by Jon E. Lewis
If cowgirls were few, cowboys were many. Running away from home to become a cowpoke was almost a national disease amongst juvenile males in the 1870s and 1880s. In words which might speak for many, one retired cow waddy remembered his boyish infatuation with cowboying:
I always wanted to be a cowpuncher. When I was a little kid on the farm in East Texas I couldn’t think of nothin’ else . . . Once in a while someone would drive a bunch of cattle by our place. I couldn’t have been more’n eight years old when I followed one bunch off . . . I had an uncle livin’ down the road about four miles. He happened to see me goin’ by his place.
“Whatcha doin’, kid?”
“A-working stock”, says I.
He finally talked me into goin’ on back home with him – I stuck it out until I got to be about fifteen. Then I pulled out for good.
Few questions were asked of a prospective cowboy. His life was nobody’s business but his own. This privacy was part of the cowboy’s code. As Teddy Blue Abbott explained it:
A man might tell as much or as little about himself as he saw fit, or nothing at all. Nobody cared. All that was required of him was to do his work faithfully, and not disturb the peace and harmony of the outfit by ill-temper or viciousness. These men might live together and work together season after season, year after year, without knowing anything about each other personally other than the names they went by.
There were many like Jim Culver, who arrived at the Lang ranchhouse more dead than alive after an adventure in the icy waters of the Little Missouri. Lang liked him and hired him. He was a young man of about twenty, fearless, of good morals, and with an unusual amount of energy and initiative. When a mean horse side-flopped and killed him two years later, all that was known about him was – “He said his name was Jim Culver”.
Dressing the Cowboy
Part of the allure of the cowboy was his distinctive dress, which set him apart from mere pedestrian farm hands. “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,” runs the line from the song “The Cowboy’s Lament”. Although cowboy clothing sometimes tended towards the fancy, it was mainly designed as a practical work uniform for ranch labour in western climes.
The essential items of cowboy dress were hat and boots. At first, Anglo cowboys wore the sombrero of the Mexican vaquero, the enormous brim of which gave the rider shade under the southern sun. When cowboys drifted north to work the plains of Montana and Wyoming, they cut or rolled the brim back so that the hat would catch less wind. Headgear was generally homemade – the favourite material being straw – and of poor quality until the 1860s, when New Jersey hatter John Batterson Stetson went west for his health. Recognizing that a market existed for practical cowboy hats, in 1865 Stetson set up a shop and factory in Philadelphia (which had skilled workers aplenty and good rail links to the West) specializing in headwear for the range. Within only a matter of years, “Stetson” and cowboy hat were synonymous. By the turn of the century Stetson employed a workforce of thousands and turned out two million hats a year. These were in a variety of styles, but the “Carlsbad” was the most popular. The “ten gallon” hat enjoyed a brief vogue among drugstore cowboys and movie stars, but such extravagant styles were rarely worn by genuine ranch hands. For a cow waddy, a hat was an implement that kept him cool or dry, and which could be used to scoop water for himself and his horse if necessary. It could even be used to slap a bucking bronc.
The cowboy boot was always made of top grade leather. Even the most impecunious cowhand would somehow find the $20–$30 for a fine pair of handmade boots, preferably from the shop of Joe Austin in Texas. Even more than his hat, a cowboy’s boots were his badge of office. Their high heels kept his feet from shifting in the stirrups (and served as brakes if he was roping on foot), while the high tops protected his calves from chafing the fender of the saddle. Initially boots were plain and straight, but gradually they became more ornate. The first fancy top was a “Lone Star” motif set in a wide red band. Since boots were difficult to don, pull straps were stitched on the inside or outside (“mules’ ears”). Until the 1890s most westerners stuffed their pants legs inside their boots.
Spurs were a necessary accessory, their name deriving from the Spanish espuela, meaning “grappling iron”. Many had vicious-looking rowels (serrated spinners) but the first thing a cowpuncher would do with new spurs would be to blunt them down. Spurs were for the control of a horse, never for its punishment.
