by Mari Sandoz
Longworth led the herd toward the corral and into the wings, the wild ones following the decoys, uneasily, suspicious, heads up, their horns seeming alert as feelers, until suddenly there was no place to go except straight ahead with the tame cattle, the men crowding them now, giving them no time to see the open country left behind. Then the Mexicans spurred forward, pushed them all through the gate, threw the heavy poles into place and lashed them there with rawhide as the wild stock, knowing now they were trapped, raced and surged around the high walls.
That this was work for experts, for artists, even the boy from Michigan realized and he intended to learn it, although he discovered that the hunts, even when so carefully planned and carried out, often failed from some sudden movement of man or horse, the flushing of a noisy turkey gobbler, or a drove of peccaries crashing off through the underbrush. Anything or nothing at all might stampede the cattle, perhaps even sweep the decoys away. At such times the swift hiss of a rope here and another there downed at least that many, not much for a day's work but something. Or perhaps, in the clearer spaces, the men tried tailing a few, then jumped off each time to make a swift tie around the feet with the piggin string, to leave the Longhorn heaving and struggling with his four feet together. If the wild maverick was up before the tailer got a knee on his neck and his nose up, the man might have to run before the charging critter through cactus and tangling brush, in serious trouble with perhaps nothing like a tree to shin up, no time for a telling shot.
For this work the men received $8 a month and found.
Some maverickers did their roping at night when the cattle left the brush to feed, but it was reckless business even under the bright Texas moon. Then after the trapping there was still the holding and the gathering to be managed. Often troublemaking old steers were necked to tame oxen, perhaps some steady work bull. Perhaps a gunny sack was slipped up over their heads, the opening tied shut around the horns, with the bottom to be cut out in a couple of days, to permit feeding. But the best remedy for the real troublemaker was still a bullet between the eyes. Often these were outlaws anyway, cattle caught sometime before, or even raised in a ranch herd and gone wild, therefore less afraid of man, wilier, often with less desire to run, more to fight.
Sometimes the eyelids of such troublemakers, such outlaws were sewed up so they had to follow the decoys to avoid thickets and cactus and other dangers. Sometimes the more ruthless cattle trappers cut a string or tendon of the knee or bound a wet rawhide thong tightly around the leg just above the hock, to dry, as the green hides dried around the men in the Spanish "Death of the Skins," shutting off circulation and movement. Sometimes the worst fighters had their horns chopped off, knocked off, or cut with a pistol bullet. Sometimes the cartilage of the nose was slit and a tie rope run through the hole, but this was more the idea of the easterners and the real outlaw soon jerked so hard the hole tore through. Besides, mutilated cattle brought very little when put on the market. That was why ranchers always mistrusted canned beef; they knew the kind of animals that sold as canners—old bulls, decrepit old cows, and the lumpy jaws, the injured, the mutilated.
However the cattle were trapped, with the fencing limited to brush and pole construction, there was seldom enough enclosed range to feed them long. They had to be started on the trail north soon or they would starve or have to be turned out to scatter back into the wild and be twice as difficult to recapture. Usually they were thrown in with the cattle of other ranchers or maverickers for the trip north. Perhaps they were sold to professional trailers, or to northern buyers who took possession on the spot. But the Texans learned a little caution about swift purchase and delivery. In 1867 a buyer down from the North had gathered up a herd from the ranchers near Waco and moved them out at once. When he was gone it was discovered that his greenbacks were counterfeit. A posse took the trail after him. The swifter of them caught him at the Red River crossing. Some said Print Olive was in the lead of the posse, although that was probably a mistake, for the Olives had their own herd on the trail. Anyway, it seemed that the buyer of cattle with counterfeit bills never made it over the river. The cattlemen took possession of the herd and sent it on to Kansas under their own man and were more willing than ever to sell a couple dollars cheaper for gold instead of greenbacks.
