EARLY STEALING—LINCOLN COUNTY WAR—NESTERS—BEGINNING OF RUSTLING—DEFINITIONS—SENTIMENTS PERMITTING RUSTLING—RANGE-DWELLERS—THEIR SEVERAL ATTITUDES TOWARD RUSTLING—RUSTLERS’ METHODS—WYOMING’S RUSTLER WAR—ITS SIGNIFICANCE.
IN the earlier days of ranching, the stealing of live stock was accomplished by the simple and direct means of openly riding up to it and driving it away. The transaction might be thus unvarnished, or it might be “decorated with gun play.”
This thievery might be effected by a single individual or by an organized band. In this latter phase, small, local civil wars occasionally were fought.
New Mexico suffered the worst of these belligerencies; as, after criminals had begun to gnaw at John Chisholm’s cattle, the men of an entire county took sides, and at least two hundred of them in a struggle of slow, sniping attrition were “passed out” by bullets. An exact count was never made; and, for years afterward, here and there in box canyons or between high rocks, wayfarers would stumble on grinning skulls with a round hole between the sockets for the eyes. Such was the “Lincoln County War.” The contiguous New Mexican counties of Lincoln and Dona Ana truly were splashed with blood.
The Rio Grande too knew murder. International robbery never has been good-natured.
In these civil wars, stealing or its prevention sometimes was the primary object. At other times, the stealing was tacked as an incidental matter onto a campaign against encroaching sheepmen or farmers or onto a feud between two ranchers of horses or cattle. Then a better class of men was drawn into it and the robber was apt to salve his conscience with the thought that he was merely collecting the money-cost of efforts made in support of a moral cause.
Thus arose the bloody, Texan struggle between the local ranchmen and the “nesters,” sometimes called “nestlers.” These nesters, individually small farmers, and in the main immigrants largely of Germanic birth, had obtained by State grant or by other means scattered parcels of farming land. Each of these farmers, acting on the faith of ostensible, legal title, threw about his little tract a fence that cut off from public use whatever waterhole was within the tract. The little farm so fenced was, by the local cattlemen, contemptuously termed a “nest.” These cattlemen, with despotic lordliness, not only fenced their own lands; but also, ignoring both law and the theory of an open Range, fenced where they chose; and not infrequently embraced in their enclosures one or more already established nests. This loosed the fence-cutter and the Winchester, and there began wholesale pilfering of live stock. Both sides were at fault, and so were compelled to compromise. Accordingly the ruction eventually worked itself onto a peaceful if jealous basis whereon each faction began to observe the law.
By the commencement of the decade of the eighties, the Cattle Country had grown tired of bald raidings, of the disciples of Slade, Watkins, Lacey, Arnett, Spillman, Henry Plummer, Bignose George, Dutch Charley, Opium Bob, and Billy the Kid. Wherefore it purchased additional cartridges and further hempen rope, “took” some criminals, “got” more of them, and quite thoroughly ended stealing done in flagrant, primitive form.
Promptly appeared the wiley “rustler,” who by more indirect and intelligent methods increased the total of the annual pilferings.
But, before entering upon that subject, one well may turn to those two picturesque Western words, “took” and “got.” The law sent out its sheriff, “took” a man, and tried him. The citizens “dug for their guns,” “got” their man, and examined his corpse.
To understand “rustling,” one first must consider the public sentiment which made its existence and scope possible; and, as a prerequisite to this consideration, one should weigh certain underlying principles which at first blush well might seem wholly unrelated.
Every Westerner was an intense individualist, and demanded exclusive management of his personal affairs. At the same time, having no curiosity whatever as to the private matters of other people, he was perfectly willing that these other people should do as they liked, provided they neither improperly interfered with his rights nor contravened such of the tenets of the Cattle Country’s code of ethics as the West deemed to be vital and fundamental both to the maintenance of life and liberty and to the pursuit of happiness.
He was ready and usually willing, for his own actions, to account to the ultimate authorities of competent jurisdiction, namely his God and the officials of either State or federal government; and he assumed that, when his neighbors felt impelled to make a relatively similar reckoning, they would, without appeal to his advice, ascertain where confession should be made, and would act accordingly. It never occurred to him that he might be his brother’s keeper, and he knew how he himself would feel, if any one, even an intimate friend, “butted into” his concerns.
So set was the disinclination of every Westerner to intrude into other folks’ affairs, that he volunteered to the public officers practically no assistance, save in such matters as pertained to his own cattle and horses.
