by H. W. Brands
The task of the men was to gain control of the herd and gradually turn the cattle until they were moving in a circle. Then, although they might break each other’s horns off and crush one another badly, the great danger was past. A well-trained night-horse needed but little guidance, and knew that if the herd came his way, all that he had to do was to lead. The speed of the herd was terrific, but the position at the head of the stampede was just what the trailman desired, for there he was in a position to start the herd to turning.…
The heat developed by a large drove of cattle during a stampede was surprising. The faces of men riding on the leeward side of the herd would be almost blistered, as if they had been struck by a blast from a furnace; and the odor given off by the clashing horns and hoofs was nearly overpowering.13
Days on the trail began before dawn for the cook, who fed the nighthawks coming in and the rest of the crew heading out. The herd ambled north, grazing as it went. Gradually the cowboys prodded the animals, till all two or three thousand were striding along at about three miles an hour. Cattle and men broke at noon. The cattle grazed; the men dined on leftovers from the night before. All loafed for an hour or two. The march resumed by midafternoon and continued for a few hours till the herd again overtook the chuck wagon, which generally stopped by a stream. Goodnight recalled that clever drovers kept the cattle from water till evening. “The last half of the day’s travel was accomplished much easier than the first half, for the cattle would be growing thirsty and becoming eager to get to water.” The men ate in shifts, with those finished or not yet fed watering the cattle. Supper was typically beef, biscuits, and coffee. The cattle grazed before being bedded down for the night. The trail boss was happy if the herd had made fifteen miles since the last night’s camp.14
The top hands rode “point,” guiding the herd with the help of the lead animals, to whom they bonded almost as partners. Less senior or experienced cowboys rode “swing” and “flank,” coaxing strays back into the main line of march. The newcomers rode “drag,” coaxing the weary and reluctant and eating the dust of ten thousand hooves.
Periodically the herd encountered a river. The lay of the plains between Texas and Kansas is such that rivers run from west to east, requiring northbound travelers to find ways across. The herds that left early in the spring could expect the lushest grasses en route but also the highest water. The cattle could swim but had to be persuaded. Low water was no guarantee of hazardless crossing. Recurrent floods and droughts left the streambeds filled with unconsolidated sediment, which turned to quicksand as the first cattle trampled through. The terror that afflicted an animal caught by the sucking sand could spread among the other animals in seconds, triggering mass panic that mixed drownings with elements of a stampede.
Worse than the stretches where the crossings were too frequent were those where the crossings weren’t frequent enough—where the herd had to travel for days between water. “Dry drives” tested the patience of the cattle and the mettle of the men. Andy Adams remembered the climax of an especially brutal march. Three days and two nights had passed since the last stream. “Holding the herd this third night required all hands. Only a few men at a time were allowed to go into camp and eat, for the herd refused even to lie down. What few cattle attempted to rest were prevented by the more restless ones. By spells they would mill, until riders were sent through the herd at a break-neck pace to break up the groups.”
The men prayed for cooler weather, but dawn came still and sultry. By nine the air almost sizzled. The cattle grew more frantic till they couldn’t be governed at all. “The lead cattle turned back several times, wandering aimlessly in any direction, and it was with considerable difficulty that the herd could be held on the trail,” Adams said. “The rear overtook the lead, and the cattle gradually lost all semblance of a trail herd.” With great effort the riders reconstructed the herd, stringing the animals out along the trail. But as soon as they relaxed, the confusion set in again.
The cattle congregated into a mass of unmanageable animals, milling and lowing in their fever and thirst. The milling only intensified their sufferings from the heat, and the outfit split and quartered them again and again, in the hope that this unfortunate outbreak might be checked. No sooner was the milling stopped than they would surge hither and yon, sometimes half a mile, as ungovernable as the waves of an ocean.… We threw our ropes in their faces, and when this failed, we resorted to shooting. But in defiance of the fusillade and the smoke they walked sullenly through the line of horsemen across their front. Six-shooters were discharged so close to the leaders’ faces as to singe their hair. Yet, under a noonday sun, they disregarded this and every other device to turn them, and passed wholly out of our control. In a number of instances wild steers deliberately walked against our horses. And then, for the first time, a fact dawned on us that chilled the marrow in our bones—the herd was going blind!
