Come to the Garden of the West! Come to Kansas! Come to Minnesota! Come to Nebraska, the Great Platte Valley. Soldiers Entitled to a Homestead of 160 Acres. Purchasers, their wives and children carried free in our elegant day coaches. Red River Valley Lands. Homeseekers! A Farm for $3 per Acre! Every Farmer, Every Farmer’s Son, Every Clerk, Every Mechanic, Every Laboring Man Can Secure a Home.
THE RICH ROMANTIC PLACE NAMES of the big rolling land beyond the Mississippi echoed across the eastern United States. Broadsides in all the languages of Europe made the strange Indian names of the faraway country familiar to emigrants long before they reached New York en route to the free lands extending to the “shining mountains” and the Pacific. The slow march of settlement which had followed the Homestead Act of 1862 turned into a stampede during the 1870s and 1880s.
Thousands of human beings moved out upon the great plains into an awesome surreal world of limitless earth and sky. For some it was a world of beauty and freedom, but for others it was frightening and sometimes maddening in its loneliness.
The young farming men, women, and children came from everywhere, bringing everything they owned—a few horses or oxen, a coop of poultry, seeds for planting, a plow. Their first days were hard, but a few people like John Ruede from Pennsylvania found time to scrawl letters to the folks back home: “Staked two corners of my claim this morning…. Looking for a place to make our dugout.” Two days later Ruede recorded: “We got through digging the hole by the time it was dark. The hole is 10 × 14 feet, and in front 4 ft. deep, 4½ behind. On Monday we must look for a ridge pole and dig steps so we can get into the place.”
Within the week, sod walls twenty inches thick were up above the ground, and Ruede wrote on Saturday, just nine days after staking his claim: “Used part of the straw on the roof, and covered the whole roof with a layer of sod, and then threw dirt on it, and the ‘House’ was finished.”
Next day, Ruede was planting gooseberry bushes along the west side of his sod house and making arrangements for help with well-digging and sod-breaking.
The new settlers used different words to explain why they moved west, but beyond all their words was the old American vision of a better life beyond the far horizon. “We wanted to come to a new country,” said Susan Frances Lomax, “so our children could grow up with the country. We were living on a good farm [in Mississippi]. My husband said he would live ten years longer by coming to a new country. You hardly ever saw a gray headed man. I did not want to come to Texas at all; I dreaded the Indians in those days…. It was a hard time on weman; they staid at home and did the work while the men were on their ponies hunting or looking after stock.”
Without their yoked oxen, thousands of homesteading families could never have plowed their first fields or hauled wood and water. And in the dark days of the settlers’ first blizzardy winters, more often than not it was the dependable ox that was sacrificed for food to keep them alive until spring.
Patient, plodding, stolid—never romantic. That was the ox, a cudchewing animal now virtually extinct, neglected by both poets and historians. Rarely does this beast of burden appear in Western fiction or motion pictures. Alongside the graceful galloping horse, the colorless castrated ox does not shine in the saga of the West. Oxen, however, were usually considered as members of the family, endowed by their owners with affectionate or dignified names. A Texan called his pair Pollux and Castor.
Everything but land and sky was scarce on the early Western homesteads. Water was usually the scarcest necessity of all. As soon as a settler marked his claim and set up a wagon-cover tent, he started searching for water. The nearest stream might be ten miles away, and water had to be hauled in barrels until a well could be dug. One Nebraska farmer hauled water for two years before he could complete digging his well by hand. He dug three hundred feet straight down through hard clay and rock with a pick and shovel.
Beyond the tree belt, sod formed the basic ingredient of building. Eighteen-inch strips were cut into suitable lengths and laid like bricks. The floors were pounded earth, the windows oiled paper or glass, depending on finances and personal preferences. To the sod house of western Nebraska with its dirt roof and shored-up walls the rancher brought his bride; here he raised his family. (Photograph by S. D. Butcher, courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.)
The young farming men, women, and children came from everywhere, bringing everything they owned—a few horses or oxen, a coop of poultry, seeds for planting, a plow. “We wanted to come to a new country,” said Susan Frances Lomax, “so our children could grow up with the country…. It was a hard time on weman; they staid at home and did the work while the men were on their ponies hunting or looking after stock.” (Photograph by S. D. Butcher, courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.)
