by H. W. Brands
The impetus for the efforts to export cattle was the price difference between Texas and the various destinations. Cattle were almost free for the taking in Texas, the principal expense being the labor cost of rounding them up. In the East cattle commanded twenty to forty dollars per head. Simple arithmetic suggested that the man who could get a thousand head of Texas cattle to market in the East might nearly retire on the proceeds. One modest-sized herd transported to Chicago in 1856 was said to have netted its owners ten thousand dollars. The simultaneous continuing growth of the Texas herds and of the Eastern appetite for beef promised future profits greater still.3
The Civil War postponed the bounty. Secession cut Texas off from Northern markets, while the Union blockade and the capture of the Mississippi isolated Texas from Southern markets. With nowhere to go, the longhorns continued to multiply, till at war’s end they numbered perhaps five million.
The Confederate surrender reopened Northern markets to Texas cattle. As the national economy readjusted to peace, the price of beef soared. The Department of Agriculture cited three-year-old steers selling for $86 in Massachusetts, $69 in New York, $40 in Illinois, and $38 in Kansas. Texans returning from military service read the price quotes and calculated how to cash in.4
The first step was catching the cattle. “We didn’t call it round-up in those days,” Lee Moore remembered. “We called it cow-hunts.” Moore spoke for many in Texas drawn to the cattle business by the high Eastern prices. Some had grown cotton before the war, others corn. But with crop prices sagging, they turned to beef. At first they acted like the displaced farmers they were. “We had no wagon,” Moore recalled, referring to a mess wagon. “Every man carried his grub in a wallet”—a cloth sack—“behind his saddle, and his bed under his saddle.” They gathered the branded cattle and divided them among the owners, and they apportioned the unbranded cattle by various methods, including poker. “Yearlings at fifty cents a head and the top price for any class was $5 a head,” Moore explained, “so if anyone run out of cattle and had a little money he could get back in the game. For $10, say, he could get a stack of yearlings.” Moore was the youngster of the group and wasn’t allowed to gamble. But he received twenty-five cents a night for tending the fires that furnished the light the others played by and was permitted to convert his cash into cattle.5
Summer had singed the prairies in 1865 before sufficient cattle were gathered to send to market, and so the first big drive awaited the following spring. Whether the same idea occurred to several dozen cattle owners independently or they compared notes is unclear, but in the spring of 1866 scores of herds set out from Texas for the railheads to the north and east. The most popular destination was Sedalia, Missouri, at that time the terminus of the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Some quarter million cattle began the journey and would have made their owners rich had they all arrived. But a series of misfortunes befell the cattle and the drovers who nudged them along. Creatures of the open plains, the cattle (and some of the drovers) became confused in the forests of the Ozarks. They wandered among the trees with no sense of direction. And even when the drovers regained their bearings, they discovered that their herding techniques—which in the open allowed a handful of men to control thousands of animals—failed amid the trunks and bushes. The forests, moreover, provided little sustenance to the animals, which grew hungrier and more ornery the farther they penetrated into the woods.
The humans along the route posed even greater impediments. The drovers discovered during that first season that range cattle and farmers don’t mix. The cornfields of the farmers struck the longhorns as the lushest fodder they had ever seen or smelled; when the animals helped themselves the farmers retaliated. Some shot the trespassers; others ran them off, provoking stampedes. The Missourians also worried that the Texas cattle brought Spanish, or Texas, fever, which would infect their own herds.
