Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  "Prairie fire!" one of the men yelled out suddenly.

  It was mid-December, the range bare, the wind sharp from the north bearing down on Buffalo Springs. The cowboys spurred their tired horses for the ranch. Supper forgotten, Campbell sent one outfit to meet the fire, slow it, taper it, split it in any bare spot, any arroyo or canyon or dry wash. Others hurried out to round up the horses and mules, get them to some bare stretches, hold them there against their blind, panicking fear of fire. The rest of the hands worked to backfire around the ranch buildings and corrals, starting little fires north of any bare strips and patches to burn slowly into the wind.

  Old-timers who had seen the Panhandle burn before realized they could only try to fight such a fire now. Some knew of the one that the army set against the Indians back in 1865, along a hundred-mile stretch of the South Platte, to come roaring down through Colorado and west Kansas and the present Neutral Strip into Texas. Men and animals were burned in that, whole herds of antelope and buffaloes killed, the fire not stopped until it died on the barren stretches of the Staked Plains. Even jumped the broad, sandy bed of the Canadian, some said, carried by smoldering tumbleweeds sliding across the ice of the frozen stream.

  Nobody was too hopeful now and by the time Campbell had the XIT organized, the fire seemed less than fifteen miles off and coming like the express train of the Santa Fe, all the night sky a burning red, the shadows of the boiling smoke rolling black over the prairie. Up north the firefighters had spurred their lathering horses through panic-blinded antelope and deer, wolves, too, even rabbits and smaller creatures frightened from the safety of their burrows. Here and there the flames leapt up twenty, thirty feet in the dead grass and reeds of a low place, sending smoke to billow black and flame-shot into the burning sky as the fire raced on up the slopes before the growing wind.

  The men sought out any barrier that might hold a backfire, any possible place to split the head flames, narrow them. Once a bunch of cattle passed, running, tails up, bellies low to the ground, horns clattering as they went head first into washouts and over banks, others upon them, and over them, when safety lay only a few hundred yards to the side. Finally, when the fire seemed almost upon the men, the sparks, the heat scorching their faces, they shot a lone cow, ripped her open, and with lariats dragged the body across the edge of the fire, working inward, and on the barer knolls, the horses faunching under the spur and quirt, wild in the searing flames and smoke, the embers burning in the manes, the men beating them out and from their scorching clothes. But it was useless. All they had hoped was to narrow the fire a little, hold it back some on the barer strips, but even there the heat exploded the dry grass beyond, and the flames raced on again to overtake the head fire, many miles wide now, and as much beyond the power of man as a hailstorm or the black blizzards of dust.

  Whipped, their beards, brows, and lashes burnt to their blistered skin, the men gave up and started back to the ranch, riding their worn horses hard to outrun the fire, small bobbing figures against the red sheet of flame around the north. They found Campbell sweating, too. While his men burned off the worn grass around the ranch he carried buckets of water, dogtrotting with them, to help hold the backfires, and wetting down his few young trees as the smoke and soot on the wind lashed his face and stung his eyes.

  When the first tongue of flames hit the black strip of backfiring at the ranch, the fire spread to both directions, leaping high in weed patches, the flame-shot smoke rolling over the low roofs where the men beat out smoldering sparks, drenched down curling boards beginning to smoke in the heat. Several times the wind carried the fire over the burnt strips and was beaten out by wet sacks and saddle blankets, while the main head swept around on both sides of the ranch and, rejoining, roared on, leaving the squatting of buildings and corrals behind in the smoky darkness. The men, using lanterns now, searched out smolderings and twists of smoke in the corral dust and the cow chips, in weed corners of the garden and the trees, even in the old swallow nests under the eaves that Campbell had protected all summer.

  The fire ran on unchallenged now, whipped southward by the growing gale, burning every fence, every windmill and tank across the XIT to the Canadian. There, in the broad, sandy bed of the river not even this hungry fire could make the jump across and so spread in feeble tongues side-wise into the wind along the worn banks, smoldering a while in the cow chips along the bottoms. Cattle, those still able to run, and the smaller creatures fled out beyond the Canadian valley, running as long as they could, for the stink of the smoke pursued them on the wind far, far from their accustomed range.

