The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  The first herd to arrive at McCoy’s stockyard was driven by a Texan named Thompson. More herds followed. Despite its late start, Abilene shipped out 35,000 Texan steers in 1867. The next year 75,000 cattle reached Abilene. In 1870 the figure was 300,000; in 1871, it was an astounding 700,000.

  Nearly all these cattle came to Abilene up the famous Chisholm Trail, which lay 150 miles west of the Sedalia Trail Shawnee road. It was named after Jesse Chisholm, a half-Cherokee trader. In 1864–5 Chisholm used an ancient buffalo route between Kansas and Texas to haul his goods wagons. When a herder later heading north from Texas crossed into Indian Territory, he found Chisholm’s wagon ruts and followed them into Kansas. And so was born the greatest cattle road in the West. Years after it became defunct its course could still be seen, a depression 200–400 yards wide beaten into the earth by the tramp of over three million cattle.

  Abilene boomed on the profits of the cow trade. By 1870, the town’s Texas Street boasted ten false-fronted boarding-houses, ten saloons, five general stores, and four hotels.

  The prosperity was short-lived. Abilene had no law. Celebrating cowboys drank and quarrelled, and several gunfights occurred. Some leading citizens posted notices forbidding the carrying of firearms within the city limits. The cowboys read them, and then shot them to pieces. To install order, the town employed a marshal, Thomas J. Smith, who had served on the New York City police force. For a brief summer “Bear River Tom” gave Abilene a taste of law, punching down rowdy cowboys and forcibly disarming them. He was killed in the fall by a settler in a dispute over land.

  Abilene’s next marshal was the noted frontier scout and Indian fighter, the fashionably dressed, long-haired James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, who was hired at $150 a month, plus a percentage of fines. At the behest of citizens Hickok ordered Texas gamblers Phil Coe and Ben Thompson to alter an offensive, pornographic sign outside their Bull’s Head Saloon. Coe resented this interference, and trouble between Coe and Hickok grew, culminating in a gunfight on 5 October 1871. At around 9 p.m. Hickok heard a shot on the street and went to investigate. He found Phil Coe at the centre of a crowd of drunken Texan revellers, with a revolver in his hand. “Who fired that shot?” demanded Hickok. Coe replied that he had fired it – at a dog. Hickok told Coe to disarm. Instead Coe pointed his gun at the marshal. “As quick as thought”, reported a newspaper, Hickok drew his Navy Colt pistols and fired at Coe, the bullet tearing through Coe’s stomach and out his back. But in the confusion of bullets Hickok accidentally slew his own deputy, Mike Williams, who had run into the firing line. Afterwards; the grief-stricken Hickok took to patrolling the streets with a sawn-off shotgun.

  When Hickok’s contract expired at the end of 1871, it was not renewed. Instead, the town decided to stop cowboy lawlessness by the simple expedient of ending Abilene’s cattle shipments. Many townsfolk, anyway, were farmers who had recently settled on the prime prairie around the town, and had no love for the Longhorns, who knocked down their fences and trampled their crops. In February 1872 a notice appeared in the Abilene Chronicle to the effect:

  We, the undersigned, members of the Farmers’ Protective Association, most respectfully request all who have contemplated driving Texas cattle to Abilene the coming season, to seek some other point of shipment, as the inhabitants of Dickinson [the local county] will no longer submit to the evils of that trade.

  On the Western Trail

  The citizens of Abilene need hardly have bothered to prohibit the cattle trade. As the railroad extended west, new towns sprang up as shipping points, all easier and quicker for the Texans to reach: Ellsworth in 1871, Wichita in 1872, and Dodge in 1876, the last and longest lived of the Kansas cowtowns. Dodge was a ready-made trail town. Two buffalo hunters, Ed Jones and Joe Plummer, had earlier brought hides north from Texas, and their route was turned into a road for cattle. It was known variously as the Jones and Plummer Trail, then the Dodge City Trail, and eventually the Western Trail.

  There were more reasons to trail a herd north than to meet a train. At the peak of its glory, the Western Trail would stretch from Texas to the Sioux reservations in Dakota, where Texas beeves fed surrendered Indians. Also using the Trail were drivers stocking the Great Plains, for in the 1860s the cattle frontier had pushed far beyond the Red River. To their astonishment, cattlemen had discovered that steers could overwinter on the plains with little care.

