More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Gerald also talked about the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty whereby the Sioux were “granted” ownership of their Black Hills “for as long as the grass shall grow”. Despite nearly a century of legal actions against the United States, the only real “honoring” of that treaty has been in various offers of cash - most recently a suggested settlement of $750 million. The Sioux point out that, over the years, the value of the gold taken out of the Black Hills by successive generations of miners has been far, far more than that. So they are reluctant to settle; they just want the Black Hills back in their undisputed ownership - as the 1868 Treaty demanded, and still demands.

  Towards the end of our conversation, I reminded Gerald of something he had said in that interview of 48 years ago: “We have had to learn to live in two worlds: the white man’s world and the Sioux world...to try to learn each of their values, which are totally different, in order just to survive.” He thought that was only slightly less true than it had been in 1963...

  Cowboys And Cow-Towns

  Hell is now in session...murder, lust, highway robbery and whores run the city day and night.

  From the Abilene Chronicle in the summer of 1869; the paper seemed to take some pride in the mayhem.

  We didn’t have much law in those early days. Fact is we didn’t need much - till all the lawyers arrived.

  A comment that appears in more than one reminiscence about various cow-towns across Kansas in the early 1880s.

  ***

  True, it was a long time ago, and I was only in his company for a couple of hours. But for me, even now, nearly 50 years later, Mr. Roberts is still someone very special. He had lived right through the taking of the West. Indeed, as a young man, he himself had played a part in that “taking”. Over the years, I have met and listened to a number of old timers, but Mr. Roberts is the only one who went back that far, back to the days of the pioneers and their covered wagons. I still wonder at my luck.

  He was 101. On that hot Colorado afternoon, he tilted his stetson forward against the glare of the sun and then, in the slow and scratchy voice of a very old man, he told me and the camera about coming west from Iowa with his father and mother. He reckoned that he was 12 or 13 years old. They had traveled by train as far as North Platte, Nebraska. There they had unloaded their two wagons, hitched their mules and trekked off for a couple of hundred miles towards northern Colorado, to find land for a homestead. He remembered the bad temper of some of the Indians along the way and, later, the bitterness of his parents and other would-be settlers when they learned that the Washington government was intending to issue some of them with guns - in settlement, in his view, of some dubious treaty obligation. His family found their land near Fort Collins; he still lived on the place. He nodded over his shoulder towards the distant Rockies, and recalled that there were still a few buffalo when he had first arrived in those parts. He talked about watching strings of long-horns coming up from Texas and the arguments that his father had with the cowboys to keep the herds off his land. Later, as a young man, he had done some cowboying himself.

  Cowboy life: a break for a dip…

  Meeting Mr. Roberts was quite fortuitous. A mile or two further up the road from his place there was a Minuteman missile. That is why we were there, to film a practice re-fuelling. We were making a BBC documentary series about The West, past and present. From the rocket, elevated and upright above its underground bunker, there streamed a feather of liquid oxygen. This was the height of the Cold War, and the missile’s destination was exactly fixed on some target on the far side of the world - though it was unknown to the crew in their concrete below. “We don’t need to know where that baby’s going; we just look after the thing.” I remember the crew commander telling me that if the coded signal ever came, the rocket and several dozen others like it spread across Colorado, Wyoming and the Dakotas could be “on their way” in fewer than six minutes. Inevitably, one reflected that less than a century earlier, quite possibly across that very ground, some belligerent Cheyenne might have sneaked up on a small wagon train, killed the men and made off with the wives and their children.

  It was while we were having lunch in a diner after the filming at the rocket site that the waitress (I think she was Mr. Roberts’ great-granddaughter) told us about the old man. She made a phone call; we went along and introduced ourselves. He had been 3 years old when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; he was 14 when Colonel Custer was killed; he was 28 when Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank; he was far too old to serve in the Great War. His life had spanned the whole history of the settling of the West, from wilderness to nuclear wipe-out.

  ***

  The Great Plains were the last part of the United States to be settled. Yet once settlement did begin, the pace was lightning fast. From wilderness to wallpaper - and the stuff is as good a gage of domestication as one might find - took just one very short lifetime. For sheer speed, say 40 years, over such a huge spread of country, there has never been anything quite like it.

  Until the Civil War, the overland pioneers had only one idea about the plains: to get across them. They were a vast and interrupting nuisance. Except for the Mormons and their Kingdom of the Saints, settlement ended at the Missouri. It did not begin again for another 1,600 miles, until the wagons finally halted in far-away Oregon, or as they rolled down the western slope of the California Sierra. Between the river-line and those distant Utopias lay this huge and, to the whites, empty land. True, ever since the Louisiana Purchase, the nation could claim territorial title to the wilderness; but that was about all it could claim. And even that “ownership” ignored the prior, but ill-defined, rights of a scatter of indigenous inhabitants who, after all, had been Americans for several millennia before the word had even existed. Even today, from eye height, there are some vistas on the Great Plains that look across a land that seems uninhabited. This steppe-land stretches unbroken from Texas north to the Canadian prairies, and from the 98th meridian to the Rocky Mountains. Whole empires have been smaller than this.