  At sunup every XIT man was in the saddle, his horse kicking up spurts of soot already running in dark curls over the blackened plain, the knolls bared to the yellowish earth where the wind would bite all winter. They found burnt animals here and there, antelope with their delicate hoofs charred, to be shot; singed cattle wading the gray ashes around the fallen windmills and the cracked and drying watering places, bawling for the water they knew should be there. A million acres were burned and although most of the stock escaped, winter was upon them.

  Campbell ordered his men to throw the cattle out on the unburnt range beyond the fallen fences of the XIT. About 5,000 head were trailed into east New Mexico, the rest south of the Canadian. Driving XIT stock to range claimed by others stirred up a lot of anger. Newspapers complained that a short time ago Campbell had declared himself independent of the stock growers association and other ranchers. He had even refused to let the Prairie Company look for stray cattle within his vast enclosure, saying they would be informed of any carrying their brand.

  "An apology would now be a clever thing," one paper suggested, but without any chance of Barbecue Campbell coming across.

  The fire had killed thirty head of cattle on the LE range and Reynolds, one of the owners, sent a letter as scorching as the fire to Taylor down on the capitol job. Reynolds was positive the XIT fence crew had let a camp fire get away in the wind and were responsible for the damage. He claimed pay for the cattle and burned fences, threatening suit. Taylor replied there was no proof and besides the fencers were independent contractors. Riders reported the blackened strip started up at the Arkansas River. The LE claim looked like one more try at bleeding a big foreign outfit.

  Long before this the snow had started, marbled in ashes at first then pure white. The XIT cattle, for whom fenced pasture had been so carefully prepared, were now wandering on overstocked, summer-grazed range. The snow turned into the roaring blizzard called the Big White Ruin, which swept so many cattlemen out of business. It struck the unprotected, gaunted XIT stock, with no familiar range to hold them.

  By the end of winter the losses of the great ranch were the talk of the country. Not that others hadn't lost, perhaps everything, but bad news about a big outfit is bigger news. It was said that the spring roundup scared up a scant 10,000 head, the spring calf crop below 900.

  "Yeh, them thousands they lost last winter must have set the Britishers back no less than $200,000."

  "More than that, if you figure the fencing, the wells, and everything. A hell of a lot more."

  But Barbecue Campbell wasn't the man to side-jump at the sight of a little bad luck. Immediately after the fire he had the fencers out rebuilding the lines, in midwinter. Slowly the posts and wire crept over the burnt prairie and beyond, to grass. A second fire came, this one blazing up suddenly out of New Mexico on a strong west wind. The fence crew whipped the horses and mules with the equipment into a wide dry wash and saved themselves. But ten miles of new fence went up in smoke, the posts charred butts in the ground, the wire crisped and worthless. Patiently the men rebuilt the stretch. Campbell contracted the large southern section, eighty-five miles at $100 a mile, with a loss, the contractor complained later, of around $30 for every mile he built.

  Although gates had been set every three miles as required by law and enforced by the Rangers to stop the earlier fence-cutting wars, organizations all the way from Texas to Montana were
fighting to outlaw all barbed wire. Unconcerned, the XIT kept stringing their fences on their own land, owned by deed or by contract that promised deeds as the statehouse at Austin progressed. By the fall of 1886 the ranch had become a showplace of Texas for at least one thing—the fences, one stretch of 150 miles without a jog, and altogether over 750 miles enclosing all the XIT except 35,000 acres of outlying sections that the owners hoped to trade for land that would square up the ranch. The fence riders had 575 miles of outside line to watch against wire cutters, gate throwers, rustlers, fighting bulls, blizzard-drifted stock, perhaps lightning or prairie fires, particularly maliciously set. That second one, from New Mexico, looked like a good try at burning the XIT out completely.

  Up to 1886 most of the XIT was treeless as the palm of a roper's hand. Then in January three big freight wagons had arrived at Buffalo Springs and unloaded sacked bundles of what looked like rough brush brooms upside down. The cowboys ankled out to see, and gawked in silent disbelief. Trees: 5,000 one-year-olds tagged as catalpa, box elder, white ash, maple, black cherry, and other stuff. The big burlap bags that looked like goober sacks were tree seeds. Almost nobody remembered seeing the seeds of any tree except the scrub acorns the javelinas hogged down, the chinaberries that made the wild turkeys taste like soap in season, and the mesquite beans the cattle carried all over hell and gone. In addition to the trees there was machinery; breaking plows, planters, and cultivators.

