Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  By 1867 King had bought out one partner for $50,000 and dissolved the agreement with another. He hoped to own all the land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande and, further, to control a strip of land three miles wide from Brownsville to the railroad in Kansas for a cattle trail. The King Ranch already contained a good portion of this land the captain coveted, and the Chisholm Trail promised to serve as a cattle highway when beef prices came back. In the meantime he started to fence his range with wooden planks, another typical King dream. But his cattle were flourishing and he had great plans for improved stock. For this the scrub bulls must be kept out, away from good blood.

  In the meantime the glutted markets forced the Texas ranchers to set up hide and tallow factories, to reap something from the great herds, make a little northern money. King was one of the first to try the slaughtering sheds and pens set up along the coast at such places as Fulton and Brazoria. Here cattle scarcely worth the rustler's trouble were harvested for the hide, worth more than the whole cow alive. Some were mossy old steers with horns eight or nine feet across, rough, wavy horns so heavy they threatened to tip the steer's thin rump up into the sky. Here New England buyers gathered hides for their tanneries, tallow for candles and soap. Sometimes hoofs and horns went to glue and comb manufacturers and hair for plaster and padding. Only the meat was worthless, left to rot or to feed the hordes and clouds of gorging scavengers—the small skittering animals and the larger, the foxes and coyotes, the buzzards and magpies, with the flies gathering thick over everything, in clouds around the long sheds and the factories as thick as the stink. At Brazoria Negroes were hired to take what was wanted of the carcasses and then slid the rest down the chutes into the river, where fish fought obscenely over them, great catfish, evil-whiskered mouths slashing and crushing, the fish leaping clear of the water in the struggle. A factory down at the bottom of the Brazos attracted whole schools of fighting sharks.

  This waste of meat distressed Richard King, who had known the hungry and saw this all as profit lost besides. He tried preserving the flesh of newly-killed Longhorns by injecting brine into the veins. The process failed but he brought in several thousand hogs to fatten on the meat. Many got away into the brushy country, where descendants of the King pigs were killed and eaten by cowboys for many years.

  The factories weren't the only places where cowhides were taken. Mexicans scoured the country, hamstringing the fleeing Longhorns with machetes, stripping off the hides. Some fired the grass to herd the cattle together in unburned strips and pockets. After blue northers the cattle that had drifted into bunches and piles along the coast drew out everybody, even boys and some women, to skin the dead and the dying. Only the slaughter of the buffalo up along the regions of the railroad exceeded the hide taking here.

  Yet even in this time so sorrowful for the cattlemen Richard King was laying plans for better cattle, with more meat and with an immunity to the disease the North called the Texas fever but which no Texan intended to admit existed. For this better, this immune stock King was working out better range methods, more efficient handling and care. His methods, all his methods, would be his own, and if there were those who objected, he intended to be too high, too big to reach, for anybody, or any power to reach. He was a dedicated man.

  There were other men with determination in the cow business. Soon after the Mexican War James Olive had moved his family from Louisiana to Williamson County, Texas, and started in cattle. He and his wife were quiet, religious, churchgoing, but there was trouble between the father and the eldest son, young I. P., called Print, for Prentice. In Texas this grew like the thorns, with the son's taste for bad companions, hard liquor, cards, and gun play and the mother still shielding him as she had from birth, keeping his actions hidden from the father when she could, standing before him with her broad skirts outspread between him and the son when his misconduct was discovered. Finally Print was drawn into the war, wounded, and, recovered, made a mule skinner and captured at Vicksburg. Paroled in an exchange of prisoners, he was appointed to garrison duty at Galveston. Here, in idleness, he found drinking and gambling even more attractive and more available, as well as several shooting scrapes that involved no one that an Olive could possibly have termed a damnyankee.

  When the war ended, Print went into stock raising near home. Pleased at what looked like a sober settling down at last, the father and two of the other sons bought more stock. Print and the other three had their farms separate but they ran a ranch farther west on a large tract of state land together, each with his own brand. Under Print's hard riding, hard cussing, they built reservoirs to catch any water that fell, dug wells, and later put up windmills. Their cattle grew into thousands. For a while they neighbored with the ranchers around them, particularly with the Snyders, J. W. and Dudley, also of Williamson County. It had been Dudley who trailed beef to the Confederacy, swimming his herds behind the two oxen who drew his trail wagon but led the steers across the swollen rivers. Dudley Snyder was known as a good man to tie to, and Print Olive missed few tricks.

  In 1866 Print had bossed the general roundup of the region, really only a great cow hunt for stock branded before the war, the unmarked, the mavericks, to be divided among the ranches represented. At night the men gambled in the light of brush fires with the unbranded stock, a top critter worth $5 in chips, down to a yearling valued at fifty cents. The Moore boy who was along watching for his father's strays kept the fires going for two bits a night. Print Olive furnished the grub: coffee, corn meal, salt, whisky, and all the beef a man could eat—so long as it wasn't Olive beef. But that was customary.

