Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Then came the news of the Kansas law against Texas cattle, this one legal in spite of the Supreme Court's decision, legal and enforceable. It provided for inspection of the herds at the border, with the power to hold infected ones until fall at the expense of the owner, and past the best sale time, even though the bonanza was still putting a very high premium on evading both the irate citizens and the law. There must be a solution, swift, clear cut, and permanent, particularly now that the British Government put a veritable embargo on American cattle against the pleuro-pneumonia and the suspicions of Texas fever. Finally the government must act, and after a bitter fight in 1884 a Bureau of Animal Industry was ordered set up, with the power to regulate the cattle traffic and suppress bovine diseases. But all this public agitation helped make the consumers mighty uneasy about the meat they were eating, and backed up those who would shut off the movement of all southern herds.

  Now there must be a National Trail, the Texans decided. In November, 1884, they belligerently had their valets pack for a trip or, more often, slicked their hair down with water, threw the other shirt into a gripsack, and headed for St. Louis and the first National Stockmen's convention. They met in the hotel lobby festooned with hoofs and horns, with mounted Longhorn heads and the newer range breeds, Shorthorns and the Hereford with the curly white faces, along the walls. There were wagon wheels, fancy bridles, and enough big hats in the decorations to warm the hearts of the westerners. But even before the registration the split in the Texans was plain as the canyon of the Rio Grande. The Panhan-dlites, led by the dedicated old cowman Goodnight, were determined to save their stock and ready to shoot if necessary. Because large-scale shipping by rail from deep in Texas was entirely too expensive, the rest were for a national trail and the only place it could run now was through the Panhandle. Pryor, Lytle, Shanghai Pierce, and fifty other old-timers were pushing the trail, led by Richard King, of King's Kingdom. Once more he proposed that the cattlemen organize a company or a federation and buy a strip of land north to Canada for their drives.

  The opposition southerners thought the government should furnish the land, just as it granted great tracts to the railroads. "Something for nothing" appealed to the free-grass ranchers rather than the "Pay for it and then it's yours" policy of King, who had secured most of his grass by buying it up long ago. Outnumbered, King gave in. He was only one of the representatives of the South Texas Association and the other organizations were mostly against him, too, the youngest, Goodnight's outfit, the most Winchester-minded of all.

  But there were deeper currents in the convention. Two years ago the Chicago beef interests had held a sort of national convention, cooperating mainly with the northern stockmen, particularly those who represented the big foreign investors in Wyoming—such men as John Clay, the Bay State, and a dozen others, and again last year. Now St. Louis was reaching out to dominate the livestock market by conspiring, Chicago claimed, with the southerners. Robert D. Hunter, pioneer in early trailing, but now in the more stable livestock commission business, in St. Louis, believed that the town could become the great cattle market of the nation again. He prepared the biggest show of splendor and spending that the cowmen had ever seen. To be sure the cattle boom was already riding down a little slope but that was just getting a run at the higher rise beyond. The new-rich of the cow business gloried in their self-confidence, strutted, drank, and applauded everything, particularly the parade of beautiful women, even though some of them were their own. The old-timers enjoyed the fun, too, but they had come to see a little more than the high-stepping drum major who led the band with a pair of polished longhorns carrying a silken banner: COWBOY BAND, DODGE CITY, KANSAS, $20,000,000. The figures stood for the cash value of the ranchers represented in the new musical group. Behind him marched the band, the men in blue flannel shirts, chaps, fancy boots and spurs, braces of ivory-handled six-shooters at their hips and white Stetsons on their heads, each hatband stamped with the brand of the ranch represented.

  The exposition building was lined with flowers, trees, the sage called purple, and other prairie beauties. The vases and the gavel were great steer horns, and everywhere were the banners of the states and territories represented, two from far New England and all across to Oregon, including seventy-seven livestock organizations. Captain Bedford Pim of the Royal Navy was there, admitting that the great quest of England was for food. Only a fool would try to invade her shores. The best attack would be interception of her food ships with gunboats. England and America united could knock out the world but they would never need do that. They could starve the world into submission without one blow.

