Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Still, the cattle culture slowly spread. By 1860, estimates of the number of cattle in Texas range from 3,000,000 to 4,000,000. The savannahs below San Antonio were swarming. The laws of the Republic of Texas made unbranded stock public property; it was relatively simple for farsighted or otherwise unemployed Texans to build a herd. From the still-Mexican ranches along the Bravo to the emerging Anglo-Mexican spreads around the Nueces, the kingdom slowly filtered up the borderlands. The men who moved out to the San Saba country, in Menard County, were ranchers; so were those who grimly defended Young County on the upper Brazos beyond Fort Worth. A few miles beyond the farmer, from north to south, the cattleman held a precarious sway. The business was restricted because the markets were few—the Army, the Indian reserves, a few settlement towns. Above all, however, the Plains Indians stopped the spread of this frontier. The cattleman went armed and defended himself and his herds as best he could. But, as Webb and several Texas writers have tried to make clear, the cowboy never thought of himself as hero. He did not destroy the Indians; he avoided them whenever and wherever he could. The Rangers were
samurai
, so much so that in later years the concept of the Western hero immediately and emotionally gripped the consciousness of Japan; the plots of American "Western stories" and samurai tales could be transposed. But the cowboy was a worker, a man trying to make a living in a harsh and still uncharted land. The Comanches were a summer pestilence, comparable to winter blizzards along Elm Creek. The cowman endured them, and begged the authorities back in comfortable civilization to do something about them. He carried a gun, for protection against Indians and his own wild beasts; a charging Texas bull could be the most formidable of foes. The cowboy was brave, like the
vaquero
, because he had to be. But he was a warrior by necessity, rather than choice. There will always be an argument in Texas whether the Army, the Rangers, or the hide hunters did most to exterminate the Indians. The cowboy fought battles, but he did not push the Indians back. In Texas, the cattle frontier did not materially expand until the Indians were removed.
Held between the cornfields to the east and the brooding expanses of Comanchería on the west, the cattle kingdom sideslipped the High Plains and spread along the slopes of the Rockies before the Civil War. Texas herds reached California in these years. Some famous Texas cowmen, such as John Chisum and Charles Goodnight, went from the northwest frontier of Texas to New Mexico, leaving the rich bison plains between. They were businessmen, not warriors waging holy war.
The explosion came after the War Between the States. Walter Prescott Webb, the historian of the Plains, wrote: "Then the cattle swarmed, passed out of the valley along the timber line, on the natural highway of the prairie, by San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth, on and on, taking meat to the giants of the North—the first tie to rebind the North and South after the Civil War."
Suddenly, giant cities had arisen in the North, hungry for meat. The wild Texas cattle were not modern pasture steers; they could walk to market, over thousands of miles, across rivers and sands, through blazing droughts and Indian raids. They made their own roads, along the fringelands on the open plains. The rails, in an outpouring of American enterprise, came to meet them in Kansas; and their flesh, tough and stringy as it was, was too good to be fed to reservation Indians but good enough for the Northern laboring hordes, as the Texans said.
The story of how a few daring men blazed the northern trails, through Indian territory and even more dangerous and avaricious whites, has been told a thousand times. It was a business: in 1865 cattle in war-ravished Texas sold for $4 a head, but brought $30 to $40 in the booming North. In fifteen years, Texas drove 5,000,000 head north, while the herds at home increased. This was a business, which brought thousands of pouches of gold to ragged Texas. It fed hungry families, and made a few cow-millionaires overnight. But it was a business that was colorful and dangerous beyond all others; it was something new, and it left its imprint forever on the American heart.
