The Mammoth Book of the West (19 page)

Jayhawker harassment caused some herds to turn back,
and bottled up others around Baxter Springs. As the summer wore into fall, frost killed the grass and the cattle died of starvation. Only 35,000 Texas cattle reached the railheads. The Long Drive of 1866, which had begun with such hopes, was a disaster.

A people less determined than the Texans might have given up in defeat. Instead, after a winter of recuperation, they began driving their Longhorns north again. And this time, thanks to an enterprising Yankee stockman called Joseph McCoy, the Texans would find a convenient railhead waiting for them.

Late starters up the Sedalia Trail in 1867 were intercepted by William Sugg, agent of the cattle buyer, Joseph G. McCoy. Sugg informed the drovers of an easier and cheaper route to market. At the Kansas hamlet of Abilene, on the route of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, McCoy had built vast pens to receive Texas cattle. He would take all that they could deliver. So began the great Kansas cattle trade.

Born in 1837, the youngest of nine children, Joe McCoy had gone into the cattle-buying business at the end of the Civil War. When he heard of the 1866 Baxter Springs blockade, he saw immediately that the beef industry needed an open trail from Texas to an easy shipping point on a railroad: in McCoy’s own words, “a market whereat the Southern drover and Northern buyer would meet upon an equal footing, and both be undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves.”

Establishment of such a cattle-shipping centre became for McCoy an obsession, “a waking thought, a sleeping dream.” Early in 1867 McCoy visited Junction City, where local businessmen refused to sell him land for a stockyard. After being similarly turned down in Solomon City
and Salina, he settled on Abilene, almost at the end of the Kansas Pacific rail line. “Abilene in 1867,” wrote McCoy, “was a very small, dead place, consisting of about one dozen log huts, low, small, rude affairs, four fifths of which were covered in dirt for roofing . . . The business of the burg was conducted in two small rooms, mere log huts, and of course, the inevitable saloon, also a log hut, was to be found.”

The hamlet, however, had everything necessary for a cattle-shipping centre. All around were the grassy, well-watered acres of Smoky Hill Valley, where cattle could be fattened up at the end of a long drive. Nearby was Fort Riley, which offered protection from Indian raids. Moreover, Abilene was outside Kansas farming country. And most importantly of all, it was on a railroad. The cattle could be shipped eastward in open pens to Kansas and thence to Chicago, and from there to the East for butchering. Later, when Gustavus Swift created a fleet of refrigerated railroad cars, the beeves would be slaughtered in Chicago and sent east as dressed corpses.

Having bought the 250 acres of land he needed, McCoy set about building the required facilities. By now it was July, and the herds were on their way north. Within two months McCoy constructed a stockyard big enough to take 3,000 surging Texas Longhorns. For the convenience of the cattlemen, he erected a three-storey hotel, the Drover’s Hotel. Meanwhile, McCoy sent William Sugg south to intercept the Texas herds, and persuade them to Abilene.

The first herd to arrive at McCoy’s stockyard was driven by a Texan named Thompson. More herds followed. Despite its late start, Abilene shipped out 35,000 Texan steers in 1867. The next year 75,000 cattle reached Abilene. In 1870 the figure was 300,000; in 1871, it was an astounding 700,000.

Nearly all these cattle came to Abilene up the famous
Chisholm Trail, which lay 150 miles west of the Sedalia Trail Shawnee road. It was named after Jesse Chisholm, a half-Cherokee trader. In 1864–5 Chisholm used an ancient buffalo route between Kansas and Texas to haul his goods wagons. When a herder later heading north from Texas crossed into Indian Territory, he found Chisholm’s wagon ruts and followed them into Kansas. And so was born the greatest cattle road in the West. Years after it became defunct its course could still be seen, a depression 200–400 yards wide beaten into the earth by the tramp of over three million cattle.

Abilene boomed on the profits of the cow trade. By 1870, the town’s Texas Street boasted ten false-fronted boarding-houses, ten saloons, five general stores, and four hotels.

The prosperity was short-lived. Abilene had no law. Celebrating cowboys drank and quarrelled, and several gunfights occurred. Some leading citizens posted notices forbidding the carrying of firearms within the city limits. The cowboys read them, and then shot them to pieces. To install order, the town employed a marshal, Thomas J. Smith, who had served on the New York City police force. For a brief summer “Bear River Tom” gave Abilene a taste of law, punching down rowdy cowboys and forcibly disarming them. He was killed in the fall by a settler in a dispute over land.