  The nation's bulk of livestock wealth was gathered at St. Louis—cowmen and outside investors with their wives and daughters lovely in silks and satins and jewels, the men all seeming great, broad-shouldered brawny figures, mostly bearded, few of them entirely at home in the boiled shirts, not even those recently from Boston or London or Edinburgh. There was banqueting and singing, even the old-timers joining in some of the hymns and "The Little Black Bull Came Down the Mountain." Some with too much of Hunter's whisky roared out the baudier verses in their wind-hoarsened voices, ignoring the shushings of the religious. Some easterner called for the wordless song of the brush and brought a serious quietness. That was impossible in the city, impossible indoors, meaning impossible anywhere outside of the brush.

  From the first meeting it was plain that the most unloved were the Texans, unless it was the Kansas rancher Print Olive, dark-faced and somehow alone in the crowd where everyone knew of him, many from long before he left the San Gabriel country, let alone before he left Nebraska. The Texans in general seemed to be unloved even though they were the ones who had built the beef business of the nation, of the world, out of a natural resource they found running loose on the hoof. But now that the Great Plains region was stocked to Canada, the feed lots of the spreading, the burgeoning cornlands full, they were not needed any more and were looked upon as an arrogant remnant from some prehistoric time, men who spread disease in the modern world. By their cattle, to be sure, but here a man was known by his cows.

  King's idea of a national trail, bought and paid for, was thrown out early. Getting Congress to set up a fenced lane six miles wide across the country north seemed hopeless. It would have been a starvation trail, a few realized, with so little of it through well-grassed country—about all that was left unclaimed by some rancher or settler long ago.

  Still the Texans from the fever regions had to fight the strangulation of their business. Their oratorical Judge Carroll demanded, even begged for a nationally financed trail from the Red River north. "There must be a trail from the breeding grounds of Texas to the maturing pastures of the North!"

  At once gray-headed Granville Stuart, from up in the Milk River country, was on his Montana-booted feet, waving his big white hat high for attention as he would from a rise out on his own range.

  "What you mean 'maturing pastures of the North'?" he roared. The prairies on both sides of the Rockies were breeding ground for the finest beef cattle in the world, and he failed to see why the government should be asked to build a trail for the Texas breeders to slough their surplus stock off up there. Thousands of cattle not ready for market had been shipped east from Montana because the range was overstocked. He, for one, didn't want the government spending his tax money to swamp the country with stock they didn't need or want. "Let them bring their cattle into Montana in the old-fashioned way—" he said.

  "And don't walk them in too fast; give them time to shake the ticks off, not kill our good stock like they did last summer," one of the Wyoming Association men added.

  Yes, it was true that 5,000 Longhorns had been trailed into Wyoming from the cattle trains that unloaded them at Ogallala and Sidney last summer, with from thirty to a hundred of the lot dying every day as they crossed the crowded northern ranges, threatening the life of every critter there. The cowmen had been helpless but they sure kicked to Cheyenne and Washington, with some em
ergency action and the promise of a quarantine of all cattle coming in by rail. In addition there should be inspection stations to keep out all infected stock. Legislation was planned for the next session at Cheyenne.

  So now the fight was in the open, with the south Tex-ans snorting as they had for thirty years at the whole idea of a Texas fever, which was plainly a sickness of northern stock. "Buy our Longhorns and have a healthy herd!" was their motto.

  Finally Goodnight threw his prestige to the Texans on the condition that the National Trail would not pass near his range. The governor of Colorado didn't object to the trail if it crossed in Kansas, but before his words were really out, Russell, from Kansas, was on his feet. They had been burned by cattle trails from Texas, he said quietly. No use telling them there was no such thing as Texas fever. He knew better, to his loss and sorrow. Kansas was not against the National Trail, just against its entering her borders.

