by Mari Sandoz
By now it seemed that all the Texas range would soon be covered, by purchase or by armed possession. The Grange, made up of farmers and small stock growers, had seen this come and aligned themselves with the Knights of Labor to work for a new capitol building at Austin, to be paid for by state lands before they were gone. Eventually 3,000,000 acres were set aside in west Texas as the Capitol Tract, with an additional 500,000 to pay for the surveying. Many considered these lands, stretching over 200 miles along the western edge of the Panhandle, a dry waste, but planned to unload it on some unsuspecting Yankee outfit before they found that out. Then the capitol building burned and the state government was on the street. Advertisements for bids were rushed out and high time, many thought, with the cattlemen over-running the whole region since Goodnight settled there, many buying only small patches, claiming as much of the rest as they could range. These outfits would be mighty hard to shake loose if a buyer did show up. Their cowboys were already armed to protect the holdings against rustlers and any new cowmen coming to look for grass, warning them away from the watering places where only a few months ago there might have been only a little mustang herd, perhaps an antelope or two and the coyotes and their small prey, with fine flocks of geese and swan settling for a rest from the long flights spring and fall.
Soon after the news that the building contracts for the state capitol were awarded to Taylor, Babcock, and Company of Chicago, there was a rash of rumors and charges. The firm included the Farwell brothers, and State Senator Matlock of Texas had received financial backing for his outstate mining interests from Congressman Charles Farwell, for which Matlock admitted he felt "under great obligation." No telling how many others of the legislature and the building commission were under equally "great obligations" in the past, or planning to be in the future.
In addition there were protests against the transfer of such vast state-sized bodies of land to an individual or a corporation. It was against the genius of free institutions, and tended to create great and overpowerful interests. Then there was another roaring heard down at the temporary legislative halls at Austin, this time from homeseekers demanding their share of the state lands. The ranchers with their cows had been getting wealthy and powerful all these years from the free range of the state's public domain that everybody had said was grass just rotting down anyway. Now a Chicago outfit was willing to put up a massive and handsome capitol building for the farthest and the driest reaches of west Texas. If those state lands were worth such a swap, why shouldn't the ranchers be paying the state for all the grass their stock was eating, and help cut down taxes?
Some politicians saw the vote-drawing power of this issue—like a great block of rock salt set out on a sweet water range. They agitated for lease bills, loudly identifying themselves with the measures. To the cowmen this was the warning bellow of scrub bulls coming out of the brush to their choice herds. They packed their grips for Austin. But a lease bill was passed and brought the end of free grass closer here where the whole idea of free range started, and created a great industry.
Before any of this Capitol Company that was to build the Texas statehouse had seen even one foot of their 3,000,000 acres they were swamped in a gully washer of inquiries from landseekers. So Colonel Babcock, one of the owners, went out with a surveyor recently from Alabama to size up what they had cornered. Through Congressman Farwell's pull with General Sheridan, he got military trail equipment from Fort Elliott, including a tent, a Sibley stove, and an ambulance for his comfort, and a camping outfit for his cowboys who at least knew something of west Texas, and the Mexican who was to do the cooking.
In March, 1882, Babcock had headed out to the top of the tract. Before long the cowboys discovered that the big trunk in the equipment wagon had a compartment fitted for bottled goods, the remaining space filled with canned and other nonperishable foods. Babcock vowed loudly that he would never eat a mouthful of anything cooked over a fire of cow chips—cow dung—only he put it more bluntly. The tricks the ranch hands played on him over this made stories to tell all the way from Rabbit Ear to San Antone. But he was a serious man who read passages from Ingersoll's Some- Mistakes of Moses to the cowboys while they all waited out a spring snow in an arroyo.
