by H. W. Brands
Roosevelt’s stake bought him a cattle ranch called the Chimney Butte, subsequently supplemented by a second place, the Elkhorn. But precisely what the two ranches included was problematic. Neither included any land to speak of. Roosevelt built a cabin on the Elkhorn place, on the bank of the Little Missouri. No one was likely to evict him, though he couldn’t have shown a title to the plot on which it stood. But the land on which his cattle grazed was federal property, part of the public domain of the United States. When Roosevelt bought his two ranches he acquired cattle and the presumption of grazing rights. For the moment the presumption was reasonable, as western Dakota remained sparsely populated by people and cattle.
But the situation soon changed. Though Roosevelt didn’t make any money his first year, neither did he lose much, and he decided to increase his play. In part his decision reflected personal circumstances. Roosevelt fell in love with the West at first exposure. The frontier life suited his temperament and made him feel like the man he had always wanted to be. He rode the range, shared grub with cowboys, tangled with outlaws. “I have been having a glorious time here,” he wrote his sister Anna. “I feel as absolutely free as a man could feel.” The personal element intensified when Alice suddenly and unexpectedly died in childbirth. Roosevelt was bereft, and in his grief he found solace in the loneliness of the great West. “One day I would canter hour after hour over the level green grass, or through miles of wild rose thickets, all in bloom,” he told Anna. “On the next I would be amidst the savage desolation of the Bad Lands, with their dreary plateaus, fantastically shaped buttes, and deep, winding canyons.”
Roosevelt’s decision to extend his investment also reflected the economics of cattle ranching. The range of western Dakota began to fill up as newcomers—other Roosevelts, so to speak—moved in. Roosevelt’s only claim to the range was priority, and if he didn’t put cattle on all the land around the Elkhorn and Chimney Butte, someone else would. “I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business,” he informed Anna—who besides being his confidante was the acting mother of his and Alice’s daughter, also named Alice.25
For a time Roosevelt did make ranching his regular business. “I have been three weeks on the roundup and have worked as hard as any of the cowboys,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, a recent acquaintance. “But I have enjoyed it greatly. Yesterday I was eighteen hours in the saddle—from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m.—having a half hour each for dinner and tea. I can now do cowboy work pretty well.”26
Cowboy work on the roundup consisted of gathering all the cattle from a large portion of the range. Cowboys from several ranches took part; the cattle were sorted by brand, and calves were branded to match their mothers. At the autumn roundup, after a summer of fleshing out, those animals bound for slaughter were culled from the herd and shipped off. The rest were released to resume their feral ways.
Cowboy work also involved defending one’s turf—that is, one’s claim to the public turf. As Roosevelt expanded his herd his animals encroached on territory over which the marquis de Morès asserted control. Roosevelt thought the French aristocrat’s claims excessive and said so. De Morès sent a gang of gunmen to Roosevelt’s ranch. Roosevelt was gone, but the leader, a reputed killer named Paddock, told Roosevelt’s foreman that his boss’s cattle were trespassing on the marquis’s territory. Roosevelt might purchase grazing rights from the marquis; if he chose not to, he’d better move his cattle.
Roosevelt refused to be intimidated. On his return (from a successful grizzly bear hunt), he rode directly to Paddock’s place. He pounded on the door and demanded that Paddock come out. Paddock, observing Roosevelt’s pistol and rifle and noting his determined air, declined to press his earlier threat. He said there had been a misunderstanding; he meant no harm.
Roosevelt’s moral victory in this instance deepened his belief that forceful action in a righteous cause would carry the day. But it did nothing to solve the underlying problem of the range. In fact, by encouraging him to continue expanding his herd, it exacerbated the problem, which was that the carrying capacity of the range was limited but the ambitions and hopes of the cattlemen—collectively if not necessarily individually—were unlimited. Not owning the land, the cattlemen had little incentive to protect or improve it. On the contrary, they had every incentive to extract as much value from it as they could, lest others do so first.
Most of the ranchers recognized the problem; some sought to solve it. They formed livestock associations that wrote rules for the use and conservation of the range. Roosevelt organized one such group, the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, whose members were so impressed by his political skills that they charged him to draft a constitution for the group. At an early meeting the members discussed measures for preventing disease, for branding strays, for foiling rustlers, for improving the herds by importing high-quality bulls. In the words of the Bad Lands Cowboy, the new local newspaper, “the utmost harmony and unanimity prevailed.”27
But agreeable though the members might be among themselves, they couldn’t bar outsiders elbowing onto the range. Some employed the intimidation de Morès attempted against Roosevelt, only more effectively. Others managed to have their actions confirmed in law, as when the Wyoming territorial legislature granted control of the range to the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. Yet despite their efforts, the cattle population continued to swell.