Edward E. Dale, reminiscing about early days in Oklahoma, recalled asking a farmer why he persisted in hauling water nine miles for his horse and livestock, instead of digging a well. Replied the farmer: “It’s just as near to water one way or the other, and I prefer to get mine along horizontal rather than perpendicular lines.”
Itinerant well-drillers finally solved the water problem for most Western settlers. The usual charge was twenty cents per foot for a hole six inches in diameter, the owner to furnish the necessary iron casing.
Water was pulled out of the deep wells with windmills, and the first homesteaders built huge ones, assuming that the bigger the wheels the more water would flow. In some areas, Dutch-type windmills were built and used for milling grain as well as for pumping water. “Jumbo” windmills were popular, requiring no tower, being merely a large fan-wheel in a crude box. Travelers were impressed by one early ranch on the plains which had a “double-header windmill with two power wheels twenty-two feet in diameter seventy-two feet from the ground.”
Finding fuel for cooking and heating was often another major problem for the plains settlers. In the Southwest, the pioneers dug mesquite sprouts from the dry earth; in other parts of the country the best woodlands were often on Indian reservations, and the Indians collected a fee—about fifty cents a load—for firewood cut by the homesteaders. During the first decade of settlement following the Civil War, buffalo chips were the surest and most common source of fuel. Gathered into wagons, carts, or wheelbarrows, the chips were stacked in ricks or piled under a shed to ensure dryness; they would not burn when wet.
Later, along the great cattle trails, cow chips replaced the vanishing buffalo dung. But as late as 1880, buffalo chips were still in good supply in some parts of Kansas. The Kinsley Graphic carried the following notice on January 17 of that year: “The County Commissioners at their last meeting issued an order to the township trustees that they would allow no bills for coal for the poor, in cases where the poor have teams to gather buffalo chips.”
When the buffalo and cow chips, the mesquite roots, and the few trees along the streams were all gone, the plains settlers learned how to burn sunflowers and hay—both in plentiful supply. The sunflower advocates claimed one acre would produce twelve cords of fuel, but unfortunately the twelve cords burned faster than one cord of wood.
Everything but land and sky were scarce on the early Western homesteads. Water was usually the scarcest necessity of all. As soon as the settler marked his claim, he started searching for water. The nearest stream might he ten miles away, and water had to he hauled in barrels until a well could be dug. When asked why he persisted in hauling water nine miles instead of digging a well, one farmer replied. “It’s just as near to water one way or the other, and I prefer to get mine along horizontal rather than perpendicular lines.” Itinerant well-drillers finally solved the water problem for most western settlers. Windmills were also used to pump water up, once the deep wells were dug. (Photograph courtesy of Kansas State Historical Society.)
Hay burned even faster, and in spite of several ingenious hay-burner stoves developed during the 1880s, a common saying of the times was that it required “two men and a boy to keep a hay fire going.”
The size of Western farms encouraged mechanization. But few of the early homesteaders could afford even the crude farm machinery of that time. Many a first crop was put in with hoes, spades, and mattocks. Because corn was grown on almost every farm, one of the first “machines” acquired was either a foot or hand corn planter. “This labor saving device,” read one advertisement for the hand planter, “is important to the farmers of the West. It is carried or used like a walking stick or cane. It is simple, cheap, accurate, and dependable.”
As the settlers prospered, they began buying newly invented machines. Across the expanding wheat country during the 1870s, reapers and binders and harvesters appeared in a variety of types and models. Unaccustomed to anything more complicated than a plow, the horses did not always cooperate. In his diary, a Western farmer proudly noted the acquisition of a stalk-cutting machine, then a few days later laconically recorded: “Finished cutting stalks. The horses ran away and broke stalk-cutter all to hell.”
But as early as 1878, the Dickinson County (Kansas) Chronicle reported that a young lady of the community was successfully operating a farm with machines: “She does her own plowing—using a sulky plow. This year she has one hundred acres of fine wheat and will cut and bind it herself—using a self-binder.”
Newcomers to the West soon discovered that they had less to fear from the highly publicized “savage Indians” than from the violence of nature—especially the capricious weather, which could be more deadly destructive than a war party of savage braves.
The most common enemy was the prairie fire, a particularly awesome spectacle after nightfall. Prairie grass grew as high as a man’s head, and during rainless autumns it dried and browned under the sun until it was more inflammable than pitchpine.