Lacking anything close to local sympathy, the drovers fell easy prey to larceny and personal violence. During the war Missouri had sheltered outlaws, deserters, and miscreants of other stripes; many remained there after the fighting ended. More than a few reckoned that the Texas herds must be worth something considerable if the drovers were risking all this trouble and effort, and they determined to claim a share of the portable prize. “A favorite scheme of the milder-mannered of these scoundrels to plunder the cattlemen was that of stampeding a herd at night,” a veteran of the trail recalled. “This was easily done, and having been done the rogues next morning would collect as many of the scattered cattle as they could, secrete them in an out-of-the-way place—much of the country being hilly and timbered—and then hunt up the owner and offer to help him, for an acceptable money consideration per head, in recovering his lost property. If the drover agreed to pay a price high enough to satisfy the pirates, they next day would return with many, if not all, of the missing cattle; but if not, the hold-ups would keep them, and later take them to the market and pocket the entire proceeds.”6
The 1866 drive proved a financial debacle and taught the Texans to keep clear of Missouri. But even though most of the pastoralist entrepreneurs lost money that season, the few cattle that did get to market commanded prices that convinced their owners and others to try again. The railroads continued to press west; by the spring of 1867 the Kansas Pacific had reached the plains of central Kansas. The herds that hit the trail that season were fewer and smaller than the previous year’s, totaling no more than seventy-five thousand. But they had much better luck getting through. They had to cope with the tribes who inhabited the Indian Territory north of Texas, and though these bands were less formidable than the Comanches and Kiowas who still roamed free, they weren’t uniformly above the same stampeding tricks the Missourians had employed the previous year. On the whole, however, the 1867 drive went well. The trail to Kansas kept to open country uninhabited as yet by farmers. Certain stretches compelled the cattle to go long periods without water, but here they showed the hardiness that made the cattlemen forgive their many faults.
———
ESSENTIAL TO THE success of the drive were the efforts of cattle buyers. Joseph McCoy traveled west from Illinois on the news the Texans were trying again. “The plan was to establish at some accessible point a depot or market to which a Texan drover could bring his stock unmolested,” McCoy explained. “It was to establish a market whereat the Southern drover and Northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing and both be undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves.” McCoy rode the Kansas Pacific to Junction City, Kansas, and tried to purchase property from one of the town’s leading businessmen for a stockyard and loading facility. “But an exorbitant price was asked,” McCoy recalled. “In fact a flat refusal to sell at any price was the final answer of the wide-awake Junctionite. So by that one act of donkey stupidity and avarice Junction City drove from her a trade which soon developed to many millions.” Solomon City, despite its name, was no wiser. “After one or two conferences with some of the leading citizens it became evident that they regarded such a thing as a cattle trade with stupid horror.” Salina treated McCoy as a “monster threatening calamity and pestilence.”
But Abilene possessed greater vision, largely because it possessed little else. “Abilene in 1867 was a very small, dead place, consisting of about one dozen log huts, low, small, rude affairs, four-fifths of which were covered with dirt for roofing,” McCoy recalled. “The business of the burg was conducted in two small rooms, mere log huts.” Yet Abilene’s very lack of amenities made it ideal for McCoy’s purposes. “The country was entirely unsettled, well watered, excellent grass.… It was the farthest point east at which a good depot for cattle business could have been made.”
McCoy purchased a tract and set to work building fences, a barn, and an office. The wood had to be imported from Missouri, as did a scales for the cattle. Meanwhile he dispatched word to the Texans as to where to bring their cattle. “A man well versed in the geography of the country and accustomed to life on the prairie was sent into southern
Kansas and the Indian Territory with instructions to hunt up every straggling drove possible (and every drove was straggling, for they had not where to go), and tell them of Abilene and what was being done there toward making a market and outlet for Texas cattle.” The Texans greeted the news skeptically. “They were very suspicious that some trap was set, to be sprung on them. They were not ready to credit the proposition that the day of fair dealing had dawned for Texas drovers. Yet they turned their herds toward the point designated, and slowly and cautiously moved on northward, their minds constantly agitated with hope and fear alternately.”
By the hundreds and then the thousands the longhorns arrived. They filled McCoy’s stockyard and spilled beyond, until the Kansas Pacific built a special siding for the cattle cars. The first shipment, of twenty cars, headed east in early September, triggering a celebration in Abilene among the drovers and the gathered locals.
