The customary method of studying history by means of a series of events
and dates is not the method which we have chosen to employ in this study
of the Old West. Speaking generally, our minds are unable to assimilate
a condensed mass of events and dates; and that is precisely what would
be required of us if we should attempt here to follow the ways of
conventional history. Dates are at best no more than milestones on the
pathway of time; and in the present instance it is not the milestones
but the road itself with which we are concerned. Where does the road
begin? Why comes it hither? Whither does it lead? These are the real
questions.
Under all the exuberance of the life of the range there lay a steady
business of tremendous size and enormous values. The "uproarious
iniquity" of the West, its picturesqueness, its vividness--these were
but froth on the stream. The stream itself was a steady and somber
flood. Beyond this picturesqueness of environment very few have cared to
go, and therefore sometimes have had little realization of the vastness
of the cowboy's kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or
the fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily
life." The American cowboy is the most modern representative of a human
industry that is second to very few in antiquity.
Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: _Quorum pars magna
fui_--"Of which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual truth,
we ought most to value contemporary records, representations made by men
who were themselves a part of the scenes which they describe. In that
way we shall arrive not merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the
stereotyped characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are
much more interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely
titillating stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the
West. We must go below such things if we would gain a just and lasting
estimate of the times. We ought to look on the old range neither as a
playground of idle men nor as a scene of hysterical and contorted human
activities. We ought to look upon it from the point of view of its uses
to mankind. The explorers found it a wilderness, the home of the red man
and the buffalo. What were the underlying causes of its settlement and
development?
There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of all
human life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men traveled
by hollowed logs down stream. Then possibly the idea of a sail was
conceived. Early in the story of the United States men made commercial
journeys from the head of the Ohio to the mouth of the Mississippi
by flatboats, and came back by keelboats. The pole, the cordelle, the
paddle, and the sail, in turn helped them to navigate the great streams
which led out into the West. And presently there was to come that
tremendous upheaval wrought by the advent of the iron trails which,
scorning alike waterways and mountain ranges, flung themselves almost
directly westward across the continent.
The iron trails, crossing the northern range soon after the Civil War,
brought a market to the cattle country. Inevitably the men of the
lower range would seek to reach the railroads with what they had to
sell--their greatest natural product, cattle on the hoof. This was the
primary cause of the great northbound drives already mentioned, the
greatest pastoral phenomena in the story of the world.
The southern herds at that time had no market at their doors. They had
to go to the market, and they had to go on foot. That meant that they
must be driven northward by cattle handlers who had passed their days
in the wild life of the lower range. These cowmen of course took their
character and their customs northward with them, and so they were
discovered by those enthusiastic observers, newly arrived by rail, whom
the cowmen were wont to call "pilgrims."
Now the trail of the great cattle drives--the Long Trail-was a thing of
tremendous importance of itself and it is still full of interest. As it
may not easily be possible for the author to better a description of it
that was written some twenty years ago, that description is here again
set down. *
* "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. Appleton. 1897.
Reprinted by permission.
The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast
rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North.
Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along
the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their
feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard tablelands or the
well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of
Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west
as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as
far north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace plainly
its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct across Texas, and
multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still
scar the iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not
buried all the old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path
still remain visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may
see the ribbons banding the hillsides today along the valley of the
Stillwater, and along the Yellowstone and toward the source of the
Missouri. The hoof marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands
and the coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of
the long cold you may see, even today if you like, the shadow of that
unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle-range. History has no
other like it.
The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day.
Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps known but
vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there
appeared, almost without warning, vast processions of strange horned
kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no
tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a master. Whither these were
bound, what had conjured them forth, whence they came, were questions
in the minds of the majority of the population of the North and East
to whom the phenomenon appeared as the product of a day. The answer to
these questions lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far
back into that civilization's history. The Long Trail was finished in a
day. It was begun more than a century before that day, and came forward
along the very appointed ways of time.... Thus, far down in the vague
Southwest, at some distant time, in some distant portion of old,
mysterious Mexico, there fell into line the hoof prints which made the
first faint beginnings of the Long Trail, merely the path of a half
nomadic movement along the line of the least resistance.
The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as it
did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway of the
continent has known. The nomadic and the warlike days passed, and
there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time. It was the beginning of a
feudalism of the range, a barony rude enough, but a glorious one,
albeit it began, like all feudalism, in large-handed theft and generous
murdering. The flocks of these strong men, carelessly interlapping,
increased and multiplied amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as
wealth. The people could not eat a tithe of the beef; they could not
use a hundredth of the leather. Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of
ownerless grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the
slow streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low coast
country, the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and thousands
and hundreds of thousands. This was really the dawning of the American
cattle industry.
Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the
Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois.
In 1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an outlet. In 1867
a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for
California, and only abandoned the project because the Plains Indians
were then very bad in the country to the north. In 1869 several herds
were driven from Texas to Nevada. These were side trails of the main
cattle road. It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed
the cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of
transportation. No proper means for this offered. The Civil War stopped
almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war
found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of
cattle which had no actual or determinate value. They were sorted and
branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase
could be converted into anything but more cattle. The cry for a market
became imperative.
Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the
upper West. The Indians were being driven from the Plains. A solid army
was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout, and plainsman. The
railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. They carried
the market with them. The market halted, much nearer, though still some
hundred of miles to the north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped
no more at the door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north
again definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to the
railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in the year of
1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a million cattle.
In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle crossed
the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita,
Ellsworth, Great Bend, Dodge, flared out into a swift and sometime evil
blossoming. Thus the men of the North first came to hear of the Long
Trail and the men who made it, although really it had begun long ago and
had been foreordained to grow.
By this time, 1867 and 1868, the northern portions of the region
immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been sufficiently
cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual though precarious
settlement. It had been learned yet again that the buffalo grass and
the sweet waters of the far North would fatten a range broadhorn to a
stature far beyond any it could attain on the southern range. The
Long Trail pushed rapidly even farther to the north where there still
remained "free grass" and a new market. The territorial ranges needed
many thousands of cattle for their stocking, and this demand took a
large part of the Texas drive which came to Abilene, Great Bend, and
Fort Dodge. Moreover, the Government was now feeding thousands of its
new red wards, and these Indians needed thousands of beeves for rations,
which were driven from the southern range to the upper army posts and
reservations. Between this Government demand and that of the territorial
stock ranges there was occupation for the men who made the saddle their
home.
The Long Trail, which had previously found the black corn lands of
Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had reached
Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa and valley of
Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laramie
became common words now, and drovers spoke as wisely of the dangers of
the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Red River
or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to
the north until it had found the last of the five great transcontinental
lines, far in the British provinces. Here in spite of a long season of
ice and snow the uttermost edges of the great herd might survive, in a
certain percentage at least, each year in an almost unassisted struggle
for existence, under conditions different enough, it would seem, from
those obtaining at the opposite extreme of the wild roadway over which
they came.
The Long Trail of the cattle-range was done! By magic the cattle
industry had spread over the entire West. Today many men think of that
industry as belonging only to the Southwest, and many would consider
that it was transferred to the North. Really it was not transferred
but extended, and the trail of the old drive marks the line of that
extension.
Today the Long Trail is replaced by other trails, product of the swift
development of the West, and it remains as the connection, now for the
most part historical only, between two phases of an industry which, in
spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in
all essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven
into the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the
American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down
the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and
since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who
have traveled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds, from the
romantic to the commonplace days of the West.