Even though a notorious robber had quizzically announced that the Union Pacific Railroad was running its trains too rapidly for public convenience, or that his “side pardner,” Skinny Joe or Black Bart, either had a contract to revise the schedule of the Santa Fé Railway or else was to act as head flagman on the Oregon Short Line, it would not have occurred to any citizen of the Cattle Country to forewarn the sheriff or even the representatives of the threatened railway. The citizen’s view-point would have been that these representatives “shore knew about it,” or “shore would learn about it”; would notify the sheriff, and would otherwise sufficiently protect themselves, or, if unable to do so, would call upon the public for aid.
However, for a while the citizen idly would have scanned the headings of whatever newspapers he ran across, to discover if possible whether the robbing Squint-Eye had “pulled it off,” or, instead, had lost his entire head before the short-barrelled, nail-loaded shotgun of some alert Wells, Fargo messenger. Whether Skinny Joe had “made good,” or “had shore got his’n” would also have been worth making desultory effort to ascertain. But all these transactions would have seemed as impersonal, foreign, and unimportant as though Squint-Eye, Black Bart, or Skinny Joe had been an Eskimo, and, amid the Arctic ice, had attempted to purloin a piece of seal meat from an oil-soaked tribesman.
If any old-timer in the West had heard that there was about to be robbed a bank with the management or ownership of which he was not connected, he would not for a moment have thought of informing the cashier. The old-timer would have felt sure that if he gave warning, the bank’s officials would have ground to complain that too many people were trying to “play in the game,” and that he himself was “feeding off his own range.” The old-timer’s view-point would have been that, if he knew of the prospective “party,” the officials doubtless either also did or else would obtain foreknowledge; and, if they wanted his aid, they would send for him.
If they ultimately had sent for him, he would have gone, as he would have gone at the call of the railroads when Squint-Eye or Skinny Joe “held them up,” and this on the instant and, if need be, ready to die. But, if his assistance had not been requested, he would have displayed in the matter no more activity than some day to inquire how far the safe door had flown.
These men were not thus close-mouthed in order to conceal any crime which they themselves approved, had committed, or were about to commit. The vast majority of them had intentions of the strictest honesty. They merely had a dread of “horning-in.”
The West was then not yet old enough to realize that universal protection came only out of concerted action.
This close-mouthedness, this non-interest in other people’s doings was the principal factor in opening the Range to the rustler’s trade.
This factor had a companion, full advantage of which was taken by the thieves, particularly by such of them as “did not come West for their health.” This put-upon companion was the kindly, tolerant pleasure which the Cattle Country derived from seeing any “likely young man” “get a start in life” and “get ahead.”
To any one in the West the government gave, without charge, title to lands, and use of grass and water, and also said, in effect: “I shall make you a gift of minerals, of firewood, and of all the wild meat you possibly can eat, if you but go and find them.”
Under such conditions, there was not a brutally outstanding, brilliantly clear-cut line of moral demarcation between, on the one hand, a noble-looking wapiti that fifty million people had donated to whoever wanted it and, on the other hand, a scrubby, anæmic calf that claimed either to belong to a distant English earl who had no knowledge that he owned the beast, and seemingly did not care, or else to belong to a “snotty city chap,” who patronized his fellow ranchers and deserved a “taking down.”
The owners of the live stock fell into two classes, the locally popular and the locally disliked.
The latter group was made up in part of non-residents who, spending the major portion of their time in England or upon America’s Atlantic coast, lived upon their ranches only during short and widely separated periods. Their visits frequently were restricted to the autumnal seasons when big-game shooting was at its best. Such men, because they failed to reside in the West, and, when there, used the Range largely as a shooting cover or private country club, were assumed to regard their holdings as an incidental luxury, not to be financially dependent on them, and not to feel the pinch if any of their stock were “borrowed” by acquisitive persons.
The West had the same mental attitude toward such corporations as, being of size, were owned by numerous and scattered stockholders. These corporations also lacked the cogent, tangible element of a man who stayed on the spot and “had his pocketbook in his herd.”
The second unpopular group was composed of such local residents as both did not fit into the scenery, and also palpably were intending a stay of but at most a few years’ duration.
The Old West lived in its then to-day, and planned for its then tomorrow, but, except for recollections of Range tenets and of human friendships, its yesterday was but vaguely remembered, while its last week was for it as remote almost as when Julius Cæsar lived. The Cattle Country recalled every word and comma of its unwritten code, it recalled the looks and statements of its dead friends, and right there it “plumb petered out,” on any affirmative interest in history.