A bandanna, chaps and slicker were also common cowboy issue. The bandanna, usually blue or red, was a multipurpose tool; it could be tied over the mouth to keep out dust, dipped in water to become a flannel, or used as a tourniquet. Chaps were seatless leg-coverings that protected against ropes, brush and bad weather. Straight-legged leather or “Shotgun” chaps were the familiar style, but loose Bat-wings or Texas legs also had their adherents. In winter, cowboys wore woolly chaps of Angora or sheepskin. Flamboyant cow waddies even made chaps out of mountain lion, ponyskin and buffalo hide. A yellow slicker saddle coat or “Fish” (after the brand name) was standardly tied behind the saddle, ready to be unrolled in inclement weather. The mail order advertisement for the Fish slicker – cowboys were regular catalogue shoppers – described it thus:
This coat is gotten up especially for horseback riders; made from yellow slicker, very heavy cloth, and makes the most perfect rain coat ever manufactured for the use of the horseman. This coat covers the entire saddle, as well as rider, thus insuring a dry seat, while the lower part is wide enough to cover the length of the rider. It is a combination coat, which can be made from a riding to a walking coat by simply adjusting one of the buttons. The best coat obtainable; has patent eyelet fasteners, non-corrosive zinc buttons; all of the latest improvement. Guaranteed to be strictly waterproof, and the best coat of its kind ever put on the market.
The cost was $2.65.
If these were the characteristic items of a cowboy’s wardrobe, the manner in which he dressed and undressed was no less distinctive. As William Timmons remembered it from his cowpunching days:
A cowboy undresses upward: boots off, then socks, pants and shirt . . . He never goes deeper than that. After he has removed the top layer he takes his hat off and lays his boots on the brim, so the hat won’t blow away during the night. Spurs are never taken off boots. In the morning a cowboy begins dressing downward. First he puts on his hat, then his shirt, and takes out of his shirt pocket his Bull Durham and cigarette paper and rolls one to start the day. He finishes dressing by putting on his pants, socks, and boots. This is a habit that usually stays with a cowboy long after his days in the saddle are over.
More than hat, boots or any item of clothing, the saddle was the cowboy’s most valuable possession. A stock saddle took many uncomfortable hours to wear in, and might cost more than a horse. One cowboy song went: “Oh a ten dollar hoss and a forty dollar saddle, / And I’m riding out to punch in Texas cattle.” The sturdy stock saddle of the American West weighed around 40–50 pounds and came in a variety of models, but common to them all was a prominent front horn and a high cantle. With a rope looped or “dallied” around it the horn, usually fashioned from iron with a leather cover, was required to withstand the pull of a 2,000-pound bull. Outside of the horn and cantle, there were substantial regional differences in saddle-making. A Cheyenne saddle had a flatter seat than the popular “Brazos tree”, while Texas, Montana and Wyoming saddles were all two-cinch or “rimfire” rigs. “Single-fire” rigs, on the other hand, were common in California and Oregon.
Bridle and bit likewise differed from region to region. Horsemen of the southern plains used the half-breed bit, which was gentle on the horse’s mouth but required the cowboy to tug firmly. His compatriot on the northern plains, influenced by migrating Californian vaqueros, preferred a spade bit, the sharp point of which lay across the horse’s tongue. When pulled back, the bit made the horse stop dead. Used roughly, the spade bit would cut the mouth, but in practised hands it could control the horse with the lightest tou
ch. On winter mornings, Montana cowboys would warm the horse’s bit by dipping it in coffee.
Such care for the horse was not occasioned by sentiment. Contrary to myth, cowboys tended to view horses as mere instruments, and changed them several times a day, much as a carpenter might move from saw to chisel to plane. A horse which was comfortable with its bit was a more efficient, less troublesome horse. This is not to say that cowpunchers never felt affection for their horses. Andy Adams, at the end of the long drive to Montana, found he had come to like and admire his mounts:
At no time in my life, before or since, have I felt so keenly the parting between man and horse as I did that September evening in Montana. For on the trail an affection springs up between a man and his mount which is almost human. Every privation which he endures, his horse endures with him – carrying him through falling weather, swimming rivers by day and riding in the lead of stampedes by night, always faithful, always willing, and always patiently enduring every hardship, from exhausting hours under saddle to the sufferings of a dry drive.
