by Mari Sandoz
The stock the helpless cattlemen agreed to sell was divided into three categories: those for grass in other regions, the hopelessly starved or aged, to be killed on the spot, and that still in some meat. The latter, of eating quality, were slaughtered, the meat sent to relief larders for the hungry. Texas cattle were sold to the government at the rate of 30,000 a day, tears streaming down the leathery faces of the cattlemen as they watched their herds go, many carefully bred up and now swept into ignominy. Some refused to sell and had to see most of their stock die slowly—stumbling bags of bones that had perhaps been fine, sleek Shorthorns or Angus, or the hard-ranging Herefords, now finally dropping like old dried-up carcasses to the gray prairie. Eight million head were bought in all, at an average of $13 each. The ranches had already been going until the mortgage moratorium took effect.
Fortunately none of the early dedicated men lived to see this, and finally the rains did come again and another, a much more extensive war. With it came the Roosevelt-sponsored ceilings that were so strenuously opposed by many cattlemen, although they were making more money than ever before. So long denied a fair price for their meat, they wanted unhampered inflation but only in beef, not in what they must buy. As soon as the war was over they got the OPA killed and instead of going up, beef went down and shot up again for a while during the Korean action. Then came 1949 with its blizzards chasing each other like calves playing over the green spring range, a range now buried under weeks of drifting snow. A few cattle were saved by the hay lift—feed dropped from planes to storm-stranded cattle. But it was so very little for the millions of range stock, and once more many ranchers reached the warmth of spring cleaned out, cleaned out of much more expensive stock than any of 1887.
In 1951 ordinary beef brought $30 a hundred on the hoof, choice up to $36. By now the Matador, too, had struck oil, the stock booming on Wall Street with the news. Perhaps because of the general financial situation in Great Britain, or through pure canniness, the Scottish owners sold the ranch for an announced $19,000,000. So the finest of the foreign ranches, born of the beef boom of the eighties, was sold in the boom of 1950, and cut up.
In 1955 Omaha became the world's largest livestock market and meat-packing center, with Nebraska the leading beef state of the Union, Cherry County, out in the sandhills where Texans like Jim Dahlman punched cows in 1878, where Richards set his great Spade Ranch, the leading beef county of all the forty-eight states.
Omaha, Nebraska spread over the breaks and flats of the muddy Missouri, was started into the world's meat marketing and packing through rancher discontent with the packinghouse trust and the railroad freight rates. Back in the beef bonanza days of 1883 Alex Swan, the largest rancher of Wyoming, with six others, mostly of ranching experience, such men as Paxton, Creighton, and John McShane, whose mother was a Creighton, set up the Union Stock Yards of Omaha and donated an estimated $2,300,000 worth of land, buildings, and capital stock to attract meat packers. They drew in five, hoping to assure competition that way, and eventually these increased to seventeen, including such early firms as Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson, the Big Four who slaughter all kinds of livestock at their Omaha plants.
The stockyards at Omaha grew steadily enough to 1943. That year Harry B. Coffee became president. He was born out at the edge of Wyoming, the nephew of old C. F. Coffee, called Colonel or Chalk Eye, who came up on the trail with a Snyder herd in 1871. Colonel ranched in the region, keeping to the more open country for elbow room and inclined to the adventuresome in other ways, too. It was said he rode a wild buffalo at Ogallala once. It was under the nephew, that the swift expansion of Omaha as a livestock market took place. After all, running the world's largest Union Stock Yards can't be so very different from riding a buffalo bull on the prairie out near the wild trail town of Ogallala. Nor was this all done without some humor from the very start. In the center of the great spread of pens stands the eleven-story Livestock Exchange Building, like three great red bricks set on end in the form of a square-cornered U. Here the members throw a yearly dinner for themselves and their ladies, with the music of bawling cattle coming up soft from far below—the annual banquet of the Stock Yards 400 Club.
