Marshall W. Fishwick, writing in Western Folklore magazine in the 1950s, a time when the few cowboys left in the country mostly roamed Hollywood’s back lots, recalled a gallant time when they were “tall, tanned, sinewy [men] quite at home in the great outdoors … weather-beaten and rough.… Never far away is his horse, Old Paint.”
Some cowboys rode alone or pushed north in small groups. Nelson Story and a few cowhands steered a thousand head of cattle from Fort Worth, Texas, up to Montana in 1866. The drive took them through Indian country and outlands controlled only by Army posts. “But what school boy knows these early cowboys’ names?” asked Fishwick. “What politician ever eulogizes them?”
In June 1883, J. T. Botkin and his brother Ed, along with seventeen trail herders, escorted a line of cattle southwest on the old Adobe Walls Trail from Comanche County, Kansas, to a railhead on the Canadian River in what would become Oklahoma. The big herds were thinning out by then, as were the cattle drives, so this journey marked something of a last hurrah, J. T. wrote, for “when cowboys were cowboys.” He scribbled down his recollections:
They knew how to raise cattle, how to gather them in the spring, how to brand them and to market the beef. There were men in that outfit who could ride anything that wore hair and traveled on four feet, and that too with a clean saddle and without having to pull leather.
Our cook was an old hand and always had a few dry limbs put away in his wagon. He saved the axle grease boxes and bacon rinds to burn. The cook boiled the coffee, fried the bacon and managed to half way cook a little corn.
At Old Kiowa there was a saloon and the boys began to licker up. At Medicine Lodge there were several saloons and they lickered up some more. As I remember the outfit stayed a day or two at the Lodge. At that time, Medicine Lodge was strictly a cow town. Everybody was interested in cattle, and so when the outfit arrived the boys were given the freedom of the city and told to “go to it,” and they went. They ran horse races on Main Street. At night they built bonfires and tried to see who could ride his horse nearest the fire. They shot holes in the atmosphere while Elm Creek, the Medicine River valleys and the surrounding hills reverberated with the sound of their unearthly whooping and yelling.
The cowboy typically climbed into $15 or $25 boots, sported a $20 hat, and settled into a $40 Cheyenne saddle. Good times or bad, thick or thin, failing or flush, he pocketed about $30 a month, small compensation for a hard life. But his overhead was low: a horse, a saddle, and a blanket to wrap around his shoulders when the fireflies lit the night. The last sound he heard falling asleep was another cowboy sitting sentry, often humming to soothe the cattle. Chow was typically boiled beef, yellow soda bread, tough bacon, blackened beans, and Arbuckle coffee. The coffee was sold from the PO Ranch in Wyoming, and each package came with a stick of peppermint candy and a couple of coupons. A cowboy who drank enough Arbuckle could redeem the coupons for handkerchiefs, razors, scissors, and a wedding ring.
Especially valuable to the cowboy were his socks. Clean socks kept the sweat off his feet and the perspiration from filling his boots, especially with all his weight dug into the stirrups. “When a man rolled out of bed at a quarter to three in the morning and didn’t get back to the wagon until between seven and nine at night,” commented cowboy George Edward “Ed” Lemmon, “he didn’t feel much like hunting a mud puddle and washing out a pair of socks.”
Slang reinforced the cowboy aura. A cow wandering off or hunting trouble was “on the pick.” A horse snorting and yanking its head was called a “snuffer.” A horse unusually strong could be counted a “rimrocker.” Riding a fast horse would leave a cowboy feeling “two points liter ’n a straw hat.” A night herder was a “night hawk.” Someone careless did not show “cow sense.” A fool did not know “dung from honey.” Vomiting out on the trail was “airing the paunch.” When he headed at last for home, the cowpoke “hit the flats.” Women were “she-stuff.” Pretty women were “fancy she-stuff.” Hard liquor? “A family disturbance.”
“The usual ride was sixteen hours per day,” recalled L. M. Cox, a Texas cowman who had herded cattle in the 1880s. “I have known cowboys to ride 100 miles per day. No union hours for them. It was from daylight until dark with work, and hard work at that.” The cowboy’s first love was his mount, Cox said. “My own horse would tell his age by pawing on the ground. And I have been criticized for saying that he could tell marks and brands, but I know he could.”
