by Mari Sandoz
"That's cattle country, by God," Newman said, showing the returns of the shipment all around.
But with the railroad creeping up the survey not much farther from the Niobrara ranches than a good man could spit his ambeer into the wind, things looked bad for the future ranching here. The country would be crawling with grangers come spring. Then a great prairie fire driven by a powerful wind swept over most of Newman's range, leaving it blackened and smoldering a long time in the cow chips of the bedding grounds. The grass would come back next spring, yes, and in a few years even cover the knolls laid bare to the winds of winter, but the N— cows had to have range tomorrow, today. Newman threw the whole outfit on the trail and hit for his territory up in Montana.
Bartlett Richards was a dedicated man of this later period as surely as any of those who first felt the pull of the great herds of Longhorns running wild and free in the bottoms and breaks of Texas—men varying from Richard King to Print Olive, from Kit Carter to Chisum and Goodnight. Bartlett Richards of an old New England family came West as a youth of eighteen to the Wyoming of 1877, with the boom of gold in the nearby Black Hills and the final defeat of Crazy Horse and his Powder River Sioux. Within six years young Richards managed and controlled a dozen brands of various ownerships and financings, and over a range from the headwaters of the Little Powder, Donkey Creek, the Belle Fourche, to the upper reaches of the Niobrara and White rivers. The next year as president, with an older brother, DeForest, as vice-president, Bartlett Richards started a bank at Chadron, up in northwest Nebraska. He was apparently little disturbed that he was ordered to take down his illegal fences around almost 61,000 acres of government land within the Lakota Cattle Company holdings at the edge of Wyoming.
Two years later DeForest Richards, with carpetbag political experience in Alabama, was appointed treasurer of the new county at Chadron, and Jim Dahlman, of the race horses, the sheriff. By then Bartlett had ridden his range and looked down upon the piled carcasses of his cattle caught in the Big Die-Up. While many of his eastern and British friends and ranch financiers, many members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and the Cheyenne Club, were leaving the country for good, Bartlett Richards decided he would stick, but not without winter feed—hay. Unfortunately there was no hay worth a real crew on all his holdings, not even in wet years, and the few ranchers around him with meadowland on their government range were prepared to protect it against even Bartlett Richards with guns and all the remaining power of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, against all such expansion.
He noticed another thing along the fringes of his Three Crow range, cattle dead all along, but some not from the storm—from bullets, rifle and pistol, one place thirty within a mile-and-a-half stretch. It was true that the ranch herds drifted down upon the settlers, eating up a man's winter range saved for his own stock, even the ricks of hay put up for the milk cow. They crowded into his little stable, rubbed down his soddy, or fell into the dugout and endangered his family. Yet Bartlett Richards was particularly furious about this killing of his cattle because he had tried to help some of these poorer families, even loaned them harness and horses for a bit of breaking to grow a little crop, maybe beans, potatoes, or turnips for the children, in patches of sod corn.
"Planning to get your place, by getting you in debt to him," an earlier homesteader told a neighbor who was working with a Richards team. But there was little way of collecting from a poor man if the borrower decided not to pay up. The homestead couldn't be mortgaged until proved up, patented, and that took five years and could be put off to seven.
Now, after the Die-Up, Bartlett Richards knew he must have two things: range with hay flats, and freedom from settlers. He went down to the Niobrara to look at the region Newman left after the great fire, but there were settler soddies all over the hard-land table that was cut by the black track of the railroad across the prairie. North was the Pine Ridge Reservation where Richards hoped to contract cattle, and Rosebud, too, over east. South, beyond the river, a scalloped gray-blue wall stood low against the sky. There he found long, empty stretches of rolling hills and beyond was the wet-valley region, with the hayflats he sought, lying between the parallel sandhills, valleys half to a mile wide, stretching no telling now how far eastward in the curious blue haze always over the sandhills. There was a scattering of cattle, some wild as the old brush poppers of the Trinity country, with several brands, but nothing that looked like fixed holdings of any size, and such as there were Richards felt could be taken over. With Cairnes, his young Irish partner, he started the Spade Ranch, the brand the ace of spades, hard to burn into anything else. If he thought of the superstition surrounding this card, the death card, he dismissed it. He looked over the fine sweep of grass, growing on thick mattings of old stuff, most of the range barely touched except by strips of prairie fire since the buffaloes vanished. Here he would restore his finances and those of his associates, British and American. For himself—well, a man could become a king here, the most powerful cattle king of all.