“A ribbon of smoke in the distance.” wrote Wiley Britton, “it rapidly increased in size, and in a very short time became a great volume of dense black smoke, with tongues of flame shooting high into the air, and a few minutes later we saw hawks and birds of the prairies flying wildly before the sea of surging, writhing and leaping flames. In an incredibly short time the whole visible horizon to the southwest was darkened by the thick black smoke, ashes and flames, and then came antelope, deer, jack rabbits and wolves, racing with the roaring, billowy, writhing flames, in mad flight for safety.”
To work the fields from Texas to the Canadian border, machines as well as men were needed to plant and harvest endless acres of wheat. Records of one farm of 60,000 acres show that 150 men were hired for April plowing and 400 during August and September for harvesting. Typical of wheat-buying centers was Fargo, Dakota Territory, as shown in this 1879 photograph. (Photograph by F. J. Haynes, courtesy of F. J. Haynes Studios, Bozeman, Montana.)
Before the end of the nineteenth century, steam-powered machines were a common sight on prosperous prairie and mountain valley farms. Each year they seemed to grow more and more gigantic, moving like clanking prehistoric monsters across the big rolling land. (Photograph by Lee Moorehouse, courtesy of the University of Oregon Library.)
Until settlers learned to plow fire breaks around their fields and cabins, the only methods of defense were to set backfires, beat out the flames with brush, or run a drag over the line of fire. Drags were often hastily improvised, as was Teddy Roosevelt’s when he stopped a fire threatening his Dakota ranch by splitting a steer in half and dragging it across the flames.
Contemporary Westerners may believe they have bigger wind and dust storms than the pioneer settlers, but early accounts of the plains country belie these modern claims. Newspapers were reporting dust storms as early as 1860: “The air was filled with bricks, barrels, boxes, tubs, signs, and boards which were blown about like chaff, and the dust so beclouded the air as to shut out the light of day.” One old story of a Kansas cowtown tells of a barber who while shaving a customer chanced to glance out the window and see his first dust storm, a solid wall of blackness descending upon the town. “God almighty!” cried the barber, “the end of the world has come. I’m headin’ for home to be with my family.” He ran out into the street, leaving his customer to meet doom with a lathered face.
The winds were as awesome as the dust they carried before them. The Wichita Eagle in 1872 reported winds lifting “ten-pound boulders and two-year-old mule colts off the ground—the squawking flock overhead may be geese, may be jackasses. Those of us who have lost their domestic animals and fowls need not be alarmed, as the chances are that such stock will be blown back by the next wind.”
With its fearful roar and death-dealing funnel, the tornado was a terror to lonely plains dwellers. As a defense against this monster, the settlers built storm cellars. They soon learned to make jokes and tell tall tales about twisters and the huge hailstones which usually accompanied them. “The twisting motion of the wind,” a newspaper reported, “drew all the milk from one farmer’s herd of cows and sprayed it into the air where it became mixed with small pellets of hail and made a veritable downfall of ice cream. Some pretty big hail fell. One chunk will furnish ice to the meat shops for the next 90 days. Another imbedded itself in the ground and is slowly melting, will afford water to stock all summer and also make a fine boating pond.”
Blizzard and flood tales of the West are legion, and many are tragic. Both these weather phenomena often came suddenly, the blizzards blowing up late on a hazy warm day, and the floods rushing down dry runs where water was seldom seen. Inexperienced homesteaders were sometimes caught away from home by blizzards, unaware until too late of how rapidly the temperature could drop and of how low was the visibility in a howling snowstorm on the plains.
Not all were so lucky as the Colorado rancher lost in a driving blizzard. Encountering a buffalo floundering around in a deep drift, the rancher quickly slew and disemboweled the animal, then crawled inside, drawing the opening tight to keep out the cold. Next morning when he awoke the rancher found his exit hole frozen shut. He solved his double problem of imprisonment and hunger by eating his way out.
Stories of nature’s violence in the West gradually drifted back to the East, reviving old tales of the Great American Desert. To counteract these stories, Henry Worrall of Topkea drew a charcoal sketch, “Drouthy Kansas,” depicting huge cornstalks, grapes, watermelons, and potatoes. Worrall’s caricature was reprinted all over the country, and tall tales about Kansas soon became the fashion.
