by Mari Sandoz
It was a long, long mile, and the noses were barely above the water the last 100 yards, but they made it, the cattle crawling out the far side, standing panting, and reluctant to set one foot ahead of the other to make room for those climbing out behind. When they were all out only 100 had failed to make it—refused the river entirely.
It was a story to cheer the home folks back in Texas, whether their sympathies were still with Indiana or Ohio or Vermont or heatedly with the South. The story of the boys grew and spread all over the cow country for generations.
Some experienced cowmen didn't do nearly so well. Dudley Snyder, who delivered thousands of Texas steers to the Confederacy after the Mississippi River was lost to the Yankee gunboats, had two work oxen, trained swimmers. On land they drew his grub and tackle wagon, at streams he unyoked them and put them in the lead of the herd. They never faltered, not even in roaring floodtime, and the herd, accustomed to seeing them ahead all the miles of the trail, followed them confidently. Too valuable to sell for beef, they pulled the old wagon back to Texas each time.
The vast unbranded herds of cattle attracted hideouts from both the North and the South, particularly draft dodgers, bounty jumpers, deserters, and plain outlaws. Many gathered up little herds in the Western Cross Timbers and similar regions, even though it was understood among most of the Texas cattlemen that unbranded calves and young stuff were to belong with the brand of the older stock. When the Texans dragged home from the war they were faced with more than Indians to fight. They found the cattle thieves thick on the northwest border and well dug in, with brands established and the guns to defend them. Early in the war the ranchers of the Keechi, with Jim Loving as leader, had formed a loose sort of protective association to fight these rustlers moving in, and to brand up the calves of the war widows, but this became impossible as more and more men went to fill the shrinking ranks of the Confederacy.
Almost no she stuff had been sold during the war years and outside of the rustlers there had been no cattle enemies except the very rare Indian raider. The Comanches, angry that they had been driven from their reservation lands in Texas and the region across the Red, had refused to join the Confederacy as some tamer Indians did. They had promised to raid the border but no Indians were very interested in gathering wild cattle from the thorny brush and breaks when the herd-minded buffalo was still plentiful out on the open prairie, and much easier to crawl up to. So the Texas cattle had multiplied until at least 6,000,000 were running free in 1865, and that in spite of the drouth of 1863-64, when the Brazos that drowned Jesse Day and other hard-bitten trailers went so dry it was said a man could ride its bed for 300 miles through the Palo Pinto region without wetting a fetlock of his horse. Vast stretches of post oak died, crops failed, and corn for the horses of the rangers who tried, with their depleted ranks to hold off the rustlers, had to be bullwhacked in from east Texas.
But now the rains were back and the men returning from the war, those who would return. They found the rustlers, the maverickers as they called themselves, already trailing large herds North, cattle that had been held ready for the moment of peace to open the routes. True, their herds were unmarked stock and, by custom, classed as mavericks, free for the taking as soon as no longer running with the cow. Even the term maverick was a new and curious one, from Samuel Maverick, the already legendary figure sometimes said to own more cattle than anyone else in Texas, although apparently he never claimed more than the 400 head he brought in to the mainland from an island in 1853 and sold out completely three years later, at range delivery, still only an estimated 400 head.
All over the impoverished, devastated South seed stock was desperately needed, even more than the meat they lacked so long. But Confederate money was worthless and even good young cows at $3 to $5 found no buyers. There was a great beef shortage in the north, too, where the breeding stock was dangerously low. A good-grade, matured beef animal, worth around $5 in Texas brought $50 in the North. It was this harvest the maverickers reaped now, making up their herds from the gentler stock. The returning Texans, shorthanded, and without a cent of northern currency, learned to round up their cattle against bluffs or other barriers, roped and branded the wild stuff in the open, developing tricks and short cuts on top of those learned from the Indian and Mexican vaqueros of the old mission herds.
