by Mari Sandoz
Even when the sun came out little curls of snow soon began to run again in the rising wind, the dry, loose snow lifted to the knee of the hair-chapped cowboys, then to the watering eyes as they turned up their buffalo coats and let their horses find the way home. Fewer and fewer cattle remained to drift with the storms, to stumble into snow-filled washouts, gullies, or canyons.
The blessed Chinook came early that January, 1887, with the day bright, the sky suddenly blue, the wind wonderfully warm from the land of the Chinooks. It ate into the darkening snow, made the river ice pop under the lifting waters. It took the kinks out of the backs of the cattle still able to stand. They waded the slushy, watery drifts seeking out patches of grass flattened down and soggy gray.
But almost before they had one belly full, the wind turned, the temperature dropped so fast no lagging thermometer could keep up, the slush ice hard as stone. The ground was covered for the rest of the winter, with new blizzard snow slipping over the ice-glazed prairies, piling deep in canyon and draw. Spring finally came. By then a young artist, Charles M. Russell, who, like Remington, came West to attach himself to the new bonanza, had portrayed the essence of this bad winter on a postcard-sized water color. Working as a cowhand he had holed up on the OH Ranch of Phelps, Kaufman, and partners. Asked by his employers at Helena for a report, he sent them the water color of a washboard-sided, goat-necked starving cow humped almost knee-deep in snow, hungry wolves watching. He called it "Waiting for the Chinook" but it was later changed to "The Last of 5,000" because Kaufman had seen so many of their 5,000 dead on the range.
The spring roundup of 1887 was the darkest, grimmest ever known to all the cattle country. It was the first time that white men ever saw turkey buzzards soar the Wyoming sky in great dark flocks, circling slowly down.
The cattle up in the severe cold of Canada had been swept southward, too, some reaching their old Montana ranges as deep under crusted snow for them as for the local stock. Drifting steers that found settlements huddled against the buildings, pushing in the windows, breaking in doors, whole walls. A late rising of blizzard wind swept thousands of ice-caked, staggering cattle past Great Falls and out upon the Missouri ice, to go down on the 50-degree-below-zero smoothness, plunge through the deep air holes and into the dark open current, the sullen water drawn back deep from the cold.
Old-timers who had survived ten, twenty, or more winters were desperate. On the Canadian ranges the disaster was complete, and a little farther south, too, and much farther south. The dead were piled in the coulees, in canyons, in arroyos, and along the foot of the cap rock—along any barrier. Their carcasses dammed the canyoned creeks and smaller rivers, blocked the lowlands with the river ice when it was finally lifted by the spring thaw. A 90-per-cent loss was general over vast portions of the open range country. Even those with native or acclimated stock lost 65 to 80 per cent. Montana, with a million head of cattle, reckoned up a loss of $20,000,000. Granville Stuart, the old-timer, the patriarch of Montana cattlemen, figured his loss at 66⅔ per cent, better than most, but his friend and former partner, Conrad Kohrs, salvaged only 3,000 head out of 35,000.
Now came the great surprise for all those who had damned the whole Chicago commission and packinghouse gang. Joseph Rosenbaum, livestock commission man, came out to Helena and called in a number of Montana ranchers who owed him a total of $1,000,000. They went as ranch owners, taking one last look at their spreads as they rode away over the stinking prairie, stinking with their cows, cows trusted to their care. They went as cowmen and would return owning less than the lowest saddle bum in ragged chaps.
But instead of foreclosing on them, taking over much of Montana range country, Rosenbaum offered the cattlemen an additional million dollars to build up new herds.
The dark-faced ranchers heard him in silence, unwilling to believe their battered and frosted ears. Gradually they accepted his words, quietly, with dignity. This was not Chicago. This was the West, in the best tradition of the West, where a man pulled even his enemy's cow out of a bog, where a man's word was his bond and could not be dishonored this side of death. The ranchers were men of few words this spring but Joseph Rosenbaum was never to regret that day's work.