Bartlett Richards was the man for such a dream, with his smooth, womanish, even cherubic curve of cheek and the Mephistophelean turn of eye. In addition to his softheartedness for an individual in distress there was an arrogance and ruthlessness toward anyone in his way, whether a slow-footed cripple before his fiery driving team, settlers in number, or outside pressure from gossips of Cheyenne or Chadron, or governmental edicts.
"Highhanded as his foreign backers any day," a newspaperman from Chadron said. But he said it to his wife. No telling when he might need a loan at the Richards bank, and certain he would get it if he did.
With not enough timber in the sandhills for a fair-sized cookhouse, Bartlett Richards moved some of the old Newman buildings from the river and sentimentally hauled a small log shack down from one of his western ranches pole by pole. His trading station was up the old trail, at Gordon, toward the Sioux reservations, but soon the Burlington cut through the south hills and he built a store, a hotel, and shipping pens at Ellsworth—the entire little cow town, except the depot and the water tower, the property of Richards and Cairnes. By then he had taken over several smaller ranches, just bought up their few shacky buildings and the cows running loose—no land. Even the Spade home ranch was on government land. He shipped in great herds of southern cattle to stock his spreading range and to fill his Indian beef contracts, with permission to hold up to 10,000 head on the reservation pastures until issued. By then the Spade, with several other brands, reached over and around the few holdings and settlers in the region from the Burlington railroad to the Niobrara and the White River, with very fluid herds, perhaps around 40,000 head or even toward 50,000. He had a big fencing crew, a hay foreman, a cow boss, and a stout bull pasture to hold his fine Hereford sires. His brother Jarvis, named for the distinguished family of their mother, was general manager, purchasing agent, and all-around utility man in charge of everything from windmills and mowers to hiring wolfers to clear out the gray wolves that pulled down yearling heifers in winter snow.
Bartlett Richards organized the ranch so he could spend much of his time at Chadron and around Cheyenne, to look after his other interests, including many sheep. Then suddenly, it seems, he did something that didn't surprise his neighbors at Chadron or up in Wyoming—he decided to marry his niece, the pretty and dashing daughter of his banker partner and brother, DeForest Richards. He left the quiet, religious Jarvis to run the sandhill holdings and went to Germany where they could marry. It heightened the gossip such romantic figures as Bartlett Richards always carry with them as a bright winter sun carries his sundogs. The Texans had hated DeForest as a carpetbagger and looked with scorn on the equality given the handsome young mulatto servant girl the Richards brought up from Alabama. "Damn Yankee Nigger lovers," they complained of the DeForest Richardses. Now the daughter was marrying her uncle Bartlett.
"Well, if they are planning to set up a cattle dynasty, Bartlett Richards's the man. He came here with down on those pink cheeks twel
ve, fifteen years ago and now he's running a good piece of Wyoming and Nebraska, probably three times as big as his entire home state of New Hampshire —banks and all—" the Chadron newspaperman said. "The Ptolemies married their sisters, you know, and kept the power in the family."
When Bartlett Richards returned from Europe, he discovered that a lot of stock had vanished under Jarvis' easygoing management. He flew into a cowman's fury and started some real investigation, but when the trail got too close to the Spade hired help, they pushed the blame off on some likely settlers. With the county officials tools of the ranchers, prosecution would be easy.
