by Mari Sandoz
"Looks like that bastard DuFran's around every time there's trouble," a cowpuncher from down at Plum Creek complained. "He'd turn state's evidence again if there was any state action."
Slowly the dust of the great crusade of 1892 settled. John Clay was back, working hard with former Governor Baxter and others to get the Invaders released. Clay seemed anxious, with so many of his connections hogtied—respected men like Campbell of the commission house and Irvine and the others from the ranches—men who could make the country mighty hot for him. Wolcott, too, should be out and working, with beef prices falling like stones. The Swan company had been reorganized when Clay was in Scotland in March. Over 280,000 acres of their railroad lands not paid for had been sold. This wasn't culling, but selling down.
Besides, Johnson County was bankrupt and unwilling to pay for the lengthy keep of the Invaders down at Fort D. A. Russell at around $100 a day for the nearly fifty men, although everybody knew they were loose and scattered all over Cheyenne, free as the high country winds blowing along the dusty streets. What Johnson County wanted was to get the Invaders tried up at Buffalo, but obviously that would never happen. There was a pretense of a trial at Cheyenne, with around 1,000 men drawn, it was said, to get a jury before the judge accepted a motion for dismissal. The story sounded fishy as a dead bullhead in the sun, but Johnson County was helpless.
So the Invaders were free to scatter. The delicately nurtured DeBillier had a breakdown, "snapped over," as the cowboys called it. He thought the Texas gunmen, rowdy, impatient, and very surly, were out to get him. Anxious to escape, he and Teschemacher had turned their ranch over to their cowboys and jumped bail, DeBillier to the doctors, Teschie to Europe where his brother had killed himself over a Russian princess, some said. Others suggested the worldwide notoriety of the "most ill-advised Invasion," and a dozen other causes, but some recalled that Teschie's mother had written to several matrons in Wyoming when he first came out: "Please look after my dear, dear boy," and knew something of the lifelong favoritism shown this elder son, the Wyoming rancher.
For a while after the release at Cheyenne men stalked each other in the Powder River country like hungry mountain lions come down from the hills. Young Dudley Champion was shot by Mike Shonsey. Some claimed Dud got loudmouth, threatening to avenge his brother Nate by a little killing, preferably that scoundrel Shonsey, who had used the hospitality of the men at the KC to destroy them. Others said Shonsey killed young Dud out of bad conscience; dry gulched him in the best cattleman fashion, then claimed that this Champion was pretty slow on the draw. But soon Shonsey and Baxter were both gone. Seemed they were caught doctoring the books of the Western Union Beef Company to get 2,000 cattle for their own brands by blaming the loss on the rustlers of Johnson County.
Many others from the Powder ranches found the climate healthier outside of the region, even outside the state. Hesse went to North Platte, Nebraska, down around his wife's folks, some said, and worked for the Bay State Beef outfit. He wrote I jams and Clay and others repeatedly, complaining about his cattle losses up in Johnson County and built plans to market what remained without there being a "kick" about it from Buffalo. He admitted that the situation had changed considerably the last year.
Billy Irvine kept his professional bodyguard with him at all times, and Allen of the Western Union Beef and the English-owned Standard Cattle Company went to the 101 in the sandhills of Nebraska with two bodyguards along, a couple of Hard Cases that even the half-a-dozen others who fled there, too, found unacceptable. Wolcott also was in trouble, apparently caught running his iron on a calf whose mother carried a neighbor's brand.
"Seems to be catching, this rustling business," Johnson Countyites told each other with tight faces.
Some of the Texans came to sudden ends. Tom Smith, the Association inspector who had rounded up the gunmen, was shot on a train down around the Red River. The Texas Kid, who put a bullet into Nick Ray, was getting himself hanged for killing his girl. He blamed it all on the Wyoming Stock Growers Association for enticing him into his first murder.