The trail boss of Adams’s outfit saw no alternative to going back to the latest water, despite the added mileage and time it would entail. “It’s a good thing that they are strong,” he said. “Five or six days without water will hardly kill any.” Nor did it. But the experience brought to mind the remark of Phil Sheridan that if he owned hell and Texas, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell. “For if this isn’t Billy hell,” the boss said, “I’d like to know what you call it.”15
ON HIS BUFFALO HUNT in western Dakota Territory, after days spent seeking the suddenly scarce beast among the broken plains and blocked valleys of the badlands, Theodore Roosevelt devoted evenings to discussions with resident Gregor Lang. Gregor’s son Lincoln eavesdropped from the attic of the Lang cabin and recalled hearing Roosevelt congratulate his father, an immigrant from Scotland, on being one of fifteen children. “The first essential of human progress is the perpetuation of the human race, and I admire the men who are not afraid to propagate their kind as far as they may,” Roosevelt said. Roosevelt was recently married but had no children yet; he assured Lang he intended to have several at least.
The two men spoke on other subjects. Politics fascinated both. Gregor had named Lincoln for the Great Emancipator; Roosevelt was taking time from his work as a New York assemblyman. He told Lang how he combated the forces of corruption in Albany and how good men must battle their ilk on the larger stage of national politics. He doubtless dropped that he had just published a book on the maritime aspects of the War of 1812 and that his historical research revealed a contemporary need for a stronger American navy.16
They spoke of Dakota and of how men made a living there. Roosevelt had come to this part of the frontier to experience the dying moment of a passing age, when a hunter might bag the largest animal in North America. But he had come, as well, to reconnoiter the dawn of a new age, when cattle were filling the niche vacated by the buffalo. For the past few years papers in the West and around the country had reported tremendous opportunities for investors in the cattle business. “Cotton was once crowned king,” a livestock journal observed, “but grass is now.… If grass is King, the Rocky Mountain region is its throne and fortunate indeed are those who possess it.” A U.S. army officer named James Brisbin, who spent the dozen years after the Civil War on service in various parts of the West, devoted an entire book to what he called The Beef Bonanza. “In the whole world there are but five great natural grazing areas,” Brisbin wrote in 1881. Four were the steppe of Central Asia, the veldt of South Africa, the pampas of South America, and the outback of Australia. The fifth was “the boundless plains of the United States,” comprising “1,650,000 square miles with over a billion acres.” Americans had never appreciated the potential of this region, Brisbin said. They called it the Great American Desert. But it was no more a natural desert than the other four pastoral zones. “The day will come when the government will derive more taxes from the grazing country than the best agricultural regions. These arid plains, so long considered worthless, are the natural meat-producing lands of the nation, and in a few years 30,000,000 people wil
l draw their beef from them.”17
Potential investors received detailed advice on how their money would multiply. In a widely reprinted article entitled “How Cattlemen Grow Rich,” the Breeder’s Gazette explained:
A good sized steer when it is fit for the butcher market will bring from $45 to $60. The same animal at birth was worth but $5.00. He has run on the plains and cropped the grass from the public domain for four or five years, and now, with scarcely any expense to his owner, is worth forty dollars more than when he started on his pilgrimage. A thousand of these animals are kept nearly as cheaply as a single one, so with a thousand as a starter and with an investment of but $5,000 in the start, in four years the stock raiser has made from $40,000 to $45,000. Allow $5,000 for his current expenses which he has been going on and he still has $35,000 and even $45,000 for a net profit. That is all there is of the problem and that is why our cattlemen grow rich.18
The news spread across America and beyond the Atlantic. British newspapers sent correspondents to cover the cattle boom. The Economist of London in 1883 described the “remarkable success” of one cattle company organized in 1880, “which paid a dividend at the rate of 19½ per cent twelve months ago, and had recently declared a second, at nearly 28 per cent.” Even Parliament got into the act, dispatching two members to America on a fact-finding tour. They reported with sober astonishment a typical return in the cattle industry of 33 percent per annum.19