The graded Herefords or Short Horns before a youthful rustler’s eyes bore the brand of, say, the English Middlesex and Montana Ranch. The young man probably restricted his reflections to calves, to pocketed telegraph wire, and to trails. But, if his thoughts drifted into scholarly channels, he foggily called to mind that the Spanish had abandoned a lot of live stock, and that it had spread about the plains, and he concluded that the Englishmen must have done a few years before a “right smart lot of roping.” Then he hazily decided that, if the Englishmen had been so selfishly wholesale in their acquisitions, it could do no harm if he himself were merely to nibble at the herd which, though the English now claimed, the Spaniards earlier had owned and thrown away.
And yet, in the very locality where the only surely safe repository for a calf was a bank’s deposit-box, a man’s saddle, pistol, clothing, money could, with impunity and without guard, be left beside the trail.
The recital thus far has disclosed that, in a country where the government made almost all necessities free, there wandered about huge herds of animals, which in some part were recognized as legally belonging to people that were supposed to merit chastening, and in other part, thanks to the Spaniard, were assumed to pertain morally, despite the brands, to nobody in particular; that, in this country, were impecunious, virile men whose desire to arrive at honored position was publicly acclaimed, and whose path for travelling thither was little scrutinized, seldom fully known or much discussed.
For another purpose of this present writing, the inhabitants of the Cattle Country were separable into five classes.
Of these classes, the first represented men who were uncompromising advocates of law, were of absolute integrity, and who scorned either to aggrandize themselves through any dishonesty or to give consciously the slightest aid to others in the latter’s wrongful doings.
The second class was composed of men who, while equally set against improper personal gain, would, because of less stanch admiration for law, extend a bit of passive or even active assistance to a friend who personally was engaged in “picking up a few ownerless animals.”
Men of the third class were like those of the second, except that these men of the third class were more easy-going in character, and were willing to “skim a little cream” themselves provided it hurt no “real Westerner.”
The fourth class brings us to the man who in more or less degree resented affirmatively the restrictions of the law, and who, if he wanted beef, “went and got it,” though to his credit it must be said that he usually first visited the undesirables’ ranches, and generally spared the widow, orphan, and poor. He commonly was as trustworthy to his neighbor as were the men of the two immediately prior classes, excepting only that he was constantly “sentimental about cows,” and temperamentally “couldn’t help making love to them.”
The fifth class, numerically the smallest, was restricted to the thieves as the novelists depict them, and was comprised of men who would steal live stock from almost any one, and who would take “even a sheep.”
But even many of these last-mentioned men had redeeming characteristics, and were treated accordingly. With the better of them, if they limited their peculations to reasonable quantity, the Range shut one eye and said: “Jim, you eat too much meat, and need exercise. Come up to the ranch, and I’ll give you a permanent job.” The Range did so, because it knew that Jim would be faithful unto death in everything except in matters of cowhide, and possibly also his treatment of stages and railway trains. If Jim’s appetite in time were not duly curbed, he would be given the address of a distant State and kindly but firmly advised to “hunt it up.”
A few of this fifth class were truly anarchistic, “had snake blood,” in them, were in fact “bad men,” and therefore had not the backing of the Range. Sooner or later they would go the way of all “bad men,” and would disappear.
For the sake of subsequent brevity, the men of these various five classes will be hereinafter arbitrarily designated by the several letters, A, B, C, D, and E, the letter A representing the first class, B the second, and so on. For the sake of clear understanding, let us keep in mind the principles already discussed, particularly the one to the effect that “other people’s business is none of mine.” Then we shall be prepared to fathom the subject of wholesale rustling.
A “low down, snake-blooded” E started to “gather” from anybody’s stock, and raided the widow and orphan. All of A, B, C, some of decent D, and a temporarily regenerated E “went looking for him,” for he had raised his hand against the Range.
A decent E began a modest “collection,” from the herds of disliked owners, i. e., from permissible sources. During the acquirement of so much of his “collection” as the public tacitly sanctioned, very likely B, C, and D helped him to rope animals and to alter brands; C, if a well-liked individual, reserving as a commission a single comely beast; D withholding on this score all that E would let him have. Very possibly the entire party, on its way to or from the piracy, stopped for a night at A’s ranch. Of course, there was made to A no mention of the expedition’s purpose. It was none of his business, for neither he nor any other “real person” was to be or had been looted. But A, by Range custom, was ready to house all passing travellers, good, bad, and indifferent, and to ask no questions.
Presently the public, thinking that decent E had made sufficient acquirement, warned him to “throw on the brakes.” If he obeyed, the matter was ended. If he did not hearken, he moved to another State.
D, in his own efforts, would receive still more extensive aid from B and C, and would be allowed a larger looting.