Now, when the trail is a lost occupation and reverie, and reminiscences carry the mind back to that day, there are friends and faces that may be forgotten, but there are horses that will never be. There were emergencies in which the horse was everything, his rider merely the accessory. But together, man and horse, they were the force that made it possible to move millions of cattle which passed up and over the various trails of the west.
Bonanzaland
The Taking of the Northern Plains
The American cattle business enjoyed a gilded age in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Slaughter by hunters had reduced the buffalo that competed with their cattle for grazing to a few scattered herds. The power of the Plains Indians was being challenged by the cavalry. The tables of the East were desperate for beef, and there was a growing demand for American beef in Europe. By the end of 1881, 110 million pounds of frozen beef were being shipped to Great Britain alone. And best of all, there were thousands of acres of free grass on the northern plains, there for the taking for those who could claim it or hold it with a gun. The profits that could be made from raising livestock on the grasslands of the West seemed almost unlimited.
Investment in the ranching business became a mania in America and Europe. Men and women begged and borrowed money to invest in steers and spreads. The finance-drumming letter of Connecticut’s Judge Sherwood was typical. “The profits are enormous,” wrote Sherwood to potential backers. “There is no business like it in the world, and the whole secret of it is, it costs nothing to feed the cattle. They grow without eating your money. They literally raise themselves.”
Even responsible stockbreeding journals caught the delirium. The Breeder’s Gazette enthused: “A thousand of these animals [cattle] are kept nearly as cheaply as a single one, so with a thousand as a starter and an investment of but $5,000 in the start, in four years the stock raiser has made from $40,000 to $45,000.”
Probably the man who was most responsible for promoting the beef boom was James S. Brisbin. A Pennsylvania schoolmaster who joined the Union army in 1861, Brisbin had stayed on after the Civil War to fight the Indians. Impressed, however, by the way cattlemen drove a herd into a reservation and left with a bag of money, Brisbin appointed himself the proselyte of ranching. He wrote glowing reports for the sporting paper Wilke’s Spirit of the Times, and eventually wrote a book, The Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains, published in 1881. Urban readers were fascinated by his purple, rousing prose, one paragraph of which read:
The West! The mighty West! That land where the buffalo still roams and the wild savage dwells: where the broad rivers flow and the boundless prairie stretches away for thousands of miles; where new States are every year carved out and myriads of people find homes and wealth . . . where there are lands for the landless, money for the moneyless . . .
The would-be rich who pored over Brisbin’s book were equally hypnotized by his examples of those who struck it rich in the cow business:
Mr R. C. Keith of the North Platte, Nebraska, began raising cows in the fall of 1867 with 5 American cows. Each year he and his partner bought more cows. The total cost of the cattle from 1867 to 1873 inclusive, was under $50,000. This did not include expenses of ranch, herding, etc. . . . which, however, were small, as they had no land or timber to buy. They had several employees; their men cost $50 per month plus board . . . They have sold and butchered cattle which brought them $12,000 profit. They have, remaining on hand, cattle worth $93,000. Thus they have made an enormous profit.
Brisbin’s book sold well in the East. In Britain it did a phenomenal trade. English boardrooms and gentlemen’s clubs talked of little else except the beef bonanza. Aristocratic British families packed “black sheep” sons off to the West to make easy money. Thousands of acres of Montana, Texas and Wyoming were bought up by cattle companies based in London and Edinburgh.
There seemed to be no end to British money. Wyoming stockman Alexander Hamilton Swan managed to persuade a group of Scottish financiers to buy out five-sixths of his holdings for $2.4 million, while he and a partner retained the remaining stock and Swan stayed on as manager of the new enterprise, the Swan Land & Cattle Company Ltd. On the southern plains, the King Ranch, the largest in the country, was financed by an English syndicate. The Prairie Cattle Company purchased the Quarter Circle T ranch of Thomas and Molly Bugbee in the Panhandle for the fantastic sum of $350,000. The same company also bought George Littlefield’s “squatter” LIT ranch – which had no legal claim to the land it grazed – for $125,000. Spread after spread was swallowed by the Prairie Cattle Company. Texas ranchers said of it that it “owned all the outdoors”. In a little under three years, the Prairie Cattle Company had purchased a range which stretched unbroken from the Arkansas to the Canadian rivers.
