Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Knowing that she stuff worked or trailed had a tendency to come in heat, Goodnight always put in a number of bulls, but the steady travel was doubly hard on them, particularly on the full-grown animals. Their testicles, banged and bruised against their legs for several hundred miles, swelled and became so infected that the bulls died. After they lost two on the drive to the Pecos and another, a big dun from south Texas, was swelling so he might be lost, too, Goodnight roped him and got down with the cutting knife and the tar pot to keep the flies from starting worms in the wound. It was so hard to spare these good range bulls that instead of castrating him, Goodnight pushed the dun's kernels up against his belly, cut off the entire bag, and with some unraveled manila rope and a knife point to punch holes, he sewed the wound up by whipping the edges together like the cook snubbing up a hole in a flour sack. Within a week the big dun bull was pursuing the cows again, and tromping at the heels of the leaders, hurrying them along. This became standard practice with Goodnight and others who had to trail large animals, and as a sort of restorative for an aging bull. Goodnight had some other firm convictions about herd sires. While they were an important outlay of money he always kept enough on his range to make a fine roaring, particularly evenings—enough bulls so they really chased the cows and kept the percentage of calving high.

  The loss of the two good range sires from the herd on this drive was insignificant compared to the cost of the Indian raids. They stampeded the herd on Clear Fork and almost as soon as the cattle were gathered up for the trail again they struck once more. Men were hit, too, one with an arrow, the hoop-iron point of it driven almost to the barb into the bone behind the ear. With two men to hold the cowboy, Goodnight worked it out and then poulticed the wound with cold mud. The man recovered, but there were more attacks farther on, with increasing stampedes, the herd run-crazy by now, gone like fall leaves in a windstorm at almost any movement. Men were killed and wounded trying to hold the herd against a whoop and the flap of a blanket. Goodnight followed some of the stock that had been swept away but all this took time and finally Loving, uneasy over the delay, started ahead to be at Sumner for the bidding on the government contracts. With One-Arm Wilson, an experienced old cowman, he struck out.

  "Now be careful. Keep well hid during the day," Goodnight advised uneasily, although he was talking to men who had been in the country a long, long time.

  But Oliver Loving was in a hurry and for all his experience he let the Comanches locate them on the Pecos. They put a bullet through his wrist and one into his side. The two cattlemen managed to hold the Indians off until night. There, too badly wounded to get away, Loving made such plans as he could to keep hidden, and for his defense if the Comanches smelled him out, and sent One-Arm to get through the Comanche line for help, if possible. It took days, but by incredible cunning and endurance Wilson reached the herd and Goodnight. He was in such bad shape he could barely speak to tell what had happened. He had left Loving surrounded, wounded, with nothing to eat.

  Back on the Pecos, when it seemed that Loving couldn't hold the Indians off any longer or hide any more, some Mexicans found him and took him to Sumner, where Goodnight finally traced him. The shattered wrist wasn't doing well, after all the exposure, but Loving was so anxious to locate the stock the Indians swept off and probably traded to the comancheros that Goodnight consented to leave him and go make the investigations himself. While he was away gangrene set in, through the neglect of the army doctor, the Texans felt, neglect because Loving was a Reb. When Goodnight returned with some of their stock rescued from the Mexicans, he found Oliver Loving dying. He got the arm amputated but it was far too late. For all the heroic courage and endurance down there alone on the Pecos, and at the hospital, the tough old cowman Oliver Loving died.

  By now it was too late for the Indian contracts, and when the herd finally reached Sumner Goodnight headed it on toward Colorado. From the Raton Pass region he looked down over the mountain slopes to the great fall-yellowed grasslands of the upper Arkansas River so like the cloud-shadowed swells of a golden sea. He pointed the herd along the north-flowing creeks and up near the head of one of these, the Apishapa, Goodnight stopped. The canyon was around twenty miles long, not very deep, but with walls steep enough so it was practically inaccessible except at the two ends, which could be kept closed very handily by casual line riding. The creek, between banks lined by box elders, shyly sank out of sight during the day and ran again when the sun settled behind the canyon walls. The cowboys joked about it, glad they could laugh after the very grueling drive.

