by Mari Sandoz
Yet when the dust of the big race settled it was clear that cattle prices had not halted their downward slide, the grass of the western ranges was still burning to brittleness and blowing away in the wind that tore at the bare snowless earth all the next winter, too. Soon there was very little laughter, not even around the Frenchmen of Dakota or towns like Chadron; scarcely anywhere from the Rio Grande to Calgary.
CHAPTER V
KINGS OF THE FENCED RANGE
THE prospect of eternal free grass had tolled investors as surely as the settler's corn patch drew the tamer range cattle, with less horn, and much less fear of a woman's high-pitched voice or her flapping skirts as she ran out to drive them off. Most of the larger ranch outfits of the north were very certain that they could keep homesteaders from their sacred domain, so certain that many never troubled to own an acre of their range, not even the ground on which their headquarters stood. Theodore Roosevelt, according to the assessment records at Medora, owned personal property there to the time of his Rough Riders, yet he never acquired title to the land under either the Maltese Cross or the Elk-horn's home buildings, bought in 1883-84.
In Texas the nesters, the grangers, had come early to all but the farthest, driest reaches, yet long before any cattle except work oxen on the trails stole one mouthful of grass from the buffalo herds, a few ranchers had seen wisdom in owning the grass for their cows. Not only Richard King, who began by buying up Spanish grants, and the XIT, but many others owned their range. True, this was easier in Texas, where the state-owned public domain was generally open to both lease and purchase in vast lots. Elsewhere government land was, in theory at least, intended for the homeless of the earth and parceled out to bona-fide settlers. But they came by the hundreds of thousands and cut so deep into the range that the cattlemen managed to obtain the Act of 1891 from what the settlers called a Robber Baron Washington, repealing the pre-emption and the timber-claim filing. By limiting them to the homestead, to 160 acres, it seemed certain that on the higher, drier reaches of the cow country the landseeker must certainly sing with Frank Baker of west Kansas:
There's nothing will make a man hard and profane Like starving to death on a government claim.
But many cattlemen soon regretted the Act of 1891, particularly with the collapse of the Johnson County Invasion that was to put the fear of God into settlers all over the Great Plains and restore the old open range. If the ranchers had to cover all their grass with filings, or even the land under their fence lines, it would have been much easier at 480 acres a throw than at 160.
Even in Texas, in the newer regions, there were often unsold school lands scattered through the private holdings, and these became a point of conflict when homeseekers began to settle on them, as in the Spur ranch, the British-financed Esquela Land and Cattle Company of around half a million acres. It wasn't as big as Rhode Island and only a shirttail patch compared to the XIT's 5,000,000 acres in Texas and Montana but it had been described as a "handy," a convenient size to the foreign investors. Well fenced and organized, the managers kept extensive records for their company, including a diary giving much of the daily occurrences, with such frank entries as, January 25, 1887: "Lomax and Davis went down to see about firing out the settlers on the Catfish." It was customary procedure. The LX had been a rustler hangout while the shoe men, Bates and Beals ran it, managed by Bill Moore, who stole from everybody, apparently chiefly from his employers. Then in the mid-eighties the LX was sold to the Scottish Arkansas Valley Land and Cattle Company, a freehold of 204,000 acres, and controlling 700,000 fenced acres, which took armed protection to hold. They hired it, as did the neighboring LS, which had the notorious Ed King on the pay roll.
By 1896 the drouth and the panic prices put the managers of many cattle companies into a hole with the investors, particularly if foreign. It was easier to blame at least part of the ranch losses to thieves and the manager of the Spun was reporting that cattle rustling was a constant worry. Six school sections within the ranch pasture had apparently been filed on by settlers who were "living the land out." Because they had a legal right there it made a good layout for thieves, right in the midst of the Spur range, if the settlers were inclined to shield them, or take part. That there might be honest settlers among these trying to make a living was not mentioned at all, perhaps because the Spur manager had them all watched by known gunmen. Along in August one of the suspected men left, uneasy perhaps, or, as was admitted, perhaps for personal reasons. The ranch spies never managed to find anything against him.