Second to win his heart was the quiet of the prairie. “No cowpuncher ever talked much. Ride further and talk less, few words and fast action,” Cox said. Eyes and ears were kept as sharp as a hunting knife. And a good horse was a friend to all. “It lifts a man above himself,” it was said on the range.
Few things ever really scared a cowboy; one may have been having to walk. “Great Scott!” an old cow puncher told the journalist Julian Ralph. “What we call riding is to take your horse across country wherever a horse can go—down gullies, up bluffs and just as it happens. A good cowboy rider is unconscious that he is riding. A man who is conscious that he is on horseback ain’t a good rider. You want to get on your horse and let your legs flop around loose from the knees down; and you must let your body sit loose, except where it joins the horse and is part of him.”
Ed Richards thought nothing of riding twenty to thirty miles to escort a girl to a dance, then see her home before breakfast. Many considered him the best all-round cowboy in northwest Nebraska; he could throw a rope and tie a steer and wear out a bucking horse.
Ed Lemmon worked fifty-three years as a cowhand, bushwhacker, and ranch foreman. He rode many of the great cattle drives from Texas up north through Nebraska and beyond. In 1871, his horse fell on him, crushing his right leg. A year later, he broke the leg again. In the saddle, he carried six-shooters and a Winchester rifle. He lived to the age of eighty-eight. He could remember so much about his youth and his cowboying, and the excitement in 1893 over the cowboys racing from Chadron to Chicago. “The big race turned out to be more of a success than its promoters ever dreamed of,” he said. “But even so it was not all on the square, for there are tricks to all trades.”
He counted Buffalo Bill and the Sioux chief Red Cloud as friends. Up in the northwest pocket of South Dakota, home also to the “world’s largest petrified wood park,” they named a town for Ed Lemmon. He wrote later of Mexican bullfighters, cowboy cockfights, gambling dens, and parlor houses of ill repute. The ladies of the evening were called “scarlet poppies,” he said. One named Connie was dubbed “the Cowboy Queen.” Over the years, she entertained so many squiring partners around Miles City, Montana, that she dazzled paying customers in a $250 dress embroidered with all of their different ranch brands. “They said there wasn’t an outfit in the Yellowstone down to the Platte and over in the Dakota too that couldn’t find its brand on that dress,” Lemmon wrote.
Cowboys and their relentless parade of cattle helped push the Plains Indians onto reservations. And that made way for wagonloads of new technology, new jobs, and new residents. Said durable Cora Beels of Norfolk, Nebraska: “I have seen [my] town pass from the days of candles and oil lamps to electric lights, from stoves to furnaces, bathtubs, Frigidaires, and all the conveniences of modern living.”
By June 1893 and the start of the Great Cowboy Race, the open range was swinging shut. To those in town or out on the farm, the cowboy image now seemed more authentic in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West arena than on the prairie. Once the cowboy had ridden, slept, and taken his chow outdoors. He had lassoed the wilderness. His freedom had seemed as vast as the untamed country. Now his time chasing stray cattle was fading; the cowboy’s heyday, from the end of the Civil War to the start of the 1890s, was drawing down.
“The age of the pioneer and settler is past,” noted William S. Cowherd, mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, speaking at the World’s Columbian Exposition on the same day that the first of the cowboys came racing into Chicago. “The pioneer wrested the state from the wilderness and filled it with hap
py homes, schools and churches, and then sat down contented to let the world wag on as it would.”
Stakes were claimed, tents pitched, and towns platted, and the gravel roads gave way to wooden sidewalks. The townspeople had outlasted the rowdy cowboys, beat them down, rustled them out. Ranches became farms; farms became spreads; statehood replaced territories.
“They are the ruin of the country,” complained an old trail driver from Texas in 1884, frustrated with the farmers. “They have everlastingly, eternally, now and forever, destroyed the best grazing land in the world. The range country, sir, was never intended for raising farm truck. It was intended for cattle and horses, and was the best stock-raising land on earth until they got to turning over the sod, improving the country, as they call it. Lord forgive them for such improvements! It makes me sick to think of it. I am sick enough to need two doctors, a druggery, and a mineral spring, when I think of onions and Irish potatoes growing where mustang ponies should be exercising, and where four-year-old steers should be getting ripe for market.”