  By the 1870's many were complaining about the Olives, not aloud, but among themselves. Their stock was shrinking while the Olive herds, particularly Print's, more than doubled every year. There were some complaints at the courthouse but nothing came of them except that a couple of the bellyachers seemed to quit the country. At least, as Print said, nobody saw them around any more. Then there were rumors of trouble with a new settler, a young man called Deets Phreme, who went into cattle. One spring day Print Olive, his brother Ira, and some hired help starting on a cattle drive ran into Phreme and a couple of his hands. It seemed that the Olives accused him of killing their cattle and pistol-whipped him until his face and head were cut and swollen, knocked him down, and told him if they caught him on the range again he would be shot.

  Old-timers warned him to go, get out, but Phreme was determined to stay. He had a legal right here. He was still as stubborn when he heard the Olive version of the encounter, saying they had found some of their brands in the Phreme herd and while the men cut out their stock, Print and the settler had words. Later Phreme and his hired man had shot at young Bob Olive, Print's brother, tried to bushwhack the youth.

  Plainly they were setting the young settler up for a target, the old-timers said.

  A few days later Print Olive managed to meet Phreme out on the prairie. "Did you shoot at my brother Bob?" he demanded.

  "No, I didn't," the settler replied, "but I sure as hell would like to take a pop at you!"

  The two men fired almost the same instant and fell together in the stinking powder smoke, both badly wounded. Phreme died soon afterward and Print Olive was several years really recovering. This time he was tried for murder and acquitted. "Easier to move men than cattle," he was reported to have said after the celebration.

  Now the rumors about the Olives were more open, some perhaps spread by them to scare the settlers from the range they claimed, and harder to hold with so many pushing into the San Gabriel and Brushy Creek region. This man or that one vanished, and while few in Texas reported their comings and goings, some were settlers or little ranchers who left families without so much as a pone or a spoonful of hominy grits.

  Maverickers, as well as out-and-out rustlers, and anybody that Print Olive decided fit these terms, were given fair warning to keep off the Olive range, claimed by the only right possible on public lands—the guns to hold them. Cattle prices were coming
up again and large rustling outfits followed the rise like the eagle's shadow follows him on the ground below. Some of the ranchers had been hiring tough, gun-fingered cowboys, men who didn't care whose cattle they burnt with the ranch brand or whose milk cow they whooped off into the passing herd. In return the little outfits and the settlers stole back as much as they dared, and a little extra for their trouble.

  Here and there suspected rustlers drew together in gangs for self-protection by lies, perjury, intimidation, and murder. Not that these methods were unfamiliar in a country largely unorganized, and where many a man even in high position was traveling under a name that never belonged to his father.

  An old man called Pea Eye because his eyes were squushed together, although apparently large enough to see one of these gangs stealing cattle, appeared in court as a witness against them. Not long afterward his faithful ox team drew him into his home yard, down in the bottom of the wagon dead, full of buckshot. It seems nothing was done about that, except that one man was found hanging to a pecan tree and another vanished. Some of this was not far from the Olives, grown into a powerful clan of farmers, ranchers, and even peace officers, as peace officers went on the frontier.

  The pointed complaint that stock was still vanishing in the Olive region Print Olive switched as handily as a spinning bronc switches ends. "We mean to kill any man found skinning our cattle or running off our horses." He said this half-tipsy in a bar but even those on fair terms with the Olives stood away a little, silent, remembering some of the things told of this fierce-eyed, gaunt-gutted man.

  In a little while everybody knew that Print Olive meant what he said. The Austin Statesman reported the death of Turk Turner and James H. Crow over near McDade, adding:

  Two beeves had been killed and skinned and in the absence of the parties who did it, the carcasses were discovered and watch kept to see who would return to carry away the beef and hides. Finally the above parties returned with a wagon and after having loaded up and started away they were fired upon by unknown parties and both killed.

  It seemed the bodies were found by Crow's young son sent to look for his father after school. The dead men were several hundred yards apart, the team tied to a tree. Later it came out that there was more than the Statesman printed. Turner and Crow had been wrapped tightly in the fresh hides of the cattle they killed, while still alive, and left on the prairie to suffer the slow and horrible Spanish "Death of the Skins" as the burning sun drew the green hides tight and hard as iron about the men. The brands had been turned up conspicuously for everyone to see—brands of the Olives.

  There was alarm in the region, the women afraid, their eyes filmed with the horror of what had happened to Turner and Crow when their own men rode away, for the skins drew as tightly about the innocent as the guilty. Turk had been regarded as a desperado but Old Man Crow, though he had son in the pen, had been considered honest. Besides, there was a courthouse and law here against rustlers.

  Although Crow's son accused the Olives of the murder, nothing came of it. They were still on close terms with two of the region's most prominent citizens, Dudley and J. W. Snyder. The Snyders had a newly-purchased herd over on the Olive range. Young Moore, who as a boy had kept the fires burning for the roundup gambling back in 1866, was hired to keep an eye on the stock and was boarding with the Olives.