  Amongst the first to realize this was J. W. Iliff, a failed gold miner in the 1859 rush to Pike’s Peak. Determined to make something out of his misfortune, the Ohio-born Iliff opened a store, bartering with passing migrants for their lame and emaciated cattle and oxen. These he turned loose on the plains and found that they thrived. To most eyes, the bunchgrass of the plains looked scanty fare, but Nature had made it a storehouse of proteins, a form of hay on the stem. This natural hay was also accessible in winter, for the snows of the plains did not usually crust, so the hay could be reached by pawing cattle.

  Bunchgrass and a ready market of hungry miners made Iliff the first of the cattle kings of Colorado. Eventually, his herd expanded to 35,000 head, built in the main from cattle driven north from Texas. Among those who supplied Iliff were the restless Charles Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving.

  In 1866, while most Texans had their hopes pegged on the Missouri railheads, Goodnight and Loving had trailed their herds from Fort Belknap to the Apache–Navajo reservations in New Mexico. After receiving $12,000 in gold for a proportion of their beeves, the rest were driven north into Colorado, some being sold to the miners and some to Iliff. The routes used by Goodnight and Loving soon became the principal cattle routes to New Mexico and Colorado, and were known as the Horsehead Route and the Goodnight–Loving Trail. Oliver Loving, however, did not live to enjoy the prestige or money the route derived; in 1867 he and cowboy One-Armed Bill Wilson were attacked by a Comanche war party. Although both men escaped alive from three days of Comanche siege and days of wandering starvation, Loving had been wounded by a Comanche arrow. His arm turned gangrenous and he died at Fort Sumner, after extracting a promise from Goodnight to bury him in the Lone Star state. Goodnight kept his word, and ordered his cowboys to make a coffin from oil drums. In this metal casket, Goodnight towed Loving’s body home to Texas, along the trail they had blazed together. Till he died, Goodnight kept Loving’s photograph on the wall of his home. (The story of Goodnight and Loving is celebrated in Larry McMurtry’s novel, Lonesome Dove.)

  After his partner’s death, Goodnight went on to build up an immense ranch on the wide open Colorado range and to lavish money on the erection of an opera house in the town of Pueblo. Inspired by Goodnight’s example, Texas cattlemen flocked north to the free range country of Colorado. And then to Wyoming, and Montana, and Nebraska, the whole plains across. They went up the Western Trail and they went up the Goodnight–Loving Trail. Somewhere between six and nine million cattle were driven out of Texas to the railheads and the plains between 1867 and 1886, with around 25,000 cowboys making the trip north. Around 2,000 of these cowboys were Mexican and 5,000 were Black Americans, who had started cowpunching as slaves or had come west after their emancipation.

  Life on the Trail

  First-hand accounts of life on the trail, such as Andy Adams’s memoir The Log of a Cowboy, make it clear that there was little glamour, much labour and some danger. The drive began with the spring round-up, with the recalcitrant Longhorns pulled from the brush and chaparral. When the herd was collected, immature animals were “cut out” and returned to the range. Any unbranded animals were dragged to the bonfire where the branding irons were heated until orange-red hot and then stamped onto the steer’s hide.

  When the work of round-up and branding was done, preparations for the drive started in earnest. A cowboy selected his mounts – he would need between six and ten for the drive – and invariably chose geldings and horses of solid colour. (Native Americans, by contrast, preferred “paints”, horses with broken white and black/brown markings, for their war
ponies.) Then he gathered up the small amount of personal belongings he would take with him: a pair of blankets, a change of clothing, his hat, a “slicker” coat to keep off the rain, and his gun.