The partying was premature. Eastern consumers resisted the western meat as tough and stringy, and the first shipments from Abilene went begging. One cargo that couldn’t find a buyer at Chicago was forwarded to Albany, where the nine hundred head were sold for less than the cost of their transport. Even so, almost one thousand cars of cattle made the journey that season, and both sellers and buyers were sufficiently encouraged to repeat the process the following season. The number of cattle shipped from Abilene grew from 35,000 in 1867 to 75,000 in 1868, before exploding to 350,000 in 1869 and 700,000 in 1871.7
By then Abilene had become the model of the western cow town. “Perhaps no point or village of its size ever had been so thoroughly advertised or had acquired such wide-spread fame,” McCoy declared with self-satisfaction but no little accuracy. “One at a distance would suppose from the many reports that it was a large town or city of many thousand inhabitants, instead of a small village of a few hundred denizens.… No point in the West of five times its resident population did one-half the amount of business that was done at Abilene.” The cattle commerce eventually totaled some three million dollars a year, which in turn supported the surrounding economy far beyond its ordinary means. Farmers in Dickinson County sold milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, pork, and chicken to cowhands hungry for anything but beef. Cattle buyers and the less thrifty of the hands put up at the Drovers’ Cottage, a hotel run by Mrs. Lou Gore, who won a reputation as the Florence Nightingale of the plains. “Many a sick and wearied drover has she nursed and tenderly cared for until health was restored, or in the event of death soothed their dying moments,” McCoy explained. “Many western drovers, rough, uncouth men such as nature and the wild frontier produces, will ever hear the name of Mrs. Lou Gore mentioned only with emotions of the kindest respect and tenderest memory and feelings near akin to the holy passion that binds earth to heaven.”
Occasionally Mrs. Gore had to summon qualities more akin to Wyatt Earp’s. Famous as Abilene was for its cattle, it was even more notorious for its debauchery and violence. The railroad divided the town into two quite distinct districts. “North side of the tracks you are in Kansas, and hear sober and profitable conversation on the subject of the weather, the price of the land, and the crops,” a Topeka correspondent recorded. “When you cross to the south side you are in Texas, and talk about cattle.… Nine out of ten men you meet are directly or indirectly interested in the cattle trade; five at least out of every ten are Texans.” The heart of the Texas district was Texas Street, crowded with saloons and dance halls. The “Alamo” held pride of place among these resorts. It served the best liquor in the greatest variety and quantity, and even exposed the cowboys to art. “Paintings, in remote but lascivious imitation of Titian, Tintoretto or Veronese, exhibiting nude women relaxed in beauty prostrate, seduced the Alamo’s sporting life,” a chronicler of the local culture related. Another observer described a typical evening at the Alamo:
Here, in a well lighted room opening on the street, the “boys” gather in crowds round the tables, to play or to watch others; a bartender, with a countenance like a youthful divinity student, fabricates wonderful drinks, while the music of a piano and a violin from a raised recess enlivens the scene, and “soothes the savage breasts” of those who retire torn and lacerated from an unfortunate combat with the “tiger.” The games most affected are faro and monte, the latter being greatly patronized by the Mexicans of Abilene, who sit with perfectly unmoved countenances and play for hours at a stretch.
Though the Mexicans took their losses with outward indifference, many of the Anglos did not. The booze brought out the touchiness in the average cowboy. “An affront or a slight, real or imaginary, is cause sufficient for him to unlimber one or more ‘mountain howitzers’ invariably strapped to his person, and proceed to deal out death in unbroken doses to such as may be in range of his pistols,” Joseph McCoy explained. “Whether real friends or enemies, no matter—his anger and bad whisky urge him on to deeds of blood and death.”8
McCoy didn’t blame the cowboys. Abilene attracted low-lifes—card sharps, confidence men, pimps—who preyed on the cowboys’ unsophistication and sudden cash. Moreover, after months on the trail, they were bored beyond bearing. “The time drags dull at camp or herd ground. There is nothing new or exciting occurring to break the monotony of daily routine events.” Any diversion was welcome, the more exciting, even dangerous, the better.
