by Annie Proulx
CHAPTER 8
Bird Cloud’s Checkered Past
The American government has bruised the people’s trust from time to time. One of the most blatant examples was the great nineteenth-century giveaway of huge chunks of public land to a handful of railroad barons in the name of patriotic progress and “opening up the country.” Some of those vigorous entrepreneurs dreamed of Far East markets served by a cross-continent rail line.
Among the most rapacious grabbers were English and Scots landed gentry, well-traveled, sophisticated, with keen eyes for profitable situations. North America was a treasure house—timber, minerals, furs, grazing land, big-game trophies—and they knew it. Despite the United States’ autonomy, an older sense of a right to exploitation still colored upper-class sensibilities in the British Isles. Today we point accusatory fingers at the most outrageous mining and railroad moguls of the period, but the pervasive ethos of social Darwinism and imperialism, the presumed right of the elite to skim the cream from any country’s natural resources, was accepted. Those who took what they wanted were generally admired and envied.
In America the intense desire to accumulate wealth and power was democratized; the wealthy, the highborn, the titled, the poor immigrant boy, the disappointed New England businessman, the dispossessed farmer, the unemployed young man all believed they had a right to the pots of gold at the end of the American rainbow. Dozens of popular books of the period featured poor, barefoot farm boys who became rich through hard work, clever ideas, recognition of opportunities and the wheel-greasing kindness of wealthy men (with blond, blue-eyed daughters). The virtue of “hard work” was often invoked to sugarcoat aggressive, unscrupulous dealings with more naïve people.
The forceful entrepreneurial spirit burned strongly in Canada and the American west. Wyoming remains to this day a kind of juicy natural resources fruit that corporate and business interests feel entitled to squeeze dry. The history of section 21—Bird Cloud—touches both ends of the spectrum. When Wyoming was still a territory a titled Scotsman who had everything owned the Sand Creek Cattle and Land Company ranch abutting what is now Bird Cloud. And before that section 21 was part of a holding bought by a trio of Irish brothers from Vermont who started out with nothing and became powerful and wealthy, the Horatio Alger story come true.
The transcontinental railroad had been talked up as inevitable since the 1830s. Abraham Lincoln put the talk into action, granting subsidies and huge pieces of territory to corporations. Chief among the broadcloth-suited railroad finaglers of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were Thomas Durant, Jay Cooke, Grenville Dodge, Oliver Ames, Collis Huntington, their relatives, friends and political connections, abetted by a carload of criminal-minded congressmen. Stock manipulations, bribery, “creative” bookkeeping, countless government loans and subsidies and, above all, very large land grants made the great fortunes of a select few.
In 1862 the Union Pacific Rail Road received, along with a right-of-way, more than a thousand miles long through the public domain, a grant of half the lands in a strip ten miles wide on each side of the tracks they promised to lay down. The railroad could do what it wished with these chunks of prairie, forest and mountain. The road extended from Omaha to Promontory Point in Utah where the tracks eventually met up with those of Huntington’s Central Pacific. Most railroads got the same sweetheart deal. For the Union Pacific it figured out to ten square miles of salable land for every mile of track. The land was divided into square-mile sections (640 acres). The government kept the even-numbered sections and the railroad got the odd-numbered. The result was the infamous checkerboard arrangement of section ownership that still disfigures maps of the west. The Union Pacific ran across the center of Wyoming Territory, bisecting the great North American bison herd. Ranchers who bought railroad sections effectively controlled the public or state land that lay between or adjacent to them. Often the buyers illegally enclosed public land with fences. It still happens. Hunters and hikers, photographers, bird-watchers, historians seeking access to public land may find the way closed by illegal gates, barbed wire and No Trespassing signs. Both state and federal government seem powerless to allow access to all public lands.
In the 1862 giveaway the government retained the mineral rights on the railroad sections. Two years later it doubled the land grant appropriation to twenty miles on each side of the tracks and threw in the mineral rights, very pleasing to the Union Pacific which had discovered rich coal deposits in the Wyoming hinterlands. The U.P. freighted in coal miners, and around the mine adits rose the Wyoming towns of Carbon, Hanna, Superior and Rock Springs. Some of the government-retained sections went to the territories and states to finance and support state colleges.
At the time the land was considered to be of low value. There were not many buyers for Wyoming Territory sections of parching winds and hostile Indians. As the railroads were keen to squeeze all possible monies out of the deal, they mortgaged the land grants. Today collectors prize the dozens of old land grant bonds.
