The Desperado of the Plains--_Lawlessness Founded on Loose
Methods_--_The Rustlers of the Cow Country_--_Excuses for Their
Acts_--_The Approach of the Commercial West_.
One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in
the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned,
and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It
is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed
the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in
spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best
was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West
was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions,
which usually attach their population to themselves and cut off the
disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law
almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on
the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible,
and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before
there can be law there must be an attached population.
The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of
conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things
that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when
sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and
second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers
of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their
place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the
great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the
territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to
call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.
Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned,
nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share it in one way
or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode;
wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself
after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed
with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared
on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known,
unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the
plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.
The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live
stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come.
The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed
north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains;
but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to
furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise
range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better;
so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose,
without a fence in those thousands of miles, to exist as best they
might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as
their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a
general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just
depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to
kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but
his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting
and changing about so much at best.
The ownership of these herds was widely scattered and difficult to
trace. A man might live in Texas and have herds in Montana, and _vice
versa_. His property right was known only by the brand upon the animal,
his being but the tenure of a sign.
"The respect for this sign was the whole creed of the cattle trade.
Without a fence, without an atom of actual control, the cattle man held
his property absolutely. It mingled with the property of others, but it
was never confused therewith. It wandered a hundred miles from him, and
he knew not where it was, but it was surely his and sure to find him. To
touch it was crime. To appropriate it meant punishment. Common necessity
made common custom, common custom made common law, and common law made
statutory law."[E]
[Footnote E: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.
New York.]
The old _fierro_ or iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and his
_venta_ or sale-brand to another had become common law all over the
Southwest when the Anglo-Saxon first struck that region. The Saxon
accepted these customs as wise and rational, and soon they were the
American law all over the American plains.
The great bands of cattle ran almost free in the Southwest for many
years, each carrying the brand of the owner, if the latter had ever seen
it or cared to brand it. Many cattle roamed free without any brand
whatever, and no one could tell who owned them. When the northern ranges
opened, this question of unbranded cattle still remained, and the
"maverick" industry was still held matter of sanction, there seeming to
be enough for all, and the day being one of glorious freedom and plenty,
the baronial day of the great and once unexhausted West.
Now the _venta_, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another
owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchaser
could put his own _fierro_ brand on a cow, and that meant that he now
owned it. But then some suspicious soul asked, "How shall we know whence
such and such cows came, and how tell whether or not this man did not
steal them outright from his neighbor's herd and put his own brand on
them?" Here was the origin of the bill of sale, and also of the counter
brand or "vent brand," as it is known upon the upper ranges. The owner
duplicated his recorded brand upon another recorded part of the animal,
and this meant his deed of conveyance, when taken together with the bill
of sale over his commercial signature. Of course, several conveyances
would leave the hide much scarred and hard to read; and, as there were
"road brands" also used to protect the property while in transit from
the South to the North or from the range to the market, the reading of
the brands and the determination of ownership of the animal might be,
and very often was, a nice matter, and one not always settled without
argument; and argument in the West often meant bloodshed in those days.
Some hard men started up in trade near the old cattle trails, and made a
business of disputing brands with the trail drivers. Sometimes they
made good their claims, and sometimes they did not. There were graves
almost in line from Texas to Montana.
It is now perfectly easy to see what a wide and fertile field was here
offered to men who did not want to observe the law. Here was property to
be had without work, and property whose title could easily be called
into question; whose ownership was a matter of testimony and record, to
be sure, but testimony which could be erased or altered by the same
means which once constituted it a record and sign. The brand was made
with an iron, and it could be changed with an iron. A large and
profitable industry arose in changing these brands. The rustler,
brand-burner or brand-blotcher now became one of the new Western
characters, and a new sort of bad-manism had its birth.
"It is very easy to see how temptation was offered to the cow thief and
'brand blotter.' Here were all these wild cattle running loose over the
country. The imprint of a hot iron on a hide made the creature the
property of the brander, provided no one else had branded it before. The
time of priority was matter of proof. With the handy "running-iron" or
straight rod, which was always attached to his saddle when he rode out,
could not the cow thief erase a former brand and put over it one of his
own? Could he not, for instance, change a U into an O, or a V into a
diamond, or a half-circle into a circle? Could he not, moreover, kill
and skin an animal and sell the beef as his own? Between him and the
owner was only this little mark. Between him and changing this mark was
nothing but his moral principles. The range was very wide. Hardly a
figure would show on that unwinking horizon all day long. And what was a
heifer here and there?"