Because mavericking opened the cattle region to out-and-out theft, the Act of 1866 made it a misdemeanor punishable by fines and jail to drive stock from the "accustomed range" unless the drover could prove ownership. Still, with the drifting of cattle in storms and through drouthed or burned-over range, and the disappearance of water holes, there could be little real enforcement even under a well-intentioned administration in all the vast unorganized region of Texas. The already rather general practice of road branding for the drives was made a requirement in 1871.
Soon after the war young Wesley and Otho Burton had put up picket pens at their ranch north of Waco, offering to brand any trail herds coming through from south Texas without a road mark. The large herds often belonged to half-a-dozen men and carried as many brands, brands unknown north, or unrecognized. A cover brand for the whole herd facilitated collection and established ownership in case of theft, stampede, or other accident on the road. The Burtons charged fifteen cents a head to brand big steers, some from the lower country ten, fifteen years old, ten cents each for those under four. In 1871 they road branded more than 4,000 head for the King Ranch. The stock came in four well-managed herds, each one taking five, six days at the pens.
A Mexican showed Wes Burton his way of managing the tough old Longhorns. A wrinkle-horned paint steer refused to enter the big pen leading to the long branding chute. He fought off the riders, dodging them, slipping from corner to corner quick as a blue racer. Finally one of the Mexicans offered to whip some sense into the old outlaw. He grabbed up a fence rail, went afoot for the steer, and when the animal charged, he side-stepped the fury of dust and power and gave the old paint a lick across the backbone that echoed loud as a pistol shot. Then, before the steer could recover, he was pushed into the chute, running before the uplifted length of rail. The Burtons watched in admiration, but knowing it was dangerous inside the high picket corral with those horns sharp as Spanish daggers.
Sometimes the southern stuff was wilder than deer and harder to handle. One trail herd stampeded right into Waco, only a few houses then, with brush still growing in the road before them. The town baker stepped out to shoo the cattle away from his door. One of the steers lunged for him, caught him under the chin with one long horn that burst from the man's scream-torn mouth, and then dragged him 200 yards before a cowboy could shoot the steer down. The baker died, the animal was butchered and the meat given away.
"No critter's let alive after he's brought on a killing," the men from the saloons told any newcomers around, and went back inside to wet their parched throats.
During the short season of 1867 at Abilene, Joseph McCoy, the father of the town's cattle trade, had proved his talk of saving the trailers from the abuse and violence they got from farmers and growers of northern cattle on the eastern trail. But the eastern market had proved very poor and yet the dust of the first trail herds of 1868 rose early and the little cow town of Abilene was full of waiting buyers. Thousands of cattle were bought for the feed lots and pastures of Illinois, for northern Indian contracts, and to stock the new ranches as far away as Montana. As the herds came in they spread farther and farther out over the prairie for feed and water, cleaning the new grass to the roots, churning the banks of the Smoky Hill River to bald gray mud. The town was a roaring bonanza station, every cowboy who could get in afire with the trail pay in his pockets and a burning thirst in him for fun and for a wet of his dusty gullet. A great invasion of saloonkeepers was ready for him, with their hangers-on— gamblers, dance-hall girls, and all the other women, white, black, and mixed, who didn't bother with any fancier approach than a tent or a shack down on the bottoms. There were con men, robbers, and killers, not only gun and knife men but garroters
from the slums of the eastern cities, too. And stalking through it all were the trail-herd owners and bosses, and cowmen in to buy, most of them as dust-bitten as the worst drag rider, for there was only one herd time— from dawn to dawn. But with the dust scrubbed away at the bathhouses, and the gray rime pounded from their hats, they gathered at the Drovers Cottage or even in the all-Texan cowboy hangouts, to talk cow. Many were quiet, soft-spoken men, whether Texas born or from Tennessee or New England. But not all. Some were as wild and colorful as the cattle they drove. Shanghai Pierce's voice was loud as any brindle bull's in the springtime, and the jingle of his gold bag was heard even farther by the small outfits with stock to sell, whether down on the Brazos or on the Smoky Hill at Abilene. He was credited with disposing of most troubles rather permanently, perhaps by gun or even the rope at a pecan tree, but for most occasions there was the clink of the gold in the bag that his old Negro companion always carried.
