When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the
continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in
all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about,
the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great
salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was
not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay
beyond the mouth of the Missouri.
The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like to
nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the great
cattle-range of America. It reached, although they could know nothing of
that, from the Spanish possessions on the south across a thousand miles
of short grass lands to the present Canadian boundary-line which certain
obdurate American souls still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40
minutes, and not where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty,"
indeed, would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.
Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the explorers;
and, for more than half a century afterwards, it commonly was supposed
to be useless for the occupation of white men and suitable only as a
hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most of us can remember the school
maps of our own youth, showing a vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great
American Desert," which was considered hopeless for any human industry,
but much of which has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the
globe.
Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which carried the
first idea of their infertility. When the first settlers of Illinois and
Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of
timber and prairie lands. Thinking the prairies worthless--since land
which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops--these
first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in
hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long
in settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in that
region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or better, and that
these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would, in a few generations,
be studded with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the
world.
But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri,
found valueless the region of the Plains and the foothills, not so the
wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than science
records. The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska,
from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have
concluded in those days that there was after all slight difference
between the buffalo and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in
untold thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure
the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the Plains.
Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its
environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that
environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best
land in the world. So with the American Indian, who, supported by the
vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which
was later to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle.
No freer life ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians
of the Plains in the buffalo days; and never has the world known a
physically higher type of savage.
On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which was to
be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the Mandans and
the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones. Farther south were the
Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages, most of whom depended in part
upon the buffalo for their living, though the Otoes, the Pawnees, the
Mandans, and certain others now and then raised a little corn or a few
squashes to help out their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the
Kiowas, the Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the
Crows, and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful captains
made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary accuracy, but without
discovering in this region much future for Americans. They were
explorers and not industrial investigators.
It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that
the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the
Mormons had trekked in search of a country where they might live as they
liked. Still the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California was
in the eyes of the world. The great cow-range was overleaped. But, in
the early fifties, when the placer fields of California began to be less
numerous and less rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared
on northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll back.
Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the great dry
plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily may be seen, the
cow-range proper was not settled as most of the West was, by a directly
westbound thrust of an eastern population; but, on the contrary, it was
approached from several different angles--from the north, from the east,
from the west and northwest, and finally from the south.
The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was crude,
lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the Indian
tribes. War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder for the most
part, was set on foot as soon as white touched red in that far western
region.
All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country of the
Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed. They
could not employ and remain content with the means by which the red
man there had always fed himself. Hence a new industry sprang up in the
United States, which of itself made certain history in that land. The
business of freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train or
by pack-train, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized,
and pursued by men of great business ability as well as by men of great
hardihood and daring.
Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its
flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned, more and
more was learned in the States of the new country which lay between the
Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north, and no
man could guess how far south. Now appears in history Fort Benton, on
the Missouri, the great northern supply post--just as at an earlier date
there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond
the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the
new Saxon civilization in the West.
Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and
romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged,
womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering, now
advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American story.
But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains,
and no one thought of this region as the frontier. The men there
who were prospecting and exploiting were classified as no more than
adventurers. No one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and the
buffalo. The reports of Fremont long since had called attention to the
nourishing quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day of
the cowboy had not yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story which
runs to the effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by
the early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the range.
It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish during the winter.
But next spring the owners were surprised to find that the oxen, so far
from perishing, had flourished very much--indeed, were fat and in good
condition. So runs the story which is often repeated. It may be true,
but to accredit to this incident the beginnings of the cattle industry
in the Indian country would surely be going too far. The truth is that
the cow industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was a Latin enterprise,
flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and
adventurers came on the range.
Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies--the
old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante
Fe and Chihuahua. Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande,
was already well differentiated and developed at the time the first
adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began to crowd
their Latin neighbors for more room. There it was that our Saxon
frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry. But these
southern and northern riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely
statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of the
herds, troubled little about the herds themselves. There was a certain
fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and easeful civilization
of Old Spain which they encountered in the land below them. Little
by little, and then largely and yet more largely, the warriors of San
Jacinto reached out and began to claim lands for themselves--leagues
and uncounted leagues of land, which had, however, no market value. Well
within the memory of the present generation large tracts of good land
were bought in Texas for six cents an acre; some was bought for half
that price in a time not much earlier. Today much of that land is
producing wealth; but land then was worthless--and so were cows.
This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republic of Texas, may
be regarded as the first enduring American result of contact with the
Spanish industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from Kentucky and
Tennessee or southern Ohio, and the first colonizer of Texas was a
Virginian, Stephen Fuller Austin. They came along the old Natchez Trace
from Nashville to the Mississippi River--that highway which has so much
history of its own. Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley
of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country,
moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed
the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American
civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end, between the
Rio Grande and the Red River.
In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering,
riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come,
there was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and
adventuring men. Thus there was an interchange of knowledge and of
customs between East and West, between our old country and our
new. There was an interchange, too, at the south, where our Saxon
civilization came in touch with that of Mexico.