  Here Goodnight established his ranch in what seemed to him a most beautiful cow country and perhaps his would be the first extensive cattle venture in southern Colorado. At least he had the world to himself again, with, so far as any of them knew, little danger from raiding Indians, probably more danger from outlaws. So they turned the cattle loose and set to cutting pines for a log cabin while Goodnight went back down to meet Joe, Oliver Loving's son, bringing up a herd. He knew Indian fighting but the herd, 3,200 head, and short around 1,000 head from Indian raids and stampedes, had been too large and so were in bad condition. Goodnight took 1,000 of the strongest and trailed them over Raton in snow, the wind sharp as ice. He got to Apishapa Christmas Eve, 1867, a hard and freezing drive behind him. It was a winter herd and not considered so dangerous to the so-called American or non-Spanish cattle among the estimated 147,000 head in the state, but large drives were nevertheless competition, and besides there would surely be summer drives, the cattlemen of Colorado realized, and they looked upon the Texan, the Johnny Reb digging in on the Apishapa with concern.

  Early in the new year of 1868 Iliff came to Goodnight's ranch and bought $40,000 worth of cattle to be delivered in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, region. Some of these were to be slaughtered and shipped by the new railroad, the Union Pacific, to Chicago in iced cars, which was surely the opening of a new era.

  But actually the new era opening was the day of the vast free range country from the cap rock of Texas northward to Canada. In this region the cattlemen were to attain an importance and a dedication never dreamed before, not by men like Goodnight, or Olive, or Richard King, or even by any of the new ranchers just beginning to move into the territory that would be the purest cattle state of all— Wyoming. The rest of the cow country would have other important pursuits and industries: Texas her vast plantation and farm areas; Colorado, Montana, and the Dakota territory their mines and wheat; Nebraska and Kansas as well as some of the others their corn and wheat. All these would be cattle states, but Wyoming would be the truest, the purest cow country.

  CHAPTER III

  THE MOVING TRAILS

  BY 1868 the future of the cattle business north of the Rio Grande was taking on the shape that was perhaps inevitable from the time the first mission stock went wild, or even earlier, from the day the first cow escaped Coronado's beef herd to hide in the brush, to drop her ticks and her calf as they ripened.

  With the end of the Civil War, Longhorn meant a breed of cattle and a cowboy was no longer a raider, a thief, and a murderer, but a hard-working cowhand, often rowdy when he hit town, spurring his horse and popping his pistol, to scatter the anklers, the people afoot, send them fleeing through the dusty street like a settler's hens before the hawk's approach. He was still sometimes a thief or a killer, as his boss might very well be, but any man who wasn't a worker, hardy, tough, and full of sand, wouldn't stick with the cow business long enough to pay for his saddle. In the meantime the Longhorns were spreading northward over the grass of the prairies. They came faster than the Indian could be driven back or the railroads climb up the Platte and the Smoky Hill rivers, the hide men turn the great buffalo herds into stinking carcasses. The buffaloes would be vanishing even faster if flint hides could walk themselves the far distances to market that the Longhorns did.

  It was once said that all the roasting meat of a Texas steer could be packed into one of his horns, but as the cattle spread out of the coastal plains an
d the swamps and brushy bottoms to the higher regions north and westward, they kept growing larger. Plainly, as the herds increased, some natural selection took place, aided later by the Anglo's cutting knife that spared only the best for sires. With their mixed ancestry, the cattle of Texas probably adapted themselves so well through long-dormant characteristics. Running wild and needing to fight off enemies, they returned to wilder ways and wilder dimensions much as the gentle house cat does when turned out into the brush, developing breadth of jaw and power of muscle that had vanished through thousands of years at the milk saucer and the soft cushion.

  Similarly the cattle of Texas sharpened in nose and eye, lengthened in leg and wind and in the spread of horn demanded by the new life—all throwbacks to the keen senses, the standing height, and the greatness of horn found in Bos primigenius and their probable cousin, the Strasbourg Ox, augmented perhaps by the iodine-leached regions of Texas.

  The Longhorn matured slowly, reaching a maximum weight of from 1,000 up to 1,600 pounds at eight or ten years. In 1868, 224 selected Texas steers weighed in at Abilene, Kansas, averaged 1,238 pounds, and this after half a day in the pens. How much of this was horns, grown to their best heft and spread in the steer, was not recorded.

