by Mari Sandoz
The same year along in June there was an argument at Pecos, Texas, about who was the best bronc rider and fastest roper in the region. Although the talk got hot as the rusty stove in the general store in a blue norther, nothing was settled. A contest was arranged for the Fourth of July, out on flat ground near the courthouse. There was no entrance fee, no ticket picker, no grandstand, no chute. The steers were turned out in the open for the ropers. The broncs were snubbed or tied down until the rider was in the saddle, then he was let up, the blind jerked away, with the circle of riders around to hold him from running off over the prairie and into some arroyo or over a cut bank. If he broke out, and took off in a blind run, fast-mounted hazers went after him, to turn him back or pull the rider from the the saddle and "let him go to hell."
Such riding and roping contests were being held all over the range country, often made up at the moment, just because some riders happened to get together, or rivals from neighboring ranches, the spontaneous "ridings" out on some flat, or some pole corral in Texas or Colorado, Kansas or Dakota.
Three years later Albuquerque put on a cowboy tournament described in the New York Herald, the drawing card twelve wild Texas steers released one at a time out upon the open prairie, the cowboy, rope up, spurring after him to bring him down and hogtie him, the prize for the best time a $75 saddle. Afterward there was wild bronc riding, too.
The idea of the cowboy tournaments spread and with them dust, excitement, and broken bones. At Montrose, Colorado, in 1887 a bronc bucked into the terrified audience, trampling a woman. This kind of publicity helped bring the crowds out. At Denver the same month a tournament drew an estimated 8,000 spectators to fill the grandstand, spread over the grounds, and gather twenty deep around the corrals. Some couldn't see but all could whoop and yell.
Inside, the broncs and Longhorn steers kept running around the corral walls, trying to get a nose over, for where the nose went the rest could follow. With the contestant flipping his loop back and forth in the dust, ready, the manager pointed out a horse in the wild-eyed, wild-maned circling herd to the man. Then he was to rope the bronc, dig in his heels to choke him down, saddle him, get on and bust him to a standstill, for which he got a box of cigars and a chance at the prize. One cowboy drew a ready-made outlaw that kicked, struck, and bit, and was so hard-winded it was almost impossible to choke him, the cowboy getting madder and madder as the crowd hooted him. Brutal with fury, he whipped the horse to a frenzy but still unwilling to be saddled. After an hour he was ordered to give up and turn the horse back into the herd, give another man a chance.
One cowboy who had great influence on the rodeo during those formative years was Bill Pickett, the Texas Negro who was credited with originating bulldogging, all unaware that there were some very substantial developments in the sport, beginning back in prehistoric times. Bill Pickett took after the released steer in the usual way, spurring up alongside, and taking a grand flying leap to grab the horns, twist them over toward him and, with the critter's nose pointing up, Bill bent forward, sank his strong teeth into the animal's tender lip, let loose of the horns and jerked himself backward. The steer flopped neatly over on his side, bulldogged. Pickett became very popular as the only cowboy bulldogger. Later he joined Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West Show and was the star of their outfit at the Jamestown Exposition, 1907, and at the New York Stampede of 1916. Jim Dahlman of the race horses, mayor of Omaha by then, and former President Theodore Roosevelt of the old Maltese Cross, the man who pushed the cattleman land-fraud cases, were honored guests to watch the bull biter work.
Ironically, Pickett died of a skull fracture, but from a sorrel horse, one that pawed him down and was on him like a cat, much as an old-time sorrel mustang mare might. Even so Bill Pickett didn't die immediately, although his head was a pulp.
Texas also furnished the rodeo with the man that many consider the greatest bronc rider of all times—Samuel Thomas Privett. He was born in Erath County, Texas, back in 1864. Redheaded Booger Red was riding at twelve, orphaned at fifteen, and went into rodeo bronc busting back when there was no time limit on the riding. It ended when a man was off or the horse gave up, standing head down, finished, or lit out to run. While other champions often went in for flossy saddles and other fixings, Booger's favorite bucking saddle was a plain hull or tree. His last public appearance was at Fort Worth in 1925. There, going on sixty-one, he rode a bucking horse on exhibition, and died two weeks later, normally.
