Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Thirty thousand cattle were delivered during the next month at Yellow Houses, with growing talk of fraud in the tallies and in the age count, yearlings turned in as two-year-olds, or even three or older, perhaps one head tallied as two and three, or the cowboys hairbranding some of the stock, burning only the hair, the critters to be rustled later, when the brand was grown out and gone, the cowboy's own mark put on. There was much talk of one of Campbell's relatives, some said a cousin, deep in the thieving schemes. And this was the man who came with such stern rules—and drier than Carry Nation.

  Still, the herds were delivered and somehow watered, at least their swollen tongues wetted. The cattle showed thirty different brands, representing some lifelong cowmen like C. C. Slaughter, who sold 10,000 head at the giveaway prices. The Snyders, who had seen a million dollars wiped out by the bust in the beef bonanza and the Die-Ups, were happy to turn their cows into a little XIT cash. But there were stories of the new stock dying of thirst on the prairie, some along Campbell's wire fences, trying to return to their home range, as cattle will, and nobody bothering to drive them back to such water as there was a few times until their feet knew the contrary route.

  When Campbell was swamped by the herds crowding in, he had called on A. G. Boyce, up with the Snyder deliveries, for help with the count and the watering. A. G. tackled the job and got the aid of the trail outfits, not because they were friends of the XIT but of Boyce. There was still fraud among Campbell's hands, and many cattle died of thirst before Boyce or Campbell could get to them—seventy-six in one of the large open wells, the smell of water tolling the desperate animals as it tolled rabbits and even the wily kangaroo rat.

  For a while Campbell had tried to be everywhere, watching with some satisfaction as the XIT herds grew and improved in quality. Most of the later cattle were from above the fever line, the larger, better grade stock of west Texas. By the fall of 1887 the herds totaled nearly 120,000 head, with around half of the bulls quality Shorthorns and

  Herefords, in addition to the Polled Angus, with their long, glossy black coats in the chill of fall, but dusty and burning in the heat of summer. The crosses of these bloods with the range stock was producing a heavier, more manageable cattle but less hardy and far less picturesque for the English visitors. Still it was good; the XIT was out to produce beef, not hoofs and horn.

  Eventually there was water, too. Many little dams were built to hold the runoff, and around 125 wells, varying in depth from ten to 400 feet, were put down, the windmills set upon them spinning their wide and shining wheels, like flower faces turned not to the sun but into the wind. The pump rods ran silently, spouting water through the lead pipes into cypress tanks, the overflow running into ponds and reservoirs.

  The drouth after the Big Die-Up brought starvation to the settlers of Texas, their teams too weak to haul bones to market or even to carry them and their families back to the in-laws somewhere. The Quaker colony that had established Estacado the fall of 1879, the first settlement above the cap rock of the Staked Plains and with such high and noble hope, gave up and left. The Dallas News demanded relief for the suffering homesteaders and in a special session the Texas legislature appropriated $100,000 to rescue the drouth victims. To the cattlemen this was like throwing money to the infidels, giving tax money to keep the grangers alive. With beef prices gone to hell, the stock growers could do with a little saving themselves, but not on $100,000, not with the second summer of drouth driving even southern stock off the range. The XIT had profited from this buying but it took money, as the fences and the wells had taken money. At Austin the statehouse was still about two years and $2,000,000 short of completion. The Capitol Syndicate was that much short of the final deeds to the XIT.

  Several plans were considered to quiet the impatience Taylor found in England and to raise a little needed capital. Taylor suggested that Campbell drive 1,000 or 1,500 steers to Kansas and sell them at a good stiff price in time to appear on the year's balance sheets. He could have his cousin at Wichita take them and guarantee him against the loss. It was very desirable to fix a good price on the cattle this year, Taylor suggested, for their friends on the other side of the water.

  But Barbecue Campbell replied that an arranged sale at a fictitious price to make an impression could only be an act of desperation. Even so the stiff price would be against them next year if beef didn't come back up. Although he knew that Farwell was in a practically hopeless struggle to keep the company together, Campbell advised against it, and Farwell fought on somehow without the sale.

