More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Her VC10 of the Queen’s Flight was, and still is, the largest aircraft to have put down at Sheridan’s airport, which for some reason has a longer runway than one might normally expect.

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  But, to return to earlier days... By the early 1880s the cattle business had reached some kind of high-water mark. Lured by optimistic prospectuses, investment capital was pouring in. Scottish investors were particularly enthusiastic; their jute industry, centered on Dundee, was making large profits, and so there was money to be turned around and put into new enterprises. Even Americans were looking back across the Atlantic for funding, and the English were not to be left behind.

  One of the most interesting English “migrants” was an eccentric young man called Moreton Frewen. Fortunately, from his own and other people’s reminiscences (some now kept in the archives of the University of Wyoming), we know a good deal about him and his various Western ventures. Mr. Frewen was a keen “follower” of the horses. On a summer afternoon in 1877 at the Doncaster Races, he backed a considerable winner. Thinking that, with luck, he might at least treble his money, he put all his winnings on a horse in the next race. If he won, he would be rich. If he lost, well, he’d go and try his luck in this American cattle “game” about which he had been hearing such enticing rumors. He lost. But his life was lived by two complementary mottoes: winner-take-all, or if things don’t work out something else will turn up. So on the eve of his departure he threw a party he could not afford and said his optimistic goodbyes. His friends, presumably amused at Moreton Frewen’s happy profligacy, wished him well and re-christened him Mortal Ruin.

  A few months later, with just three companions, he was caught deep in the winter snows of the Big Horn Mountains. The temperature was far below freezing and a blizzard was not long past. Even today, the skidoo-mounted locals will tell you that winter is no time to go trekking across their high-country wilderness. But, as one comes to know the man better, there seems to be something characteristic, even admirable, about Mortal Ruin’s breezy carelessness. He was ever the optimist: things would work out.

  Once through the mountains (he and his English chums drove a small herd of bison to bulldoze a path through the drifts), Frewen looked out eastward; the vastness of the Powder River basin stretched away forever. The land was hardly clear of Indians; the Custer debacle had occurred only three years earlier, just two days’ ride to the north. Now, from somewhere just below the snow line, Frewen looked in wonder at what he saw: “Again and again we dismounted to spy out the far distant horizon through our glasses. Never was such a view. To the east was limitless prairie, the course of the Powder River showing its broad belt of cotton-woods fading out in the far distance. Not a human habitation in sight.”

  I know the scene because, almost 100 years later, from what may have been much the same spot, I filmed a slow panning shot across the same marvelous vastness. Yes, indeed, “Never was such a view.” There were still not many “human habitations in sight”.

  It was that “limitless prairie” that set Mortal Ruin thinking. Here he would make his fortune. He hurried back to England to talk up his project with the people who mattered. He called the enterprise the Powder River Cattle Company; private partnership shares sold quickly to the value of £300,000 (about £18 million or $26 million today). He invited the Duke of Manchester to be the chairman of directors. With the money raised, he hurried back to the Powder River. He now set about establishing himself in the grand manner. He started to build a two-story chateau: the “home ranche”. “We selected the site with much care. It was on a flat prairie about a hundred yards from the river and perhaps seventy feet above it. There we rightly judged we would be free of mosquitoes. Nor did it escape us that half-a-mile away was a seam of excellent coal quite seven thick.”

  The building logs had to be hauled 20 miles from the pine forests on the eastern flanks of the Big Horn Mountains. In the same month that construction began, Frewen paid for several thousand Longhorns to be driven 700 miles north from Texas. From New York, Chicago and London he ordered a prefabricated staircase, curtain material, carpets, hardwood paneling, and several four-poster beds. Also on his shopping list were several tons of flour, sugar, lentils, dried peas and soap; and sacks of seed for a vegetable garden. Then there was a sawmill, hardware for a blacksmith and a carpenter’s shop, and several cast-iron stoves for cooking and winter heating. And lastly came what he considered to be the other essentials: a piano, sofas, pictures, boxes of quality cigars and fine French wines. Everything had to be hauled from the nearest point on the Union Pacific railroad, 200 miles away.

  The ranch was huge: 50 miles in one direction and 50 miles in the other, or 1.6 million acres. Yet none of that land belonged to Moreton Frewen and his aristocratic backers in any legal sense. Some nervous investors asked a London lawyer for an opinion. Looking across the Atlantic, he did his best: “In point of fact... these people put their cattle in common, and if any stranger came in and built a ranche (sic) and put out his cattle we think the place would be, to use a vulgar expression, made ‘too hot to hold him’.” Exactly. For a decade or so, the system worked.

