Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Several cowmen had hurried to Washington to talk Cleveland into stopping his order, and were told that the ranchers' cattle made trouble with the Indians—all that beef around and their families starving. In the end he turned out tough as any old mossy-horn steer that had walked to Montana. The cattle would be out on the deadline; the government had troops to see to that.

  There was little time to curse the president and the railroads that the cattlemen were certain had pushed the order. The chuckwagons rumbled out and dust rose in clouds over the reservations like smoke spreading. The roundup crews worked from light to darkness and right through the moonlit nights. One rancher gathered up a mixed lot of 10,000 and headed them for the Cimarron. At nine in the morning the lead cows jumped into the river, throwing salty spray. Behind them came the great herd stretched back in a string to the horizon. At three in the afternoon the last drag was over, the banks on the far side churned to mud clear across the bottoms and into the breaks by the dripping cattle. The ranchers and the Kansas guards who had had trouble with stubborn men like Blocker and West smiled dryly. "General Miles and his troops standing around handy sure greased them cows' heels."

  Finally it was fall and everybody tried to sell the last moment before the snow, with very little buying. Last spring grass-fat steers were quoted at $5 a hundred, already far below the 1882 top of $9 and over. Later this season they dropped to $3, the poorer grades down to $1.80 a hundred, the lowest since 1873.

  The drouth-shorted corn in the feeding regions helped the tight system of stockyard trading, particularly in Chicago. Commission houses controlled the distribution of most of the cattle and worked together like card sharps taking a mess of greenhorn sight-seers to Dodge City.

  "Yeh, it's sell at our price or take your damn beef off the doorstep," was the way one shipper told it out on the Sidney Table of western Nebraska.

  "And pay our freight rate or walk them to Chicago, the railroads tell a man," another added.

  It was true that beef was no lower, only cattle. Commission charges and freight rates were no lower, only cattle. The railroad monopoly had long been a bur under the saddle blanket to the cowmen. Late in 1879 Kit Carter, of the Northwest Texas Association, had appointed a committee to confer with the rail company heads at St. Louis. They got the same cold-decking that the beef trust gave out lately. The movement of slaughterhouses to the plains, the meat shipped East in the new refrigerator cars got a real push these years. The Marquis de Mores over on the Little Missouri and Moreton Frewen were two of those putting these hopes to the test, but there were dozens of others.

  Last year a speaker addressing the Wyoming stockmen predicted great changes in the packing situation. "The day will come when a live bullock will only be seen in circuses in Chicago." Dressing beef would be a home industry and the commission merchant, now a necessary evil, would be wiped out.

  It was true there were plans to ship more live beeves straight through to England for fattening, in spite of the quarantine against pleuro-pneumonia. Perhaps that could be side-jumped like a bronc avoiding a rattler on the trail. Frewen was sent over to see. In the meantime there was agitation for a congressional investigation into monopolistic practices and rates. There were also more threats of wage cuts for the railroad workers and other buyers of meat.

  In the meantime nature seemed inclined to help a little on the overstocked ranges. Texas got a most disastrous storm over such crowded counties as Fisher. Ten days of sleet and snow sent cattle drifting with the wind, to sweep stock along clear down the edge of the Staked Plains. Thousands ended up in the Pecos River.

  The old-time cowman, Ike Pryor, was caught in the storm. He had made a $500,000 deal in the fall for cattle he would deliver in the spring, on a $100,000 down payment. In the spring he had to return $30,000 of the advance, let alone deliver any stock on the rest. It was as well that he cleared this up fast, like cutting out a worm-infected wound on a steer. Later the deliveries would have been even harder to make.

  After another dry summer, late December brought the first real clouds flying in from the pale haze that had lurked along the horizon for some time. The weather-wise Long-horns from Kansas down started a swinging march long before the sun was hidden, stringing southward in long lines, some halting in breaks or in timbered bottoms, perhaps to move out again, mostly in single file almost as the buffaloes had migrated, much like the ancestors of the Longhorn had marched purposefully southward before the push of the encroaching icecaps. They moved now as with some deep mem- ory for survival stirring in them, urging them on. Cowboys and ranchers saw them go, and old-timers spoke of it in wonder. Few could recall ever seeing such a thing among cattle.

