by Mari Sandoz
There was great settler disappointment because even the first one to the window on opening day found all the good land already covered. "Fraudulent cattleman filings," Old Jules told his homeseekers. "We'll protest the entries, contest those we have to. We'll kick until we get a good investigation going."
But there were some who still considered bucking the cattlemen dangerous and tried to warn him, and members of his family, as other fighting locaters were warned.
Dozens of cattlemen were haled into court in the "Roosevelt Roundup" over the range country, from New Mexico up across the last reaches of North Dakota. The Wyoming contingent included several men in the Johnson County Invasion and A. J. Bothwell of the Averill-Cattle Kate hanging. They spent twenty-four hours in the custody of the sheriff and were fined $500 each.
All the cow country was aroused at the thought of this renegade Roosevelt. The settlers were furious, too. Five hundred dollars for stealing whole empires of the public domain and holding them by the mercenaries of empires? They met in groups to protest the land lease bill, always up in another form for passage, signed petitions, fired hot letters to the papers and to Washington. Jim Averill had died for writing such letters but perhaps those days were past.
November, 1905, Bartlett Richards and his partner, Will G. Comstock, were brought to trial for illegal fencing of public lands. At the trial last June they had said they would show in the fall court that they had never seen the land, knew nothing about it, and leave it up to the government to prove by surveys in the vast region of obliterated land corners that they had broken the law. But the surveyors worked all summer under the protection of Secret Service men and the ranchers dared not interfere. By fall Richards and Comstock pleaded guilty of fencing 212,000 acres of government land and because they had taken down most of their wire, and were saved the charge of intimidating settlers that others like the Krauses faced, they were fined $300 apiece and given six hours in the custody of their attorneys in Omaha. It was a not-unpleasant interlude, with a great champagne dinner and toasts, and promises of a great future for the cow in the sandhills.
"A farce!" the newspapers cried, including many who had backed the lease bill and, until now, most of the cattleman actions. Such ranchers as Richards and Comstock, they reminded their readers, could pay such a fine every day of the year. The small fellow who had a quarter section of free land inside his fence would have been hit for the limit and given perhaps months in jail. "Don't steal a quarter of sand hills, but gobble up the entire country," the Rushville Standard told its readers.
Roosevelt blew up like a North Dakota thunderhead when he discovered what had been done in Omaha, on top of the light punishments drawn elsewhere. The settlers heard that he got U.S. Marshal Mathews fired for letting the men spend their custody time at their club, decapitated U.S. District Attorney Baxter for insufficient vigor in the prosecution, and was furious that he couldn't touch the federal judge, appointed for life. He rounded up a whole herd of ranchers and their agents and got indictments against them for conspiring to defraud the government out of vast tracts of public domain and for subornation of perjury. Bartlett Richards and his family were in Europe and newspapers carried rumors that he had sworn allegiance to the Kaiser to save his skin. Apparently the rancher hadn't considered indictment possible, but the fact that their confidential land agents were included looked bad. Special agents of the land office, under the constant protection of the Secret Service, sought out the extent of the Spade range.
Hundreds of witnesses were scared up all over the country. The trial lasted a month, the jury took less than three hours, including time for lunch, to return a verdict of guilty. In March the sentence was pronounced: Richards and Comstock fined $1,500 each and one year in jail. Lesser officers and employees of the Nebraska Land and Feeding Company received smaller fines and sentences. Now the appeals began. In May, 1908, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals acted, sustaining the lower court on most counts, charging the nine men involved with securing sixty-three men and women to make fictitious homestead filings and conspiring to induce these sixty-three to perjure themselves in swearing falsely to the papers filed at the land offices.
"Sixty-three!" some of those who passed the newspapers around at the Spade post office exclaimed. "Hundreds and hundreds!" the settlers said openly, bold as breachy cows in a corn patch now.
