by Mari Sandoz
The falling cattle prices had long cast their shadow across the path of the moving herds, the foreboding shadow of general economic collapse. In spite of their uneasiness, and all their energy and initiative, many of the cattlemen went broke. The Texans saw everything they had built up since the war defeat swept away. Even Charlie Goodnight was cleaned out by the panic.
Wichita, with the well-established trade to Indian Territory and the great government contracts for Indian goods, always with big graft rake-offs all along the way, had a kind of basic stability as solid as a wide-tired freight wagon. Even some of the dance halls were run by people of education and some refinement. Not that there wasn't shooting, too, but with more money left in circulation and the business less seasonal, Wichita offered more than Abilene ever did. A Negro group sang to guitars, an armless wonder put on daily performances. There was a variety theater, a beer garden with a band, a hall with from 100 to 150 players of keno, bawdy houses with twenty, thirty women apiece, and several brightly lighted churches. In addition there were always Indians camped down at the river, usually friendly but now rather surly over broken treaties and the loss of the buffalo ranges, their relatives killed in the fights before and after the attack on Adobe Walls, followed by General Mac- kenzie's expedition into the Panhandle. There were raids clear up on the Smoky Hill Trail and one right over on the Medicine, later said to have been by white men painted up, ranch hands, scaring out the swarming settlers. A dozen little stockades were thrown up along the Kansas frontier, but the early winter cooled everybody, including the actual redskins.
The gloom over all the cow country deepened all winter and the early herds of 1874 ran into trouble everywhere: George W. West and his brother Sol had started very early from Lavaca County and struck burnt range in the Territory and an April blizzard that froze their horses and scattered their herd. George West, generally considered an impatient man, roared that if he had to fight the winters he'd do it up north where the grass was fattening and the railroads handier. After selling what they could gather up, he divided the profits with Sol, handing him his seventy-five cents, and made plans for a move north. Perhaps no one had told them about the grasshoppers up there, darkening the noonday sky, making the railroad tracks so slippery that the engine wheels spun, or that up at the mines in Montana a full-grown steer sold for $10.
During 1874 only 166,000 cattle were shipped from Wichita and Ellsworth, 151,618 in 1875. By then the Chisholm Trail was closed forever by the farmers, by their fields and their buckshot and by the justices of the peace and county judges who gave the farmers the damages they demanded for their crops, to be paid before the herds could move. Sometimes the trailers bulldozed their way through with guns. But that couldn't work long.
By 1876 the land around Wichita was mostly settled and the homesteaders heaping their complaints about recurrent Texas fever on top of the long protests from the breeders of blooded stock, particularly Shorthorns. Finally the legislature had to push the quarantine line westward once more, shutting out all cattle not wintered north of the fever regions of Texas from any market east of Dodge City. So now it would be the town built by the buffalo hunters who had fought the cowboys all along the fringes of the cow country from Fort Griffin to Sidney, up on the Union Pacific. But the skin men were gone from most of the region, and the wind blew sweet over the weeds grown up in the hide yards and down the practically deserted streets of Dodge.
CHAPTER IV
THE INDIAN SUMMER OF OLD DODGE
THE year 1876 was the end of an era, not only for the wandering Chisholm Trail and its cow towns but for the whole nation. Philadelphia was straining to put together the first representative world's fair of the industrial age, and even the most remote country store and cattle-trail saloon was planning to celebrate the Centennial Fourth of July with noise, and with oratory, if possible.
The nation's first hundred years ended under a sky dark as a Panhandle black blizzard. For months one federal scandal after another had blown its stinging load into the eyes of the public, the dirty tracks of the grafters plain to the very doorstep of the White House for all who could still see. The cattlemen, and the farmers, too, were angry, desperate after all the years of lagging prices and the rising monopolistic power of the railroads and meatpackers while the workingman, the beef growers' ultimate market, faced repeated pay cuts and growing unemployment. Although contributions to Hayes' campaign for the presidency seemed generous enough, the rumble from the voters scared his managers and so once more the bloody shirt of the Union dead was hauled out to stampede the voters like Longhorns before a flapping Indian blanket. Yet even this proved not enough, and Tilden was elected president by a popular majority of over a quarter million votes, with the House of Representatives going Democratic, too. But Hayes, and particularly those who had put their money on him, would not take defeat so easily. It was immediately made plain that Grant and the army would back Hayes, not the elected Tilden, come Inauguration Day, with cannon probably mounted in the circles of the street intersections, as the French planner of Washington anticipated. But the cannons would not be turned against a revolution, only against the entry of the legitimate government.
Unwilling to bring on another bloody civil strife, Tilden agreed to leave the contested election to the decision of a commission. They threw out the Democratic electoral votes of Florida and Louisiana and declared Hayes the winner.
This decision in favor of the minority Republicans was not made until midwinter, very close to Inauguration Day. It brought immediate and loud cries of "Stolen election!" and "A shameful steal of the presidency!" through the southern cattle country. Usually the Jack Texans kept quiet as a wild calf in the brush when it came to politics, but Charlie Goodnight, down there visiting and looking around for cattle, heard a drunk humming "Marching through Georgia." Galled by the presidential decision Goodnight roared out, "By God, it's another bloody march all right, but through Washington, D. C., this time. I thought I pulled out of Texas to get away from the damned carpetbaggers. Now we got them in the White House!"
