by Mari Sandoz
"Just another of them biggety Lincoln Niggers gettin' an Olive ticket to hell," a sympathetic southerner said, and counted the dead Negroes credited to Print and to his brother Bob on his fingers, moving to the second hand and grinning. But no one counted the white men openly.
Even those friendly to the Olives were getting uneasy about Print. He was drinking more, brawling more, too, perhaps with the Union vets who had returned to Williamson County but often with long-time associates as well, until one or the other of the more peaceful brothers or a trusted ranch hand had to coax him out of the bar. Not even his brothers were spared Print's violent tongue now. And there were so many ways to get even with a rancher, ways that didn't involve actually facing his gun. He had cattle to be stolen, scattered, or destroyed, range ready for the lucifer or even flint and steel. He needed some who passed as friends in the emergencies common in the wilds, not only in prairie fires, stampedes, or attacks but in accidents and sickness. Even in ordinary times he needed someone to offer a pleasant word not forced by the fear of a low-slung gun, particularly a man with children, with a growing boy. There were rumors that even Print Olive's wife dared a little gentle urging for a move to new, less-crowded range.
Perhaps the wildest section of all Texas was the Big Bend country of the Rio Grande. Most of it was barren earth and rock, the stream squeezed into a deep canyon by the dark and rugged mountains, like a great hard-knuckled fist thrusting the river toward Mexico. In the entire region it seemed that nothing could ever be found except by the eagle or the buzzard. Yet even here at least one man had dedicated himself to the cow. Milton Faver was from the outside, too, although few who knew him had any idea of his origins, but no one doubted that he was the first cattle king of the Big Bend, with vaqueros to work his cattle and a trooping of Mexican farm hands for his fields and gardens and his famous peach orchards. His wife was a beautiful Mexican, fitted to her courtly, educated husband who spoke French, German, Spanish, and English fluently. It was said he came to the region in 1854, and that while he brought no cattle with him he tolled a comfortable number to swim the Rio Grande and burned his little F brand on them. Others said Faver was from England, had come to Mexico and started in cattle by trading with the Indians and then moved to Texas in 1857. Another account was that he came much later, straight from the North somewhere for his health, and that the start in cattle came with his beautiful wife.
He established the famous Cibolo Springs Ranch, later a freight stop for his ox trains on the Chihuahua-San Antonio line. The ranch, in the Chinati Mountains, was good tillable land, irrigated from living springs that had watered the cultivations of prehistoric Indians there. Faver's peaches were famous, and his peach brandy, too, particularly at the roundups. He made it in his fifty-gallon copper still, with enough extra to trade to the Indians but never delivered until they were safely far away from the ranch.
As the herds of Milton Faver, Don Milton as his Mexican neighbors called him, increased, he built new ranches for cattle and for sheep, the first of the latter in the region of the wolf and the eagle. At Cibolo he built a fort against Indians and bandits, the walls twenty feet high, with tall lookout towers and portholes. The commander at Fort Davis furnished him with a cannon and some troops who took their orders from old Don Milton. But during the wartime shortage of men the soldiers were withdrawn from such frontier stations as Davis. Indians raided the region as they pleased, and while Faver's Mexican help fought well, he lost all his cattle except thirty, forty calves in the corrals at Cibolo. With these and what he got through persistent and careful trading he built up a new herd, much of the stock from the Indians who liked Mexican spurs, bridles, and so on, preferably silver-mounted, and knew where to find plenty of cattle for the taking.
Sometimes even the friendly Indians raided Faver's stock, particularly the sheep, with their astonishing panic that the Indians found so amusing. The raiders killed Faver's brother-in-law, who was foreman at the sheep ranch, and stole the man's wife and sons. They were never traced although some reported them up in Indian Territory a long time later.
Still Don Milton Faver stayed on, to dominate the wild Big Bend country for thirty years. His trade grew; he increased his string of freight wagons with their fast-walking Mexican oxen and set up five freight stations. Each had a good adobe house and a little irrigated farm so the station keeper could grow his frijoles, his chili, and corn, with his Mexican peaches ripening golden and red in the sun. Thousands of Faver's cattle roamed free and unbranded, not even with the small F, and when Don Milton died he was buried on top of the mountain behind his house at Cibolo. His origin and his past were as deep a mystery as ever, as much as the man's nature.
