Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

After a while Mitchell's rope parted and he fell into the burning brush and accumulated leaves amid a gushing of smoke, one arm still uplifted to Ketchum by the handcuffed wrist.

  Nodding to his men, Print Olive turned his horse toward the ranch, the rest following, leaving two of the hands behind to keep the fire from spreading to the range.

  It was the next day before anyone dared to follow the wheel tracks to find what everyone knew would be there. But no one was prepared for the burning. Now shock spread over the state, even to the hiding place of Mrs. Mitchell and her daughters, including the twice-bereaved Tamar Snow. It reached over much of the cattle region and over the nation. "Alleged Rustlers Burned Like Witches and Heretics!" one of the headlines cried. "Nebraska Settlers Victims of Heinous Crime Out of Inquisition!" another added. But mostly the headlines screamed out the same two words, over and over: MAN BURNERS! MAN BURNERS!"

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  BOOK III

  ORGANIZATIONS,

  CORPORATIONS,

  AND BUGGY BOSSES

  CHAPTER I

  DISCIPLES UNDER THE OAK

  AND THE COTTONWOOD

  OF ALL the expanding cow country the only part that was ever Rebel territory, and suffered the swarms of carpetbaggers, was Texas. The anger against this exploitation not only drove out men like Goodnight but helped swell movements such as the Klan, with its hooded night riding and whipping with wet rope, but it encouraged the violent and the lawless all over the state. The attempt at regulating the early postwar cow hunts, with the general ignoring of the law, was often blamed for the custom of frying up anybody's beef but the rancher's own at his cookhouse and chuck wagon. Yet long before one Rebel shot was fired there really were people in Texas who would almost as soon eat one of their own children as one of their own beeves. To butcher his own meat for a guest was the cowman's highest honoring, a little like the Old-Testament father killing the fatted calf.

  Besides, for a long time the wild cattle were there for the taking, with such county organization as existed often very far off, with counties perhaps sixty miles one way and ninety or a hundred the other. As the loose cattle grew scarcer and wilder from all the chousing, branded stock and their calf crop became more attractive to the careless, particularly as the blood was improved and the taking more profitable. Almost from the first the cattlemen saw they needed rules and some agreement on branding, the calf to go with the cow as the tail goes with the hide, and for a fair division of the mavericks, usually on a percentage of the herd ownership on the particular range.

  But almost before branding dates were agreed on "Sooners" were jumping the gun, working the loose herds, taking the pick of the calf crop and the older unbranded stock, the mavericks. To separate the calf from the branded cow some slit his tongue to make his sucking painful long enough to wean him. Even easier was just to kill the cow in some thorn patch or arroyo. Some carried bows and arrows for this, leaving the arrows sticking in the dead animal.

  "Damn Indians been working the range in a new way," some of the ranchers complained. But there were plenty of men who knew Indians. Some of these looked at the arrows and spit out their tobacco into the dust. "Bucks from the Short-Hair tribe—"

  Up in Palo Pinto County one of the Sooners was out weeks ahead of the February 1 date, carrying his chunk of fire for the branding irons along because wood and cow chips were too wet for the flint and steel. He moved his roundup outfit out very casually and openly. Late in January he appeared at West Edwards holding pens with around 100 mavericks gathered on Edwards' range. Bold as a skunk in a hen yard he built up his fire and branded the mavericks right there under the rancher's nose. Furious, Edwards and three good hands rode out to the Sooner's own range. They traveled light, with only a blanket apiece, some grub in a morral, a Winchester at each saddle, and a couple of six-shooters at the hips. In two days Edwards branded 250 unmarked cattle from among the Sooner's stock.

  It was said that another enterprising rancher, Haley, rounded up a branding pen full of big calves and yearlings a day ahead of the opening date, ready for the iron. That night an owner of some of the penned stock, with a few other cowmen, threw the gate to Haley's pen, drove the cattle to his own corrals, and notified the surrounding ranchers. They came, divided the young stuff figured on the probable number of cows each man had on the open range, an estimate because there was no way to be certain in the broken, brushy country.