When the news reached Dodge the streets were full of dirty snow instead of angry, gun-armed Texans ready to answer the jibes of the northerners, which included most of the gamblers and hangers-on around the saloons, and the bluecoats from the neighboring post. No bullets spurted dust from the windy street, no men ducked for cover. No horses along the hitch racks plunged, perhaps screaming like a woman as they were hit, and broke loose, to head for the open country, with men spurring after them, while others shot it out where they crouched. It would have been a time for bystanders to run for the washouts, with windows crashing from stray bullets, or thin walls torn, with women and children crying inside, the dead not only those who were sprawled in the streets and alley. If this steal of the election had happened in the summer, the taunts of the northerners, feeling bigger in the trickery than from any fair win, would certainly have brought blood to run in the streets of Dodge, and who could tell where else in the cow country, with troops close almost everywhere, in little knots, but only enough to aggravate, to arouse a tender pride that dared not be satisfied short of death?
One of the flamboyant bluecoats that some Texans had had to endure would never come charging against them in any fight now, nor his less famous brother take out his anger and envy by brawling and cracking southern heads up around Hays only a few years ago. George Custer had ridden out in arrogance once too often and found the Sioux up on the Little Big Horn no peaceful, unguarded winter camp like the Cheyennes that he struck down in the Washita country only a few years ago, and very near to the new cattle trail planned to Dodge City.
Another and more recently active enemy of the Texans died during the fateful year of 1876. Wild Bill Hickok would never bulldoze another man, north or south, nor draw upon an unarmed one, or one of unequal marksmanship. Many who had endured the bragging ways of his admirers took a little satisfaction in McCall's bullet up there at the new gold camp of Deadwood, particularly some who knew ho
w Hickok had killed his men, from McCanles through Coe and Williams. But there were a few who realized that halos bright as January sundogs had surrounded all the lights he faced for a long, long time now, with the shadows of a permanent night creeping in all around him. In this even the men who despised his kind the most, the outdoor men living with the sharpened senses, particularly unbounded sight, felt a deep pity.
Yes, 1876 was the end of an era, not only the end of a hundred years but of a ten-year period that demanded the gaudiest, the most exaggerated characters to continue, if not the violent heroic times and deeds of a very bloody war, at least such heroics as could be whipped up to feed the public's voracious, wolfish hunger. The two showiest, Custer and Hickok, had not survived the year, and even the most conspicuous of Indian scouts, the tattered, rope-belted California Joe, who couldn't be separated from his jug by Custer or from his tangled red hair by the Indians, was dead, too, ended by a bullet up in the White River country of Nebraska. Violent ends to fit a violent time.
The year also brought a beginning to the cow country, the start of a long, slow revolution not visible for years. At the Centennial at Philadelphia W. S. Ikard, early rancher of Henrietta, Texas, saw his first Herefords—a handsome red cattle, with clean, curly-haired white faces and white-lined backs, the horns shortish, the eyes mild. But what interested Ikard was the blockiness, the short bones, and the width and depth of the meat on shoulder, back, and hindquarters—steak animals. And certainly good keepers.
"Can they graze?" he asked.
Their owner swore they were one of the best keepers known, slow, even-tempered, easy to handle. "Here, put your hand out," he said. And as Ikard extended his hand, the young bull sniffed inquiringly at the silver-studded leather cuff the Texan wore, tested it with a speculative tongue.
Ikard went home without the Herefords, but the white faces haunted him and he talked of them repeatedly. "Too short-legged; never make it to water from the range," some of the other Texans argued.
"Nah, never cover the ground for good grazing here," Ikard's hands agreed.
But W. S. worried the idea like a coyote returning to a bone that smelled of the marrow inside.
The year was also a new beginning for Dodge City, up the Arkansas River. There had been a scattering of cattle in there before, some in 1872 while the place was still Buffalo City, the first tent stakes barely pounded into the baked earth or the whisky barrels unloaded. Doc Barton, looking no more than nineteen at the time, had hit the place with eight trail hands, 1,000 cattle, and high hopes. He had swung out around the great buffalo herds and the Indians who were building up to the fury with which, two years later, they struck the hide men at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. Doc had reached the Arkansas far up in Colorado and followed the river and the railroad survey down. At the Dodge station the piercing headlight of the engine puffing westward out of the evening had scared his cattle, and some of his trail hands, too. Here was a railroad at last, but there were no loading pens and Doc had to take his steers clear down to Great Bend.
Since then a few settlers and small ranchers had gradually sifted into the region to supply Fort Dodge and the growing town with milk and a change from buffalo meat, later to serve as holding ranges for Texas stock until delivered at Newton, perhaps, or farther north, kept for better prices, sometimes for any price at all. At first whoopers were hired to keep the migrating buffalo herds off the range but now most of the buffaloes were gone and the Indians, except the few making trouble down around Double Mountain Fork and the Thompson canyon in Texas, had been whipped to the reservations.