The first sign of trouble was a drop in beef prices, which lost 50 percent between the spring of 1882 and the summer of 1886. Leveraged investors, who had hoped to profit on margin, now found their levers kicking them in the teeth. Roosevelt had sunk eighty thousand dollars into his cattle operation by the end of 1886 and had yet to turn a profit. Two partners he had recruited grew discouraged and pulled back.
Roosevelt might have retrenched, too, had he not been distracted. In the autumn of 1885 he encountered a childhood sweetheart whom he had thrown over for Alice. The flame rekindled and they engaged to be married. But because Roosevelt disapproved of second marriages, he insisted on a quiet ceremony—overseas. He and Edith Carow traveled to England in the autumn of 1886; they were married in London in December.
The newlyweds were honeymooning on the Continent when Roosevelt learned of the larger consequence of the overstocking. The summer and fall of 1886 had been dry on the northern Plains, and the cattle entered the winter thinner than usual. Ranchers with experience—a comparative term where even the longest-tenured cattlemen had operated less than a decade—expected snows and cold snaps before Christmas but nothing extended or severe till after New Year’s Day. This year the first snows came in early November, and not as the tentative flakes of previous autumns but as a full-blown blizzard. Within hours the temperature fell to forty below zero. Humans were caught without their cold-weather stores; the cattle were still growing their winter coats. After several days the snow stopped falling and the wind diminished, but the warm Chinook wind that usually followed early storms never came. The snow kept the cattle from finding grass; already weak from the drought, they lost more weight and insulation. Further storms drove survivors into coulees and canyons, any places where they could escape the killing wind. But the quiet zones were precisely the spots where the snowdrifts accumulated, and the cattle were buried under four feet, six feet, twelve feet of icy powder.
So severe was the weather that the cowboys and other humans huddled indoors, happy to keep warm—and knowing, in any event, that there was nothing they could do. The range cattle business was premised on the ability of the cattle to fend for themselves during the winter. No one had built barns to shelter the animals from the cold; few harvested hay for winter feed.
Not till spring was the extent of the destruction known. With cruel irony, the same warm winds that finally lifted human hopes brought the bad news in a fashion that stunned even the hardiest spirits. “In the latter part of March came the Chinook wind, harbinger of spring, releasing for the first time the iron grip that had been upon us,” Lincoln L
ang remembered. “At last, it seemed, the wrath of Nature had been appeased.” The melting proceeded, appallingly.
A few days later such a grim freshet was pouring down the river valley as no man had ever seen before or ever would again. For days on end, tearing down with the grinding ice cakes, went Death’s cattle roundup of the upper Little Missouri country. In countless valleys, gulches, washouts, and coulees, the animals had vainly sought shelter from the relentless “Northern Furies” on their trail. Now their carcasses were being spewed forth in untold thousands by the rushing waters, to be carried away on the crest of the foaming, turgid flood rushing down the valley.
With them went our hopes. One had only to stand by the river bank for a few minutes and watch the grim procession ceaselessly going down, to realize the depth of the tragedy that had been enacted within the past few months.28
THE TERRIBLE WINTER of 1886–87 cured Roosevelt of his illusions about cattle ranching. “I am bluer than indigo,” he wrote Anna, after returning to America and surveying the damage. “It is even worse than I feared.… I am planning how to get out.”29
Many others had the same idea. As with most speculative bubbles, the same collective mania that had prompted thousands to buy simultaneously now prompted thousands to sell. Under different circumstances the massive die-off of cattle might have boosted beef prices, but with everyone rushing to get out they remained depressed. Roosevelt was rich enough to write off his eighty-thousand-dollar loss to a hard lesson in the school of capitalist experience, although he did have to scale back his living standard and begin looking for alternative employment. Many others were wholly ruined. Cattle companies failed by the score, bringing down banks in Wyoming and other ranching regions. The financial effects rippled across the country, and even to Britain and the European continent. The marquis de Morès fled to France.
Those who stuck it out changed their modus operandi. First to go—not surprisingly—was the idea that cattle could survive the winter unassisted. They needed shelter and especially hay. Growing hay required fencing the land (to keep the cattle out during the growing season). But fencing public land was frowned upon by both the land’s official custodians and the neighbors, who saw no reason to allow one person to control what belonged to all. Early efforts to fence the public domain—using the cheap barbed wire recently developed by Joseph Glidden and others—triggered range wars that started with wire cutters and escalated to six-shooters and rifles. The biggest cattle barons could get away with the practice for a time; Charles Goodnight was reported to have run 250 miles of fence across the Texas Panhandle in 1884. In the more remote areas the illegal fencing persisted for decades. But eventually most ranchers came to the realization that in order to fence land permanently they had to purchase it.30
The need to purchase land altered the economics of ranching dramatically. No longer did the business appeal to the speculator interested in quick profits. Money could still be made in cattle; the growing population of the East had to be fed, and refrigeration was allowing American beef to be marketed abroad. But profits would be earned rather than conjured. The cost of land was only the start, for investment in land made other investments prudent. Ranchers with fenced land could segregate their herds from their neighbors’, giving them incentive to improve those herds with imported bulls, which ought to be barned in winter and otherwise pampered, at least by comparison with run-of-the-range longhorns. The coddling extended to the offspring of the bulls, and it prompted a general devotion to details quite at odds with the carefree approach of the early days.