Starting from Buffalo Springs, up near the Neutral Strip, Babcock found a neighboring ranch running a cow camp on his Capitol range. From there he headed down the tract, past a scattering of other new ranch shacks and great ricks of buffalo bones where the hunters had finished off the vast Texas herd, leaving nothing salable except these bleaching remains. In thirty-six days he traveled 950 miles over the Capitol lands, talking to the few people he saw and hearing that the Panhandle ranches paid 25 to 40 per cent annually, "and generally with very slack management." Apparently nobody mentioned the disastrous times for the ranchers operating back in the panic years of the early seventies, perhaps because none of these outfits were in the business then. Nobody suggested that the bonanza on now might ever sour.
Babcock did a lot of figuring in the little memo books he carried in his pocket and the papers he spread on the military field table. He came up with what he termed a conservative estimate of the prospects—a net return of over $4,500,000 in five years from the investment of $3,000,000 in the Capitol Company's lands. With this he recommended no attempt at colonization now but that the entire stretch be turned into a cattle ranch and fenced, involving, as any rancher knew, a neat little outlay just for wire and work.
But the company had to have some immediate cash, and the land deeds were only to be delivered in designated blocks as units of the capitol were completed and approved. Down at Austin Babcock's son-in-law, Abner Taylor, was struggling with the building schedule. The rising costs forced him to borrow money, and anywhere he could, even from Charles Farwell, while Babcock was selling his Midwestern real-estate holdings to throw this ante into the pot, too, small as it was in the total need.
"All outgo, no income," was the sour complaint of the land-poor, acre-poor millionaires.
But it was plunge now or lose heavily. Babcock and Taylor got out a thirty-page prospectus glorifying Texas and particularly the wonderful Capitol tract. They had 10,000 copies printed and sent them to every promising British and European address they could scare up. A few were distributed in the eastern United States but apparently none at all in Texas.
Then John V. Farwell returned to Europe where he had made evangelistic tours with Moody, and where he and his brother, as drygoods wholesalers, had several purchasing offices, particularly in Paris and in England. Farwell talked Texas and the 3,000,000 acres—around 4,700 square miles, a region nearly four times as large as the sovereign state of Rhode Island, almost a sixth as large as all of Scotland, and larger than half a dozen of the world's smaller nations. It was truly a nation in itself, an empire.
This, on top of all the recent optimistic news of the American beef bonanza and the artificially maintained high dividends paid by many of the British-owned ranches in the West brought cables piling up in the Chicago offices. Some investors hurried across the sea, determined that no one should get to the good pickings ahead of them.
Farwell formed the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company, Limited, capitalized at 3,000,000 pounds, about $15,000,000, the English officials including such men as the Earl of Aberdeen and Henry Seton-Karr, M. P., with the Marquis of Tweeddale, a Scottish banker, the chairman of the board. Among the American board members were Abner Taylor, the capitol builder, and the Farwells, with John the managing director. Although the American owners formed the Capitol Syndicate and leased the property from the British company, with detailed and itemized reports due annually, the Texans always looked upon the ranch as British. Perhaps the British were of the same mind for they finally sent a man to the ranch to represent them. The representative's incompetency didn't alter the intentions at all.
Before the ranch that Babcock advised was set up, they needed an experienced cowman as manager. B. H. Campbell was approached. He had borrowed a
little of John Farwell's loose money back in 1879 for one of his curious cattle operations. Mainly Campbell was a Shorthorn man, bred them in Illinois, helped found the American Shorthorn Breeders Association, and had been through the continent and England for breeding stock.
Still here was at least one man who knew a Longhorn from a lap saddle. He was running range stock along the Kansas-Indian Territory border, branded Bar BQ, and so was known as Barbecue to every cowhand on the trails, perhaps because he was a teetotaler and demanded that his help keep dry off the job as well as on. He permitted no rough treatment of any livestock, not even a spur to touch up a lagging horse or take the morning frost out of a humping bronc. He was a short, lean man, militarily stiff and brisk, with a neat graying beard, gray eyes sharp as hail under the cloud-heavy brows, and always had several boxes of his favorite cigars handy. He could be loud mouth and overbearing as old Shang Pierce, almost, but in a pinch he settled to business quiet as a good cow horse in roiling floodwaters and quicksand.
