incomplete bill which, rushed through at the hot, hurried end of a
session, authorized the opening of this territory. The President
might with equal judgment have proclaimed that “The silver vaults of
the United States Treasury will be opened on the 22d of April, when
citizens can enter in and take away one hundred and sixty silver
dollars each,” without providing laws to prevent or punish those who
entered before that date, or those who snatched more than their share.
One would think that some distinction might have been made, in opening
this new land, between those who came with family and money and stock,
meaning to settle permanently, and those who took the morning train
from Kansas in order to rush in and snatch a holding, only to sell it
again in three hours and to return to their homes that night; between
those who brought capital, and desperadoes and “boot-leggers” who came
to make capital out of others. If the land was worth giving away, it
was worth giving to those who would make the best use of it, and worth
surrounding with at least as much order as that which distinguishes the
fight of the Harvard Seniors for the flowers on Class day. They are
going to open still more territory this spring, and in all probability
the same confusion will arise and continue, and it is also probable
that many persons in the East may be attracted by the announcements and
advertisements of the “boomers” to this new land.
The West is always full of hope to the old man as well as to the young
one, and the temptation to “own your own home” and to gain land for the
asking is very great. But the Eastern man should consider the question
very carefully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the New
York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on which some
philanthropist has painted “Go East, Young Man, Go East.” One might
write pages and not tell more than that sign does, when one considers
where it is placed and for what purpose it is placed there.
A man in Oklahoma City when the day’s work is done has before him a
prospect of broad red clayey streets, muddy after rain, bristling with
dust after a drought, with the sun setting at one end of them into
the prairie. He can go to his cottage, or to “The Turf,” where he can
lose some money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are
the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real estate
to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate there. Once
or twice a week a “show” makes a one-night stand at the opera-house.
The schools are not good for his children as yet, and the society that
he is willing his wife should enjoy is limited. On Sunday he goes to
church, and eats a large dinner in the middle of the day, and walks
up to the top of the hill to look over the prairie where he and many
others would like to build, but which must remain empty until the
twelve different disputants for each holding have stopped appealing to
higher courts. This is actually the case, and the reason the city has
not spread as others around it have done. As the Romans shortened their
swords to extend their boundaries, so the people of Oklahoma City might
cut down some of their higher courts and increase theirs.
I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed itself on me,
because I think any man who can afford a hall bedroom and a gas-stove
in New York City is better off than he would be as the owner of one
hundred and sixty acres on the prairie, or in one of these small
so-called cities.
[Illustration: OKLAHOMA CITY TO-DAY--MAIN BROADWAY]
And the men who are at the head of affairs, who rose out of the six
thousand in a week, and who have kept at the head ever since, if they
had exerted the same energy, and showed the same executive ability
and the same cleverness in a real city, would be real mayors, real
merchants, and real “prominent citizens.” They are now as men playing
with children’s toys or building houses of cards. Every now and then
a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes out of the South and West,
and among these politicians and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men
who only need a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what
they can do. There are as many of these as there are uncouth “Sockless”
Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is pathetic and exasperating to
see men who would excel in a great metropolis, and who could live where
they could educate their children and themselves, and be in touch with
the world moving about them, even though they were not of it, wasting
their energies in a desert of wooden houses in the middle of an ocean
of prairie, where their point of view is bounded by the railroad tank
and a barb-wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are
men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a town of six
thousand inhabitants, who are meant for nothing else, and it is just as
well they should be satisfied with the unsettled existence around them;
but it would be better for these others to be small men in a big city
than big men on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their
art gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where the
rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morning and goes to
bed with them at night.
V
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS
V
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS
THE inhabited part of a ranch, the part of it on which the people who
own it live, bears about the same proportion to the rest of the ranch
as a light-house does to the ocean around it.