On the Johnson County side, Flagg started The Voice at Buffalo after the independent roundup was done. Several of the less-rooted men on the Dead List ended violently up in Montana. An obscure one was killed robbing a drugstore up there. Allison Tisdale, brother of Johnny ambushed the fall of 1891, was reported shot in a gun fight up there, too, and Ed Starr, supposed to have killed Wellman, also ended in Montana. To please his wife he had quit carrying a gun and when he was cornered into a fight and had to go dig it out, the cartridges in it had been changed for blanks. Many were certain that Arapaho Brown wouldn't be allowed to live very long—not the big, fearless man who had thought up the go-devil at the TA, a man with a library, a reader, a talker. There were stories that he had done a little killing himself. Anyway, he was attacked, apparently by Canton and the Bill McCann who helped kidnap Jones and Walker. They shot Brown on his homestead sitting at his supper, threw him on the woodpile, and burned him.
"Is there to be no end to these burnt offerings on the altar of the cow?" Reverend Rader demanded from the pulpit the next Sunday.
If Frank Canton was guilty, he escaped paying for this murder and this burning, too, and lived into old age. But he had to leave Wyoming again, first for Nebraska, where J. Sterling Morton and Weare, rancher of Wyoming and Chicago, hired him as superintendent of the Nebraska City Packing Company. But Frank found the Missouri River town pretty tame, with little gun play, and so he turned to chasing outlaws as far as Alaska and later was appointed adjutant general of Oklahoma, where he had important relatives. But he never went back to the name he jumped when he left Texas so long ago.
E. W. Whitcomb was killed, too, apparently by lightning on the Belle Fourche. In some ways old Pap was the saddest of the Invaders. After thirty years of sturdy life on the wild upper Platte and a record in such civic interests as relief for the blind and the dumb, he was sucked into the unhappy venture by his obligations to an outsider like John Clay. A foreign money slicker, Mrs. Whitcomb's Indian relatives called the outsider thirty years later.
Not that names broke any bones for John Clay. He had been called murderer by Mercer in the Stock Growers Journal—the murderer of Ray and Champion and, by inference, of all the others killed by men connected with Clay through employment and obligation. Mercer had included C. A. Campbell of Clay-Robinson in the Invasion as Clay's hired hand in the murders. Up in Buffalo they heard that as soon as Campbell got released he went after editor Mercer with his fists. Perhaps the rumor that the newspaperman had gathered up a book about the Invasion sharpened the Scotch-Canadian's need to defend his boys and his Scottish backers.
Campbell's death in 1896 was hastened, Clay believed. by the rigors of the Invasion and the humiliation. By that time Clay had been fired from the management of the vast Swan holdings and his range boss, the William Booker of the Invasion, with him. There were rumors that this grew out of the deep involvement of his Scottish backers in the Johnson County War, which was denounced so energetically in much of the British press. Or perhaps it was because the venture failed.
Not that Clay left the ranch country. He had a genius for organization and management and even without the Swan Company there were the commission-house interests and other Scottish companies happy to keep him in the cattle business. Many years later, in his My Life on the Range, he spoke of the good he believed came out of the Invasion:
Great reforms are brought about by revolutionary methods. The Boston Tea parties, the victories of Washington, were protests flung world-wide against a Teutonic dictator.
Even some of the Invaders still alive thought this a curious statement from one of his origins and his backing.
That other Scotsman, Red Angus, lived out a long and reasonably quiet life up in Buffalo, Johnson County, a town and county official almost all those years. Later the place of sheriff went to the son of Johnny Tisdale, only four years old when his father was shot in a gulch by the Canton who had said he wo
uld "take care of Tisdale."