These men made a fancy saddlebag of characters for the great new cow outfit: the Farwell brothers, together wholesale merchants, one a politician, the other an evangelist; Colonel Babcock with his volume of Ingersoll, and Barbecue Campbell, the manager, not only dry as the young woman of growing militancy named Carry Nation living not far from his Kansas ranch, but as furious as any member of the ASPCA over the bullfight of Dodge City. He understood that this was to draw the Texas trailers back and bring in eastern money, but he roared out his anger at the baiting of the bulls and loudly hoped that somehow the instigators might get a horn. Around the cow camps Barbecue was damned as being tight as hackberry bark, but as soon as he got to Buffalo Springs, selected as the home ranch of the Capitol company, he loosened up noticeably.
"Dealing with other people's money," one of his old cowhands said.
"Yeh, English money," another agreed, thinking of the galloping over the hills on the postage-stamp saddles, canned peaches at the cow camps, and the boss over at the Rocking Chair Ranch breaking out a bottle of whisky for any passing cowboy.
At Tascosa on the Canadian Barbecue Campbell found what he expected, no brass band or any welcome at all from old friends, now that he was with the Capitol, and moving in on a region where half-a-dozen ranches were running cattle, even if the Capitol owned the land. He discovered, too, that rustling was big business here, with so much of the country open and wild, the New Mexican and Neutral Strip borders just a good jump away. The big ranchers hired a special crew of gunmen, including Pat Garrett, the killer of Billy the Kid, to ride the range against the thieves, run them down. They disregarded any losses the small outfits coming in might suffer, often helped discourage the newcomers, and worse. But it was the homeseeking settlers who were considered the prime menace, potential killers of beef, rustlers of calves, and, like a Longhorn in an alfalfa patch, decoys for more of their kind. Even if the settler was an honest man he was a menace, in fact a greater menace.
The hired gunmen brought growing bitterness against the big cattle outfits far beyond their range on public lands, particularly down at Austin, already in the hands of the hoe men, the grangers, because they had the votes.
Although more and more ranchers seemed to be pushing in, Bates and Beal, millionaire shoe manufacturers from Boston, took a cautious sniff at the wind, or perhaps consulted the Farmer's Almanac hanging in the ranch cookhouse. Some said it was the growing violence, the rustlers and gunmen as well as the settlers. They sold the LX at the peak of the boom to the American Pastoral Company, Limited, of Britain, and went home with the money. The cow was not for them, only her hide.
Barbecue Campbell, for all his ranch experience, was certain that wire fences would keep rustlers out, and with no free land inside the Capitol holdings there would be no settlers. So he refused to join the Panhandle Association.
Campbell had one worry: water. The Capitol lands stretched down into the Staked Plains to where only a few years ago troopers and buffalo hunters had died of thirst and panic. Campbell realized that every drop falling or flowing must be saved and protected from wandering stock and trailing herds. Fences would keep outside stock away, and for water he certainly had to sink wells, many and deep wells over the vast expanse that lay beyond the walking distance of the springy-legged Longhorns.
Babcock had ordered $35,000 worth of barbed wire and hired an old buffalo hunter to run the fencing, just around a 500,000-acre range at first. Long strings of freight teams crept from the railroad toward Buffalo Springs, groaning wagons piled high with dark, bristling spools of barbed wire, others loaded with yellow new-wood kegs of staples. There were no trees and so men were sent to government land to cut millions of posts, one for every thirty feet around the great pasture, for a stout four-wire fence, strong enough to hold all but the breechiest cow or the ranniest scrub bull. The fencers had a little trouble with mustang herds attacking their horses and mules, the wild stallions squealing as they charged in to sweep off the mares, but a few well-placed rifle shots usually sent them off, their fine, long manes and tails flying in the wind.