  Martin Culver of Dodge City softened Russell's objections a little by coming out for the trail. But many there knew that Culver bought vast herds deep in Texas and trailed them straight through to Kansas, scattering infection all the way, and he intended to keep doing just that.

  Plainly nobody really needed or wanted the trail except the coastal ranchers and everybody else was anxious to get on to his own snake killing. The 1,300 delegates memorialized Congress for a national cattle highway from the Red to Canada, to be located on unsettled, meaning unclaimed domain as far as practicable and interfering with no habitation or material interest without compensation.

  With the trail fight done, most of the Texans stayed awhile longer for the speeches and complaints about the stranglehold of the packing and railroad monopolies and for the lease law, of no interest to them with their state lands both for sale and lease. But underneath there was the growing power of Chicago and for this there was no remedy, no arnica, and no iron-boiled sage tea.

  A southern delegation, without the Panhandle, went to camp on the Potomac until they got a trail to pack home in their ditty bags. They made it look very good: 690 miles from the Texas line across No Man's Land north to the border, not over six miles wide, all on government land, 1,324,000 acres. The surveying and fencing; sinking artesian wells in the waterless stretches, and bridging the wilder streams would cost $1,000,000. This was only 2.78 per cent the value of the land granted the western railroads, to say nothing of the cash bonuses paid them.

  With the bill in both houses of Congress, the Texans were suddenly as red faced as kids caught riding a prize bull calf. They were demanding a free trail through the rest of the nation and not throwing one foot of their own state into the kitty. Hastily a new bill was drawn up for a trail from mid-Texas to the Neutral Strip, the No-Man's Land, but only two miles wide.

  The proposed raid on the treasury for the trail was fine ammunition for the northerners, but their chief complaint was the planned evasion of the quarantine laws and other state laws as well, the trail an alien strip beyond all local jurisdiction running from Texas to Canada. Mighty easy way for an outlaw to hit for the border. Kansas protested to Congress and alarmed the adjoining areas. If Kansas with her armed guards to enforce her quarantine blocked the trail there, where would the markethungry, gun-packing Texans break through? They had bulldozed their way for a long, long time, gone where they pleased, spread their disease out wide behind them. Angry livestock associations passed angry resolutions against the Texas herds, now that they did not need them any more.

  The Panhandle ranches were joined by those of the Cherokee Outlet and the Cattle Growers Association of Bent County, Colorado, agreeing to block every Texas herd. The Bent County ranchers had already lost $500,000 to the Texas disease, the Panhandle $300,000, Kansas and Indian Territory $300,000 just the last season. The cattlemen agreed they were against violence but passage of cattle from the infected regions would be resisted by every legal and by every necessary means.

  The disappointed Texans dragged back from Washington and added Winchesters to the six-guns of all their trail hands, even one for the chuckwagon, and prepared to shoot their way to market. When the governor promised them he would provide a trail out, alarm as from the pale smoke of a prairie fire swept the Panhandle. The governor must mean he was ready to use the Rangers and the sharpshooters and crack shots from the war and the Indian fighting. That he could certainly blast a trail through the Panhandle with the state arsenal even the tough-minded former Ranger, Goodnight, admitted. There were some saying that Rangers were already passing as cowboys and were ready to force the herds through any opposition.

  As this news spread, any who had faltered before saw now that they must prepare for war if they intended to save their herds, their blooded stock—war, and perhaps their lives the stakes.

  Many of the older ranchers had looked upon the railroad strike against the drastic pay cuts of 1877 as the newspapers suggested, as a communistic, an anarchistic revolt, a revolution. But in 1885, with a shrinking market, the Texas cowmen took a more sympathetic view. Once more the railroads were cutting wages, and when desperate workers walked out, even down in Texas, the cattlemen passed resolutions and expressions of sympathy for the Knights of Labor and their women and children, many hungry and sick. At last the cowmen were forced to lift their eyes beyond the pasture and the water hole, even beyond the rustler and the settler, to look more closely into the national picture. What cut the purchasing power of the workingman certainly cut the market for meat.