There is an ironic commentary on the mangement of the railroads here in Omaha. In 1955, 91 per cent of all cattle arriving at the Union Stock Yards came by truck, 99 per cent of the hogs and 49 per cent of the sheep, while 45,000 truckloads of livestock left the yards. If the cowmen of 1884 were interested in revenge for the monopolistic freight rates they were fighting then, here it is, at the world's beef market.
During World War II meat brought so much on the black market that rustling boomed beyond anything since the great bonanza times and never since law came to the West. In 1943-45 a steer butchered in some arroyo or coulee or canyon brought real money at markets selling without ration points. Some ranchers took up the practice themselves, getting two, even four and five times as much as the legal ceiling price. After the Korean War was over and prices dropped, the cowhands out of work kept on rustling, aided by the great cattle haulers rumbling over the roads. Down in Oklahoma a gang got away with 200 head in 1954. They stuffed the branded hides into old auto tires and burned them in piles, the stink of the rubber to hide the smell of burning skin and hair. Late in 1956 a South Dakota rancher was convicted of the state's biggest rustler haul: 233 head from a neighbor's herd of 269, leaving him thirty-six. The thief admitted he trucked the stock to market in big haulers and sold them under their own brand, which the neighbor had neglected to renew. Flack, the thief, had the brand recorded in his own name and got $18,000 for the lot.
But ordinary rustling declined fast after 1952—beef no longer worth the risk for the low return. When meat started down, some of the ranchers, particularly in the drouth regions of Texas, did some panic selling. Cows worth $300 a short time before went for $100. Many who could hold their stock were unable to believe that a president born in Texas would let the state's great product keep dropping in price when everything else climbed like a Panhandle thunderhead.
Once more holding their stock didn't help, only overgrazed the dried-out range with the increasing herds, spreading from the 53,000,000 head of 1951 to 63,000,000 in 1955, with a drouth such as Texas and much of the country north of there had not seen since the nineties, and in many regions not then. Finally Congress voted drouth relief to help buy feed to tide the needy cattlemen over, the relief to be distributed by the Department of Agriculture. Soon there were complaints and rumblings—not against federal intercession but that the relief was going to the big bugs able to buy feed, not to the little rancher whose cattle died around him, whose ranch went under the sheriff's hammer as in 1933 and no moratorium ahead to save him.
Eventually the investigators came. Turned out that Richard Kleberg of the King Ranch, with money for race horses and with oil wells spouting, had received $32,585 in 1954 for drouth relief, just before he died, leaving the world's greatest ranch, estimated at $7,000,000, to his heirs. But his take from the relief fund was really piddling compared to what the Robbins Ranch got—$400,000 since 1954 to the time of the investigation. Besides, Robbins had not contributed to the upbuilding of the cattle business for one hundred years as the King Ranch had. Robbins was a New York investment banker for a while, still a director of the Santa Fe Railroad and of several other extensive ventures. When asked by the Department of Agriculture what he did with the $400,000, what he bought with it, he refused to tell them. It must have been something pretty substantial on a 60,000-acre ranch, over $6.66 an acre, compared to the very minor sum to Kleberg for the nearly 1,000,000 acres of the King. Such favoritism to an upstart would have embittered Richard Kleberg, who, as congressman back in 1938, complained loudly against the government's interference with natural economic laws, such as drouths and famines, and opposed every appropriation to help the farmer and the stockman except the one for the eradication of the old enemy of the King herds—the cow tick.
In the midst of this time came the politica
l conventions of 1956, one at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the other at the amphitheater of the Chicago stockyards. But all the cattle held from the Rio Grande to Canada finally had to be sold and beef dropped to $14.50 a hundred, with that thunderhead of prices on everything the cowman had to buy still going up into 1958. Once more there was a blizzard and the dispatch from Amarillo, Texas, to the New York Times, March 31, 1957, started "The grimmest spring round-up in years is taking place on the rangelands of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and in the Northeastern New Mexico." Five hundred fine cattle lost here out of 2,500, 300 there, with "fifty dead jackrabbits" standing poised as though to break and run for safety when the snow left. It struck up North, too, with whole trains buried for days, the herds drifting and gone. Only a low cattle population, perhaps the lowest since the days of the open range, saved the ranchers from another Big Die-Up. But spring brought the rains so the bluebonnets of Texas once more were like flowing swaths of fallen sky upon the prairie. There were floods, too, great ones, and record-breaking rainfall, in some places the highest in seventy, eighty years, the grass green and fine all the way across the Marias. Yet many cattlemen with no bank stock, no oil wells, no money in General Motors, were very hard pressed. But to those others cattle losses were convenient deductions.