Charlie Goodnight was another man who made his whole life out of cattle. At nine he had ridden bareback from Illinois to Texas. It wasn't as far a piece as to Oregon in 1845, but it was a long, dreary overlanding for the family, with no good prospects and without solidarity, for Charlie's father was dead and the stepfather acknowledged as a pretty poor stick. Still, the boy got a fine bow to his growing legs all those miles, and soon there was another, a more acceptable stepfather. In 1856 the twenty-year-old Charlie Goodnight formed a partnership with his stepbrother, Wes Sheek, to run cattle on shares. At that time most of the ranchers penned their stock at night against Indians, the occasional rustlers, and against the persistent urge to go wild. Soon the herds were too large for corraling and after a year Goodnight and Sheek trailed their stock to Palo Pinto County, where the fall mesquite grass was like a golden buffalo robe spread over the earth and where the Comanches came riding with the full moon. Scouting the Indians led Charlie Goodnight into the Rangers. By the end of the war his herd was estimated at around 8,000 head but he knew they might not be able to collect more than 1,000, with the roundup difficulties in the Cross Timbers country and with the neighbors, near and far, who had stayed home branding diligently.
The protective association formed by the early cattlemen of the region, to serve until law and order arrived, had disintegrated long ago and little unmarked stock within reach of a hot iron went unbranded. The Comanches were a constant threat and Goodnight and some other discouraged Cross Timbers cowmen went looking for new range, freer from Indians, the running iron, and the growing crop of carpetbaggers reaching out from Austin. The others headed across the Rio Grande into Mexico where a whole party of Rebel officers had gone. But Goodnight valued markets too much. He gathered up what he could of his remaining cattle, added a wild bunch of around 250 head he cut off at a watering place, and with a few cowboys to help, he moved 1,000 head farther up the Brazos, twelve miles from a settlement. He was freer of the maverickers for a while but he ran into immediate trouble with the Indians.
The buffaloes, never very fond of timbered, brushy or rough country, were probably always scarce up and down central Texas. They had become even scarcer after the Civilized Tribes were crowded into eastern Indian Territory, forcing the local Indians west and south, making more hungry people to feed. Before the cattle came in these Indians had to venture out among their enemies on the open plains for their meat. Then the white men brought their spotted cows, drivable stock, and the even more attractive American horses, meaning larger, non-mustang horses and much more valuable to keep and to trade to the New Mexicans, the comancheros, who dealt in stolen stock from the Indians. The young braves took to this with whoops of joy, waving blankets to stampede them flying off west into the wild country.
Goodnight had gone back to gather up another herd of around 1,200 to 1,500 cattle. He started for his new ranch shorthanded and was attacked by Indians who killed a wily old frontiersman he had along and swept away all the cow horses except those the night herders were riding. After that it was one raid after another in the region; many people killed and around 10,000 head of cattle run off.
Trail drivers had discovered early that herds of more than 1,800 to 2,500 were too difficult to water, to handle in stampedes, and to protect against raiders. Most stories of great tra
il herds of 5,000, even 10,000 and 15,000 head, came from liars while talking to a tenderfoot who didn't know that fighting a grizzly barehanded was a feat. They simply threw in another grizzly, even two. However, many reliable men were certain that in 1866 a party of around 100 Indians started west from the San Saba region with a herd of 10,000 cattle they had stolen from the ranchers. How they got across the waterless Staked Plains to the Pecos, or if they went that way, wasn't known, but the cattle disappeared and some of them, some of Goodnight's, were found in New Mexico later.