But the hard times of 1893 brought even more settlers—
CHAPTER IV
COW HORSE AND
BETTING BLOOD
THE darkness upon Wyoming and the shadowing over the entire range country the last few years had shut out almost all fun, all sport, all gaiety. Yet there would be natural gaiety in a region that grew such long bones in its animals as Wyoming did and brought such exuberance to the Sioux, the mountain men, and the early traders and settlers along the trails. Back eight, ten years ago there had been a kind of transplanted foreign high spirits at the Cheyenne Club and the larger of the British outfits like Frewens. The smaller ranchers and the settlers had their native doings and dances even with very few women in the country. The last five years there were more girls, particularly the sisters and daughters of the homesteaders, welcomed by the cowboys if not by their employers. Yet the sound of laughter and the fiddle had been mighty scarce, so scarce that the spies of the Invaders around the KC spoke long of the fiddle they heard until almost morning the day the shooting started—the fiddle that was burned, too, before the day was gone.
All these years there had been more gaity over eastward, particularly in the Dakotas, with the Frenchies and the breeds, and then all the Texans who came to the region that lay like a curved hand from northwest Nebraska around east of the Black Hills, with its roistering Deadwood, and up to the Little Missouri and the edge of Montana.
Most of the gatherings for fun were centered on the fiddle or the horse. Between roundups, fencing, and hay time there was an occasional Sunday off at one ranch or another, with perhaps a little get-together for some calf roping and bronc-riding—particularly outlaws and wild stuff that had never felt the rope and spur. Even at first there was usually a girl or two, maybe the foreman's daughter or perhaps outside friends come to sit on the pole corral watching the fight to the finish between man and a wild and infuriated horse.
"There ain't no horse what can't be rode; there ain't no man what can't be throwed," somebody would tell them, perhaps trying to hide the mouthful of ambeer, the girls perhaps exchanging looks, laughing a little, not understanding.
The Arbuckle Brothers, who later supplied the cow country with its coffee, had a private railroad car to haul out guests for their ranch down on Pole Creek, Wyoming. One summer the sister of William Force, the foreman, brought out a New York friend, who fell in love with the bronc riding of William and married him. Their daughter Madeleine became Mrs. John Jacob Astor, saved in the Titanic disaster in which her husband was lost.
Occasionally a man was crippled by a bronc, even killed, for with the rare opportunity to show off a little, chances were taken, the younger riders trying to outshine each other, perhaps climbing aboard an outlaw with only a hackamore, nothing to keep the horse from bogging his head between his knees and bucking until the tough mustang blood in him was done, nothing to hold him from crashing through the little pole corral and taking out across the prairie, perhaps over some cut bank or into a badland canyon. Maybe the bronc was ridden slick-headed or without saddle, too, only a rope tied around the middle, bucking and squealing to rid himself of this flapping, spur-heeled creature clinging like a cougar to his back.
Sometimes these ridings were made a part of the Fourth-of-July celebration, a soldiers' reunion, or the wedding of some French or breed rancher, which usually turned into a prolonged blowout for all the region. Back in 1887 Fred Dupree put on a real shindig for his daughter Marcella when she married D. F. Carlin. Fred was a French-Canadian trapper into the Dakota region in 1838. By 1887 he had an Indian wife and ten grown children and was running his Circle D with something like forty relatives living around him, Fred the only one who spoke understandable English, of a kind. For the ten days of the wedding he brought in four freight wagons of outside food—grub—two ten-gallon kegs of whisky, a cask of imported wine for the women, particularly the more delicate city guests, in addition to the barrels of wild-grape wine Fred made and liked. He had thirty fat beeves ready in the butchering lot and four young buffaloes out of the herd he raised from calves caught in the last great buffalo hunt on the Grand River. The barbecue pits were readied for the match, washboilers and tubs polished up for the coffee, stacks of roundup tin plates brought out, the tin cups hanging in rings strung on twine. Everybody within prairie notice—news on the wind—was welcome.
Fred's son Pete played the fiddle and Xavier the bull fiddle. They were spelled by relatives and friends and by other instruments, perhaps a cowboy's guitar, the sky pilot's folding organ, and a hammer harp from one of the Tennessee families over along the river. A couple of enthusiastic cowboys "borrowed" a piano to be hauled over in a hayrack before they were told how well provided with musical instruments the Dupree household was.