Julian Ralph lamented in 1892 in Harper’s Weekly that “rum, cards and women are the epitaphs in the cowboy’s graveyard.” He once spotted several sad cowboys lolling around a Montana railroad depot in big flat-brimmed hats, a line of horses hitched to the rail outside. They had nowhere else to go on their bronchos (the common spelling then for western-bred horses).
Two other cowboys showed up in New York in May 1893, hunting for work with “anything that has to do with horses,” reported the New York Sun. But, the Sun stressed, “there isn’t any wild West any more. Those people who saw it ten or a dozen years ago saw a little of the wildness and they saw the last. No cowboy thinks of shooting his way through the streets of a Western town for fun in these days. He’d be arrested mighty quick if he tried it.”
A new modern world was emerging, one that largely would not include the working cowboy. The transcontinental railroad belted the country. Hordes of white immigrants flooded the frontier, and smallpox traveled with them, devastating the northern Plains and many of the still resisting Indian tribes. Congress stopped making treaties with Indian nations; now they simply pushed them aside.
The Hunkpapa Lakota holy man named Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881. The white man had all but exterminated the buffalo herds, which had fed, clothed, and sheltered his people. The Major Crimes Act of 1885 extended federal jurisdiction over crimes committed on the reservations. Two years later, Congress passed the Dawes Allotment Act, which encouraged Indians to embrace U.S. citizenship.
In December 1890, Sitting Bull was murdered in sudden gunfire on the Standing Rock Reservation, shot down by one of his own, a Lakota reservation police officer. On Pine Ridge two weeks later, amid the fury and shrieks of the Ghost Dance (prophesying a day when the white man would vanish and the buffalo return), soldiers fired into crowds of reservation Lakotas. The bodies of more than two hundred men, women, and children froze in the snow at Wounded Knee Creek; fifty-one more were wounded. The Indian Wars were over.
“Look at me, I am poor and naked,” the once great but now contrite Sioux chief Red Cloud had told an audience of white faces at New York’s Cooper Institute in 1870. “We do not want riches, but we want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world.” No, he said; “we do not want riches; we want peace and love.”
To Fourth of July revelers in 1889 at the Nebraska Panhandle town of Chadron, on land once belonging to his vast tribal range, an angry Red Cloud said, “The white people would take all the good land from me, and I would have nothing but bad lands where I would starve to death.”
Asked on a train how many white men he had fought and killed, a flippant Red Cloud dismissed the question. “I have been in eighty battles,” he said. Confined to the Pine Ridge Reservation, a disparaged Red Cloud told a white visitor, “You see this barren waste. Think of it! I, who used to own rich soil in a well-watered country so extensive that I could not ride through it in a week on my fastest pony, am put down here.”
Almost ninety and nearly blind, a dying Red Cloud would gingerly walk the mile and a half each day to the Pine Ridge Reservation post office, looking for some good news to arrive, hoping that the white man had abandoned the West and the old Sioux lands had been restored. He would sit and wait on a wooden bench outside. Joined by a friend, he spun out much of his life’s story. But the weary chief spoke primarily of his youth and the gone glory of the Sioux before he had led them hopelessly against the encroaching white masses. Everything else, he acknowledged, was “past.”
The meat, clothing, and shelter the buffalo had brought to native peoples were disappearing; soon all that remained were the bones. In 1876, I. G. Baker and Company, in Fort Benton on the northern Missouri River, shipped 75,000 buffalo robes. That fell to 20,000 four years later and to 5,000 by 1883. A year later, it sent none at all. Figures kept by trader Joseph Ullman, headquartered in Chicago and St. Paul, were equally dim. 1882: 40,000 hides and 10,000 robes were shipped. 1884: Less than 2,500 hides, many of them holdovers from the previous year hoping for a better market. A few robes were carried over as well. 1885: Few or no hides.