Many must have wondered why they were ranchmen at all, as so many had before them, clear back to 1867. But then they probably went out to look at the cows, shining, sleek, and fat. Next year would be a mighty fine one.
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* In 1956 some real estate was still held for a rising price.
CHAPTER II
RITUAL AND RESTORATION
THE five-way corral gate, the squeeze chute, and the stable-bred herd sire have just about retired the roper and the cutting horse from all except a few show places not concerned with the poundage run off or the extra hands on the pay roll. Even some of the smaller outfits have put on jeeps and light planes to round up the stock and hunt out strays that show little tendency to wander, with their heavy bodies and short legs, the balanced rations before them winter and summer, and medicated rubbing posts and insecticide oilers to keep flies and other insects off, water always in easy reach, as well as medicated salt.
Where once the Longhorns quit the country at the sight of anyone afoot, particularly a woman with blowing skirts, the later grade Herefords came running to see what this strange walking creature might be, a fine sweep of white faces charging up, sending the tenderfoot racing for the nearest wire fence, certain it had been a run for life. But if the walker had stood his ground, the cattle would have veered suddenly away, every whitefaced, horn-bearing head gone and only red rumps visible, fleeing. Now even the bulls are tame, particularly the placid Hereford sires who may come sidling up in any western pasture to have their bulging ribs scratched and the itchy places back of the drooping horns.
All these changes in breed and coddling care brought a realization by 1927 that the foundation stock, the Long-horn, had vanished, the blood existing only in crosses. Then the United States Government tried to locate Longhorns for two official herds, one in the Wichita Mountain Wild Life Refuge in Oklahoma, the other at the Niobrara Game Reserve in Nebraska. They combed the Texas border and started the Wichita herd with twenty cows and three bulls. Several showed Brahman blood but this has apparently been bred out of the offsprings. Selected bulls have been brought in from Mexico to strengthen the strain, and by 1957 the two herds totaled around 500 head. However, as Goodnight wrote Frank Dobie, the climate in the Wichita Mountains would grow a shorter, thicker horn, with the bodies of the cattle also more compact. The greatest length of steer horn was generally developed in fairly low brush country, perhaps west of the Guadalupe River and often under rigorous circumstances. So far none in the tame herds have the fine, wild spread of horn or the generally wild look of the early photographs. Presumably the life is a little soft.
Another and more daring restoration is that attempted in Munich, Germany. By selecting domestic cattle with attributes found in drawings and sculpture of the urus, the wild ancestor of the present domestic cattle, including the Longhorn, the start was made. In one variety used the bull was black, the cow chestnut, the horns powerful, the legs longish, the back straight. These were crossed with cattle from the Hungarian plains, the Scottish highlands, and Corsica, the latter with the ringed nose, a stripe down the back, and a high crown of coarse hair, such as the urus, the aurochs, had, and from these a "present-day aurochs" has been created.
But long before any restoration was attempted the great changes that made a pretty tame business of ranching brought a reluctance to let the romance and the old seasonal routines die, particularly as they were recalled through the sunset haze of time that gilded the dust, made gallant the drudgery and the endurance of stinging blizzard and saddle wolf. Out of this and the long and very deep relation of man to the cow came the great American circus, the rodeo, which has grown into the third American sport in number of spectators, outranked only by basketball and baseball. Both of these get their followers from the very wide participation by the young—baseball on the sand lot or the cow lot, milk-cow lot, diamond, basketball from the schools.
In almost every competition of the rodeo the cow or the means of handling, controlling, the cow as the rancher used the term, is involved. In the center is the bulldogging, now called steer wrassling, but the idea is still the same—the supreme test of man against the lord of, say, the Chamber of the Bulls at Lascaux.
