Cattlemen
Page 6
Although the butchery of mission stock was sudden it was apparently well organized. Six men armed with long Spanish knives rode at full speed through the herds, giving each head of cattle a blow at the back of the neck so it fell dead. Behind them the skinners ran in, and the butchers, who took the best cuts for solid beef and jerky. They were followed by swarms of Indian women who gathered the tallow into leathern hampers, to be tried out in large iron or copper kettles and, cooled a little, poured into skin botas containing an average of 500 pounds each.
There are apparently no records of the number of hides shipped by the missions and the rancheros in that bloody year of 1834. The port of Los Angeles received 100,000 hides, 250,000 pounds of tallow, and several cargoes of soap from the butchery. Evidently the buzzards and wolves got the flesh—the wolves, the worms, and the stinking winds.
At the time of secularization the twenty-one missions owned 396,400 head of cattle. By 1842 this had dropped to 29,020 head. Then the 49ers came to eat up everything in sight. Prices climbed like an eagle on the wind. There were rumors of $200 steers and 75-cent mine candles containing a nickel's worth of tallow. Texans headed their herds westward.
It was not an easy prospect to face, and the trail hands slung rifle scabbards to their saddles and prepared to fight their way through the Comanche and Apache country and any trouble beyond. There were, of course, the trails of the military, the stagecoaches, and emigrants, but all these moved faster than a trail herd and required much less grass and water. At the best it was a long, long whooping way to California, with vast stretches fit only for desert camels. Even the iron-hard hoofs of the Longhorns were worn sore on the stony reaches, their horns banging in the wild, tangled charges upon shrinking water holes, perhaps to find only alkali-crusted mud, cracked and stinking. Farther west they struck the routes of earlier herds from New Mexico and Arizona to the coast and the Texans made it through, past some flats that were snow-white with the bleached bones of the mission slaughter, and past the newer bones of meat gone to feed the hungry gold seekers, the stink of carrion and death still about them. Now and then a critter or two left the herd to bellow in anger and terror over the bones, eyes bulging, tongue out, others drawn to join in.
From the beginning there were Indian raids against the Texas missions, some energetic and persistent enough to drive the missionaries out. Ever since the settlers first pushed in, there was a skirmishing against the Indians, one that lasted longer and with more intensity than anywhere else on the Great Plains, with more depredations and killing, more captives taken. Originally the missions had encouraged the taking of captives to be turned into neophytes by paying the tame Indians for bringing them in. Later the Indians kept right on capturing anyone worth ransom—Mexicans and whites, the ransom usually paid by individuals or by the government. Sometimes captives were taken by the Texas Indians as the northern tribes did occasionally—to add to their people. It was during such a raid that the small girl Cynthia Ann Parker was captured, with some others, after the massacre of Parker's Fort in 1836. In 1840, at San Antonio, twelve Comanche chiefs brought a party of sixty-five Indians to a council with a dozen Texas leaders to bargain for the freeing of thirteen white captives. The Indians, suspicious in the stronghold of the whites, had brought only one of the captives along, the rest to be delivered later, when the good faith of the Texans was clear. Some of the settlers proposed that the chiefs be held as hostages. Upon this the Indians made a break for freedom. Thirty-three were killed, thirty-two captured, and seven white men died in the fighting. But many, many more whites were killed in revenge raids for this. Thirty years later young men were still avenging their dead relatives upon whites who had never heard of the Massacre of San Antonio.
There were friendly Indians, individuals and tribes, during these years, mostly enemies of the Comanches and Apaches or individuals like Caddo Jake, who taught the young Charlie Goodnight that a boy could stagger home under the carcass of a new-killed deer if it was gutted and everything useless thrown away. But too many Indians recalled the Spanish torture and mutilations upon their people and the later massacre of their chiefs. In revenge they committed depredations and atrocities unequaled anywhere else.
