch house still stands, where our neighbor Ken Olson and his family lived for years before selling to the TA Ranch, then bordering Bird Cloud on the northwest, in 2006. The Seton-Karr house, as well as much of the ranch property, currently belong to the TA Ranch, owned by Campbell’s Foods and its subsidiary, Pace hot sauce. This ranch currently abuts Bird Cloud on two sides.
Henry Seton-Karr also had investment interests in the XIT, the giant ranch of the Texas Panhandle first known as the Capitol Ranch. Chicago businessmen had made a deal with the Texas legislature that they, the businessmen, would supply the mone
y for the new capitol building after the original burned down, in return for 3 million acres of the unsettled panhandle region. The Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company of London attracted wealthy investors, including Seton-Karr and the Earl of Aberdeen. It was an agreeable bargain for both parties, and the Capitol became known as the XIT after Ab Blocker, who drove the first thousands of cattle onto the property, drew a brand that supposedly could not be altered, in the dust with his boot heel. The XIT was the largest cattle ranch in the world, and its size likely appealed to that pursuer of gigantism, Seton-Karr. Later he was tangentially linked to the other very large ranch of the Texas Panhandle, the Matador.
The Pick Ranch, like other big Wyoming spreads with absentee owners, suffered loss and depredations. Wrote Seton-Karr, “It was extraordinary how herds of range cattle, bought often on book-count, melted away in the course of a few years from off the wild unfenced prairies and foot-hills of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado.”13
“Book count” was one of the most stupid practices in cattle ranching during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The owner made an estimate—often just a wild guess—of the number of cows in his herds and wrote it down in a notebook. Later, if he sold a herd, the gentlemen’s agreement figures in the book were taken as reality. Tales abound of cheating, lying, imaginative cattlemen selling paper cows that did not exist. Eventually the light came on and buyers and bankers realized that an actual count was necessary. Seton-Karr admitted that bad winters and book counts were partially responsible “for the disappearance of good English dollars that have jumped into western pockets and have since given little or no return.”14 There was another reason for the lack of income: cattle rustling.
The titled Scotsman tried to make light of the unpleasant fact that Pick cows seemed to decrease in number instead of multiplying. He wrote in an amused tone that “many western owners possessed . . . ragged old Texas cows of an extraordinary fecundity, even in seasons when the big outfit of the neighborhood had had, maybe, a very poor branding season. Two celebrated cows . . . on Sand Creek, belonging to an old native rancher of my acquaintance and his wife, were known in two years to have ostensibly produced no less than fifty-two calves.” In the best Wyoming style of local justice, the “old rancher and his wife were found hanging to a convenient cottonwood-tree . . . one fine morning.” Seton-Karr declares sanctimoniously that the perpetrators were unknown, but slyly adds that among those rumored to be responsible, was a candidate for the state legislature.15 In a later chapter Seton-Karr mentions that Boney Earnest was running for election to the legislature.
This story sounds suspiciously like a tale based on the 1889 vigilante hanging of the homesteader Jim Averell and nearby Ella Watson, the latter believed to have traded sexual favors to cowboys in return for mavericks. (She was called Cattle Kate by a Chicago newspaperman.) Some historians see the double hanging as an early chapter in the Johnson County War. This big-rancher-versus-little-homesteader “war” became the plot basis for countless western movies. As Miss Watson was, according to the historian T. A. Larson, “the only woman ever hanged in Wyoming, legally or illegally,” Seton-Karr’s loose account was probably patched together through hearsay and imagination; he undoubtedly dined out on it for years. Larson names the perpetrators as “A. J. Bothwell, Tom Sun, John Durbin, R. M. Galbraith, Bob Connor, E. McLain and an unknown man.”16 Seton-Karr’s account of the Johnson County War is also suspect, as he confuses the town of Buffalo with Casper, and, unlike most historians, says the hired Texas gunmen were Texas Rangers. It is possible he knew something we don’t from his XIT connections in the Texas Panhandle, but nothing in the literature suggests the Rangers were the mysterious hired Texas gunmen.
There was a rustler closer to home. One of the Pick Ranch cowboys was Charley Smith, “a long-legged, powerful rider of the ideal cowboy type.” The Pick foreman was Chico, a fine roper. One day Chico asked Frank Earnest and Seton-Karr if he could fire any cowboy he wanted. They, somewhat puzzled, said yes. Chico explained that he thought Charley Smith was too handy with a rope. Local talk indicated that Smith was in league with a Rawlins butcher, Al Hurt, whose new “flatiron” brand appeared tailor-made to absorb the “pick” with only a few alterations.
It was September and the fall roundup was at hand. While Chico and the cowhands gathered the three- and four-year-olds “destined to provide dividends for shareholders in the old country 5,000 miles away,” Seton-Karr and a party of friends would be on a month-long hunt in the Medicine Bow range. They arranged that cowboys and hunters would meet up “at the far side of the range.” It did not work out that way.
