by Jon E. Lewis
On thus opening up an intelligible conversation, I called Fox Quarternight, who spoke Spanish, and he rode up from his position of third man in the swing and joined in the council. The two young Indians through whom we carried on the conversation were Apaches, no doubt renegades of that tribe, and while we understood each other in Spanish, they spoke in a heavy guttural peculiar to the Indian. Flood opened the powwow by demanding to know the meaning of this visit. When the question had been properly interpreted to the chief, the latter dropped his blanket from his shoulders and dismounted from his horse. He was a fine specimen of the Plains Indian, fully six feet in height, perfectly proportioned, and in years well past middle life. He looked every inch a chief, and was a natural born orator. There was a certain easy grace to his gestures, only to be seen in people who use the sign language, and often when he was speaking to the Apache interpreters, I could anticipate his requests before they were translated to us, although I did not know a word of Comanche.
Before the powwow had progressed far it was evident that begging was its object. In his prelude, the chief laid claim to all the country in sight as the hunting grounds of the Comanche tribe, – an intimation that we were intruders. He spoke of the great slaughter of the buffalo by the white hide-hunters, and the consequent hunger and poverty amongst his people. He dwelt on the fact that he had ever counseled peace with the whites, until now his band numbered but a few squaws and papooses, the younger men having deserted him for other chiefs of the tribe who advocated war on the palefaces. When he had fully stated his position, he offered to allow us to pass through his country in consideration of ten beeves. On receiving this proposition, all of us dismounted, including the two Apaches, the latter seating themselves in their own fashion, while we whites lounged on the ground in truly American laziness, rolling cigarettes. In dealing with people who know not the value of time, the civilized man is taken at a disadvantage, and unless he can show an equal composure in wasting time, results will be against him. Flood had had years of experience in dealing with Mexicans in the land of mañana, where all maxims regarding the value of time are religiously discarded. So in dealing with this Indian chief he showed no desire to hasten matters, and carefully avoided all reference to the demand for beeves.
His first question, instead, was to know the distance to Fort Sill and Fort Elliot. The next was how many days it would take for cavalry to reach him. He then had us narrate the fact that when the first herd of cattle passed through the country less than a month before some bad Indians had shown a very unfriendly spirit. They had taken many of the cattle and had killed and eaten them, and now the great white man’s chief at Washington was very much displeased. If another single ox were taken and killed by bad Indians, he would send his soldiers from the forts to protect the cattle, even though the owners drove the herds through the reservation of the Indians – over the grass where their ponies grazed. He had us inform the chief that our entire herd was intended by the great white man’s chief at Washington as a present to the Blackfeet Indians who lived in Montana, because they were good Indians, and welcomed priests and teachers amongst them to teach them the ways of the white man. At our foreman’s request we then informed the chief that he was under no obligation to give him even a single beef for any privilege of passing through his country, but as the squaws and little papooses were hungry, he would give him two beeves.
The old chief seemed not the least disconcerted, but begged for five beeves, as many of the squaws were in the encampment across the North Fork, those present being not quite half of his village. It was now getting late in the day and the band seemed to be getting tired of the parleying, a number of squaws having already set out on their return to the village. After some further talk, Flood agreed to add another beef, on condition they be taken to the encampment before being killed. This was accepted, and at once the entire band set up a chattering in view of the coming feast. The cattle had in the mean time grazed off nearly a mile, the outfit, however, holding them under a close herd during the powwowing. All the bucks in the band, numbering about forty, now joined us, and we rode away to the herd. I noticed, by the way, that quite a number of the younger braves had arms, and no doubt they would have made a display of force had Flood’s diplomacy been of a more warlike character.
The drive to the Kansas railheads took three months, the drive to Montana or Dakota six months. Most of the men, horses and cattle endured. And then, after all the Indians, stampedes, rain, choking alkali dust, heat, 14-hour days in the saddle, mosquitoes, rustlers and short rations, it was the end of the drive. And time to go to town.