The transition didn’t occur easily. Those closest to the work often had the greatest difficulty adjusting. “Cowboys don’t have as soft a time as they did,” one lamented.
I remember when we sat around the fire the winter through and didn’t do a lick of work for five or six months of the year, except to chop a little wood to build a fire to keep warm by. Now we go on the general roundup, then the calf roundup, then comes haying—something that the old-time cowboy never dreamed of—then the beef roundup and the fall calf roundup and gathering bulls and weak cows, and after all this, a winter of feeding hay. I tell you, times have changed.31
Chapter 8
TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM
We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” John Wesley Powell wrote on August 13, 1869.
Our boats, tied to a common stake, are chafing each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month’s rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried, and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun, and reshrunken to their normal bulk; the sugar has all melted, and gone on its way down the river; but we have a large sack of coffee. The lighting of the boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better, and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage.
We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders.
We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.1
Powell’s gloom might have intensified had he known that the world had given him and his small party up for dead. When the ten men and their four boats had put into the Green River at the town of Green River, Wyoming, where the just completed Union Pacific Railroad bridged the stream, amateur geographers and other followers of exploration anticipated a compelling story from the Powell party. Twenty-five years after emigrants to Oregon carved their trail to the Willamette Valley, twenty years after the forty-niners made a highway of the Humboldt River across Nevada, fifteen years after stage lines started rattling their passengers and mail across the northern and southern edges of the Great Basin, ten years after surveyors scouted the passes and river crossings that would enable the Pacific railroad to link Omaha to Sacramento, maps of the western United States contained a single blank region. The Colorado Plateau—the vast tableland bisected by the Colorado River—was almost as unknown to outsiders as when Coronado of Spain came through in the 1540s looking for the seven cities of Cíbola. By the 1860s geographers had inferred that the Green River and the Grand River, the former rising in Wyoming, the latter in Colorado, were actually branches of the Colorado River, which emptied into the Gulf of California. But no one had physically confirmed this inference by descending from the Green or Grand to the lower Colorado.
A few had tried. William Ashley and a party of fur trappers floated a stretch of the Green River in 1825. William Lewis Manly and a group of gold miners sought a shortcut to California and floated down the Green River for a hundred miles or so before encountering an Indian chief who through gestures and a few words they understood convinced them that to continue meant certain death.2
John Wesley Powell wasn’t so easily dissuaded. Powell’s strength of will became evident after the Civil War battle of Shiloh, in which a cannonball blasted his arm off at the elbow. Spurning a medical discharge, he transferred from engineers to artillery to get closer to the front and repay his injury in kind. He rose to command the field guns of the Seventeenth Army Corps and at war’s end boasted the rank of major, a striking black beard, and an irrefutable claim to have given his right arm for the Union.3
The combination made it impossible for the War Department to deny his request for support of a journey down the Colorado. Powell’s interest in science antedated Sumter but blossomed only after Appomattox, when he landed a job in the geology department of Il
linois State Normal University. The major-professor wanted to know what the rocks of the Rockies looked like up close, and he organized an expedition across Colorado. Nothing of particular value came of the journey except a larger appetite for adventure and a nagging curiosity as to where the Grand River went when it disappeared to the southwest. He traveled to Washington, where he asked the War Department for cash but settled for supplies drawn from army posts in the West. He might have pressed harder for money had he not guessed—correctly—that he would be able to convert some of his ration tickets to hard currency once he reached the frontier.
The interest of the War Department in an expedition to the Southwest began with the army’s Indian troubles in that district, where Geronimo and the Apaches were vigorously disputing Washington’s authority. But the interest also reflected a desire to please capitalist-minded members of Congress who had heard stories that the Colorado might be navigable. Powell’s mission could open a whole new region to economic development, starting with the discovery of the gold and silver it was bound to contain.
Consequently, with enough War Department backing to get his expedition going but not so much that he couldn’t ignore Washington’s wishes when he chose, Powell returned to the West. He stopped in Chicago to pick up four boats crafted to his specifications. Keeled of oak and ribbed of pine, the boats ranged in length from sixteen to twenty-one feet. Their peculiarity consisted in watertight compartments fore and aft, which allowed them to float even when swamped or capsized. Powell pulled the boats off the Union Pacific at Green River, regathered the best men from his previous expedition, and at noon on May 24, 1869—two weeks after the golden-spike ceremony at Promontory, Utah, two hundred miles to the west—he and his hardy crew set off down the river.