The poor, winter-gaunted remnants of great herds wandered in search of the sprouting grass, their ears, tails, feet, even legs and backs frostbitten, the skin ragged and dropping off. Men like Granville Stuart, who had found the cattle business engrossing, compelling, all their lives were suddenly shocked and disgusted with it. Some never wanted to own another cow as long as they lived. It was as though a whole way of life had failed them, a basic faith betrayed them, an idol fallen.
The Cheyenne Sun, long a powerful voice of the stockmen's capital, also became critical. "A man who turns out a lot of cattle on a barren plain without making provision for feeding them will not only suffer a financial loss but also the loss of the respect of the community in which he lives."
The larger companies had been most responsible for blowing good cattle prices into a boom, a bonanza, a sort of South Sea bubble, by buying up vast herds on borrowed money at fantastic interest, paying fantastic dividends. Now it was all gone as a tally sheet in a blizzard wind, and with them their welcomed terms "cattle baron" and "bovine king." Before the Marias and the Milk, the Yellowstone, the Little Missouri, and the Cheyenne and Platte had carried off the snow water, the Swan Land and Cattle Company, the largest of the northern outfits, the first to import White Faces, was in the hands of the receiver. They were only one of a whole generation of cowmen dead broke, busted.
Thomas Sturgis had hurried from the East to Wyoming in the lush days of the boom. He had become one of the big stockmen and helped make a power of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, was the secretary when the Chinook thaw froze to ice. He stayed until he saw the fat buzzards wheeling low, caught the stink of dead stock on every wind. Then he boarded the train east and from New York he resigned his position. The Union Cattle Company, a $3,000,000 outfit that he had headed, was gone as were a dozen eastern financial organizations that had backed the western cattle companies. The swanky Cheyenne Club, the hangout of the men who ran Wyoming and the statehouse—the headquarters of the International Cattle elite—defaulted on its bonds, and was to be sold for two winter-thin dimes on the dollar. Nearly all the big outfits in Wyoming headed into quick liquidation. Up in North Dakota Teddy Roosevelt left his blizzard-swept ranch to the hired help. The shoe company in St. Louis that had bought a great herd from Glenn Hal-sell for $340,000 sold out to a cowboy who had saved his year's wages.
The next fall, after the worst had been faced, the Cheyenne Sun congratulated its readers on the departure of the Frewen brothers, managers and promoters of the Powder River Cattle Company. Of all the English snobs of great pretentions, who flew very high and sank very low, the Frewens were probably the toppers. They had had flowers shipped out to the ranch, conducted their business on a level that was a constant surprise to even the most reckless and extravagant Americans. They had brought an important and legitimate business into discredit even in the East.
It was typical that a character like George West would face the Big Die-Ups in his own way. He had 150,000 acres of Texas land stocked with mortgaged steers when the drouth and the blizzards struck. After the last dry leaves clinging to bush and thorn were eaten the cattle were about gone, too. His men skinned until he couldn't face the bull trains of hides any more. He sent the hands out with hatchets to knock off the left horn of every dead steer found and bring it in as a record. When they had a pile of 2,200 horns in the corral, like a great rick of mesquite, he stopped them.
The summer of 1887 in northwest Texas had been a season of burned and barren range, with no rain to replenish the holes when the snow water of the second ruinous winter was gone. C. C. Slaughter sold 10,000 cattle at giveaway prices. Ikard and Harrold, gone so hopefully into Greer County with almost uncountable cows, sold wherever they could, for whatever they could get, and pulled in on their small home ranges. T
he Snyders, of the early dedicated men of Texas, had been in the cattle business since around 1857, were major suppliers of beef for the Confederacy, had survived the price busts of 1871 and 1873. Before the Big Die-Up struck they had been offered an even million dollars for their cattle outfits from the Gulf to Wyoming and over to the Pacific slope. In the spring of 1887 they owed nearly that much, and selling out, retrenching, they started in the saddle once more, back where they were thirty years ago. Colonel Ike Pryor, publicized as the orphan cotton picker who had been offered nearly a million for his ranch holdings, was pretty nearly back in the cotton patch.