In the 1860s Bird Cloud—section 21—was an odd-
numbered Union Pacific section. The railroad still owned it in 1908, but in 1909 sold it, along with sections 3, 9, 11, 15 and 23 for eleven thousand dollars and change. The buyer was that poor Vermont farm boy, Thomas A. Cosgriff, who worked his way up to become president of the massive Cosgriff Sheep Company.
The Cosgriff Brothers
Many of the entrepreneurial adventurers who carved up Wyoming were sets of brothers. The Cosgriffs were the sons of an Irish immigrant, John Cosgriff, who settled in Colchester, Vermont (today a suburb of Burlington). Their mother was Mary Barry, a Vermont native. The two older sons were Thomas A. and John B. Cosgriff, educated at Burlington High School, the boys all powerfully ambitious in the get-ahead spirit of their time. The finest expression of that urge to seize and triumph was the poetry of Walt Whitman. The basest expression, detailed in pioneer journals and letters, was the streak of meanness in some pioneers. There are reports of parties on the westward trails who, when forced to abandon their wagons, cut them in half lengthwise, so no one else could use them. Some dog-in-the-manger types chose to make bonfires and burn their abandoned goods in order to prevent others taking them up.
Thomas A. Cosgriff, born in 1854, worked in a mercantile establishment in Burlington. He saved up a little money, and at age twenty-three headed for Denver. There he found work with the May department and dry goods store, founded by David May in Leadville and Denver. May’s became Daniels and Fisher, and in the next century controlled many national department stores including Lord & Taylor, Marshall Field’s, Filene’s. All were swallowed up in 2005 by Federated Department Stores and continue to exist as Macy’s, now a chain store in malls across the country.
Thomas Cosgriff, sensing the chance to make something big out of the raw Wyoming Territory, shifted north to Cheyenne in 1882. In Cheyenne he started a general store which did very well. With the profits, he and his brother John B. (Cosgriff Brothers Company), opened stores in nearly fifty Wyoming towns. The Cosgriffs were rivals of J. W. Hugus who graduated from the lucrative job as sutler at Fort Kearney in Nebraska during the Civil War to the sutler’s berth at Fort Steele, Wyoming, where he opened the first of a chain of dry goods stores in Wyoming and surrounding states.
Canny Thomas Cosgriff noticed a need for banks and began attaching them to his various stores. Together the brothers bought the First National Bank of Rawlins, started the State Bank of Saratoga, and opened the Cosgriff-Enright company, a wholesale grocery house, in Salt Lake City. In the 1880s the brothers set up the Cosgriff Sheep Company, buying vast acreage in Wyoming, especially land abutting the open range Red Desert, regarded as superior sheep grazing ground. Thomas Cosgriff became one of Wyoming’s first self-made multimillionaires and owned banks in Colorado, Utah and Idaho as well as Wyoming. He built a hotel and a railway in Cheyenne, his adopted city. He didn’t marry until he was fifty-nine, bad timing as he died three years later in 1916 before his second ch
ild, Thomas A. Jr., was born.
His younger brother, John B. Cosgriff, apparently came west with Thomas. Exactly what Thomas did in his employment with the Denver May department store is not clear, but one report has it that John B. (presumably with Thomas) ran a freight line between the Denver and Leadville stores. One source says that John B. had a construction contract to excavate the sites for Denver’s famous Tabor Opera House and for the Union Depot. He was a partner with Thomas A. in many ventures—dry goods stores, grocery stores, and beloved of both men, banks. John B. was a director of a dozen banks during his lifetime. He was involved, with one or the other of his brothers, in the lumber business and owned a floral supply house. He even became president of a small railroad. But it is for their sheep operation that the Cosgriffs’ name is remembered.
According to contemporary reports the brothers were reticent, frugal and of saving disposition. As they prospered, most of their profits went into more and more sheep which they pastured on Wyoming’s Red Desert under the care of a trusted [New?] Mexican foreman, Adiano Apadaca.
Their younger brother James E. joined the two older men around 1890, but soon moved on to Utah. When John B. bought the Commercial National Bank of Salt Lake City he changed its name to the Continental National Bank. James E. became president of this bank, a position he held until he died in 1938, while John B., perhaps something of an éminence gris, served as vice president and one of the directors.