A couple of years later there was good news to send to the home office. A suspected cow thief on the Catfish had been killed in a gun fight. "His sudden taking off has, I think, rather disconcerted some of our neighbors," Horsbrugh, the manager, reported tersely. Next year he hired a detective to add to "the famous Standifer" he already had on the pay roll and who was lately acquitted in the case in which he killed the worst thief "we had down at Clairemont last year." Besides, Standifer drove out the man that the Spur had tried to send to the penitentiary. Apparently encouraged by this, Horsbrugh hired additional range-riding help and a detective and then wrote the home office:
I am operating in the books an account to be called "Protection A-c" to which we will put the expenses thus caused by the employment of these extra men. The detective will have to be treated differently. Nobody knows about him. Will pay him through his Denver firm.
His connections with the Spur unknown, the man was to work himself into the confidences of the thieves and settlers while the known protection men, Standifer and Tynam, caused uneasiness among them. The stealing declined, and by 1899 two families of "well known thieves" moved out and others were looking to go. The Denver detective was not rehired, but with more settlers pushing in on the strip of public domain down near the Catfish, the two protection men were kept on. Standifer, at least, also worked for the neighboring Matador, owned by a Scotch syndicate of which John Clay was a member, and working for them since the Swan Company fired him in 1896. These protection men did nothing but hide out at night, to watch, "and are prepared to act as occasion requires." Most of the settlers had dugouts in the scrub waste, the shinnery, and "can't make a living without stealing, so the moral effect of the two men known to be fearless and on the lookout is valuable."
But guarding against the rustlers and the equally unwelcome settlers became more difficult because the ranches couldn't depend on the ordinary cowhands for range protection any more. They were faithful, Horsbrugh said, but they wanted to keep on friendly terms with the settlers, and often rode far around to keep from seeing anything.
For all the alertness of the professionals, one man bedeviled the Spur from the early nineties until they finally bought his land in 1901. He had come in with thirty-five head of cattle and sold, the ranch management claimed, around 100 head a year. He must have cost the ranch $15,000, in addition to the time chargeable to the Protection A-c.
In 1903 Tynam quit, and the job went to Pinckney Higgins, one of the leaders of the Horrell-Higgins feud that scattered dead men all over the Lampasas region back in 1877. The Spur and the Matador hired the "two ostentatious gunmen to ride the range to strike terror into the hearts of the cow thieves." Pink Higgins soon proved that his reputation really shorted him. It seems he came upon a man who was preparing to skin one of the cows Pink was hired to protect. He shot the man, ripped the dead critter open from chin to tail and stuffed the man's body inside. Then he rode into town to tell the officers where they could find a real freak of nature—a cow giving birth to a man.
After that cattle thieving did seem to ease off a little on the Spur and the Matador range protected by Pink Higgins and the worn Winchester in his saddle boot. But this had been Standifer's stomping grounds for a long time, Standifer the boss, the top gun. Now this Pink came moving in on him with the old tricks of the days when the Olives and the Higginses were running things down around the Lampasas and San Gabriel rivers.
Eventually it came to a showdown
between Standifer and the new man, with Standifer dead in the dust. For this the Spur dropped Higgins and hired a range inspector from the Northwest Texas Stock Raisers Association instead. But they were glad to have Higgins stay around as deputy sheriff, operating and planning with the new inspector. Early one fall morning the two men and a Spur cowboy along as witness appeared at a nester's little weaning pasture. They found a couple span of calves necked together and some others wearing heavy weaning yokes to keep them from reaching a teat. The settler was away, probably hiding off in the brush, Higgins said afterward, but a woman came running out, wiping her arms on her apron. In spite of her angry protests, the men stripped off the weaners, turned the calves out and drove them to the Spur cows they had previously located. One of the calves sucked.
