by Mari Sandoz
But by 1877 George Reynolds, the solid old cowman still carrying an arrow in his back from an Indian fight ten years before, was defending the Shorthorns. He predicted that they would be one of the coming breeds for Texas. He drove in some seed stock from Colorado, in addition to the over 200 carloads of blooded cattle the Katy railroad had already hauled into the state. Much of this stock went to men who once, with enterprise and millions of Longhorns, almost wiped out the beef producers in the original cattle regions of the nation—New England and the area around New York and Philadelphia. Not by the fever, although that had been a threat for many years, but because in those regions cattle had to be fed and winter sheltered, with both breeding stock and land high, so high they couldn't compete against the Longhorn from the wild, free herds, to feed on free grass, with almost the only outlay the roundups, trailing, and shipping expenses.
But as the wild cattle vanished and the range was practically all claimed if not owned, the Texan turned to better blood. Although a heavy investor in Shorthorns, Goodnight felt there must be a better stock for his range. He recalled that during the winter of 1871 he saw some Aberdeen Angus cattle out on the Laramie Plains of Wyoming—the polled blacks thick-haired and straight-backed and in good shape when many other cattle froze in the high, blizzard-swept country. But there was almost no Angus breeding stock available.
Goodnight talked the problem over with W. S. Ikard, who had seen a remarkable breed of cattle at the World's Fair in 1876—a breed of red whitefaces called Herefords, a fine, blocky beef stock said to be good foragers. Finally he had brought a few into Texas, as did several others, and found that almost no one would take the new cattle as gifts. Then in 1880 Lee and Reynolds walked seven carloads of Herefords from the railroad to the LE ranch west of Tascosa. They turned out hardy, good keepers and beefy as ever.
During the next few years Goodnight brought in substantial numbers of White Faces, too, first for the JA range, then to the ranch on the upper Tule, near the bone piles left there back in 1874 by General Mackenzie when he butchered around 1,200 captured Indian horses. Goodnight paid a flat $75 a piece for a fine herd of twenty-five bulls, over 600 cows, with around 400 calves. Old-timers who had seen plenty big four-year-old Longhorns go at $5 shook their heads when they heard these prices. Foreign capital! That Irishman was getting skinned like a fat heifer, and his hide hung out on the corral to dry.
But the Hereford blood raised the quality of the JA cattle and produced the first range yearlings in the region to bring $25 a piece. In a stretch of eight years around 10,000 purebred Hereford bulls were brought into the Panhandle. Goodnight's cross of a little of the old Longhorn for self-reliance and initiative and Shorthorn for weight and bone on top of the dominant Hereford blood made a most excellent cow for the Panhandle. She was fine to see, with her white face, perhaps with a white patch like a kerchief behind her neck, sometimes a white stripe all down the back. A good grazer, she laid on meat and fat and was still perfectly able to walk the shortening trails to market and to the slaughterhouses when they moved out upon the range.
Another of the early ranchers, one who was as dedicated as King or Goodnight and the others in his own way, started to move the year Charlie Goodnight returned to Texas. Except that I. P., Print, Olive was leaving the state. The San Gabriel region was overrun by nesters, with fool hoe men, he said. But everybody knew it was because he had become so hated that, armed and ruthless as he and his entire outfit were, he was being handed the same treatment that he had doled out to those around him, to Negroes, Mexicans, settlers—to anyone who got in his way, particularly those who couldn't fight back.
Yet some had been fighting back, as his wife apparently reminded him, striking out of the darkness upon the Olives, killing Thomas and one of their Negro hands, crippling Print and others of the help. It was no way to raise their children, their son William, already talking of killing although still a girl-faced boy. For years now there had been little except violence, with almost everybody against them except the Snyders, fine people, but there were fine Olives, too, fine God-fearing Olives.
Print must have known that although he was always acquitted of the killings by the courts, none of the outfit was acquitted in the minds of the cattlemen around them, nor of the settlers. More and more were wondering openly whether this neighbor or that one who vanished had received one of the Olive "Tickets to Hell."