  With the movement of vast, trail-gaunted beef herds to market the demand for fatter meat grew, meat requiring more corn, corn of better feeding quality, shorter growing season, greater yield, and of vastly increased acreages. In addition there was the booming population, the millions of immigrants sent to America by the unrest and the famines in Europe. Many were laborers hoping for work, particularly on railroad construction gangs, but mostly they sought homes and land in the West, their plows and sod corn pushing as hard at the jingling spurs of the cowboy as he tromped the heels of the buffalo hunter and the Indian.

  Once the cow had changed man from hunter to herdsman, now with her need for corn she was changing the agricultural pattern of much of a nation, and with her flesh much of the nation's diet and, eventually, much of the outside world's. Surely nothing short of earth, water, and air could have been more important to the life, the rise of man, than the cow. It was no wonder that her image appeared on the earliest coins, and long before that on man's religious objects and his religious places, to invoke the cow's great mysterious power. Often these showed exquisite craftsmanship, and many of these early portrayals resembled the Longhorn that was plodding the trails out of Texas to new pastures, to new meanings, new significance.

  The roundups of the late sixties and early seventies were still largely cow hunts, as men went bear hunting or out for mustang, and with little more claim to the quarry until captured. The methods were also still the same—cutting off little bunches outside of the brush or breaks if possible, otherwise roping the stock one by one, hog tying them, later throwing them into little herds held somewhere in the open. Indians still slowed the mavericking. In the Palo Pinto country they kept many of the ranchers afoot much of the time. Many stories were told of outwitting the Indians. It seemed that the five Cowden boys and the three neighboring Bradfords began their mavericking afoot, barefoot, in mesquite and cactus and rattlesnake country. The eight youths had one mounted cowboy along to hold the stock and bring up the drags. Their scheme was to run around a bunch of cows and then ease them into a pen. Those they couldn't pen they got with two ketch dogs who snagged them by the nose and hung on, much as the dogs of England did in the bullbaiting except this was wild stock capturing. Jeff Cowden, the fastest, always took the lead in the runs, but in the cattle business all except Jeff made fortunes from their barefoot start. Even after the Indians were gone and Jeff Cowden had all the horses he could hope to ride, and tame enough to avoid a fight every time he hit the stirrup, he kept on working stock afoot. It was said he roped the smokestack of the first railroad engine into his region by running up alongside.

  Many men with good boots high enough so they need not fear the ordinary rattler, and with good cow horses, depended on dogs for their cattle hunts. A good ketch dog was prized like a fine cow horse. Some were so well trained that on sight of a bunch of cattle they singled out the only slick ear, the only maverick in it, and held the charging, bucking critter by the nose until it was roped and tied. Now and then a mavericker tailed his fleeing quarry down. He spurred up on a flying cow, caught her tail, dallied it around his leg or the horn of his saddle, swerving his horse suddenly to jerk her down hard, bust the wind out of her as she rocked in the dust. This required a good horse, trained, and a good man, but the technique was old, thousands of years old.

  Mavericking by any trick or turn was not for the shorthorns, for the tenderfoot. No outfit could afford to take chances with more than one or two green hands at a time, not even a big one with the boss an experienced mosshorner and a good Indian fighter on the side. Often the captured cattle were corraled at night at the ranch of some cowman in the outfit or perhaps at some of the pens built out in the wilds for general hire. Even then the men usually rode herd on the stock at night, for a milling in a corral was soon a stampede over the fence.

  Maverickers had to travel light. Usually each man carried his own grub in a wallet—a sack with both ends sewed up and a slit for the hand down the center. Filled, this was tied behind the saddle on top of what he called his bed, seldom more than a slicker. Often there was a boy along who stayed with the trapped mavericks, tied down or kneed, or otherwise secured. He looked after the bunch of wallets, too, and usually had a string of tin cups on the rawhide hobbles swung around his pony's neck.