There had been a time when the red man and white man alike had believed that the great herds would roam the Plains forever. None could imagine the overkill pouring from the barrels of rifles, many belonging to sportsmen leaning out of passenger train windows. “Man never could have exterminated them,” one old trapper had once thought. Now, he realized, “they went back into the earth from whence they came.”
George Bird Grinnell, in an article for Scribner’s Magazine in September 1892 titled “The Last of the Buffalo,” recalled how years earlier “an Indian once said to me, in the expressive sign language of which all old frontiersmen have some knowledge, ‘The country was one robe.’ ” Now, Grinnell wrote, “the swelling hosts which yesterday covered the Plains today are but a dream.”
A pipe-smoking, Yale-educated anthropologist and naturalist, Grinnell discovered that C. J. Jones in Garden City, Kansas, owned one of the last domesticated buffalo herds in the country. He once had managed 250 head; soon he was reduced to fifty, with another eighty trailed down from Manitoba, Canada. Now his fences held a mere forty-five head, fifteen of them breeding cows.
In all, Grinnell concluded, it had taken less than six years to slaughter all the buffalo in Kansas, Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and northern Texas. Some herds feeding on the western plains of Texas “had a brief respite” until white hunters found them, too. “On the great plains is still found the buffalo skull half buried in the soil and crumbling to decay,” wrote Grinnell. “The deep trails once trodden by the marching hosts are grass-grown now, and fast filling up. When these most enduring relics of a vanished race shall have passed away, there will be found, in all the limitless domain once darkened by their feeding herds, not one trace of the American buffalo.”
Army Colonel J. H. McLaughlin recalled encountering an eighty-year-old Indian warrior “who was determined to kill his last buffalo with his bow and arrows, which he finally did, making the buffalo look like a porcupine with his quills sticking therefrom.” With that hunt, McLaughlin declared, “it seemed the slaughter was almost fully completed.”
The last white man to claim the last buffalo in Nebraska was A. N. Ward of Milford. He put it at October 1881, when he was hunting black-tailed deer in McPherson County. “I saw this buffalo, which proved to be a two-year-old heifer, coming out of the shallows where it had been for water,” Ward said. “I made a capital shot, killing the heifer stone dead at 150 yards with a bullet back of the left fore-shoulder.”
The decimation of the herds left the High Plains littered with buffalo bones bleaching under the searing summer sun, and those brought out the hunters, too. One scavenging company reported that between 1884 and 1891 it had carted off the skulls, skeletons, hoofs, and decaying cartilage from some 5.9 million carcasses. The bones filled boxcars to the rim and were shipped to processi
ng plants in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. There they could draw $18 to $27 a ton. They were crushed and reduced to paints, dyes, cosmetics, lubricants for iron and steel, even white sugar and sugarcane juice when boiled down. The industry boomed but briefly, and frontier families hard hit by droughts, snowstorms, and the economic panics of the 1890s scoured the creek beds and flats with carts and wagons, hunting for relics of the dinosaurs of the Old West.
The first telegraph poles had been planted in the Nebraska Territory in early 1861, the wood and the wires shipped out from Ohio. With bonuses offered if jobs were completed ahead of schedule, immigrant laborers feverishly strung their way to the Mormon capital in Utah, their giant rivets bolting down the earth. Soon California would be wired in. “Allow me to greet you,” foreman Edward Creighton telegraphed his wife from the Great Salt Lake. He promised her (and he was right) that the “two oceans will be united.” The wireless telegraph followed, next the radio telephone, and then the radio itself.
By 1893, five railway links spanned the country. That same year, not only did long-distance “telephoning” become possible, but suggestions were also made for how callers could make sure they were heard. Speak loudly, they were encouraged. Shout.
The first automobile was assembled in 1894, and a year later a number of inventors were improving on the horseless carriage. They were crude and expensive, and every young man coveted one. They soon flew right past the horse.
“While I like horses in a certain way, I do not enjoy caring for them,” wrote Amos Ives Root of Medina, Ohio, a beekeeper and tinkerer with just about anything that moved—clocks, widgets, and eventually his Oldsmobile Runabout. When the auto came along, his horse-riding days were finished.
A covered wagon with jackrabbit mules confronts the future—an automobile—on the trail near Big Springs in the Nebraska Panhandle, 1912. (National Archives)
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