Even the word rodeo, Spanish for a surround, a roundup, once separated the initiates, the people of the cow country from all the rest by the shift in accent to the first syllable in the good old untutored Anglo-Saxon way. But the rodeo as a contest did not start in Spanish America or in Spain. Much of it reaches back to early religious dances and combats, back into mythology. Midway through the Bronze Age, perhaps four thousand years ago, there was rugged bull grappling in the arena before the palace of Minos, king of Crete. Scenes from this have been preserved in frescoes, basreliefs, and statuettes showing the steps in the sport. The challenger was posted into position, the bull released, and when he charged, the grappler clutched the points of the horns to swing lightly, feet first, upward on the force of the bull's furious toss. With this momentum the grappler turned himself into a back somersault as he released the horns and landed standing on the bull, looking backward. There, if he was an accomplished grappler, he struck a momentary pose for the applause and then leapt gracefully to the ground behind the animal. It was proper and not unusual for women or even girls to join the ranks of the professionals in this acrobatic, ritualistic sport. There was also the twisting of the bull's head by the horns to make him manageable.
In Thessaly riders chased the bulls around the arena and then brought them down by jumping upon them, grabbing the horns and twisting them in the Minoan fashion, much as the modern bulldogger does. It was only far in time and not in spirit from the Thessalian bull throwing to the capture of good young Longhorns about to escape into the brush of Texas by leaping upon them and twisting them down, to be tied with the piggin string and left to grow cramped and subdued enough to follow the decoys to the pens.
From the fourteenth through the sixteenth century the English put on bull baitings by specially bred dogs with pushed-out underjaws. Such a dog couldn't be choked off or shaken loose from his hold on the bull's nose no matter how powerful and swift the thrusts and lunges or how high he was swung, or how hard. There was bull running, too, the bull turned loose by the butcher and chased by the townsfolk until both were worn out. Then the animal was slaughtered.
In the Texas region of the 1770's the bulls of Espiritu Santo and Rosario Missions were prized mostly for the "Days of the Bulls," with bull tailing, bull roping, and riding. Even the occasional castration was left until the animal was grown for the sport of catching him on the prairie. In Spanish California, before the big Kill-Off, the bulls were sometimes run by horsebackers at full speed, each man spurring and maneuvering to
get the bull by the tail to throw him, as later some of the brush poppers of Texas did to capture the wilier of the Longhorns, particularly some fine young bull for the ranch herd or a sleek young cow of good bone and meat. In Brazil the bull that showed special fight during cattle work might be surrounded by dozens of men grabbing at him anywhere, and brought down. Then, with the conqueror's boot on his neck, he was given long-winded and oratorical hell in a speech. If the bull got up and away, it just meant another speech.
The Indian was driven from his romantic hunting life to sit morosely on some reservation, the buffaloes killed off, and the law overtook the lawless. Wild West shows began to sell their romantic versions of the vanished era to the east, and the come-lately westerners, with spurious Indian fights, buffalo runs, and stagecoach robberies. As ranching turned toward bookkeeping, with planned breeding and the gasoline-powered hay sled not far off, cowboy shows were put on the road, although there were some cowboys in the Wild West shows that got so much spread in the magazines and newspapers and so little money.
Back in the spring of 1883, at the height of the beef bonanza, A. B. Grady of Lockhart, Texas, had organized a company of cowboys to put on exhibitions of Texas cowboy life: roping and tying wild stock and bronc busting and handling. They bought silver-banded Mexican hats, fringed leather jackets, Angora chaps, and great-roweled Mexican spurs. Their horses, all paints, carried Mexican saddles, the stirrups covered by huge silver and fringe-trimmed tapaderos. Gaudy and handsome, Grady's Cowboys helped set the style for all the show and dude cowboys to come. They advertised themselves as record breakers at roping and tying down wild steers, but at the show at San Antonio the local boys took the shine off Grady's professionals by beating their time. Grady's boys were fine, the local newspapers suggested, patronizingly, for the large eastern cities.