Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Loving had the herd traveling very well in the heat and dust by the time they reached the head of the Middle Concho, where they rested and fed before starting over the dry, horse-killing jump of around eighty miles to the Pecos, with twelve, fifteen miles considered a good drive in the burning sun. Then, after days without water, and the smell of it from the river to drive the cattle wild, they would have to pass the poison lakes marked by whitened bones long before the first Spaniard rode through that way. They had been warned against the poison lakes, the alkali strong enough to kill everything that drank the water, and just beyond was the Pecos, with most of the bank very steep, the crossing a swift, swimming current.

  Goodnight and Loving watered the herd, steers, cows, and calves, with all they would drink and filled the canteens and the water barrels of the grub wagon to overflowing. Then in the afternoon they pointed the herd to follow the sloping sun out upon the pale baked earth.

  They trailed late that first evening, made dry camp, and pushed on early. While the Longhorn on the range often went without water for three days, driving dried out stock as it did men. The second night the herd was too thirsty to bed down, many trying to break back as they walked and milled all night so it took most of the men to hold them. Goodnight realized that this wouldn't do—the cattle had walked enough on the bed ground to take them most of the way to the Pecos. He got the herd started very early, knowing that the cattle would have to be pushed today, the faltering whipped up by the sleepy, worn-out cowboys under the sun that shimmered in great rippling mirage lakes ahead. The canteens dried up, the water barrels began to rattle in the wagon, and the dust rose in bitter white clouds that grayed them all. It cracked the lips under the protecting kerchiefs tied loosely enough to be drawn up over the nose, almost to the hat-brim, the dust-rimmed eyes bloodshot and burning; it stung and burned in the sweated saddle galls.

  The pointers had to hold the strong leaders back while the drag riders whooped and cursed and popped their down ropes to keep the weaker stuff up. The herd bawled and then moaned for water, until many grew silent, their swollen tongues hanging out dry and dusty, eyes sunken, their ribs like some old pole fence. Often a maddened one turned to fight, as a critter drawn from a bog will, perhaps with the same desperation of death upon it. Those, too, were left to die.

  The men grew as raw nerved, on the prod, worn, without sleep, and what was worse for a good cowhand, helpless to relieve the suffering of the stock. Irritable and dangerous, swift anger lurked in them as in a rattler, and with guns handy at the hip.

  Loving worked with the drags now, holding them together the best his long experience could manage, fighting the alkali dust and the thirst to save as much as he could from the stock they had salvaged out of the losses of the war years and all the thieving and the Indian raids since. Goodnight had pushed on ahead into the pale, cloudless night, the second without sleep. The cook boiled up black coffee to hand to the men as they passed on the shadowy prairie, trying to make the stock follow the bells Goodnight had put on the lead steers, keep them reasonably together, help prevent the stampeding at any whiff of water that tolled them to some long-dead wallow or pond perhaps off to the side. Each time Goodnight spurred hard to overtake the leaders, to slow them, avoid a disastrous pile-up. But long before the steers reached such places they had usually slowed by themselves, with only a hopeless kind of bewilderment as they milled over the dried mud, bawling hoarsely, unwilling to leave where water had been, the weaker cows beginning to go down, too, as even the strong calves had long ago.

  The men were ready to drop in the rising heat of the day, swearing thickly, their tongues stiff and swollen, as though unaccustomed to words. But mostly they were silent except for the "Hi-ah! Hi-ah!" to keep the drags moving. Finally one of the men couldn't stop his call, going on and on until he fell to mumbling, saying "Damn-damn-damn," over and over to himself, sitting his horse like a limp and leaking meal sack. At last Loving came to pull him from the saddle and push him under the bank of an arroyo, offering a little strip of shade almost wide enough to cover the man's gaunt frame. Tying the horse to a hastily driven picket in the bottom of the cut, out of sight, he left a precious half-filled canteen with him and went on. "Wait till dark, then try to follow the trail," was all Loving could suggest, without much hope, realizing that Indians were probably sniffing around the herds.

