More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  There was always a recognized alleyway of vice. In Abilene one learns that it was called Texas Street, in Ellsworth it was Naunchville, in Newton it was Hide Park. And Dodge City claims to have donated its own particular label - the Red Light district - to the rest of the world. It was, some say, the area surrounding one particular “sporting house” which, rather grander than its neighbors, had red-tinted windows on the ground floor and was, therefore, called the Red Light House. Ellsworth, not to be outdone, has it that when the locomotive men took a few hours off while their trains were being loaded with cattle, they would take the red brake lanterns off their cabooses to hang outside whichever establishment they were visiting, so that they might be found when their train was ready to go. Like so many stories about the early West, you can take your pick.

  The joy girls, “everyone a genuine former virgin”, were invariably the first women to arrive at the various railheads and, later, at the mining camps. They seem to have had a civilizing effect: men might even take a bath and change their shirts. The new arrivals were known by a variety of inventive soubriquets: prairie nymphs, calico queens, fancies, soiled doves and Marys (as in Magdalene). Individually, they traded under some appealing pseudonyms: Lonesome Flower, Little Miss Muffet, Lady Jane and, neatest of all, Sue de Nym. No doubt some of them really did have hearts of gold.

  “I never seed such a little town with such a mighty name” is the reported comment of one out-of-season traveler when he arrived in Abilene. The Dodge City Times, in September 1877, when most of the Texans had hit the trail for home, opined that “our city is relapsing into morality”. Then, with nostalgia for times just past, it reported that “at this time of writing there are only seventeen saloons and dance houses, sixty prostitutes, thirty gamblers and eighty cowboys left in town”. It was all good small-town Chamber of Commerce stuff - with no Parent Teacher Association to worry about. But civilization (and much else) had surely arrived when, a few years later, there was formed the Dodge City Dramatic Society; it even put on an abridged performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream; maybe they played it for laughs. At about the same time, the place got itself its own Cowboy Silver Cornet Band - so that “Dodge City can toot its own horn”. Presently the band shipped east and invited itself to play at the inauguration of President Harrison.

  Nevertheless, these civilizing touches and that earlier “relapse into morality” were only partial. From the height of the cow-town era of the mid 1870s to the end of the century, and across the frontier as a whole - which would include the many mining camps - it seems (though estimates vary) that as many as 5,000 violent deaths may have occurred. Most would have been by gunshot or hangings (also sometimes referred to as being “jerked to Jesus”). Judged against the rough-and-ready legal code of what has come down to us as the “Wild West”, some of that so-called justice might even have been warranted. As someone is reported to have reminisced, “We didn’t have much law in those early days. Fact is we didn’t need much -till all the lawyers arrived.”

  The Wild West? Yes, it certainly existed. And if one were to point to a time and place where that universally popular concept was born, the time would be the early 1870s, and the place would be any cow-town.

  The cow-towns are still there, but they don’t do so much cow-business these days. Mostly it is wheat. Coming into town, past the feed-lot, you slow to 30 m.p.h. and roll past the Old Corral Trailer Park and the Frontier Filling Station: “Fastest Gas in the West”. Then just beyond John Deere Implements and the Town-n-Country One-Stop Mart, the speed limit drops again to a mere 20 m.p.h., and you’d better believe it: they’ve got radar hereabouts. You start looking for somewhere to bunk down for the night: the Trail Motor Inn, the Western Skies, the Silver Spur, the Long Horn, or the Lariat. But maybe you could find something cheaper at the Lazy U. You check in. The lady stops sniffing her Vicks Inhaler for long enough to run your card through her swipe; she hands you a room key. You take your car round to park in front of your room; you go inside and, depending on the season, you turn down the heat or turn up the cool. Then you “wash up” - after you’ve unwrapped the soap, sorted out an assortment of towels, worked out how the faucet at the basin works, and taken the Sanitized-for-Your-Protection label off the seat. All this for $52.50 plus tax, if you’re lucky. If you’re in Dodge City, there will be a card on the mirror inviting you to “Step downtown and relive the Legend at the Boot Hill and Front Street Museum and Gift Shop”. No sir, the cow-towns may not do too much cow-business any more, but they sure can dream.