Truly this was the end of an era. From now on cattle would have to be specially winter-pastured, and at least the cows, calves, and bulls winter-hayed and given some shelter from the fiercer storms—all pretty expensive for common southern range stock.
There were some whites and some Indians who did not think of the future, but looked back to these Plains fifteen, ten, or, in the North, even five years ago. A couple of old Cheyennes headed down toward Indian Territory as soon as the snow thawed off to visit their relatives. They saw hundreds of magpies and buzzards, too plump to do more than flap awkwardly out of the way, the coyotes and wolves so fat and lazy they barely rose to move before the snorting of the Indian horses. The men rode with their blankets drawn about them in the chill Montana morning, over prairie scattered with carcasses that were bloated round as great dark puffballs, their awkward legs sticking straight out. As they moved southward into warmer regions, they were never out of the stink of dead cattle and seldom away from the curious rushing sound of maggots working.
The Indians had seen such sights before, when the white men, in their violent way, had killed the millions of buffaloes, leaving their carcasses an offense on the clean earth and wind. Now there was another great killing, but this time it was not from the roar of the hunters' guns.
CHAPTER IV
THE NATIONAL TRAIL
FROM the first cow that escaped Coronado's herd, with her double burden to be dropped at ripening, Texas cattle were known for their fertility, their high percentage of sturdy calving and, particularly those from the southern regions, for the fever that struck wherever they passed. First the Arkansas and Missouri farmers lost their milk cows, then the cattle breeders as far as New York State had to see their good stock die. There was action, varying but angry: boycott, arrests, guns, rope, and bull whips. But it was the Kansas settlers with their fury and violence who pushed the Texas herds westward, using whip and rope and gun, too, and finally the courts and barbed wire to protect not only their stock but their crops and grass.
Legislation came, too, but slowly, bucking the power of the railroads and the stockyards of St. Louis and Chicago, and the booming business of the trail towns. It was even harder to get enforcement than enactment, with the long, open border to the south and the west, the trail drivers willing to use money and lead to get through, some lawless by nature but more frequently by necessity or because to them the cow could do no wrong.
Even in Texas there had been appalling losses among the blooded stock brought in to improve Longhorn beef. While it was generally accepted in the North that the fever was somehow connected with the cow tick, some still believed that the southern herds breathed contamination upon the wind. Others claimed that traveling gave the cattle a fever, which justified their unwillingness to butcher their own beef while on the move, yet even the loudest mouth against frying his own trail meat in the chuckwagon skillets had no more fear of any fat strays in the herd than of any fat young heifer unlucky enough to be caught grazing along the trail.
The south Texans still claimed that their cattle were clean, healthy stock, as any fool could see. They denounced the quarantines as aimed against the competition of their low-cost beef. While there was much opposition in Colorado against herds straight from Texas, many ranchers disposed of their good but fever-susceptible American stock for the cheaper Longhorns. Not that there wasn't violence plenty there, too, almost from the first. Joe Curtis and John Dawson, former associates of Goodnight, trailed 1,600 head up toward Denver in 1869 and were attacked by a gang of around fifty men. They shot down many of the cattle, wounded others, and stampeded the herd. Afraid of the Texas fever, they said, but the Pueblo Chieftain suggested that their object was "doubtless plunder." To be sure some recalled that Goodnight and others were important in Pueblo affairs, but the trailers who heard of the attack sent back for armed reinforcements to shoot their way through, whether ranchers or plunderers.
Although the Coloradoans complained that they had asked the trailers to go around the more settled regions, beyond the range of American stock, on a perfectly feasible route, the Texans swore they would go where they goddamned pleased through any damn Yankeeland. When Goodnight was stopped near Canon City by fifteen, twenty men who refused to let the herd cross the Arkansas, he loaded his shotgun with buckshot and led the way, a hired hand with his Winchester out across the saddle pointing the herd in behind him, the rest of the trailers with their Winchesters ready, too.
