by Mari Sandoz
By this time the pattern was coming out plainer elsewhere. A settler was a settler. Lewis, an Englishman, was found dead on his claim over in the Iron Mountain region, within forty, fifty miles of Cheyenne. He had been accused of rustling and warned to get out. He stayed and died, Tom Horn got the credit publicly and claimed it privately in letters as reference for further jobs. Even some Association members protested, embarrassed that a man like Horn was headquartering at the home of Clay, their president. Others complained that even if the rancher contention that no jury would convict a settler held true in some regions, Cheyenne, stronghold of the cattle interests, wasn't one of them, and if there was no evidence, Horn knew how to produce it, give the case a good natural look. But he preferred the clean ambush, with nobody shooting back. After a while most of the out-of-job cowboys hit for healthier country, and many settlers deserted their homesteads. In the meantime, as in the sandhills, it wasn't long until another man was shot not far from Lewis, near the Wyoming range of Allen's Standard Cattle Company, with Bartlett Richards connections. For that matter, they were also near the Boslers, who had a long reputation for hiring killers down along the North Platte in Nebraska.
Anyway, the one-armed settler, Fred Powell, had been too tough to scare out so he was picked off from ambush in plain sight of his hired man while cutting willows to make a hayrack. Afterward this man talked about his boss "taking in" company cattle, and while some suspected the hired man might be the killer, Tom Horn got, and welcomed, the credit. There was another story, too—that' Powell, warned to get out, was hurrying to leave but was caught before he could escape. After all, he was worth Horn's regular $600 fee dead.
A brother of Powell's wife started to run the little place and was given three days to leave the country. He left, and once more Horn received congratulations, and no interference from the sheriff. By now his name was the terror of the Wyoming range and his appearance in a community scared out many, who, guilty or not, were fond of living.
But thievery didn't stop, not in Wyoming or in the other free-range regions, and so a few tried the law and got some convictions down in Nebraska. Dave Tate was still around the Spade Ranch, getting more arrogant every day, until finally he shot a man in the leg to get his saddle and then skipped out with it and a couple of horses, a six-shooter, spurs, and even five dollars from the bunkhouse. Now, at last, Bartlett Richards was angry enough to offer a reward for his gunman. He would not harbor a thief.
As cattle prices came back, rustling grew up again, particularly with war clouds rising over Cuba. Richards had a talk with the other ranchers who called themselves the vigilantes, but secretly, among themselves. The Nebraska Land and Feeding Company, Richards' new concern with William Comstock, an Englishman, instead of the Irishman Cairnes, grew out of the boom from the sinking of the Maine and what was called Hearst's war. Around the West many had known old George Hearst when he bought in on the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills and boosted the fortune that gave his son the newspaper power to promote the war. He also bought beef for the army, and if it was spoiled, that meant more "embalmed cow" had to be bought.
Then the dry gulching of McKinley from amongst a forest of people brought Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider and cowman from the Little Missouri into the presidency. The cattlemen, from the Rio Grande across the Marias country, lifted their glasses to this piece of plain barefoot luck. With a former rancher in the White House there would be a new Golden Age of the Cow, and an end to the persecutions by such cheap men as Sparks and his successors. The old feeling of power would be running strong as hell in the cattleman's arms once more.
By the end of 1901 they weren't so certain. Still it seemed Teddy must be on their side and there were other problems to take up their minds. Range in North Dakota and southward was mighty scarce after another season of drouth and prairie fires. Some cattlemen from north of the White River had been down to the Rosebud Indian Reservation and found grass there, untouched grass, fine to winter on. When the river froze over, they eased their stock over into the Indian lands without sending so much as a horse wrangler to tell the agent or the Sioux. The government had a fixed price for the range but with Teddy in it was only reasonable to assume very little money would actually have to be paid. In addition to the deliberately moved cattle, the winter storms drifted in more, some of them deep into Nebraska. By spring the earth was eaten bare and May 25, when the Indians were beginning to butcher some cattle and the grass of 1902 was well started up on their own ranges, the largest spring roundup of the Dakotas was started in the Rosebud country. Stock of sixteen large outfits was in there, the 73 Ranch claiming around 30,000 head alone.
