The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  “Coffee! Well, if that don’t go clean ahead of me, I’m d—d!”

  The Ribbon of Steel

  The poor facilities Holladay provided for his customers hardly mattered: he had a near monopoly on the lines in the West. But Ben Holladay was astute as well as arrogant. From the resolute spread of railroad tracks across the nation, he realized that the era of animal power was at its close, and in 1866 he sold out to the New York enterprise Wells, Fargo and Company for $1.8 million. He acted none too soon. Wells Fargo itself only survived the next decade by restructuring, running “feeder” coaches to railheads and concentrating on its express and bullion interests.

  The dream of a transcontinental railroad had excited the imagination of the nation ever since the discovery of gold in California. A railroad could haul gold east by the truckload. In 1861 the vision started to become reality, when four California-based merchants, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, sank eight and a half million dollars into founding the Central Pacific Railroad. A year later Congress granted them a charter. At the same time, the legislature approved federal funds for the Union Pacific in the East. The financial practices of both companies were dubious in the extreme, but they got the job done. By 1866 the Union Pacific was advancing through Nebraska at a remarkable mile a day.

  Men flooded in to work on the iron road. Ten thousand Chinese “coolies” employed by Central Pacific (on the suggestion of Charles Crocker’s Chinese manservant, Ah Ling) struggled against the terrible geology and weather of the Sierra Nevada. They hung in baskets against sheer rock faces, drilling holes for dynamite; they died of heat exhaustion in mountain tunnels from which they did not emerge for months. When hundreds of coolies and miles of track were swept away by blizzards, the company was forced to build 40 miles of snow sheds. The Chinese endured, and got the Central Pacific over the hump of the Sierra Nevada and on the downgrade.

  As the Chinese gangs drove eastwards, the gangs of the Union Pacific – who were predominantly Irish – rushed to meet them, a trail of steel behind. The recreational needs of the Chinese, save for gambling, were almost non-existent; those of the Irish were many and predominantly sinful. At “end of track” on the Union line was a temporary tented city, where a navvy could throw away his money in saloons and brothels. When the tracks had been laid out for another stretch, the claptrap canvas town was dismantled and moved along to the new “end of track”. A number of Western towns grew up this way, such as Cheyenne in Wyoming. More usually, the “hell on wheels” became extinct as the line moved on, or rotted and was blown away by the winds of the high plains.

  In the early spring of 1869, six years after the first spikes had been driven, the two lines were fast approaching each other. When they did meet in northern Utah – they passed each other. Congress had inadvertently set no junction point. Moreover, the more track each company laid the more money and land – which could later be sold off – it received. They had no incentive to stop. The farce was only halted when Congress ordered the rails to be joined at Promontory Point, Utah. On 10 May 1869, workers and officials observed the laying of the last tie, laurelwood bound in silver, and the driving of the last spike, made of gold, by the sledgehammer swings of President Stanford of the Central Pacific and Vice-President Durant of the Union. The crowd groaned when Stanford missed, but then the spike pierced the laurel and the tracks were joined. Two locomotives, the CP’s Jupiter and the UP’s No. 110, gently chugged forward and touched cowcatchers. A telegraph operator tapped out to a waiting nation, so recently divided by Civil War, a single word: “Done”.

  America celebrated that night, from coast to coast, North to South. Only one people felt no joy. The American Indians gazed down on the iron road and could only see how dire their future was.

  For American cowboys, however, the railroad was a godsend, the means by which their poor and tattered beef economy was rescued from despair.

  Part II

  The Trampling Herd

  I RIDE AN OLD PAINT

  I ride an old paint, I lead an old dam,

  I’m goin’ to Montana to throw the hoolihan.

  They feed in the coulees, they water in the draw,

  Their tails are all matted, their backs are all raw.

  Refrain

  Ride around, little dogies,

  Ride around them slow

  For the fiery and snuffy

  Are rarin’ to go.

  Old Bill Jones had two daughters and a song,

  One went to Denver and the other went wrong,

  His wife she died in a poolroom fight,

  Still he sings from morning till night.