  On official maps printed not much more than 150 years ago, much of this ocean of land was written off under the forbidding title of the “Great American Desert”. Yet less than 25 years later, in 1890, the US Census Bureau decided that the vastness had been filled to the extent that the use of the word “frontier” was no longer justified or relevant. The federal statisticians and bureaucrats were more or less right. What had initially been called the Great American Desert, and then a little later the Wild West, would now often be referred to, by the railroads’ boosters, as the Garden of America. To be fair, in some of those parts irrigated from the rivers that was not just Madison Avenue booster talk. Almost the whole process of settlement had taken less than a generation. How?

  Well, to start a little before the beginning, the cowboy had something to do with it, though he himself was anything but a settler. His problem, though he did not see it that way, was that he didn’t have a wife; he had a horse. As a Frenchman once neatly put it, “pas de cheval, pas de cowboy”. Horses are for traveling, wives are for putting down roots and raising families. The cowboy had nothing against wives and children, but he was (and his few true descendants sometimes still are) shy of strong family ties. He was and still is (the few that are left) a drifter with a Castilian pride in his freedom; he doesn’t care to plan too far ahead and, until he is into middle-age, he does not take easily to being tied down to mortgaged domesticity, least of all to a homestead or a farm. Anyway, he is likely to be bow-legged, and his high-heeled boots are not much good for spade-work - for digging wells or irrigation ditches or holes for fence-posts. In fact his boots are not much good for anything except riding. Yes, I exaggerate; but not beyond recognition.

  So the footloose cowboy looked down on the humble farmer and called him a “sod-buster”. Sometimes he still does. I would not want it thought that I do not admire cowboys - though, as I have just implied, there are not many thoroughbreds
left. They are among the straightest men I know. In their hey-day - and their dominion was very brief, 30 years at the most - they were the stubble-chinned princes of the plains. And they gave the West something that is still not quite gone: its romance and its style. Those qualities come through today in the Westerner’s instant informality: “Howdi, Tim”, with a handshake like a vice; and in his walk, his accent, his humor, his hospitality, his sentimental and wonderfully tuneful songs, his sometimes gauche yet always disarming manners, and in his occasionally rather graceless politics.

  I am glad that their forebears have, for the rest of us, become the accepted archetype of the West; after all, they opened up a good deal of the place. But the realist in me knows that the cowboys had little to do with the actual settling of it. Indeed, for a few short years they warred contemptuously against the incoming settlers; what the sod-busters wanted to do with the cowboys’ open range was not just alien, it was downright hostile. So they fought back. Perhaps, contrary to the myth, the cowboy’s Colt or Winchester did not really win the West, not for settlement anyway.

  Like many legends, that of the cowboy has several possible beginnings. But as good a place to start as any other would be in Texas just after the Civil War. Texans straggling home after the collapse of the Confederacy found that, while the half-wild long-horns of the back country had multiplied “sump’n considerable”, there were no local markets for this latent wealth. So a few hardy outfits headed their herds toward the hungry mining camps of the Rocky Mountains, or to army posts and early Indian reservations in Kansas and Nebraska. Others tried to reach north-east all the way to the abattoirs of St. Louis. But the longhorns (though themselves immune) carried a disease, tick fever, which aroused the hostility of the Missouri settlers; they blocked the cowboys, sometimes with guns. They established what they called “deadlines”; indeed, it seems that is where and how the term derives. So the only thing left for the Texan cattlemen was to convert their stringy cattle into mere tallow and hides. But the profits were small. And that, to a Texan, even in those days, was a waste of time.

  ...and a break for the chuck-tent

  The solution lay with a certain Joseph McCoy, a 29-year-old cattle merchant from Illinois. He had two older brothers who were also involved in the business, but years later Joseph wrote a book about it all so he still gets the credit. “This young man”, he wrote of himself, “conceived the idea of opening up an outlet for Texas cattle... a market whereat the southern drover and the northern buyer would meet on equal footing”. It was an absurdly simple idea and was to make a great deal of money for the McCoys.

  Early in 1867 (only a few months after Colonel and Libbie Custer arrived in Fort Riley), the McCoy brothers looked at a map and saw their opportunity. They would build stockyards somewhere along the Kansas-Pacific railroad, which was then starting to push across the plains of Kansas towards the distant Rockies. Young Joseph was dispatched to get things started. After being turned away from Salina and Junction City -they feared tick-fever - he settled on a scatter of shacks and tents called Abilene: “A poor dead place”, he later wrote, “consisting of about a dozen huts.” He bought the place. Then he sent three or four agents riding down to Texas to spread the word: bring your cattle north to Abilene where they can be shipped by rail all the way back to the meat-hungry towns and cities of the East; everyone will make a packet. There was a last-minute hitch when the Kansas-Pacific Railroad pulled out; the bosses back in St. Louis had decided they did not want tick-fever infecting their wagons. So McCoy made a quick deal with the smaller Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad; it agreed to haul the cattle in their trucks if the Kansas-Pacific would let them run over the latter’s tracks for the first few hundred miles of the journey east. Everyone agreed to this arrangement, but, as a result of the Kansas-Pacific’s reluctance to have a bigger part in the deal, St. Louis missed out on the beef trade. Chicago was where the Hannibal and St. Joseph terminated. So Chicago was started on its way to becoming the biggest meat market in the world.

