by Mari Sandoz
BOOK IV
PRIVATE EMPIRE
CHAPTER I
THE THREAT
UP NORTH, particularly in Wyoming, the ranchers were in what they realized was a fight to the finish if they would preserve the free range as the private empire of their cows. True, they knew that the Cheyenne Club might never offer the extravagant glories of 1884 again, or even of that final autumn of 1886. Paulus Potter's huge painting of the bull of some effete and sheltered Dutch breed would not draw another angry and critical bullet of a beholder in the club. Nor would the cattlemen gather there with the old exuberance in their Herefords, as some called their white-fronted evening attire appropriate to those formal and elaborate days. But those occasions, with food and drink fitting the exalted and lovely guests, equal even to Harry Oelrich's friend, the Jersey Lily, were gone. Never again would such a display of wealthy young men turn up in the Territory of Wyoming from perhaps halfway around the world, to spread themselves around Cheyenne, to ride out like the lords that some of them were, observing their minions conduct the rituals and the dispensations of the roundup spread over the new spring grass.
The Wyoming Stock Growers Association looked back to those golden times much as a Longhorn steer would to a season in some settler's lush green stretch of corn. When the first little rise of beef prices had come, most of the new territory of Wyoming was without county organization or sheriff, and the Association had established itself as The Law. Since then any man who tried to run cattle without their full approval was automatically operating outside of that law—a rustler. It had been easy at first because Wyoming was so essentially cattle. Texas had the vast agricultural regions, with wide stretches of snowy cotton fields and other croppings, too. Kansas and Nebraska had their corn and wheat; the Dakotas, particularly the eastern and northern sections, their bonanza wheatlands. Colorado and Montana were mining camps before one Longhorn came stringing his hoof dust northward, and later South Dakota, too. Only Wyoming was cattle from the day the Indians were driven off the old buffalo plains, cattle and practically nothing else.
The first officials of the new territory of 1869 included men to go high in the ranching business, such men as Carey, appointed U. S. Attorney for Wyoming, from Philadelphia; Wolcott, Receiver of the Land Office, from Kentucky, later the manager of the Scottish Tolland Company's VR Ranch. Other officials to turn to stock growing included Surveyor General David, to become general manager of Carey's ranches, and Warren, the territorial treasurer.
From the first the territorial officials and the Stock Growers Association overlapped, but as much of the range law and enforcement as possible was kept in private hands, away from the meddling voters. As cattlemen they assessed themselves a cent a head on their herds and hired gun-armed stock detectives and inspectors to protect the interests of the Association members while a few of them ran the government and enjoyed their private preserve beyond anything they could have dreamed of a few years ago, even better than carpetbagging.
In 1883 there were only two ranch holdings not to be termed large between the upper North Platte River and the Missouri, deep in Montana. The stock growers, particularly the Wyoming men, planned to keep it that way. Of the more than 400 Association members in the Territory, all but eighty already owned over 1,000 head of cattle each. Then in 1884 they managed some pretense of legality for their practices through the Maverick Bill that made branding a maverick a felony, all mavericks to be sold to pay the Association inspectors. "All rustler brands and all stray brands for which there are no owners to be treated as maverick cattle."
"That means anybody they decide to call a rustler is out of the cattle business. I can't even brand me the mavericks that's hanging around my herd without going to the pen," a member of the Henry's Fork Stock Growers Association roared.
"No. Guess not. Them big outfits's got their start and now they're shutting the gate on the rest," another member agreed.
By the spring of 1885 the Henry's Fork group was rejecting the roundup foreman the state association sent out. They put in their own and branded their mavericks in the old, old way—for the man on whose range the unmarked critter was found.
This open defiance was only one instance of a growing rebellion against the big outfits, especially against the domination by the foreign money behind so many of them, including the financial interests of John Clay. Clay was the American representative of W. J. Menzies and his Scottish-American Investment Company and other Edinburgh capitalists. Although a newcomer, he agreed with many others of the Wyoming Association, particularly members from the Sweetwater and the Powder River that there should be swift and drastic punishment to stop the ranchers at Henry's Fork, crush this bunch-quitting before it spread. But down at Cheyenne those with their own money at stake were more concerned with the falling beef prices.
Not that the extra-legal hand of the Association was to be unfelt by the little fellows, as everybody realized when Frank Canton was put in as range inspector to take over the criminal work of the range and then was made sheriff for the newly created county of Johnson in the Powder River country. One of the stock detectives and roundup foremen up there turned out to be Phil DuFran, gone to Wyoming to tend a little bar soon after he had delivered the handcuffed Mitchell and Ketchum to the Man-Burner, Print Olive, down in Nebraska, and then turned state's evidence against him. Some thought Olive would not have had to buy himself out of the pen if it hadn't been for DuFran's testimony.
The Association found Canton and DuFran valuable for years. Canton, who had left his past and his name behind in Texas, as many others before him, was arrogant and ready for gun play or ambush, yet always agreeable to those who paid him. DuFran, the affable and Indian-nosed Frenchman, was liked by almost everybody, rancher and settler, although there were some on both sides who were easier in mind when he tended bar.