The roundup varied from twelve to sixteen wagons, each with up to sixty men. Part of them started on the fifty-mile front from along the Pine Ridge Reservation border, going east, with a similar push of wagons heading westward from the Missouri River breaks, to meet on a line with the forks of the White. It was wide, rough country, but the cuts and canyons were scoured for stock, the calves branded, the cattle separated into day herds until too cumbersome. Then they were thrown north across the White River, the herds, held there until finished or too unwieldy, were trailed to their usual pasturage ahead of time. By the Fourth of July everybody was done and all his stock on his home range.
There were a few attempts to get some pay for the Indians for all the grass, the overgrazing, but nothing came of it. "Old Teddy knows grass is worthless until a cow sticks her nose down in it," a rancher said at the Association meeting that fall. "He's one of us."
But Washington rumors warned them that there were investigations of fences on government land, and the large cattle outfits hurried agents out to scratch like badgers to get the land under the fences covered by filings, if not deeded. Because old soldiers' and sailors' widows could apply the period of military service involved to the required five-year residence for a homestead patent, the ranch agents combed the pension rolls and scoured the country over, eager as quail dogs around a brush patch. For a small fee, usually most welcome to the poor pensioners, they filed on the land under the range fences, entries not "reasonably compact" as the law required but strung out into long strips of forties. The entries were from lists of names wherever possible, half-a-dozen hired fronts, elderly women, and men like old soldiers swearing to the filings where this extreme was necessary, some making dozens of entries.
Even if the homesteaders actually made the filings their oath that they had seen the land and intended to make their homes on it was false. "A mere formality," the personable agents assured the war widows who could understand the oath. "A formality like the 'obey' in the marriage ceremony."
These filings, mostly by people no nearer the land than perhaps Chicago, Philadelphia, or Boston, gave the ranchers a sort of legal rim or rind to their government range, at 160 acres a throw. And they were certain of one thing: none of these would come bobbing up wanting to live on their land for themselves, as happened with their cowboys so often.
In addition the cattlemen worked for a lease bill, giving them practically permanent hold on the public domain. It was announced that the Alliance, Nebraska, land district with the one adjoining, encompassing much of the sandhill region, contained 6,146,200 acres of government land under cattleman fences, pasturing 344,326 cattle valued at $58,575,350—without fetching one cent for the grass into the public till. Why not lease these grazing lands and help raise the revenue to run the government?
It was a good point, but it pleased none of the land hungry. "Legalizing their steals, shutting the homeseeker out forever," they said bitterly, and without hope, certain the bill would pass.
In the meantime Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior was ordering the fences down. Really uneasy, cattlemen from everywhere hurried to Washington to flatter old Big Teeth a little, herd him into the bunch, back into it, they would assure the damn bunchquitter. Bartlett Richards headed the Nebraska delegation and worked for Wyoming, too. He was well fitted for the job, with his distinguished ancestral backgro
und that was certain to appeal to Roosevelt, and with real charm and grace of approach when it suited him. But as one rancher reported after their untriumphant return, all they got from Roosevelt was, "Gentlemen, the fences will come down."
When the land lease bill passed Congress, there was celebrating from Chicago to the Oregon coast, and in London and Edinburgh. For that one night the fine blowout at Cheyenne reminded some of the gay days when the pretty young bachelors ran the Cheyenne Club. But only a little. Most of the cowmen celebrating in Cheyenne now were tough as old range bulls.
It was as well that they were, for Roosevelt vetoed the lease bill and already had Colonel Mosby, the famous Rebel cavalry leader turned Republican out smelling around for illegal land practices in Nebraska. Mosby's appointment infuriated both the Texans up North and the northerners. "I sure want to see DeForest Richards' face when that turncoat Mosby starts working on that carpetbagger," a Texan who left the south in sixty-seven wrote to a friend. Many of the cattlemen still tried to believe that this was all just Roosevelt's shrewd New York-style politics, to fool the little voter and get a strong Republican Congress re-elected, but the belief came harder.
