by Mari Sandoz
Other, similar cattle companies were formed for the Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana ranges and helped dominate the legislatures of these territories for years. In 1882 alone ten major British-American ranch companies were incorporated. Added to the earlier ones, their total subscribed capital reached $15,500,000. The high dividends paid caused some uneasiness in serious circles. The Economist thought the public was ill-advised to suppose that these dividends paid by the "Texas Companies" were from actual profits but came out of the inflated valuation placed on the stock. The rapidly increasing competition was expected to lower the cattle prices before long. Others agreed. A correspondent to The Scottish Banking and Insurance Magazine pointed out what few had any intention of mentioning: that most of the stockmen were merely squatters on the western land, that they usually owned only narrow strips along the waterways and used the range on sufferance of the United States Government. Prairie fires or a severe winter after a dry season of short range could prove disastrous. Besides, buying cattle by "book count" projected an estimated increase year after year, without ever actually counting the stock, alarmed the correspondent, as did the risk of being put off the public range. The Laramie Boomerang was already reporting that the Secretary of the Interior had begun to move against all fences enclosing government land.
But the cattle companies kept right on sprouting in the British Isles. In 1883 the Swan Land and Cattle Company, Limited, bought out the Swan ranch holdings of Wyoming and Nebraska. The land claimed was centered on the Laramie River, a range 130 miles long, east and west, and from 42 to 100 miles north and south, mostly public domain. The price seems to have been $2,387,675, stock and all. The next year the company bought railroad lands, which were checkerboarded, alternate sections still the public domain and open only to regular settler entry.
So it went on, but with a little more caution among the Scots after the Swan transaction. London companies for Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas lands were still formed, including Lord Tweedmouth's Rocking Chair Ranche, Limited, in Texas, called Queenie's Cow Outfit by the neighboring ranch hands.
The general complaint against the invasion of the West by foreign capital brought a congressional investigation in 1886, which revealed something of the power of the foreign holdings in the range country. Twenty-nine foreign companies controlled 20,747,000 acres, much of it public domain, government land—a term that meant something entirely different to those from the old, old baronial and crown land holdings of Europe, particularly Britain, than it did to the democratic American, something different in mind and in law.
It also came out that several ranches promoted in England around late 1883 and early 1884 never got under way and perhaps it was as well, for range inspectors inquiring into the Prairie Company ranches reported them overstocked, which raised the charge of mismanagement. Shares dropped in value and stockholders of other companies became nervous. There was a general complaint about the packing-hour combine in America, that the book counts for the ranch stock bought were always far too high and that the range on public domain was appallingly insecure now with the rising protest, public and governmental. There was some attempt to improve some of these situations. Moreton Frewen was managing the Powder River Company that bought him out, with Frank Kemp as assistant manager and Fred Hesse foreman. These men relieved him of the daily supervision to plan his own feeding and slaughtering operations down along the railroad, outlays he had trouble justifying to the shareholders at next year's meeting. Perhaps this was chiefly because beef prices were down. Compared to 1882, prices were far down, but while this was disappointing, cattle would come back. All the ranchers had to do was hold them over for next year.
In the meantime around $2,000,000 worth of blooded bulls had been turned loose on the Wyoming ranges. Old cowhands crossed their arms over the saddle horn and moved their cuds meditatively. "Them bulls shure are going to raise a fine chorus come winter, bawling around the corrals for somebody to come shovel out the feed," one said.
"Hell, they'll want to get inside. Look at them soft bellies sticking out. Ain't built to cut the wind like the Long-horns."
Still, it was plain that the cow country had confidence in the beef prices of next year, or the year after.
CHAPTER III
THE BIG DIE-UPS
FOR some time very few men had managed to pull their eyes away from the sleek, grass-fat steers and their fine price long enough to feel the curious stillness gathering around them, see the thin, warning haze rise along the far horizon to suspect they were in a weather breeder, climatic and economic. The price collapse of the early seventies had been forgotten and the losses of the winters of 1878-79 and 1880-81, too. The profit on the stock that survived the last big winter had paid for a lot that were bleaching bones in canyon and draw. Since then the winters had been mild, the country growing warm again, old-timers like Stuart and Kohrs told each other, taking a personal pride in it. Cattle, even the unacclimated Texas herds and most of the imported eastern stock, were making it to grass without very serious losses as far north as the Marias of Montana, while native stock and second-year emigrants came through fine as frog hair.
Although the 1883 drive north from Texas was only around 260,000 head, the westward movement of American stock increased, with cattle from as far away as Ohio and New York State, even from Florida—an estimated 185,000 head, mostly young heifers, with probably 20,000 more driven in from Oregon.
The northern ranchers watched the boom in new cattle companies uneasily, but were less aware of the powerful foreigners, and feeling less able to fight them than the little outfits starting up with perhaps a log shack along some creek bottom, and a brand. Sometimes these little fellows had no intention of fighting for a piece of the free range, not even as rustlers, just hoped to sell out for the big money of the foreign investors. But most newcomers brought in cheap southern cattle and on top of the Longhorn's threat of fever was his inferior blood on the range with so much northern she-stuff good grade and the herd sires mostly pureblood.