Babylons of the Plains
“EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA”
Notice posted on town approaches
Helling Around
When a drive reached its destination, the cowboys were customarily given their wages. With money jingling in their pockets they mounted their ponies and galloped to the excitements of the trail town, desperate to forget the back-breaking monotony and dangers of the drive. They wanted to eat, drink, gamble and dance with painted women – to “hell around”.
The names of the towns into which they rode were Abilene, Ellsworth, Caldwell, Wichita, Newton, Hays, Dodge, Miles City, Cheyenne, and Ogallala. What they were called or where they were hardly mattered. To the cowboy rushing in on his pony, firing his pistol in the air – “just to raise a little excitement and let people know he is in town,” as the Dodge City Times put it – cow towns were virtually identical to each other: a collection of shabby false-fronted buildings strung out along a long dirt street. They milled with people and dinned with the noise of cattle, carousing cowboys, and the constant sound of gunshots. “The firing of guns in and around town,” recalled one resident of Newton, “was so continuous it reminded me of a Fourth of July celebration from daylight to midnight. There was shooting when I got up and when I went to bed.”
Although the citizens of cattle towns made their money out of cowpunchers, they tended not to like them or their ways. The Topeka Daily Commonwealth editorialized in 1871 that: “The Texas cattle herder is a character, the like of which can be found nowhere else on earth . . . He generally wears a revolver on each side of his person, which he will use with as little hesitation on a man as a wild animal. Such a character is dangerous and desperate, and each one had generally killed his man.” The fears of the townsfolk had some justification. Ellsworth, Kansas, had eight homicides during its first year as a cowtown; Dodge City had ten. Attempted homicides with guns were probably around three times these figures.
They may have been disorderly and dangerous, but Texas cowboys were also very good business. During the cattle season, 300–400 cowpunchers could ride into town daily to spend their wages. A town could take as much as $40,000 in its tills each day. Much of the money would go to saloons and “soiled doves” (prostitutes), but a good chunk would also go to the bootmakers, grocers and other citizens of substance. The difficulty for the towns was finding a way of containing the cowboys’ violence without implementing a law-and-order regime which was so puritanically iron-clad it put them off visiting. The solution hit upon was to allow the rowdy “dens of sin” the cowboys demanded but to either restrict their number or congregate them in a particular area of town. To enforce law and order a small police force was hired. Astutely, their costs were often met by charging the brothels, saloons and gambling houses a licence fee and implementing a system of fines for such offences as carrying a concealed weapon. According to the Topeka Daily Commonwealth, the rival town of Ellsworth
. . . realizes $300 per month from prostitution fines alone . . . The city authorities consider that as long as mankind is depraved and Texan cattle herders exist, there will be a demand and necessity for prostitutes, and that as long as prostitutes are bound to dwell in Ellsworth it is better for the respectable portion of society to hold prostitutes under restraint of law.
When the cowboy fresh off the trail arrived in town, however, sin was not his immediate preoccupation.
After hitching his horse he usually headed for the nearest barber shop, for a haircut and a proper shaping, blacking and waxing of his long moustache. His head spruced, he then went to the dry-goods store to buy a new set of clothes. Preferably these were gaudy and expensive. The outfit chosen by Teddy Blue Abbott, who rode the Texas trails in the 1870s, was by no means untypical:
I had a new white Stetson hat that I paid ten dollars for and new pants that cost twelve dollars, and a good shirt and fancy boots. They had colored tops, red and blue, with a half-moon and star on them. Lord, I was proud of those clothes! They were the kind of clothes top hands wore, and I thought I was dressed right for the first time in my life.
Decked out in his new finery, the cowboy completed his ritual of preparation by walking to the best hotel in town, and ordering a meal of eggs, ice cream and fresh oysters. The elite establishment in Abilene was the Drover’s Cottage, where J. W. and Lou Gore served drinks with ice cut from the Republican the previous winter and stored in a cellar. With the demise of Abilene, the Gores hauled over part of the hotel building to Ellsworth to establish a Drover’s Cottage there.