  Cattle Barons

  Cattle raising in the western states of America is at the present time one of the most lucrative enterprises in the world.

  From the 1882 prospectus for the Wyoming Cattle Ranche Ltd, a British company

  Where is the man that wants to be a cattle king? We venture to say that within ten years his money will fill a boxcar.

  From the Mandan Daily Pioneer (North Dakota), July 1883

  ***

  In 1873 the prices at the Kansas railheads were poorer than usual. So some Texan cattlemen, hoping for a better bargain the next year, held their herds back from sale and wintered them on the open plains. It was a mild winter and in the spring the beeves were found to have put on weight; certainly they fetched better prices than the travel-tired animals that shortly arrived from Texas. What had been a temporary solution started to become a permanent answer: the grassy plains of Kansas, then Nebraska and, within a few years, those of Wyoming and Montana and even Alberta became a new home for the cowboys and for the founding fathers of big-money ranches.

  Given that there was not a fence between Texas and the tundra, the early cattle spreads, some of them far bigger than mere feudal baronies, had imaginary boundaries, the location of which had much to do with whoever was doing the imagining. Of course there were some sharp disputes, but, for much of the time, the cattle barons got along in an uneasy alliance with each other; they had common interests, the chief of which was “to have and to hold” against the disrespectful latecomer - the small man who had the impertinence to “locate” along some creek or meadowland “belonging” to a baron. “How come that man is running all those new-branded calves? He sure didn’t bring them with him when he pulled in last fall. And whose land does he think it is anyway?” The fact that a baron would be claiming exclusive possession of land to which he often had no formal title was, as far as he was concerned, wholly irrelevant.

  His brand was his heraldic crest; it marked his property. As in the early days in Texas, a common problem centered on the annual “crop” of unbranded calves. In the mêlée of the spring round-up, it was inevitable that some of those “doggies” would become separated from their branded mothers. And rustlers were becoming increasingly bold. It was too easy, given the enormous size of the some of those early ranches, for thieves to sneak into unguarded corners and drive off 20 or 30 head - and not just maverick calves. Such cattle could be quickly rebranded. It became a very serious offense to be caught with a running iron: an iron rod (rather like a short upside-down walking stick), the crook of which, when red hot, was used by the rustler to “modify” an existing brand to something different. Some men were artists at it. But if caught, they were likely to pay with their lives - jerked for Jesus.

  The arithmetic of ranching was simple. It was reckoned to cost $8-$10 to raise a calf over three years. At the end of that period, the full-grown steer might sell at the railhead for between $25 and $30. So, even at a poor showing, there was a theoretical return of, say, 40% a year on capital. Of course, it often did not work out like that. For a start, the calculations took little account of the ups and downs of the market. Further, they ignored the weather which, in a dry summer, could reduce carcass weight by a third; and in a severe winter, when the thermometer dropped well below freezing for weeks on end, could much more than decimate a herd. And yes, there were those rustlers. Nevertheless, despite these problems, the profits were
still unusually attractive.

  An ex-army officer, General James Brisbin, in the pay of the railroads, had written a book with a seductive title: The Beef Bonanza or How to Get Rich on the Plains. Besides having a domestic readership “back East”, it sold well in Britain. Indeed, The Scotsman newspaper sent a reporter, John Macdonald, on a fact-finding tour of the West. His report, published as Food from the Far West, was as enthusiastic as the American booklet. Simultaneously, the high price of meat in Britain was prompting various experiments in crude forms of refrigeration, to permit the import of carcasses from across the Atlantic. The problem was reliability.

  It was a New Yorker, John Bate, who came up with the first effective solution. In 1875, he persuaded a shipping company to adapt part of a hold. He loaded just 12 carcasses and several tons of winter ice. Throughout the 8-day crossing to Liverpool, he employed men to turn fans, to drive a steady flow of icy air past the carcasses. The meat arrived in good condition. On the next voyage, the ship-owners provided steam to power bigger fans. Within three years, Liverpool was receiving 1,000 tons of meat every week. And at the same time investors, surveyors, accountants and long-faced lawyers were buying tickets for places they had never heard of: Ogallala, Missoula, Amarillo, Fargo, Rapid City, Sioux Falls and Medicine Bow. Joint-stock companies had arrived in the West. The place would never be the same again.