  Within a year, Moreton Frewen doubled the number of cattle. At the same time he was importing Shorthorn and Hereford breeding stock to improve his herds. In the evenings, he wrote to his moneyed and titled friends inviting them to come West and see things for themselves. After all, work on his two-story chateau was now almost finished. The paneling and the staircase were in. The main room on the ground floor was 40 ft square with a large stone fireplace at each end. The dining table could seat 30 people with ease. There was a separate drawing room and, up the stairs, a corridor of large bedrooms. A cook and a butler were in place. The cowboys were agog: they had never seen anything like it; they called it Frewen’s Castle. Nor had they seen anything like the guests who now, over the next two and three summers, accepted those invitations. The house-parties combined the influential and the famous with the merely double-barreled: Lords Gordon, Granville, Manners, Mayo, Queensbury, Linlithgow, Desborough and Donoughmore, Sir Samuel and Lady Baker (just back from their search for the source of the Nile), Mr. T. Porter-Porter, and Mr. J. Turner-Turner - amongst others.

  The guests got off the Union Pacific train at a wayside halt north-west of Laramie; they transferred to a stagecoach sent to meet them. Then they swayed and bumped for two days (and those 200 miles) across the mountains and the prairies. During the summer months, it seems that there was music in the drawing room, al fresco banquets in the bunk-house and, who knows, croquet on the prairie. Buffalo Bill came by several times to take some of the guests off hunting along the foothills of the Big Horns. The cowboys got confused with all these notables and assumed that everyone coming from “the old country” had a “handle”; they called their boss Sir Frewen.

  At a ford further down the Powder he established a post office and a general store for his and other people’s cowboys. He called the place Sussex after his home-county back in England. Between the store and his Castle, 20 miles upriver, he strung wires for “an electric voice-telephone”; it was said to be the first in Wyoming. History has it that one day he arranged for Plenty Bear at one end and Wolf’s Tooth at the other to talk to each other. At first they could not believe their ears. But then, in slow wonderment, as they identified each other’s voices, they were persuaded that the white man’s talking wires were, indeed, heap-big-medicine.

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  In the spring of 2007, in the course of that flight with my English friend across the West (already mentioned in the chapter on the Overland Trail), we flew over the Powder River country and the small settlement of Sussex. During our flight planning, we saw that across most of what would once have been Moreton Frewen’s ranch, the air chart was marked as an “MOA”, a Military Operating Area. Apparently this is where the pilots of A10 (Wart-hog) aircraft practice their low-level attacks before being dispatched to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ther
e being no practise that day, we were allowed across. From 2,000 feet, we looked down on the river crossing that is still called Sussex.

  Thirty minutes earlier we had flown over some of the largest open-cast coal mines in the world. Mr. Frewen could not know it, but his 7-foot seam widens (and deepens) to 90 feet only a long day’s ride to the north. Statistics vary, but it seems that the coal railed out of Wyoming’s Powder River basin is, through the first decade of this twenty-first century, now providing nearly a quarter of all the nation’s power-station fuel.

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  On his frequent journeys to and from England - he made the trip two or three times a year - Moreton Frewen often tarried for a few days in New York in order to court a young woman called Clara Jerome. Clara and her two sisters were the daughters of Leonard Jerome, a rich financier. Some years earlier, Jennie had married Lord Randolph Churchill, second son of the Duke of Marlborough. So, when Clara and Moreton finally married in June 1881, he became an uncle-by-marriage of an 8-year-old lad called Winston.

  Moreton took Clara back to Wyoming. She seems to have enjoyed herself, for she wrote to one of her sisters: “This is our real honeymoon. Moreton is the greatest darling. You’d love it here... the air is perfectly delicious and the scenery so beautiful with the snow-capped Big Horn Mountains in the near distance and troops of antelope by our house going down to the river to drink.” She went on to tell of the summer house-parties and to extol the interesting life that she and her husband were living on the ranch. But, sadly, toward the end of her first pregnancy, she went into premature labor and, though rushed south to Cheyenne (the nearest proper medical help), her baby was stillborn. They buried Jasmine by the Castle. Perhaps the distance (230 miles) and the roughness of the journey made the tragedy almost inevitable. After she had recovered, Clara returned to the family home in New York. She never went West again.

  From distant Wyoming, Frewen wrote frequent letters to his wife. For several years, as he later put it, “no cloud was in the sky”. Beef prices were high, and he reckoned on the ownership of 45,000 cattle. This was almost certainly a considerable over-estimate, but, ever the optimist, he told Clara (and others) something of the next Big Project that he had in mind. He planned to start new ranches further north in Montana and across the border in Canada. In 1884, with these projects in hand, he was confident enough to tell his backers that “we have legitimate cause for congratulation”.

  Frewen was never short of big ideas. But to raise the financial steam, he found that he had no choice but to turn the ranch into a public company. Years later he wrote, “I fell into line with the company mongering craze... and transferred the Powder River herds to a company.” While Frewen retained a large number of shares, he no longer held a controlling majority. In time he found that the directors sitting in London thought they knew better than he did how to run the ranch in Wyoming. For example, at just the time when he was trying to build up some financial reserves to fund that expansion onto the Canadian prairies, the directors decided, without reference to Frewen, to pay out an unsustainable 20% dividend.