There have also been noted women in the rodeo field, although they usually drifted into the more fixed routine of the Wild West performers, trick riders, queens of the rodeo, and so on. But at seventeen Lucille Mulhall, daughter of Colonel Zack Mulhall, was a steer roper and better at it than most men. She busted them so hard they seldom got up before she could tie them. When Theodore Roosevelt visited Oklahoma she roped a coyote for him. In 1904 she was with her father's Wild West Show at the World's Fair in St. Louis and in 1905 in New York's Madison Square Garden with Will Rogers and Tom Mix in the outfit. The Mulhall girl roped horses, too, and could ride a mean bronc. With Homer Wilson she staged the first indoor rodeo at the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show at Fort Worth. This was the real start of big-time rodeo in the region. Lucille Mulhall died in 1940, at fifty-six, in an auto crash, and was buried the day after Christmas on the last pitiful acres of the once great Mulhall ranch.
Depressions were always hard on the Wild West shows because they had a pay roll to meet. In the 1930's they just about vanished. The rodeo, made up of contestants who depend for their existence on prize money, could survive and did.
The first real impetus to the rodeo as a complete show came out of Wyoming. As early as 1872, with the Sioux still lords of all the Powder River country and the Black Hills, the rising Crazy Horse just growing into the war leader to stop General Crook, Cheyenne already had steer riding the Fourth of July. A few months later there was bronc busting right on the open streets, the crowd falling back as the horses bucked this way and that, endangering the windows, too, and the barking dogs.
The first rodeo in Wyoming was apparently around the early 1880's. The Two Bar Cattle Company, with 160,000 cattle and 200 riders, claiming a region approximately across the Territory, put it on. The Scottish and English owners came out to Cheyenne, about 150 of them. Alex Swan met them there. With carriages, wagons, saddle horses, and camp equipment, they headed out to Laramie Plains. A great wild west show and barbecue was laid out for them on the prairie, with Indians, too, for color. Each man on the pay roll trotted out his specialty. There was horse racing, bronc busting, an Indian and cowboy tug of war, bareback riding of wild horses and steers, and a bullfight of sorts. In this fight a little Mexican stepped on the charging bull's head, was tossed into the air, and came down on the animal's back, slid off the rump, and grabbed the tail, to run along behind, fanning the bull at every jump with his sombrero as rodeo clowns were to do for years and years.
One of the cowboys, Butch Cassidy, known as Parker then, later the notorious outlaw, put on a fine bit of fancy pistol shooting. There was a bronc race—twenty-five men on horses that had never been ridden before. Mounted, the blindfolded broncs in a rough sort of row, the best that could be managed, the blinds were jerked away for the start on the 200-yard course. There was bucking and squealing, some going farther backward than ahead, but half an hour later one of the men made it, still with a horse under him.
After a second night under the stars, this one of deep sleep, the visitors started back to Cheyenne, some of them, particularly the very blond, badly gnat-eaten, their eyes and ears red and puffed up like dough. But it was all a great success, and, as the spokesman who thanked Swan at breakfast had said, was worth coming 6,000 miles to see.
From then on there were small rodeos through Wyoming and the adjoining territory as there were over the rest of the cow country. In 1897 the editor-publisher of the Cheyenne Sun-Leader, Colonel E. A. Slack, who had seen the Greeley, Colorado, Potato Day, whooped it up for
a Cheyenne Frontier Day. He got it the twenty-third of that September, with blast of cannon and ringing of bells, everything from mule and sheep bells to a big one hauled in by the railroad. Even the blacksmiths whanged their anvils, and the Union Pacific shop whistles tooted. So Cheyenne's first Frontier Day opened to 3,000 spectators. Out of that beginning sprouted a dozen others, then hundreds all over the country. In the meantime the test of man against the wild, unconquered horse in a fight to a finish has been cut down to ten seconds, the horses mostly what the contemputous old cowmen call "pullman ponies." The tips of the Brahman's horns have been cut off, too, but there is still danger enough for an occasional blood offering in these ceremonials to the cow of the old range days, and before. In 1957, by July 5, the great hump-shouldered Brahmans had thrown twenty-three of their twenty-seven riders in two weeks of rodeos around the country. At Prescott, Arizona, which claims to have the oldest Frontier Days Rodeo, started seventy years ago, one of the riders got his mouth full of blood and teeth when his bull butted him in the face. Another was thrown by his bull as they came out of the chute and was tromped mortally, to the moaning and horrified cries of the spectators and the unconsciously increased interest in the contests. The more serious business of the rodeo clown is to lure the animal from any thrown man and then run for his barrel, the bull probably hard after him. Sometimes the little man in the baggy old pants doesn't make it.