  Soon after the war a boy from Michigan named James H. Cook came to work for Ben Slaughter of the early cattle family. Ben had his maverickers working the Frio River, which, like many Texas streams, was often dry. The corrida or cow runners, ten rawhide-equipped Mexicans, bossed by John Longworth, started on their cow hunt with a bunch of decoy cattle. They took pack mules for the provisions, a rattling of cooking utensils, and practically nothing else, not even slickers. The provisions were green coffee, sow belly, corn meal, saleratus, and pepper berry, with a good supply of black navy plug tobacco and prepared cornhusks for cigarette wrappers, the Mexican's idea of a smoke, lit by the flint and steel each man carried. They camped near an old corral of strong, close-set posts standing at least seven feet above their solid footing in the ground. These walls were lashed together with long strips of green cowhide that shrank up tight, the gate posts of powerful oak with loose poles to slide in place. Staunchly built wings of poles ran out from the gate about 200 yards or more each way to help pen the wild stock.

  At sunrise they started on a cow hunt with the decoy herd, Longworth leading the way through the thick growth of chaparrel and mesquite. About a mile out he left the herd in a dense clump of brush under the guard of two men and signaled the rest to follow him. Keeping as quiet as possible, they rode in single file, young Jim Cook bringing up the tail behind the dark-skinned, leather-chapped Mexicans. After a couple of miles there was a sudden crashing up ahead. Instantly every rider shot forward, bent low over his horse's neck. Jim's horse went, too, almost skinning out from under the boy, who didn't dare to try holding him back because he might never find camp again if he lost the rest. Clinging to the horn, he let the horse tear hell-bent this way and that through the brush and cactus and scrub timber, Jim dodging and ducking branches large enough to knock him from the saddle and warding off the whip of the smaller ones with his upraised arm, keeping the jagged stubs and branches out of his face and eyes but getting the sleeve ripped and cut to rags by the thorns and catclaws. He rode all over the saddle and out of it as the horse took the brush expertly, hurdling the low-bent mesquite trunks, snaking under big live-oak branches that left barely six inches for the stooping boy, switching in and out across the prickly-pear stretches growing from two to ten feet high and almost solid in places. The cactus the horse couldn't dodge he jumped, knocked down, or tore through, his breast and legs cut and torn, but he kept on, snorting in his frenzy—a true cowcatcher, as hot after the prey as a hungr
y coyote at the tail of a dodging rabbit.

  Finally the run ended, even for the greenhorn from Michigan. Suddenly before him one of the Mexicans was stopped, outside a mesquite clump, a hand up in warning, pointing to the brush just ahead. There were cattle in it and young Jim Cook caught a faint rise of Mexican voices in a curious, coaxing, wordless song, the song of the brush, while the waiting brush horses quivered, ready to jump for any wild critter that made a break. Thin and quavering the song crept high and higher, and then sank low, gentle, soothing, the beat of it the soft throb of quiet and rest in the untamed heart.

  Then the singers seemed to be closing in on the cattle from all sides, narrowing the circle about them. They moved slowly, quietly, their horses stepping delicately with barely a snapping twig to disturb the song. After a while some of the little herd started, coming toward Jim. He recognized them as of the decoys, but there were wild Longhorns with them, cattle that whirled about as soon as they saw the boy. He wanted to shrink out of sight but was motioned to stay perfectly still. There was an experienced cowcatcher on every side of the herd, stopped now, motionless as a clump of thorn. The decoy cattle, fairly calm, simply milled around through the thicket and by the time the wild ones were well mixed into them, Jim could hardly hold his horse or himself either. Finally the men began to move a little again, very quietly, singing softly, the sound coming as from the air, from everywhere as they rode carefully and slowly, around and around the cattle without seeming to, all except young Jim singing the Texas lullaby and perhaps he, too, for his horse fell into place in the slow circling and the boy was too excited to know what he did.

  After an hour or so Longworth rode away out of sight of the herd, dismounted, and tightened the cinch and then returned to the circling and another man dropped out to do the same, making ready for a run or a roping, and then another, until all were ready. The horses, too, had had a breathing spell. Now Longworth turned away into the chaparral, still singing, and the Mexicans slowly closed in on the cattle, starting them after him, pointing the herd in the direction of his voice when he was lost in the brush. Everybody kept off a little from the cattle, and no one made a sudden move or sound that might start a stampede, the well-trained horses stepping carefully without toss of head or jingle of bit, not even a snort or side-jump for a rattler.