By this time young Bob, twenty-two and considered the most reckless of all the brothers, was in trouble again. "Looks to me like that outfit's determined to plant a steady crop of casualties like some folks plant cotton," one of their neighbors, a good twenty miles off and plainly close enough, said slowly.
Evidently it was true that Bob had shot a Negro who, he claimed, was stealing corn from the Olive cribs. Naturally Bob was not tried for that but now there was another killing, some said his third, perhaps the fourth. It seemed that this time Bob was in a saloon drinking with a man called Cal Nutt,* whom the Olives said later they suspected as one of the gang that attacked the ranch and killed Thomas. Or perhaps he was hired to dispose of Bob because he had sworn to get his brother's murderers.
After the two men drank together awhile, Bob Olive said he had to be going. Some argument came up outside the saloon door, their voices rising, the men around them moving back as cattle would from a couple of bulls bellowing mortal challenges. Suddenly Cal Nutt fired a bullet through Bob Olive's loose-swinging vest. The report was lost in Bob's fast shots that knocked Nutt backward through the swinging saloon doors, two bullets in his vitals. This time there were plenty of dark and angry faces, and a lot of lynch talk, talk of lynching an Olive, all the Olive brothers.
But by then young Bob was gone, riding hard for the home ranch. There his brothers filled his pockets with money and hustled him off for Wyoming. GN, Gone North, as Bob Stevens. This was no time to chance a trial, Print Olive argued, with the juries going against them now. There was even some concern among the brothers, particularly Ira, about their Methodist parents and sisters. Bob would surely get a ranch job up in Wyoming, probably with Federal Judge Carey, a good friend of Dudley Snyder.
A reward of $400 was posted for Bob and now gradually the news spread, too, that the Olive brothers were moving north, not just taking a herd or even half-a-dozen herds to market but pulling out, going lock, stock, and barrel. Many went to some far hill to watch them go, holding their impatient horses long after the Olives were past. Others watched by rumor, by telling and retelling, until the going had grown to mammoth size. Some said there were 60,000 cattle and 2,000 horses, driven by seventy-five cowboys, mostly Mexican and Negro, some of them with the Olives for years. Perhaps it was allegiance; perhaps at bottom the loyalty that the Olives got from their men was some curious fear. But perhaps that, too, was allegiance.
Because the Olive herds came from down in the tick belt and were headed through settlements, the cowhands would need their guns handy, and they all had them, including young William, a blustering boy talking big, pulling his Colt at any excuse. Print had a new Winchester in the boot and his holster low over his worn chaps. Print Olive was never a Shanghai Pierce, to go unarmed, whether, as old Shang did, in south Texas or on the streets of badman Abilene. Nor was he like gun-shy Jesse Chisholm or even John Chisum, whose hired hands were notoriously fast with gun play but Old John was always a muley, without weapon or defense.
The Olives went north with long trains of freight wagons carrying ranch tools, equipment, implements, and supplies. I. P. rode ahead, his dark face even darker at this necessity to lead this departure from his home region, the milder brother, Ira, riding beside him, his eyes and his drake-tail hair the same Indian black under the dust.
Behind them came some of the chuck wagons and the family carriage with Louise Olive looking out anxiously from among her children back along the trail to where her son William must be riding. The carriage was followed by several lighter vehicles, buggies and carts, and the wagons with the family belongings and their
camp equipment. Far back, their manes and tails streaming in the wind, the loose horses followed the bell mares, and finally there were the cattle, broken into many herds with their remudas, separated by long stretches to let the dust clear off and to keep them from crowding and mixing at the watering places and the stretches of grazing. Finally, far behind the last drags came the families of the hands, mostly Negro and Mexican, and then the heavy wagon trains, moving slowly but doggedly.
Altogether the Olive outfit was strung over ten to twenty-five miles of trail, depending upon the water and the range. They traveled at a good steady rate. Any stock that couldn't keep up was dropped, the rest not hurrying but moving, moving. So a remote ancestor of the Longhorn had come westward out of Asia, except that there must have been fewer, far fewer cattle and a great many times more people—an exodus of man.
