Cattlemen

by Mari Sandoz

  Kleberg put the first Santa Gertrudis bulls up for sale in 1950. Since then herds of the blood had spread around the world. A steer will grow big and grass-fat on an acre of good hot-climate forage, such as, say, the pasture lands of Florida, instead of the fifteen to twenty-five acres required on the King or in regions of Arizona, the Middle East, or the dry land of Australia. The Santa Gertrudis are good rustlers. The breed matures fast and at market age averages around 200 pounds more than other breeds of the same age and pasture. Often they feed on experimental plots of imported and hybrid grasses, also a King Ranch venture.

  But other Brahman crosses are already being developed: with Angus, the Brangus; with Hereford, the Braford; with French Charolaise, the Charbray, and more coming. Men like Buttram and Slick are becoming known for their meaty, hardy, jet black Brangus. Farther north, at the Lasater Ranch in Colorado there is a fine herd of Beefmasters, half Brahman and a quarter each of Shorthorn and Hereford— beefy but proud and aloof red animals, fine for drouth regions. In fact, the crosses are spreading so fast all over the beef world that perhaps fifty years from now some of the standard breeds of 1900 will have to be preserved as the Longhorn is now.

  Long before the free land was gone small outfits of cattlemen hard pressed by drops in beef prices or die-ups from storms or even tick fever tended to drift into sheep. Usually they received stern warning from any ranchers around, as the Richards did when they brought sheep into the Niobrara country north of the Spade. Often the protestors went into the woollies, too, perhaps even within the year. But most of the cattlemen, while still fighting settlers, had drawn imaginary lines across the free range against sheep because they ate the grass roots out of the ground, cut up the sod with their small cloven hoofs, and turned much of Wyoming into sage plains, helping to finish the overgrazing begun by cattle. The cowboys usually whooped any herds that crossed the lines into writhing gray piles at the foot of some deep cut bank or in some canyon. The dogs and the herders, too, might be killed if they were foolishly slow in moving, or refused the warning to take the herds off the range and the water holes, which the sheep roiled so that only a sheep horse would drink. But the rifles the herders carried against eagles and wolves penetrated the flesh of ranch hands as well.

  Yet even after violence and shootings, some of the sternest resisters of sheep had to give up and go into the business to pull themselves out of the hard times of the Roosevelt Inquisition and the new depression looming up before the war, particularly the years when the tariff on wool was high. Long before 1900 there had been conspicuous examples of cattlemen running sheep—even in the special regions of Wyoming and Montana, men like Senator Carey of Wyoming and the Richards, both DeForest, governor of Wyoming, and Bartlett, and in 1905 the Swan Company.

  The big weakness in ranching treated strictly as a business or as a manufacturing process is in its curious long-range nature. A ranch can't be shut down like a pants factory or a mine or even a steel smelter. Expenses for feed and care of the stock go on, and increase, while the prime stuff ages into canners. If the ranch is closed down, three, four years are lost putting it back into running—that long from cow to salable steers unless a ready-made, mixed herd can be bought, very scarce and expensive in times of rising prices and probably much higher than the selling price of the herd turned off.

  After the Spanish-American War beef prices fell like drifting cattle hitting the Chugwater bluffs or the cap rock of Texas, driven down, it was claimed, by the manipulations of the Beef Trust. The ranchers, through the American National Cattleman's Association, accused the big packers of violating the antitrust laws and insisted that the railroads were in cahoots with them. President Taft promised an investigation but it was left for the Wilson administration to show that the Big Five—Swift, Armour, Morris, Wilson, and. Cudahy—together controlled 514 companies and had interests in 762 more, dealing in 775 commodities including nearly everything from the loans that paid the cowpunchers to the fertilizer and tankage left from the cow as well as dozens of other products that no one would expect to find in the packing business, including, of course, the newspapers of the packing towns.

  "Yeh, it's not only take what they offer us or go to hell," a usually unprofane old rancher admitted, "but pay what they ask for any of the 775 commodities we got to have. And tell us what we got to pay to get our steers to Omaha or Chicago to boot."

  It took a long, long time from the promise of Taft, but in 1920 the packers agreed to get out of everything except meat packing and closely allied lines, and to operate under the shadow of the U. S. courts.