In 1884 some Eastern newspapers carried a story of a Kansas farmer who climbed to the top of a cornstalk one evening to inspect the state of the weather. His foot slipped and he fell into a nearby treetop where he dangled precariously by his suspenders all night. When he was rescued the next morning he swore he would buy an almanac and keep himself posted on the weather without resorting to such dangerous methods as climbing tall cornstalks. The Kiowa Herald of July 8, 1885, commented on this story: “Coming from an eastern paper, we don’t believe it. If he had fallen out of the top of a cornstalk in a field of Barber County corn the blades would have been so thick and strong that they would have sustained his weight and he could reach the ground as easily as walking down a step ladder, and not been put to the painful necessity of hanging all night in a tree top with only his suspenders between him and eternity.”
In the summer of 1874, farmers all over the West began seeing strange silvery spots circling in the sunny skies. The puzzled plainsmen soon discovered what the silvery circles were—millions of grasshoppers in flight. Before that summer ended, 1874 was known as the Great Grasshopper Year.
From Oregon to the Dakotas, south to Texas and east into Missouri, the insects descended upon the land in columns 150 miles wide and 100 miles long, beating like hail against the roofs and sides of farmhouses. Tormented homesteaders tied strings around their trouser bottoms to keep the pests from crawling up and biting their legs. At Fort Scott, Kansas, a descending grasshopper cloud stopped a horse race, covering the tracks three inches deep. Lighting upon trees, the grasshoppers broke limbs under their weight.
In the summer of 1874, farmers all over the West began seeing strange silvery spots circling the sunny skies. The silvery circles were millions of grasshoppers in flight, and before that summer ended, 1874 was known as the Great Grasshopper Year. The insects descended upon the land in columns 150 miles wide and 100 miles long. Efforts to save crops were futile. Hundred-acre cornfields vanished in a few hours. Farmer Swain Finch of Nebraska (above) doing battle with the invaders of that year. (Photograph by S. D. Butcher, courtesy of the S. D. Butcher Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society.)
Efforts to save crops were futile. Hundred-acre cornfields vanished in a few hours, the plants denuded to the stalks. When blankets and sheets were spread over precious vegetable patches, the grasshoppers ate the bed clothing. One account tells of a man who lay down to rest beside a road; when he awoke his throat and wrists were bleeding from the bites of starving grasshoppers. They ate harnesses, window curtains, hoe handles, and even each other.
When a dark cloud of grasshoppers landed upon the Union Pacific tracks near Kearney, Nebraska, they stopped all trains, grease from the crushed insects setting locomotive wheels to spinning.
News of this major victory for the grasshoppers came as an anticlimax. Many Great Plains farmers had already given up, and wagon after wagon filled with household goods moved eastward with “Grasshopper” signs on their sides, like the Pike’s Peak “Busters” of an earlier decade.
One group of disillusioned settlers, returning through Topeka, stopped there long enough to speak their minds to Henry Worrall of “Drouthy Kansas” fame. “Had it not been for the diabolical seductiveness of that picture.” reported the Topeka Commonwealth, “they said they would never have come to Kansas to be ruinated and undone by grasshoppers.”
Homesteaders who refused to quit—and they were in the majority—were faced with a hard winter. Many had no money, no credit, no food; some had no fuel or clothing. Some settlers earned enough money to live through the winter by gathering the bones of buffaloes and other animals from the stripped land. The bones were symbolic but were not a direct result of the grasshoppers’ ravages; they were converted into cash and shipped east to fertilize plants. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government offered relief to farmers, the Secretary of War issuing a “grasshopper appropriation” for the purchase of food and clothing to be “divided among the naked.”
Funds were quickly exhausted, and appeals were made to more fortunate citizens in other states to help with offers of food and clothing. Several Western states issued Grasshopper Bonds to relieve their desperate people. Nebraska passed a Grasshopper Act naming the insect as Public Enemy Number One, requiring every able-bodied male between the ages of sixteen and twenty to serve as legalized vigilantes in a continuous war against the foe.
Western settlers fought the grasshopper hard in 1875. Minnesota established a bounty of fifty cents a bushel on the insects. Happy farmers fastened boxes on their reaper platforms and drove around their fields until the boxes were full. One farmer who had an abundance of the insects chased his neighbors with a pitchfork when he discovered them “poaching grasshoppers” on his land. It was fun while it lasted. But the bounty was in the form of state scrip, and so many grasshoppers were turned in for collection that Minnesota went bankrupt.