  The English, hearing many rumors from the neighboring ranchers and perhaps settlers and politicians, too, tried to keep their eyes on the XIT. They had sent a man out early to act as general manager while Campbell was off organizing the ranch. His name, Walter de S. Maud, was too much for some of the cowboys and their common contempt for foreign outfits. They called the new general manager Lady Maud. Not that he wasn't roostering it around the ranch with girls brought in by the wagonload and whisky by the keg. Much of the time he was off gambling at Tascosa, taking up this American game called crap shooting with the enthusiasm of a convert.

  On top of the appalling mismanagement of the new herds received the summer of 1887, evidence of other gross negligence and of graft was piling up. Apparently Campbell, in spite of his stern entry into the Panhandle, had no more control over his employees than over a shirttail full of lizards. The ranch had become a hangout for rustlers, outlaws, and plain Hard Cases.

  Suddenly John Farwell acted. He sent a trusted young man from the Chicago office ostensibly to look after the bookkeeping of the ranch but to lift an eye above the shimmering horizon now and then to see what was going on at the other ranch division headquarters. In addition Farwell hired Matlock, the former state senator, who had borrowed the money from Charles Farwell, and in return, it was said, helped get the Capitol contract for them. He and the bookkeeper were to investigate the general situation for Farwell and for Goodnight and the LS ranch, too, all anxious to get rid of the rustlers they claimed were dug in at the XIT and operating on the surrounding ranges from there. How much self-interest was in the protest of these neighbors one could guess and yet plainly something drew all those buzzards soaring.

  At Yellow Houses, Matlock reported, he found the range boss a man he saved from being hanged by a mob some years ago. The man had his brother-in-law there, too, a horse thief—a good example of much of Campbell's pay roll there. Farwell fired Barbecue Campbell, away from the ranch at the time—skipped out, some said, with XIT money. Actually he had gone to Chicago to sell his interests in the ranch, and then home to his family, still in Wichita.

  Farwell hired Matlock to run the ranch with Boyce to help. The new manager started clearing out at Yellow Houses, firing most of the cowboys and the foreman. He had no trouble replacing them with able men but there were loud and frequent threats against Matlock's life. The dismissed range boss and eight, ten of his gun packers returned to take over but the new manager faced them down and was still around the next day, the gunmen gone, later to appear in New Mexico. What Chicagoans and the British didn't understand was that western gunmen did not shoot important people, whose killing would bring certain action. Print Olive shot only small men, until a small man killed him. Hickok, the most publicized of gun fighters, would shoot a southerner, a Reb in northern territory in 1861 but never a man of any consequence. "Only halfwits and greenhorns pull down on a man of any substance," was the common contention of men like John Chisum, who never carried a gun, even with vast sums of money on him. There were others like him.

  But there was plenty of dirty work still going on around the XIT. Fences were cut between every post for miles along the New Mexican side of the Yellow Houses range, a mile of fence and a windmill went up in smoke, and half-a-dozen small prairie fires were set. Farwell suggested big rewards for conviction but spite work proved hard to nail down.

  Nor were things good at the other headquarters of the ranch, with gambling, thiev
ery, and harboring of outlaws very common, particularly at the Escarbaba, only a good jump from the New Mexican line. Some of the little outfits were building up their herds mighty fast—almost everybody working foreign-owned stock. Often a man too considerate to touch a grouse or wild turkey on another man's range went to great trouble to steal from a British-owned outfit, the bigger the better.

  Although the XIT herd was not much under 120,000 head with some fine big steers, nothing had been sold, no beef income had reached the books, and the British investors were very hard to hold together. Henry Seton-Karr, M. P., and a major shareholder in the ranch, was picked to go investigate. Taylor returned from London furious to find, as many in the Panhandle believed, that Campbell was apparently fired on "trumped-up charges," and an incompetent political friend of Charles Farwell put in. With the capitol building still unfinished and the deeds of the land incomplete, quarreling among the American shareholders would wreck the British company, as the Farwells knew. They agreed to the angry Taylor's insistence that he be appointed manager of the ranch with the power to prepare for Seton-Karr's coming. Nothing of the charges against Campbell must be mentioned, no hint of negligence or dishonesty. Taylor, with a fine nose, delicately flanged, and the appearance of a very learned man, and with a handsome statehouse going up under his hand, impressed the British visitor. By then the railroad, aimed at Tascosa, had reached the Canadian River. With a substantial right of way on their land, the XIT got the railroad to lay the track diagonally across their holdings to the northwest corner of Texas, giving the land value a fine jump, if only on paper.