The Texans struck back but the Indians had vast hiding territory in the wild plains and the Cross Timbers, those parallel strips of scrub trees and brush that ran southward out of Indian Territory and across much of central Texas. It was seldom that any Indian was caught and, as happened elsewhere, those caught were often not the depredators and so more wrongs were left to avenge. When the early ranchers moved into the region of Jacksboro they were struck by the Comanches, several killed, horses swept away, one rancher lanced almost to pieces. More and more atrocity stories came out. In west Parker County the Sherman family was attacked; the father, ill-fitted for the Texas frontier, didn't even have a gun for hunting game. The Indians, so it was reported, drove the family into the rain, attacked Mrs. Sherman, shot her with arrows, and then stripped the house and swung out through Loving Valley and the Keechi Creek region, their herd of stolen horses growing as they whooped them off westward.
The small ranchers scattered through the region immediately raised a posse and followed the Indians through the western Cross Timbers and out upon the open prairie, gaining on them, encumbered as they were with the stolen horses. But the Indians got into a migrating buffalo herd who not only hid the trail but held up the pursuers. Without food or blankets or a change of horses the posse gave up. The reports of twenty-three killed in the Indian raids brought out the Rangers under Sul Ross. They struck the camp and among the captured Comanches was the chief's wife, the Cynthia Ann Parker carried away at Parker's Fort twenty-four years ago. She was sent to her relatives but died, apparently of a broken heart, far from her chieftain husband and her son Quanah, called Quanah Parker because among the Plains Indians a man became a member of his wife's family, the children taking the mother's name when surnames were first thrust upon them.
This punishment of the Comanches by the Ross expedition was only a temporary defeat for the tribe that had well-defined trails over the same Staked Plains that tested Coronado so severely back in 1541. Their raiding trails reached from beyond the Canadian River in Indian Territory down through Texas and across the Rio Grande to the good horse herds of north Mexico, and anyone who settled near these routes was in trouble.
By now ranchers were pushing hard into the Comanche hunting lands. Back in 1855 Kit Carter had headed up the Brazos with his wife and one child, following the precious water to a spot he had seen and admired. Few white men knew of the hidden bend or that it was the favorite shelter and camp ground for many Indians. They did not give it up easily and Carter had many chances to try his rifle against them as they raided his herds and attacked his home and his rapidly increasing family. Carter's Bend was thirty miles from the nearest neighbor but Mrs. Carter was fitted for the life. She was the sister of Sul Ross, most famous Indian fighter of Texas, and no Indians, rustlers, or tragedy managed to shake the Carters loose from their spot on the Brazos. It was a long haul. Nine years after the Ross expedition that brought back Cynthia Ann Parker, one of the Carter sons, working out from Graham with eleven other cowboys, was surrounded by perhaps fifty Indians. The cowboys opened fire with their pistols but the Indians charged with their arrows and some long-range rifles. The white men managed to hold them off all day. One was killed there and six wounded, two mortally. The Carter boy died that night of an arrow in the side.
Still the frontier was moved farther out, thrust out. As under the Mexican Government, the Republic of Texas offered a settler 177 acres of land for farming; for ranching he was allowed a total of around 4,440 acres, a square league. With an enlarged family more could sometimes be added, up to a total of eleven square leagues at small cost. Through the various land scrips the settler could buy up a section, 640 acres, at fifty cents an acre. In the annexation agreement Texas was permitted to keep all her government land, to dispose of as she pleased. Land fr
auds were common, as they had been under the Mexican Government and the Republic.
The settlements creeping up the streams scared out not only the shyer game but some of the early frontiersmen who might be gone like a quail flushing far ahead of the gun. It was in those years that men like Kit Carter, Richard King, Dudley Snyder, the Olives, the Lovings, Charlie Goodnight, and scores of others started into cattle. They needed not only seed stock, theirs for the rounding up, but lots of range, still free farther on. They also needed a readiness to fight Indians and other raiders, and the will to search out markets, always to search out and fight for markets.