In spite of grasshoppers and the violence of nature. Western homesteaders endured and eventually came to prosperity. They experimented with new crops, eagerly sought improved varieties of wheat and corn, and replaced their long-legged sway-backed scrub cattle with blockier, meatier animals. As a means of spreading information among themselves, they organized annual state fairs. Because Western states were large and transportation was poor, the early fairs were held in different towns in succeeding years.
At a Colorado fair held in Denver in 1876, farmers exhibited “all varieties of produce among which are mammoth squashes, beets, potatoes, and melons, besides some freshly cut grass measuring over six feet in height.” Premiums included ten dollars for the “best-dressed buffalo robe dressed in Colorado by a white man.”
Fair managers favored horse racing but frowned on such things as balloon ascensions and trapeze performers. “They should be left to the domain of the circus,” said John Shaffer of Iowa in 1880. “They are no part and parcel of the purpose for which State Fairs were organized. People will come to a fair without them.” But Mr. Shaffer admitted that farm families needed some amusement and recommended that side shows be permitted. “They will follow after a fair, anyhow, as persistent eagles will gather together about a carcass. If admitted inside the grounds, any indecent or unmoral exhibition can at once be driven away, or any vices practiced under the canvass can be apprehended and abolished.”
As settlement continued, the more populous counties began holding county fairs, offering long and varied lists of awards. In addition to the usual livestock and crop prizes, awards were made for such entries as best lady driver of single horse and double team, best display of evergreens, best ten pounds of Indian corn starch, best fancy painting in oil, best agricultural wreath, best map of the solar system.
Manufacturers of farm machinery and household goods were encouraged to display their wares, and were given medals for the best revolving horse hay rakes, corn shellers, horse collars and shoes, kerosene lamps, washboards, bar soaps, and artificial teeth—all of which reflected the deep-felt needs of hard-working farm families in the West.
By 1884, just ten years after the disastrous grasshopper year, the settlers of the Western plains had proved the Great American Desert to be a myth. In that year they prospered while Eastern farmers suffered alternate droughts and floods. In April, Henry Worrall, the Kansas caricaturist, had the pleasure of drawing a sketch of a gaily draped train loaded with grain—the gift of Western farmers to flood sufferers back East. “The cars were rudely but effectively decorated with designs in color,” reported Harper’s Weekly, which published Worrall’s drawing with an account of the event. The grasshopper—rampant and couchant—was much in evidence among the blazing banners.
Transportation, however, remained as a formidable obstacle to farm prosperity in the West. The Missouri was the only navigable river which flowed to markets in the East. And although five great railroads were spanning the continent, there were few branch or intersecting lines to serve thousands of square miles of farmland long distances from the rails. Thirty miles was a long day’s journey. One hundred miles required at least a week to come and go by horse team—even longer by ox team.
A Southwestern cattleman could drive his stock overland to trail town railheads, but a wheat farmer had to load his crop in wagons, and then after consulting his almanac, drive off across the prairie behind a twenty-mule team headed for the nearest railroad stop or steamboat landing. If the almanac was in error and heavy rains caught his tandem wagons en route, the wheels soon bogged to the axles. And even if the weather held good, very likely there was no shelter or grain elevator at the railroad loading point.
Typical of wheat-buying centers was Fargo, Dakota Territory. In the larger towns like Fargo, dealers such as J. R. McLaughlin built Farm Machinery Halls, where the latest in plows, wagons, and power machines could be inspected by interested settlers. The center of attraction during Fargo’s Fourth of July celebration in 1881 was a fancy chariot advertising Cyrus McCormick’s new twine binder.
Some Western homesteaders acquired steam-powered farm machines before they were able to enjoy the benefits of steam-powered rail transportation. In December 1870 a settler near Hell Gate, Montana, wrote to the Wood, Taber & Morse Company, explaining that since railroads had not yet reached his region, “your engine is a rare sight in these mountains. Some of the old mountaineers have come down the valley and camped for two or three days to see the machine and listen to the whistle of my agricultural steam engine.”
Before the end of the nineteenth century, steam-powered machines were a common sight on prosperous prairie and mountain valley farms. Each year they seemed to grow more gigantic, moving like clanking prehistoric monsters across the big rolling land.