And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonely. Some light-houses
are isolated in the ocean, some stand in bays, and some in harbors;
and in the same proportion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from
principalities to farms no larger than those around Jersey City. The
simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of men
constantly leaving the “ranch-house” and wandering about over the
range, sleeping wherever night catches them, and in this way different
parts of the ranch are inhabited as well as the house itself. It is
as if the light-housekeeper sent out a great number of row-boats to
look after the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men in those
boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the light-house
variously as best suited their convenience or their previous orders.
But it is the loneliness of the life that will most certainly first
impress the visitor from closely built blocks of houses. Those who live
on the ranches will tell you that they do not find it lonely, and that
they grow so fond of the great breezy pastures about them that they
become independent of the rest of mankind, and that a trip to the city
once a year to go to the play and to “shop” is all they ask from the
big world lying outside of the barb-wire fences. I am speaking now of
those ranch-owners only who live on the range, and not of those who
hire a foreman, and spend their time and money in the San Antonio Club.
They are no more ranchmen than the absentee landlord who lives in his
London house is a gentleman farmer.
The largest ranch in the United States, and probably in the world,
owned by one person, is in Texas, and belongs to Mrs. Richard King, the
widow of Captain Richard King. It lies forty-five miles south of Corpus
Christi.
The ladies who come to call on Mrs. King drive from her front gate,
over as good a road as any in Central Park, for ten miles before they
arrive at her front door, and the butcher and baker and iceman, if such
existed, would have to drive thirty miles from the back gate before
they reached her kitchen. This ranch is bounded by the Corpus Christi
Bay for forty miles, and by barb-wire for three hundred miles more. It
covers seven hundred thousand acres in extent, and one hundred thousand
head of cattle and three thousand broodmares wander over its different
pastures.
[Illustration: THE RANCH-HOUSE OF THE KING RANCH, THE LARGEST RANGE
OWNED BY ONE INDIVIDUAL IN THE UNITED STATES]
This property is under the ruling of Robert J. Kleberg, Mrs. King’s
son-in-law, and he has under him a superintendent, or, as the Mexicans
call one who holds that office, a major-domo, which is an unusual
position for a major-domo, as this major-domo has the charge of three
hundred cowboys and twelve hundred ponies reserved for their use. The
“Widow’s” ranch, as the Texans call it, is as carefully organized and
moves on as conservative business principles as a bank. The cowboys
do not ride over its range with both legs at right angles to the
saddle and shooting joyfully into the air with both guns at once.
Neither do they offer the casual visitor a bucking pony to ride, and
then roll around on the prairie with glee when he is shot up into the
air and comes down on his collar-bone, they are more likely to bring
him as fine a Kentucky thoroughbred as ever wore a blue ribbon around
the Madison Square Garden. Neither do they shoot at his feet to see
if he can dance. In this way the Eastern man is constantly finding
his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. It is also trying when the
cowboys stand up and take off their sombreros when one is leaving their
camp. There are cowboys and cowboys, and I am speaking now of those
that I saw on the King ranch.
The thing that the wise man from the East cannot at first understand is
how the one hundred thousand head of cattle wandering at large over the
range are ever collected together. He sees a dozen or more steers here,
a bunch of horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even
as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and as far as his
chance of finding them again would be, they might as well stand forty
miles away at the other end of the ranch. But this is a very simple
problem to the ranchman.
Mr. Kleberg, for instance, receives an order from a firm in Chicago
calling for one thousand head of cattle. The breed of cattle which the
firm wants is grazing in a corner of the range fenced in by barb-wire,
and marked pale blue for convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in
colors, like a patch-work quilt, which hangs in Mr. Kleberg’s office.
When the order is received, he sends a Mexican on a pony to tell the
men near that particular pale blue pasture to round up one thousand
head of cattle, and at the same time directs his superintendent to send
in a few days as many cowboys to that pasture as are needed to “hold”
one thousand head of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The
boys on the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will
take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which one man
leads, and from one to another of which they shift their saddles as men
do in polo, and go directly to the water-tanks in the ten square miles
of land. A cow will not often wander more than two and a half miles
from water, and so, with the water-tank (which on the King ranch may be
either a well with a wind-mill or a dammed cañon full of rain-water) as
a rendezvous, the finding of the cattle is comparatively easy, and ten
men can round up one thousand head in a day or two. When they have them
all together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station arrive,
and take them off.