  In the first year of McCoy’s stockyards, 1867, he shipped about 30,000 long-horns. He thought that he could do better. So, in the fall, he sent more emissaries south. They promised that for every steer delivered to Abilene, Mr. McCoy would pay three times as much as they were then getting from the Texas tallow merchants. The Texans took the bait and in 1868 they came surging up the trail like “wolves who smell summer butter”, as someone oddly put it at the time. Through that summer a third of a million cattle were shipped east in 10,000 wagons. And those earlier promises of solid cash were honored immediately, from whence, some folk suggest, we derive that ultimate guarantee of good faith: the Real McCoy.

  During the five short shipping seasons of 1867 to 1871, Abilene was probably the wildest town in the West, though it was not without competition. With more than 200 foot-loose young men in town at any one time, it was “the beautiful, bibulous, Babylon of the frontier”. Like sailors coming into port after a long and lonely voyage, the cowboys - paid off at the end of a 700-mile trail - set the place ablaze. Sometimes literally. For a week or two, before riding back to Texas, they were unemployed, uninhibited and totally unrestrained. No wonder that the saloon-keepers, the card sharps, the store-keepers and the madams rubbed their hands in anticipation as soon as they saw the first dust clouds coming up from the south. In 1871, three quarters of a million cattle came up from Texas.

  In April of that year, the town council, under Mayor McCoy, anxious to bring some order to the place, signed up Wild Bill Hickock as town marshal. He was a dandy with a big reputation, and he demanded an appropriate salary: $150 a month. But he seems to have done his job; the killing rate went down and he himself only shot two men all summer. Perhaps he was so effective that he did himself out of a job; the town council paid him off in the fall and appointed a successor at a mere $50 a month. Perhaps the truth was that, as the last of the trains rattled away to the east that fall, the cattle trade - together with the saloons, card sharps and the rest - had moved on. With the railroad and branch lines pushing further west, McCoy had shifted his operations to a new and more convenient railhead: Wichita.

  The pattern was repeated all through the 1870s as the railroad built out across the plains: Abilene, Salina, Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge City. Each reigned briefly as the self-styled Queen City of the Plains until it was succeeded by the next. But Abilene was the first and the original. Incidentally, only a few years later, in quieter times, this was the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower; his boyhood home still stands.

  There was a saying “there was no Sunday west of Junction City and no God west of Salina”. At this distance in time, it is difficult to sort some of the legend from the reality. But we know quite enough to judge that in the flux of a Kansas cow-town, life did not count for much. For example, in the first four months of Dodge City’s existence, the claim was that “of the 24 people who have been buried, not one has died a natural death, except for a prostitute who shot herself”. Whether that claim is half true or merely colorful does not really matter; more than a century later every one of those Kansas cow-towns tells much the same story of itself: proud of its raucous birth, yet, at the same time, coyly embarrassed at its heathen beginnings. After all, this was a society almost entirely made of single males. So, as already implied, the ingredients of mayhem were simple: too many young men on the loose, too many loaded guns, too many gamblers, too much cheap liquor, and too few women - cheap or otherwise.

  The cow-town of Stratton in Nebraska celebrates its first anniversary in 1888.

  Glamor has become the legend; dirt, dust and squalor and not a little disease (particularly what they called “the venereals”) are probably nearer the truth. Yet we have not been entirely misled. There was a raw courage and even a rough chivalry among many of those people on the cattle frontier, though judging by the number of people shot from behind, or bushwhacked at short range from the shadows, there must have been a number of p
rudent cowards around too.

  Each cow-town grew up around its railroad stockyards. At first, it was not a town at all, just a few false-front saloons, a dance hall, and a rickety general store or two. These were quickly built of canvas and wood; they were frequently burning down. If the place prospered and business was going well, the traders would get together and contract with someone to lay wooden planks in front of their shops - the boardwalk. This saved walking in the mud or dust. Then the traders on the other side of the street (if there was another side) would do the same, so that they did not lose out to the competition. Presently someone would start a newspaper, someone else would set up as a lawyer - one did not need any high-flown qualifications. Pretty soon there might be a bank and a post office. By now, a sheriff would have been appointed and, with the income he collected from fines and petty taxes, a jail would be built. Within a few weeks, the place had a name, a mayor and, no doubt, the beginnings of a reputation.