A stimulating element in this, like a shot of redeye to the swill-barrel johnnies of the frontier towns was the race of the new railroads heading west, like long fingers reaching up the main streams. In the North the Union Pacific had already crossed into Nebraska and was pushing up the Platte into the buffalo plains. Other railroads were creeping across Missouri, and to reach this market the old Shawnee Trail across southeast Kansas into Missouri, grown deep in grass during the war, was cropped cleaner than a barroom floor, the water holes and riverbanks chopped into bottomless mud by thousands of sharp and eager hoofs. Once more the farmers hurried out to guard the border against the disease their cattle had not suffered once during the war years with no Texas cattle on the trail. Most of them had been guerrillas in the war and Union men, to whom any Texan was a bloody Johnny Reb. At the first death of a milk cow near the trail they were out with guns, axes and scythes, pitchforks and bull whips.
"Can't you see our herd is clean and healthy?" the southerners tried to argue.
"They carry poison wherever they go!" a Missourian shouted in reply, waving his Long Tom, his thumb on the hammer.
"Just tromping over the grass, they makes it poison!" another added.
After some shooting and a horsewhipping or two, and several stampedes that spread the cattle and with them the fever, Baxter Springs, Kansas, became the end of the trail. But there, without pasture or shipping facilities, the herds had to be sold to any Kansan who would take them off the owner's hands. Some sent their cattle on to Kansas City and St. Joseph by the fort-to-fort road and the railroad or steamboats for the eastern corn country. Many were bought by Iowa farmers, until their cattle came down with the fever. By then east Kansas stock, too, was dying of this Texas sickness, and so Baxter's day was done.
The summer of 1865 the drive had been small but the next year an estimated 250,000 cattle crossed the Red into Indian Territory for Missouri or Kansas. The first drives ran into trouble with the Five Civilized Tribes of the Territory. These Indians raised cattle, too, and demanded ten cents a head toll for the grass the herds ate going through. Some drovers paid it, a legal charge; others traded cattle for their passage; a few drew guns and bluffed or bulled it through, although the Indian Act of 1834 penalized drovers $1 a head for cattle driven across any Indian lands without the owner's consent. Others swung around east into Arkansas, risking attack from the farmers and the raiding thieves hidden out in the rough breaks of the Ozarks. One of these trailers was Captain E. B. Millett, who made it to the Mississippi but by then his herd was too gaunted to sell in the glutted market. He crossed into Illinois, bought winter feed for his cattle, and lost money. Many other herds were started north without specific destination and most of them ended disastrously, the cattle scattered over southeast Kansas, hunting feed, unsold. But the owners went home to gather up more herds for next spring—even Millett. It was like a call, a sacred call that could not be denied.
R. D. Hunter, a Scotsman who had sickened in the Colorado mines, started toward Texas that 1866 for cattle. At the Red he bought a herd of 400 at $25 apiece. On the way to Sedalia, Missouri, the sheriff took the herd over and arrested Hunter, along with the bosses of around 10,000 head more. Hunter got the sheriff to take him to the county seat for a talk with the authorities. As soon as the two men were out of sight, the trail bosses headed the herds west for Indian Territory thirty-five miles off, without stopping for rest or grass. At the county seat it seems Hunter had a sociable drink with the sheriff, enough to get him drunk, and then slipped away to overtake the herds. After a few days recuperating in the Territory, they struck westward for about 150 miles, then north to hit the Kaw River near Atchison. They
ran into settler trouble there, too, but got across the river to St. Joseph and shipped the stock to Illinois at a profit.
The obvious route to avoid the farmers and settlers was to swing clear around west but the Comanches were still more dangerous, even for the old cowmen, thorny as the brush of Texas, and tough as the bois d'arc, the osage orange of the Red River bottoms. The drovers now were all kinds, from youths like Saunders and his companions who had swum their herd over the mile-wide Mississippi, hound-gutted Confederates, experienced stockmen who had been fighting Indians and Mexican raiders for years, army mule skinners, and professional Indian fighters, to the riffraff of the southern river towns, gamblers, con men and hide-outs from the law and just plain murderers. They were all looking for a new cattle route north.
Jesse Chisholm, a half-breed Cherokee hunter and trader, had built a post near the Wichita Indian village on the Arkansas River up in Kansas. Some time later he organized a trading expedition to the tribes down in the Washita River region of southwest Indian Territory not far from Texas. For three years he made regular trips back up to his post with bull trains of buffalo robes and furs, sometimes driving small herds of cattle, and returning loaded with trade goods. Soon white men and Indians were using his trail up through the Territory to the Wichita site. Then in 1866 Joseph G. McCoy, from Illinois, saw some of the big Texas herds and listened to the troubles encountered in marketing the season's quarter million head of cattle, with little except violent receptions, the year a calamity to most drovers.