From the first disastrous trials to move cattle through Missouri, only to be met with warrants, floggings, robbery, and armed mobs, to the alliance with the Northern buyers and railroaders that led to the building of Abilene, far to the west, as the shipping point, this story has been too well told to be repeated here. The cattlemen learned they had to pass beyond the farmers' frontier. They put together vast herds, sometimes numbering 5,000, with slender crews. Ten men could drive 2,000 head. It was cheaper to drive than ship by rail, even after the railheads reached Texas. The best route was the famous Chisholm Trail, blazed by Jesse Chisholm, a Cherokee, which ran along the 98th meridian from deep in Texas to Caldwell, Kansas, then branched out to Wichita, Abilene, Newton, and other towns. Abilene was displaced by Ellsworth and Wichita by 1871, and these by Dodge City in 1876, as the rails extended west. In these towns, weary and battered men who had begun the trail at Brownsville, or San Antonio, or a hundred other Texas points, rammed their milling herds into loading chutes, received their pay, and created a thousand legends on the Plains. The months of grinding, eighteen-hour days in the saddle, the misery of rainstorms and endless dust clouds, the fright of Indian or cattle rustler attack, the sheer terror of a night stampede when lightning sparkled across the Plains, were dissipated in a few wild days, as gunslung Texans descended on the trail towns. "Abilene!" Webb wrote:
Abilene was more than a point. It was a symbol. It stands for all that happened when two civilizations met for conflict, for disorder, for the clashing of great currents which carry on their crest the turbulent and disorderly elements of both civilizations—in this case the rough characters of the plain and the forest. On the surface, Abilene was corruption personified. Life was hectic, raw, lurid, awful. But the dance hall, the saloon, and the red light, the dissonance of immoral revelry punctuated by pistol shots, were but superficialities which hid from view the deeper forces that were working themselves out round the new town. If Abilene excelled all later cow towns in wickedness, it also excelled them in service—the service of bartering the beef of the South for the money of the North.
Here Texas cowboys tried to refight the Civil War with careful, deadly Northern killer-marshals, whom the town business interests sensibly hired.
They rode horses into saloons; they galloped with six-shooters blazing along the dirt streets. Most of them spent their pay; a few died. After the horror of the trail some drovers forswore the drive forever, but owners in Texas had no trouble putting together new crews. Some of these cattlemen, such as King Fisher and Shanghai Pierce, were as wild and tumultuous and dangerous as the surly longhorns they drove to market. But the majority were businessmen who came to get the Yankee dollar. They sold beef, drank whiskey, and made deals with Northern shippers and capitalists. They forged new ties. Webb exaggerated only a little when he asked: "Who can say that Abilene was less significant than Appomattox?"
For, on that ephemeral but immortal frontier, Texas replaced the cotton kingdom of the slave South with a cattle empire. In the West, for the first time in the 19th century, elements of North and South met and merged: The cowboy or the cowman, recognizable wherever he stood, was neither Yankee nor Southerner; he could be either, or both. The great majority of all Texans were then, and for decades remained, Southern farmers. But out beyond the 98th meridian the Plains sun burned through the fogs and lifted the burdens of Southern history. The Texas drovers set out to sell beef, but they recast the image of a state.
The Texans did not just ship cattle East through Chicago. Texas herds passed out of the historic triangle, north, northwest, and west. Round-barreled Texas cattle and Texas know-how passed across twelve Western states, from New Mexico to Montana. With the end of the Indians, the cattle business exploded. In 1876, the cattle frontier had barely arrived at the 100th meridian; five years later it had closed the High Plains and was established far beyond Texas, from New Mexico to the Cascades, and from the Panhandle to Alberta. Texas stocked the Western range, with stock and men. Some small modifications were made: a northern saddle could be distinguished from a Texas rig. But in the shadow of the Rockies, or on the semideserts of Oregon, cowmen were essentially the same.
This was because Texas shot not only a businesss but a form of culture across the American West. It was protean and adaptive, yet strangely uniform. The cow culture—and it was a genuine, if abortive culture—was the only Anglo-American process that adapted to, rather than developed and destroyed, the primeval land. The ranchers were nomadic, casting themselves out on the great sea of grass. They and their cattle moved from place to place. The cowmen built incredibly ugly ranch houses and raw corrals, and sometimes squalid shacks or sod huts that were as much forts as homes. But they built these miles apart, always out of sight of other human abodes, and otherwise they did not scar or modify the land. They used it, and perhaps loved it, much as the Indians had.