But the time of the hired killer was not past. Midsummer one rode into the yard where Emile Sandoz, brother of Old Jules, the locator, was milking his cow and in the presence of his wife and seven children shot the settler down. There was no rumor of cattle rustling, only a flimsy story that Emile had talked about the character of one of the girls at the local road ranch. As soon as the news of the shooting spread, neighbors warned that this was only an attempt to get Old Jules into a gun fight and kill him.
The locator was away in the Spade range with some homeseekers and had no news of the murder for a week. By then the sheriff had been forced to make some move and the killer had to leave the country to avoid arrest. But another one came riding up through Old Jules' orchard and around the corner of the house, hand on holster, to find the locator in the doorway, his rifle up. The gunman didn't draw, and after a long moment he set spur to his horse and was gone.
The Woodmen got a conviction for the killing of their lodge member, Emile Sandoz, but only manslaughter. It was, however, the first conviction of such a killer in all the region.
The winter of 1909-10 was a long, snowbound one. The cold bit the lungs, made thawing ears stand out stiff and purple, and froze fingers and toes. Most of the big cattlemen were in Florida or the more fashionable California, Bartlett Richards among these, waiting out another appeal. But back on the northern ranges no one had hay enough to last, and the Spade, with a lot of southern cattle, was hit very hard. Much of the imported stock was too winter green even to smell out the deep drifts but walked or staggered straight into them on the level flats, and died there in the bright, revealing sun. The feed hands, with no hay left to shovel, had time to skin the carcasses as the snow thawed off. It wasn't a winter like the Big Die-Up but neither were the times like the 1880's. Richards and Comstock felt the loss deeply.
All spring the Kinkaiders realized it, too, and complained to the state Board of Health about the stench and the flies from the range cattle that had drifted up around their soddies of board shacks and died there. By June the Spade had contracted summer range at thirty-five cents each for 10,000 head in the new government reserve for forestry experimentation down along the railroad. This was to take the place of the land the settlers occupied now, most of the ranch's summer pasture. As soon as the cattle were moved the Spade laid off all the regular hands except the cowpunchers. "The beginning of the end," the newspapers predicted.
By the fall of 1910 almost every section in the sandhills had a settler on it, and little except the correction-line strips and the roughest chophills remained public domain. Now, finally, the Spade was paying for all its grass and hay, mostly leased from the settlers—those who lacked the cattle to eat it up—and buying out as many of them as possible as fast as the patents came through. Many got in debt at the store, through Richards' liberal policy of groceries on tick, on time, but many Kinkaiders were staying, too many, and going into stock farming despite all the discouraging talk around the ranches. They planted corn and rye and alfalfa, put up wild hay, raised cattle and hogs and chickens and turkeys. They stayed, far too many of them.
The land-fraud cases were refused review by the Supreme Court and Bartlett Richards and Will Comstock had to come to their sentence as others had all over the cow country, and even some horse ranchers, too, such as the Huidekopers of the Little Missouri River, one of the few ranch outfits of any kind up in that region with much public domain enclosed. They fought hard, depending upon their old ranching assocation in the Badlands Country with Roosevelt, and on Senator Boies Penrose from their home state of Pennsylvania. But they got no further than men like Senators Carey and Warren di
d. Although their enclosure of public lands was only about 21,000 acres, the Huidekopers were fined $1,000 each and their manager, who tried to bribe the special agent of the land office, was hit for $300. Not that others didn't offer bribes, too. Perhaps that was why the manager got off cheap. In addition to the fines all three men were given twenty-four hours in the county jail "or its equivalent," as the settlers around there called it. By then the ranch was sold to Pabst of Milwaukee for around $300,000. Later a cousin, Wallis Huidekoper, made a fine record as breeder of Herefords over in Montana and sponsored the development of improved stock growing past the middle 1950's.