Sheep had been important in the Cosgriffs’ home state of Vermont. In 1811 the U.S. consul to Lisbon was William Jarvis, a Boston man who had a farm on the Connecticut River in Weathersfield, Vermont. After Napoleon defeated Spain there was an opportunity to buy stock from the royal Spanish merino flocks, a monopoly that had been carefully protected from foreign buyers until the power shifted. Under the new regime two hundred merino rams and several hundred other sheep went to Jarvis’s Weathersfield property. The cold New England winters caused them to grow prodigious fleeces. Jarvis sold purebreds to his neighbors at reasonable prices and Vermont quickly became synonymous with quality wool. By the time the Cosgriff boys were growing up, sheep raising in Vermont was more costly and beginning to give way to dairy farming. It was far cheaper to run sheep in the opening west.
Years after they came to Wyoming the brothers had not forgotten that there was money in wool and they formed their sheep company to take advantage of the territory’s thousands of acres of free, open range land. At their most expansive, a Wyoming Wool Growers Association profile says the Cosgriffs ran 125,000 sheep.
In their own way the conservative, long-sighted brothers were as opportunistic as the railroad and mining buccaneers. Thomas Cosgriff in particular had a superior instinct for business and moneymaking through diversification. The brothers bought up the Union Pacific Railroad’s odd-numbered sections of land at bargain prices. The railroad, which had not done very well selling arid, sagebrush land to settlers, let the sections go cheaply.
The Cosgriffs developed a reputation for always coming out on top, fencing in government land adjacent to their purchased sections, and overgrazing the national forest lands. They chose promising young men for business partners. They shipped the largest known consignment of Wyoming wool in 1895. In the battles between Wyoming sheepmen and Colorado cattlemen early in the last century, the sheep owners were in the stronger position because of the financial support of the able and savvy Cosgriffs.
A decade into the new century the aging Cosgriffs divided their sheep empire. The Cosgriff Sheep Company property was broken apart, the Cow Creek section going to James E. Cosgriff, the section west of Saratoga sold to John Hartt, one of their young partners. After the estate was settled some twenty thousand acres were left over. L. E. Vivion bought half of that, the land east and south of Rawlins. The remainder was bought by an oil outfit, the Producers and Refiners Company which created the strange little town of Parco (now renamed Sinclair) a few miles east of Rawlins, site of the Sinclair refinery. The land that Vivion bought included the section that became Bird Cloud. It was a descendant of Vivion who sold section 21 to The Nature Conservancy in the 1990s.
L. E. Vivion arrived in Wyoming in the 1880s and worked for Isaac Carson Miller who had emigrated from Denmark in 1864. By 1870 Miller was in Wyoming Territory prospecting for gold, then running a Rawlins saloon. As he settled into the place he began to graze cattle and sheep. By the time Vivion went to work for him, Miller was getting into politics. He was elected sheriff of Carbon County in 1880, and appointed foreman of an extraordinary grand jury overseeing the trial of the notorious bandit-murderer George Parrotte, better known as Big Nose George. Big Nose was sentenced to hang in April 1881, but in late March, when Miller was away from Rawlins on business, the condemned man tried unsuccessfully to escape. A few hours later a vigilante gang took Big Nose forcibly from jail and hanged him from a handy telegraph pole. (Telegraph poles were useful in several ways to early settlers in this treeless country.) The grisly-minded Rawlins doctor, John Osborne, took over the corpse, cut off the top of the skull, and flayed large sections of skin from the body, skin which he ordered tanned and made into a pair of shoes. Eleven years later Dr. Osborne, a Democrat in a staunchly conservative Republican state, somehow got elected governor. He wore his macabre outlaw shoes to the inauguration.
Vivion had learned enough about cows to start a herd and was living the tough ranch life. In a period when fresh vegetables were hard to come by, his ranch grew a garden. The garden was not fenced and, during lambing season in 1892, the ewes of the old Saratoga Valley pioneer, George Ferris, got into the vegetables. The exasperated Vivion got plenty of exercise chasing them out, but the exercise piqued his curiosity. He asked Ferris if there was money in sheep. Ferris said there was indeed, speaking in such a convincing way that Vivion sold his cattle and bought a band of animals from him. Another local man, George Seeley, also bought a band of sheep from Ferris and it was a natural progression for Vivion and Seeley to throw in together. Despite the depression of 1893 they made money and when they broke up six years later each owned four bands of sheep free and clear. A band of sheep is generally assumed to be a thousand animals.
