The Mammoth Book of the West (24 page)

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 pursuers 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.

John Clay, a Scotsman who managed several Wyoming ranches, described the ambience of the Cheyenne Club in his memoir,
My Life on the Range
:

It was a cosmopolitan place. Under its roof reticent Britisher, cautious Scot, exuberant Irishman, careful Yankee, confident Bostonian, worldly New Yorker, chivalrous Southerner and delightful Canadian, all found a welcome home . . . a motley group full of ginger and snap, with more energy than business sense.

There at the club they met and they fashioned it after eastern and foreign methods. The foreigner was caught up by the ease and luxury of its café and dining room. There was an atmosphere of success among its members. They spent money freely, for all along the line there was a swelling song of victory.

The northern plains were not the only great range to be opened up for cattle in the bonanza years. There was also the
Llanos Estacados
, the Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle,
long the domain of the buffalo and the Comanche.

The man who opened up the Panhandle for ranching was the ubiquitous Charles Goodnight. The financial panic of 1873 had wiped his Colorado cattle enterprise “off the face of the earth,” obliging him to sell his property and most of his stock. From the wreckage of his empire he managed to salvage 1,800 head of cattle, and with veritable grit decided that he would start up a new cattle venture in a new land.

Thus in the fall of 1875 Goodnight began driving his remaining Longhorns south towards the unbroken grassland of the Panhandle, an area he knew from youthful service fighting Indians with the Texas Rangers. A volunteer assistant on the drive was Englishman James T. Hughes, the son of the author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
. Another was the Scot J. C. Johnston, later director of Murdo Mackenzie’s Matador Ranch. Both men had money, and invested it in Goodnight, buying a third of his herd.

As Goodnight’s outfit trailed their way southwards they found the army everywhere before them, fighting their final campaign against the Comanche of the Staked Plains. Wintering on the Canadian, Goodnight began to search for the exact place where he would build his new ranch. By chance a Mexican trader, Nicholas Martinez, drifted into Goodnight’s camp and told him of the Palo Duro Canyon, a fabulous grassy valley where Chief Lone Wolf had fought Mackenzie’s cavalry. Goodnight employed Martinez to lead him to the canyon. They wandered for days, Martinez seemingly lost, until Martinez gestured Goodnight to the brink of an enormous gash in the earth.

One glimpse over the edge was enough to convince the rancher he had found the place he sought. Buffalo grass carpeted the bottom of the Palo Duro, while its towering walls made it a natural enclosure. A creek – the headwaters
of the Red River – ran through it, giving it a plentiful supply of water. Only a few feet wide in parts, in other places the canyon bulged out to form miles of broad range. To get the cattle in, Goodnight had to drive them in single file down an old buffalo trail. His beloved chuckwagon was taken apart and lowered down the cliffs by lariat.

In the valley, Goodnight and his men discovered thousands of buffalo, which they “choused” out by firing bullets near their feet. To prevent the buffalo returning a guard had to be mounted at the mouth of the canyon. Then, on a choice piece of green level ground near the creek, Goodnight built the log house of what he called the “Old Home Ranch”.

With the ranch house completed, Goodnight returned to Colorado to collect his wife, Mary Ann. On the journey he met the Irish financier John G. Adair, who proposed he back the cattleman in his venture. So was established the 1.25 million-acre “JA Ranch”, after Adair’s initials, which realized a profit of more than $500,000 in five years. Astutely, Goodnight upgraded his cattle by crossbreeding them. An experiment with shorthorned Durham bulls was a failure, but when in 1882 Goodnight tried white-faced Herefords he was immediately successful. The Hereford, as it developed, was the answer to the western livestock problem. It was hardy enough to survive the range, but produced plentiful, fatty meat.

Adair himself stayed in the East and left the ranching to Goodnight. When the Irishman died in 1885, however, his wife took to descending on the Palo Duro to check over the investment. A prominent Eastern socialite, Cornelia Wadsworth Adair always brought with her a vast train of maids, butlers and baggage.

