by Timothy Egan
At Turnbull’s booth, crowds of people sampled his ostrich jerky (sweet, not too stringy), studied charts showing different cuts of the birds meat, and peppered him with questions about how to raise and market the flightless birds. He talked about how the bird’s skin made a soft leather, how the feathers could be used for pillows. Some people snickered at the ostrich boy—he didn’t belong at the Western Stock and Rodeo show; ostriches had nothing to do with stock, rodeo, or the West. But Turnbull could not have been happier: just before the show opened, the Colorado Department of Agriculture certified the state’s first slaughterhouse for ostriches. It was an enormous break for the two hundred or so pioneer big-bird ranchers in the state.
“The little seeds I planted are starting to grow,” said Turnbull, sounding very much like a Johnny Appleseed of Ostrich. The cattlemen consoled themselves with numbers. America was a nation of beef-eaters, and that was not going to change, goddamn it. There were more than forty million cattle in America, compared with barely 150,000 bison on ranches throughout the country. As for ostriches, the cowboys sniffed: the birds looked ridiculous, they were foreign and exotic.
Cattle, as Turnbull said, had less of a claim to being native to the American West than ostriches. He had been going through Internet files, attending museum shows, consulting experts in the study of Jurassic-era fossils. He found considerable evidence, including an account of a skeleton in New Mexico, to indicate that when much of North America was a tropical savanna, ostriches had been part of the ecosystem. They evolved into one of the fastest animals alive as a defensive mechanism. They were likely wiped out in the Americas by the same cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs—a huge meteorite, in the consensus scientific view. They remained in Africa. Egyptian royalty trained them to pull carts and rode them as the Romans rode horses, with gilded saddles and ornamented reins.
Cattle had come to the New World with the Spanish, arriving on January 2, 1494, along with those other exotic creatures brought to the Americas— horses. They were transported over the Atlantic during the second voyage of Christopher Columbus and landed on the island of Hispaniola. During Oñate’s 1598 entrada, cattle came to New Mexico in large numbers, but the word “cowboy” had yet to make an appearance in America. The British, who coined the term, used it as a put-down, applied to Irish cattle-tenders. The Spanish word was vaquero, and it was from the Spanish that most of the cowboy terms came. Rodeo means “roundup”; a stampeda is a wild, rushing charge of animals; chaparreras are the leather chaps a cowboy wore on his legs; la reata is the rope lariat; barbecue is camp chow under the stars. When Ralph Lauren, the fashion designer, was trying to create a uniquely American line of clothes he went to Wyoming and came up with something called “Chaps,” posing cowboys in eighty-five-dollar jeans. They sold well in boutiques in Europe, the ultimate source of cowboys and chaps.
Outside of New Mexico, cattle were background history for several hundred years; the natives, except for tribes like the Navajo, who took up sheep-herding and some cattle ranching, preferred to eat what nature had so endowed the West with, the American bison. No detailed account of Western land is without some superlative-fatigued description of these herds, fast and thunderous on the Plains, equally stirring as they charged through mountain draws. They once roamed over 40 percent of the nations surface. The furs made warm blankets, and when stitched together, a portable home. The meat was delicious; it could be dried and preserved, smoked, grilled, eaten raw, or ground up with berries and made into a high-energy snack bar of pemmican. Written accounts all came down to one theme: pure abundance. And it was because of the huge bison herds that the West was so often described by visitors from the East or Europe as an American Eden. Lewis and Clark simply stopped writing about bison, they were so ubiquitous. Consuming ten thousand calories a day, per person, hauling keelboats up the Missouri and Yellowstone, then walking on foot to the Continental Divide, the Americans sent west by Jefferson never would have made it past the prairie without buffalo. Fifty years after the Corps of Discovery came through Montana, Father Pierre DeSmet was astonished at what he saw—“thousands of bison, the whole space between the Missouri and the Yellowstone was covered as far as the eye could see.” The irony is that the Catholic missionary called the land on which the bison lived, “unoccupied wasteland.”