Dodge City was born the daughter of the hide men, born out of their need, and matured to their joy. As the buffalo herds dwindled, their bleaching bones whitened the prairie like morning frost in November or even strips of snow, and great bone ricks grew along the railroad at Dodge. But they were poor compensation for the lost drying prairie, where thousands of hides had once been staked out, or the hide yards said to have held as many as 100,000 buffalo skins at one time, piled and baled, waiting for the strings of empty cars. At the best bones were cheap pay, and besides they did not replenish themselves with the recurring springtime.
One business after another had moved away from Dodge, some of the gambling dens and dance halls first, then even a tailor, perhaps, or a harness shop. A few followed the shrinking buffalo herds deep into west Texas but generally they went to the mine camps of Colorado and beyond. Sometimes the owner scooped the few coins from the till into his drawstring pouch or an old tobacco sack and skipped with whatever else he could pack off before the creditors came, if they weren't hitting out somewhere in the night themselves. Every few days the wind whistled through more empty windows, somehow broken almost as soon as the owner turned down an alley.
The deserted prairie had grassed over behind the buffalo herds, deep and wonderful as it had perhaps never been before, the shy prairie plovers not rising until the rare intruder's feet were upon them. Most of the wolves were gone to fatten on the last harvest of the buffalo hide men far down in west Texas, many coyotes following as was their scavenging nature. Even the old trails of the hide wagons were grown over into yellow bands of sunflowers and gum-weed reaching toward Dodge. Around town the cockleburs and the stinking bee plant had moved in, with the horse-weed and the yellow rose of Texas, the big sunflower, growing man-high in the old freight lots, the elephant corral, and the hide yards.
On Front Street grass had pushed up through the old sidewalk and grew into the burning days of July, some still standing between the gray boards that winter. Then suddenly it seemed that the Centennial year might bring a new era to Dodge also. Perhaps the hide town had only slowed down a while, drowsed a little in an early squaw winter of life before a fine, long Indian summer. Rumors told of a new cattle trail well west of the latest quarantine line. Several Texans were laying out a route through the wilder Indians in the west end of the Territory, hoping to avoid the long stretches of sparse prairie and jack oak—stretches with sandy stream beds and upland ponds practically waterless after the first of May. Some recalled the hard drive that J. W. Driskill made to Dodge last year with a herd of 1,450 Longhorns. It was summer and they went without water four days crossing Indian Territory and then, when the experienced old drover just about gave up saving his stock and hoped only to rescue his pitifully small crew of four men, the old lead steer had lifted his head with the dark swollen tongue sticking from his mouth. He saw what Goodnight saw on that terrible drive to the Pecos nine years ago. Here, too, the worn cattle tried to break into a shuffling, stumbling run terrible for the weary and desperate men to see, and yet wonderful, too, for this meant there was water near. They struck it just before sundown and worked all night to keep the thirst-crazed cattle from killing themselves.
Somehow they got the herd through those four days and that night of watering with the loss of only one cow, but the faces of the men when they reached Dodge and their stories made every hopeful trailer uneasy about trying a western drive until more permanent water was located.
Then, the spring of 1876, with Dewees and Ellison, the Millett brothers, Bishop, and Head and several others already on the way north, stockyards were thrown up in addition to the old loading pens. Riders carrying words of welcome were sent out: grass fine, water plentiful, no grangers or practically none, and drinks two for a quarter.
Few of the old-timers around Dodge dared believe that the herds would actually stop there. "Hell, when they get to them dry stretches they'll swing 'round west through Colorado, or east, spite of the quarantine," a dozen merchants and saloonkeepers told their help, one way or another.
Then one day a pearly thread of haze seemed to cling to the southwestern horizon. Later a faint sound like bawling somewhere high up floated on the wind, and a thin, dark line appeared, moving over the rolling prairie like fall ants hurrying with winter almost upon them. As the line neared and became a string of cattle heading for the crossing above the toll bridge, the crippled gatekeeper jer
ked off his hat and waved it toward the town, yelling, pointing. But he was probably the last one of all of Dodge to discover the fast-walking lead steers, already breaking from the pointers toward the smell of water.
So, almost overnight, the deserted Daughter of the Hide Men became the Queen of the Cowboys.
Before a month was past the herds wore the grass down in one great swath from Doan's Crossing of the Red River north to the Arkansas and the new Western or Dodge City Trail was established, with dust hanging over it like dry smoke along the sky. Most of Dodge and many hundreds drawn there by the beef bonanza were as excited as with any gold strike up around Deadwood Gulch. They saw Dodge as the new metropolis of the West. To them this was not to be a boom but permanent.
A few tried to stay calm—men like Robert Wright, who had hunted the region long before the railroad came, and Mayor Hoover, who sold the early buffalo hunters their whisky back in 1872—ran it right into their tin cups from a barrel set on pegs driven into the prairie. Such men took a lot of codding and scoff for the four years since then, magnified to forty.
"Old-timers like Bob there always think yesterday's chickens was bigger than today's geese," a homesteader just north of town said, perhaps because he hoped to sell his place for building lots in an expanding city.