  Early in August the brothers, Print, Jay Thomas, and Ira, with four cowhands, including two Negroes, were branding a new herd. Although they were working the stock at the ranch, at night the men stretched out on the prairie beyond the corrals to sleep, their guns ready, apparently expecting a raid on the cattle. Around one o'clock, when the moon was well hazed, they were awakened by shots, men setting fire to the ranch buildings and shooting at anyone seen moving out on the dusky prairie. All the Olive outfit except young Moore were well armed. They fired from behind banks and bushes in the rising flames from the ranch house. There seemed to be fifteen, perhaps twenty in the attacking mob, some scattered in a wide circle around the ranch, others closer up, apparently with shotguns. In that first stiff fire in the light of the burning ranch Thomas was hit with several blasts of buckshot. Dying, he thrust his rifle into young Moore's hand and motioned to him to unbuckle the cartridge belt. Print was struck in the hip and crawled painfully for better cover, growling his curses against the men who killed his brother. One of the Negroes was dead, too, the other badly wounded. Inside the corral the cattle were milling hard from the shots fired into them and in terror of the flames rising high from the burning logs of the ranch house, sparks, and rolling smoke over them. As they surged against the poles of the corral, the attackers jerked the gates back and the big steers stampeded for the breaks, almost running over the defenders scattered behind the shadowy clumps and banks.

  The fire of the buildings died rapidly and the lowering moon was lost in the smoke that filled the valley. In the darkness the fight became a watchful preparation for dawn, but with the first graying that might show a known face, the attackers slipped away. The ranch hands got Print stretched out to ease his wound a little and covered the half-naked body of Thomas. Then they discovered from the wounded Negro, who had been the first to awaken, that the place had been robbed of seven or eight hundred dollars Print kept on hand as down payment on cattle delivered.

  But plainly this was not just a robbery; it was a plan for extermination. Many blamed the Turner and Crow killings. Crow's son, who had served time, promised vengeance. It was known that he headed a lot of toughs and desperados, probably the mob that attacked the Olive ranch. But immediately another gang loudly claimed the honor in saloons and the country post offices. Not even Print seemed certain who the attackers had been, with a dozen enemy outfits long itching for a showdown. In addition the Olives still had the trial for the murder of Turner and Crow before them. When court convened, the Olive forces camped at one side of Georgetown, the county seat, with an estimated forty armed men ready to drag the jury out to the trees down along the San Gabriel if the verdict went against them. On the other side of town it seems another camp had gathered, sixty men against the Olives, determined to uphold the law of Texas, here so close to Austin, to stop this bloodshed practically on the capitol steps.

  All through the trial the town was divided into these two armed forces, the main street a barren and dusty sort of dare line between the waiting belligerents. But in the end the Olives were turned loose and without bloodshed.

  By now more dead men had been turning up. Two were found hanging by their picket ropes near the Williamson County line, with plenty of money still on them, so it wasn't robbery. Later in the summer another dead man was found in the timber, stripped naked except for a hickory shirt and a blanket over him. "Almost like he was ambushed in bed, like Thomas Olive was," some said.

  The law-abiding people of the region were furious as a bull at the smell of blood. Here, within a twenty-five-mile distance, ten or twelve men had been killed during the past few months, and more farther out. Newspapers agreed in their protests, pointing out that more men had been killed in Texas the last year than she lost during all the lamented war. The editor of the Austin Statesman suggested a remedy, "— instead of hanging, have horse thieves and robbers surgically rendered incapable of crime and of the procreation of knavery."

  As Print recovered enough to get around in his buggy, the bold attack and the death of one of their brothers stirred the Olives to a revenging fury, particularly young Bob, and the eldest, I. P., Print, his small eyes always burning in one rage or another. The women of the region pitied his wife, even those who envied her the wealth of her husband's ways. She had been an orphan reared by her grandfather, and was now the mother of a growing family, including a son who roused his father's anger and contempt as Print himself had infuriated his religious father. It was said that both Print's wife and his parents begged for a quieter life, for peace for the children. But families counted very little in these days of cow feuds, and Print and young Bob were laying for the killers of Thomas.
Then one day two Negroes stopped in at the home ranch and asked Mrs. Olive for a drink of water. Although Negroes outside of the army were not allowed to carry guns, Print saw they had pistols strapped to their saddles. He ran to the house for his rifle, for once not beside him. With it across his arm he got between the Negroes at the well and their horses. When they started to leave, he pulled down on them, ordered them to halt, to explain their business.

  Oh, they were just out hunting stolen horses and needed a little water this hot day, one of them answered amiably.

  "Then why was you asking my wife where her husband's at?" Print roared. "Don't make a move!"

  Scared, one of the men jumped for the horses and was shot dead on the spot. The other surrendered and was driven off the place with a bull whip, so it was rumored, perhaps to explain the deep red and swelling cuts on his dark face and the bloody shirt slashed from his crusted back. Within a month Print Olive was tried for the murder of the Negro and acquitted.