  Occasionally the rancher himself would make the drive; more often he would entrust his foreman or sell his cattle to a professional driver like the famed Ike Pryor. For the driving of a herd of 3,000 head, a crew consisted of a trail boss, 15 to 20 cowhands, together with a horse wrangler to handle the herd of spare horses, the remuda or “cavvy”. A cook or “Old Lady” was also essential, and was expected to be skilled in more than cuisine. He had to sustain morale and be an expert “bullwhacker”, driving the chuckwagon over every terrain. Invented by Charles Goodnight, the chuckwagon was an adapted Conestoga, made from Osage orange, the toughest wood Goodnight knew of, the wood Indians used for their bows. A chuckwagon carried (in an allotted place) everything the cook needed, from tins of Arbuckle coffee to a Dutch oven. Many cooks were of Portuguese or Mexican descent.

  At the start of the drive, the cattle were always jittery and it was necessary to proceed slowly. The beeves disliked leaving their home range, and had to be broken to the road. An astute trail boss singled out a dominating animal and made it the lead steer. Some animals were used year after year in this way, like Charles Goodnight’s “Old Blue”. After several days on the drive, the animals would take up a natural order of march. The cowboys, likewise, proceeded according to a set pattern. The trail boss rode out in front, surveying the route and seeking water or grazing. At the point of the herd rode the most experienced cowboys, and along its sides were the swing and flank riders. The tail or drag riders brought up the rear. They had the dirtiest, least desirable job, pushing along the lame or cussedest steers in the clouds of choking dust thrown up by thousands of hooves. Well behind the dust proceeded the remuda and the chuckwagon, which would be driven ahead of the herd in the afternoon for the cook to fix supper. Meals seldom varied beyond black coffee, drunk by the gallon, sourdough biscuits, pinto beans, meat, gravy and “SOB stew” (stewed entrails).

  In a day’s march, a herd would expect to cover an average of 15 miles, before being bedded down for the night. During the hours of darkness the cattle had to be constantly watched, with the men usually working two-hour shifts. Describing night duty, Andy Adams wrote: “The guards ride in a circle about four rods outside the sleeping cattle; and by riding in opposite directions make it impossible for any animal to make its escape without being noticed by the riders. The guards usually sing or whistle continuously, so that the sleeping herd may know that a friend and not an enemy is keeping vigil over their dreams.”

  Among the songs the cowboys crooned were “Cotton-Eye Joe”, “Dinah Had a Wooden Leg”, “Saddle Ole Spike”, and “Sally Gooden”. One of the most beautiful was “The Night Herding Song”:

  Oh, slow up dogies, quit moving around,

  You have wandered and trampled all over the ground;

  Oh, graze along dogies and feed kinda slow,

  And don’t forever be on the go.

  Move slow, little dogies, move slow,

  Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

  Oh say, little dogies, when you goin’ to lay down,

  And give up this driftin’ and rovin’ around?

  My horse is leg-weary and I’m awfully tired,

  But if you get away, I’m sure to be fired.

  Lay down, little dogies, lay down,

  Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

  Oh, lay still, dogies, since you have laid down,

  Stretch away out on the big open ground;

  Snore loud, little dogies, and drown the wild sounds,

  That’ll go away when the day rolls around.

  Lay still, little dogies, lay still,

  Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

  The crooning was not always successful. At night the steers, their vision limited by darkness, were easily “boogered”. Stampedes were an ever-present menace. Thunder and lightning were amongst the most common causes. The only way to stop “running beeves” was for the riders to gallop alongside the front and side of the herd and turn the leading animals into the centre, creating a circular mill. At night this was a dangerous, terrifying task made strangely eerie by the blue flames which flickered at the tips of the steers’ horns – the result of friction from their jostling bodies. (The same friction also generated a heat that could blister the skin on the face of a cowboy who got too close.) Often it was impossible to turn a stampeding herd. A witness to a stampede in Idaho in 1889 reported the grisly – and typical – result. The stampede killed 341 cattle, two horses, and one cowboy, the latter “literally mangled to sausage meat”. Steers and men were scattered over a huge area by such runs. Reassembling the herd and crew was a laborious and costly business, made worse by the knowledge that a herd which had stampeded once was likely to be “spoiled” and do it again. The depressing and ruinous effect of constant stampedes was caught by George Duffield in his diary of a drive to Iowa in 1866.

  May 1. Big Stampede. Lost 200 head of Cattle.

  May 2. Spent the day hunting & found but 25 Head. It has been Raining for three days. These are dark days for me.

  May 3. Day spent in hunting Cattle. Found 23. Hard rain and wind. Lots of trouble.