His stomach full, the cowboy was ready for entertainment. The cowtowns’ saloons and dance-halls were often bunched together outside town limits, usually a short walk across the railroad tracks. In Abilene, the vice district was known as the Devil’s Addition, in Ellsworth it was Nauchville, and in Newton Hide Park. The sinning area of Dodge City, “Queen of the cowtowns”, was the Red Light district, named after the Red Light House, a two-storey frame brothel with red glass in the front door, through which light shone in lurid welcome. From Dodge, the name would go all over the globe. Another term Dodge would bequeath the world was “Boot Hill”, because so many of its citizens were buried in the town cemetery with their boots on after gunfights. The first to occupy the Dodge cemetery was an African-American cowboy called Texas, who was shot by a gambler called Denver.
Cowboys were congenital gamblers. They played cards in the bunkhouse, and around the camp fire on the trail, but it only became meaningful in a saloon, where they could pit their wits and money against a professional. The saloons of the trail towns boasted names which were promisingly colourful – the Crystal Palace, the Alhambra, Old Fruit – or consciously designed to appeal to Texans, like the Lone Star and the Alamo. Some were gaudy to the rafters. The Alamo in Abilene had three sets of double glass doors, and giant murals of nudes in imitation Italian Renaissance style. Music blared incessantly from piano and bull fiddle. Wild Bill Hickok was an almost constant fixture in the Alamo during his period as marshal. In 1871 a reporter from the Daily Kansas State Record described the scene inside the saloon: “A bartender, with a countenance like a youthful divinity student, fabricates wonderful drinks, while the music of a piano and a violin from a raised recess, enlivens the scene, and ‘soothes the savage breasts’ of those who retire torn and lacerated from an unfortunate combat with the tiger.”
The card games cowboys liked were faro, monte, and poker. They distrusted fancy games and any sort of gambling machinery. Many lost their wages to the gamblers and sharps. As the cowboys played, so they drank. They favoured whiskey – bourbon, rye, or corn – or “Kansas sheep-dip” as they called it. (Very strong whiskey was a “Brigham Young cocktail”, since it made a man a “confirmed polygamist”.) The combination of alcohol and cards could have fatal results, as with the cowboy Texas buried in Dodge’s Boot Hill. A verse from the old song “The Cowboy’s Lament” warned wisely:
It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
Once in the saddle I used to go gay;
First to the dram house, then to the card house,
Got shot in the breast, I am dying today.
There were other ways to die in a saloon than by calling “cheat”. Saloons bred drunken rowdiness, horse-play that spilled easily from camaraderie to the hasty pulling of a knife or gun. To refuse a drink was to breach bar-room etiquette, and led to the deaths of numerous men. Some saloons just seemed to spawn violence, like Shorty Young’s Bucket of Blood Saloon in Le Harve, Montana, which caused cowboys to apply the name to any tough frontier whiskey-mill. Cowboy violence almost always took the form of knives or “manstoppers” (guns). Fisticuffs was unmanly. “If the Lord had intended me to fight like a dog,” as one cowboy put it, “He’d a-give me longer teeth and claws.”
The Calico Queens
After some hands of monte and “Kansas sheep-dip”, the mind of many a cowboy turned ineluctably to female companionship. There were few “respectable” women in a cowtown; the only women a poor cowboy associated with were prostitutes and dance-hall girls, who careered around the floor with the cowboy for a price. Joe McCoy drew a vivid picture of the cowtown dance-hall in his 1874 memoir, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade in the West and Southwest.