  Refrain

  Oh, when I die, take my saddle from the wall

  Put it on my pony, and lead him from his stall.

  Tie my bones to his back, turn our faces to the West

  And we’ll ride the prairie that we love the best.

  Refrain

  (Old cowboy song)

  3. The Trampling Herd: the Cattle Industry Frontier

  Prologue

  The cattle came to the New World with Columbus. On 2 January 1494 the explorer, making his second voyage, unloaded 24 stallions, ten mares and an unknown number of beeves onto the island of Hispaniola. The animals proliferated, and ranching became established throughout the Caribbean. From there the cattle spread to the mainland, with Gregorio de Villalobos shipping the first herd across in 1521. Used to the swamps of Santa Domingo, the cattle thrived on the rich coastal grasslands of Mexico. Richard Thomson, a visiting Englishman, wrote home in 1555: “There is in New Spain a marvelous increase of cattell which dayly do increase and they are of greater growth than ours. You may have a great steer that hath a hundred weight of tallow for sixteen shillings and some one man hath 20,000 head of cattell of his own.”

  Explorers and missionaries took the cattle north. The first stock-raising in what would become the United States was done in Florida in the 1560s. Wherever the Spanish went, so went their cattle. Organized ranching first appeared in the American Southwest in 1598, with the estancia of Juan de Onate at San Juan.

  The British colonies in America also developed a cattle culture. Jamestown imported cattle as early as 1611. Herders tended beeves in colonial Carolina and Virginia, and a cattle industry had spread as far southwest as Georgia by the eighteenth century. Much of the labour of tending the stock, which was penned, was done by Black slaves. It was the British who imported the term “cowboy”, the first recorded use of which was in AD 1000 in Ireland. Yet, aside from this piece of nomenclature, the British contribution to the development of the United States cattle culture was negligible. Overwhelmingly, it would be the Spanish who would shape that seemingly most American of enterprises, the ranching of cattle. The American cowboy would be indebted to the Spanish-Mexican vaquero for everything from his equipment to his language. Almost inevitably, then, the cradle of the American cattle industry was a sometime Spanish province: Texas.

  The Cradle of the Cattle Kingdom

  That Texas was the cradle of the American cattle industry was no accident. The great diamond-shaped area formed by the Nueces and Rio Grande Valleys is God’s own cattle country, with plentiful open grass, a temperate climate, and stalls of trees for protection and shade. Jose de Escandon drove the first stock there in 1748, wiry Andalusian cattle with sharp-pointed horns. More Spaniards brought more cattle. Within a generation, there were major Spanish livestock enterprises around Nacogdoches, the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio.

  To prevent the Indians running the beeves off, the Spanish let them roam semi-wild, with the vaquero keeping a trailing watchful eye. Over time the vaquero would evolve a distinct set of tools and prejudices concerning his labour. Machismo prevented him from riding a mare, while his vanity required an ornate and expensive saddle. To protect his legs from cacti and thorns he wore leather chaparreras, and la reata was his universal implement. Much of the dress code, technique and language of the vaquero would be passed do
wn to the American cowboy. Stampida would become stampede, la reata the cowboy’s lariat, and chaparreras his chaps. Even the vaquero himself would be corrupted into buckaroo.

  Anglo-Americans did not originate the Texas cattle industry; when Stephen Austin and his followers arrived in the province in the 1820s they found a beef economy already in place. In 1836 they took it over. During the Texan Revolution, Mexican ranchers headed south in droves, and those who remained found their stock plundered. Together with genuinely feral cattle, these abandoned and stolen beeves were the seed herd for many Anglo-American ranchers. Probably the one major innovation of the Anglo settlers was in stock quality: they crossed the scrawny Retino cattle of the Spanish (which was immune to tick fever) with fleshier descendants of the English Longhorn breed they brought with them. The result was the storied Texas Longhorn, which would come in time to dominate the western livestock industry.