  Some of the well-to-do British immigrants came not merely to enlarge their fortunes but to become self-styled “Gentlemen of the Prairie”. They brought their hunting pinks with them; they galloped after coyotes; they built baronial ranch-houses furnished from New York and London; they became founding members of the Cheyenne Club. Within a few years, the Club’s cuisine and cellars would compare with any gentlemen’s club in New York or London.

  One thing that everyone, from both sides of the Atlantic, had early recognized: if the meat business were going to prosper, the feral Longhorn, more bone and gristle than meat, would have to be replaced. So, the Scots brought in the quicker fattening and more docile Shorthorn and Angus; the English imported the Hereford. These three breeds have been the mainstay of the American beef industry ever since. Within 20 years the Longhorn was almost extinct.

  ***

  In confident ignorance I wrote that last sentence in London. A few months later I found myself driving along Kansas Rural Route 14. As I came over a rise I saw two cars stopped about a mile ahead. It seemed that they were held up while some cattle crossed the road. As I approached and then slowed I realized, with surprise, that the cattle were Longhorns. I had never seen any of these legendary creatures before, so I got out to ask someone what was going on. She and her friends had on large sun-bonnets and long dresses; their ensembles were straight out of the pioneering 1870s. She explained that next Saturday, Ellsworth (10 miles down the road) would be celebrating its 140th birthday; it had started life as a cattle-shipping town on the newly-arrived Kansas Pacific Railroad in the summer of 1867. Fortunately, I was able to say that I had heard about that. Those Longhorns crossing the road were part of a “memorial” herd and had been trucked in from Oklahoma to a nearby ranch. Now they were being driven toward Ellsworth, in readiness to be paraded down Main Street as the high spot of the commemorative celebrations. “You oughta come - it’ll be a lot of fun.”

  It was too. On parade was all the joyous hoopla of small-town America: strutting bands and leggy twirlers, cowboys on showy horses, covered wagons, bars open all day and half the night, hot dogs and burgers, raffles (I didn’t win a ’73 replica Winchester rifle), side shows, square dancing, and, as something of a finale, those Longhorns came sauntering down Main Street. I was surprised, after all that I had read, that they were so docile. A neighbor explained that, over many years of breeding, they had “been tamed down a bit”. He then wondered what a Brit was doing in those parts. I explained. He asked me to convey his polite displeasure to BBC-America (a cable channel): his complaint was that the channel was now no longer showing “One Man and His Dog”, a series about competitions between shepherds and their respective dogs. He bred Border Collies, so this was his favorite program. I said that I’d pass on his disappointment. Who would have thought that, in the middle of Kansas, one would find a stetsoned aficionado of that most pastoral and English of programs? But these strange things occasionally happen.

  ***

  The Cheyenne Club, where the cattle barons were to plot the armed invasion of Johnson County

  Through the late 1870s and into the 1880s, British investment played as important a role in the early ranching business as did those three imported breeds. The aristocracy led the charge: Lord Dunmore, Lord Dunraven, the Marquis of Tweeddale and the Earl of Airlie took up land along the foothills of the Rockies. Even today there are said to be several titled British families who draw dividends from cattle companies started in those early days.

  The Cheyenne Club, with its $500 joining fee and $200 annual subscription, its uniformed waiters, its hunting trophies and its full-dress balls has long gone. But not so some other traces of those Anglo-Americans. One can still come across unexpected echoes: close by Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains there is the IXL Ranch. It was founded by two retired officers of the 9th Lancers; that is what the brand still stands for. And I remember meeting an attorney in Laramie, Wyoming, who subscribed to The Illustrated London News and Punch - because “the family always has”. And, still in Wyoming, there is a ranch where, in the stables, alongside the heavy (almost armchair) Western saddles, one can see two lightweight hunting saddles shipped over from the shires 130 years ago. Then out on the plains of central Kansas, there is the patriotically named town of Victoria; the local high school plays baseball in the George Grant Park, named after a baronet who founded the place. He came West with a party of friends to restore the family fortune. But things did not work out for him or his chums and, after a couple of years, bored by the heat of summer and the icy winds of winter, they all went home. Incidentally, just 6 miles from Victoria is the town of Catharine, founded by some Russian émigrés and named after their queen who, nearly 100 years earlier, had helped their grandparents. (We will come to that story.) And spread right across the West there are scores of other echoing names: Andover, Derby, Glasgow, Kensington, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Midlothian, Nottingham, New Waverly, Albion, Stockton, Westmoreland, Torrington, Newcastle, Plymouth, Winchester, Watford City and many more.