Few more wild, reckless scenes of abandoned debauchery can be seen on the civilised earth, than a dance hall in full blast in one of the many frontier towns. To say they dance wildly or in an abandoned manner is putting it mildly . . . The cowboy enters the dance with a particular zest, not stopping to divest himself of his sombrero, spurs or pistols, but just as he dismounts off his cow-pony, so he goes into the dance. A more odd, not to say comical sight is not often seen than the dancing cowboy: with the front of his sombrero lifted at an angle of 45 degrees, his huge spurs jangling at every step or motion, his revolvers flapping up and down like a retreating sheep’s tail, his eyes lit up with excitement, liquor and lust, he plunges into it and “hoes it down” at a terrible rate in the most approved yet awkward country style, often swinging his partner clear off the floor for an entire circle; then “balance all” with an occasional demonic yell near akin to the war whoop of the savage Indian. All this he does entirely oblivious to the whole world and the rest of mankind.
Although civic-minded reformers tried to ban them, prostitutes graced most cowtowns, entering the periodic census under such euphemisms as “horizontally employed” or “night worker”. The occupation of Ettie Baldwin in the 1870 Ellsworth census was written in red ink as “squirms in the dark”. The prostitutes came from all over America, the fortunate ones working out of brothels under a madam, where there was some comfort and hygiene. Most “soiled doves” or “calico queens”, however, worked above saloons or dance-halls, or in rough wooden shacks known as “cribs”.
There was little stigma attached to a visit to a “crib” or “sporting house” (although Black cowboys were not allowed to visit White houses of prostitution). Not infrequently the cowboys formed strong attachments to the girls. Teddy Blue Abbott, in his autobiography, was unapologetic about the relationship between cowpunchers and prostitutes:
I suppose those things would shock a lot of respectable people. But we wasn’t respectable and we didn’t pretend to be, which was the only way we was different from some others. I’ve heard a lot about the double standard, and seen a lot of it, too, and it don’t make any sense for the man to get off so easily. If I’d been a woman and done what I done I’d have ended up in a sporting house.
I used to talk to those girls, and they would tell me a lot of stuff, about how they got started, and how in Chicago and those eastern cities they wasn’t allowed on the streets, how their clothes would be taken away from them, only what they needed in the house, so it was like being in prison.
They could do as they pleased out here. And they were human, too. They always had money and they would lend it to fellows that were broke. The wagon bosses would come around looking for men in the spring, and when a fellow was hired he would go to his girl and say: “I’ve got a job, but my bed’s in soak.” Or his saddle or his six-shooter or his horse. And she would lend him the money to get it back and he would pay her at the end of the month.
The Newton Massacre
For every woman in a trail town there were eight men wanting companionship. Disputes over affections were inevitable. None, however, had such a bloody consequence as that between Mike McCluskie and the gambler Bill Ba
iley, the so-called Newton “General Massacre”.
Newton’s reign as the “Cowboy Capital” lasted for the single frenzied year of 1871, before the lines of the Santa Fe railroad pushed ineluctably on to Wichita. Among those charged with the keeping of Newton’s order was Mike McCluskie, a night policeman, who formed an attachment to a prostitute who worked the red light district of Hide Park. Texan gambler Bill Bailey, alias William Wilson, was a rival for her favours. On the evening of Friday 11 August, the two men had a drunken argument over the woman in the bar of the Red Front saloon. Bailey ran out of the saloon into the street, McCluskie following with his pistol drawn. As Bailey crouched in the dark, McCluskie shot him. The gambler was taken to the Santa Fe hotel, where he later died.
Many of the people of the town considered the shooting justified, but Bailey had numerous friends among the Texan cowboys who had just come up the Chisholm Trail. One of these, the young and unstable Hugh Anderson, decided on revenge. Past midnight on Saturday 19 August, Anderson, accompanied by several friends, walked into the bright lights of Perry Tuttle’s dance-hall, and over to the gaming table where McCluskie was sitting. Drawing his pistol, Anderson screamed at McCluskie: “You cowardly dog! I’m going to blow the top of your head off!” Anderson fired twice. One bullet entered McCluskie’s neck, but he managed to stagger up and pull the trigger of his revolver. The hammer failed to detonate the cap, McCluskie collapsed onto the floor, and Anderson shot him again, this time in the back.