With this fine start, the year of 1868 still was not a profitable one for Abilene or the Texas cattle sent east, although 1,000 cars went out of Abilene in June. Soon after the first of these reached Illinois there was an appalling outbreak of Spanish, Texas, fever, with a spreading alarm through all the north country that was touched by Texas cattle or meat. The alarm was particularly felt among the owners of Shorthorn cattle. Many thought the deadly plague was shipping fever, the idea talked up big by the Abileners as they told about a shipment of around 40,000 cattle picked up in Texas by Chicago buyers and crowded upon Mississippi River steamboats at the mouth of the Red. The cattle reached grazers and feeders at Cairo thin and weak, and within a month domestic cattle all around were dying so fast that most of the region was stampeded into pushing all the stock to market, unfinished and even much breeding blood.
"Got to get 'em off our hands before they all die," the desperate feeders admitted sourly to each other.
It seemed that Illinois was so snorting mad that any man bringing in a load of Texas cattle now would have been mobbed, given a feather overcoat, and a ride on a bucking rail. It was easy enough to talk about it lightly out in Abilene until the bottom went out of the market, flooded by the dumping, and the buyers wary of all southwest cattle, with the stock still dying, when the shipments reached Chicago, the disease spreading there, too.
Then cattle began to die around the eastern shipments from Abilene, and finally it got out that some were dying around the trail herds of the town, even the milk cows at Abilene, and the scattered stock of the homesteaders. The whole region was really under quarantine between March and the end of November since 1867, some discovered but unenforced. To avoid trouble that might bring fines, even jailing, most of those losing stock near town were immediately paid for their losses, as legally entitled, the dead cattle buried by the drovers and others interested in keeping the news well-corraled. Soon, however, the new settlers along the streams crossed by the Chisholm Trail were standing at their homestead lines with their guns cocked, crowding the trail westward into buffalo country.
"Let the buffaloes do the dying," they taunted.
Some of the trailers swung around west by preference, seeking grass not tromped under thousands of sharp hoofs, some deciding to drive on through to the Union Pacific along the Platte. But the fever scare spread to the northern ranges, too, the American stock from the east and from Oregon dying, with more panic marketing and more people afraid to eat Texas meat. Even the trail drivers stopped butchering the usual strays gathered to their herds. Salt sow belly became the cowboy's staple, which he called sow bosom, mimicking the elegant people coming in who said "gentleman cow."
But fat pork, salted or smoked, although fine in a bean hole, was not for strings of dusty, waterless days. The trailers returned to fried beef, beef sliced thinner than ever and fried even longer.
In the meantime New York State, with fine herds of blooded stock, was quarantining western and northwestern cattle, and a convention on Spanish fever was called in Illinois, with delegates from all over the North and Canada but apparently none from Texas, where there was still angry insistence that their fine, healthy Longhorn cows were attacked by the envious heretical Yankees, and by growers unable to meet the competition of free grass and free-running cattle. The federal government ordered an investigation, too. Various theories were propounded. Some thought it was a shipping fever; others pointed out that frost stopped the spread of the disease and suggested that it might be a tick-borne infection. There was no denying that some cattle in from south Texas were so ticky they actually looked gray from the swollen bodies of millions of ticks.
"Hell, if them ticks was poison, why don't the critters packin' 'em around die?" The old Texans snorted over their rawhide whisky. "Or us that works with 'em?"
But there was no denying that Illinois had a disastrous disease among her cattle. Many buyers went broke, even big feeders like John T. Alexander, who lost $75,000 through the Spanish fever and much more through the panicky demands of those holding the mortgages on his extensive lands, compelling liquidation at this unfortunate time.