  The Texans, north and south, called a meeting to work out the trail problem, approaching Dallas like range bulls marching to battle. Some of the steadier men like Slaughter, or Simpson of the Texas Livestock Association, refused to get drawn into an open fight. Finally some southerners were asked to recommend a trail that avoided the outlawed Indian Territory. They platted it north along the state line, past Doan's store on the Red River, elbowing west to Buffalo Springs, up through No Man's Land, called the Neutral Strip now, and on to the corner of Colorado. Most of the southern ranchers roared like angry bulls all right over the extra distance in the swing around the Panhandle ranges. The men of the Strip, still without legal status, finally decided it was better to keep the stock to one definite route than letting it infect the whole region. Of course there was still Colorado to be heard from, waiting, armed.

  One man who couldn't see the cattle business without free range, great trails, and the sky the limit, was Martin Culver of the old Queen of the Cowtowns, Dodge City. Late the spring of 1885 a herd of his steers had moved through the Neutral Strip, grazing the deep grass, fattening on the seed-topped annual that brought gloss to the hair. The bristle-whiskered cowboys idled along, perhaps resting a leg swung around the saddle horn, rolling a cigarette, with the wind down and the grass green, or replenishing a cud from the plug in the worn back pocket.

  Suddenly at the Kansas border a dozen mounted men spurred up, yelling, the sun flashing on their drawn rifles. "You can't come into Kansas! Head you for the jailhouse if you do!"

  "Them steers're Mart Culver's, over to Dodge. You can't stop a citizen from bringing his stuff in."

  But the border guards weren't interested. The dark-bearded trail boss looked around the determined men, their row of Winchesters, then back over the wide prairie and the steers piling up behind him. He motioned his men up. They came spurring, hands on guns as they jerked their horses to a stop around him.

  "Bend 'em west, boys," he said. "Nothing in Kansas anyhow except the three suns, sunflowers, sunshine, and sons of bitches."

  His remark was repeated around the camps and ranches for weeks, with roars of laughing, but old-timers recalled that this had been said many times since the first yellow rose of Texas came creeping up the Santa Fe Trail to flourish wonderfully in Kansas soil, in the sunshine that grew the fattening grasses and the sons of bitches fit to meet the Texans on even terms.

  Culver, the adopted Kansan, didn't hear the stories. His herd had grazed up along the eastern border of Colorado while he, knowing that a million Texa
s cattle were spilling out of the roundups with no trail, no markets, hurried to Washington. There he got permission to drive cattle from the Neutral Strip up along east Colorado, on public domain, without touching Kansas. So finally there was a National Trail of sorts, but marked with bleaching buffalo skulls and Texas cow chips instead of the strong wire fences planned.

  Always the opportunist, Martin Culver laid out Trail City where the new route crossed the railroad near the Arkansas River. It was inside Colorado but so close that a drunk stumbling out the back door of a saloon would be practically in Kansas, and safe from the local marshal or sheriff, as would any rustler or gunman fleeing out the back way, or jumping between the buildings. The National Trail, the main street of the town, would make it boom as Abilene and Dodge had boomed, but safe from the blight of the quarantine.

  Culver got a couple of partners and by August, 1885, had saws and hammers going, enough to scare the herds straggling through into fine stampedes if they hadn't been trail worn. In a few days any cowboy with money could satisfy every need and desire, including a final spot in the boothill cemetery. Inevitably there was a rival town twenty-eight miles down the trail and just across the line in Kansas. It was named Borders, for a Kansas banker who established the Border Rover there and promised a railroad and irrigation canals to make the town a paradise of lawns and shade trees. Not only that, it was available to the thirsty cow hands long before they reached Trail City.