The second night in the hunting camp, one of the Pick crew, Jack Savage, galloped in with the news that Charley Smith had killed Chico after Chico fired him. When Smith started to retaliate, Chico shot at him. Smith’s thick-rolled neckerchief saved his life. Chico wasn’t so lucky, and died that night with—according to Seton-Karr—the pathetic last words, “Boys, I die for the Pick.” He is supposedly buried in a Rawlins cemetery. Seton-Karr was annoyed, for he and his hunting companions had to give up their hunt and gather cows for the next three weeks; the shareholders in Scotland and England were waiting for their dividends. Charley Smith came to a bad end a few years later, plugged by a rancher who knew the man had been rustling his stock.17
In late May 1914, the sixty-one-year-old Seton-Karr, still fit from a lifetime of athletic adventures, enjoyed a successful climbing holiday in British Columbia and was on his way back to London. In Québec City he boarded the S.S. Empress of Ireland, a Canadian Pacific Railway luxury ocean liner on which he had his usual first-class accommodations. The ship, with fifteen hundred passengers, and fitted with sufficient lifeboats after the tragedy of the Titanic two years before, sailed in late afternoon, heading east down the St. Lawrence Seaway. An hour and a half after midnight the pilot left the ship at Rimouski and the Empress steamed toward the open Atlantic. Very soon after the pilot left, Captain Henry George Kendall, on his first trip with the Empress, saw a low-lying collier coming up the river. The coal carrier, S.S. Storstad, from Sydney, Nova Scotia, was heavily laden. Exactly what happened next is still not clear, as heavy spring fog blanked out everything and the accounts given at the later investigation varied. The Storstad somehow rammed the Empress amidships. The beautiful liner sank in fourteen minutes. So swiftly did she go down there was not enough time to launch more than a few lifeboats. Among the 1,012 people who lost their lives was Henry Seton-Karr, but a New York Times report on the tragedy depicted him as a hero who gave his life jacket to a man who had none, saying confidently that he would get another. He didn’t.
Over the next century Bird Cloud was used as pasture for sheep, for cows, for horses, for deer. The native shrubs and grasses disappeared under the decades of grazing assault. By the time we bought the property in 2003 most of the native grasses were gone, only a few winged saltbush shrubs existed. Cheatgrass had moved in along with leafy spurge, Canada thistle and whitetop, all noxious weeds. There were no cottonwood seedlings, only older trees, most in poor condition, racked by storm and cows rubbing against them.
We began a program of rehabilitation, trying to eradicate the cheatgrass, then sowing inland salt grass on its former ground. As soon as the fencing was complete marauding cows were barred from the property. The simple step of removing grazing pressure encouraged cottonwood sprouts to spring up by the thousand. We planted trees, willows, encouraged the saltbush which suddenly began to appear. The James Gang planted some beautiful lodgepole pines from Idaho, but we discovered these were like candy to porcupines who came in the winter nights and reduced the trees to skeletons. Any new plant was immediately attacked by deer and porcupine. We should have planted only local trees, such as juniper and cedar.
Wildlife has cautiously moved onto the property, several elk now spending the winter near Jack Creek. Owls enjoy the bosque at the east end. Skunks wander around, eating insects and bothering no one. A sage grouse restoration project with
Wyoming Game and Fish is in the talking stage; it would provide water and shade for these birds. The land has generously responded to the slightest care. I wish I had a lifetime to see it recover.
CHAPTER 9
“. . . all beaded,
all earringed, wing feather
bowstring sided . . .”1
Robert Louis Stevenson, on his 1879 journey across this continent, wrote a wonderful line about New York: “Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below New York.”2 So, too, does old red Wyoming lie under this trammeled ground. According to some estimates, people have lived here for more than ten thousand years.
After Bird Cloud was finished and I was living in the house I found that the Euro-American division of time into five-day workweeks and two-day weekends crumbled away. I became more intensely aware of the seasons, animal movements, plant behavior and I could imagine the different shape of time in the Indian world by thinking, for example, of the Papago-Pima “calendar” made accessible to me through poetic translations of ritual oratory. The anthropologists Ruth M. Underhill and Donald M. Bahr, in Rainhouse and Ocean, explained that the important times are not some arbitrary “beginning of the year” date, but the solstices, the longest day (June 21) and shortest day (December 21). Their year fell into approximately three seasons, each with four moons. Instead of a catalog of months there were certain important moons with ritual ceremonies attached to them, as the winter solstice “backbone moon” when days and nights were equal in length and it was fitting to tell the creation story. A second important time was the “summer wine feast” preceded by the “Saguaro ripe moon” when the important picking of saguaro fruits occurred. Then came the “rainy moon” of summer clouds and precipitation followed by the “dry grass moon.” The fermentation of the fruits, the drinking of the wine, feasts and traditional oratory followed this lunar progression and went on to the “surviving moon” honoring plants that were not felled by the first frosts. The last month in their year was the “black seed moon” preceding the ripening of the saguaro cactus fruits. I wondered if a similar calendar had guided the ancient people living around Bird Cloud. It is not knowable. It all must be imagined.