With Print Olive always up ahead, leading his herds to new grass, there was no encouragement to friendliness along the route. Once, when one of the men was asked at a trail supply store where they were going, he scratched under his dusty hat and said, "Damn if I know. I aims just to follow."
One day the Olive brothers came up on a covered wagon stranded out on the prairie, one horse dead from snakebite, a man, his wife, and a baby in the wagon, helpless, many miles from any habitation, with no food left, no gun for hunting, not even the knowledge for a rabbit snare or the digging of an Indian turnip. The man had not eaten for two days.
Print Olive slouched over his saddle, his arms folded on the horn, listening, his sharp little eyes probing the desperation on the man's face. After a while he raised himself in the stirrups and shifted his holster. "Come along. I'll adopt you," he said.
He ordered a team hiked to the tongue, the lone horse sent back to the stock herd, and had the cook wagon stop to feed the starving little family. Then they were dropped in with the other wagons of the hired help, far behind. There were other men, brown-skinned and white, in that long, moving outfit who had come to Print Olive through some desperation.
As I. P. Olive neared the Kansas-Nebraska line he made plans for the coming winter. His family would be settled in some little town. Perhaps he knew that his wife looked hopefully toward quieter times here in the north with the Yankees, who were perhaps not so hotheaded. Certainly she could hope that there would be less here to arouse her husband to his violent angers, with pleasanter times for her children, particularly for her beloved, the young William. He was a good boy, but a little wild, his mother admitted, and as restive as a young mustang under his father's hand, as Print had been very early, Print's mother once told her daughter-in-law. "His father never understood Prentice," she had defended.
The herds were stopped at the Republican River, with fine, long grass, lush enough to feed the great herd of buffaloes once centered there, and mostly gone four, five years ago. There seemed only a scattering of cattle to fatten on these well-seeded slopes already ripening golden toward fall. Here the Olives built a great spread of corraling, the Olive Pens, to which the herds were gathered at night and turned out mornings. The methodical one for such tasks was Ira. He saw to it that all the penning was orderly. He always stationed a man in the gate as it opened, to hold the cattle back, keep them to a single file, without crowding so no horns were broken off.
"I hate and despise a critter with a horn gone," he said.
Evidently he meant it. One morning he was late coming out to the pens. The cattle were gone to the range but there were a couple of fine long horns tramped into the dirt of the gate. He cursed the Mexican gatetender, called him every vile Texas name in Spanish and English. But Leon was not the man to take this quietly as the older hands did, men like Uncle Amos and the other Olive Negroes. Caught without his gun, he whipped a knife from his boot, but before he could throw it Ira shot him down. Several men saw this coming but none dared move to stop it, or to avenge the killing. No one could be certain he might not be next, now that this quieter one of the Olives had taken to gunning his hired help down, too.
Afterward Ira Olive paid the man's widow well, and, of course, it never became a matter for the law. By this time news from Texas got around the Republican country about the cattlemen named Olive who had pushed into the region like a stray hog into a corncrib. As settlers began to move into the old Olive range down in the San Gabriel country rumors ran northward on the wind. Bodies were being found in the empty Olive reservoirs and dirt tanks—more and more bodies, apparently of some of the ranch hands and settlers who had vanished and were never heard from again.
With the Indians so recently pushed out of much of Wyoming and Dakota and most of the Yellowstone basin, and the cattlemen just beginning to move in, many wondered why Print Olive squatted in the rapidly settling Republican country. Still, he had clung to the San Gabriel and Williamson County region with settlements from before the days of the Texas Republic, when he could have started out in open country as King did, or moved, as Goodnight and a hundred others. Perhaps he needed the fighting, as the gunmen of Griffin and Abilene, of Newton and Tascosa and Dodge City needed gunplay.