Great reputations have been built for ropers and riders and for bucking horses in these rodeo years. It is still true that:
There ain't no horse what can't be rode,
There ain't no man what can't be throwed.
Perhaps Midnight was really the king of all the buckers, as his admirers claim. He probably spilled more cowboys than any other horse in the world, and earned the monument over his grave. There are outlaw mares, too. Miss Klamath, who died in 1955, tallied up the greatest buck-off record of recent years. She had been ridden and used as a pack horse on a ranch in Oregon before she decided to sink her nose and rid herself of man or pack. Her owner refused $10,000 for the Miss the year before she died. Current top buckers are not for sale at any price and their publicity is managed as carefully as a Hollywood starlet's sometimes is. Buckers are getting mighty scarce these stable-bred days.
But the first of the great rodeo bucking horses of international reputation, and to many still the greatest, was Steamboat. He came from the Two Bar Ranch where, almost twenty years before, the big rodeo had been put on for the visiting Scotsmen and the English. By 1903 Steamboat was bucking off all the ranch hands and professional bronc peelers as fast as they could crawl on and yell, "Jerk 'er!" to the man with the blindfold. In 1905 Steamboat was entered at Cheyenne and came away unconquered, unridden. Apparently nobody rode him until 1908, when Dick Stanley stayed with him at the Frontier Days, the horse past his bucking prime. In 1913 Steamboat, a really old horse now, was ridden again. The next year he died of an injury received in the Salt Lake City Rodeo, still bucking. He had never quit and was as surely a dedicated horse as the bulldogger Pickett and the bronc rider Privett were dedicated men, dedicated to the great memorial ceremony to the bygone power and glory of the cow.
From late spring deep into October is the season of the rodeo, the contestants moving from the larger western ones: Cheyenne, Pendleton, Calgary, Fort Worth, Prescott, Belle Fourche, and so on into the smaller fields, splitting up, a few to each state fair, and to the littler ones, counties, small towns, competing against local boys, and corn and hog exhibits, and pumpkins and preserves, with perhaps a rodeo queen and some Indian dances by the Boy Scouts in the dust before the little wooden grandstand in the evenings. But the rodeo people are working their way eastward, drawn to New York and Madison Square Garden for late September and the big prize money. Perhaps 200 cowboys and cowgirls will gather there, with the rodeo clowns, the current western moving-picture and TV stars, and perhaps some old standbys like the Lone Ranger and Lassie. There, before many, many thousands of partisans they re-enact their formal rituals, the bronc riding, bareback and saddled, the calf roping, wild-horse race, Brahman bull riding, and so on, always with the steer wrestling, wrassling, still the center of the events. But more and more there are pretty girls in few clothes, the girls of the arena, lightly draped, going through this formal ritual or that one, perhaps riding pure-white horses in a flying charge, almost a stampede, to applause that rocks the Garden.
But the cowmen are not there, no more than their kind would have been dancing around the golden calf at the foot of Sinai when Moses was late coming off the mountain, in the arena before Minos, or even in the great caverned ceremonial Hall of the Bulls. As always those who actually work with the cattle are out looking after the meat of the people. Perhaps some of the cowmen are thinking a little about their own shows, those of the state fairs, just past, where some of their calves might have gone in a Calf Scramble, or were shown by Four-H Club winners. One might have been a boy in jeans proudly showing his champion Hereford, or Angus or Shorthorn. Perhaps it was a girl, with her steer on display in some great hotel lobby while the evening-dressed crowd milled past, some glancing at the sight of the girl on a campstool calmly knitting a school sweater beside her great blocky young Angus who chewed his cud as calmly inside the velvet-roped little enclosure, his feet in the convenient hay.