  "Goddamn nester layout!" a gnarl-toothed old cowhand snorted and spit his cud far out, to roll itself in the sand.

  But the XIT would have shade and the cowhands would plant it. They planted big gardens, too, and alfalfa and corn. Campbell's assistant estimated that the corn would run forty-five bushels to the acre. There would be 100,000 cattle, with the best bulls to be bought.

  By July the XIT had a thin scattering of cattle spread the length of their holdings, at least so long as the water holes lasted. Farwell reported to the London office that they received 51,116 head of cattle, nearly all of high breeding, which must have meant something besides Longhorns, or even Texas crossbreeds, in that far land of blooded stock. Still Campbell was buying the very best possible, and he had contracted for purebred Shorthorn and Hereford bulls. The range was in fine condition, Farwell wrote, the cattle doing well.

  If the stock was doing well it was because Campbell had hired some of the best cowhands ever to sit a saddle and then put them to ankling, as they called it, to such foot jobs as digging ditches to lead water miles out over the thirsty range to dirt reservoirs, perhaps to old buffalo ponds or wallows. Deep furrows were plowed, scooped out and plowed again until the canals were low enough to draw the water along, some as far as eight, nine miles from the source. The mowers and hayrakes came, and the Texas cowboys who had never pitched a forkful cursed Barbecue Campbell for running a goddamn granger outfit. But when they went to call for their time they remembered that jobs were scarce as a prairie hen in a hailstorm. Besides, the grub put out here was mighty good and a man got Sundays off if no cow fell in a well or a fool horse got into the bob wire.

  Soon weather-beaten, bowlegged old cowboys were mowing creek bottoms while others were well-digging in gangs, sinking holes perhaps eighty-five feet deep. If the vein turned out a strong one, it was walled up and a windmill set over it to pump day and night in the eternal winds of the Panhandle.

  All this was very fine but apparently there would be no profits or dividends for a long, long time and the British investors wanted to withdraw. They were encouraged to send representatives over to look around the vast holdings, see the alfalfa patches green as good Irish sod, listen to Far-well preach a Sunday sermon to the congregated hands in front of the bunkhouse.

  On the way back to Chicago Farwell bought 100 Aberdeen-Angus bull calves, blocky and as shiny black as a prairie raven's wing. Fortunately Campbell put off the delivery to spring, as he did most of the undelivered portion of the 110,721 head bought and under contract.

  The Big Die-Up followed last winter's Big White Ruin, with even the tallest weeds buried under snow and the cow chips lost to the cookstove and the heaters for a month at the least. In the depths of the snow some of the cowboys recalled an old coal mine over near Rabbit Ear Mountain in New Mexico. Campbell sent a man to see, and bought eighty acres there. He wished Babcock to know that the XIT had burned its last cow chip. The ranch hands not only plowed and planted, mowed and dug. They mined coal.

  There were several burs under the saddle for Barbecue Campbell and the XIT. Beyond the general antagonism against such sprawling vastness there was a growing hatred of foreign outfits competing on the cattle market. With costs at the statehouse at Austin still going up and beef falling, there was no return for the protesting British investors, and neither Campbell nor the Farwells could see any way to make the situation look good.

  Campbell managed to contract for twenty-five wells bored in the south half of the ranch, in the driest portion, where ten years ago, those men of the Lost Expedition died with thirst-blackened tongues. At least twelve of these wells were to be near the bluffs called Yellow Houses, and working in time for the new herds about due. The receiving camp was ready in time but there was no water, not a single well put down, and with the drouth the cattle from down in the Colorado City region would come in from a fifty- sixty-mile barren stretch from three water-crazed days. There was only the small and shrinking laguna at Yellow Houses and a little spring in the canyon. Thirty thousand cattle—cows, heifers, steers, and bulls, the best stock that Campbell could scare up —were headed here, and while he raged and bounced over the dry prairie in his buggy, seeking some way out of this box canyon in which he found himself, the long-brewing range trouble up at Tascosa on the Canadian blazed into a gun fight, lurid even for that wild cow town. Three LS ranch cowboys and a bystander ended up in Boothill—died of the bitterness growing between the large cattle outfits on one side and the small ranchers and settlers on the other. Outside for the present, a sort of bystander, was the XIT, the largest of all, the most hated by both sides.