By now everyone knew that the Texas Longhorn took rivers like an otter and that his long, swinging stride could carry him almost anywhere that a market could be scared up. Although the competition and the middleman still cut into the profits at Shreveport, particularly with the depression of the middle and late 1850's, it is perhaps true that more cattle passed through there than anywhere else in those years. Shreveport was close, and several trailers made two drives a year. They could start out as late as September, when branding and other ranch work was done and the steers fat. The drive could be a slow one, with a plain wagon road all the way. At the port the cattle were loaded on barges, forty, fifty steers to each, and towed down the Red and on to New Orleans. This avoided the early spring start necessary for the longer, more uncertain northeastern drives, with the dangerous spring crossing of the Brazos, perhaps, and certainly the Red.
Saddle ponies for ranch work and the trails cost around seven, eight dollars, some good ones with Mexican brands, wet stock, accepted without questions. Costing so little, the horses were usually turned out in the fall, perhaps even chased off, to keep the raiding Indians, who would get them anyway, from coming to the ranches. The remuda of a trail herd was often mostly mustangs, perhaps new to rope and saddle—a wild circling of grays, blacks, duns, sorrels, and bays inside the rope corral every morning, their manes a cloud about their heads, the long tails streaming. Usually they were sold when the drive was done.
By 1859 cattle were moving steadily to Missouri and farther northeast. Many took the Old Beef Trail, as it was called, almost from the start. A herd of say 500 big steers might leave the Waco region early in June, cross the Trinity at Dallas and the Red at Rabbit's Ford, where the trail wagon was ferried over for a dollar. From there they went through the Indian Nation, crossed the Blue at Nail's Mill, and on to the Boggy and the Canadian, the Arkansas at old Fort Gibson and then over into Missouri, perhaps to Neosha and Honey Springs, perhaps on to Springfield, a little town, but a place where cattle might bring around $50 a head, at first. The drive was leisurely, taking around two and a half months, the steers holding their weight well. By this time thousands of cattle were trailed to Missouri and farther into the Midwest, many to Chicago and beyond. Truly it seemed that the grasses of the great western prairies could grow meat enough to feed all the nation. But the meat of a four-, five- , even six-year-old steer that had walked from Texas to the Hudson could be mighty tough, and no denying.
Nor was there any denying that after a Texas herd passed, the local cattle began to die, and no amount of dosing and drenching could save even a poor farmer's lone milk cow.
But these did not seem serious problems to the adventuresome business of trail driving, very adventurous to those who had never eaten the dust of the drags or been nearer to ranch work than the romantic pictures of this new hero, the cowboy, in Harper's Weekly or Leslie's. They did not exist at all as problems to the young men and boys who, disappointed in the California gold fields, stopped off on the way home to become Texas trail drivers. Most herds had boys along now, some very young but usually from ranches, boys equal to a man's work and responsibility before there was enough down on their cheeks to catch a little dust.
Not that all of even the responsible boys could resist an occasional range bullfight. In the spring and early summer boys and some men, too, liked to sneak out and drive a couple of good fighters together, not wild brush poppers but more manageable ranch bulls who would put on a real battle. Grudges between some of them grew up, so it took careful watching to keep them from killing each other and spoiling the fun.
Gradually these fights grew into regular Sunday contests over much of the ranch country, the bulls brought together at a good central watering place, with perhaps everybody except the owners knowing about it and going to slouch over the saddle horn and watch. Sometimes bull calves with fine roaring voices, big, powerful, and full of meanness, were hidden out from the cutting knife, to grow up for the fights. There was much far gathering to these contests and high betting until the owners discovered how their best herd sires were spending their strength.
But serious times were coming, as everyone knew even in the wilds of Texas, and trailers hurried their herds together. Early in April, 1861, Jesse Day with two young sons started his Longhorns across the Brazos at Waco. Usually if there were steers in a bunch, one of these led, as the bellwether led sheep, even into the slaughterhouse, except that the good wether was allowed to escape to bring others to the knife. Eventually some trailers took their good lead steers back to Texas, to use again. But the steers of Day's herd were all new and they balked at the first stream they faced, the Brazos in roaring flood. He plunged his horse into the boiling current to toll the leaders to follow while the boys crowded the rear with yihoos and whipping. But the water was so deep and wild that the man and horse were swept under and away.