  So far there had been only one attempt to get an XIT beef sale on the books. A thousand of the biggest and best steers had been rounded up and trailed the 120 miles to the Santa Fe railroad. But prices were so low then that the first loading didn't pay the freight, and the Chicago managers wired orders to trail the rest back to the water-short range. It was a sad and dusty job. For the Farwells, too. Once more John had to talk the British into standing by for another season.

  In 1888 the New Order, under Abner Taylor as nonresident manager, took entire charge, with A. G. Boyce managing the ranch. Boyce was a short, stout, chin-whiskered cowman with sun-narrowed brown eyes in a leathery and lined face. The general headquarters were moved from Buffalo Springs, at the very northern edge, to Alamocitas Creek, nearer the middle. With the move came a jolt like a man's cutting horse going down in a badger hole for the cowpunchers—250 copies of a little book of ranch rules, one for each employee, were handed out and 90 copies of the twenty-three new laws written by Taylor were to be posted at every camp. These rules and laws broke entirely with the range country customs and furnished many jokes and jibes. But Boyce had to tack them up. Not only did they regulate the relationship of ranch worker to employer but undertook to run what the West always had considered a man's own business—his private life. No employee was to carry a pistol, dirk, Bowie knife, knuckles, or slingshot "on or about his person." There was to be no gambling on the ranch, or even card playing, and no liquor was permitted any employees "during their time of service with the Company." No grub-line riders were to be fed, no hunters permitted anywhere.

  Unfortunately the weather was beyond even Taylor's twenty-three steel-jacketed rules. In January, 1888, Boyce and the Chicago bookkeeper stood at the ranch window and saw what had been summer temperature turn to a white and howling norther, shutting out everything before their eyes, the wind so powerful the city man was struck silent. Boyce was silent, too. He was making plans for the skinning crews. They stripped 3,500 carcasses bare and estimated that 1,000 more were never found. The loss in expensive bulls and heifers was appalling in number and in cost. The two-day storm that killed so many people farther up the Plains cost the XIT nearly $100,000 above the value of the hides.

  Now at last they were where the hair was short. Wages were cut, the great ranch divided into seven very distinct divisions, under separate foremen. Families were brought to the ranches, the first women permitted there, officially, and telephones, that new invention to the Panhandle, were installed, to tie the vast cow empire into a whole.

  The next few years the XIT went on its unwestern way. Trees and gardens were put in at each of the seven ranches, in a larger way a little like Faver's gardens and peach trees in the Big Bend country. Great reservoirs were dug, cemented, tarred, and still found to leak. Finally the bottoms were plowed and the rock-salt blocks put there for a while, the earth packed stone hard by the milling cattle. Big dams were thrown up, one 115 feet wide at the base, twenty-one feet high, holding twenty-five feet of water at the deepest and spreading to 300 yards in width, nearly a mile long. Double fireguards were plowed around the 3,000,000 acres, thirty-five feet apart, the grass between burned off—grass that alone would have made a good-sized ranch even in Texas.

  Although Charles Farwell seemed busy in the Senate now, his brother John was firm about lawlessness around the XIT. Foremen with reputations for short rope with rustlers were hired and Winchester-packing fence riders made it dangerous to be caught anywhere near ranch-owned wire and post. There was no hesitation about following rustlers or anyone suspected of tampering with stock, range, or fence anywhere, even across into New Mexico. Angrily this was called armed invasion but it had been going on from back in the early comanchero days and before.