  Things got worse. Frewen was torn between dashing back to London to persuade the absentee directors to see sense, and staying where he was to re-organize as best he could. Before he could decide which course to take, London telegraphed instructions to the bankers in Cheyenne that the company’s accounts were to be frozen, for the time being anyway. As soon as news got out that his credit was suspect, Frewen was paralyzed. He could do nothing. The Powder River Cattle Company began to come apart as he watched. Frewen hurried back to England to bring legal action against some of his fellow directors. But it was too late to put the bits together again. Demoralized, he suddenly seems to have lost interest. In fact, although he could not know it at the time, many of his friends at the Cheyenne Club would be facing their own crises within the next two years.

  He left Wyoming in June 1885 and, as he suspected at the time, he never went back. But over the next 30 years, ever the extravagant optimist (“never talk poor”, he would say), he made and lost several fortunes funded with other people’s money: in Canada, Australia, South Africa and India. He promoted a rock pulverizer which would release gold in prodigious quantities from abandoned spoil heaps around the world; he trumpeted a grease which was uniquely suited to lubricate the axles of the world’s railroad rolling stock; he invested in “an improved disinfecting fluid” he called “Electrozone”; he was on the edge of making a fortune with a new tramway system for Denver; he saw “magnificent investment promise” in the obscure port of Prince Rupert on Canada’s Pacific coast; he lobbied for a railroad to be built from the prairies north to Hudson Bay (it would be built, but not for another 40 years); he pushed the highlands of Kenya as a land of limitless opportunity for white settlement; he proposed a monetary union between Canada, the US and the British Empire. Always he thought of himself “as a rich man in the making”. He tried hard, desperately hard, but sadly he never quite made it.

  In its obituary, The Times called him “a thwarted Elizabethan”. Rudyard Kipling, who as a near neighbor in Sussex (England) had known him in later years, wrote: “He was a man who lived in every sense except common sense.” Someone else said, “Moreton had a first class mind quite untroubled by second thoughts.” Maybe those comments are too harsh. Yes, he was ultimately a failure; indeed, with the bailiffs literally knocking on his Sussex door to take away some furniture, he ended his life as a pauper - but a rather splendid one. And while he lasted those few years on the Powder River, he had put on quite a show.

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  A few months after that flight over Sussex (Wyoming), I drove to the place. There is nothing much to see: a small cattle feed-lot, a couple of ranch-houses and their stock yards, some irrigated fields of alfalfa, and a road bridge across the Powder River. The general store and the post office are long gone. And 20 miles upstream, there is nothing left of Frewen’s Castle either. I was told that, for a few years in the 1890s, its main room had been used as a school. Then a little later it was pulled apart for its timbers by incoming settlers; a mile away is a derelict barn supposedly built with some of those timbers. Where the Castle itself once stood there is nothing but a dimple in the ground; this may be where the well once was. There is no trace of little Jasmine’s grave. After a good deal of asking around I was later shown, in a bank 70 miles up the road, a paperweight allegedly fashioned out of one of the balustrades in that staircase. That seems to be all that is left.

  The evening after I had been to Sussex and the Castle, I checked in at a motel an hour or two away. Recognizing that I was a Brit, the owner asked where I had been that day, so I explained. He asked if I knew the story about “your Mr. Churchill”. Apparently, local legend has it that when Moreton Frewen learned that his young nephew-by-marriage was not performing too well at school (and in his autobiography, Churchill complains that at Harrow “I remained in the Third Fourth three times as long as anyone else”), Frewen suggested to Winston’s mother that perhaps, in a few years’ time, when he was into his teens, the lad might do worse than to leave school and come out West and learn the cattle business. I have tried to check the tale, but there is no mention of it in any of the several books about Moreton Frewen. But who knows? It is possible - just. Certainly at one time Winston’s mother was close to despair: “He is so idle and of course that is conducive to naughtiness...one can’t manage him.” Certainly English ranchers of the day used to take on boys in their teens from the “old country” as apprentices; they called them Pups and charged their families $500 for a year’s tuition. So, Cattleman Churchill? Might he have succeeded as a rancher where Frewen failed? The possibilities must make this one of the more beguiling (if minor) “what ifs” of history. As such, the story is far too intriguing not to pass on.

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  If it was the McCoy brothers’ good judgment, good luck and self-confidence back in Kansas that had much to do with sparking the cattle business b
ack in 1867, it was other people’s poor judgment, bad luck and over-confidence which put the brakes on less than 20 years later. Until then, everyone had been making money out of cattle. The industrializing cities back east and in Britain were a sure and ever-growing market. The boosters continued to claim that a man starting with a relatively small investment could become wealthy in just a few years. “Where is the man who wants to be a cattle king in western Dakota?” asked the Mandan Daily Pioneer in July 1883. “Let him come at once and select a suitable location. We venture to say that within ten years his money will fill a boxcar.”