by Mari Sandoz
It turned out that about ten o'clock a man had come to the cavanaugh place where the Kid worked and from the dark beside the door asked for him. The Kid got up, slipped his six-shooter into his belt, and went out and then returned for his sheepskin coat. He gave his wife no reply to the anxious question "Who is it?" saying only that the chief of the Indian police had sent for him.
Perhaps she thought about Waggoner leaving his family over on the other side of the Black Hills with some unidentified men in the night back in 1889. Still, that was long ago, and so Mrs. Rich went back to bed. Later Jim Cavanaugh said it had been too dark to tell whether the man who came for the Kid was white or Indian and when he was reminded that he knew every man in the country, he agreed. "But the less I say the better—"
During the rumors and concern it was recalled that the Kid had come down-river about ten, eleven years ago and worked for the French-breed, Narcisse Narcelle, married to a Sioux and running a big spread, much of it on reservation lands. After a few years Rich had married Narcelle's sister. They broke up and although both married again there was still some trouble between the Kid and Narcelle. Now the Kid was dead, perhaps out of personal hatred or because he had to be shut up, with the government agents out everywhere scratching up any evidence that settlers or little ranchers had been intimidated by the big outfits. Or perhaps the shooting was revenge for some man killed, one of the two found or for some other one, perhaps face down in the grass somewhere, picked clean by buzzard and coyote.
Anyway, now that Dode Mackenzie had been killed, Lebeau was given the goby and even Phil DuFran left, moved to Evarts for a while. One fire after another struck through the board shacks of the deserted town, until there was little except the cellar holes.
But Murdo Mackenzie's concentrated efforts to improve his herds had begun to pay off. In 1908 the Matador steers won prizes at the International Livestock Show at Chicago and got a lot of attention at Kansas City. In 1911 they captured the Grand Champion Award at Chicago. Such reputation, hooked up with the general rise in beef, pushed their steers to the top of the market. In 1914 the government canceled the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation lease and most of the Matador stock was withdrawn to Texas, where adjoining range was bought from the Prairie Cattle Company. The war boom justified the outlay. In 1918 Matador steers pulled down an average of $120.03 a head against the $34.75 average in 1903, and lucky to get that. Many took much less.
The old outfits that couldn't make the economic jump from free grass were gone and with them most of the old ways, although some, like the Matador, clung to the horse-drawn chuckwagon, the open corral, and the throw rope instead of the squeeze chute and the cross fences, the smaller pastures. But new problems arose with the new times. The list of cattle diseases doubled, tripled, and more, particularly as the blood improved and the old hardiness of the Longhorn was lost. Some recalled that the coastal steers could keep going when they were gray with bloodsucking ticks.
The Plains were once as free of cattle diseases as any region new to a species usually is. Some kind of rinderpest, perhaps foot-and-mouth disease, had swept up along the larger streams a couple of times in the first half of the nineteenth century, destroying millions of cloven-hoofed animals. Some regions, like the Laramie Plains, were left stinking and empty. The salt licks of the present Lancaster County, Nebraska, were once the center of buffaloes, deer, and other salt eaters and they suddenly were left dark with carcasses and avoided as poison by the Indians for years. There was a scare of foot-and-mouth disease as late as World War I.
Epizootics came and went but the tick fever apparently was there from the first cattle, perhaps from the first cow. The South had the screwworm, too, infecting any break of the skin, particularly castration before the bloodless emasculator was put on the market. Then came blackleg, spread all through the cow country, fatal to great numbers of the finest young stock, the animal lame for a little while, the leg swollen, the victim down a few hours and dead. The disease was easily identified by even a range child. A thrust with a quirt handle or a boot toe on the swollen leg made a rushing sound. The disease was thought to be spread by coyotes, wolves, and dogs that had gnawed at a blackleg carcass. So in addition to dipping for ticks and itch there was the seasonal vaccination for blackleg and then for such diseases as pinkeye, hemorrhagic septicemia, and a dozen more. The antibiotics came into general use and saved many cattle, particularly calves. Increased weight in feed lots is produced by the addition of aureomycin and stilbestrol to the feed mix but there is some public concern about the overuse of the latter, a fear of effeminization of the traditionally very masculine beef eater. It is true that the Plains Indian lived almost entirely on buffalo cow, and the cattleman, even the trail drivers, preferred a fat heifer for meat, but perhaps the natural hormone is in less concentration. Besides, the Indian wanted his meat well cooked if there was time and fuel, and the cowman would eat his beef no other way.