  The storm came out of the north upon the Dakotas. The last morning of the closing year was a weather breeder, close, oppressive. The whistle of the new railroad heading up through northwest Nebraska could be heard clear to the Black Hills. By midmorning tatters of gray cloud streamed in from the north, boiled over all the sky, ran in a thick mist barely off the prairie. The wind came, first sneaking in little puffs here and there along the tablelands and blowing harder as the temperature fell. The mist turned to snow, thick and white, to cling to the northwest side of every weed and bush and cottonwood, until they were lost in the driving blizzard.

  One of the hundreds of cowhands who had been swept into speculation by the promises of the bonanza had bought up a herd of 2,300 steers in Texas and trailed them north to the Black Hills region, planning to repeat this seasonally and after a few years to take his profit and settle down in Texas to a ranch of his own. Now as the wind hit the thin southern hides of his steers they bunched up as before an enemy, a cougar, perhaps. But this was not something to be faced down and so they turned their tails to the wind and started southward, blinded by the thick, powdery snow that choked their breath. Their backs caked white, and their heads, their blank-eyed faces as they hurried faster and faster, straight for the rim of the tableland where it fell in a steep wall straight down.

  Their owner had seen them start and tried to head them, turn them into a spin, a mill, as in a stampede, but before long he couldn't even see any of them, his horse snow-caked, too, even the head lost to him in the driving snow. But he kept going, following the best he could by the dull sound of the thousands of hoofs. He heard them as they went over, plunging down the forty-foot bluff.

  Slowly he turned his horse away, whipping him side-wise into the storm to keep from going over, too, in the push of the wind, seeking shelter, pulling his icy-white buffalo saddle coat about him, chilled not only by the storm but the debt that would be with him for years, for many, many years at a cowboy's pay. It was no comfort to him to discover later that the Reynolds brothers, old-timers in the cow business, had trailed 7,000 steers up to Dakota from Texas and lost them all.

  The storm hit Kansas a night later. It froze cattle and people caught on the prairie, tore their little board shacks to pieces, and froze those huddled there, too. Down in the Texas Panhandle it struck a homeseeker's wagon and left the whole family dead, parents, three children, and the horses at the tongue. It drove hundreds of thousands of cattle on as it had those up in Dakota and Kansas. Some went hundreds of miles, piling up in arroyos and canyons, going through the ice of the occasional lake and the rivers. The Arkansas, Cimarron, and Canadian were full of carcasses. Farther west the ranchers of the Indian Territory had built a barbed-wire drift fence one hundred seventy miles long from their west border across the Panhandle to New Mexico, with a parellel fence south of it along the Canadian. Endless strings of cattle from southwest Kansas and No Man's Land hit the first drift fence. The leaders piled up in low places and on down slopes, going under in the blind push of those behind until the broken, the freezing, and the dead were so deep the rest clambered over them, or the posts went down, the fence flattened for miles as the cattle were driven on by the fury of the blizzard. At the second drift fence it was the same, with ten thousands of bodies lining its reaches both ways. In places the dead cattle
lay in piles 400 yards wide along these fences, sometimes only the horns of the top ones showing through the drifted snow. The manager of the LX Ranch with his men skinned an average of 250 head to the mile along thirty-five miles of the Panhandle drift fence. Other ranchers did the same. Hides went east by the trainload, the only marketable product on the prairie.

  Every ranch in No Man's Land showed a loss of at least 50 per cent, some 75. The Kramer brothers, after months of search, found only 2,500 head out of their herd of 20,000. In the spring the carcasses and even live cattle bearing brands from ranges as far as five hundred miles north were found in Texas. The Kansas prairie, too, was dark with carcasses, the second time in eleven, twelve years—first the buffaloes and now the cattle, almost like a retribution. Ten thousand cattle lay dead between Garden City and Punished Woman Creek. The pool that included Print Olive was hard hit, Olive too, after the fortune his burning of Mitchell and Ketchum had cost him. Now the new start that the boom had brought was cut down by the bust and the blizzard.