McCoy hunted up the officials of the Kansas Pacific Railroad heading west, eventually to Denver, and proposed that they build shipping pens and other facilities for handling the Longhorns at some Kansas frontier station. He spoke of the hauling this would bring to the road, the large trail pay rolls to be spent in the town, and touched on the troubles of the trailers with Indians stampeding the herds, sweeping off their horses, and from the violent farmers and the bands of "no-counts"—discharged and jobless soldiers ranging the prairies, stealing, pillaging and murdering. But mostly McCoy stressed the money ready for the taking.
With arrangements made for carload deliveries of cattle to Quincy and Chicago, McCoy went out to find a suitable railhead along the KP, and met Colonel John Jacob Myers, an enthusiastic Texan who blandly promised 1,000,000 cattle to come up the Chisholm trail and north to any station McCoy selected. Meaning exactly what he said, Myers worked out an extension from Chisholm's place on the Washita to the Red River and south to his home town of Lockhart, then spread the word that McCoy would maintain an honest market up at the new town of Abilene, Kansas. By then it was almost midsummer of 1867, too late to increase the drive to Kansas very much that year, but early enough to draw those already on the road or about ready to start—35,000 head. It was a cholera summer and the plague that struck the troops guarding the Kansas Pacific trackworkers through the state sickened, even killed, many cowboys on the trail. R. D. Hunter, who had run into trouble with the sheriff in Missouri last year, drove 1,200 head straight through to Omaha before he heard of Abilene. The railroad records list Myers' own cattle as the first Texas herd to reach the new market although several others claimed the honor. Among these was C. C. Slaughter, said to have shipped the first cattle out of Abilene. Many favored him because C. C. was the first native cattle king of Texas. His father, who had dealt in early wild Spanish cattle, had been Sam Houston's right-hand bower and the first man to be married in the Republic, C.C. the first child born of the marriage.
But no matter who was first. The world's greatest cow path, the Chisholm Trail, was started, although Chisholm's road was only the middle section, and the trail was not widely known by that name until it no longer led to Abilene. By then the trail had moved westward, kept moving westward before the push of the granger, the despised hoe man.
BOOK II
IN DIVIDUAL RANCH SPREADS
CHAPTER I
SOME DEDICATED MEN
MANY an early Texan lived almost as wholly from his cow as the Plains Indian from his buffalo. She was meat, fat, soap, and candlelight to him, and her skin had even more uses than the buffalo's. Although it was less commonly the white man's dwelling, she often did provide his shelter and the cover for his wagon bows, the door to his first dugout, and perhaps the floor and the rugs. Early ranch and settler shacks were often lined with rawhide against the blue northers and the scorpions, centipedes, and rattlesnakes. Rawhide made the woven bottom of the Texan's springless bed and his chairs, stools, cradles, trunks, valises, baskets, buckets, dough pans, and even the settler's churn, although some thought it gave the butter a peculiar flavor.
Cowskin furnished the rancher his winter coat, his carriage and wagon robes, often his bedcovers as rawhide made his poncho and his chaps, his chaparejos, to protect him against brush and thorns and rain and cold. In addition to the regular leathern uses, rawhide often took the place of iron, cotton, wood, and even silver or paper. It was the rawhide riata in place of the surveyor's chain that measured off the Spanish land grants. The horses were hobbled with strips of rawhide instead of iron, and sometimes shod with it, as were the oxen. In a pinch rawhide served as slates, blackboards, playing cards, and faro table tops. Portraits and holy pictures were embossed or burned on it. When the horrifying cholera epidemic of 1849-50 swept up along all the western trails to the edge of swift water, and reached San Antonio, too, there were so many dead in the town and the fear of infection was so great that the corpses were simply rolled into cowhides and buried. To the Texan the cow was all the things the buffalo was to the hunting Indian, except perhaps the center of his highest religious ritual that the buffalo occupied in the sundance of many Plains tribes, and perhaps that could come, too.