  Ranch life soon mellowed the stiff-necked attitudes of those upper-crust Britons. One such, Horace Plunkett, the younger son of Lord Dunsany, wrote in his diary on his first visit, before he knew better: “Here, there does not seem to be a gentleman - no, not one.” After a year or two of rough and tumble he wrote more appreciatively of his American neighbors: “They are to a certain amount clannish and feel our intrusion. The exact feeling they would express thus, ‘You compare us with your society. We don’t compare favorably perhaps. But we are members of a greater nation than yours and just as good - though you don’t know it.’ English visitors make themselves and us unpopular by their incapability to adapt themselves to the people.”

  ***

  The captain of one of the teams told me that, as a young man, he had “done a spell at your (sic) Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester”. He and his friends played most Sundays through the summer: the Over-the-Hill Boys against the Wolf Creek Crew, the Dutch Creek Outfit versus Sheridan Town. For the rest of the week, the ground doubled as the rancher’s airstrip. But, apart from the wind-sock and the Big Horn Mountains behind, the scene - rugs on the grass, and picnics spread out on the tailgates of the station wagons - was not very different to the one below Windsor Castle on a fine July afternoon. Polo arrived in the West with the English m’luds who, well over a century ago, came to find land in this part of Wyoming.

  The transatlantic connection still continues, as I found out a few days later when I drove to Sheridan airport (a few miles from that polo field) to pick up some
BBC film stock. As soon as the airport manager recognized that I was a Brit, he leant over the counter and quietly suggested that I might like to pay the $14 that, he explained, the British Embassy had underpaid on the landing-and-parking fee incurred some months earlier by an aircraft “belonging to your Queen”. The Queen? Here in Wyoming? Surely not. “Oh yes, you bet.” And he pointed to a photograph on the wall. No doubt about it. She was coming down the steps of her aircraft on arrival.

  While he explained, I reached for my wallet; after all, it seemed that the nation’s credit worthiness (to say nothing of the Queen’s) had suddenly become my personal responsibility. Then the manager laughed. “Only joking; and even if it was a few dollars, I wouldn’t be chasing you for it. A charming lady - great to have her here.” Relief on my part? No, disappointment. After all, I might have found unique fame as the Man who Once Paid the Queen’s Parking Ticket.

  It had happened the previous autumn: the Queen, at the end of a royal tour of Canada, diverted to put down at Sheridan to stay for a few unofficial days with some old friends, Lord and Lady Porchester. They had (and still have) a small ranch tucked under the lee of the Big Horn Mountains. Lady Porchester’s grandfather was the youngest son of the Earl of Portsmouth. As a young man seeking to make his own way in the world, he had come west in 1888 to start a ranch on which to breed horses for the British army. In time he became an American citizen and, in 1908, he ran for and was elected to the Wyoming legislature. Meanwhile his father had died and the title had passed to his eldest brother. Then, over the next decade, his other brothers also died until, unexpectedly, he found himself with a seat in the House of Lords and, and at the same time, that place in Wyoming’s own small parliament. Rather than renounce the Portsmouth title, he reluctantly gave up his American citizenship. But his children remained Americans. Decades later, his grandson, Malcolm Wallop, became one of Wyoming’s two US Senators (1976-1995), and it was his granddaughter, Jean, who was now the Queen’s Wyoming hostess. How come? Well, in 1955 she had married the Queen’s racing manager and long-time friend, Lord Porchester. Presumably, “Porchie” (as he seems always to be known) had been telling the Queen about Wyoming for some years and now, at his urging, she had come by to see for herself. By all accounts she had a very good time, and although it was a private visit she acquiesced to public interest and went for several walkabouts to meet the people of Sheridan and the nearby “village” of Big Horn. They still talk about her.