They were erased from the West in about twenty years. If it was not formal government policy to kill upwards of thirty million bison, then it was understood by many a cavalry commander that the best way to eliminate or subdue Indians was to get rid of their food source. But already, several decades before the wipeout of the two main Western bison herds, the Indians had accelerated their own hunting, after finding that bison robes brought money and trading goods. Following the Civil War and the arrival of the railroads, the slaughter was swift. Some hunters boasted of killing a hundred bison a day. Bill Cody said he killed 4,280 animals in eighteen months. In two years, from 1872 to 1874, more than 4.5 million were killed. Many a tourist shot buffalo from the window of a rail car. The accounts just a few years earlier of the great abundance were now replaced by equally same-sounding stories of the great waste. Carcasses were scattered all over the land. Skeletons were stacked, pyramid-style; one picture shows a man standing atop a veritable mountain of bison skulls. By 1873, the southern herd was gone. Ten years later, the northern herd, based mainly in Montana, was down to It’s last members, and so were the people who depended on them. A Blackfoot Indian, Almost-a-Dog, cut a notch into a stick every time a member of his tribe starved to death; his eventual total was 555 notches. One government estimate placed the number of bison left in America at twelve, though surely there were more. Late in the slaughter, Congress passed a law aimed at protecting what bison were left, but President Grant vetoed it—a way of retaliating against a handful of Indians who had recently begun to fight back.
Teddy Roosevelt arrived in the West in 1884, all teeth and spectacles on a horse, looking to get his shot at a buffalo. For days he rode over the Dakota Badlands, expecting to find the American Serengeti. Instead he found barren land, exhausted of wildlife. Roosevelt ultimately got his buffalo, a joyless task prompted by the demands of his own code of manhood. But the killing helped to make him a fierce conservationist, in the same way that seeing the fire die out in the eyes of a wolf he had shot moved Aldo Leopold. Another unlikely nineteenth-century green was the chief taxidermist of the United States National Museum in Washington, William T. Hornaday. He wrote the Smithsonian about the impending extinction of the great American animal, flabbergasted that such a thing was happening in a land that was supposed to be without limits. The reaction was utilitarian. “Since it is now utterly impossible to prevent their destruction, we simply must take a large series of specimens, both for our own museum, and for other museums,” the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Spencer F. Baird, wrote back. He ordered the chief taxidermist west at once to find some bison, and kill and stuff them, before they were gone. Hornaday scoured Montana, hiring guides to help him look, but all he could come up with was a lone orphan calf, which he named Sandy. Taken back to Washington, Sandy posed for the capital press corps and died in the midsummer humidity of the Potomac River. Hornaday went on to write a series of blistering accounts of how his countrymen, “the game butchers of the great West,” had brought bison to the brink of extinction.
With the bison gone, the government had to come up with some way to feed the people who had once relied on free buffalo herds. Thus were born the first major government subsidies of cattle. Significant numbers of people began to kill one another over cows as well. Indians were starving to death on the barren, bisonless reservations they had been moved to, in Oklahoma and eastern Arizona. Wards of the state, they were promised rations of beef by federal Indian agents. By 1880, the government was purchasing fifty thousand animals a year to feed the tribes. Providing those rations, through huge contracts, was a source of graft and ultimately folklore—of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, for example.
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bsp; At first, the dominant cattle were hybrids from Texas. These longhorns were scrawny and ornery. And they had two other major problems: they carried a tick, which infected Herefords, the popular cattle brought to the West from Britain, and their meat was tough and gristly. As one cowboy put it, a Texas Longhorn was “eight pounds of hamburger and 800 pounds of bone and horn.” Longhorns were quarantined, banned from most rail-shipment towns. The smaller, more docile, white-faced dogies became the dominant animal of the latter half of the cowboy era. The contrast between Herefords and bison was the difference between a redwood and a potted plant. Conditioned to a wet climate, cows bunch up along rivers and streams and will kill their water source with poop and poison unless moved. Bison spend most of their time on arid higher ground, going to a water source only for short intervals. In the winter, bison use their shaggy heads to plow through snow for forage; cattle whimper and bawl for human help. Bison can survive droughts; cattle need the equivalent of forty-plus inches of rain a year.