Wibaux, the Frenchman who had made money up near the Badland region from the Frewen stock that was hardy enough to survive the Die-Up, had disposed of his stock cattle back in 1902 when he saw the settlers swarm in thick. He had been an adventurous figure in the cattle business, a fine-looking man, boxer and fencer, driving handsome trotters, with a house that contained ten rooms on the ground floor alone. His wife was from an artistic English family, regal and charming, but very democratic and idealistic. A handsome figure on her spirited horse, she reminded many of that other handsome woman of the north, the auburn-haired wife of the Marquis de Mores and also of Cornelia Adair down in the Palo Duro country thirty years ago, sturdy, elegant, and handsome after many days side-saddling through the Texas Panhandle to a ranch in the wild new country. Later women ran ranches of fine blooded stock, kept the pedigrees straight, built up the blood lines, managed the hired help as well as the publicity becoming as necessary in ranching as mere meat production.
But there was no old cowman who wouldn't doff his Stetson to the memory of the early beauties of the cattle country, and then to those other women, too, the hardy resolute fighters against the wilderness and Indians and loneliness, perhaps thirty, forty miles from a neighbor. Sometimes they bore their children alone, nursed them in sickness alone, even buried them with none to stand by their sides, for the men were so often far away, on the trail, chasing Indians or fighting rustlers. But perhaps none endured a travail equal to that of the wives left behind by the Johnson County Invaders, some coming to the gradual realization of the deeper power that drew so many of their men to the futile crusade, a realization that came very slowly, for the women had no need of such identification.
Nor was the long battle with the government over the range upon which the cow walked easy for the women. The wives of Richards and Comstock must have been weary long before the men had to admit defeat. They had fought Roosevelt, the former cattleman turned avenger, and went to jail under Taft, the former lawyer turned golf player. They and their associates were permitted one concession Old Four Eyes might not have tolerated. They were given a choice of institutions and picked the county jail at Hastings, Nebraska, instead of the state penitentiary. There, according to the newspapers, they lived in luxury that they brought with them: expensive rugs and lace curtains; a well-rounded library; the daily papers and all the magazines they wanted; a pantry well stocked with choice foods and beverages; and a Japanese cook. Cartoons showed them living on the fat of the land—like the millionaires they had been for years. The New York Times said: "palatial quarters were allotted to them" where they had frequent banquets.
Whatever the truth in all these stories, Mrs. Comstock did move to Hastings to be near her husband and his jailmates, but Bartlett Richards would not permit his mother, his wife, or his children to see him a prisoner. Even his enemies were saddened by this, and a little proud of him, too. It was true that many settlers, particularly those who had suffered from the Spade of the early days, took these changes gleefully. The ranch postmaster, the storekeeper, and the cowhands kept their mouths shut, unless they were hired settlers, as many were. Even Marquard Petersen, the foreman, had little to say although, having discovered that the home ranch of the Spade was on government land, he had homesteaded it, buildings and all. When the owners tried to fire him, he threw this in their faces. They couldn't fire him or even put him off the ranch. He was on his homestead, in legal residence, and they could get the hell off any time they didn't like what he did, but they were leaving everything that stood on his land there.
Even some of the earlier settlers looked around the shrinking ranch, the shabby, rundown place it had become, with the loafing cowboys, the haphazard way of the fence, and windmill riders, the hay crews, and were saddened by the fall of the cattle empire. Many of the Kinkaiders had been living on Spade groceries, against their land lease and final sale when the patents came. Some skipped out, selling their land elsewhere, or stayed and dared the ranch, with the owners in the pen, to sue a settler. Suddenly it was the cattle kings who had no rights.
Toward spring Bartlett Richards discovered that the managers of their Wyoming holdings were going bad with whisky. His health was reported as poor; the jail, without a prison yard, was too confining. His first application for a pardon never got to the President and on advice from the Department of Justice he refused to discuss the matter at all, it was said. His mother saw this in the papers and against his orders went to spend some time with him. In June, Bartlett Richards got permission to go to Mayos' for an operation although many pointed out that lesser prisoners had to be content with what Nebraska offered. Up at Rochester a deputy U.S. marshal was stationed outside of his hospital door as with a dangerous, an ordinary criminal. The operation evidently didn't help much. At least he still complained of phlebitis. Six weeks after his return to the Hastings jail, it was reported that Bartlett Richards was rushed to the hospital with a gallstone attack and died, some said on the way, others soon after he arrived.