Other Europeans entered the industry, as Roosevelt learned at first hand in Dakota. Across the Little Missouri River from the town of Little Missouri, the Northern Pacific rail stop where Roosevelt had alighted to commence his hunt, Antoine de Vallombrosa, the marquis de Morès and a relative of French kings, was building the headquarters of what he hoped would be an empire of beef. Stockyards had been constructed; an abattoir was going up. An entire town, named Medora for his wife (who nonetheless hadn’t yet seen fit to join him in Dakota), was being laid out. De Morès intended to capitalize on recent innovations in rail technology, in particular the development of refrigerator cars. The cold cars allowed the decentralization of butchering and obviated sending whole steers east. The bones and entrails could stay in Dakota—along with the processor’s profits, de Morès hoped.20
Roosevelt could see the de Morès empire abuilding. He heard from locals how the marquis anticipated sinking millions of dollars into the project. He had read the literature of the cattle boom with its testaments of doubled money in two or three years. His own wallet was heavy from an inheritance that had made him one of the wealthiest undergraduates at Harvard in the late 1870s and that still sought gainful employment. Politics was a pastime for Roosevelt, for now at least. A Republican reformer in a legislature dominated by Democrats and spoilsmen, he could tell that his future in Albany had limits. Besides, at twenty-four he wanted to strike out in a different direction from his urban upbringing. He had long read and reveled in the exploits of frontiersmen; as a sickly child he had dreamed of doing what they did: of riding horseback across the open West, sleeping under the stars, relying on courage and wit to win what the land had to give.
On the spot, with the same impulsiveness that was causing many others to take the plunge, Roosevelt determined to be a ranchman. He asked Gregor Lang to be his partner. “That is exceedingly kind of you, Mr. Roosevelt,” Lang replied. “And I am more than sorry that I cannot see my way clear to accept. But Pender”—his current employer—“is depending on me to carry this undertaking through and I do not feel that I can disappoint him.”
Roosevelt asked Lang if he could recommend anyone. Lang mentioned Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Both were good men, he said. Roosevelt asked to meet them. They explained that they too were obligated. Roosevelt offered to buy out their current contracts and pay them more than they were now making. They said that they’d have to ride to Minnesota to clear the idea with their employer, but they liked it.
Roosevelt drafted a check for fourteen thousand dollars. This would purchase the small herd they were managing for the Minnesotan, allow them to buy a few hundred more cattle, and cover start-up expenses for the Roosevelt operation. They asked if he wanted a receipt. He said if he doubted their honesty he wouldn’t have made them his partners. Years later Merrifield still marveled at the moment. “We were sitting on a log up at what we called Cannonball Creek,” he said. “He handed us a check for fourteen thousand dollars, handed it right over to us on a verbal contract. He didn’t have a scratch of a pen for it.” Ferris added, “All the security he had for his money was our honesty.”21
LIKE OTHER ASPECTS of American business, the cattle industry evolved continually during the decades after the Civil War. The drives from Texas to Kansas lasted about fifteen years, till the railroads arrived at the cattle regions of Texas. By then the business was shifting north. The longhorns flourished in south Texas, with its warm winters and twelvemonth grass-growing season, but more than a few cattlemen wondered whether the longhorns might be able to survive winters on the northern Plains. In 1866 an adventurous soul drove six hundred longhorns from Dallas to Montana’s Gallatin Valley. They thrived there, learning to paw through the typically light snow to the bunch grass blanched by the first frost. Like the buffalo they turned their tails to the arctic blasts of winter and slowly drifted downwind.
The news spread quickly. And even while the drives to Kansas continued, drives to Colorado, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana grew larger and more numerous. The drives differed in certain respects. Those to the railheads—that is, to the dinner tables of the East—comprised chiefly steers, which fattened more readily and fought less frequently than uncastrated bulls. Those to the northern Plains—that is, to the ranches of prospective cattle barons—included mostly cows and bulls. (Drives from Texas to Indian reservations of the North, under contract with the War Department, constituted an exception to the latter rule, as the animals were for slaughter rather than propagation.)