  But Campbell was occupied with the desperate search for water, improvising plans and equipment. The drillers had hauled up big machines, big enough to aim for artesian water, but they struck dry formations and a whole string of trouble. As the time for the herds came very, very close, Campbell roared his complaints and the contract driller moved his rig into a valley. This time water came flowing. Everybody was excited. A mile south another well was sunk, with more flowing water, but then somebody noticed that the first had dropped far down. There just wasn't enough water for two wells on the Yarner there, as the old-timers had long assumed.

  Any other cowman would have headed off the incoming herds, sent them on to the Canadian River, but not stubborn Barbecue Campbell. He would need water in the Yellow Houses region for the cows eventually and he would show all the wrinkle-horned old cowmen that he could get it.

  Finally the drillers struck a seepage, but a good one, at only six feet near Yellow House Spring and another at eighteen feet. The fencing boss called his men in and set them to work. With plows and shovels they dug out big supply tanks or reservoirs to catch the seepage and set up treadmills run by old cow ponies, to lift the water by endless chains of sheet-iron buckets. It was primitive, as primitive as the equipment of prehistoric man along the Nile, where bullocks perhaps plodded the treadmills, or of Asia, where the cow roamed very early, sniffing the lifted water and drinking deep of it.

  Campbell had stout wire fences built to regulate the cattle approach to the water. It was the best he and his help could devise. After all, men experienced in the region had died for water on the trail to Yellow Houses.

  When the tanks shimmered in the heat dance of early June and the dust began to rise from the horizon and grow like puffballs, Campbell stood bareheaded to watch for the thin, wavering line that would approach like an enormous snake, a rattler—no, more like some giant coachwhip humping over the low ridges, raising the great trailing of dust. The bawl
of the cattle came hoarsely on the wind, from swollen tongues, Campbell knew. At the first sniff of water their tails went up, and the stock broke into a hurried and shambling trot. The cowpunchers spurred in, yelling but hoarse, too, swinging their ropes like whips to break the herd into small bunches, let them in to water a few at a time, hold the rest back from the desperate crowding at the cottonwood troughs. As fast as they had drunk a little they were punched away to the branding corrals, to make room for more of the crazed stock, the weary men cursing, their eyes red-rimmed holes in the dust-caked faces. At last the first herd was done, Campbell still watching, his bare head forgotten in the broiling sun.

  Finally night settled over the bare prairie, dotted with trail camps and their fires, the pumps groaning on as the old horses still walked the treadmills. Thirsty cattle still bawled, crowding, pushing in the darkness, the men silent now, their ropes popping.

  Checking his remaining water holes, Campbell found a big Matador outfit watering at the XIT Spring Lake. He demanded where they were going. Arizona, the brawny, bearded trail boss said, hand on his gun, but easily, as though just resting it. There was a stretch of 111 miles to the next water and he wasn't pulling out until it rained.

  "I can't allow that," Campbell said. "I have cattle coming in every day with their tongues hanging out. This is XIT land and water."

  Now there was no doubt why the Matador foreman's hand was on the holster, his cowboys drawing in at a motion, letting the cattle spread. They were all armed, Campbell and his few men as always without guns. Finally the trail boss said he wasn't unfriendly but if the XIT tried to move his herd away it would mean lead.

  Campbell ordered a man to ride out to round up the hands. "Tell them to bring all the guns they can."

  At dawn the men started coming in, wondering, but ready. With a good force about him, Campbell rode over to Spring Lake. But the Matador herd was gone. Luckily they hit rain farther west. Campbell felt relieved. A gun fight would have blown the Farwells sky-high, and with the Matador, too—the big Scottish-owned ranch. Sky-high wouldn't have expressed what would have happened over in England.