By the next spring Goodnight was prepared to move again. With his partner he gathered up a beef herd to trail to New Mexico and Colorado—2,000 big steers and fat dry cows. But the Indians stampeded them, fought off the trail hands, and swept the whole lot away. Thoroughly disgusted at last, Charlie Goodnight gave up ranching in Texas. Too many Indians and no use begging for help from that Reconstruction gathering of scalawags and carpetbaggers down at Austin. In addition there was the news of glutted markets up in Kansas and farther east. But the mining regions of the Rockies seemed to have some money left. Besides, George Reynolds had taken a small herd no farther than New Mexico the summer after the war and found that steers worth at the most $8 or $10 in Texas brought $60 up there. Not only that, but his sister went along on the drive. Of course he could start from Fort Davis in the Big Bend country, on the other side of the Pecos, with no Staked Plains to cross and almost none of the Comanche country.
Even so, it was no Natchez promenade with ruffled parasols and crinolines for a lady, Goodnight was told.
No, but Sallie Reynolds could sit a saddle longer than most of the hard-bottom cowhands of the country. Besides, that drive was nothing compared to one from the Brazos. It would take real time, money, and sand to swing down an unknown trail through waterless country to get around the Comanches, or most of them. Yet Charlie Goodnight, an old cowman at thirty, insisted he was heading for Colorado and going around the south to do it. He gathered up little herds of loose, unmarked cattle here and there. Some objected to this, particularly the Jacksboro Unionists, who had left Texas for the safety of south Kansas during the war and then come tearing back to their old stomping grounds to get a crack at the cattle before the Texans were out of their grays. Thieves, Goodnight called them, and they paid him back in the same coin a time or two, until it seemed the bad blood between them would break into gun play, especially now that Goodnight was preparing to quit the country with cattle he had run out of their herds, claiming they belonged to him but with no brand to prove it.
Old Charlie, as some called him now, was convinced by his wartime experience with the Rangers, and since, that any crossing of the Indian country of northwest Texas was to be avoided. To those who pointed out that the Comanches surely preferred fat young buffalo to trail beef, there was the reply that they preferred anything they could trade to the comancheros who were selling the stolen stock to the new ranchers starting up in New Mexico, the trailers to California, or to the Denver traders for the mines.
Goodnight also knew something of the country he would have to cross on the southern swing and the turn westward to the Pecos and up its briny, forbidding canyon and beyond. The reputation of the stretch to the Pecos was bad ever since the first cattle came to Texas with Coronado. The other two ranchers who were to go with Charlie Goodnight to Colorado got scared out just chewing it over. In the end the old rancher Oliver Loving, who had tried to talk Goodnight against it, too, asked to go along.
Oliver Loving, father of Jim of the Keechi region, was the most experienced cowman on the cattle fringes of northwest Texas. Back in the 1850's he ran a small, remote supply store on a military trail, with a few slaves and a good ranch herd. On the side he bought most of the minor lots of cattle then produced in the Cross Timbers and trailed them to Shreveport or New Orleans. In 1858 he and another man pointed a herd northward, swung around the larger settlements to avoid trouble, turned eastward, swam a dozen streams, and marketed the cattle in Illinois. In 1860, with John Dawson, he headed 1,000 steers to the new gold camps of the Rockies by striking the Arkansas River below the Great Bend and following the stream up past Pueblo, where they wintered. In the spring Loving peddled the stock in Denver for good money but the Civil War broke out and the authorities refused to let him return to Texas. Only his friendship with Kit Carson, Lucien Maxwell, and other oldtimers got him away, to help feed the Confederacy, as the Denverites had feared.
After the war he enlarged his roundups with Bose Ikard as his right-hand man. Bose was a former slave from the Ikard ranch, a good bronco buster, exceptional night herder, good with the skillets when necessary—an all-around ranch and trail hand, tough and lasting as rawhide, one of the most devoted men any rancher ever had.
Goodnight had planned his drive in the hope that there was some nice money loose for beef in Colorado and certainly there would be grass to hold any stock not readily salable. Now another and, by his planned route a more immediate, hope came up—the hope of selling beef to fill Indian contracts in New Mexico on the way. There was even a chance of cornering a little of the often-exorbitant prices that some Indian contractors seemed to get. True, the agent for the Mescalero Apaches at Fort Sumner was already charged with graft in cattle dealings, but there were other agents around the post for other tribes, and the government was advertising for steers to be delivered there.