There was a generally popular C, who jauntily sallied forth on his own account and “picked some blossoms.” B worked like a dog for him, while the Range smiled, said nothing, did nothing, for the Range knew that C would never “overplay his hand.” But no disliked C or D could, without the Range’s implied consent, be “careless with his branding-iron.”
As already stated, overt stock-raiding, so-called “brass-band stealing,” had ceased by the commencement of the eighties, to be succeeded immediately by the more finished methods of highly specialized rustling. For some ten years this rustling continued in a widely spread but somewhat desultory manner. During that period the operations in each State were largely confined to its own citizens, its members of our alphabet below the letter A. The herds of well-liked owners were left quite inviolate; but our letters B, C, D, and E modestly whittled away at the holdings of the English and other vacationers, and occasionally were killed while at their work.
In this period the owners sowed seed for future trouble, because they began the system of paying bonuses to cowboys for finding mavericks, and later not only abolished the system, but also, on some ranges, forbade cowpunchers to own live stock.
This prohibition against owning live stock was in strict accord with the tendency which the entire West possessed, and incidentally which obtained in various Eastern States, the tendency to enact remedial laws of sweeping effect and general application, and to expect the laws to enforce themselves, and also to enact laws without first considering as to whether or not they probably would prove enforceable.
The prohibition availed nothing toward checking stealing, because the punchers had, in their bonuses, already tasted monetary blood.
The pilfering methods used by rustlers were both the altering of brands, and also the wrongful branding of thitherto unbranded animals; followed, in either case, by separating from their mothers such of these misbranded brutes as were maternally escorted, this last to insure that there be no combination of close companionship and divergent markings wherewith to advertise that “bossy had a stepfather.” This separation was achieved by impounding in isolated corrals such of the youngsters as showed filial affection, and keeping them there until weaned away from their mothers, or by searing or scarifying the soles of the mother’s hoofs to prevent her from following her baby when it was led away, or else by the very direct method of shooting the mother and thereby “pinning crape on the kid.”
Meanwhile, paralleling the Union Pacific Railway, another transcontinental railway, the Northern Pacific, had been built across the Cattle Country; but the buffalo had lasted long enough to feed the railway’s constructors, so the cattle had not as yet been much cut into. Nevertheless, these very buffalo had created a menace, for they had called together numerous men of a curious type, the queer beings who earned their livelihood either by killing buffalo for their skins or by merely collecting the dead buffaloes’ bones. When “skinning” and “bone-picking” ended, the men of those trades were ripe for the rustling of cattle.
Meanwhile there was pushing, in quantity and over the edges of the Range, a new type of citizen or prospective citizen, the small farmer, who frequently was fresh from Europe. He already was or quickly became sufficiently “Americanized” as to look with envy upon the wandering assets of the earlier settlers.
Soon still another railway, the Burlington’s Western extension, was projected into Wyoming, and so into the very heart of the Range. It attracted to itself workers from distant places, and, in addition, unloaded at its advancing railhead not only legitimate farmers but also many of those unwelcome characters who haunt the rails yet shrink from steady or honest work. Of the men who came to fill construction jobs, some proved inefficient and were discharged.
There thus seeped out among the cattle a new lot of citizens containing a leaven made of persons possessed of then as yet dormant criminal instincts, made also of fugitives from the justice of far-off States, made also of men who, out of jobs, turned to rustling for intended temporary livelihood, but, once in the dishonest calling, would not quit it.
While the leaven of these human misfits was filtering into the country, the political leaders were stirring the newly arrived farmers to have active interest in citizenship, and to exercise its duty, the casting of the vote. Simultaneously, political demagogues were descanting upon the themes that all these recent comers were the “real people of the land,” and that the herds which these recent comers saw represented wealth improperly withheld from them.
Eventually, in Wyoming, the small farmers, with the perhaps unnecessary, but nevertheless enthusiastic, assistance of the ne’er-do-wells, held all the public offices in an entire county, and thus controlled the issuance and disposition of all its judicial process, a process that was prone not to attack the rustlers but was disposed to deal curtly with long-vested interests.
But all the disgruntled of the small farmers and all the confirmed thieves within Wyoming could not have gashed the stock industry as it presently was gashed, if it had not been that such of our above friends from the alphabet as lived within that State had the moral attitudes hereinbefore described, and that the truly Americanized of the new immigrants already had distributed themselves among those various lettered classes.