The restrictions in trade and money during the war made Texas even more surely the Rawhide State. The trail drivers used the skin of the cow as thread and twine, pins, nails, washers, screws, bolts, as well as iron and cloth. While hackamores and picket ropes were usually horsehair, the lariat was rawhide, of four, even eight long, even strands, round-braided into graceful length, stretched and oiled until the throw rope was just stiff enough to sing out like a fiddle string and just the right weight for deft and accurate aim.
While the Texas Ranger was turning to the Colt six-shooter, California vaqueros still lassoed and dragged horse-stealing Indians to death rather than shot them, as the early Spaniards of Texas had also done. Once duels were fought by horsemen with leather riatas, each man trying to dodge the rival's loop while trying to rope him, jerk him off, drag him to pieces behind a spurring run through the cactus. Sometimes more or less friendly chapping contests decided who was to escort the very occasional girl home from a ranch country dance. Even the winner would be stiff for a week from the spanking his saddle-leaned buttocks took from the rawhide chap leg wielded against him. A particularly keen rivalry between Negro or Mexican bullwhackers or cow hands was sometimes settled by bull whips at a certain number of steps, the experts snaking the whips out in powerful, stinging, flesh-cutting lashes that sounded like sharp pistol shots but carried farther on the wind. To admit defeat short of blindness or collapse was shameful beyond a man's gut. Sometimes the welted faces were carried with a little of the show-off of the German officer's sword-cut cheek. Even in Texas the welts were proof of a little extra Texas dash and sand, an ability to ride life to a finish even as it had to be lived in the San Saba country.
Perhaps it was true that the Texan of 1867 needed to be tough as whang leather and hard as a flint hide, with the darkness of defeat and ruin on all the South and, except in the vast increases among the Longhorns, as heavily upon Texas. In addition to all the rustlers there was the Reconstruction Act of March, 1867, passed by the Radicals over President Johnson's veto. By this the South was turned over to the carpetbaggers pouring in all the past winter and to the local citizens not "disfranchised for participation in the rebellion" called scalawags.
McCoy's promise of good facilities and a sure and fair cattle market at Abilene
started a booming of hope from the Red River to the Gulf and out beyond the Cross Timbers. But he had no control over the depression in the East. The first trainload of Longhorns sold very poorly in Chicago and the second shipment, around 900 head, found no market at all and had to be taken to Albany, New York. Apparently it wasn't that no one wanted meat, even trail and railway-gaunted meat, and from cattle rumored diseased enough to sicken any cow that touched the ground the Longhorns walked on. There just wasn't much money around. Newspapers reported long queues of the unemployed being fed in the Tombs at New York City, and not with beef or even beef soup.
Surely these postwar years seemed enough to discourage anyone, but to many men of Texas the cow had been a way of life for a long time—dedicated men, dedicated to the cow with all their property, their time, even their lives.
One who was already an old-time cattleman by 1867 was Richard King, a New York Irishman. At ten he had stowed away on a schooner for Mobile. Discovered, he was made cabin boy and was on the steamer back in 1842 when the chief of the Seminoles and his principal warriors were lured on board for counciling and then told they were prisoners. Later, with a partner, King operated twenty-six small steamboats on the shifting, treacherous Rio Grande. Much of this time Captain King was also a cattleman. As early as 1852 he selected the Santa Gertrudis country of south Texas for a ranch, and bought the land as he could, land of many and sometimes doubtful titles: Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and United States. Some of it he had to buy twice. But it was coastal plain and seemed worth the effort. There was green-gray prickly pear, with the great flat ten-inch tongues or hands, reaching up to eight, ten feet. Most of the scattered trees of the sandy region had been brought in by the Longhorns dropping the seeds as they roamed the region. The most prolific were the mesquite and live oak, both able to exist without rain, both low, twisted, and often in clusters or mottes penetrable only to small animals or a determined man on foot. The oaks favored the coast, particularly the sandy belt, the mesquite spreading farther west on the black loam and clay as well as the sand. Willows came in too, and the huisache, the wild persimmon, the ebony and the brazil bush—all gnarled and thorny, mostly four, five feet high, seldom much above the mounted cowboy. This was the wild brush that the Long-horn favored, and therefore the cowman.