Abilene’s next marshal was the noted frontier scout and Indian fighter, the fashionably dressed, long-haired James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, who was hired at $150 a month, plus a percentage of fines. At the behest of citizens Hickok ordered Texas gamblers Phil Coe and Ben Thompson to alter an offensive, pornographic sign outside their Bull’s Head Saloon. Coe resented this interference, and trouble between Coe and Hickok grew, culminating in a gunfight on 5 October 1871. At around 9
p.m. Hickok heard a shot on the street and went to investigate. He found Phil Coe at the centre of a crowd of drunken Texan revellers, with a revolver in his hand. “Who fired that shot?” demanded Hickok. Coe replied that he had fired it – at a dog. Hickok told Coe to disarm. Instead Coe pointed his gun at the marshal. “As quick as thought”, reported a newspaper, Hickok drew his Navy Colt pistols and fired at Coe, the bullet tearing through Coe’s stomach and out his back. But in the confusion of bullets Hickok accidentally slew his own deputy, Mike Williams, who had run into the firing line. Afterwards; the grief-stricken Hickok took to patrolling the streets with a sawn-off shotgun.

When Hickok’s contract expired at the end of 1871, it was not renewed. Instead, the town decided to stop cowboy lawlessness by the simple expedient of ending Abilene’s cattle shipments. Many townsfolk, anyway, were farmers who had recently settled on the prime prairie around the town, and had no love for the Longhorns, who knocked down their fences and trampled their crops. In February 1872 a notice appeared in the Abilene
Chronicle
to the effect:

We, the undersigned, members of the Farmers’ Protective Association, most respectfully request all who have contemplated driving Texas cattle to Abilene the coming season, to seek some other point of shipment, as the inhabitants of Dickinson [the local county] will no longer submit to the evils of that trade.

The citizens of Abilene need hardly have bothered to prohibit the cattle trade. As the railroad extended west,
new towns sprang up as shipping points, all easier and quicker for the Texans to reach: Ellsworth in 1871, Wichita in 1872, and Dodge in 1876, the last and longest lived of the Kansas cowtowns. Dodge was a ready-made trail town. Two buffalo hunters, Ed Jones and Joe Plummer, had earlier brought hides north from Texas, and their route was turned into a road for cattle. It was known variously as the Jones and Plummer Trail, then the Dodge City Trail, and eventually the Western Trail.

There were more reasons to trail a herd north than to meet a train. At the peak of its glory, the Western Trail would stretch from Texas to the Sioux reservations in Dakota, where Texas beeves fed surrendered Indians. Also using the Trail were drivers stocking the Great Plains, for in the 1860s the cattle frontier had pushed far beyond the Red River. To their astonishment, cattlemen had discovered that steers could overwinter on the plains with little care.

Amongst the first to realize this was J. W. Iliff, a failed gold miner in the 1859 rush to Pike’s Peak. Determined to make something out of his misfortune, the Ohio-born Iliff opened a store, bartering with passing migrants for their lame and emaciated cattle and oxen. These he turned loose on the plains and found that they thrived. To most eyes, the bunchgrass of the plains looked scanty fare, but Nature had made it a storehouse of proteins, a form of hay on the stem. This natural hay was also accessible in winter, for the snows of the plains did not usually crust, so the hay could be reached by pawing cattle.

Bunchgrass and a ready market of hungry miners made Iliff the first of the cattle kings of Colorado. Eventually, his herd expanded to 35,000 head, built in the main from cattle driven north from Texas. Among those who supplied Iliff were the restless Charles Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving.

In 1866, while most Texans had their hopes pegged on the Missouri railheads, Goodnight and Loving had trailed their herds from Fort Belknap to the Apache–Navajo reservations in New Mexico. After receiving $12,000 in gold for a proportion of their beeves, the rest were driven north into Colorado, some being sold to the miners and some to Iliff. The routes used by Goodnight and Loving soon became the principal cattle routes to New Mexico and Colorado, and were known as the Horsehead Route and the Goodnight–Loving Trail. Oliver Loving, however, did not live to enjoy the prestige or money the route derived; in 1867 he and cowboy One-Armed Bill Wilson were attacked by a Comanche war party. Although both men escaped alive from three days of Comanche siege and days of wandering starvation, Loving had been wounded by a Comanche arrow. His arm turned gangrenous and he died at Fort Sumner, after extracting a promise from Goodnight to bury him in the Lone Star state. Goodnight kept his word, and ordered his cowboys to make a coffin from oil drums. In this metal casket, Goodnight towed Loving’s body home to Texas, along the trail they had blazed together. Till he died, Goodnight kept Loving’s photograph on the wall of his home. (The story of Goodnight and Loving is celebrated in Larry McMurtry’s novel,
Lonesome Dove
.)