  Up in western Nebraska the Bay State lost an estimated 100,000 head. The carcasses formed an almost solid covering between Pumpkin Creek and the roughly parallel Wild Cat Mountains, the deep creek bed choked with the dead stock for ten miles. It broke the great power of the Bay State, with all its eastern and British backing, and opened a vast new region to settlers, and to rival cattle empires.

  From Dakota to mid-Texas the fragrance of spring flowers was lost in the stink of the Great White Ruin. It was estimated that 300 people died in the storm but there was no way of telling who all might have been on the plains, seeking stock, or game or land, or fleeing from some pursuer and never heard of again. Skeletons found ten, twenty years later were identified by various means as men lost in the Ruin.

  Cattlemen could organize against rustlers and the tick. They could fight the packing combines and the railroads. They could even fight the grangers, the settlers, one way or another for their cows, but against such a blizzard they were helpless. They shook off the complaints of eastern stock growers that cattle, particularly cows, calves, and bulls, should not be turned out with no feed or shelter, to die like this. They laughed sourly to complaints from that new outfit of do-gooders, the Humane Society, who had objected to branding and ear bobbing from the start. Now they had turned to angry protests against letting cattle live their natural lives rustling on the range.

  "Want us to stall-feed 50,000, 100,000, 300,000 cows?" the cattlemen snorted.

  But only a few knew about the Humane Society and the rest. Others too low down to read or listen, rode the range where the fall had shone golden on so many cattle, yes, too many cattle, but good stock, their stock. Many turned everything over to the bank; others just quit the country, never trying to round up the few cattle left. Almost to the day that their range seemed deserted others moved in, particularly the out-of-job, land-hungry homeseekers. They rushed in everywhere.

  It was the natives, the fat steers, the cows unencumbered by a growing calf that survived, or survived the calving, perhaps with the help of a cowboy who had sworn that was one thing he would never do—play midwife to a goddamn heifer. But it was the fond cursing of the beloved, and everybody knew it. Even for all their help the calf crop was almost zero. J. M. Day's big D Cross spread near Ashland, Kansas, branded 900 calves compared to 10,000 the spring before. Besides, many cattle that did survive had to be killed because their frozen feet were amputating themselves, falling off. In some regions a third of the stock had lost their tails, dropped off, too, and many horns, while some carried strips of tattered, loose hide where wolves had been at them. With so much meat around they had not needed to chase the animal, finish the job.

  By summer it seemed that all the moisture of the sky had fallen in that one blizzard, to run off in one swift thaw, roaring down the gullies and arroyos and away. By June almost all of Texas was burning, only the mesquite and the cactus green. The drouth that had started the summer before spread into the midwestern corn belt, with farmers and stockmen both short of feed. It widened into Wyoming and Montana. By fall the cattlemen were spooky as a herd of steers smelling javelinas in the brush. The Chicago market was declining steadily, the papers announced, as though that could be news.

  "Bottom dropped out," the cowmen told each other when they met, saying it quietly, past the relief of profanity now.

  The demand for stock cattle was about gone. The southern ranchers had rushed their cattle to market to get out with what skin they might save and found prices still going down, lower than any time in range history. They had dropped ten, fifteen dollars a head below last fall, with most of the run poor stuff, drouth-thin, but better sold at any price or given away than left on the bare, baking range to die, or to steal the little remaining pasturage from better stock. Up in Montana ranchers leased large tracts in Alberta from the Canadian government. In August, 40,000 thin, dusty cattle from Dawson, Custer, and adjoining counties were plodding slowly, with popping joints, across the border. By September over a quarter of a million Montana cattle were on Alberta grass.

  While there was often incredible mismanagement on the outside-owned ranches, as was to be expected, sometimes, however, the mistakes were the foolish interference of the far owners, innocent not only of cattle but of geography as well. Moreton Frewen, the Britisher who had learned a little about ranching by the time he had lost his Powder River outfit and had to take on the job of manager, had bought up cattle right and left. By the summer of 1886 he tried to take advantage of every little inch of rope possible and gathered up the biggest herd of beeves ever seen in Wyoming—good beeves, fed on the sub-irrigated river bottoms. The foreman, Fred Hesse, got the herd to Fort Fetterman to be shipped out on the railroad due there. But Hesse received a cable from London ordering him to turn the great herd back and ship from Medora, far up the Little Missouri near the Roosevelt ranch. From there the cattle were to be routed to Duluth and shipped by the lakes to Liverpool.