Despite her customary scandalously late hour of rising, Cornelia Wadsworth Adair proved a canny rancher and
by 1890 the JA Ranch grazed 100,000 cattle, many of them Herefords, which were given their own special JJ brand. But, ever restless, Goodnight decided to withdraw from the JA. Once again, he started up a new ranch, this time along the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad. Fuelled by a diet of black coffee, meat and a box of cigars a day, Goodnight also found time to develop a safe sidesaddle for women, and breed a cross between cows and buffalo which he called cattaloes.

He also spent many hours on the affairs of the Panhandle Stock Association of Texas, of which he was a prominent member. Although the cattlemen liked to surround themselves with an aura of individualism, the bonanza years saw them band together in powerful oligarchical association. The Cheyenne Club, behind its façade of carefree opulence, was the headquarters of the hardnosed Wyoming Stock Growers Association, who would achieve infamy with their range war in Johnson County in 1892.

The livestock associations offered many advantages to the established rancher: they supervised round-ups, registered brands and ran down rustlers. Above all, they sought to protect the wealth and advantage of the big cattle raiser by denying latecomer ranchers – pejoratively termed “range pirates” – and farmers access to the free grass.

Barbed wire was one means of doing this. Invented in 1873 by Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden, the coiled barb had initially been looked on with suspicion by the beef barons, who feared it would cut their cattle. When Glidden demonstrated to them that it would not, they bought roll upon roll of it, fencing off huge areas of grassland, even public highways. The XIT spread in Texas employed so much barbed wire that the staples needed to attach it to posts had to be shipped in by the freight-car load.

As more and more of the open range was closed to
small stockmen and farmers, they began to take countermeasures. Letters of protest were sent to Washington. They formed masked, night-riding groups which cut the ranchers’ wire. The barons responded in kind, trampling down farmers’ crops and cutting their wire. Violence and murder were the result. To stop the bloodshed, Congress enacted a law in 1885 which forbade fencing on the public domain.

This brought a sort of peace to range country, but only the peace which precedes the storm. Overstocking, range wars and blizzards were about to bring the beef bonanza crashing down.

Before the cattle kingdom fell, a curtain-raiser was played out on the vast plains of New Mexico. The Lincoln County War of 1878 was the first of the great range wars. It also created a legend in one of its dramatis personae, Billy the Kid.

Trouble began with the attempt of ex-Californian army officer Lawrence G. Murphy and his business associate James J. Dolan to turn Lincoln County into their private economic empire, based on the mercantile store and bank they operated in the county seat, also known as Lincoln. This empire – known to all as “the House”, after Murphy and Dolan’s imposing store building – was thoroughly corrupt, had much of the local political-legal machine in its pocket, and derived a principal source of its income from rustling the Long Rail cattle of John Simpson Chisum, which were then sold by government contract to the Mescalero Apache Reservation and Fort Stanton. Chisum, the so-called “cattle king of New Mexico,” had been the pioneer rancher on the Pecos Plains; by the mid-1870s he had carved out a range of grama grass 200 miles long, and lived in palatial splendour in his adobe ranch set within irrigated orchards and shady cottonwoods.

By 1876 local discontent with the House’s monopoly and high prices was rising, but found no practical expression
until the arrival of patrician, tweed-wearing Englishman John Henry Tunstall in Lincoln County. Tunstall bought a small ranch on the Rio Feliz – and also opened a new store in Lincoln. His partners in this enterprise were the town’s only lawyer, Alexander McSween, and John Chisum who opened a bank in the rear of the store. Patrons flocked to the Tunstall–McSween store, to the considerable irritation of the House. Matters were exacerbated when Murphy accused McSween of embezzling the estate of a former partner. As a precautionary measure against any sequestering, the lawyer transferred his property to Tunstall.