Successful wheat farming with the new and expensive machines required extensive acreage, and upon the vast land grants paralleling the railroads, bonanza farms began developing in the late 1870s. The Northern Pacific Railroad, which crossed the Dakotas, took the lead in this type of farming, operating farms as large as 100,000 acres in the valleys of the James and Red rivers.
“You are in a sea of wheat,” one visitor wrote, “the railroad train rolls through an ocean of grain.” Hundreds of horses, dozens of mammoth steam-powered machines, seeders, harvesters, and threshers were required to operate these bonanza farms. “Even the telephone is brought into requisition for the management of such an estate.”
Workers as well as machines were needed to plant and harvest these endless acres of wheat. Records of one farm of 60,000 acres show that 150 men were hired for April plowing and 400 during August and September for harvesting. But only a few hands were necessary during the other nine months.
To meet this demand for seasonal labor, migratory harvesting crews moved north across the plains each summer—working the wheatfields from Texas to the Canadian border. Ironically, quite a few of these workers were unemployed cowboys, refugees from bonanza cattle ranches which collapsed after the blizzard of 1886.
“They reached our neighborhood in July,” wrote Hamlin Garland, who lived as a youth in the wheat country, “arriving like a flight of alien unclean birds, and vanished into the north as mysteriously as they had appeared. Some carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean shirt and a few socks.”
Flying dust, cracking whips, glistening straw, a ceaseless ringing humming—that was horse-power threshing as described by Garland. “The wheat came pulsing out the spout in such a stream that the carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in order to keep the grain from piling up around the measurer. There was a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil—for each sack weighed ninety pounds.”
Along with bonanza wheat farming, sheep ranching also prospered in the late nineteenth century. “The expenses are not heavy,” said Major William Shepherd, who made a study of the industry in 1885. “Two men can through the year easily drive two or three thousand sheep. The returns from wool and increase are not exaggerated at twenty-five per cent.”
When President Rutherford B. Hayes toured the West in 1878, he stopped his special train to have a look at the famed Dalrymple Farm. “It was a sea of wheat, the railroad rolling through an ocean of grain.” (Photograph by F. J. Haynes, courtesy of F. J. Haynes Studios. Bozeman, Montana.)
Many additional men were needed at shearing time, however, and sheep shearers, like harvest hands, followed the season north, shearing wool with hand clippers. Beginning in March they moved up from the Southwest into the Rocky Mountain ranges, reaching the Canadian border by July. A good shearer could clip a hundred sheep a day, and might earn ten dollars—very good pay in those days.
Sheepman trailed their stock to grazing lands and to markets, but unlike cattlemen they did not swim the animals across rivers. A sheep bridge was necessary for a river crossing. “It often consists of a single large pine tree, which has been felled, and directed in its fall across the stream. A rough balustrade is added, and a few stones are piled to make a ramp by which the sheep can mount readily on to the log. The banks of the river on either side, above and below the bridge, may be fenced, to prevent the sheep from pushing each other into the water when crowding to cross.” Wethers or goats were trained to lead the crossings.
Not all the Western cowboys had turned to harvesting, and certainly very few would drive or shear sheep. The cattle trade still flourished after a fashion, but the range was closed, and no more trail drives could be made across the fenced and furrowed land. Said old-time cowboy Teddy Blue: “Fences and sheep and settlers were coming in, and the old-time big cow outfits was going out, and nothing was like it used to be in anymore.” The cowboys spent their time riding within fenced ranges, searching for stray calves to brand, or routing outlaw steers out of hiding places in brakes and arroyos.
Western stockmen also liked to experiment with new breeds of animals. Along the grassy coastlands of Texas, A. P. Borden imported the first Brahmins from India; out in the Panhandle and on the plains of Kansas others crossbred cattle and buffalo. In Bastrop County, Texas, Bethel Coopwood and John Wesley Lanfeer started a camel-breeding experiment, hoping to market their product to the army for transport use across the high dry trails of the Southwest.
By the turn of the century, the trusty ox had practically disappeared. But the horse was in his glory. As the West filled with new settlers, demand for horses reached a peak. The natural supply of wild mustangs was soon exhausted, and horse ranches developed into profitable enterprises.
But the big money crop from Southwestern land during the last years of the frontier was cotton. Texas and Oklahoma took over cotton raising from the Old South, fields of green and white covering the former grazing lands of the Longhorns.