Then the big blizzard of the winter swept cattle from the Neutral Strip and from Kansas into and through the Capitol lands, icicles on their muzzles, eyes and ears lost in the snow caking. They piled up along the stout new fence or went over or through it, pushed on by the blinding blizzard wind, not stopping except for death before they reached the canyons and the timbered strips of the Canadian. At night herds of pronghorns, frightened by the big hungry wolves, hit the frost-tautened wires on the higher tables, set them singing, the terrified antelope cut and torn in their panic.
Though prices had slid from the bonanza peak, Campbell recommended contracting for only 20,000 cattle, steers and she-stuff, for the summer of 1885. Buy only the best, Far-well ordered, which was easy with the Texas market glutted, not only held for a rise but for a trail to get through to the North, so the very best was available for a little down payment in advance.
Ab Blocker, the man with hell in his neck, as the West called it, worked hard to get his herd, 2,500 head, in first. He knew of the Goodnight Winchester quarantine of the Palo Duro region so he cut around east, past Fort Elliott, and then swung back northwest to Buffalo Springs, the Capitol headquarters. It was farther, but he pushed his men and stock on by starlight—old Hell-in-His-Neck for sure. When he got there the branding corrals and a long, tight chute were ready to handle up to twenty-four head at a shot. But Campbell had no brand.
"Biggest ranch in the world and no brand?" Ab said scornfully, pushing his dusty old hat back from his forehead as he let himself down to his boot heels. A brand needed three things. Got to look good and sound good, be easy to run, and planned so it wouldn't fit under any other brand around or any possible for the brand blotter to make. An X was always good, so was a bar or a diamond, with any good-sounding letter. Stretching out a bowed leg, Ab Blocker scratched three enormous letters in the dirt with his worn boot heel: X I T.
Campbell marked it off in the dust for himself with a weed stalk, tried to blot it, change it as a rustler would. He couldn't make anything else of the XIT and so it was adopted. Because there was no iron ready they used a single bar about five inches long forged across the end of a wagon rod. Then Ab Blocker burned it on one steer to see how it would look and hurried off to help his brother John, in trouble with the Kansas border guards.
Campbell had tried to hire him to manage all the branding but he did get a start at a ranch crew by picking up forty men from the trail outfits delivering cattle to him, many ranchers glad enough to let them go, with money much too tight for big crews now. Barbecue had sent a sixteen-mule team to haul cottonwood and piñon from the draws on Neutral Strip, a good forty miles away, for the branding fires, the wheels cutting deep ruts back and forth.
As the stock arrived it was herded through the crowding pens into the long chute where one man with a pole pushed through across the back could hold a critter tight and motionless for the hot iron. The hands kept twenty
of the new branding irons going, twenty red-hot irons from the fires that trailed pungent smoke toward the low ridge of hills beyond the spring. It was a big enough job of branding finished in sufficient speed to have impressed even old Hell-in-His-Neck if he had stayed, 22,000 head carrying his brand, his XIT. It wasn't much for 3,000,000 acres but enough for the range that was ready. They were around 43,000 head short of the 65,000 the delivery contracts finally covered but the Capitol was lucky they didn't come. By 1886 prices had dropped so far that they saved money on new contracts.
Before fall some of the new cattle found their way down to the old trail by which Coronado must have brought the first cows into Texas. The stretches, so hard and dry that the Spaniards had to pile rocks and clods and whitened bones to mark their passing for the herd coming behind, were still the same.
From the first the XIT proved hard on the chute run of practices so fixed in the cow country: hard liquor, pistols at the hip, the rancher's precious water holes free to any outfit coming along, partly, of course, because the rancher usually didn't own them either. Campbell was against stocking good range with Longhorn blood, killing another man's cattle for beef, and Sunday work. Worse, the XIT fence was closing the range although at least technically they owned what they fenced. And old Barbecue Campbell seemed to be everywhere. With his sturdy buggy and high-stepping horses he traveled fifty, sixty miles a day, the most energetic buggy boss of them all.
Then one night some hands riding in to headquarters saw a glow rising into the sky off toward the Neutral Strip—almost like northern lights before a blizzard, but not quite.