The railhead of the new railway, the Burlington, pushed further into the Wyoming Range. There were no buffalo for the railway’s builders to eat. Some unrecorded, enterprising youth, who previously had outgrown the tedious process of stealing calves, rebranding them, raising them to maturity, and then smuggling them into legitimate East-bound channels, who later had adopted the more direct method of shooting adult animals, skinning them, destroying either the telltale markings of the hide or else the entire hide, and delivering the carcasses to butchers in the farmers’ little towns, now made a great discovery. It was that the layers of ties, the drivers of spikes, the shovellers of dirt, in fact everybody in the construction camps of the railway had unlimited capacity for eating fresh meat.
Immediately eastern Wyoming ran amuck. Except for such of the old-timers as were austerely honest, and except for such men of the absentee landlord type as happened to be within the State, the male inhabitants in an astonishingly large proportion madly turned to rustling. Such of the better element as engaged in it did so with a grin, sometimes with no more definite purpose than a lark, but usually as a means of “getting hunk” with some well-to-do but hated rancher. The other participants were actuated by resentment against wealth or by affirmative desire for gain, and, in the latter case, materially differed in the amounts of their cupidity.
Almost every man of strong dislikes and weak conscience joined with his more ignoble brothers in devastating such of the large herds as belonged to unpopular owners, and in selling to the railway contractors the meat of “slow elk” and “big antelope.” This movement, among the more dishonorable rustlers, extended first to raiding any large herd and, later, on the simple theory that “beef was beef,” to ignoring completely the question of identity of ownership.
The movement became so well established as to have a jargon of its own. The movement had also militant apostles in the “waddies,” men faithful to the illegal art of rustling; and these, by the weapon of derision, tried to wean honest punchers from protection of their employers’ interests. These honest chaps were taunted with willingness to “slave,” to be “peoned out,” to be “servants,” to be “low down enough to carry a bucket of sheep dip,” to be “sheep-herders at heart,” and, if in English employ, to “shine coronets.” They sneeringly were termed “sheep-dippers,” “bucket men,” “pliers men,” “saints,” and again, if in English employ, “royal crowns.”
The more sober-minded citizens began to realize that the very life of the cattle industry was threatened.
Suddenly there happened an event which brought the whole situation to a focus and resolved it into sanity. In 1892, some of the larger suffering ranches launched from Cheyenne an armed expedition which was intended to exterminate certain of the rustlers. This expedition presently opened fire upon the ranch of a man accused of being a “waddy.” Forthwith many of the smaller ranchers and of the farmers hastened to relieve the threatened thieves. Out came the local sheriff with a posse, which was exceedingly large, and in which were many “waddies.”
Throughout the whole affair, but a few shots flew, but two men fell. United States cavalry cut short the hostilities. Yet the episode had affirmative result.
The relative numbers of the people aligning with the several factions showed conclusively that the old order had ended, that the Range had ceased to be a political entity and had been apportioned among the States, that the cattle kings had forever ceased to rule, that the control of what had been the Cattle Country had passed from the herd-owners and top riders to the farmer recently from New Jersey, the clerk just come from an Ohio village, the shopkeeper who, through unreasoning fear of Indians, had long delayed his immigration from Iowa, the settler newly arrived from Europe and armed with his first papers of naturalization.
The Old West had passed. The New West had come.
Thereupon such of the robbed ranchers as were not in entirety of old-time Western spirit disposed of the wreckage of their holdings, and retired both from the industry of raising stock and from the country where their animals had ranged.
The men who continued in the business came into closer mutual relationship with one another. They were joined by the better class of men among the rustlers; and, through a revitalized machinery for the guarding of the cattle industry, there was soon suppressed the stealing which the more confirmed rustlers had endeavored to continue.
Very presently, by reason of increased activity in policing throughout the West, rustling became everywhere there virtually extinct.
Those happenings in Wyoming terminated by that shooting, which was the so-called “Rustler War,” or “Johnson County Raid,” had a distinct political and social significance. That final burst of thieving represented, for some of its performers, mere robbing; for others, a reckless, rollicking lark; for others, opportunity for punishment or revenge; but, for the majority, an uprising against concentrated wealth; and, at the end, it signified an accomplished, social and political revolution.
Though Wyoming alone pitted armed man against armed man to decide a fundamental problem, all the other Western States sooner or later arrived at the same conclusion that Wyoming did in Johnson County in 1892. From the Missouri River to the Sierra Nevadas, the open Range as a dominant, political entity passed into history. True, thereafter cattle-owners as such had great political power; but, to obtain results, they often had to seek the assistance of the farmers, of the townspeople, and, at times, ye gods! of the sheepmen. It was a power which, though able still to make a legislature hesitate, was no longer capable of imperious dictation from a horse’s back.
The open Range had everywhere overstayed its leave.