Still the settler's wife claimed they were all her husband's property and that they must not drive off his stock. "At least wait till he's home," she insisted. Horsbrugh wrote about this case to the owners. The woman protested that she had been mistreated, but such people often make this charge. There was trouble getting convictions for a foreign company in the local courts here.
Some of the other settlers raised their voices against Pink Higgins, too. They claimed he was an old hand at planting sucking calves in a man's corral at night and then finding them, particularly when the settler's wife and family were alone. He was also good at sticking a settler's brand on a calf and then turning it up beside the Spur mother, either with witnesses around, or while ready for a fast draw, whichever came handiest if the outfit paying him for protection wasn't particular.
Anyway, Standifer was dead, and only a few recalled that the Nate Champion killed up in Wyoming by hired gunmen was a Standifer of Williamson County, too, on his mother's side.
As the range grew scarcer people outside of Wyoming began to stretch their necks like hungry cows looking toward the vast empires of grass owned or claimed by the foreign, the outside, companies—perhaps eastern but very many actually foreign, with the evils of absentee control.
"Where you gonna get at the man what's behind the one who pulls the trigger?" a settler asked bitterly after his neighbor down on the Catfish was killed.
It was the question asked a thousand times, particularly during the hanging of Averill and the Johnson County troubles. Was it the Cantons, the Hendersons, and Elliotts and the rising killer Tom Horn who were guilty, and the Britishers like Hesse, grown large as foremen for the strutting Frewens or similar outfits? Or was it the Scottish John Clay, American representative of a great Edinburgh financial group besides Wyoming rancher, Chicago commission man and president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and who had so many of his connections in the Johnson County invasion while he was safely and pleasantly touring Europe? Or were the Scottish owners behind him the guilty ones, the Lord of This and the Earl of That, with their great ancestral seats and the tradition and the actuality of defending them against the landless and the hungry for 1,000 years, holding them off with the justification of divine right.
Many asked such questions although very few in Texas knew of Clay's connections with the Matador, and most of those would not have believed that he could be aware of the professional killers on the pay roll. Clay was an honorable man, but so were all of them—those he represented, too—honorable and upright men who had learned long ago how to deal with the poachers upon their lands and their shooting. Men like the Farwells of the XIT had trouble understanding such attitudes and had stopped the hiring of two blatant range killers, even after the disastrous man-set fires a few years back. But the Farwells were from Chicago, and had power enough in their English company to have influence, too, with no nonsense about the divine right of anyone, man or beast.
"Time them goddamn foreign outfits quit shootin' down Americans," was heard in one wording or another around the bars and over sweaty plow handles and where roving range cattle were driven from a settler's corn by shouts and clods and perhaps cracked rock salt in a shotgun shell, later or by the more impatient buckshot.
"That's dangerous, shooting stock. The ranchers got a good excuse to come shooting back, even if it is your own land. You liefer kill a man's kids than his cows in this here country."
"They come shooting even faster if you take up a foot of their free range. What's a few cows compared to a quarter section of land?"
But that was still the cows, wasn't it?
It was also the range manager's business to make a good showing on his reports to investors sitting around their clubs in London, Edinburgh, or Dundee, men unable to grasp much of the principle behind the public domain and quicker to understand losses charged to rustlers than to hard times, drouth, or the cold and drifting of winter blizzards or the seldom-mentioned rank mismanagement.
"Yes, they couldn't know about the drifting off onto other ranges, and to other brands, maybe," settlers along the Catfish told each other. "You notice how many of the ranch managers turns up with good herds soon's they're shut of their jobs. Sometimes looks like the nesters and the rustlers're getting to be like the devil in the old hell-fire religions—mighty handy to lay the blame on."