"Ain't nothing rannier than them scrub bulls," an old rancher of the Chug country complained as he watched a dusty herd of Longhorns come in. "One of them Texas bulls'll come bellerin' clear across the table from Horse Creek and bust right in my corral if he smells a cow."
"Why don't your short-leggers, your Shorthorns, run 'im off, out of the country?" a Texan asked pleasantly, setting his hat back a little to show his humorous intentions.
"Oh, them big fellows ain't so eager," a cowboy put in, a little on the scrubby side himself.
There was a lot of laughing, not all humorous. The last few years one southern bull after another had been found dead on the Wyoming range. "Stopped a hunter's bullet," was the usual explanation.
It was true that the apparently unlimited flow of southern cattle was a real threat to the crowded North, the leggy stock able to beat the improved blood to the scarcening grass, and Montana and Wyoming had opposed all talk of a national cattle trail from the start. But when it came to a showdown, the range, the land was the main worry. Squatter holdings that exceeded a man's filing rights on government land had never been recognized and squatting had no legal status anywhere after land offices came into the region. The early cattlemen had divided the free range among themselves, as Goodnight and the Mexicans did in the Texas Panhandle, and prepared to defend their holdings in the only two places possible: in the legislative halls and on the premises, with money ready for the first, veiled or open threat of guns for the second. It was hoped that in the meantime their holdings would become classified as "accustomed range" with eventual legal standing, or that a lease bill could be forced through Congress.
While the cattlemen talked up the worthlessness of the land for settlement and homes, they took energetic steps to warn off those with ranching ambitions. In his report, 1883, to the Secretary of the Interior, the governor of Wyoming Territory outlined the difficulties a newcomer would have getting into the local ranges. In addition the S
tock Growers Association pushed their law of 1884 through. This took the branding of a man's cattle, even on his own land, out of his hands entirely by making all branding illegal between February 15, before the calves were dropped in the North, and the Association's general spring roundup, the only one permitted by the law. In the roundup all stock with brands not accepted by the Association was automatically classified as mavericks and sold for the Association funds, with their hired inspectors empowered to confiscate stock and make arrests anywhere.
The Montana cattlemen welcomed the Northern Pacific Railroad's roaring approach up the Yellowstone but it would bring in settlers and make things easier for rustlers unless the ranchers could hire brand inspectors for the shipping points. It would bring in more competition, too, particularly eastern and foreign money. Without the powerful organization that stock growers could attain in the almost purely cattle territory of Wyoming, Montana ranchers had turned to their legislature with a "Cattle King" bill. It was passed in spite of the powerful mine and farm interests but the governor vetoed it, calling the bill a menace to personal liberty, a delegation of arbitrary power to unsworn subordinates, empowering the employees of a civilian organization, the stock growers, to make arrests without warrants.
So the Montana stockmen worked for control out on the range. Through their local associations they published notices warning off any newcomers. The papers carried such a warning from the stock owners of the Musselshell, July 19, 1883:
... we positively decline allowing any outside party or any party's herd upon the range, the use of our corrals, nor will they be permitted to join in any roundup on said range from and after this date.
Without the privilege of joining the general roundup on the open range a man's cattle business was soon closed out. True, without control of the legislature the cattlemen couldn't make such a boycott work legally, but few had the money or the guns to fight long. Individuals, too, staked out their range in the newspapers. The Glendive, (Montana) Times, April 12, 1884, carried this advertisement:
I, the undersigned, do hereby notify the public that I claim the valley, branching off the Glendive Creek, four miles east of the Allard and extending to its source on the South side of the Northern Pacific Railroad as a stock range. Chas. S. Johnson.
Of course such claims had no more legal standing in court than those of the associations and so the cattlemen tried to get control of as much of the range water as possible. The rancher, if a citizen, could use his land-entry rights—homestead, pre-emption, perhaps timber claim, 160 acres each, or a Desert Act claim, first a section, 640 acres, later a half section. To these he might add such filings as he could talk his cowboys into making, trying to select those who would get no ranching notions of their own. With luck there might be the two school sections of each township open for rental, or some railroad lands for sale, unfortunately only alternate sections. That was just about the limit of his legal approaches to a wide range. If he could cover all the water, he controlled the surrounding prairie also, sometimes very wide stretches in the drier regions of Wyoming and Montana. Yet much later than 1884 some of the cattlemen didn't bother to own even the quarter of land that held the home ranch, depending entirely upon other and more immediate measures.
So long as the region wasn't crowded, all but the real range hogs had tolerated an occasional newcomer, if not too close. Some, like the Boslers, who claimed 150 miles of the North Platte water front in Nebraska, considered almost anything too close. They hanged a man from one of the government surveying outfits come to run the lines that would enable any greenhorn settler to find the numbers of the land he wanted. But the surveyor didn't scare out. He just picked up another helper, apparently from the disappointed miners deserting the Black Hills.