  By then there were only the ranchers who survived the Roosevelt recession of 1907, when banks closed all over the country, even if not for long. Beef prices didn't pick up until toward 1910, moving moderately until the boom of 1914, with the war demand for meat.

  By then many, many who had survived the Big Die-Ups and the hard times of the 1890's, even the fencing and land-fraud trials, were gone. The Spur had closed its "Protection A-c" and sold its holdings in 1908, paid the debts, and had a little left over to apply to the twenty years of outstanding dividends. The Western Ranches, managed by John Clay since the Swan outfit fired him, had passed dividends, too, and finally liquidated, to reorganize as an investment company. "Loan the cowman money and let him take the risks with blizzards and hard times," was the sour comment of a man who had to give them mortgages on every foot of land and every cow he owned to pull himself through the bad years, although no one could promise much future, with the growing ranges of the Argentine and Australia and fleets of ships rolling off into the water, cargo hungry. All this time the rancher operated on the open market while everything he bought and that his customers bought, except meat, was protected by the high tariff of the McKinley days, almost unchanged on anything except wool and hides.

  There were more sour comments on Clay for other reasons besides the loan business. One was a speech he made before a feeders' convention in 1914 attacking the cowboy of his Wyoming cattle company days:

  The chief obstacle of the range at that time was the cowboys, who were mostly illiterate, uncivilized; who drank and thieved and misbranded cattle, and with a kind of rough loyalty, never told on one another in their crimes.

  "Hell, he's still mad because none of them would join the Regulators, the Invaders, gone to clean up Johnson County," one of the feeders told his neighbor at the table.

  Out on the Laramie and the Cheyenne, the Belle Fourche and the Powder there was a certain amount of laughing, now that most of the Clay interests were off the range. "The cowboys were good enough to make a lot of money for a foreign hired hand like old tight-fisted Claybowels, with his sly way of getting everybody in debt to him and then gouging them hard," one of the Whitcomb relatives said, speaking not only for old Pap but a dozen others around him.

  One ranch owned by the Scottish groups that included Clay as a member was still running, due largely, many thought, to the years of Murdo Mackenzie's excellent management. The Matador was the only British ranch to make a decent profit for its investors, although its dividends had almost vanished from 1903 to 1908. But with the upswing from the declaration of war they rose as high as 20 per cent, much of it from British meat sales. Mackenzie was the finest cowman the foreign ranches brought in, many thought one of the finest cowmen anywhere, foreign or American. A booklover, he was considered one of the West's most influential supporters of the government in the fight for conservation of national resources and for shaping the government's policies in the interest of the small settler and homeseeker, although not all agreed on them. There were those, too, who recalled the range protection that the Matador hired with the Spur, to keep settlers from running tick-infested cattle into the Matador herd, Mackenzie claimed, although that wasn't the story the settlers told, nor the Spur. When one of the hired killers proved a real troublemaker for his employer, threatening to kill Mackenzie, the rugged Scotsman went right on, unarmed.

  But many of the old free rangers spit into th
e dust at any talk of Murdo Mackenzie's good will toward settlers. Yet they had to admit that he was a powerful man in the fight against the railroads, with his admiration for, and friendship with, Theodore Roosevelt, even through Old Four-Eyes Inquisition, which didn't affect the Matador much. Most of the southern land was deeded and the northern ranges usually leased from the Indians, through Roosevelt's intercession in the Indian Bureau, the other ranchers said. Mackenzie, with Turney, the Big Bend rancher who followed the Scotsman as head of the cattle association, called on the whole cow country to stand solid against the high freight rates. When the Interstate Commerce Commission decided for the ranchers, the railroads went to court against price fixing and won. In 1904, Mackenzie visited with the President and got a plank for railroad control into the Republican platform. That brought legislation for rate fixing by the ICC, and changed the entire conception of the government's right and authority to regulate.