  As early as 1868 small groups of owners had organized into protective associations to keep out thieves and maverickers. Some hired stock detectives to watch as much of the vast ranges as possible and keep an eye on the pens and cattle work. As ranching spread into the open country north and westward, drovers coming through, particularly with mixed herds, got mighty careless about sweeping along any local stock handy. The idea caught on and by 1872 there were two protective associations up in Colorado, with delegations from the young Wyoming association down to observe. Up there the lead was taken by Cheyenne, with her freighting and stage lines anxious to protect their stock, horses, mules, and bulls, from rustlers. Over west the Laramie County Stock Growers Association organized in time to run the first general roundup the spring of 1873, with eleven ranchers participating. In 1879 the name was changed to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and within a couple of years they had acquired powerful connections over in the capitol. Soon the association's stock detectives were arresting men or shooting them down if they resisted as though they were law-enforcement officials. Next the Association spread its supervised roundup and its detective system into parts of Colorado, up around the Black Hills, and into Nebraska as far as the forks of the Platte. From the first, newcomers into the free-land regions looked with uneasiness upon the growing power of the Wyoming association. Down in Nebraska settlers were openly against this outside, extra-governmental force invading their state. Somehow the settlers feared the Association and its armed range riders much more than the rustlers or the outlaws did.

  By this time cattle were once more worth stealing and Texas was sprouting stockmen's associations like mesquites on new cattle range behind the buffalo hide men. Fort Griffin, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, first only a way-station for southern trail herds, suddenly flourished under the only wealth Texas knew in the depression—buffalo hides—and drew as fine a lot of snakes, varmints, and plain trash as any gully washer ever swept down. Then, suddenly, the buffalo was gone, except in the farthest reaches, leaving only bones and lengthening grass. The men who had made fortunes either from the hunt or from the hunters around Griffin were out of jobs. Some went into cattle, but most had blown in any money they made and now found cowboy wages at $25 a month and found pretty slow pickings. Gangs of such men rode out of Griffin in the nights to the surrounding ranches, such as the Lynch outfit and others, and drove off herds of cattle. Often they waited until the rancher had rounded up his stock and then struck. Rustling became big business, flaring up everywhere, spreading like prairie fires in the wind over all the range country until solid cowmen like Jim Loving, who once stood off the Indians successfully for years, were cleaned out by the rustlers.

  Not that cattle stealing wasn't old long before a cow crossed the Rio Grande—surely reaching back to the time of the first semi-domesticated bovine. The migrations bringing herds out of Asia into Europe must have had to fight off thieves much of the way. The early and very destructive raids by the infuriated Indians and the mestizo seeking food and breeding stock bedeviled the missions and then the ranchers. Later, if Indians swept stock away or it was driven across the border into Mexico, the rancher could appeal to the government for reparation but stock gone with the rustlers was stock entirely lost.

  True, the practice of mavericking—the hard work of gathering unbranded stock past weaning age—had first been accepted as legitimate cow hunting, then as a sort of gentle- manly theft from great pools of cattle in the wilder brush and breaks, in strictly limited, unclaimed areas. Before 1870 horse stealing was the ultim
ate crime, for to set a man afoot to the mercies of the Comanches or, worse, to death from starvation and torturing thirst, was more dastardly than a bullet through the back. In those days it was an honor to help string up a horse thief, while mavericking, even driving off a few of the usually very distant neighbor's cows, didn't keep a man from being a deacon in the church or playing a spread of dominoes with the sheriff. Many ranchers had been cow-poor after the war and were actually obliged to the man who helped reduce their herds to fit their grazing ground. Rustlers usually took the tamest, the most tractable stock. Often this was the poorer and more likely to draw raiding Indians to the ranch than the brush herds. For a long time cattle stealing in Texas was at the worst a misdemeanor and the thief found guilty might pay a small fine and go on his way undisgraced, for who hadn't got his start with a rope and a running iron?

  But the new rustler changed all this and cowmen shagged down to Austin demanding protection. In 1873 cattle stealing was made a felony but even then rustling by the herd was safe enough. The ranges were scattered over one third of the vast state, with almost no telegraph and no local officers. Off west and northwest were the emptying buffalo plains; just across the Red lay the ambiguous political area, the Indian Territory; north of the Panhandle stretched the forgotten strip called No Man's Land, and west was the rugged, largely unorganized, and welcoming, territory of New Mexico.