But kings, even cattle kings, are impatient with courts, and with the laws of others. Bartlett Richards knew of the procedures worked out down at the Spur and the Matador and elsewhere, all individual action, with no unfortunate public noise, nothing disturbing like the noxious hangings and burnings. Perhaps it was a choice encouraged, too, by the fact that, as Richards put it, Cleveland's gang was back in Washington and that father of a bastard would surely be calling the army out against the cattlemen if J. P. Morgan and the hard times weren't keeping him so busy propping up the U. S. Treasury. Probably be barking at the heels of the ranchers as he was back in eighty-five, making all that stink about the fences on the public domain, with even Bartlett's own Lakota ranch plat spread out in the New York Herald labeled "Illegal Fencing," for all his eastern relatives to see. Not that it made any difference with the Richards backing on credit rating. The cow business was above such gnat bitings.
Although Bartlett Richards was an honest man if an arrogant and ambitious one, he could see that a few swift killings over the remaining free land region could get the same results as dropping a few bullets into a herd of elk—scatter them in all directions, running in blind panic, but running. Although he was disturbed by the cattle losses while he was gone to Europe, the number of new settler shacks and soddies disturbed him even more. Many had strips of breaking that would certainly have grown corn if there had been any rain at all, and many were edging in upon his range, both in Wyoming and in Nebraska, some boldly homesteading on the best of his sandhill meadows.
Up in Wyoming the Swan company under Clay had brought in Tom Horn, the professional killer. Horn had been a good cowhand once, and a prize contest rider and roper, it seemed, but as Pinkerton range detective he learned the methods that Siringo* protested so emphatically as overbearing and illegal, even plain evidence fabricating. Horn found the Pinkerton methods restricting. Like being hobbled. "Killing men is my specialty," he always said when applying for jobs to be done. He proved so effective for the Swan outfit that John Clay made a personal friend of him and the Wyoming Stock Growers Association put him on the pay roll, some said unofficially.
For a while after Bartlett Richards brought his young bride back to Chadron the sandhills seemed very quiet, like the stillness before a storm, strange with so many refugees from the Johnson County war hidden out there, not only ranchers like Allen and his bodyguards but hired hands like Shonsey who showed up there a while and half-a-dozen others, but mostly these had seemed only the usual drifting of jobless cowhands in and out of the Spade region. Now, however, the regular cowboys began to stand away from some of the new men in the country, one of them Dave Tate, the Texas gunman who was making Richards' Spade Ranch his headquarters. He wasn't as ladylike as some, nor soft-fingered, but he did no more cow work than his kind. He liked to hang around Gordon and other settler supply towns and shoot every cat that crossed his path, even some in store windows, his gun hand darting down and out, swift as a rattler.
Although the drouth and hard times of the early nineties were shaking all but the deepest-rooted settlers loose, to drift like tumbleweeds on the wind, many were tough enough to stick. These got warnings to quit the country. Here, too, they were called rustlers, some without as much as a milk cow to their names. But they believed the rains would come and a man could hope to make a living for the family. They would stay.
Then suddenly, in 1894, three of these stubborn ones were found dead, only a few weeks apart. The first one was Johnny Musfeldt, over west of the Spade. Warned to get out, he remained and was found dead at the plow on his wife's homestead. Tate, the cat killer from the Spade Ranch, was arrested, but turned loose for lack of evidence. Musfeldt's in-laws, the Greens, got warnings, too. Get out or be carried out. With Johnny dead they knew this was no bluff and they took the letters to Old Jules,* a lame-footed locator and surveyor who had been helping homeseekers get land. He had hunted the sandhills with the Indians, who called him Straight Eye, knew the hills like the breech of his gun before the cattlemen moved in. A few days after the Greens got their warning letters Old Jules rode in at the Spade Ranch on a horse conspicuously carrying the Green brand. He talked about hunting gray wolves and did a little long-distance target shooting when the ranch hands were around to watch. He was treated well at the Spade cookhouse, and the Greens stayed on, unmolested.