But there was no doubt that Bartlett Richards was dead, died September 5, 1911, one month short of his release —at fifty-two, with thirty-four of those years spent in the cattle business.
It was the end of a latter-day dedicated man—and the end of the cow held above the law.
* * *
*Chas. A. Siringo, A Texas Cowboy or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony, 1885, First edition.
* Jules Sandoz. See Old Jules.
* This son is State Senator D. J. Cole. The Jason Cole homestead is still in the family.
BOOK V
BEEF FACTORIES
AND FESTIVALS
CHAPTER I
NEW BREED—
NOW the free-range days were surely done, and the dedicated men gone. A few old-timers hung on as buggy bosses, perhaps in the new gas buggy to make their rounds, with a couple of young mechanics to help push the city automobile out of the sand or off rocks and high centers. Even Charlie Goodnight had moved to town and up in Montana Granville Stuart, the grand old man of the cow business in the North, was puttering his time away as librarian of the city of Butte.
The old brush poppers were mostly gone, too, although an occasional stove-up old-timer still limped around the livery stables of the cow towns and was surly with the dudes awkward in their cheap slant-heeled boots and fancy shirts asking for "a cowboy horse to ride out," but looking uneasy even after they got a grip on the horn, the reins sagging.
It was a sad passing of the cattlemen who considered paying for the grass an indignity, an affront to their cows. Most of them knew they were dealt out when the settlers began to overrun the country, even many who hired range protection, or went broke defending themselves against the federal government, the invading government as they saw it, come claiming land that their stock, their cows had walked on for years.
But if the range had to be bought, taxed as deeded land, then ranching became a hard business profession, worse—no better than rooting a living out of the sod, or working on the railroad or mining coal. Every acre would have to produce the most meat possible, for the highest price. The northerners always claimed, and the southerners agreed at least tacitly by taking their stock north to finish out, that their range grew more beef, of finer quality, brighter in color and with the fat finely laced through the meat, making it more flavorsome, juicier, tenderer, and from better grade of
stock in the first place. To be sure, the pastures of the South, if not actually lush and green all winter, were at least grazable. There was no call for hay and feeding crews, and no real winter loss of growth and weight, almost no loss of actual stock even among the new calves.
But the South did need a better strain of cattle, one free of tick fever and other insect invasions.
Frequent dipping was found to be one preventive of ticks as well as the spreading scabies, itch, but not if the neighbors were neglectful. The solution, if there was one, would probably come through an immune stock, perhaps by crossing with the coastal Longhorn, who managed to live with the tick. Unfortunately, when enough beefy blood for good meat was added, the immunity vanished. The first effective crosses came from the Brahmans of India. These cattle had been brought into South Carolina back in 1849 and only later were found fever-immune and fitted to heat, humid or desert dry—a tough stock but tough-meated. Long and imaginative experimentation was carried out on the King Ranch. The captain's great trail herds once spread ticks and hatred all the way North and even brought him and Goodnight, that other towering figure of the early Texas cattle period, into open conflict. Out of the opposition to King's bulldozing of settlers and stock growers along the trails came the need and the determination that eventually made a great experimental laboratory as well as a great beef factory of the modern King Ranch under the Klebergs, who worked in a fine racing stud, too, and an oil kingdom.
This first purely American breed, the Santa Gertrudis, named for the original location of the King headquarters, originated in the cross of the Brahman and the heavy, tender-meated, but tick-susceptible Shorthorn, fixed by patient and calculated breeding to carry much of the heat and disease resistance of the Brahman with a little of the distinguishing hump. Added to this was much breadth and bulk of good eating meat from the Shorthorn.