Moving beeves, as cattle were called, over open ground was said to be one of the easiest routes to riches in the 1870s and 1880s. The grass cost nothing, or so the owners and the government agents initially thought. Cattle chewed up all that feed on the public domain over which buffalo used to roam, and then were herded to rail depots for transport and slaughter. Establishing a tradition that, today, allows foreign-owned companies to extract billions of dollars in minerals from American public land without paying a dime in royalties, the United States opened the former bison lands to anyone with a head of beef. The point was to bring people west, for any reason, and to use the land, also for any reason. The Marquis of Tweeddale had 1.7 million acres. Large British investment houses bought enormous herds, and by the early 1880s more than 100 million pounds of frozen beef was being sent annually to England. The XIT Ranch in Montana, owned by a British conglomerate, counted fifteen thousand square miles of rangeland as It’s cattle domain—an area bigger than any of a half dozen states in the former British colonies. Inside wood-paneled clubs in Cheyenne and Denver, the owners read the Sunday Times from London, sipped gin-and-tonics, and purchased local sheriffs. In Wyoming, the stockmen-owned legislature passed a law making it a felony to possess a cow that was not branded by the owners’ association. Basically, that meant any cow not owned by the monopoly was illegal. Rebellion by small homesteaders against this law prompted the Johnson County War, the biggest violent clash over red meat in the West. An army of hired guns owned by Wyoming stockmen started hanging, burning, and shooting people on a death list drawn up by the stockmen. A story of calculated violence and feudal power at a time when the homesteader was supposed to be king, the Johnson County War inspired one of the worst movies ever done on the West, Michael Cimino’s bloated and interminable Heavens Gate.
While the British were cornering their share of the market on the open lands, the ranch hands at the low end of the scale, the cowboys, were living the life that would define the West. Nobody glorified it, in written form or song, until well after the era was over. Then, the dime novelists made cowboys into something they never were. Cowtowns, among them Denver, Cheyenne, and Miles City, Montana, were places where the herders could shoot off their guns, get drunk, and spend their meager earnings at the end of a cattle drive. They were the source of many a John Wayne Western, like The Chisholm Trail. To police these violent, trail-end cattle ports, the towns hired violent, pliable gunmen. Marksmanship was not always their strong point. Bill Hickok, employed to patrol the streets of Abilene, shot and killed his own deputy by accident during the first gunfire exchange of his term. In the Johnson County War, one of the stockmen’s hired guns accidentally shot his righthand man in the genitals. Other cowtown shooters showed undue modesty. Objecting to a newpaper account that he had killed six men who had kept him from a full nights sleep in Abilene, John Wesley Hardin asked for a correction, of sorts, insisting on accuracy from those writing the first drafts of Western mythology. “It ain’t true,” said Hardin. “I only killed one man for snoring.” His plea went largely unheeded. Most writers followed the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—when fact and legend conflict, print the legend.
Dodge City, largest of the early cowtowns, banned guns within the city limits. Abilene, best known of the cowtowns, went a step further: It’s town leaders tried to ban cowboys. They had seen enough of “the evils of that trade,” as they said in a petition. But that trade did produce a small, unique subculture, and a haunting American musical form, a blend of Spanish guitar songs and black blues, mixed with rural poetry. From “The Night Herding Song” came this verse:
Snore loud, little dogies, and drown the wild sounds
That’ll go away when the day rolls around.
Lay still, little dogies, lay still
Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.
And typically, the songs warned listeners away from the dirty job, as in this verse from the cowboy poet Gail Gardener.
If you ever have a Youngster
And he wants to foller stock
The best thing you can do for him
Is to brain him with a rock.