  Needing northern range to finish their excellent-quality steers for top market prices, Mackenzie had leased half a million acres of Dakota Indian Reservation lands. But he struck trouble up there, including hard winter storms for his soft southern stock, also the problem of getting cattle across the Missouri to the Milwaukee railhead at Evarts, the old river town on the east bank. Ferries ran in floodtime, really paddle-wheeled flatboats like floating pieces of stockyards, with enough small pens to hold forty to sixty head and keep them from sliding to one side and dumping the lot into the brown, muddy depths of Big Mizzou. To help the stockmen get their cattle to the crossing, the Milwaukee railroad provided a sort of trail, a leased strip of land six miles wide between the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Indian Reservations. It started up near the slope of the Black Hills, was lane fenced all the way, with watering places about every twelve miles, natural or from big dams and reservoirs built by the railroad, all large enough for several herds of 1,200 each a day. Gates opened from the ranges of the Matador, the L7, the HO, such Indian outlets as LaPlante's and Narcelle's NSS brand, and the Turkey Track, and many others with range neighboring on the Strip. When heavy shipping was on, waiting herds might reach as much as twelve miles back from the river.

  Another problem was fires. One August day, with the sun almost hot enough to ignite the dry, curling grass as from an empty bottle concentrating the rays, the Matador was gathering beef. They had about 1,000 head of steers on the divide between the two Moreau rivers, cutting out the shipping stuff, when somebody happened to look up from the dust and sweat to see a great boiling of whitish smoke on the horizon.

  "Prairie fire!" he yelled against the wind. "Big fire coming out of the west!"

  Every horse was set back on his haunches at the uplifted arm, the pointing gauntlet of the warning cowboy. The wagon boss ordered the herds whooped away out of the fire's probable path, started the chuckwagon off for water, and sent a hard-riding puncher to the line camps for the fire drags. The Turkey Track, gathering beef some twenty-five miles south, turned their herds loose, too, and spurred in to help. The big drags, twelve-foot squares, looked like great bedsprings of netted steel chains woven through layered sheets of asbestos, a heavy bar across the end for the lariats. Snubbed to the saddle horns they were pulled by six strong horses, the work so heavy and so hot that the horses had to be changed every two hours. But in a wild gale-driven fire like this one little could be done except to guess where the head tongues of flame might come and backfire there. The streams and even the larger canyons all ran eastward, and the fire was coming down between them like stampeding Longhorns down a country lane. There was no barrier against which extensive backfires could be set, to burn safely into the wind. If they got away, they would be as damaging as the one roaring in from the west.

  Mainly the cow crew worked the drags along the sides to narrow the spread of the fire. But the asbestos soon wore out and steers were killed, split and piled, entrails and all, on the nets of chains while Indians and white men followed to beat out the remaining pockets and smolderings. But they couldn't help much. The fire had started nearly 100 miles west of the Missouri and spread to a twenty-mile front as it came like a Milwaukee express train before the shifting west wind, burning in zigzags for two days and nights on its way to the river. One prong turned southeast, jumped the Big Moreau, and ran to the banks of the Cheyenne fifty miles away, while the main fire swept this way and that, as though to clean up what might have been missed. Finally the last flames died along the worn banks of the Missouri—over a million blackened acres behind them, much of the Matador range gone, with the stock to hold fat for market, and strengthened for the hard Dakota winter.

  The men of the Drag V, the Matador of the north, had trouble around the wild Missouri River towns during the winters. Lebeau, particularly, drew the reservation and river riffraff, the gamblers, con men, and gun slingers loafing the dull season away around the saloon run by the dark-shadowed Phil DuFran. After the Johnson County war he had hit out for Arizona as a healthier climate for a while. But he didn't do so well as foreman of the Aztec Land and Cattle Company and came back North to work as brand inspector for the Black Hills Stock Association and represented Rosenbaum Brothers of Chicago on the side, a well-liked firm because Joseph Rosenbaum had saved the Montana cowmen after the Big Die-Up. Now Phil DuFran was back running a saloon again, and some recalled his stretch at bartending up in Buffalo while he spied for the Invaders.

  "Wonder whose fire he's heating his iron on now?" one of the punchers asked. He had been working for the Hoe outfit over in Johnson County at invasion time and got fired for not joining up. "Somebody'll feel the burn of his mark, I'll bet."