But by midsummer two more men were found dead, these over east in Cherry County, in the meadow region connected with the Richards holdings. One, Jason Cole, had five years' residence on his three quarters of land—all patentable now. But he was a family man and started in Polled Angus cattle, including a registered sire, to build up a little herd of the handsome blacks. Plainly Cole had ambitions and would stay. So he was found shot off his mower, with no sign except the tracks of a saddle horse stopped beside the machine. Apparently it was someone Cole knew because there was a little pile of whittled weed stalks, as Jason Cole often made while visiting with an acquaintance. He was found dead beside the whittlings, a bullet in his head.
Cole's brother received threats, too, and, afraid of making more trouble for his brother's family, left his homestead and headed up to Wyoming. But Mrs. Cole and her two small sons stayed. Because the local officials seemed to make no effort to find the killer, she hired the Pinkertons but ran out of money. In the meantime, she may have discovered that they were supplying detectives all over the range country to spy on men the ranchers wanted driven out, and also what men like Siringo had to say about them. Anyway, she stuck with her land, although by that time Will Dunbar was found shot dead on his homestead, not far from the Cole place. Nothing was done about this either, and no telling how many more settlers or landseekers were left face down in the tall meadow grass or packed off into some blowout for the circling buzzards, although public discovery and shock were very important for their scare value.
Mrs. Cole stayed, knowing that a woman had been dragged away and hanged up at Bothwell, Wyoming, as recently as five years ago, and that some of the cattlemen behind that were also interested in the sandhill ranches. Besides, she had her two sons, four* and two, who must be protected as much as possible. But she stayed in spite of everything and apparently nobody was hanging women in the sandhills of Nebraska.
By this time curious rumors were sifting down from Wyoming, saying that Cole and Musfeldt had both worked for Bartlett Richards on one of his ranches up there before they homesteaded in the hills. Then somebody recalled that there were Coles in the Bothwell region back in 1889, and that one of them, Ralph Cole, saw the hanging of Averill and Cattle Kate, but disappeared, as all the witnesses had, to be followed by the killing of Henderson, after, some said, Ralph turned up so burnt that only his little bullet mold was left to identify the ashes.
Maybe it was just the commonness of the Cole name, with no relationship between Jason and the Thad Cole on the Johnson County dead list, either. Maybe the Coles referred to were the two settlers down in an isolated little flat of lower Cherry County, an unfriendly couple of men, who, it was said, had a tunnel out of their shack off into a washout full of brush. There were rumors plenty about them and the several names they used besides the Cole that slipped out on some legal papers, it seemed. One story called them the brothers of a man killed because he knew too much about the Wyoming cattle fights. One of the Nebraska brothers, it seemed, went up and cleaned out three of the killers but he fel
l with six, seven bullets in him and was left for dead. His brother slipped up and smuggled the apparently dead man out of Wyoming under a tarp, with cedar posts he cut in some canyon on government land ricked carefully around the wounded man. That was when the two first appeared in Cherry County, but nobody saw them much for a long, long time. Then, because lead is poisonous only when it is hot from powder, the brother recovered and got around, but he was always careful, always with the Winchester standing between his knees in the wagon, or across the saddle after he managed to pull himself up that high.
Some said that the uninjured brother was the man called Popsey or sometimes Copsey who worked as range boss for the Parmalee Company up across the South Dakota line. He was considered one of the best bronc busters in the country and sometimes he admitted he was an Englishman who had worked for an English syndicate in Wyoming back in the cattle wars and was hiding out around the sandhills since then. But that put him and his brother on the cattleman side, maybe avengers not of Cole or DeCory or the others ambushed by the cattlemen but of Wellman or maybe Henderson or someone like those men. Often the earlier story, that these men were really named Cole, cropped up again. Plainly nobody who knew the truth of all this was telling, and that left many to wonder where such hatreds and hunger for revenge might break out, or when, and on which side the guns would be barking. At least nobody among the settlers seemed to know.