Some of the English and Scots financiers and cattlemen cut a curious spectacle on the range. In 1883 the Rocking Chair Ranche Company was formed, with the Earl of Aberdeen and Baron Tweedmouth as its principal shareholders. To oversee the Ranche’s operation in the Panhandle, the company sent out a relative of Tweedmouth’s, Archibald John Marjoribanks. The young Marjoribanks called his employees “cow servants”, and antagonized them by insisting that they address him as Sir Archibald. When Marjoribanks rode the range, dressed in his elegant black scissor-tailed hunting jacket, his employees would bushwhack him, yipping like Indians and firing off their pistols.
Moreton Frewen, the son of a Sussex gentleman, arrived in the West and promptly had himself photographed in a tasselled and embroidered outfit. For the headquarters of his Powder River Company he built a rambling wooden house, “Frewen’s Castle”, which featured a 40-feet square room, where guests could dine while musicians played on the adjoining mezzanine. However, although the house boasted the luxury of a telephone, Frewen could not persuade his wife, Eastern heiress Clara Jerome, to endure frontier life, and she returned to her New York home. (Clara’s sister, Jennie, was the mother of Winston Churchill, later to become British prime minister.) Though energetic and ambitious, Frewen had no luck in corporate ranching. He was constantly in time-consuming difficulties with his London board of directors, and after several years of bubble prosperity the Powder River Company went into liquidation. Afterwards, Moreton Frewen became nicknamed “Mortal Ruin”.
Other cattlemen from Albion did better. In the late 1880s, the British-financed XIT Ranch added 15,000 square miles of Montana to its considerable Texas holdings. To move cattle to the northern spread, the company forged a route which ran through seven states, the 1,200-mile-long Montana Trail. Equally impressive was the Scotsman Murdo Mackenzie, manager of the immense Matador Ranch. Mackenzie, vigilant and frugal, ensured that the Matador paid a steady 15 per cent to investors for three decades.
There seemed to be almost as many British capitalists as cowboys chasing cows in the West. Between 1880 and 1885, English and Scots investors poured $40 million into Western ranching. But the British were not the only pursu
ers of the beef bonanza. There were German barons, titled Frenchmen (including the Marquis de More, who arrived in the Dakota Badlands with no fewer than 20 servants), Ivy League graduates, and farm boys from Illinois. Anyone who was footloose and who could scrape together enough for a seed herd seemed to be heading West. Above all, there were East coast financiers from Boston and New York, who outspent even the British.
For them all, mecca was the free grass of Wyoming, Dakota and Montana. The small independents began with sod huts, heavily fortified because the Plains Indians had not been entirely subdued. A gentleman’s agreement gave grazing rights to all land stretching back from a claimed stream. Some, through hard work, luck and guile, did become successful ranchers, even “cattle barons”: men like Granville Stuart, a Virginian gold prospector turned rancher, who started with a spread in the Yellowstone in 1879.
The social centre for the cattle barons of the northwest plains was the famous Cheyenne Club. Established in 1880 by wealthy ranchers and stock managers in the frontier town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, the Club – originally called the Cactus Club – was a Great Plains facsimile of a London establishment for gentlemen. In the summer, stockmen sat on its broad verandah sipping cool drinks and reading the London Times. There were rooms for reading, playing billiards and cards, and its baths were much sought after. The management was especially proud to be the first club in America to install electric lighting. Rules of behaviour were strict. Members could be disciplined for profanity and drunkenness, and expelled for an act “so dishonorable in social life as to unfit the guilty party for the society of gentlemen.” The colourful Charles M. Oelrichs, one of the Club’s founders, was suspended for 30 days for hitting a bartender. When he refused to accept his punishment, the board of governors terminated his membership. Another member, John Coble, was suspended for shooting an oil painting of a pastoral scene, which he declared to be a travesty on purebred stock.