"Let 'em go!" the elder of the sons shouted. Together they spurred down along the river. They found the father after a while, washed up, and took the body back to a nearby town to bury. Then, fiercely determined now, they gathered up their herd and pushed it into the river and on northward, to blaze their own trail to Kansas City. At the Missouri border they were halted by angry farmers armed with squirrel guns and pitchforks, shouting threats against the Texas herds that brought a sickness to kill their cattle. The boys had to go around, hunting out rougher country with fewer farmers. Finally they reached St. Louis, sold the stock, and bought horses that they drove down to Louisiana for the sugar plantations. When they got back to Austin they went up the trail to fetch the body of Jesse Day home, and then gathered another herd. But it was too late to go far, with the feared, and anticipated, fighting against the Yankees started. There were few slaves in the cattle country and with the men gone to war, no one could gather up a herd in a region that had no fences to hold more than a couple of wrangling horses. The Union sympathizers, fairly numerous in north Texas, hurried to safer territory across the Red, their cattle running loose, too.
With no one to pursue her, the Texas cow spread and burgeoned like the bluebonnets of the April plains. Starting with an estimated four million, the Longhorn increased so the herds spread out toward the buffalo ranges and deep into the Timbers, unbranded, unmarked, unaccustomed even to the sight of a rider. As was usual in any new region, there were almost no old men in Texas, and the few herds gathered were mostly the work of boys too young for the gray uniform. Many stories were told of these young cowmen. One of them, W. D. H. Saunders, a rawboned seventeen, with half-a-dozen others about his age headed for New Orleans with 1,100 steers—meat that the Rebels needed desperately. They swam the Colorado, Brazos, Trinity, Neches, and the Sabine to the Mississippi. There they heard that New Orleans was in the hands of Union troops. After chewing this over for an evening, they decided to swing around north, planning to sell the herd at Mobile, beyond the Mississippi, with no way of ferrying the steers across the stream a mile wide here and around forty feet deep. Young Saunders hunched his awkward shoulders as he slouched wearily in the saddle and looked at a river such as he had never seen, the far side only a dim line beyond the swirling water, brown-gray, almost like the flanks of their lead steer already shying angrily from the first sniff at the stinking floodwaters.
"We got 'er to do. We can't let them damnyankees get one over on us," he said, rubbing the soft curling of young beard on his chin, but d
oubtful.
The trail-gaunted young cowboys beside him nodded. They took down their ropes, fell in around the resting herd, took it back from the river a way, and started the steers running straight for the water, crowding them, whooping, yell- ing, popping the ropes on the bounding flanks, pushing them hard on the tail of Saunders' horse as he put the animal into the water, and went half under. But the horse came up, swimming strong. The young cowboy shook the water from his face and looked back. The lead steers were being crowded over the bank, eyes rolling in panic, many trying to hold back, feet braced at the water's edge against the press of stock behind, others working to turn back into the rushing herd, their horns a thorny thicket pointing in every direction.
"Crowd 'em! Crowd 'em!" he yelled, knowing nobody could hear.
Then suddenly the mouse-gray steer jumped far in, came up swimming. Several others in the lead took to the water behind him, their horns up, strung out, kept from crowding too close by some of the cowboys to avoid raising the waves too high. The leaders hesitated again when they neared the current, very swift, rushing past in a foam-streaked swelling full of floating trash and branches and now and then a small tree. For a whole minute it seemed a spin was inevitable, the lead steers to turn back and start a mill, here in the middle of the Mississippi, where the entire herd and perhaps some of the riders would be lost. Horrified, young Saunders dropped back and drew his laboring horse in on the upstream side of the faltering lead steer until the animal saw him. Then he struck confidently ahead, pointing his quirt to the far, far bank as he had directed the herd all the way. He had to hope, and for a while he listened to the wild churning behind him. When he dared look back, the river was full of cattle still swimming, some drifting downstream but not too far, their horns looking truly like the rockers of half a thousand granny chairs floating across the boiling flood, the riders whooping along beside them and behind.