At the station the agent of the Chicago firm and the agent of the King
ranch ride through the herd together, and if they disagree as to the
fitness of any one or more of the cattle, an outsider is called in, and
his decision is final. The cattle are then driven on to the cars, and
Mr. Kleberg’s responsibility is at an end.
In the spring there is a general rounding up, and thousands and
thousands of steers are brought in from the different pastures, and
those for which contracts have been made during the winter are shipped
off to the markets, and the calves are branded.
[Illustration: A SHATTERED IDOL]
Texas is the great breeding State from which the cattle are sent north
to the better pasture land of Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming Territory,
to be fattened up for the markets. The breeding goes on throughout the
year, five bulls being pastured with every three hundred cows, in
pastures of from one thousand to ten thousand acres in extent. About
ninety per cent. of the cows calve, and the branding of these calves is
one of the most important duties of the spring work. They are driven
into a pen through a wooden chute, and as they leave the chute are
caught by the legs and thrown over on the side, and one of a dozen hot
irons burning in an open fire is pressed against the flank, and, on the
King ranch, on the nose.
An animal bearing one of the rough hall-marks of the ranchman is more
respected than a dog with a silver collar around his neck, and the
number of brands now registered in the State capital runs up to the
thousands. On some ranches each of the family has his or her especial
brand; and one young girl who came out in New York last winter is known
throughout lower Texas only as “the owner of the Triangle brand,”
and is much respected in consequence, as it is borne by thousands of
wandering cattle. The separating of the cattle at the spring round-up
is accomplished on the King ranch by means of a cutting pen, a somewhat
ingenious trap at the end of a chute. One end of this chute opens on
the prairie, and the other runs into four different pens guarded by
a swinging gate, so hung that by a movement of the foot by the man
sitting over the gate the chute can be extended into any one of the
four pens. With this mules, steers, horses, and ponies can be fed into
the chute together, and each arrive in his proper pen until the number
for which the different orders call is filled.
It is rather difficult to imagine one solitary family occupying a
territory larger than some of the Eastern States--an area of territory
that would in the East support a State capital, with a Governor and
Legislature, and numerous small towns, with competing railroad systems
and rival base-ball nines. And all that may be said of this side of the
question of ranch life is that when we are within Mrs. King’s house we
would imagine it was one of twenty others touching shoulder to shoulder
on Madison Avenue, and that the distant cry of the coyotes at night is
all that tells us that the hansoms are not rushing up and down before
the door.
[Illustration: SNAPPING A ROPE ON A HORSE’S FOOT]
In the summer this ranch is covered with green, and little yellow and
pink flowers carpet the range for miles. It is at its best then, and is
as varied and beautiful in its changes as the ocean.
The ranches that stretch along and away from the Rio Grande River are
very different from this; they are owned by Mexicans, and every one
on the ranch is a Mexican; the country is desolate here, and dead and
dying cattle are everywhere.
No ranch-owner, whether he has fifty thousand or five hundred head of
cattle, will ever attempt to help one that may be ailing or dying. This
seems to one who has been taught the value of “three acres and a cow”
the height of extravagance, and to show lack of feeling. But they will
all tell you it is useless to try to save a starving or a sick animal,
and also that it is not worth the trouble, there are so many more. In
one place I saw where a horse had fallen on the trail, and the first
man who passed had driven around it, and the next, and the next, until
a new trail was made, and at the time I passed over this new trail, I
could see the old one showing through the ribs of the horse’s skeleton.
In the East, I think, they would have at least pulled the horse out of
the road.
