It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which
we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the
Plains. The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone,
but are soon to pass.
Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide,
open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None
claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet
waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all men who
had cows to range. The land laws still were vague and inexact in
application, and each man could construe them much as he liked. The
excellent homestead law of 1862, one of the few really good land laws
that have been put on our national statute books, worked well enough
so long as we had good farming lands for homesteading--lands of which a
quarter section would support a home and a family. This same homestead
law was the only one available for use on the cattle-range. In practice
it was violated thousands of times--in fact, of necessity violated
by any cattle man who wished to acquire sufficient range to run a
considerable herd. Our great timber kings, our great cattle kings, made
their fortunes out of their open contempt for the homestead law, which
was designed to give all the people an even chance for a home and a
farm. It made, and lost, America.
Swiftly enough, here and there along all the great waterways of the
northern range, ranchers and their men filed claims on the water fronts.
The dry land thus lay tributary to them. For the most part the open
lands were held practically under squatter right; the first cowman in
any valley usually had his rights respected, at least for a time. These
were the days of the open range. Fences had not come, nor had farms been
staked out.
From the South now appeared that tremendous and elemental force--most
revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted in the swiftly
changing West--the bringing in of thousands of horned kine along the
northbound trails. The trails were hurrying from the Rio Grande to the
upper plains of Texas and northward, along the north and south line of
the Frontier--that land which now we have been seeking less to define
and to mark precisely than fundamentally to understand.
The Indian wars had much to do with the cow trade. The Indians were
crowded upon the reservations, and they had to be fed, and fed on beef.
Corrupt Indian agents made fortunes, and the Beef Ring at Washington,
one of the most despicable lobbies which ever fattened there, now wrote
its brief and unworthy history. In a strange way corrupt politics and
corrupt business affected the phases of the cattle industry as they had
affected our relations with the Indians. More than once a herd of some
thousand beeves driven up from Texas on contract, and arriving late in
autumn, was not accepted on its arrival at the army post--some pet of
Washington perhaps had his own herd to sell! All that could be done then
would be to seek out a "holding range." In this way, more and more, the
capacity of the northern Plains to nourish and improve cattle became
established.
Naturally, the price of cows began to rise; and naturally, also, the
demand for open range steadily increased. There now began the whole
complex story of leased lands and fenced lands. The frontier still was
offering opportunity for the bold man to reap where he had not sown.
Lands leased to the Indians of the civilized tribes began to cut large
figure in the cow trade--as well as some figure in politics--until at
length the thorny situation was handled by a firm hand at Washington.
The methods of the East were swiftly overrunning those of the West.
Politics and graft and pull, things hitherto unknown, soon wrote their
hurrying story also over all this newly won region from which the
rifle-smoke had scarcely yet cleared away.
But every herd which passed north for delivery of one sort or the other
advanced the education of the cowman, whether of the northern or the
southern ranges. Some of the southern men began to start feeding ranges
in the North, retaining their breeding ranges in the South. The demand
of the great upper range for cattle seemed for the time insatiable.
To the vision of the railroad builders a tremendous potential freightage
now appeared. The railroad builders began to calculate that one day they
would parallel the northbound cow trail with iron trails of their own
and compete with nature for the carrying of this beef. The whole swift
story of all that development, while the westbound rails were crossing
and criss-crossing the newly won frontier, scarce lasted twenty years.
Presently we began to hear in the East of the Chisholm Trail and of the
Western Trail which lay beyond it, and of many smaller and intermingling
branches. We heard of Ogallalla, in Nebraska, the "Gomorrah of the
Range," the first great upper market-place for distribution of cattle to
the swiftly forming northern ranches. The names of new rivers came
upon our maps; and beyond the first railroads we began to hear of the
Yellowstone, the Powder, the Musselshell, the Tongue, the Big Horn, the
Little Missouri.
The wild life, bold and carefree, coming up from the South now in a
mighty surging wave, spread all over that new West which offered to the
people of older lands a strange and fascinating interest. Every one on
the range had money; every one was independent. Once more it seemed that
man had been able to overleap the confining limitations of his life, and
to attain independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of
Homeric, riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all over the
great range. After all, it seemed that we had a new world left, a land
not yet used. We still were young! The cry arose that there was land
enough for all out West. And at first the trains of white-topped wagons
rivaled the crowded coaches westbound on the rails.
In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values. This
country, but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with
gold, deeper than the gold of California or any of the old placers. New
securities and new values appeared. Banks did not care much for the land
as security--it was practically worthless without the cattle--but they
would lend money on cattle at rates which did not then seem usurious. A
new system of finance came into use. Side by side with the expansion of
credits went the expansion of the cattle business. Literally in hundreds
of thousands the cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the
lower country.
It was a wild, strange day. But withal it was the kindliest and most
generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest time, in all the
history of our frontiers. There never was a better life than that of the
cowman who had a good range on the Plains and cattle enough to stock his
range. There never will be found a better man's country in all the world
than that which ran from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the
Rockies.
The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for quite a
time. Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower Kansas in turn made
bids for prominence as cattle marts. Agents of the Chicago stockyards
would come down along the trails into the Indian Nations to meet the
northbound herds and to try to divert them to this or that market as
a shipping-point. The Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to
their reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open
extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow season.
Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed hangers-on to the
northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trails--with some
reason, occasionally; for in a great northbound herd there might be
many cows included under brands other than those of the road brands
registered for the drovers of that particular herd. Cattle thieving
became an industry of certain value, rivaling in some localities the
operations of the bandits of the placer camps. There was great wealth
suddenly to be seen. The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and
the unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they had
not sown. If a grave here or there appeared along the trail or at the
edge of the straggling town, it mattered little. If the gamblers and the
desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge,
furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for
plenty of men remained, as good or better. The life was large and
careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.
During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the
frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all the time,
coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter
notions of trade and business. The enormous waste of the cattle range
could not long endure. The toll taken by the thievery of the men who
came to be called range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not
long be sustained by thinking men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in
the mining camps, so now in slightly different fashion the new property
owners on the upper range established their own ideas, their own sense
of proportion as to law and order. The cattle associations, the banding
together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual protection and mutual
gain were a natural and logical development. Outside of these there was
for a time a highly efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot
and hanged some scores of rustlers.
It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the
last flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla offered
extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately into the worst
of these capitals of license came the best men of the new regime,
and the new officers of the law, the agents of the Vigilantes, the
advance-guard of civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild men
of the West. In time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and
the gambling parlors went out one by one all along the frontier. By 1885
Dodge City, a famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long
as the history of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and
declared that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no
more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned. But this was
after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting
off from the town the holding grounds of the northbound herds.
This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had enabled
men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own homesteads. Casually,
and at first without any objection filed by any one, they had included
in their fences many hundreds of thousands of acres of range land to
which they had no title whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow
barons of the Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a
little unnoted realm all their own--had money and political influence.
And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to throw a
drift fence here or there, what mattered it?
Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little Fellow,
the man of small capital who registered a brand of his own, and who
with a Maverick * here and there and the natural increase, and perhaps
a trifle of unnatural increase here and there--had proved able to
accumulate with more or less rapidity a herd of his own. Now the cattle
associations passed rules that no foreman should be allowed to have
or register a brand of his own. Not that any foreman could be
suspected--not at all!--but the foreman who insisted on his old right to
own a running iron and a registered brand was politely asked to find his
employment somewhere else.
* In the early days a rancher by the name of Maverick, a Texas
man, had made himself rich simply by riding out on the open range and
branding loose and unmarked occupants of the free lands. Hence the term
"Maverick" was applied to any unbranded animal running loose on
the range. No one cared to interfere with these early activities in
collecting unclaimed cattle. Many a foundation for a great fortune was
laid in precisely that way. It was not until the more canny days in the
North that Mavericks were regarded with jealous eyes.
The large-handed and once generous methods of the old range now began to
narrow themselves. Even if the Little Fellow were able to throw a fence
around his own land, very often he did not have land enough to support
his herd with profit. A certain antipathy now began to arise between the
great cattle owners and the small ones, especially on the upper range,
where some rather bitter wars were fought--the cow kings accusing their
smaller rivals of rustling cows; the small man accusing the larger
operators of having for years done the same thing, and of having grown
rich at it.
The cattle associations, thrifty and shifty, sending their brand
inspectors as far east as the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago,
naturally had the whip hand of the smaller men. They employed detectives
who regularly combed out the country in search of men who had loose
ideas of mine and thine. All the time the cow game was becoming stricter
and harder. Easterners brought on the East's idea of property, of low
interest, sure returns, and good security. In short, there was set on
once more--as there had been in every great movement across the entire
West--the old contest between property rights and human independence in
action. It was now once more the Frontier against the States, and the
States were foredoomed to win.
The barb-wire fence, which was at first used extensively by the great
operators, came at last to be the greatest friend of the Little Fellow
on the range. The Little Fellow, who under the provisions of the
homestead act began to push West and to depart farther and farther from
the protecting lines of the railways, could locate land and water for
himself and fence in both. "I've got the law back of me," was what he
said; and what he said was true. Around the old cow camps of the trails,
and around the young settlements which did not aspire to be called cow
camps, the homesteaders fenced in land--so much land that there came to
be no place near any of the shipping-points where a big herd from the
South could be held. Along the southern range artificial barriers to the
long drive began to be raised. It would be hard to say whether fear of
Texas competition or of Texas cattle fever was the more powerful
motive in the minds of ranchers in Colorado and Kansas. But the cattle
quarantine laws of 1885 nearly broke up the long drive of that year.
Men began to talk of fencing off the trails, and keeping the northbound
herds within the fences--a thing obviously impossible.
The railroads soon rendered this discussion needless. Their agents went
down to Texas and convinced the shippers that it would be cheaper and
safer to put their cows on cattle trains and ship them directly to the
ranges where they were to be delivered. And in time the rails running
north and south across the Staked Plains into the heart of the lower
range began to carry most of the cattle. So ended the old cattle trails.
What date shall we fix for the setting of the sun of that last frontier?
Perhaps the year 1885 is as accurate as any--the time when the cattle
trails practically ceased to bring north their vast tribute. But,
in fact, there is no exact date for the passing of the frontier. Its
decline set in on what day the first lank "nester" from the States
outspanned his sun-burned team as he pulled up beside some sweet water
on the rolling lands, somewhere in the West, and looked about him, and
looked again at the land map held in his hand.
"I reckon this is our land, Mother," said he.
When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.