There was dancing every night and some afternoons, perhaps an old French dance or two by the visitors from St. Louis, somebody's aunt playing sad and stately little melodies on the mandolin. There were a few reels and a polka and so on, but mostly they danced square dances. The girls, particularly the breed and Indians, laughed and flirted, their feet flying. Many were very well dressed, willowy, svelte waisted and pretty, the cowboys stomping their boot heels as they swung the girls and set their skirts to whirling. Over 100 whites and 500 Indians came to eat, dance, play poker, and race their horses for the ten days, while Fred, with other ranchers, looked on and made cattle plans and deals over their quiet pipes and cigars, their hands leisurely on the whiskies. Yes, Doug Carlin would make a man a fine son-in-law.
As the settlers pushed their farming westward they brought the trotting circuits, but in the cow country it was still the running race as it had been with the Indians ever since they got their hands on this great creature of the white man's. They were very partial to the hot race, the short run, whipping their fastest animals into a second wind before the start as they did for the war charge. When the army officers came to the frontier posts they brought the larger horse, often the thoroughbred, for the longer stretch.
To the cowboy his horse was the most important piece of his outfit. The lariat man needed a good roping horse, one fast enough to carry him up on a critter, strong enough to set against perhaps a four-year-old steer, a fat eight-year-old cow, or sometimes a grown horse, and bust any of them end over end as they went against the rope. He had to have a horse that held while he went down the manilla, one that kept facing the critter, taking up the slack, holding it while the man worked, steady, alert. Then at the slightest jerk of the hand on the rope the horse gave slack to release the noose. And finally the good roping horse stood for the man, even with an enraged Longhorn cow charging, to pick up the rider and carry him away.
Then there was the most valuable range animal, the cutting horse, short-coupled, fast, able to turn on a dime and give two bits' change. Such a horse, once shown a critter among a hundred or ten thousand, pursued him through all the herd if necessary, turning, cutting in here, heading off there, dashing, dodging, always on the tail of the animal, so swift in the changes of direction that he came out on the other side with the right critter, whether the rider was still with him or not.
Then, for roping or cutting, and no matter how full of buck on a frosty morning, the horse the cowboy had to have was one that never left him in a piece of bad luck on the range alone, when perhaps thrown by a running foot into a prairie-dog hole in a night stampede, or a bullet from ambush, or even when thrown during a surprise fright and bucking. The good horse stayed close by, came to the whistle, let the man pull himself up the stirrup even with a broken leg or stood over him as a signal for searchers if he was gut shot or broken clear to pieces.
The memory of such a horse has brought the swift stab of homesickness to many a wanderer half a world from the range country, perhaps brought even a little mistiness to time-hardened eyes.
But there was another horse deep in the affection of the cowboys, of the whole cattle region—the runner, the race horse. There were little race tracks scatt
ered all over the cow country, to be stirred to dust by fast hoofs when the spring roundup was done. In the Dakota country this came when the sweetness of the sand lilies and the golden banner along the slopes had blown away, the swarms of white butterflies and the statelier orange and black ones, drawn by the metallic fragrance of the wild plum thickets, were gone. By then the spring calves, their brands peeling, romped on the hillsides, and the Shorthorn bulls and clean-faced Herefords walked ponderously among their cows or fought in the flats, their bellowing a fury in the air where so recently the buffaloes clashed with ground-shaking impact, and, farther south the great battles of the wild Longhorns sometimes ended in death. Now was the time, if ever, to bring on the fast horses.
One of the real gamblers in this competition of the horses was Jim Dahlman, who had traveled with some speed out of Texas under the name of Jim Murray, much as his father had left Germany back in the 1840's, except that Jim went North because he shot a man. His father, like the grandfather of Bob Kleberg who married Alice King of King's Kingdom, had left Germany for his liberal political views.
Although Dahlman worked as inspector and detective for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in the Nebraska-South Dakota border region, he had a much greater fondness for a fast horse and a heavy bet than for running down rustlers of either cattle or land, or for pulling a gun on anybody.