In the meantime, there was a reminder from Washington that it was illegal to enclose government land. Every foot of the public domain must be fenced out of a rancher's pasture. Over in Colorado Jarvis Richards was in trouble for including the alternate government sections in his stretch of railroad lands within his fence line. There were rumors that down in New Mexico the Interstate Land and Cattle Company, with Charlie Goodnight an owner, was seeking an extension of time, due to the vast improvements, to get their fences down from the 3,000,000 acres that they controlled, some said 30,000,000—a bit of tall tale.
Bartlett Richards, the Nebraska cattle king, had been ordered to remove his fences from around sixty townships of government land in the sandhills, over 1,000,000 acres. But the same order had hit the older outfits back in the mid-eighties, the homeseekers counseled by the Secretary of the Interior to cut any wire barring them from free land they wished to homestead. Proceedings were started then against such barbed-wire kingdoms as the Swan, with 130 miles of illegal fencing and Bartlett Richards, with forty-two miles of such fence around the government land inside his little Three Crow Branch, up the Niobrara. Back then some of the cattlemen had rolled up their wire and got their blooded stock mixed with scrub bulls. But working together they forced Sparks' removal and eventually got rid of Cleveland, too, even though he made a return but with his tushes considerably dulled and his land crusade forgotten.
Somehow it didn't work out that way with Four-Eyes Roosevelt. While he was damned as a renegade by both his class and his fellow ranchers—a bunch quitter, Mosby's wire cutters were out. From the Omaha Commercial Club west and New Mexico north protests and resolutions hit Washington like a blizzard sweeping in from the Dakotas. Suddenly all the cattleman organizations and the newspapers they controlled, the cow companies and the individual ranchers, rose in benevolent concern for the settler and the public. The cattlemen were making their government land produce all that could be expected, and to interfere with them would be harmful to the whole country, cutting down on the feeders to eat up the vastly increased corn crop of the Middle West, raising meat prices for the poor man, losing the rancher's tax money. Further, it was criminal to encourage a poor man to take his family out to the government lands, where every foot available for farming in ordinary seasons was under cultivation. Even the most elaborate systems of reclamation would be useless in such places as the sandhills of Nebraska, for it was patently impossible to irrigate a wilderness of sand heaps. Let the government call in its men with the wire nippers. Help keep the poor settler from starving to death on a government claim.
In December of 1902 there was a rising optimism in the range press. Mosby had blown a loud blast and it had died away in the wide-open spaces. The fraudulent filings by war widows existed largely in the colonel's imagination. In the meantime, the land lease bill was to be resubmitted to Congress and in the bust of Roosevelt's pet persecutor of the cattlemen it could be passed over his veto, if he dared another veto.
But where the fences had been removed the cattle were mixing hopelessly and drifting, the settlers and small outfits helping themselves to the beef gathered around their places, and to calves, with no Dave Tate and no Tom Horn to shoot them down.
In fact, Horn was in trouble with the law at last, perhaps due to the Roosevelt cloud over the whole range country. He was arrested for shooting a sheepman's son, a boy, although a neighboring cattleman was arrested, too, and then turned loose.
Tom Horn had been over in the Browns Park country, which rode the Colorado-Wyoming line like a jay bird on a fence. Operating there as Tom Hicks, he killed Rash, the president of the Browns Park Cattle Association, a Texan in the region since the middle eighties and generally respected. Rash owned around 700 cattle and no one claimed that he stole one head of the lot, but the cattle baron of the region wanted the Park cleared of the small ranchers, so the top man, the leader, was shot. Perhaps because Horn liked to work by twos, he also killed Rash's Negro cowboy, one of the best cowhands in the country.
An angry Colorado posse intercepted Horn before he got away. He wounded one of them mortally but was knifed himself. As soon as he was up and riding again he was back at work without opposition until the Nickell boy was killed, apparently by mistake because he was riding his father's horse. This got Horn to jail, but money poured in for his defense, perhaps to keep his mouth shut during this Roosevelt Inquisition, when evidence of any intimidation of settlers, let alone murder, might make things mighty hot for the cattlemen already in trouble over the fences and the fraudulent land filings.