There is still a constant struggle to clear out the infectious abortions, particularly Brucellosis, Bang's disease, which destroys many cows for calving and causes undulant fever in man through milk from the infected cows. Many fine herds have had to be replaced from the ground up because of Bang's. Now, however, a calf vaccine is coming into general use. But leptospirosis is rising.
Where, fifty, sixty years ago, ''immune Shorthorn" meant immune to tick fever, now strains are watched for inherited susceptibility to eye cancer, say, with the recommendation that the eye be removed, the calf fattened, and both mother and calf sent to the slaughterhouse. The last eight, nine years a new problem, the "sinister gene," the carrier of dwarfism, has cropped up increasingly among fine beef cattle, the result, some think, of the overclose breeding for the blocky, squat, spraddle-legged look, the one that prize judges favor and that feeders pay premium prices for. If a bull carrying a gene of dwarfism is mated to a carrier cow, one fourth of the progeny will be dwarfs, one half carriers, and only one quarter clean of the taint, and who's to say which is which until proved out? A carrier bull mated to a dwarf-free cow produces a normal-appearing first generation but half of these will be carriers.
There have always been bovine dwarfs as there have always been dwarfs among humans, but with the recent alarming increase in the three main beef breeds—Shorthorn, Hereford, and Aberdeen Angus, this has become of great concern. Often the dwarf calves are born dead or short-lived, the year's work of the cow lost. If they survive, they are often killed to hide the blight on the herd, which has already, in some cases, reached as high as 12 per cent—far above the losses required to bankrupt a breeder if the loss continues.
The only solution now seems to be the radical one of clearing the bloodlines. To make certain that a bull, whether of $500 or $50,000 blood, is free of the taint he must be mated to at least fifteen carrier cows, which takes time and can involve the loss of the cow's year if he is a carrier. Other methods are being developed, the profilometer, to detect the slight bump on the bull's forehead which indicates that he may be a carrier, or examination by x-ray for the so-called crumpled vertebrae that some carriers have. But it is a slow process, and as the stock is bred lower and lower to the ground the sinister gene becomes more common—one more problem unknown in the days of the leggy Longhorn that could outrun a good saddle horse for a nice stretch.
Before the firecrackers and cannon boom of the false armistice had died away over the fall range, war veterans discharged early were seeking land much as the soldiers had hurried to Philadelphia with their Revolutionary muskets barely cold, demanding homes, farms. There wasn't much left now, mainly isolated plots in Wyoming and Montana too far from water for the improved cow to reach on her shortening legs, the grass too sparse for slow feeding. But to a man who had spent months, perhaps years in the close confines of mud and blood in the front-line trenches, with the roar and crash of war over him, dry landing looked mighty good, out where only the wind, the coyote, and the prairie dog owl broke the night stillness and a flaring red sky was northern lights.
Anyway, with his war service deducted it wouldn't take long to prove up on the place, to get his patent. Instead of singing "Starving to death on a government claim," while the blizzard shook and rattled the tar-paper shacks of the settlers, they usually kept to "I'm always chasing rainbows." They got them, too, summers, after the high, dry-country thunderheads had spent their swift crashes of thunder and lightning, spattered a few rain drops into the dust, and were finally swept away in white mare's-tails against the far sky. But no lily-fingered range protection came riding through to warn these settlers to clear out. No latter-day Tom Horn brought death with him as he dogloped his horse along a rise.