We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle
industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made from the
hands of Mexico.
The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of African
and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New World--the same
horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a breed naturally hardy
and able to subsist upon dry food. Without such horses there could
have been no cattle industry. These horses, running wild in herds, had
crossed to the upper Plains. La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark,
had found the Indians using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have
seen, had learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to
drag the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first called
the horse.
In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas, countless
herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership over wide and
unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm country, they bred
in extraordinary numbers. The southern range, indeed, has always been
called the breeding range. The cattle had little value. He who wanted
beef killed beef. He who wanted leather killed cattle for their hides.
But beyond these scant and infrequent uses cattle had no definite value.
The Mexican, however, knew how to handle cows. He could ride a horse,
and he could rope cattle and brand them. Most of the cattle of a wide
range would go to certain water-holes more or less regularly, where they
might be roughly collected or estimated. This coming of the cattle to
the watering-places made it unnecessary for owners of cattle to acquire
ranch land. It was enough to secure the water-front where the cows must
go to drink. That gave the owner all the title he needed. His right to
the increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature, just as
inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal instinct of a
cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother gave the old rancher
of immemorial times sufficient proof of ownership in the increase of
his herd. The calf would run with its own mother and with no other cow
through its first season. So that if an old Mexican _ranchero_ saw a
certain number of cows at his watering-places, and with them calves,
he knew that all before him were his property--or, at least, he claimed
them as such and used them.
Still, this was loose-footed property. It might stray away after all,
or it might be driven away. Hence, in some forgotten time, our shrewd
Spaniard invented a system of proof of ownership which has always lain
at the very bottom of the organized cow industry; he invented the method
of branding. This meant his sign, his name, his trade-mark, his proof of
ownership. The animal could not shake it off. It would not burn off in
the sun or wash off in the rain. It went with the animal and could not
be eradicated from the animal's hide. Wherever the bearer was seen, the
brand upon its hide provided certain identification of the owner.
Now, all these basic ideas of the cow industry were old on the lower
range in Texas when our white men first drifted thither. The cattle
industry, although in its infancy, and although supposed to have no
great future, was developed long before Texas became a republic. It
never, indeed, changed very much from that time until the end of its own
career.
One great principle was accepted religiously even in those early and
crude days. A man's cow was _his_ cow. A man's brand was HIS brand.
There must be no interference with his ownership. Hence certain other
phases of the industry followed inevitably. These cattle, these calves,
each branded by the iron of the owner, in spite of all precautions,
began to mingle as settlers became more numerous; hence came the idea of
the round-up. The country was warm and lazy. If a hundred or a thousand
cows were not collected, very well. If a calf were separated from its
mother, very well. The old ranchers never quarreled among themselves.
They never would have made in the South anything like a cattle
association; it was left for the Yankees to do that at a time when cows
had come to have far greater values. There were few arguments in the
first rodeos of the lower range. One rancher would vie with his neighbor
in generosity in the matter of unbranded calves. Haggling would have
been held contemptible. On the lower range in the old times no one cared
much about a cow. Why should one do so? There was no market for cows--no
one who wished to buy them. If one tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a
yearling or a two-year-old, the owner might perhaps offer the animal as
a gift, or he might smile and say "_Con mucho gusto_" as he was handed a
few pieces of silver. There were plenty of cows everywhere in the world!
Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in
picturesque romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The
westbound thrust which came upon the upper part of the range in the days
of more shrewd and exacting business methods was simply the best-known
and most published phase of frontier life in the cow country; hence we
have usually accepted it as typical. It would not be accurate to say
that the cattle industry was basically much influenced or governed by
northern or eastern men. In practically all of its great phenomena the
frontier of the old cow-range was southern by birth and growth.
There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so soon to
write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into the admiration
or the wonder of a great portion of the earth--a land of fascinating
interest to the youth of every country, and a region whose story holds
a charm for young and old alike even today. It was a region royal in
its dimensions. Far on the west it was hedged by the gray-sided and
white-topped mountains, the Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the
cattle were to live, high up in the foothills of this great mountain
range which ran from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay
the Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with high
native grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among them, the
sweet-william, the wild rose, and often great masses of the yellow
sunflower.
From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the frontier
sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The rainfall was
not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful country, one of
optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south, along the Rio Grande,
the climate was moister, warmer, more enervating; but on the high
steppes of the middle range in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western
Nebraska, there lay the finest out-of-doors country, man's country the
finest of the earth.
But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows. The
upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north had not
begun. It was after the Civil War that the first great drives of cattle
from the south toward the north began, and after men had learned in
the State of Texas that cattle moved from the Rio Grande to the upper
portions of the State and fed on the mesquite grass would attain greater
stature than in the hot coast country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly,
there leaped into our comprehension and our interest that strange
country long loosely held under our flag, the region of the Plains, the
region which we now call the Old West.
In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed, the vast
gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each cow with its
title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle were now going to
take the place of those on which the Indians had depended for their
living these many years. A new day in American history had dawned.