Horn was loyal and for this and perhaps as a special precaution he was helped to escape. Recaptured, it was said he confessed to all the known killings, including the Nickell boy's. Some said Joe LeFors, a stock detective, got the confession; others pointed to Phil DuFran, somehow always involved, whether it was a man burning by the Olives, the Johnson County Invasion, or now this hired murderer. Apparently Tom Horn implicated no one directly except the Bosler outfit in any of the killings, and the Boslers only in the deaths of Powell and Lewis over near Iron Mountain. It was estimated that more than $100,000 was spent for Horn's defense. Many ranchers testified as character witnesses for him, including John Clay, who said Tom had headquartered with him for years, as everyone had noticed.
In 1903 Tom Horn was hanged, an ironic end for a man who, a few months earlier, needed only to be seen riding through a region to drive almost any settler out, whether accused of rustling or not. Three had left their homesteads up in the north Laramie River country in one week because Tom Horn had been up that way.
By now changes were coming upon the Richards cattle and banking empire, with sheep, too, up in Wyoming. De-Forest Richards, governor of Wyoming, died in the spring of 1903 leaving sheep and banking interests to his children and so to Bartlett, with plans to move some of the sheep down to the Niobrara River north of the Spade, under Paul Richards, a relative.
Bartlett's efforts to build up his herds in the long grass of the sandhills were beginning to show. The Spade won the silver cup for the finest carload of Hereford range yearlings at the Kansas City Stock Show in 1903. It brought newspaper praise and editorials regretting the persecution of men working so hard to improve the American beef stock. But the Spade, characterized now as a fine, quiet place, the range hospitable to any settler who wanted to come looking for a homestead, had a nice murder on its hands. Nothing as clean as a gunman's bullet. Wofford crept up behind a man called by such names as Cummins and Reinhart, hit him on the head with a club, and rode off. Cummins died, a sheriff beat a mob to Wofford, and Bartlett Richards spent good money to put the murderer into the pen, although the two men were now characterized as mere tramps hanging around his ranch.
Then, June 28, 1904, the Kinkaid Act went into effect in certain regions, particularly in the sandhills of Ne
braska. It permitted every bona-fide homesteader to take up 640 acres of land. If the settler had received a 160-acre homestead in the past, he could enter 480 now, the new homestead requiring five-year residence and $800 in improvements
Ostensibly intended for the great flood of landseekers pouring in from all the world, actually the cattlemen took advantage of the Kinkaid Act to cover their range, at least any land that a settler might want. Strung out in forties, a section could automatically cut the heart out of four miles of meadowland or put a legal floor under four miles of wire fence, at least until further investigations, and surely Roosevelt wouldn't be in the White House forever. So the agents of the cattlemen wrote out bushel baskets of Kinkaid filing papers and had them ready behind the land office windows for prior entry on opening day. With the fences down, locators and surveyors plodded over the prairie with land-seekers, hunting out the government corners obliterated long ago, intentionally, or trampled down by the cattle, the wooden stakes buried in the holes or burnt by prairie fires. Each region had its locators and surveyors, perhaps combinations of the two. In the western reaches of the Spade Ranch Old Jules Sandoz, who had come shooting target practice there after the Musfeldt murder, was one of these. He had hunted deer with the Indians all over the sandhills and remembered where many corners, even the carefully destroyed ones, were and knew about some of the cattleman tricks, such as burying old mower wheels or other massive iron nearby to throw the compass needle off. He had the ability and the patience to line up the probable site of a corner and then to skin off vast areas of the sod to find the rings that showed where the section holes had been.
Weeks before the Kinkaid opening, landseekers went to camp around the land office towns and began to line up before the windows days ahead. War veterans came in their old uniforms and received priority to the land, the old bonus practice established almost before the guns of the Revolution had cooled.