Before long a rush mentality surrounded the northern drives, not unlike that which had characterized the gold rush to California. In both cases a piece of the public domain—gold in California, grass on the plains—was up for grabs. Early arrivals claimed the choicest locations and expected the highest profits. Unlike gold, grass was a renewable resource—but only up to a point. The scant rainfall on the plains limited the growth of grass and therefore the number of cattle any particular parcel could support. The person who got there first put his cattle on the range and preempted others.
But for a time there seemed enough for all. James Brisbin, the Beef Bonanza author, printed a letter he identified as having been written by a “gentleman of means” in the West to his brother in the East. Possibly Brisbin fabricated the letter—the practice was common in promotional literature of the era—but even so it conveyed the essentials of the cattle business as perceived by potential investors:
Dear Brother—I have bought a cattle ranch, and as you have long wished to engage in business out West, I do not know of a better thing you can do than raise cattle. As you have no knowledge or experience in breeding, I will tell you what I think, with proper care, we can make out of it. The ranch is twenty-two miles from a railroad, and contains 720 acres of land, 600 acres of which is hay or grassland, and 120 acres good timber. The meadow will cut annually 2½ tons of hay to the acre, and there is a living stream on the land. The timber is heavy and will furnish logs for stables, corrals, and fuel for many years to come. The hills in the vicinity afford the best grazing, and we can have a range ten miles in extent.
The writer (perhaps Brisbin) reiterated the capitalist arithmetic of cattle procreation. “You can put in $2,500, and I will duplicate it and add $1,000 for bulls. For $5,000 we can get 400 head of Texas cows to start with, and I will add a sufficient number of Durham bulls to breed them.… At the end of one year the cows would have 400 calves, each worth $7.00. I count full yield, for in cross-breeding there is not one cow in a hundred barren.… Our first year’s profit is 400 calves, $7.00 each, $2,800.”
From there the profits expanded exponentially. The second year would yield $4,800, the third year $6,800, the fourth $10,200, the fifth $14,600.22
In the face of such numbers, investors would have been fools not to take advantage of this unique and wasting opportunity. Or so concluded the many who poured money into cattle and made Cheyenne the reincarnation of San Francisco at the height of the gold rush or Virginia City in the salad days of the Comstock Lode. “Sixteenth Street is a young Wall Street,” one observer wrote of Wyoming’s territorial capital. “Millions are talked of as lightly as nickels, and all kinds of people are dabbling in steers.… Large transactions are made every day in which the buyer does not see a hoof of his purchase and very likely does not use more than one half of the purchase money in the trade before he has sold and made an enormous margin in the deal.” Lawyers appeared to be particularly susceptible. “The chief justice of the Supreme Court has recently succumbed to the contagion and gone out to purchase a $40,000 herd.… A Cheyenne man who don’t pretend to know a maverick from a mandamus has made a neat little margin of $15,000 this summer in small transactions and hasn’t seen a cow yet that he has bought and sold.”23
“HURRAH!” Theodore Roosevelt scrawled to his wife, Alice. “The luck has turned at last. I will bring you home the head of a great buffalo bull.” This was supposed to be the good news. Alice may have interpreted it differently, as her tastes in interior decorating ran more to proper Bostonian (she grew up in Chestnut Hill) than Dakota primitive. The announcement of their new wall decoration prefaced Roosevelt’s announcement of his investment in cattle ranching. “The more I have looked into the matter—weighing and balancing everything, pro and con, as carefully as I knew how—the more convinced I became that there was a great chance to make a great deal of money, very safely, in the cattle business. Accordingly I have decided to go into it, very cautiously at first, and, if I come out well the first year, much more heavily as time goes on.” He was less confident than this sentence made him sound. “Neither Uncle Jim nor, I am afraid, even Uncle Jimmie”—his financial advisers, after the death of his father—“will approve of the step I have taken,” he conceded. But he was taking it anyway.24