"I've monkeyed as long as I want to with you sons of bitches," he said, and the Coloradoans parted, sitting their horses awhile, watching, and then went home.
Out of these conflicts a Colorado Cattle Association was organized, around 1,500 men pledged to let no Texas herds pass over the main trails between the Arkansas and the South Platte unless within the territory at least a year. The law forbidding the importation of any Texas cattle for any purpose whatsoever was unenforced and so repealed. But even the arrogant Goodnight found it expedient to swing his herds around east of the settled areas. In 1875 he blazed the New Goodnight Trail from Fort Sumner to Granada, the station on the Arkansas River just west of the Kansas line. But by the late 1870's Goodnight's Texas range lay astride the new trail routes through the Panhandle and was running expensive blooded cattle. Once more he drew his Winchester but this time against drovers stringing their coastal stock through his range. Made a difference which way the skunk was headed.
Ranchers in No Man's Land were losing their herds to the fever from trail stock out of the Gulf regions and Goodnight was in even greater dangers with his Shorthorns. After lone-wolfing it so long, he decided that the Panhandle cowmen must organize or be cleaned out. True, the use of the wide loop and the running iron had increased until the rustlers practically controlled the country, at least up around the Canadian, but now the cattle had begun to die of the fever and against this the cowmen had to stick together or go under. Cowboy couriers were sent around the more reliable ranches from north of the Canadian down to the Matador. They met at Mobeetie and elected Goodnight president of the new Panhandle Association formally launched next year, 1881.
Goodnight worked on a three-man committee to stop the coastal herds from coming through. There were powerful men down there, men like Richard King, and rambunctious ones like old Shang Pierce, but the committee made a trip to the governor anyway, to suggest a quarantine, with one well-marked trail through the Panhandle and the herds to be kept strictly within it. The Northwest Texas Stock Raisers Association had already slung together a plan for a trail with a fine of five cents a head for each day a trailer's cattle were outside of the route. This seemed pretty stinking cheap to ranchers who were finding their good herds scattered dead and dying over the prairie after the coastal stock went through.
No Man's Land, which still belonged to no state or territory, with no political organization, was a natural refuge for thieving, brand-burning outlaws. The ranchers up there had an early sort of league against them and were reviving it against the fever herds when a Texan named Moore appeared with his southern herd. They tried to tell him the route he must follow on to Dodge City but they couldn't agree among themselves where this was to be and so Moore went his own way. Next year when the old trailer Ab Blocker came through he told the ranchers he would drive his herd where he damned please.
"I make my own trail," he roared.
To this the leaguers had to sti
ffen. Go their route or be thrown out, herd, horses and men, they told him, and stuck to it. Outnumbered and outgunned, Blocker gave in. When the Texans wrote the Secretary of the Interior for an opinion about these stoppages, they were told that No Man's Land was still literally no-man's territory and open to all in a broader sense than any other region within the nation.
But now there was more trouble farther south. George Reynolds, long in the cattle business, headed a herd northward. Before it reached Goodnight's region, one of Charlie's cowboys, Smith, came riding with a letter saying that he was to guide the Reynolds herd out around the Goodnight range, adding that if Reynolds had any feeling as a friend or an acquaintance, "you will not put me to any desperate action. . . . My cattle are now dying of the fever contracted from cattle driven from Fort Worth.... I simply say to you that you will never pass through here in good health. Yours Truly, C. Goodnight."
Reynolds sent the letter to the Fort Griffin Echo, commenting that stockmen in general should know how overbearing prosperity can make a man. Not to be stopped by any Winchester quarantine, Reynolds started two herds across Goodnight's range, one under his brother. Neither was molested, but the enmity lasted. Others, too, resented the Goodnight attitude and swore to contest his self-appointed rulership of the old buffalo plains. There was, however, the plague, the fever, all the Panhandle infected, some losses up into the hundreds, thousands of dollars, yet out through the Panhandle was the last trail open to the northern markets.