But a live horse or steer is just as valuable in Texas as in the
East--even more so.
The conductor on the road from Corpus Christi sprang from his chair in
the baggage car one day, and shouted to the engineer that he must be
careful, for we were on Major Fenton’s range, and must look out for the
major’s prize bull; and the train continued at half speed accordingly
until the conductor espied the distinguished animal well to the left,
and shouted: “All right, Bill! We’ve passed him, let her out.”
The Randado ranch is typical of the largest of the Mexican ranches
which lie within the five hundred miles along the Rio Grande. It
embraces eighty thousand acres, with twenty-five thousand head of
cattle, and it has its store, its little mission, its tank, twenty or
more adobe houses with thatched roofs, and its little graveyard. There
is a post-office here, and a school, where very pretty little Mexicans
recited proudly in English words of four letters. Around them lie the
cactus and dense chaparral cut up with dusky trails, and the mail comes
but twice a week. But every Saturday the vaqueros come in from the
range, and there is dancing on the bare clay floor of one of the huts,
and the school-master postmaster sings to them every evening on his
guitar, and once a month the priest comes on horseback to celebrate
mass in the adobe mission.
Around San Antonio are many ranches. These are more like large farms,
and there are high trees and hills and a wonderful variety of flowers.
There are also antelope and wild fowl for those who love to hunt, and
the scalp of a coyote brings fifty cents to those who care for money;
for the coyotes pull down the young calves. The life on the range is
not at all lonely here, for the women on the ranch do not mind riding
in twelve miles to a dance in San Antonio, and there are always people
coming out from town to remain a day or two. The more successful of
these ranches are like English country-houses in their free hospitality
and in the constant changing of the guests.
[Illustration: HILLINGDON RANCH]
Many of these about San Antonio are owned, in fact, by Englishmen,
although a record of the failures of the English colonists of good
family and of well-known youths from New York would make a book, and
a very sad one. There was a whole colony of English families and
unattached younger sons at Boerne, just outside of San Antonio, a
few years ago; but they preferred cutting to leg to cutting out cattle,
and used the ponies to chase polo balls, and their money soon went, and
they followed. Some went to England as prodigal sons, some to driving
hacks and dealing faro, and others into the army. A few succeeded, and
are still at Boerne, notably a cousin of Thomas Hughes, who founded the
ill-fated English colony of Rugby, in Tennessee.
Of the New York men who came on to San Antonio, the two Jacob boys are
more frequently and more heartily spoken of by the Texans than almost
any other Eastern men who have been there. They did not, as the others
so often do, hire a foreman, and spend their days in the San Antonio
Club, but rode the ranch themselves, and could cut out and brand and
rope with any of those born on a range. Their ranch, the Santa Marta,
still flourishes, although they have become absentee landlords, and
have given up chasing wild steers in Texas in favor of the foxes at
Rockaway.
A ranch which marks the exception in the rule of failures of our
English cousins is that of Alfred Giles in Kendal and Kerr counties.
It covers about thirteen thousand acres, and a very fine breed of
polled Angus cattle are bred on it. Indeed, the tendency all over
Texas at present is to cultivate certain well-known breeds, and not,
as formerly, to be content with the famous long-horned steer and the
Texan pony. Mr. Giles’s ranch, the Hillingdon, looks in the summer,
when the imported Scotch cattle are grazing over it, like a bit out of
the Lake country. Walnut, cherry, ash, and oak grow on this ranch, and
the maidenhair-fern is everywhere, and the flowers are boundless in
profusion and variety.