Of the 75,000 cattle that reached the Abilene region in 1868, one fourth had gone to Illinois in June, but after the outbreak of the fever, the herds waiting for cars in Kansas and those on the way up found no buyers. Any possible profits were eaten up by the cattle that had to be held over, with herds spread too close for grazing a hundred-mile region around Abilene, the dead smell of disaster on every wind. The town boosters did work up some sales and managed to snag a few buyers for the stock cattle to go to the growing range country farther up, but nobody wanted the beeves. The businessmen even worked up an exhibition car of buffaloes to be shunted all over the East, hoping to make buyers think about the West without remembering the fever. The buffalo exhibit drew crowds everywhere, and brought out buffalo hunters, a special train of them.
The Illinois legislature barred all Texas and southern cattle from the state unless wintered outside of the banned region, the proof of this to be a "swear paper," as the cowboys called it, an affidavit sworn to before a justice of the peace. The cowmen had a good round of drinks on that one. Hunt up J. P.'s out on the open range? Well, there were a few in the cow towns and more could be made. Even off in Illinois some feeders knew that this was an easy spin for any lariat, but they had a lot of grass and corn and very little to eat it. Buyers crowded Abilene early in 1869 and the swear papers were ready.
By now the Kansas Pacific had cut through the buffalo plains of west Kansas and headed into Colorado. The Union Pacific had reached Utah's borders. Drovers could find shipping points anywhere from the Missouri River to Rock Springs, Wyoming. Yet the largest herd of the year seems not to have gone north at all. It was larger even than the 10,000 the Indians had swept together back on the San Saba region and apparently whooped off up the Pecos for the comancheros. Now a herd estimated at 15,000 head of mixed stock was reported leaving the Brazos of lower Texas. The owners were a group of Confederate veterans disgusted with carpetbag rule and the political equality of the Negroes. But instead of heading for Mexico as those who wanted Goodnight to join him right after the war, these were going to California. The 200 men with many wagons and around 1,200 horses drove the cattle in four divisions, still far beyond good workable size. But they were going through country tapped by the comancheros and when there seemed danger of night attacks by Indians the whole drive was bedded in one vast, spreading herd over the prairie, like a great mass of buffaloes resting. It was a story to tell around the campfires and the Alamo bar. But few envied the men, and besides they would still have the problem of markets, and every cattle owner along the whole trail would be howling about the dirty, disease-spreading Rebs as loud as the mobs of Missouri pukes ever had.
There was growing danger along much of the trail to Abilene, too, but that didn't scare out many, not even the women. George Cluck and his wife ran a ranch down on Brushy Creek, in the troubled region near the Olives and half-a-dozen other violent outfits. Around April 1 the Clucks trailed out 1,000 goo
d steers. Dudley Snyder drove a similar herd along close enough for mutual protection. Mrs. Cluck, with three young children and a fourth due in the fall, went along, driving a team of Indian ponies to an old hack, a camping outfit back of the seats, a spyglass and a shot gun at her hand.
They found the Red River in a roaring, rampaging flood, the whole broad valley full of herds waiting for the waters to subside. But Cluck and Snyder were out for the best of the market, which meant getting to Abilene ahead of the rush, so Cluck's men lashed old cottonwood logs to the running gears of the hack to float it and with the woman and children watching, one of the trail hands climbed into the seat and whipped the ponies off into the swirling water, splashing red. When he was across, Mrs. Cluck climbed up behind her husband on their most trusted horse, a powerful swimmer. The children were carried in the arms of expert riders. All up and down the bank men from the other outfits gathered to watch in alarm and amazement.
"Hell, they're from Williamson County—they grow 'em tough and longhorned down there," one admiring old cowhand said as he replenished his cud and started his jaw working again, now that they were all out of the boiling flood and drying off on the far side around a big fire.
Through the Territory the two trail herds moved closer together. The Indians gave them little trouble but they had to pull their guns on some white rustlers who charged out of the Wichita Mountains, demanding a big cut of the herds. The ruffians far outnumbered the sixteen trailers and some of the young drivers were very nervous. But Mrs. Cluck loaded the rifles in the hack and handed them around. "If any of you boys don't want to fight," she said, "then get in the hack here and look after the children and let me have your gun."