After his partner’s death, Goodnight went on to build up an immense ranch on the wide open Colorado range and to lavish money on the erection of an opera house in the town of Pueblo. Inspired by Goodnight’s example, Texas cattlemen flocked north to the free range country of Colorado. And then to Wyoming, and Montana, and Nebraska, the whole plains across. They went up the Western Trail and they went up the Goodnight–Loving Trail. Somewhere between six and nine million cattle were driven out of Texas to the railheads and the plains between 1867 and
1886, with around 25,000 cowboys making the trip north. Around 2,000 of these cowboys were Mexican and 5,000 were Black Americans, who had started cowpunching as slaves or had come west after their emancipation.

First-hand accounts of life on the trail, such as Andy Adams’s memoir
The Log of a Cowboy
, make it clear that there was little glamour, much labour and some danger. The drive began with the spring round-up, with the recalcitrant Longhorns pulled from the brush and chaparral. When the herd was collected, immature animals were “cut out” and returned to the range. Any unbranded animals were dragged to the bonfire where the branding irons were heated until orange-red hot and then stamped onto the steer’s hide.

When the work of round-up and branding was done, preparations for the drive started in earnest. A cowboy selected his mounts – he would need between six and ten for the drive – and invariably chose geldings and horses of solid colour. (Native Americans, by contrast, preferred “paints”, horses with broken white and black/brown markings, for their war ponies.) Then he gathered up the small amount of personal belongings he would take with him: a pair of blankets, a change of clothing, his hat, a “slicker” coat to keep off the rain, and his gun.

Occasionally the rancher himself would make the drive; more often he would entrust his foreman or sell his cattle to a professional driver like the famed Ike Pryor. For the driving of a herd of 3,000 head, a crew consisted of a trail boss, 15 to 20 cowhands, together with a horse wrangler to handle the herd of spare horses, the remuda or “cavvy”. A cook or “Old Lady” was also essential, and was expected to be skilled in more than cuisine. He had to sustain
morale and be an expert “bullwhacker”, driving the chuckwagon over every terrain. Invented by Charles Goodnight, the chuckwagon was an adapted Conestoga, made from Osage orange, the toughest wood Goodnight knew of, the wood Indians used for their bows. A chuckwagon carried (in an allotted place) everything the cook needed, from tins of Arbuckle coffee to a Dutch oven. Many cooks were of Portuguese or Mexican descent.

At the start of the drive, the cattle were always jittery and it was necessary to proceed slowly. The beeves disliked leaving their home range, and had to be broken to the road. An astute trail boss singled out a dominating animal and made it the lead steer. Some animals were used year after year in this way, like Charles Goodnight’s “Old Blue”. After several days on the drive, the animals would take up a natural order of march. The cowboys, likewise, proceeded according to a set pattern. The trail boss rode out in front, surveying the route and seeking water or grazing. At the point of the herd rode the most experienced cowboys, and along its sides were the swing and flank riders. The tail or drag riders brought up the rear. They had the dirtiest, least desirable job, pushing along the lame or cussedest steers in the clouds of choking dust thrown up by thousands of hooves. Well behind the dust proceeded the remuda and the chuckwagon, which would be driven ahead of the herd in the afternoon for the cook to fix supper. Meals seldom varied beyond black coffee, drunk by the gallon, sourdough biscuits, pinto beans, meat, gravy and “SOB stew” (stewed entrails).

In a day’s march, a herd would expect to cover an average of 15 miles, before being bedded down for the night. During the hours of darkness the cattle had to be constantly watched, with the men usually working two-hour
shifts. Describing night duty, Andy Adams wrote: “The guards ride in a circle about four rods outside the sleeping cattle; and by riding in opposite directions make it impossible for any animal to make its escape without being noticed by the riders. The guards usually sing or whistle continuously, so that the sleeping herd may know that a friend and not an enemy is keeping vigil over their dreams.”