It was time to discourage all the newcomers settling over the open range, make a sort of example for them, hang out a dead owl to scare the others away. For this somebody selected the Young brothers over in the Sweetwater country where Clay's firm had bought the Quarter Circle 71, and a half-a-dozen others of British roots or money were running ranches. The three Youngs were building up their herds very fast. Next thing the settlers heard was that Porter Young had been arrested by a Pinkerton detective from Chicago with a sheriff's posse. Young was ironed, it seemed, and taken by train down as far as Omaha and around by Denver, Santa Fe, and south Texas. At every stop he was exhibited as an example of the way Wyoming managed cattle thieves. People came to look at the helpless man as they had stared at captured Indian chiefs a few years earlier. Nobody told them that Young was arrested for an alleged murder back East, and not for rustling or anything else done in Wyoming.
The bust in cattle prices and the Big Die-Ups had cleaned out some of the largest ranches of the West, with little outfits popping up like cottonwood seedlings the moment the wind brought down the great old tree that had shut out the sun. Often before the remaining ranchers could agree on a peaceful division of the vacated public domain, settlers and former cowboys swooped in and covered the waterways and hay flats with homesteads, those poor man's kingdoms, inviolable to all except death, even free from taxes for seven years. Some, as those who slid in around the lordly old Frewen holdings on the upper Powder River sensed this kingship particularly, and they would not be driven out even by that age-old threat—the dried ear stuck to the claim shack door with a nail or knife blade, or a rope knotted into a noose thrown at the step.
The antagonisms were perhaps stronger because many of the remaining ranchers got their start in earlier and less-regulated days, with cows that had twins, and older stock picked up in the night. That was before Sir Horace Plunkett, manager of the EK, got most of the cattlemen to boycott any cowboy who owned a place he used or even had a little bunch of cows.
"They claim they're afraid that a man with stock'll be sneaking some of theirs," one of the Swan cowboys complained. "Some of them ought to know—"
Besides, many ranchers used to hire cowboys for special expertness with the long rope and the running iron and paid them an extra $2.50 to $5.00 or even a competitive $7.50 a head for all the mavericks branded for the boss. Now, with the collapse of beef, many of those cowboys were out of jobs and might use the tricks they learned to build up herds for themselves. The Britisher, Fred Hesse, started as a cowboy. While foreman for Moreton Frewen, back in 1882, he started a herd and his 28 Ranch. When the gay and spendthrift Frewen saw the end of his British company after the bad winter, he sold the bulk of what remained of his herd, once estimated at 80,000, to Pierre Wibaux, Montana's French cowman. The remnants he gave to Hesse, as did several others of his countrymen. Hesse claimed 50,000 acres of the public domain up near Buffalo, with additional interest in range and cattle down in the Sweetwater country.
It was not surprising that to many Wyoming of the 1880's meant not merely cattle but British-financed cattle. The region was never directly on the trails from Texas to the larger Indian reservations nor did the Reconstruction-minded territorial government attract southerners. Further, most of Wyoming wasn't open to cattle until the early promise of bonanza profits had drawn the British, who turned there naturally, out of old attachments. Back in the days of the big-game hunting and the Noble Red Man, the region had drawn such sportsmen as the Irish Sir Gore and his forty servants. Even earlier the Scottish Sir William Drummond Stewart came to live among the Sioux for years, back when the only cow of Wyoming was the Indian's mother-creature, the brooding buffalo.
The decoy to toll the young Britishers was the Cheyenne Club, organized by a group of gay young blades from the East: the Daters; two of the Sturgis family; young Edgar Beecher Bronson, nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and of the Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Oelrichs, C. M. and Harry with his English Drag said to be worth $4,000, the only one west of the Mississippi, one of the few in the nation. Soon the club was swamped by the actual foreigners.
There seemed little thought about the power of the outsider and outside capital in Wyoming, perhaps because except for those like the breed family of Elias Whitcomb, almost everybody else was an outsider, and even Whitcomb owed John Clay money. There was a little uneasiness around the club, however, after the dinner the British members gave for the Americans back in August, 1883. It was elaborate, formal, and impressive, but in the midst of it some of the earlier ranchers noticed two old-timers were missing, and suddenly saw the Britishers as their permanent hosts, solidly in the saddle.
"They made us look like grub-line riders in our own Wyoming," Jack Hunton was reported to have said. But then he was a southerner, and a little thin-nosed anyway.
There was no denying that the British cattle interests and their employees were determined to have the Wyoming range regulated and orderly. Perhaps they looked upon the American public domain as something like their own early backlands, to be gifted by the king to his favorites or appropriated by any aggressive chieftain with the long bows to hold it. Anyone setting foot upon it thereafter was a trespasser or a poacher, not too different from the predatory animals with a bounty on their ears, or, taken connected, their scalps. The early British colonists had put a bounty on the scalps of the Indians, introducing the aborigine to the scalp knife. In the West the bounties were on predators of cattle—wolves, mainly, and Indians, occasionally comancheros. The settler or small rancher moving into the free-range country, whether rustler or not, was considered most predatory of all.