In 1894 Vivion accompanied a Lancashire butcher, Robert Jackson, to the Pick ranch to give advice on the butcher’s purchase of steers. They came across a band of ewe sheep belonging to Napoleon “Boney” Earnest, brother of Frank Earnest. Jackson, as payment for Vivion’s help in cattle buying, loaned him enough money to purchase those sheep.
Henry Seton-Karr
Henry Seton-Karr held much of the property adjacent to Bird Cloud in the nineteenth century. He discovered world-class hunting and a dubious business opportunity in Wyoming. Although it is not fair to judge him by today’s values—historians call this “presentism”—he seems a caricature of the landed gentry in his 1904 My Sporting Holidays. Seton-Karr was a Scot and a privileged member of the elite class of wealthy landowners in the British Isles. He wrote his book for “My Brother-Sportsmen of the Anglo-Saxon Race.” He was a creature of his times, as we all are. Born in 1853 in India where his colonial service father represented the British Raj, he believed in the inborn rights of patriotic, educated white Britons to rule presumed lesser parts of the world. He saw his class, those representatives of the British Empire, as possessing the inherent freedom to use the entire globe for purposes of monetary gain or pleasure.
He was a sportsman in the way only the wealthiest and most fanatic upper-class shooters of the period from 1870 to the First World War could be. He lived by a sportsman’s code and defended the British hunter’s “lust to kill the hunted.” He was rock-certain that “no race of men possesses this desire more strongly than the Anglo-Saxons of the British Isles . . . an inherited instinct—which civilization cannot eradicate—of a virile and dominant race.” His photographs show him in his twenties and thirties as slender, very dapper, and with a large dark mustache. His face was handsome and intense. As the years passed and he spent more time in Parliament than in the forest
s and fields, he put on weight, and at the time of his dramatic death was fairly hefty.
He always sought out the largest and handsomest animals, and when he was shooting wapiti or red deer or mountain sheep it was the quality of the animal’s head that guided his choice of target. And of the head it was the horns he most esteemed, following a complicated horn-and-antler value scale of points. By today’s standards he was a game hog: he blithely noted that he and his party once “easily obtained our limit of 800 brace of grouse and blackgame,” killed “eighteen stags in ten days’ stalking,” and on a good day, in the morning caught “a salmon of 12 pounds,” while after lunch “three good stags were killed.” He seemed unaware that size-focused trophy hunting removed the largest animals from the gene pool, a kind of secondary genetic engineering that favors smaller racks and animals.
Wyoming’s first territorial legislature met and passed a feeble law in 1869 to limit the taking of big game, but without provision for enforcement it was writ in water and everywhere flouted—“perhaps one of the most notably ineffective laws of its kind ever passed.”1 Everyone—military men, emigrants, settlers, train passengers, foreign sportsmen—shot animals in truly astounding quantities in the western territories. Seton-Karr was only part of the anything-goes wave of unchecked hunting and fishing.
Many of the early settlers in Wyoming were men who had worked on the Union Pacific Railroad when it pushed through the Territory in 1868, and military men who had served in the Wyoming forts during the Indian wars.2 One of the perks of these men’s hard duties was a certain amount of freedom to hunt and fish. Foreign sportsmen, most of them titled and well-heeled men from the British Isles and Europe with gold-plated bison guns, breech-loading rifles and Purdey shotguns, came with enormous entourages. They hired local guides, bought dozens of wagons, commandeered food and drink, and set out on month-long hunts, for game was not evenly distributed, and could be hard to find. Among these men was Lord George Gore whose immense income came from family land holdings in Ireland. Gore had a bison hunt at Fort Kearney, Nebraska, on his way to Wyoming. Wrote Eugene Ware in his memoir The Indian War of 1864, “Lord George Gore came with forty horses, forty servants, forty guns, forty dogs and forty of everything else. He stopped at Fort Kearney and hunted.”3 In Wyoming he arrived at Fort Laramie in 1854 with not quite forty of everything except servants, and lesser numbers of wagons, horses, oxen, dogs and carts. He spent nearly a year hunting. The Earl of Dunraven, Otho Shaw, Moreton Frewen and other wealthy big-game hunters came for the sport and some stayed to play at cattle ranching. Most of them, including Seton-Karr, were robbed blind by the locals. It is not known whether some of the lesser Wyoming ranchers who fattened on the wealthy sportsmen had sprung from landless Irish peasantry whose people had suffered during the famine years of the 1840s, many under the hard yoke of unfeeling British absentee estate owners.