Before many weeks on the Republican River Print Olive was informed he had moved in on grass saved for winter range by cattlemen who claimed the region for years. He discovered that he was hemmed in by ranchers and homesteaders, and that there was no grass for any Johnny-Come-Lately except through an army of guns, and it was plain there were too many guns here already, Texans, too, and British money, never shy about putting unruly natives down. Besides, many of the ranchers and the settlers were old buffalo hunters, men who put their trust in long-distance rifles, long-distance marksmanship. From their faces he knew they had heard his reputation and were not afraid.
"Yeh, I hear you killed nine niggers down in Texas," one of the old hunters now running cattle told Print in a bar. With his mouth tilted up he said it and then took deliberate aim on the spittoon, hit it squarely, and walked away.
But there was more to make I. P. Olive uneasy. The whole region was organized into counties, with officials and law, law that could be bought, certainly already bought, and would be mighty expensive for Rebel money or any outsider's money to unbuy. Before long Print led a wedge of his riders up to the Platte and across it into the long-grass country of the sandhills, where the fall bunchgrass ran orange in the wind of sunset. But the Texas cowman realized that this handsome sweep of grass was perhaps longer on looks than on feed value, or the other grasses around would show less grazing. Yet there must be plenty of good range farther on, in the rolling chophills, sandy as some of the region that Richard King had drawn into his cattle empire down in the gulf country. As they rode in deeper the cow chips became scarcer, and not a cow in sight, only an occasional antelope to turn and run with a toss of white rump hair, but to circle around back to look.
The region was without a rock or tree or even a shrub beyond a few little buckbrush patches or perhaps a dwarf willow shorter than the stirrup, in some low spot. The only thorns to make the Texans feel at home were those on the low clumps of red-hipped prairie roses in the grass, the spears of the soapweed clumps on the sandier knobs, and an occasional patch of bull-tongue cactus—patches like greenish hearthrugs scattered around, the sections small and dainty to the eye accustomed to prickly pear that grew taller than a man on horseback, with the gray-blue sections over a foot long, the barbed spines the size of darning needles.
Finally, riding over a low ridge, Print Olive and his men looked down on a sandy little valley, as empty as all the others except that a stream clear as spring water ran through it, filled almost level with the grassy banks that showed little variation from drouth or flood. The men bellied down to drink, the water very sweet to the alkalied tongues of the Olives and their cowboys. Wiping his bristled mouth with the red bandanna about his neck, Print took out the little map he carried and saw no humor in the name, the Dismal River.
The Olives sold a fine lot of late-fall grass-fat beeves, certainly finished out better than any they ever marketed from Texas. This was me
at country and the Olives were the outfit to produce it, so Print bought around 150 two-year-old Shorthorn bulls and the next week he was stringing 15,000 Texas cattle northward in one close-trailed herd after another, across the sand-choked Platte and into the foothills beyond. Many of the Republican ranchers had been out to see him go, stopping their horses on the far ridges, as down in Texas, the men here not to be contented until the last hoof tracks of the Olive cows were blown over. Along the Platte men watched, too, the sun glinting on the rifles across their saddles. They knew it was Olive stock coiming through and were prepared to see that the range-hungry Texans did not linger overlong.
Finally the last of the drags were in the protected hills of the Dismal country. Print had a few shacks thrown together for his riders. He was satisfied with the wintering, but by spring he was looking around for something nearer the railroad, nearer the comforts of town for his family, his hands, and himself, too, for I. P. Olive liked to spend the evenings in one bar after another, feeling big as he stalked through the swinging doors and saw the faces at his coming, the Yankee faces showing they knew him. True, there was no vacant range near the railroad and he would have to clear the settlers off their homesteads and push some small ranchers from the land they had been holding ten, twelve years. But they had no rights beyond the gun, not even the settlers, no matter what the law said.
Print settled some of his best men into a log house on a rented school section on the South Loup River and took a house at Plum Creek on the Union Pacific along the Platte. Almost immediately old Plum Creek, a stagecoach station not so long ago, became Olive Town, taken over by his outfit. Some Texans were surprised that Print would move his headquarters to the railroad, where there was law and courts, the latter certainly with the local cattlemen against the outsider.