  It was easy for even an eastern greenhorn to whoop a whole herd away from some watering place off to the open wilds, even easier to drive the stolen stock to market from there or to sell it, at almost pure profit and very little risk to some of the big outfits trailing to Wyoming, Dakota, or Montana.

  The Comanches, too, had entered the larger rustlings. Goodnight and Oliver Loving, in the attacks that finally took Loving's life, had discovered that the Indians were after cattle. It wasn't that they were after the meat—they found hump ribs of fat young buffalo cow much sweeter—but they were age-old traders of raided stock, with regular, well-worn trails out along the cap rock where now the comancheros, mostly Mexicans, brought their goods to barter for the stolen cattle and horses. There were many stories of one prominent trader, Tafoya. Backed by the commanding officer of Fort Bascom, New Mexico, and a ranch storekeeper who supplied much of the goods, Tafoya took his heavy wagon trains out to the Comanche trails. Where the Staked Plains dropped off into the canyons and badlands leading into the southeastward streams he met the Indians, usually just after the Comanche, the raiding moon. In his camp the Indians found bright calico and flannel cloth, beads, bracelets and bangles, paint, coffee, lumpy brown sugar, bags of hard bread, knives, guns and ammunition, including lead and powder. There was whisky, too, the most valuable of all, and well guarded to avoid violence.

  As fast as the stock came in, sometimes with brands as far away as the Brazos and the Trinity, Tafoya's Mexicans swept the herds up the trail along the Canadian and over the state line, to be sold to the far ranches at handsome profit to Tafoya and his army friends and suppliers. One superintendent of Indian Affairs, finding New Mexico full of Texas brands, cut down the trading permits of the region to four, but by subletting the privilege or by ignoring it entirely, the comanchero trade went right on.

  The real menace to traders like Tafoya was not the law or angry cattlemen but drunken Indians. One said he hid his whisky kegs eight, ten miles from his camp, got the Indians to turn the cattle over to him, and then, after the herds had a substantial start, he showed them where the whisky was. Then he hit it out of the country on the fastest horse he could buy.

  By the time the cattlemen were talking of organizing against the rustlers and raiders there were at least three of these comanchero trails or roads tapping the stock stolen from the advancing fringes of the Texas cow country. One struck the Pecos, crossed to the buttes called Yellow Houses, and down to Double Mountain Fork, another lay along the old army road down the Canadian to Las Tecovas, with a New Mexican fork turning southeast to The Door of the Plains, a large cut in the cap rock near the head of Trujillo Creek. From there the traders struck across the high, wide table to the head of Palo Duro and down it, turning to Tule Creek and the foot of the Plains, to camp at a headwater of the Pease called The Tongues because so many languages were spoken in the trade there. The third, the middle trail, hit the lakes, the lagunas, of the Staked Plains and up to the region of The Tongues, too.

  This was old trading country, with an earlier meeting place just south called The Valley of the Tears. Here earlier raiders had brought their captives, white, mestizo, or Indian, to be traded and separated to complicate pursuit and bring more rapid assimilation. Mothers and daughters torn from homes in Texas and Mexico were scattered out from here, sometimes to be ransomed or rescued, but perhaps too late, as happened with Cynthia Ann Parker, who died of grief when she was taken from her Indian husband and family.

  By the 1870's the comanchero trade carried a growing risk from organized cattlemen and from the occasional forays by the Rangers and by Indians who stole their stock back and forced the trader to pay for them a second time under threat of death. The whisky they demanded made the warriors uncontrollable by the chiefs, who considered the theft of stock from a rancher on what they thought of as Indian land much as a rancher looked on a smart deal or a merchant on beating out a competitor. A trade, however, was an honest man's agreement to the chiefs, and unbreakable.

  Yet even with the growing insolence of the warriors the comancheros found the profits great. A loaf of bread might buy a cow, a keg of whisky, a good herd.