  Furious, Hesse turned his herd back. It was late summer and although he had kept the stock in good flesh, now he had to move fast to beat the winter. He pushed them over the long, weary, waterless stretches as fast as he could but even so he had to load the great herd in a blinding snowstorm and got them to Duluth too late for shipping through the Lakes, already freezing up. There was no range around Duluth, no feed available. Starving in the pens that cost money, the cattle were turned loose in the snow to eat dead leaves from brush and trees, to break in here and there, spreading terror with their wide horns, their wild eyes. Finally Hesse got permission to ship them to the Chicago market, gaunt and starving, to be sold at giveaway prices. Stockmen figured that the London cable cost the company at least $200,000, the cable and their innocence of geography of the West.

  It was not a good fall in Chicago anyway, with the big packers having their own troubles. In October, 1,200 of Armour's beef butchers joined their pig stickers in the strike that spread to other firms. Even when an agreement was reached in November, some of the Morris and Swift men objected to some of the conditions. The situation was a heated one, with an alleged attempt to poison the family of P. A. Armour with sample packages of buckwheat full of strychnine. It sounded unreasonable and hopelessly amateurish—such a bitter poison, one that had to be hidden very carefully from the wolf and the coyote, stirred into bland buckwheat. But Chicago was in a sullen, angry mood, as was the whole cattle country.

  All the summer of 1886 the ranchers of the South had looked toward Indian Territory and the reservation ranges that Cleveland had cleared of outside stock. Would the government let cattle starve while vast Indian pasturages stood in untouched grass? Plainly the government would. Up North private deals had been made with the Crow Indians along the Little Big Horn and the Yellowstone at fifty cents a head. But it was done too late in the season, the range too near the river breaks for good grazing. Some Montanans scattered part of their cattle in small bunches of around 1,000 head through the agricultural region for winter herd. The Cheyenne
paper reported large shipments of cattle to forage as far east as the Nebraska and Iowa cornstalk country. But these were all small, last-minute remedies, like scooping up a hatful of buffalo gnats from a great swarming, even with the quarter million cattle on herd in Alberta.

  The real uneasiness hit the old cowmen of the North when they noticed curious and unusual movement among the wild life that fall. Animals were very scarce, even the varmints. Prairie dogs holed up early, Elk moved in determined march southward. Suddenly almost all the birds were gone, even those that usually stayed all winter, even the gay, dark-crested little waxwing. The snowbirds, after whirling like tossing leaves in the wind awhile, no longer gathered in their circles to pick up seeds, while they fluffed out their feathers in the growing cold. Instead, Arctic owls came flying on silent wings, the first seen in the Judith Basin so far as any white man could remember. Old Indians followed their ghostly flight with their narrow eyes and drew their blankets closer.

  "Big cold—" they said, with blank faces, and then their camps, too, were gone.

  Clouds came to the whole region of the range lands, almost the first since early spring. They brought winter, early winter. Blue northers whistled across the Texas expanses that had been hit by the Great White Ruin last January. From Montana through the Dakotas, Wyoming, western Nebraska, Colorado, and parts of New Mexico snow fell and was welcomed as a break in the killing drouth. But it kept falling, let up a little, and fell again, deepening on the ground so it buried the tallest patches of blue joint grown up where a little snowbank had lain last winter. The snow choked the streams and covered the water holes to trap the wandering thirst-driven stock. Cattle, even the rustling Longhorns, went hungry, weak and sore-footed, their knees cut and red-iced from plowing the deep crusted snow. Then in December the blizzards started, howling from the north and the northwest, with the pale cold sun out a few hours between storms. None of these were as bad as the Great Ruin of last year, but after weeks and months even the hardiest stock began to die where there was no bark to gnaw off the trees with the half-toothed bovine jaws. A few feeble attempts were made to feed hay from the stack or two put up for the driving team, or the blooded bulls. But mostly these, too, had to rustle, their short legs soon too weak to carry their gaunted bellies dragging the snow.