  When Goodnight fell back to look over the plodding horses, the men swaying in the saddles, the stock falling all along the trail, he realized something had to be done, and fast. With the dry canteens strung to him like the gray and empty hulls of some futile fruit he set out for the river, pushing the plucky little black to stumbling, so he cursed himself for his brutality, his own tongue refusing the words. He slowed down but almost at once he was urging the tired horse faster again, faster and faster, while he wondered at the fools that cattlemen were.

  Back from the hard twenty-mile ride over the burning earth Charlie Goodnight saw it was a case of saving what he could of the dying herd or losing all. With the four men and horses that had stood up best, he let the stronger cattle, around two thirds of the herd, go as fast as they could, making no effort to trail herd them beyond pointing the leaders for the Pecos, trying to let the men take turns at a few minutes' sleep in the saddle.

  But there were the poison holes this side of the river to avoid. The herd must be swung out so the first smell they got would be from the Pecos itself. The old cowman watched for it, saw it come: the lead steer suddenly lift his head, his dry tongue out stiff as a stick of dark and sandy wood. He broke into a feeble, stumbling run, then the others behind him, too, in sprawling gallops, the earth thundering hollowish as the wind carried the smell and the excitement back along the strung-out herd, the men fighting to keep them so, to avoid bunching and piling up in the swimming depths of the Pecos, stomping each other under.

  In spite of all that the five worn men could do the cattle poured into the river valley in a broad, dust-gray blanket, the dried alkali rising in choking white smoke over them. The leaders went over the Pecos bank, the followers in a cascade upon them, thrusting them out and clear across the narrow roiling stream before they could stop for the desperate drink. Goodnight, ahead, turned the cattle back, and as the jam of the frenzied animals spread up and down the narrow river they blocked the current, damming it to rise halfway up the banks. Then they had to be quirted out, the leaders found and started, to keep the herd from foundering themselves. Slowly, falteringly, they backed out of the water, stopping to blow, lolling their swollen, dripping tongues, and finally started away slowly before the whoops and popping ropes of the cowboys, to stop in the grass away from the Pecos valley and the alkali water, the first grass they had tasted in days.

  Here the men were set to hold them, working in relays, with plans to let them sleep, too, hoping there would be no Indian attack now while Goodnight was going back to help Oliver Loving. But worn down as the men were, they couldn't keep awake, and some of the cows broke for water again. This time they got to the alkali holes back from the river. Before they could be stopped three had finished drinking and fell in their tracks, some of the others dying later.

  Back on the trail the weary Oliver Loving was still with the drags, around 500 of them able to move. The wind turned and carried the smell of water from a place where the Pecos ran between banks six to ten feet high. Nothing could stop the stampeding cattle and they poured over the bank, falling and going under, most of the horse herd, too. Many of the weak ones drowned right there, and some were swept into a quicksand bend. The cowboys worked for two days but in the end 100 head had to be left in the river although still alive, in the quicksand, and stranded under high bluffs at the water's edge, with no way to reach them. Three hundred others had been dropped on the way to the Pecos, not counting the newborn calves killed—all those bones strung out to mark the desperate trail, the graveyard of the cowman's hopes.

  After several days to recruit the stock and the men, the herd was pushed up th
e east side of the Pecos, through country where the only living creature seemed to be the fish in the stream. Not even one prairie bird panted through the shadeless noontime, no kingfisher flashed his blue as he dove straight down, to come up with wriggling of silver in his mouth, no buzzard circled the pale and empty sky. But there were rattlesnakes, and of these one cowhand with eyes so crossed that they looked in two directions, and poor eyes at that, got seventy-two before the herd reached Sumner.

  Fort Sumner was the center for around 8,500 Indians gathered to reservations, but the soil was poor, and fuel, even grass, scarce. The heat and drouth were particularly trying for the mountain Navahos who had been torn from their lovely homeland to live on the sterile plain among their traditional enemies. But it was a common misery, for all the Indians were on the edge of starvation, and Goodnight and Loving got the exceptional price of eight cents a pound on the hoof for the steers, two-year-old and up. No wonder the Texas Indians went to such trouble raiding the ranches for herds to trade to the New Mexican comancheros.