  The winter months dragged for the Matador hands, many of them laid off to spring or at least not busy now that the ground was frozen and little feeding to do, nothing much except keeping ice chopped out of the water holes so the cattle could drink. Murdo Mackenzie's powerful son Dode, managing the ranch, seemed to feel the inactivity the most and took to spending his time, and money, at Lebeau, particularly at Phil DuFran's saloon, perhaps because Bud Stevens, a former Matador hand, tended bar and listened to his dreary complaint and sent him home to bed if he could.

  Then after a night spent in hell-raising, Dode made a final round of DuFran's saloon. By then his drunk was souring on him. Cursing everything around him, he staggered up to the bar and demanded a drink. Stevens, perhaps saddened by the condition of this son of the firm and upright Murdo Mackenzie and his sturdy breed, tried to talk young Dode out of it. But this time it didn't work. Infuriated, Dode pulled his gun, leveled it on the bartender. "Damn your bossing heart! This time I'll kill you!"

  Bud Stevens drew and beat him to the shot.

  Astonishment slid over Dode Mackenzie's face. He staggered back from the stinking blue smoke and burst out the side door, into a man's surprised arms, and slumped through them to the frozen walk. When they picked up Dode's gun it was empty. Looked like it had been empty a long, long time, somebody said.

  Once more, for the fourth important time, Phil DuFran had a lot to tell the officials, this time about violence against a son of a cattleman. There were rumors and whisperings about many things all that winter. One claimed that DuFran had used talebearing to work on Dode Mackenzie, telling him Bud Stevens was always trying to run him, telling him what to do. "Damn kid ain't got the gumption to go around the corner without being reminded," DuFran was supposed to have reported that Stevens said. And much more.

  The Matador outfit never went to Lebeau again, let alone to Phil DuFran's Hell Hole, as many called it. But the killing of Dode brought up talk of DuFran's Wyoming days, and the loose rope ends left raveling from the Invasion. There had finally been news of the two men captured at the KC and kidnaped as the only two witnesses against the Invaders. The younger man, Bill Walker, who rode for Hesse on the Sweetwater some years before, reappeared and told of being held in Rhode Island by Dixon, at times in charge of other men the ranchers wanted kept out of the way. With the Invaders freed, Jones and Walker had been told they could ca
sh their checks, reported to be $2,500, as payment for their property lost in the KC fire. But the checks bounced and Jones, newly married, headed back to Wyoming to investigate. He was never heard from again, it seemed. Walker said he went to law about his money, to collect it, but his trunk was rifled and the bouncing check stolen. Still, he got away alive, and that was something to be thankful for. Seems he didn't play the fiddle much after that night at KC.

  There was a lot of general talk those days about the hard feelings among the Frenchmen and the breeds against the big outfits like the Matador coming in on the reservation leases, crowding out everybody, even such old-timers as La-Plante, around the region back when Indians and buffaloes had it all. But he was forced to round up his stock and get moving, just like the rest. In addition to the outside herds pushing in, there were the settlers, demanding reservation lands for homesteading, and brand inspectors like Phil DuFran snooping around everywhere. Some of the men with soft, uncalloused hands appeared around up here, too, as they had down in Texas and the sandhills and Wyoming for years. Many recalled Kid Rich of several years before. Some said he had a penitentiary record and a growing tendency to drink and raise hell, although he had been brought in by one of the big outfits some time before to do a couple of killings. Because he hung around afterward, shooting off his mouth, he was picked off on the road. There were other stories, too, as with Henderson and Wellman and a dozen others.

  The Indians still liked to tell of finding the Kid one February morning in 1903 down in the Cheyenne River country below the mouth of Bull Creek. He was dead on the frozen snow; his horse, a little roan, was standing patiently nearby, frosted skin shivering in the cold but held by the fallen reins as though staked where the man had slid off, carrying the far stirrup over the saddle as he went. There was nothing except the dead man on the snow, with little blood but a cud of tobacco coughed out as he died. He had been shot from the back, so close that a three-inch spot was burned on his sheepskin coat, otherwise clean, the bleeding internal. There were tracks of another horse ridden beside him to the killing and then one track heading on up Bull Creek and so lost on a bare spot of frozen ground.