There was no legal way to get empires of grass from the public domain anywhere except in Texas, through the state lands, as Goodnight and the XIT did it. While the organizers of foreign-cattle companies often hid this from their investors, their American representatives and ranch managers tried to hold their government grass by armed men, by herds on grand and overawing scales, and often by great ranch houses with handsome imported furniture, chefs, valets, Irish hunters, and monkey saddles, while perhaps even the grand houses were on free land that any bona-fide homesteader could file on, improvements and all, for the $14 fee, if he liked hot lead. Gradually, however, many ranchers asked their guests, citizens or foreigners with their first papers, to file on the waterways and the bottomlands, making what the guest might never understand was a fraudulent entry by swearing he intended to live on the land, and later perjuring himself by his oath that he had lived there for the final proof. Many old ranchers as well as the foreign interests scorned this procedure, as many frowned on fencing the public lands. They had the free range, possessed it, and any such concessions as filings or fencings seemed to admit doubt of their eternal right to keep it.
Because the Maverick Law had not been enforced and produced too little money to pay the inspectors, the cattlemen pushed the legislature to set up a Board of Live Stock Commissioners to take over the detectives and inspectors, and to supervise the roundups and the sale of the mavericks. The Board was composed of the leaders of the Association, and only the source of the money was shifted, the range control given a little more legality.
Some of the big outfits still hired their own inspectors. Besides, with the Herd Law of Nebraska making the owner liable for damages by his loose stock, even for a homesteader's unfenced corn patch, eastern Wyoming ranchers had to set up a Line Riding Association to turn their cattle back at the Nebraska border. Mike Shonsey, stock inspector and long foreman for the Guthrie and Oskamp Cattle Company, was made foreman of the Line Riders.
The Wyoming Live Stock Commissioners gathered no more mavericks to be sold for the inspectors' salaries than the Association had, and the cattlemen, particularly the large absentee outfits, complained that no man's stock was safe from rustlers. To this many replied that the cry of "Rustlers, rustlers!" was raised to fool faraway shareholders, to cover losses from bad winters, mismanagement, and from substantial thievery by employees.
Still, no one could deny that the situation was serious. A Cheyenne paper not overly sympathetic to the large interests agreed that cattle stealing had become almost respectable. Men of good reputation frankly raided the stock on the open ranges and bragged about it. Sometimes overwhelming evidence against a cow thief stealing from the large companies, particularly foreign-owned, brought no indictment. Those caught in the middle feared for their stock and their lives from one side or the other, and so managed to see nothing done by the hired gunmen of the big outfits or by the actual rustlers.
To be sure the ranchers understood that the great loss was the land but the settler's filing was legal and so the only charge they could bring against him was that of stealing their stock. It wasn't working. Whole townships, whole counties were being cut out of the range country, chopped up into small holdings, with a few cows, a little breaking, a garden, perhaps only a dozen barefoot children, and a couple of milk cows. Buffalo, up in Johnson County, jumped to over 1,000 population and helped throw Frank Canton, the Stock Growers Association's range inspector, out of the sheriff's office. In spite of Canton's capture of Teton Jackson, a genuine horse thief, and Packer, the man eater, the voters put in the bristle-mustached, stubborn Scotsman, Angus, Sheriff Red Angus.
There were 5,000 brands of one kind or another in Wyoming and the overlapping ranches from outside the Territory and scarcely over forty Association members, all but eight of these from big companies, mostly foreign financed. But the president, John Clay, now of the Clay, Robinson commission house of Chicago, still had his hand on an empire of Scottish-financed ranches, including the old Swan spreads, taken over since Alex Swan went broke owing money to the John Nelson Trust of Edinburgh, through Clay. Under Clay's strong leadership the Association armed for one last mighty effort, "a sort of crusade," one man called it at Clay's induction into the presidency and laughed a little. But Clay did not laugh.
Now the inspectors at the markets and shipping points were ordered to enforce the Maverick Law to the letter, to attach every head of stock bearing a brand not approved by the Association. Any man who questioned this could face the Stock Com
missioners and try to prove to their satisfaction that the stock attached was rightfully his, had never been stolen, and that he was a man of good repute, not what they called a rustler.
During the first ten months, with limited staff, 16,306 head of stock bearing unacceptable brands were confiscated at various shipping points. Of these 5,238 were sold and the $13,949.83 held back by the Commission—money from stock not proved stolen, carrying the brands of men never convicted of rustling, most of them never accused of it.
At this news the corral-fence and brass-rail lawyers let out bellows like old herd bulls under the knife. Was this America, where the burden of proof was supposedly on the accuser, this stock confiscated without proof of a crime committed, of any such cattle stolen anywhere? These buckshot sca'tter-gun methods could only drive the settlers and small ranchers into the same corral, up the same box canyon, with the actual thieves. Towns like Douglas, Glenrock, and Casper as well as Buffalo, began siding with the little fellows. The press, really dependent on the advertisements of the large cattle companies and those who lived off them, dared join judges, juries, and the general public against the Stock Growers Association. The officials of the organization complained that they were making the members look like thieves. The editor of the Cheyenne Sun in what was still called "The Holy City of the Cow" was ordered "to appear before the executive committee at once" because the Association didn't like his editorial.