  Of course the partners still had the cows and calves, between 700 and 800 head, but neither man had suspected there was such money in cattle these days, and both were happy even with all the cutbacks. Charlie Goodnight was suddenly less angry with Texas, less impatient for a look at Colorado ranch possibilities. He hurried back on the 700-mile trail to gather up another herd for the Indians before winter. He rode ahead, followed by a pack mule carrying the $12,000 in gold under the provisions, with three cowboys coming along behind. They traveled down the Pecos by night, sleeping hidden out during the daylight, and prepared to shoot a path through any Indians or holdup outfit who might have heard about the sale at Sumner and try an ambush.

  Their real trouble came from one of the swift night storms of the arid country, the sky blazing with lightning— great, blinding forks of it crashing to the earth, the thunder shaking the ground so that the dust rose in a hazing in the rainless night. One bolt struck too close to the pack mule, and he was gone with the provisions and the gold. Goodnight had managed to get his hand on the neck rope and hung on while the mule ran, bucking and bawling like a bay steer, provisions flying in every direction. Finally the mule was worn out and Goodnight, too, scratched and skinned up. The money was safe but the food was lost and no telling how many Indians might be around, so they couldn't risk much shooting, even if there had been any game beyond an occasional catfish. Before they got through the 200-mile ride down the Pecos they would have been happy to trade a lot of the gold for a bait of even Yankee sore-thumb bread.

  Up near Fort Sumner Oliver Loving put a little meat on the cows and calves the Indian agent had turned back, and then trailed them slowly to the Raton Mountains, the Arkansas River, and beyond, blazing the trail most of the way. Near Denver he sold the whole lot to John W. Iliff for his range in northeast Colorado, in the heart of a new cattle region.

  Down in Texas, Goodnight collected his second herd of the summer, 1,200 head, all steers, able to travel fast and strong. But with no cows to quiet them they were a stampeding outfit, nervous all the time and very hard to handle, particularly after they were struck by a herd of migrating buffaloes, a bull herd, coming in a solid, lumbering string reaching back for miles, moving under the wild urge that drove them southward before the winter and back with the spring. Headed into the wind, the lead buffaloes hesitated at their first sight of the cattle, and Goodnight hoped his herd might have room and time to pass. They were about halfway through when the wind carried a whiff of man smell to the buffaloes and they stampeded, following their noses straight upon the trail herd in a thundering run. Goodnight and his hands tried to turn them but it was like turning the cloudburst waters from a dry wash. The stampede cut the steers in two near the middle of the herd and the snuffy old mosshorns went crazy. Those cut back by the buffaloes turned and headed for the Brazos bottoms again, the drag riders trying hard to start them into a spin. Those beyond the buffaloes had curled their tails up and fled toward the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos, with the cowboys riding hard at their rumps. Goodnight was with these and by fast work they got the leaders to turn upon themselves and managed to hold the steers while the buffaloes poured by, between the two halves of the steer herd. For almost an hour they thundered past, the air full of their gruntings, the shaking of their running hoofs. When the steers were finally brought together again a day was killed, but not a head was missing.

  There were scattered buffaloes all the way to the Middle Concho, and the line riders had to spur out here and there to drive them off, for even the wind of one of them set the tails of the steers up again. Plainly the whole buffalo country was no place for the wild Longhorn.

  This time, before the dry stretch from the Concho region to the Pecos Goodnight gave his herd all the water and grass they would eat to sundown and then drove all night on the trail so well marked by his earlier passing, often by the stench of the dead. In the cool of the morning he grazed the steers again and then went on. After the first such stop they didn't eat much, for thirst, and he kept them moving all day and the next night, too—hard to handle and mighty hard on the men, but they crossed the Staked Plains to the Pecos without losing a head. The whole drive took around forty days, the cattle quiet and gentle when Goodnight made winter camp about forty miles below Sumner. Loving came in, too, and they struck a dugout into the bluffs on the east side of the river and lived there in comfort until spring, supplying beeves to the government contractors at Sumner and over at Santa Fe. Apparently they were the first Texans to establish a ranch in south New Mexico.