The range cattle were their buffalo; their spectacles and socializing acts were not the hunt, but the roundup, which was a form of hunt, and the cattle drive. Both required cooperation, and widely separated men came together briefly. In the early years, there seems to have been little concern for seizing strategic lands, such as riverbanks or water holes. In the developing culture a code worked out, which opened the range to all. In these years the land was not crowded, even by cattle, and the plainsmen looked upon the land something as sailors looked upon the sea, and gave as little thought to claiming its ownership.
Ironically, most of what was later looked upon by outsiders as Western lawlessness, came only when Eastern concepts and Eastern laws were forcibly imposed on the West. The Anglo-Saxon organic law was absurd as applied to water in the West, because it contained no useful precedents; it could not envision a land where rain fell only spottily, but surface water, wherever it happened to be, was needed by all. Anglo-American law thus gave full possession of all the water in a valley to whoever owned the surrounding land or riparian rights; it was centuries behind the pragmatism of the Hispanic-Mexican codes. This nonsense later led to bloodshed, but as most Western observers had little success in pointing out, the adherence to unworkable laws caused the violence in the first place.
The few years of the cowboys' West proved how quickly a new culture could germinate and explode. Of course, it was a transmittal direct from Mexico, but the adaptation and expansion were phenomenal. Cowmen came from everywhere, Scotland to New York. Many never got beyond the trail towns or the Eastern or British-owned cattle company's town offices, but others were as adaptive to the West as though they had been born in frontier Texas. The first wave learned the country's ways, rather than destroying the country to fit their own prejudicial judgments.
Cowmen came from everywhere, not only because the beef business was booming, but because something in its way of life called strongly to certain breeds of men; however obscured in romanticism and mythology this became, a core of truth remained. The new frontier culture that Texas blazed into America held a barbaric exhilaration; it affected some Americans as much as the transmittal of the horse exalted the grubbing mountain Comanches, more than one hundred years before.
Owners and capitalists might make quick fortunes on open range and free grass, while cowhands worked for $10 per month. But still they came, Scot financier and runaway farmboy, and both settled comfortably and grandly into the West.
The cowmen lived off different beasts and held by different totems—not the antelope, or the wasp, or the bear, but circle dots and flying Ls, the sacred brands; but their society, in its great years, was as atomistic as the Indian. Their endless horizons were as culturally limited as the Kiowa's, yet their adaptations said something about the innate nature of the animal, man. They created the second American enterprise that became more than a business, and a way of life.
The terms used to describe the cattle explosion were always kingdom or empire, never the cattle business or the cattle industry. The home of the American cattle industry, in these years, never moved West.
In 1880, Texas and the Plains states and territories that Texas seeded produced only 28 percent of Americans' beef. Thousands of small farms and acreages in the East collectively marketed more meat. The East had its industry; the West its kingdoms. But the West, in a few short years, left its imprint forever on the American mind, because the West did its small business with sheer grandeur.
The cattleman was not an economic unit, but a man. His work—and it was work, not play—was arduous, danger-filled, and dirty. But he rode and roamed, and thus in his own cultural trap enjoyed great freedom; he fought for his own, and thus emblazoned living legends. Only a tiny handful ever sought this last frontier, but that handful captured the imagination of most men.
The cattle culture was logical; in 1870 there was hardly any other possible adaptation to the arid lands. The appurtenances of that culture—the horse, the pistol, wild cattle, the boots, chaps, big hats, and dust-catching kerchiefs or bandannas—were logical, too. They were necessary tools of a trade. But because, in their time and place, they seemed romantic to outsiders, they were to become as stylized, and eventually meaningless, as toreros' garb. Just as Spanish bullfighters adopted and clung to a degenerate form of 18th-century gentlemen's dress, thousands of Americans would someday dress as cowboys, unconsciously hoping to assume the role of Western hero. They would wear cowboy boots while driving their automobiles to drugstores, and never quite know the reason why.