  By the end of the 1830s, cattle outnumbered Texans in Texas by a ratio of six to one. Mostly the cattle were slaughtered for their hides and tallow, and the carcasses left to rot. As early as 1842, however, Texans were driving small herds into New Orleans and Shreveport, and in 1846 Edward Piper made the first northwards drive when he moved a herd up to Kansas. The California Gold Rush, with its meat-hungry miners, also provided an outlet. The drive overland to California was perilous and time-consuming; it was also financially rewarding. Texas Ranger Jack Cureton drove 1,100 brawling Longhorns through the Apache country of New Mexico and Arizona. At sale in San Francisco the herd fetched $20,000, a small fortune.

  But the big market for beef lay in the industrial, populous North and East. A trial attempt to supply the North with Texan beef was made by two young Illinoisans, Washington Malone and Tom Candy Ponting. Late in 1852, Malone and Candy left Christian County, Illinois, for Texas, where they bought 700 head of cattle. The next spring they drove the beeves all the way back to Illinois, reaching Christian County again on 26 July 1853. Here the Longhorns were rested for winter, but in the spring of 1854 Malone and Candy selected the best 130 steers and shipped them by train to New Jersey, then ferried them to New York’s Hundred Street Market. These much travelled steers were the first Texas Longhorns to reach New York. The city’s Tribune commented:

  This drove started in April, 1853, and drove four months to Illinois, where they were watered, and then drove to Marius, Indiana, and thence by cars to Cleveland, Erie, Dunkirk and by way of the Erie road. This made about 1,500 miles on foot and 600 miles on the railroad. The expense from Texas to Illinois was about $2 a head, the owners camping out all the way. From Illinois here the expense is about $17 a head. The drove came 5,000 miles through the Indian country . . . part of the route was through the Kansas Territory.

  The top of the drove are good quality of beef, and all are fair. These cattle are generally 5, 6, and 7 years old, rather long-legged, though fine-horned, with long tapir horns, and something of a wild look.

  With the example of Malone and Candy before them, other cattlemen began driving Texas herds north, following the so-called Shawnee Road. Outbreaks of tick fever in Missouri and Kansas, however, caused farmers there to turn back Texas herds by force of arms. Although Longhorns had immunity to the disease, they carried the ticks that transmitted it. The farmers did not know how the disease was communicated, only that when their cattle came into contact with Texas stock, their cattle died. Northern cattle could die merely from crossing the trail of a Texan herd. Many states passed quarantine laws to keep Texas cattle out. When the Civil War broke out, the drives north stopped entirely.

  Texas was overwhelmingly for the Confederacy. The young went off to fight in Virginia and Tennessee, and the herds ran wild. The price of beef plummeted. Some herds were driven over the Mississippi to supply the Southern armies, and were paid for in Confederate money that was worthless long before the final surrender. When the Texan war veterans returned home, they found their ranches in ruin and their families living in poverty. Their only asset was cattle: five million of them, with possibly a quarter of them untended and unbranded. In Texas, the animals were almost without value, selling for $3 per head. They needed to find a paying market.

  During the Civil War, the Northern economy had expanded to a gigantic degree. Millions of Americans had flocked to the mills and factories. And these industrial workers wanted beef on their tables. Beef was the symbol of the American good life. When immigrants arrived from Europe, they too adopted the preference for beef. The markets of the East paid over $40 per head of cattle.

  The cowmen of Texas determined to share in this bonanza. Throughout the winter of 1865–6 they spontaneously began rounding up their herds for the “Long Drive” to the nearest railhead, Sedalia in Missouri, from where the beeves could be shipped east. In the spring and early summer of 1866, about a quarter of a million cattle crossed the Red River and headed into Indian Territory.