It was not only Goodnight and the cattlemen of New Mexico who had trouble with sheep. By the early seventies the moving gray blankets that were the herds crept in from the west upon Montana and by 1881 the assessed sheep outnumbered cattle. By 1884 three western counties of Wyoming were predominantly sheep country. Against this invasion hog wire or force was the only protection. Yet both the sheepmen and the ranchers were on government land, like tumbleweeds trying to cling to the earth that refused their roots.
To the settler neither cattle nor sheep range claims and customs existed. He saw the public domain as land held for the bona-fide homeseeker, the poor man, offering him a homestead of 160 acres for the filing fee, around $14, and five years' residence and improvements, with a second quarter obtainable by pre-emption at $1.25 an acre and often a third 160 acres, a timber claim, by planting and caring for ten acres of trees for five years.
Often the settler went boldly beyond the ranch-held waterways, sank a well or hauled his water, planted crops, to be destroyed by the range herds who might also rub down his sod house in an hour or fall through the roof of his dugout upon his bed. In return he shot at the cattle, often felt free to eat the beef that fattened on his grass and plantings. With those settlers pushing in all around the east, many cattlemen envied Print Olive his dispatch if not his tactics. There was no denying he knew how to hang out an owl that ought to help every rancher keep his range clear.
Those who looked southward with the uneasiness of a cow smelling a storm, the spring of 1884 turned out as keen-nosed as any old brockle-face. Although it was the year that Dodge City put on the big bullfight to draw the cattle trade back there, without much success, the drive, 420,000 head, was the largest since the disastrous year of 1871. More stock came in from the East, too, the heavier, blockier, barnyard cattle. The Northern Pacific alone carried 98,219 of these west-bound pilgrims to the open range and only 75,000 market stock went back. Other railroads reported the same trend.
These barnyard cattle cost around $35 a cow instead of the $24 the Longhorn brought. They were of better bone and flesh every year, quieter and gentler to handle. But long before January they would be up around the buildings and corrals bawling their heads off for hay and shelter instead of rustling the snow-swept ridges like the natives. Besides, the East was full of pleuro-pneumonia, a constant threat to the range herds. Yet the worst danger was still overcrowding, particularly after the very short summer grass of 1884 that sent the underfed cattle into winter without fat or strength. Before the boom 640 acres of good grazing land in south Texas usually fed 150 cattle, but after the grass was thinned and killed out by overstocking, with the usual invasion of mesquite, cactus, and other thorn, ten acres were required for one cow. In Wyoming and Montana sagebrush sprang up where good grass had grown, and while the cattlemen looked angrily toward the sheep as the culprits, much grass disappeared before the pungent, green-gray tangle of sage where no sharp-hoofed, root-cropping sheep had ever walked.
The success of the local cattleman organizations brought a national stock growers' movement to work on the wider range, with the first convention set for the fall of 1884 at St. Louis. The Texans planned to fight for just one thing— a national trail to the North. But there were the deeper problems: range rights and a national lease law, the railroad monopoly, the packing trust, and the shrinking grass. Perhaps jealous that the early cattle market, St. Louis, was given this convention and aware of the criticism of Chicago's commission houses and packers, the Chicago Board of Trade put out a warning report. The western ranges were all badly overstocked; barbed wire had made many little pastures of big ones, and the mysterious Texas fever was spreading into a national plague. When the price of range cattle dipped sharply the editor of the Daily Drovers Journal informed his readers, "If you have any steers to shed, prepare to shed them now."
The uncertainty and unrest had brought the first Democrat to the White House since before the war, one not to be counted out as Tilden had been eight years ago. The angers of that steal seemed of another age, even to the Texans, as the men whose lives were ended that year seemed of some prehistoric time: Custer, fighter of the miserable Indians now squatting on reservations waiting for their only opportunity for violence—shooting down
trail-gaunted Long-horns or Wild Bill Hickok, bad man of Hays and Abilene, the memory of him like a faded Wild West Show poster tacked to an old buffalo hide yard. Even the great herds of those buffaloes had no reality left for the men who had made as much as $5,000 or even $6,000 a season and now were perhaps punching cows for $25 a month and found. But some had a little jag of cows stashed away with a friend's herd or a relative's, and with a little luck—
There seemed so much concern for the ailing beef bonanza that only a few seemed uneasy about Cleveland. "There's a damn sight of laws on the books that could be turned up against the cowmen if he's so-minded," one of these said uneasily.
"Yeh, I hear Sparks is stirring up hell on fraudulent filings and fencing public lands over in Oregon," the newspaper readers replied.
The ranchers looked serious when this came up but were more uneasy about beef prices still sliding a little, telling each other cattle couldn't help but come back. The larger companies, particularly the foreign ones, were faced with the problem of falling dividends. To show a paper profit they sold off too much stock before the peak age, which helped the grass but cut down the number of salable stock the next year and many years following.
March, 1885, a stock journal put out a comforting report. There was really no cause for uneasiness, and with this assurance many ranchers held their beeves until late summer for a recovering price that never came. By then President Cleveland had ordered the herds expelled from the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation where they had grazed under old and unprofitable leases, unprofitable to the Indians. But the 200,000 cattle forced out had only one place to go, to the overstocked ranges. That or the market.