THE ERA OF THE CATTLE DRIVES FROM TEXAS TO KANSAS was remarkably brief. It lasted less than a decade, ending when railroads reached the plains of Texas. Cowboys still rounded up cattle and drove them to the railheads, but these were now mere days from the cattle’s home range rather than months.
The exception was a particular kind of drive, of cattle meant not for market but for stocking new ranges. The Texas longhorns were surprisingly resilient; though creatures of the scorching plains of south Texas, they could survive the bone-chilling winters of the northern plains, as the cattlemen discovered when cows driven north to the railroad didn’t find buyers. The animals weren’t worth driving back to Texas, and so were simply left to fend for themselves through the winter. Not only did they survive, they reproduced. In doing so they suggested to cattlemen that there was a whole new realm to be added to the cattle kingdom. Conveniently for the cattlemen, the longhorns showed their cold-resistance just as the buffalo hunters were completing the near-extermination of the previously dominant species. No sooner had the ecological niche opened than it began to be refilled.
One of those who helped in the filling was Theodore Roosevelt, who bought his Dakota ranch and became a cattleman at just this time. There were many others. In the early 1880s a boom mentality seized the range-cattle industry, a mentality not unlike that of the California gold rush. The range was finite, and those who arrived first could choose the best spots—near the railroad, with good water and streamside timber for building.
The cattle rush had its Sam Brannans: the boosters who shouted of the fortunes to be made on the range. James Brisbin had spent the dozen years after the Civil War on duty in the West as an officer in the army; he guessed that he could improve his pay by writing and selling a book called The Beef Bonanza. Brisbin concocted a letter, as from one brother to another, with the former urging the latter to come west and make a fortune in beef, just as he had. “Dear Brother,” he wrote, “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.”
Brisbin’s alter ego made a specific proposal. “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.” The Durhams added meat to the bony frames of the Texas longhorns. “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.” Already the money would be rolling in. “Our first year’s profit is 400 calves, $7.00 each, $2,800.” Addition became multiplication: the second year would yield $4,800; the third year $6,800; the fourth $10,200; the fifth $14,600. The writer would sell his share over time to the younger brother. “What business on earth is there that can equal this?” he asked. “You have often said you wished me to put you into a good business and show you how to make some money, and now, sir, I think I have pointed you out the way to a fortune, and the good wife too. In eleven years you can, by care, be at the head of a blooded-stock farm worth $100,000, and very soon afterwards its sole owner.”
Brisbin’s promise was echoed by writers of similar tracts. Some, like Brisbin, hoped to profit primarily from the sale of the books and pamphlets. Others—railroad companies, most notably—had land they wanted to sell. Still others were boosters of particular towns, counties and states.
The sales pitch worked. Investors lavished money on the cattle business, filling the northern plains with livestock and causing cities to emerge where mere rail stops had existed before. Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming Territory, became the San Francisco of the cattle rush. “Sixteenth Street is a young Wall Street,” a Wyoming editor remarked. “Millions are talked of as lightly as nickels, and all kinds of people are dabbling in steers.” Speculation became abstracted from the cattle themselves, and developed a dynamic all its own. “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.” People quite ignorant of cattle and their habits jumped into the speculation with both feet. Lawyers were oddly susceptible, and apparently successful, the editor said. “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.”
THE BOOM LASTED UNTIL THE MID-1880S. AND THEN THE boosters, the investors, the ranchers and the cowboys discovered something crucial about the northern plains. The weather there could vary dramatically from year to year. The Indians might have told them this, had the Indians been asked. Some summers were drier than others; some winters colder. In the lifetime of an elderly Sioux, drought had stricken the plains several times, searing the grass and causing buffalo numbers to plunge. The Indians recalled these as hungry times. When a cold winter followed a dry summer, they suffered even more.
The cattlemen learned the lesson in the punishing winter of 1886–1887. The massive die-off that terrible season cured tyros like Theodore Roosevelt of the notion that they might become cattle barons almost overnight. With much of his inheritance having floated down the Little Missouri on the ghoulish tide of frozen flesh, Roosevelt lacked the wherewithal to replenish his ranches. He refocused his energy on his first ambition, politics.
Those who stayed in the cattle business retrenched and built a new industry on sturdier foundations. It wasn’t just the weather that produced the winter’s slaughter; it was the overstocking of the range. Most of the ranchers on the northern plains owned little of the land their cattle grazed on. The land was in the public domain, with the grass free for the taking by whoever got there first. Existing ranchers used strong-arm tactics to keep newcomers from encroaching on what they considered their territory. After Roosevelt had bought his ranch, he received a visit from a squad of gunslingers in the employ of one of his neighbors, a French aristocrat named the Marquis de Morès, who was projecting a cattle empire of his own. Roosevelt was away at the time, hunting bears in the Rockies, but the leader of the gunmen, a rough character named Paddock, left a message. Roosevelt could purchase grazing rights in the area from the marquis, or he could get out.
Roosevelt, with confidence boosted by having bagged his grizzly, returned Paddock’s call. Armed with pistol and rifle, he demanded to know what Paddock meant by his message. Paddock—and the marquis—evidently had thought that the greenhorn from the East could be easily intimidated. When Roosevelt demonstrated that he wouldn’t go without a fight, Paddock explained that there had been a misunderstanding. Nothing more was said about Roosevelt’s paying de Morès for the right to graze on public land.
Roosevelt’s refusal to back down was a personal triumph, but it contributed to the public problem: too many cattle for the range to support. The cattle were already overgrazing the range before the bad winter hit. Roosevelt himself had helped organize an association of ranchers on the Little Missouri as a first step toward dealing with the issue. Similar groups gathered elsewhere; the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association was ceded control of the range by the Wyoming territorial legislature. But the cattle population on the range continued to grow. A first symptom of distress was falling prices for cattle. A second, much sharper, was the die-off of 1886–1887, which would have been less severe had the range and the cattle been in better shape before the blizzards came.
The winter accomplished what the cattlemen couldn’t accomplish on their own. It convinced them they couldn’t rely so heavily on public lands in running their operations. Of their own volition they limited the size of their herds; they purchased land on which to grow hay for winter fodder; they fenced their land to keep others’ cattle out; they rotated their herds among fenced fields to let the range recover. They drilled wells to ensure a water supply. They imported Durhams and other breeds that, although less hardy than the longhorns, produced better beef.
In sum, in a shift that mirrored the transformation of the mining industry, they moved from the model in which a person with few resources could enter the cattle business and thrive to one that required major investments. The corporatization of the cattle business, like the corporatization of mining, squeezed out most individual entrepreneurs.
And it left the cowboy in the dust. Cowboys had always been hired hands. But they had had a great deal of freedom, and during much of the year they had plenty of leisure. Now they became industrial laborers, distinguishable from factory minions chiefly by working outdoors. “Cowboys don’t have as soft a time as they did eight or ten years ago,” one who experienced the transition remarked. “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.”