“Cotton is the surees crop to rais in Texas,” a shrewd settler wrote to a friend back in Ohio as early as 1833. By the end of the century, the railroad yards at Houston each ginning season were clogged with long lines of boxcars and flatcars stacked high with bales of cotton.
Underneath the rich cotton lands of the Southwest were even greater treasures. The Indians had known of places where brown fluids seeped from the earth, oils which healed battle wounds and skin diseases. Around such seeps were invisible substances in the air that would burn forever—better than pine torches to light the night during times of tribal ceremonies. The first pioneers learned to use the brown fluids for softening leather, lubricating wagon axles, and making ointments. Most Texans despised the stuff; it ruined their water for drinking. In 1886, a rancher near San Antonio drilled 235 feet for water, but hit oil instead. He was disgusted until he discovered he could use it for fuel around the ranch.
Then in 1894. a well being bored for water at Corsicana, Texas, suddenly began spouting oil in a steady stream. It caught fire and started the first oil boom in the West. Corsicana was soon producing petroleum commercially—1,450 barrels the first year. Four years later production rose to more than half a million barrels.
The Corsicana boom encouraged other petroleum drilling in Texas, and on January 10, 1901, an oil gusher big enough to surprise even a Texan blew in just outside Beaumont. Spindletop. the gusher was called—the most famed well in the history of Western petroleum.
The first showing of oil came at around the 800-foot mark, and Al Hamill, the driller, figured he might bring in a fifty-barrel well. With his old-fashioned rig, he drove down another 200 feet. Suddenly the drill pipe shot up out of the casing and knocked off the crown block. “In a very short time,” Hamill said afterward, “oil was going up through the top of the derrick and rocks were shot hundreds of feet into the air. Within a very few minutes, the oil was holding a steady flow at more than twice the height of the derrick.” Spindletop spilled oil all over the Texas landscape, 100,000 barrels a day.
In a few weeks Beaumont was running a high fever. Wooden oil derricks shot up like weeds. The population jumped from 10,000 to 30,000. Tents, shacks, saloons, and gambling houses sprang up as they had in the old cattle trail towns of an earlier generation. Land values soared from $40 to $1,000,000 an acre.
The railroads ran special weekend trains for tourists, and the obliging oil drillers arranged for new wells to be spouting over the derrick tops every Sunday to entertain the visitors.
But before long another field, Sour Lake, had surpassed Beaumont as a rough, tough boomtown in the true Western Tradition. This pool was so rich that derricks were built with their supports adjoining. “For surging energy,” recalls Charlie Jeffries, who worked there as a roustabout, “for unrestrained openness and diabolical conditions otherwise, Sour Lake was head and shoulders above anything Texas had seen up until that time or perhaps has seen since. A short while after operations began, a large part of the field was worked up into such a mess of mud as can hardly be imagined. In saloons, Sour Lake ranked high. These were of all sizes and quality…. After payday, when a gang of pipeliners came to town, especially if it happened to be a chilly, drizzly evening, the sidewalk for a block or more would be filled with jabbering, reeling men.”
The West’s oil fever soon moved into Oklahoma, where homesteaders of recent land rushes were having no easy time of it on 160-acre claims unsuited for plow farming and too small to support range livestock. Many were selling the land off for a few dollars an acre.
Then in 1905 near a sleepy village which the natives called Tulsey Town, wildcatters made a big strike in the Glenn Pool. Gamblers and speculators and the new fraternity of oil men in their big hats and laced boots swarmed into the little town on the Arkansas River. Millions of barrels of oil poured out, breaking prices on the market for a time. The Glenn Pool changed Tulsey Town into Tulsa, Oil Capital of the World.
A mad search for oil spread north and west across the Great Plains, new strike following new strike. Any shift upward in oil prices set off new drillings, sometimes so frenzied that thousands of barrels flowed back into the earth for lack of storage tanks. Often the spouting wells caught fire and burned for days in ominous clouds of greasy boiling smoke.