For a time, I was among the Youngsters who wanted to follow stock. At age fifteen, I hired on for a summer at a ranch near the Idaho-Washington border, a big spread run by a divorced woman, Jenny, and her three wild children. Like a lot of ranchers, Jenny was land-rich and cash-poor. She never told me what she was going to pay me when I signed on, but she said it would be worth my while. She milked cows, fattened cattle on the good Pend Oreille alfalfa, and kept a few horses as well. Some cows were pregnant when I arrived. Man, this was going to be the life. I dragged a musty canvas army tent from my family basement, and, with my friend John Buckley, set up camp down by a creek on the edge of the farm, shaded by willows. We smoked cigarettes at night, fixed up a motorcycle, and used it to herd the animals, chased farm girls. The second week, Jenny gave us pitchforks and shovels and walked us toward the barn. When she opened the door, I nearly fell back—the smell was incendiary.
“Clean the barn and that’ll get you started,” she said.
The barn was a foot deep in cow shit, slightly fermented. It took five days to clean. Three of those days I could not eat I was so sick. The next week one of the cows gave birth. In the elemental routine of farms, it was a momentous and graphic occasion—the willowy calf, encased in a clear bubble licked clean by her mama. The morning after, Jenny told me to get the small dozer and go bury a calf. The newborn had died. It was a sad ride to the woods, carrying the tiny dead calf in the bucket of the clanking old tractor. So it went that summer, up at 4:30 A.M. every day, bucking seventy-pound bales of hay, shooing stubborn animals, sunburned and bug-bitten, always smelling of animal essence. In late August, when I was set to return to Spokane for school, Jenny called me into the house to pay me. “You can have a cow,” she said. Did I look like Jack the Beanstock? What was I going to do with a cow in the city? “Or five hundred dollars.” The cow, she added, would be worth $800 in a year. I took the five bills.
Cowboys of the open range knew full well what I learned that summer: the job sucks. “We wasn’t respectable and we didn’t pretend to be,” said Teddy Blue Abbott in his cowboy memoir. How it became one of the most romantic, glorified, and iconic roles in America will have to remain a mystery, and a prime debating point at those fractious conferences between New West and Old West historians. At least the argument usually ends under the stars.
What people on both sides of the cow debate agree on is this: just a few years after the bison were wiped out in the West, nature took It’s revenge on the animals that had replaced them. The Great Die-Up of 1887 hit most Western cattle states like a biblical plague. In the years leading up to it, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and the western plains had been grazed and stomped bare by the millions of domestic cattle, and the wild grasslands were turned over for agriculture. Barbed wire, invented in 1873, only made matters worse: huge portions of the range were fenced and given over to a single ecologica
l use. But the money was good, and every year the herds increased. A popular book, published in 1881, was The Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains. Basically, all you needed to do was plop some cattle on the land and wait for them to multiply, the book said. But what the sodbusters, the European cattle tycoons, and even the hardscrabble cowboys forgot was that the West was not England, and Here-fords were not bison.
In the summer of 1886 there was no rain. The bunchgrass of the plains came up stunted, then failed. The overgrazed prairie was spent, the sod dusty and depleted. “Wrong side up,” said a Pawnee Indian, looking over the old buffalo stomping grounds. A haunt settled on the West: beavers stored double the usual water supply, ducks migrated well before the summer was out, and otter and muskrats grew thick fur. In the fall, snow came early, with blizzards throughout the northern Rockies and prairies in the first weeks of November. It fell to twenty-five degrees below zero in Colorado, forty-six below in Wyoming, and sixty below in Montana. A brief thaw in January turned the snow to slush, and then it became an ice block in plunging temperatures. Barbed wire proved deadly; cattle ran up against it, snagged, and died—frozen beef on the line. They scratched at snow but couldn’t get beneath the crust to find anything. They piled into drifts in little ravines, huddled together for warmth, and died en masse, not to be found until spring, when weeds grew up between their rib cages. Nobody sang songs about little dogies or wrote home about easy riches. It was a life-and-death struggle, through a six-month winter, for people and cattle. “A business that had been fascinating to me before suddenly became distasteful,” wrote Granville Stuart, a Montana rancher, bison killer, and vigilante, who lost upwards of 85 percent of his herd. When the snows finally melted in April, the rivers flushed hundreds of carcasses downstream. The losses were astounding: many ranchers lost 90 percent of their herds. The disaster drove out many of the British investment houses and broke the backs of countless small cattle ranchers.