  The drives were nothing but trouble. Abnormally heavy rains turned the prairie to a mass of mud. The Indians were peaceable, but charged 10 cents a head for the grass the cattle consumed on their lands. Farmers, remembering the pre-War outbreaks of Texas fever, rode out with rifles. Worse, Kansas swarmed with Jayhawkers, settler-outlaws who had fought on the Union side. As their price for letting the Texan herds be, the Jayhawkers demanded money. Inevitably, violence sometimes ensued, as was shown by the experience of James M. Daugherty, a young Texan traildriver:

  Some twenty miles south of Fort Scott, Kansas, and about four o’clock one afternoon, a bunch of fifteen or twenty Jayhawkers came upon us. One of my cowboys, John Dobbins by name, was leading the herd, and I was riding close to the leader. Upon approach of the Jayhawkers John attempted to draw his gun and the Jayhawkers shot him dead in the saddle. This caused the cattle to stampede and at the same time they covered me with their guns and I was forced to surrender. The rest of the cowboys stayed with the herd, losing part of them in the stampede. The Jayhawkers took me to Cow Creek which was near by, and there tried me for driving cattle into their country, which [the cattle] they claimed were infested with ticks which would kill their cattle. I was found guilty without any evidence, they not even having one of my cattle for evidence.

  They began to argue among themselves what to do with me. Some wanted to hang me while others wanted to whip me to death. I, being a young man in my teens, and my sympathetic talk about being ignorant of tickey cattle of the south diseasing any of the cattle of their country, caused one of the big Jayhawkers to take my part. The balance was strong for hanging me on the spot, but through his arguments they finally let me go. After I was freed and had joined the herd, two of my cowboys and I slipped back and buried John Dobbins where he fell.

  Jayhawker harassment caused some herds to turn back, and bottled up others around Baxter Springs. As the summer wore into fall, frost killed the grass and the cattle died of starvation. Only 35,000 Texas cattle reached the railheads. The Long Drive of 1866, which had begun with such hopes, was a disaster.

  A people less determined than the Texans might have given up in defeat. Instead, after a winter of recuperation, they began driving their Longhorns north again. And this time, thanks to an enterprising Yankee stockman called Joseph McCoy, the Texans would find a convenient railhead waiting for them.

  On the Trail

  “A Very Small, Dead Place . . .”

  Late starters up the Sedalia Trail in 1867 were intercepted by William Sugg, agent of the cattle buyer, Joseph G. McCoy. Sugg informed the drovers of an easier and cheaper route to market. At the Kansas hamlet of Abilene, on the route of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, McCoy had built vast pens to receive Texas cattle. He would take all that they could deliver. So began the great Kansas cattle trade.

  Born in 1837, the youngest of nine children, Joe McCoy had gone into the cattle-buying business at the end of the Civil War. When he heard of the 1866 Baxter Springs blockade, he saw immediately that the beef industry needed an open trail from Texas to an easy shipping point on a railroad: in McCoy’s own words
, “a market whereat the Southern drover and Northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing, and both be undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves.”

  Establishment of such a cattle-shipping centre became for McCoy an obsession, “a waking thought, a sleeping dream.” Early in 1867 McCoy visited Junction City, where local businessmen refused to sell him land for a stockyard. After being similarly turned down in Solomon City and Salina, he settled on Abilene, almost at the end of the Kansas Pacific rail line. “Abilene in 1867,” wrote McCoy, “was a very small, dead place, consisting of about one dozen log huts, low, small, rude affairs, four fifths of which were covered in dirt for roofing . . . The business of the burg was conducted in two small rooms, mere log huts, and of course, the inevitable saloon, also a log hut, was to be found.”

  The hamlet, however, had everything necessary for a cattle-shipping centre. All around were the grassy, well-watered acres of Smoky Hill Valley, where cattle could be fattened up at the end of a long drive. Nearby was Fort Riley, which offered protection from Indian raids. Moreover, Abilene was outside Kansas farming country. And most importantly of all, it was on a railroad. The cattle could be shipped eastward in open pens to Kansas and thence to Chicago, and from there to the East for butchering. Later, when Gustavus Swift created a fleet of refrigerated railroad cars, the beeves would be slaughtered in Chicago and sent east as dressed corpses.

  Having bought the 250 acres of land he needed, McCoy set about building the required facilities. By now it was July, and the herds were on their way north. Within two months McCoy constructed a stockyard big enough to take 3,000 surging Texas Longhorns. For the convenience of the cattlemen, he erected a three-storey hotel, the Drover’s Hotel. Meanwhile, McCoy sent William Sugg south to intercept the Texas herds, and persuade them to Abilene.