The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed the cowboy
as a picturesque element of recklessness and lawlessness in south-west
Texas. It suppressed him and localized him and limited him to his own
range, and made his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb-wire
fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to another, and
the man of fifteen thousand acres would over-stock, knowing that when
his cattle could not find enough pasturage on his range they would
move over to the range of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently,
when the men who could afford it began to fence their ranges, the
smaller owners who had over-bred, saw that their cattle would starve,
and so cut the fences in order to get back to the pastures which they
had used so long. This, and the shutting off of water-tanks and of
long-used trails brought on the barb-wire fence wars which raged long
and fiercely between the cowboys and fence men of rival ranches and the
Texas Rangers. The barb-wire fences did more than this; they shut off
the great trails that stretched from Corpus Christi through the Pan
Handle of Texas, and on up through New Mexico and Colorado and through
the Indian Territory to Dodge City. The coming of the railroad also
made this trailing of cattle to the markets superfluous, and almost
destroyed one of the most remarkable features of the West. This trail
was not, of course, an actual trail, and marked as such, but a general
driveway forty miles wide and thousands of miles long. The herds of
cattle that were driven over it numbered from three hundred to three
thousand head, and were moving constantly from the early spring to the
late fall.
[Illustration: FIXING A BREAK IN THE WIRE FENCE]
No caravan route in the far Eastern countries can equal this six
months’ journey through three different States, and through all changes
of weather and climate, and in the face of constant danger and
anxiety. This procession of countless cattle on their slow march to the
north was one of the most interesting and distinctive features of the
West.
An “outfit” for this expedition would consist of as many cowboys as
were needed to hold the herd together, a wagon, with the cook and the
tents, and extra ponies for the riders. In the morning the camp-wagon
pushed on ahead to a suitable resting-place for the night, and when
the herd arrived later, moving, on an average, fifteen miles a day,
and grazing as it went, the men would find the supper ready and the
tents pitched. And then those who were to watch that night would circle
slowly around the great army of cattle, driving them in closer and
closer together, and singing as they rode, to put them to sleep. This
seems an absurdity to the Eastern mind, but the familiar sounds quieted
and satisfied these great stupid animals that can be soothed like a
child with a nursery rhyme, and when frightened cannot be stopped by a
river. The boys rode slowly and patiently until one and then another of
the herd would stumble clumsily to the ground, and others near would
follow, and at last the whole great herd would be silent and immovable
in sleep. But the watchfulness of the sentries could never relax. Some
chance noise--the shaking of a saddle, some cry of a wild animal,
or the scent of distant water carried by a chance breeze across the
prairie, or nothing but sheer blind wantonness--would start one of the
sleeping mass to his feet with a snort, and in an instant the whole
great herd would go tearing madly over the prairie, tossing their horns
and bellowing, and filled with a wild, unreasoning terror. And then
the skill and daring of the cowboy was put to its severest test, as he
saw his master’s income disappearing towards a cañon or a river, or
to lose itself in the brush. And the cowboy who tried to head off and
drive back this galloping army of frantic animals had to ride a race
that meant his life if his horse made a misstep; and as the horse’s
feet often did slip, there would be found in the morning somewhere in
the trail of the stampeding cattle a horrid mass of blood and flesh and
leather.
Do you wonder, then, after this half-year of weary, restless riding by
day, and sleepless anxiety and watching under the stars by night, that
when the lights of Dodge City showed across the prairie, the cowboy
kicked his feet out of his stirrups, drove the blood out of the pony’s
sides, and “came in to town” with both guns going at once, and yelling
as though the pent-up speech of the past six months of loneliness was
striving for proper utterance?
The cowboy cannot be overestimated as a picturesque figure; all
that has been written about him and all the illustrations that have
been made of him fail to familiarize him, and to spoil the picture
he makes when one sees him for the first time racing across a range
outlined against the sky, with his handkerchief flying out behind, his
sombrero bent back by the wind, and his gauntlets and broad leather
leggings showing above and at the side of his galloping pony. And his
deep seat in the saddle, with his legs hanging straight to the long
stirrups, the movement of his body as it sways and bends, and his
utter unconsciousness of the animal beneath him would make a German
riding-master, an English jockey, or the best cross-country rider of a
Long Island hunting club shake his head in envy and despair.
[Illustration: GATHERING THE ROPE]