Such was the temptation and opportunity which led many a man to step
over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact
that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact.
It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the
profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these
herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent
owners began in time to tire of working on a salary, and settled down
into little ranches of their own, starting with a herd of cattle
lawfully purchased and branded. An occasional maverick came across their
range and they branded it. A brand was faint and not legible, and they
put their own iron over it. They learned that pyrography with a hot
poker was very profitable. The rest was easy. The first step was the one
that counted; but who could tell where that first step was taken?
At any rate, cattle owners began to take notice of their cows as the
prices went up, and they had laws made to protect property rapidly
enhancing in value. Cow owners were required to have fixed or
stencil-irons, and were forbidden to trace a pattern with a straight
iron or "running-iron." Each ranch must have its own iron or stencil.
Texas as early as the '60's and '70's passed laws forbidding the use of
the running-iron altogether, so that after that it was not safe to be
caught riding the range with a straight iron under the saddle flap. Any
man so discovered had to do some quick explaining.
The next step after this was the organization of the cattle associations
in the several territories and states which made the home of the cattle
trade. These associations banded together in a national association.
Detectives were placed at the stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City,
charged with the finding of cattle stolen on the range and shipped with
or without clean brands. In short, there had now grown up an armed and
legal warfare between the cow men themselves--in the first place very
large-handed thieves--and the rustlers and "little fellows" who were
accused of being too liberal with their brand blotching. The prosecution
of these men was undertaken with something of the old vigor that
characterized the pursuit of horse thieves, with this difference, that,
whereas all the world had hated a horse thief as a common enemy, very
much of the world found excuse for the so-called rustler, who was known
to be doing only what his accusers had done before him.
There may be a certain interest attaching to the methods of the range
riders of this day, and those who care to go into the history of the
cattle trade in its early days are referred to the work earlier quoted,
where the matter is more fully covered.[F] Brief reference will suffice
here.
[Footnote F: "The Story of the Cowboy." By E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.]
The rustler might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were,
writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy
and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look
suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better
tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered
brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the
whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. The fresh burn
fitted in with the older one so that it was impossible to swear that it
was not a part of the first brand mark. Yet another way of softening a
fresh and fraudulent brand was to brand through a wet blanket with a
heavy iron, which thus left a wound deep enough, but not apt to slough,
and so betray a brand done long after the round-up, and hence subject to
scrutiny.
As to the ways in which brands were altered in their lines, these were
many and most ingenious. A sample page will be sufficient to show the
possibilities of the art by which the rustler set over to his own herds
on the free range the cows of his far-away neighbor, whom, perhaps, he
did not love as himself. The list on the opposite page is taken from
"The Story of the Cowboy."
Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of
the mysterious and untraceable crimes were ascribed. Such also were
the excuses to be offered for some of the men who did what to them did
not seem wrong acts. The sudden hostility of the newly-come cow men
embittered and inflamed them, and from this it was easy and natural to
the arbitrament of arms.
[Illustration: HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various
alterations follow. It will be noted that with every change there is
something added--the rule always adopted by the swindler]
The bad man of the plains dates to this era, and his acts may be
attributed to these causes. There were to be found among these men many
refugees and outlaws, as well as many better men gone wrong through
point of view. Fierce and far were the battles between the rustlers and
the cow barons. Commerce had its way at last. The lawless man had to go,
and he had to go even before the law had come.
The Vigilantes of the cattle range, organizing first in Montana and
working southward, made a clean sweep in their work. In one campaign
they killed somewhere between sixty and eighty men accused of cattle
rustling. They hung thirteen men on one railroad bridge one morning in
northwestern Nebraska. The statement is believed to be correct that, in
the ten years from 1876 to 1886, they executed more men without process
of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States
since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may
perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our
earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and
relative one, and one extremely difficult of exact application.