California had small petroleum fields long before Corsicana and Spindletop were discovered in Texas. But boomtowns and oil fever were lacking; perhaps California was immune to oil fever after its wild gold rush days. Not until the Lake View gusher blew in and poured out 90,000 barrels a day did Californians go a little mad over oil. For months Lake View spouted completely out of control, the richest oil well of all time, the spray covering an area fifteen miles around. “We cut an artery down there,” said the driller, “Dry Hole Charlie” Wood. “What we feared most was an early rain. A flash flood could have spread our ocean of oil down over the valley below. So we went up into the hills with an army of 600 men and damned up the mouths of canyons with earth walls twenty feet high and fifty feet thick. Down below we built storage for ten million barrels of oil.” Nine million barrels ran into the Lake View reservoir before it could be controlled, a flood of oil that dropped the market price from fifty to thirty cents per barrel.
Half a century before the contagious oil fever struck in the West, pioneers had been searching for riches under the big rolling land. The original wildcatters were gold prospectors, miners with pans and cradles. Men without women, they traveled on foot alongside their trusty burros instead of behind yoked oxen in covered wagons. They traveled light with only a pick and shovel, and needed no rotary rig to wheedle fortunes from the tantalizing earth.
“Stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves.” Mark Twain described them. “Brimful of push and energy. But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky, fights and fandangoes.”
They panned and cradled for gold; they built crude but ingenious machines to crush hard quartz. One was built in the Black Hills shortly after Colonel George Custer’s expedition found gold there in 1875. As the quartz was crushed, water was introduced; the resulting milky mixture flowed out over a framework where quicksilver riffles picked up the precious particles of gold.
Like the homesteaders, miners were often hampered by lack of water and transportation. Gold could not be mined without water, and silver ore had to be transported to stamping mills, sometimes with a train of twenty-mule teams hauling silver ore. Each wagon would be manned by a driver and a swamper, the driver wielding a whip, the swamper hurling stones at the mules to keep them moving.
While homesteaders were plowing the land and prospectors were digging beneath its surface, others were at work in the forests. Demand for lumber was rising rapidly as new towns and cities began to grow. During the era of settlement following the Civil War, the logging industry was first centered in the Lake States of Michigan. Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Here in the vast white-pine forests was born Paul Bunyan, legendary hero of Western loggers. Here again, the ox is the forgotten pioneer, as in the case of the first homesteaders. Ox wagons brought in veteran loggers from the East, ox teams hauled food and supplies to set up the first lumber camps, and then they went to work skidding logs on go-devils over ice and snow to river landings. Paul Bunyan’s best friend was Babe, the Blue Ox.
Like an outdoorsmen, loggers enjoyed eating, but one of their peculiar traditions was silence at mealtimes. Stewart Holbrook, historian of the lumber industry, says the origin of this custom of no talking at mealtimes is lost in history: “Some lay it to the cook’s desire to have the men fill their gut and get out as quickly as possible.” Any violation of the rule was quickly quelled by the cook, who tolerated no sound except the “champing of jaws.”
“We seldom ever worked on Christmast,” wrote Otis Terpenning, a Minnesota lumberjack. “Some spent their time in playing cards, And listing for the cheerie sound of the dinner horn, Saying come and eat, eat. The cook would always have something extry, and plenty of it. Their was roast beef brown gravy, Good home made bread. Potatoes, Shiny tins heaped with golden rings called fried cakes And close to them a punkin pie baked in a ten-inch tin about one and a half inch deep.”
While their contemporaries, the cowboys of the Southwest, were putting brands on cattle, Western loggers were similarly designating ownership with log marks. Both bark-marks and end-marks were used, applied with branding axes. When logs came down tributary streams to the big river booms, sorters worked over the jamming mass of timber, sorting the various brands, which were then joined into rafts for further movement down to the lumber mills. A log in a boom without a brand was like a maverick cow in a roundup; it was anybody’s log. And lumber “rustlers” tempted by thousands of unguarded logs sometimes stole choice specimens, obliterating or changing the original brands, and then selling them to the highest bidders.
By the end of the nineteenth century—the end of Western settlement—the logging industry had leaped from the Lake States to the Pacific slopes, from white pines to Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine and redwood. As the loggers moved westward with settlement, they took their oxen with them to bring giant pines out of the mountain forests. But in a few years, funnel-stacked engines were puffing into formerly inaccessible areas on narrow-gauge rails. The logging locomotives were equipped with fireproofers to control sparks.
Through all these swiftly changing years, the lumberjacks kept the big rivers of the Western land filled with the felled giants of its virgin forests—logs from which came the millions of feet of lumber that built the towns and cities beyond the Mississippi.