  Loving had much to tell that snug winter in the dugout, stories of Iliff, who in 1865 had gone to the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory and drove 1,300 cattle to New Mexico on a government contract. Last summer, two years after the massacre of the Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, he was furnishing beef to the Union Pacific construction gang laying the tracks toward Cheyenne, up in Wyoming, in the middle of an Indian war. Iliff said he had little real trouble.

  "Seems it's the Yankee bluebellies the Indians are after," Loving told Goodnight. He talked often of the grass he saw up in Colorado—long and cured up seedy and golden in the fall. He heard it was like that all the way across to the Milk and the Marias in Montana, and with hungry Indians sitting on reservations every few jumps up along the Missouri River all through Dakota Territory.

  But in Wyoming and Montana there were still millions of the buffaloes that had stampeded Goodnight's Long-horns, eating the grass, and followed by wild Indians. It seemed, though, that a man could make a go of ranching up that way, as Iliff was doing in the South Platte Valley. It was even possible to drive cattle straight through the wild Sioux country to the mines in Montana where beef was bringing real money. The meat they were eating up there now was mostly trailed in from Oregon. Yet last summer, while they were both fighting thirst and alkali down there on the Pecos, Nelson Story had trailed a herd of 600 Longhorns from deep in Texas up past Fort Laramie to the Montana gold fields over the route called the Bozeman Trail. He made it, although the Sioux had closed the trail to all except heavily escorted army trains going to the new forts being built to guard the route. Men were picked off every few days, horses swept off, and yet Story got through.

  "He wouldn't have made it through the Comanches," Goodnight said sourly.

  "No, guess not. Seems the Sioux prefer fat hump ribs of buffalo to beef, anyway trail beef. Besides, they got no place to trade the cows, no comancheros. I did hear they're hell on Yankee bluebellies. Ran a whole army out of the country summer before last, but they don't make raids against the settlements like the Indians do down in Texas. Iliff ain't uneasy."

  "Sounds like country worth looking into," Goodnight admitted, scratching his beard thoughtfully.

  By late January they heard more of this Bozeman Trail route to the fabulous beef prices at the Montana mines. The Sioux and Cheyennes up there had annihilated a whole detachment of troops under a Captain Fetterman —eighty, ninety men massacred, the
y heard tell at Sumner.

  By now it became a sort of race to get cattle from Texas to where they paid out. During its first summer the Goodnight-Loving Trail had grown into a prominent route to good markets and to a great new range country. Some smallish herds had plodded to California over the old Butterfield Trail long ago, usually starting early, when the holes and wallows still might be wet and the heat was less burning. Now the route was suddenly rediscovered as far as the Pecos and extended north toward Wyoming. The success and profits of the Goodnight-Loving drives in 1866 multiplied in the telling, particularly the profits. True, it was a hard route but Texas was the Rawhide State, the men of rawhide, too. The need to believe the stories was very great in the hard times of 1867.

  Unfortunately the Comanches soon discovered the herds crossing the vast, isolated stretches of the Pecos country—out of reach of the punishing troops and Rangers—big bunches of cattle trained to drive well and ready to be swept away, with good trail horses for the taking, too. The Indians captured two herds early in 1867, attacked emigrants on the trail and Goodnight and Loving as well on their return to the Keechi range. The two men escaped, to buy up more cattle for New Mexican contracts and the northern ranges. Goodnight accumulated powers of attorney from the neighboring ranchers to gather up stock with their brands for the trail herd, paying around $20 in gold for the best beef steers, about $5 under the price in greenbacks. With his Circle road brand on the herd they started, this time into almost constant Indian trouble.