So, in 1866, trailing a mixed herd of 2,000 steers, cows, and calves, with eighteen hands, mostly armed, they set out, the fifty-four-year-old tough and range-hardened Loving in charge of the herd, Goodnight scouting ahead. But neither of them had ever been over the route which had stretches that few except the Comanches raiding into Mexico for horses even attempted. Those Indians preferred to make the run early in the spring or in the fall, when there was some hope of finding water holes not dry mud baked iron hard.
CHAPTER II
PULLING FOR NEW GRASS
IN THE early years of the cattle drives most of the larger herds that marched north in the swinging walk of the Longhorn were steers, with some dry cows, all headed directly for the slaughter pens or perhaps by way of the fattening grasses of Indian Territory or Kansas or the broadening corn regions of the Middle West. But almost from the start there were herds with young she-stuff, the seed for new ranches. These were usually headed for the opening ranges of the north and the west, yet they had to cross the same Indian barriers as the beef herds, the Civilized Tribes demanding toll in cattle and, even before the war, in money. West of them were the reservations of the Southern Cheyennes and the Arapahoes, and of the Kiowas and Comanches, who still claimed vast hunting grounds in northwest Texas, where the Southern or Texas herd of buffaloes ranged. It was usually to these regions that the raiding Indians escaped with their loot and certainly no drover could hope to get a trail herd of cattle up through there. Besides, there was the Kansas summer quarantine, June to November, on cattle brought in from Texas. This one might avoid but if not, there was the expense of holding the herd to fall.
Goodnight and Loving gave no thought to these obstacles now. They were headed the other way, down the old Butterfield Trail, to follow it as far as seemed handy. Goodnight, out far in front on his short-coupled black, looked over his shoulder from a rise, back toward the Texas of the Palo Pinto country and the Brazos, almost as though he were making a last mind picture of it, bidding it good-by. Then he considered the long, dusty line of their herd winding toward him out of the breaks. They were already getting trail-broken, and moving pretty well. Perhaps it was true that in Colorado a cattleman could still make a living.
He let his impatient horse out, pointing his hat at arm's length before him, signaling the direction. So Goodnight scouted the trail for water, for range and bed ground, doubling back to give his signals. Loving, behind him, knew how to get the most from the men and the herd. All but the two point riders, the best men of the outfit, shifted positions daily to relieve those on the dusty side and those riding drag —always keeping the herd strung o
ut well and yet close enough to let them feel each other, hold them in an unbroken file to crawl like a thin, dark, thousand-segmented joint snake over the rolling prairie. It was a pretty route through the mirage region, the Phantom Hill country. By then the herd was a fine traveling unit, the leader taking his place every morning, keeping it day after day. As in most beef herds, the steers had traveling companions and when separated they raised their heads to get wind of each other, bawling until they got together. Each strong young cow gathered her own following within the herd. As in most good-sized drives, there were a few muleys, born hornless, and within a few days these bedded down together, a little apart. As usual, too, there was a loner or two who went prowling up one side of the herd and down the other, apparently searching for the never lost. Sometimes there was an outcast, hooked at everywhere, with even the muleys making the horning motion. All these, unless steadied down early, ended up with the drags, with the poor, the old, and the very young. But the two-year-old heifers were the real flighty ones wilful as young Texas girls, and most difficult to settle down, to road-break. Some never settled down at all and these it was best to eat early, if the owner could bring himself to kill his own beef.
Then, with this mixed herd, every morning there were the newborn calves to kill on the bed ground. There would be hundreds of these dropped before the herd reached Sumner in New Mexico. Every morning one of the trail hands made a circle, disposing of the freshly dropped stock, who couldn't keep up anyway and would only weaken the cows. But all that day the mothers would bawl and try to break back, and particularly that first night. If the cow had smelled her calf, or sucked it, she might have to be yoked to a steer, or hobbled, so strong was the Longhorn's instinct for her young. But even with the best of care they would have slow, difficult trailing for the Pecos route, at the best not good for a mixed outfit.