  But all these things took years and cost money, as the cattle had cost money. No well-run ranch, understocked as the XIT was all this time, sold off more than the steers and the culls and dry cows. The investors, however, were tired of anteing up and wanted a smell of the kitty, the profits, that the prospectus had promised. The great profits. Now they would have them, or there would be hell in Texas.

  Yet there was still the combination of railroad and packer monopolies. Kit Carter, president of the Northwest Texas Association, said people told him that cowmen must be getting mighty rich at the prices they had to pay for beef. Yet his steers barely paid the shipping costs. It was the big packers and the railroads working in cahoots who were sitting in the easy chairs, reaping the cream of the cowman's saddle-pounding work. Under Governor Sul Ross, Carter's old Indian-fighting brother-in-law, Texas chalked up her first anti-trust law. C. C. Slaughter was appointed a delegate from the 1888 Association to the Farmers Alliance and Knights of Labor, organizations that were proposing a cooperative system of refrigeration and distribution of beef. The fight between St. Louis and Chicago as top cattle market was up again, with Senator Vest of Missouri getting a Select Committee appointed to ride herd on range problems. Vest was the chairman, Coke of Texas and Farwell of Illinois, and the XIT of Texas, on it.

  But Kit Carter died before anything was done, or times got better. A. P. Bush, new president of the Northwest Texas Association, appointed Goodnight, Cape Willingham, sheriff of Tascosa, A. G. Boyce of the XIT, and Murdo Mackenzie, who had made the Dundee-owned Matador a cattle empire, to hammer at the Select Senate Committee for results. Slaughter, a born Texan, in the cattle business almost since he could climb an old horse like a boar coon goes up a tree, blamed the beef trust for the poverty of the western ranges. Hard work and judgment weren't enough, and everybody knew that he had reason for his opinion. He had found that when he wouldn't sell his cattle at Kansas City for giveaway prices, Chicago could tell him exactly what he had been offered down there, and St. Louis the same.

  Beaty's little packing plant at El Paso managed to get the contracts to supply refrigerated beef to Los Angeles and San Diego, but soon the railroad refused the cars to haul the meat. "Along about the first of February Mr. Armour concluded that our business could not continue; that it was detrimental to his interests," Beaty said. "The moment Mr. Armour put his refrigerator beef into California the customers of Beaty had to ship their steers to Kansas City and sell at a loss."

  Senator Vest insisted that St. Louis should be in as advantageous a position as Chicago in purchasing and shipping cattle. Five firms in Chicago controlled the price of beef. Every butcher felt it and shipper
s had to accept what the packers would pay.

  The investigators blamed Armour for encouraging vast overproduction by financing the ranges for the slump. Philip Armour denied any attempt at price fixing or control of cattle or dressed-beef market and although the fight on the packers didn't get any results at the time, harder battles were planned for later. In the meantime attempts at packing on the range, such as the Marquis de Mores' up in Dakota, were squeezed out, as Beaty was at El Paso, by the railroads. To avoid any such nuisances in the future, the Big Five of the packers spread into the country, to Omaha, Fort Worth, and so on, underselling the little operators everywhere, until they were frozen out.

  In 1888 the magnificent capitol building of red Texas granite was finished and dedicated. Now the XIT owned all the 3,000,000 acres and because cattle from the northern ranges brought more than southern stock, they leased range from the VVV up near the Black Hills of Dakota. Boyce rounded up 15,000 steers and by the end of May had the last hoof set on the trail north, with men ready to see that the herd got through Colorado, where the quarantine had tightened up. In the fall he sent some XIT steers to market. They brought $13.40 each, at a $16 a head loss. Finally he sold 30,304 head for an average of $24.77 each, $750,000, but they had cost more than that to produce.

  Still deeper in the red, Farwell gave Boyce the job of general manager, now that Taylor was done at Austin anyway, and warned him that economy must be the watchword. Early in 1890 Boyce leased 2,000,000 acres between the Yellowstone and the Missouri rivers in Montana—bringing the XIT range to 5,000,000, the giant of them all. With such distinction and prestige from their American ranches, could the Britishers cry for profit, too?