  Cattlemen all along the Texas border and up the Pecos reported Indian attacks and losses, even entire herds. They kicked to Austin, to Washington, to the frontier posts, particularly Fort Bascom, said to be the center of the trade. Troops did pick up several thousand Texas-branded cattle at various times and Goodnight tried to get back stock he found carrying his brand in New Mexico. He finally went to the federal courts. The comancheros admitted that they took around 300,000 stolen cattle out of Texas, with perhaps around 100,000 horses, but all Goodnight got was the privilege of paying the court costs. The governor of New Mexico did issue a proclamation against the thieving practice but so much of his territory was still rugged as ever, and still unorganized, with the rustlers dug in.

  The anger of the cowmen finally stirred up a little action. H. M. Childress, a native Texan, had trailed cattle north seven years until he was cleaned out in 1871 around Abilene. Scouting for something to do, he ran into a man authorized by the governor and some ranchers who had lost stock to make a raid into New Mexico for the stolen property. Even with the detachment of U. S. Cavalry along it was a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Childress fought seven pitched battles and killed several Mexicans but he recaptured 11,000 cattle and 300 horses without losing a man. The stock was sold up in Colorado at a good price and Childress wound up the year with a neat little fortune for his daring. True, some of the New Mexicans claimed he was no better than a highway robber himself, coming in and taking whatever pleased him, and some of the Texans complained about the big profits he made, but they didn't dare to follow him up the profit trail. Next year Childress was back in the cattle drives with a herd of his own, convivial, jolly as ever, and bighearted. And if it was true that he was a deadly pistol shot, and high-riding, there were many who explained that he wasn't really overbearing.

  Childress threw a little scare into the comancheros and their customers and encouraged William Hittson, the Texas cowman known as Colonel John, to try his own raid in 1873. With powers of attorney from many cattlemen of northwest Texas and three very good men with guns along to enforce his paper, Hittson rode west and up the Goodnight Trail. He let it be known that he was after any Texas cattle that the holder couldn't prove were legally acquired, and started repossessing stock right and left until he had around 10,000 head and was ready to call it a good job. In the meantime, even after he was back in Texas, he offered much free advice to the government on how to stop the traffic.

  To be
sure the herds recaptured were barely a drop in a desert, and discouraged the raiders and those who bought from them no more than sporadic hanging of a few rustlers discouraged that practice. The invasions did infuriate the authorities and New Mexicans in general. Texans, disliked before, were hated now, hated enough for a war if the two regions had been small treaty-backed European nations.

  Next year, after the Indian attack on the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls, General Mackenzie had gone out and whipped the Indians, Comanches, Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes, and a scattering of others, including Apaches, to their reservations and left the great pile of dead horses in Tule Canyon. Tafoya, with his vast familiarity of the Staked Plains, did a little guiding for the troops, now that the Indians who had furnished him with trading stock were gone. Other comancheros took up even duller work or restricted their activities more to their home territory.

  The rustlers, too, were having a litle trouble, but in disposing of their stock in the hard times. Some even started to offer bills of sale. Once, while one of these papers was being drawn up, the owners of the cattle rode in over a ridge. Under the sights of their rifles they grabbed the thieves and marched them out to a tree and left them hanging in a row with a note: CATTLE THIEVES DOOM pinned to the shirt of each one, to flutter there awhile in the wind.

  Over at Fort Griffin a vigilance committee had been formed but that soon proved to be riddled by rustlers and gunmen, working from the inside for advance information on coming attacks, and to dispose of competition inside and outside of their own gangs.

  By 1877 cattle prices had gone up again and rustling increased, particularly in regions like Dillingham Prairie, handy to Cross Timbers and the Red River, increased until it was ruining every stockman in that wide, unfenced range. For over a year men like C. C. Slaughter, Jim Loving, and Kit Carter had chewed over ways to fight the cattle thieves. Several of the loose organizations had had some haphazard success, mainly down along the border. John N. Simpson, rancher from Parker County, began to talk up the achievements of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, particularly the policing of the roundups, and the range detectives. But Carter was against violence, even in defense of his property. Slaughter, son of a minister, leaned toward a firm stand against the thieves, and Simpson, hard hit by the rustlers, too, was anxious to try force where the law failed or didn't exist.