Perhaps the cowman out there on the Great Plains is thinking a lot about his own livestock shows, Fort Worth, or Denver, or Chicago, as he takes the fall buyers out to his sleek grass-fat stock and prepares for the forty-foot haulers. They will come in long rows, more orderly than the wild strings of Longhorns trailing themselves to Abilene or Dodge or Ogallala. As the cowman works he keeps an ear out for the market reports and later for blizzard warnings. In the meantime there is branding and dehorning of the young stuff, and weaning time, with the voice of the cow loud on every wind.
And as for thousands of years past he knows that they'll all make it somehow, if they can make it to grass.
NOTES
On Some Controversial Points and Incidents
(The published material on man and his cattle in the Great Plains region is vast. Much more lies unpublished but open to the researcher in the various historical repositories and particularly in the National Archives and related federal accumulations, such as the records of army posts and military divisions, the Department of the Interior, including Indian Affairs, the Congress and its investigations and hearings, the federal courts, the Department of Agriculture, and so on. Personal accumulations may also grow too voluminous for listing during a lifetime of research, interviews and writing concentrated upon one region. Often, too, the sources are confidential. In my childhood I knew men who came to the Niobrara River with Chisum's Jinglebob herd fresh from the Lincoln County War, some of them excellent cowmen, others hideouts. Few who were connected with the man-burning Olive gang liked to have this widely known. Although perhaps a dozen men from the Johnson County War lived in the sandhills around us, several were traveling under various names and the survivors are still unwilling to be connected with their stories, as are many others over the cow country, for various and sometimes good reasons.)
(Sources from bibliography listed by authors only.)
BOOK ONE
Chapter I. Much on the character of Longhorns from stories told by Jim Dahlman, A. R. Modisett, Tom Milligan and other old trail drivers in northwest Nebraska, and from Dobie's The Longhorns.
Chapter II. Wheel in America: Kluckhohn, Clyde, "Suppose Columbus Had Stayed at Home." Saturday Review. Sept. 22, 1956.
BOOK TWO
Chapter I. Olives: J. W. Snyder Papers, Library, University of Texas; Moore, Lee, Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, pam., Cheyenne, 1923; Benschoter; Foght; Taylorsville (Tex.) Times, Feb. 10, 1879; Appeal for Change of Venue, State of Nebraska vs I. P. Olive, (etc.), Indictment for Murder, 5th Jud. Dist., Adams Co., including depositions from everyone known to be involved, Nebraska State Historical Society.
Chapter IV. Olives: See Chapter I above, also Butcher; Jenkins; and Daily State Journal (Lincoln, Nebr.), Dec. 1878 through Dec. 1880.
BOOK THREE
Chapter I. Comancheros: Files of Mackenzie Expedition, Sept.-Dec. 1874, Dept. of Texas, War Records, National Archives, for crushing defeat of Indians who supplied them.
Olive trial: See Notes above.
Chapter III. Montana man burners: When the "Cattle King" bill failed in 1884, even Granville Stuart, formerly a voice for moderation against the anger of Roosevelt and De Mores, was ready for direct action. He helped organize the Stranglers against the so-called horse thieves of the badlands. After some scattered killings, they made a dawn attack, July 8, on the old Missouri River woodyard at Bates Point, below the Musselshell, and burned the cabin to the ground with, some said, five smoking bodies inside. Of the men who escaped several were hanged later, the total dead estimated from 19 to 75. There was angry protest and some complaint that the aim was to scare out the rush of settlers. James Fergus, a neighboring cattleman, finally said the attack was not "by bands of lawless cowboys but was the result of a general understanding among all the large cattle ranges of Montana." There was a story that the Stranglers made a breed boy play his fiddle for them all evening and then strung him up next morning. In 1924 an old Montanan told this author, "You run with horse thieves, them days, you hung with them."