Not that there weren't American ranchers who kept their own versions of the Protection Account, at least in their heads. Usually they did it less openly, their gunmen less conspicuous, often selected to shade off into the regular ranch hands. General John A. Logan, who had made such a remarkable career for himself with very little schooling or opportunity, had a valuable ranch in the American Valley of New Mexico. But by the early eighties the range was filling up with settlers that Logan claimed were depredating his stock, but really mainly his grass, taking it up right under the noses of his cows. Logan was a U. S. senator with higher ambitions, including the nomination for president, but he had to accept second place to Blaine. Even so he found time to move against the settlers and hired a long-hair named Courtright who had soldiered under him, served as police chief at Fort Worth, and then as marshal in the mining regions of New Mexico. Logan put him on as foreman but actually he was to rid the range of settlers. Although the law was on their side, Courtright sent word around, ordering them to get out. Two Frenchmen on a nice piece of watered bottoms seemed a little slow in moving and so Courtright and another gunman rode down that way. The Frenchies refused to leave their land and they stayed, two bullet-torn bodies on the ground.
The shooting stirred up an unreasonable amount of anger and noise, considering that the settlers were a couple of foreigners and the rancher a U. S. senator, more, a general very popular with the most powerful voting block—the G.A.R. But warrants were sworn out and talk passed around for the quicker rope, thrown over a tree someplace, the end fast to the horn, a spur set to the horse.
"Ain't no occasion to bother with a tree," a wind-burnt settler said loudly. "There's that good old Mexican drag I seen a time or two when I was punching cows down along the Brava—"
The killers quit the country, one heading straight for South America, Courtright following later. But he came back and ended up stopping a bullet when he tried the border shift.
One of the last regions tapped by the range-hungry cattlemen was one of the best—the sandhills of Nebraska, a great egg-shaped region blown in on an old lake bed. The sandhills were almost 250 miles long and from thirty to 100 miles across, with barely a rock and scarcely a tree—a fine, unbroken, long-grass country. Except for the narrow border of low chophills all around, the region was a series of high, generally grassed parallel ridges running southeastward, the tops of the highest wind-torn, sand flying from an occasional blowout, altogether like a great sea running, with here and there a crest to break. Many slopes were dotted with soap-weeds, yuccas, and rippled in orange-tinged grasses to the protected valleys often hard land or down to the black dirt of the old lake bottom in broad hay flats, with around 1,000 lakes, all but the most westerly sweet water. These drew great clouds of ducks and geese, and the thin, twisting lines of migrating sand-hill cranes, and flocks of swan, snow-white on the dark blue water.
Altogether the sandhills were one great sponge. With no runoff water, every drop of moisture soaked in, to follow the shallow water table that formed the lakes, and, as the land fell away, seeped out in little veinings of clear, steady streams that grew and headed southeastward for the Platte. Ranches had crept up the lower reaches of these streams even before the moccasin of the Indian was gone, followed by the Olives, determined to drive out the settlers already there, the Brighton Ranch, listed in 1885 as having 125,000 acres of government land fenced illegally, and a dozen others, crowded hard by the settlers.
Around the north of the sandhills, like a gently curving arm, lay the deep canyon of the Running Water, the Niobrara, swift, cutting its way along the hardland table across north Nebraska. Back in 1878 the protected river canyon drew two Texas outfits, the Newman Ranch, where Dahlman worked when he first came up from Texas, and Hunter and Evans, who had bought up Chisum's New Mexican herd and took on the trail hands who brought the cattle up, some of the men from the Lincoln County war, tough cowboys, tough in the saddle and with the rope and gun.
Everybody knew about the fine grass of the hills, belly deep and more, full of deer and antelope and drawing the regular fall migration of thousands of elk, but with the ridges and chophills so broken, it was difficult roundup country. Both Newman and Hunter put in line riders to turn stock back, but some always slipped past; some winter drifters never returned. Finally a cowboy, hunting strayed horses, returned with loud praise for the fine, fat mavericks he saw around some of the lakes. A wagon was sent out and several thousand head of stock rounded up, some branded, many of them slick, a few of the moss-horns with far Texas burnings, perhaps lost five, six years ago from some herds trailed through the hills to fill beef contracts at the Rosebud Indian Reservation. When the stock was brought up to the river, there was astonishment at the size and sleekness of the cattle. A few choice cars were made up and topped the Chicago market.