Most of the cowboys survived their encounter with Abilene. “After a few days of frolic and debauchery, the cowboy is ready, in company with his comrades, to start back to Texas, often not having one dollar left of his summer’s wages,” McCoy said. And those who didn’t live to leave perhaps didn’t deserve to. “By far the larger portion killed are of that class that can be spared without detriment to the good morals and respectability of humanity.”9
SOME KANSANS FELT the same way about Abilene generally and weren’t sorry when its moment of celebrity passed. The railroad continued to press west, making a rendezvous point even farther out on the plains possible. Such a more distant connection became necessary from the fact that farmers, following the railroad, filled in the territory south of Abilene and refused to let the Texas drovers cross their land. Though the cattlemen disliked to admit it, and many perhaps didn’t even realize it, theirs was an intrinsically marginal existence, confined to the moving border between the empty range lands to the west and the populated farm districts to the east. As the farmers crept west, the cattlemen had no choice but to move on ahead of them.
The Texans rerouted their trails, meeting the railroad at Ellsworth and eventually at Dodge City. Abilene reverted to its previous subdued condition, like any number of other boom towns in the West. “Four fifths of her business houses became vacant,” Joseph McCoy recalled sadly. “Rents fell to a trifle. Many of the leading hotels and business houses were either closed or taken down and moved to other points. Property became unsalable. The luxuriant sunflower sprang up thick and flourished in the main streets, while the inhabitants, such as could not get away, passed their time sadly contemplating their ruin.”10
But the industry thrived. The best of the drovers made careers of their craft. Borrowing money for six or eight months, they purchased herds in Texas and trailed them north. To prevent losses they marked each of their steers with a trail brand, administered with a red-hot iron as the cattle crowded through a chute built for the purpose. The drovers hired trail hands, who supplied their own saddles and bedrolls but rode horses belonging to the drovers. A junior member of the outfit was designated the wrangler, with responsibility for the horses, collectively called the remuda. A hired cook completed the division of labor. The cowboys collected salaries, typically twenty-five to forty dollars a month, depending on experience, although the best hands could make as much as five dollars a day. The cook received a bit more than most of the hands; the trail boss—the supervisor of the whole outfit—earned well over a hundred dollars a month.11
After a few years of practice, the drovers knew what they were about. They spent the first several days of each drive breaking the ca
ttle to the rhythm of the trail. They let the herd find its leaders and only slowly directed it north. (This practice wasn’t universal. Some drovers, believing cattle were least manageable on their home range, pushed the herds hard at first to get them away from familiar territory.) Charles Goodnight remembered the first ten days of any drive as the critical period, as that was when a herd was most likely to stampede. “If we succeeded in holding the herd together for that length of time we seldom experienced trouble from stampedes farther along the trail,” he said. But those ten days could be extremely trying.
The men slept on the ground with the lariat wrapped around the wrist and with the horse so close he could be mounted at a bound. Sometimes the demands were so urgent that a man’s boots would not be taken off his feet for an entire week. The nerves of the men usually became wrought up to such a tension that it was a standing rule that no man was to be touched by another when he was asleep until after he had been spoken to. The man who suddenly aroused a sleeper was liable to be shot, as all were thoroughly armed and understood the instant use of the revolver or the rifle.12
The men could do their work admirably only to have their efforts frustrated by a single steer spooked in the night.
The herd of 2,500 or 3,000 cattle might be lying on the bed-ground in the most perfect peace and security, with everything as quiet as a graveyard, when, in a second and without the slightest warning to the eye or ear of man, every animal would be on its feet, and the earth would tremble as the herd swept off through the darkness. The experience was one of the most thrilling a man could ever know. Every person in camp would be up and away. No one, not even the most experienced trailman, could, at the beginning of the stampede, guess the direction of the flight. The course appeared to be at random, for the cattle would plunge headlong against any obstacle and down any precipice that stood in their way.