The boom of war prices was swept away like a tenderfoot's camp in a gully washer. Beef fell, everything fell, and around 6,000,000 workers were unemployed, with strikes everywhere against wage cuts that went to 20 per cent and higher in cotton mills, coal mines, meat packing. The railroads ordered a $26,500,000 annual wage cut for 325,000 workers. The newspapers managed to keep the seriousness of the postwar depression from the public, but there was no way to keep it from showing on the cattle market at Chicago and Omaha and wherever beef cattle were put up for sale. It cleaned out many cattlemen who had gone in deep on the encouragement of the public and the government.
Old John Clay made speeches for holding on. Basically the cattle business was sound. He got some sour lip from those who had memories beyond yesterday, particularly those who recalled his denunciation of the cowboy, and those who had deeper reasons for packing a grudge against the Scotsman. If Alex Swan nursed one, it was ended. He had been the big rancher of Wyoming and western Nebraska for a long time, one of the principal men in the formation of the Union Stock Yards of Omaha. But then the Big Die-Up came and eventually Clay took over for his financial backers until, after the Johnson County Invasion, Clay found himself out, too. Eventually the old Swan place became one of the finest Hereford ranches in the world. Long before that Swan had gone to Ogden but apparently couldn't get started again and died in an asylum almost forgotten except perhaps by a few like R. S. Van Tassell, who had helped get the horses for the Invaders. The second Mrs. Van Tassell was Alex Swan's daughter, his eldest, his favorite.
By now old C. C. Slaughter, the Texian, was dead, the last of the three men who were so important in the start of the Northwest Texas Stock Raisers Association out under the oak at Graham back in 1877. Conrad Kohrs, up in Montana, was gone, too, another of the solid, old-time cattlemen. He had come out of the Big Die-Up with 300 head left from his herd of 35,000, and was saved, along with some others, by Rosenbaum, the Chicago Livestock Commission man. Kohrs returned the favor twenty years later, when, during the hard times of 1907, Rosenbaum faced ruin in the Grain Exchange. Kohrs and the others went in together and loaned Rosenbaum $1,000,000, saved him, and got their money back very soon.
In 1924 John Clay published his book My Life on the Range, including a little about the Clay-Robinson commission house. Every rancher grabbed a look into the account, and settlers did, too, if they could get to a copy. Neither side was pleased, particularly, perhaps because no one except Clay could have seen his past in such an un-Scottish glow of self-approval. Perhaps that came out of his long years in America, where he died.
When the prices had first gone to pieces the old cowman, Ike Pryor, pleaded with the big cattlemen to pay off their notes at the banks so that the smaller ranchers, many sure to go under if called on now, could be carried. Here and there a few of the younger cattlemen got together on cooperative schemes but many were squeezed out, their land taken over by the bankers or the banker-ranchers, the big fellows, always the big fellows.
"Yes, that's what they want," some said bitterly. "Hard times of the nineties they done the same. Like the song says, 'The rich get richer and the poor get children.'"
But some of the big outfits or once-big outfits went down, too. Will Comstock of the old Richards and Comstock outfit outlived his partner by only a few years. The foreclosure on the old Spade Ranch failed court confirmation but finally it went for the mortgage, 22,000 acres—all that was left of the spread over sixty townships of government land twenty years ago. What there was left of it went into the hands of a settler's son, one of those that was supposed to starve to death.
Up in Wyoming the Swan company transferred the entire management to an American board in a sort of admission that the foreign management had been a failure and that the land assets would probably never cover the capital investment.* In the meantime the Matador dropped the Canadian leases, partly because of the heavy protective duties put on by both sides of the border. They substituted a short-term lease on 350,000 acres on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southern South Dakota.