  After five more days rounding up the scattered beeves, Duffield started on the trail once more. After only a week of progress, the herd scattered again:

  May 15 . . . Cattle all left us & in morning not one Beef to be seen.

  May 16. Hunt Beeves is the word – all Hands discouraged & are determined to go. 200 Beeves out & nothing to eat.

  May 17. No breakfast. Pack & off is the order. All hands gave the Brazos one good harty damn & started for Buchanan.

  Eventually, Duffield reached the Red River at the end of May. But no sooner was he out of Texas than the herd “spooked”:

  June 1: Stampede last night among 6 droves & a general mix up and loss of Beeves. Hunt Cattle again. Men all tired & want to leave.

  June 2. Hard rain and wind Storm. Beeves ran & I had to be on Horse back all Night. Awful night. Men still lost. Quit the Beeves & go to Hunting men is the word – 4 P.M. Found our men with Indian guide & 195 Beeves 14 Miles from camp. Almost starved not having had a bite to eat for 60 hours. Got to camp about 12M. Tired.

  And so Duffield’s drive continued, with one stampede after another, all the way to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). By the time he arrived he had only 500 of the thousand steers with which he had started off.

  He had also lost a man to the waters of the Brazos. After stampedes, the most feared hazard of a trail drive was crossing rivers. The Brazos, Red, Trinity, Washita, Canadian, Cimarron and Arkansas all flowed east across the path of the herd. If there was no ford, and the water was deep, the cattle had to be swum over. In spring, or after heavy rain, the rivers roiled and spat. It was considered good practice to approach the water at a brisk pace, “crowding” the cattle, letting them build up a momentum which would carry them into the water. One seasoned drover, Colonel Andy Syder, had two “swimming steers” which were more or less trained to take the plunge, the herd instinct causing the rest to follow.

  Even when the cattle started in the water, many things could go wrong. The steers were as easily “spooked” in the water as they were on land. An unusual wave, a floating branch, or a whirlpool could make the leaders stop swimming to the opposite bank and attempt to turn back. Hundreds of animals would then mill around, become exhausted and drift downstream to their deaths. To save the cattle, the cowboys had to swim their horses into the mêlée, and with blows and kicks get the Longhorns swimming straight. Many cowboys drowned in such situations. Their fear of river crossings was all the greater in that few of them could swim.

  Stampedes and river crossings did not exhaust the dangers of a drive. Horses could step into gopher holes and throw their riders. A foot caught in a stirrup could mean a fatal drag across the ground. Lightning on the open prairie was a perennial peril. A Texan cowboy by the name
of A. B. Withers was riding with his brother and a rancher called Gus Johnson when lightning struck: “It set Johnson’s undershirt on fire and his gold shirt stud, which was set with a diamond, was melted and the diamond never found. His hat was torn to pieces . . .” The bolt killed Johnson, and also blinded Withers’ brother in one eye. In camp, cowboys took off their spurs, pistol and any other metal objects, put them in a pile, and slept well away from them.

  Although drives were rarely attacked by Indians, lone outriders were sometimes assaulted or the herd stampeded. The “Indian menace” faced by the drives tended to be either the toll the Indians demanded for passage over their grounds or their begging for food. Andy Adams was witness to one such encounter:

  We were following the regular trail, which had been slightly used for a year or two, though none of our outfit had ever been over it, when late on the third afternoon, about forty miles out from Doan’s about a hundred mounted bucks and squaws sighted our herd and crossed the North Fork from their encampment. They did not ride direct to the herd, but came into the trail nearly a mile above the cattle, so it was some little time from our first sighting them before we met. We did not check the herd or turn out of the trail, but when the lead came within a few hundred yards of the Indians, one buck, evidently the chief of the band, rode forward a few rods and held up one hand, as if commanding a halt. At the sight of this gaudily bedecked apparition, the cattle turned out of the trail, and Flood and I rode up to the chief, extending our hands in friendly greeting. The chief could not speak a word of English, but made signs with his hands; when I turned loose on him in Spanish, however, he instantly turned his horse and signed back to his band. Two young bucks rode forward and greeted Flood and myself in good Spanish.