In the midst of the beef slump news came that somebody had managed to get away with a steal worth billions of dollars out in the cow country. Cattlemen were recalling that twenty, even fifteen years ago the government had hounded some of them into bankruptcy and the penitentiaryfor fencing government land illegally, or obtaining parts of the public domain in mean little 160-acre chunks fraudulently. The steal was north of Casper, on the trail to Johnson County, over the high, dry hump with the shallow depression of Salt Creek through it. A standing rock shaped like a teapot had pleased the saddle-weary Britishers of the Invasion that day in 1892. Now all that dome was gone, but not stolen by cattlemen. President Taft had set the region aside as an oil reserve for the U. S. Navy. Under Harding it was shifted over to the Department of the Interior, and Secretary Albert B. Fall turned the valuable oil pool over to his cronies. Fall was a rancher from New Mexico, that state so favored by cattlemen who were first of all national politicians as Wyoming had drawn cattlemen who were Britishers. Secretary Fall had to resign and finally, after a long delay, was convicted of accepting bribes, and sentenced to a year in the penitentiary and fined $100,000. Bribery and conniving in the theft of billions of oil essential to the defense of the nation and the culprit got one year in jail— the same one year that was doled out to a Bartlett Richards. It was not only that there was a difference between a Theodore Roosevelt and a Harding; the Bartlett Richards had acted out of an age-old allegiance and affection.
The financial boom of the later twenties brought little prosperity for the ranchers. Only the cowmen with money in Wall Street got ahead, now that prices on almost everything except ranch and farm products were soaring high as the eagles over the Spanish Peaks. The farm bloc in Congress was a constant threat but never more than a threat to the unbalanced economy under unreceptive presidents. Beef was just beginning to pick up a little before the collapse of October, 1929. The ranchers, clinging to Hoover's optimistic confidence, held up their usual fall shipments, hoping every day to hear of a little rise in the steer market from Omaha or Chicago, hanging around the radio or the telephone until the market reports came through. Or getting the bad news by the old range grapevine after they had to give up the radio and the telephone. The boom had never come for them.
In the meantime old Charlie Goodnight had had a heart attack early in December of 1929 and on the morning of the twelfth he died, in his ninety-fourth year, one more proof that hardship, insecurity, danger, violence, swift changes of fortune, towering rages, bitter partisanship, and disappointments did not shorten human life. He was a pioneer of cattle and trails, a friend to the Indians, fighting their cause in Washington, giving the Taos Indians a foundation herd from his buffaloes when he was not much better off, financially, than they. He appreciated their integrity, their honor, their affection for their earth. These things he understood. He was planning a son-of-a-gun stew for Christmas, it was said, but he died before he could enjoy it.
"I wish I could find words to express the trueness, the bravery, the hardihood, the sense of honor, the loyalty to their trust and to each other," he once wrote of his Texas cowboys. There must have been many who contrasted this to John Clay's tirade against cowboys. But Goodnight knew. His life had often depended upon them.
By 1932 it seemed there was nobody left with the
money to buy meat at any price and once more fat beeves put on the market didn't pay the freight and the commission. The Matador's good steers had climbed to an average of $66.41 a head by 1929, contrasted to the $120.03 of 1918. In 1930 they dropped to $39.83, in 1933 to $23.23. As seems inevitable, drouth came with the depression. When the ground winds of 1934 struck there was no grass cover and the black blizzards of spring, always lurking in the Panhandle regions, rose in their great, dark walls and moved up across the cow country almost on the trail over which Goodnight had once pushed his herds. They stripped the top soil and dropped it into gullies, into russian-thistled fence corners and across roadways, leaving little except dust pneumonia for man and beast.
The streams and wells were dry, the grass gone in much of the cow country, the good stock of the ranchers gaunted so their bones wore through the skin on hip and spine. And still some argued and protested against what was called the New Deal Roundup, the second Roosevelt Roundup that many had seen, only this was in stock. Yet the overloaded, drouth-gaunted range and the vanishing demand for beef were not matters visible only to the political eye. Finally, the summer of 1934, the biggest, strangest, and most heartbreaking cattle deal of all time was made through the controversial emergency stock-buying program, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation. Although this was largely the conception of Congressman Marvin Jones of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, it was denounced as a Yankee work of the devil.