The Mammoth Book of the West (27 page)

It was not only the cattle that died. So did many cowboys, their frozen bodies stored in drifts near ranch houses because the ground was too hard for graves. The Bismarck
County Settler
reported “an appalling loss of life”. Whole families were found perished from hypothermia.

At last the spring sun shone, thawing the frozen land. The Little Missouri burst its banks, huge ice-cakes grinding over and over each other. Countless carcasses of cattle rolled and tumbled down the raging river.

As the ice and snow melted, the extent of the tragedy became clear. Coulées were piled deep with dead cows, and the few that survived were gaunt and barely able to walk. The cowboy artist and rancher Charles M. Russell, who was managing a herd in the Judith Basin, was asked by the absentee owner for a report on the situation. Unable to find words, Russell painted a picture of a skeletal, dying cow, “The Last of Five Thousand” (also known as “Waiting for a Chinook”).

Russell scarcely exaggerated. Losses were fantastic. Some ranchers, the worst hit, lost 90 per cent of their herds.

The suffering of the livestock affected even hardened cattlemen. Confronted with a landscape littered with dead and dying cattle, the Montana rancher Granville Stuart suddenly found the industry distasteful. “I wanted no more of it. I never wanted to own again an animal that I could not feed and shelter.” (This was only to come into line with public opinion; the American Humane Society had obtained legislation governing the treatment of cattle as early as 1873.)

The blizzards dealt the industry a reeling blow. With creditors clamouring at the ranch house door, those who had cattle left loaded them on the market. Prices fell through the floor. In the Chicago markets, grass-fed steers worth $9.35 a hundredweight in 1882 were worth $1.00 in the fall of 1887. Ranch after ranch slid into insolvency. “From southern Colorado to the Canadian line, from the 100th Meridian almost to the Pacific slope it was a catastrophe,”
wrote Wyoming ranch manager John Clay. “The cowmen of the west and northwest were flat broke. Many of them never recovered. Most of the eastern men and the Britishers said ‘enough’ and went away. The big guns toppled over; the small ones had as much chance as a fly in molasses.” Among the firms that went under were the giant Swan and Land Company of Wyoming, and the Niobara Cattle Company of Nebraska. The once mighty Cheyenne Club defaulted on its bonds and sold out for 20 cents on the dollar.

All over the plains, a shuffling, straggling army of bone-pickers appeared. Before, they had come for the skeletons of the buffalo. Now they came for the remains of the once mighty cattle herds.

The beef bonanza had come to an end. Some ranches – generally the better-run sort – hung on and revived. When the Western Ranche Ltd (registered in Edinburgh, Scotland) wound up in 1919 it was still paying shareholders £9.00 for every £5.00 invested. But never again would cattle carpet the open ranges of the West, and never again would a stockman assume his cattle could survive a plains winter unaided. In the aftermath of the Great Blizzard the industry underwent immense change. Ranchers fenced all the land they dared, but restricted the size of their herds and grew hay, alfalfa or sorghum for winter feed. The West became a land of enclosed pastures, stocked by carefully selected and sheltered beeves. (To their surprise, ranchers discovered that a relatively small herd of improved stock sold at a young, plum age yielded more beef and profit than the large scrawny herds of the open range system.) Cowboys, the knights of the saddle, spent much of their time doing farm chores, digging irrigation ditches and cutting hay. “I remember,” reminisced one regretful, ageing cowboy to the
Independent
of Sidney, Texas,

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 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. You didn’t hear the sound of a mowing machine in this country ten years ago.

New work for the cowboy brought with it new rules governing his employment and lifestyle. Less and less was he a free spirit; more and more was he a company man, a rural proletarian. The XIT outfit in the Panhandle issued 23 new regulations for employees in 1888. Notably, employees at the XIT could not “own any cattle or stock horses on the ranch”, thus preventing them from getting a start in ranching themselves.

Old-time cowboys who regretted such changes had other causes for alarm in the late 1880s. Farmers and sheepherders were pressing hard into the shrinking domain of the Cattle Kingdom.

Sheep raising in the West began with the Spanish missions, Juan de Onate and his colonizers driving a flock of a thousand ewes and rams into New Mexico in 1598. For two and a half centuries the industry was concentrated in the Southwest, with itinerant Hispanic and Indian (mainly Navajo) herders tending flocks of the sturdy
churros
. In the nineteenth century, new strains of sheep were introduced – the American Merino from Kentucky, the French Rambouillet, the English Cotswold, Shropshire and Lincoln – which
increased the wool yield for their unromantic keepers to four or five pounds per animal per year, at the same time producing an animal tender enough to eat. Eastern mills were prepared to pay a good price for the wool, while the gold miners who flocked to California were prepared to pay a good price for the meat. In the decade after 1849, nearly a half a million sheep were driven from New Mexico to California. Those delivering the sheep included Kit Carson, the noted fur trapper, scout and Indian fighter.

Under the incentives of California gold and Eastern banknotes, sheep ranching grew rapidly. By the early 1880s there were four million sheep pasturing in New Mexico alone. Inevitably, flocks spilled out of their traditional ranges into terrain that cattle raisers saw as their own.

Some ranchers turned sheepfarmer. “Woolies” made twice the profit of steers for relatively little effort. A man with two dogs could control up to 3,000 sheep. More, wool was a commodity which could be stored indefinitely, was protected by tariff from foreign competition (until 1894), and was harvested annually with little harm to the animal. Even the American cattle industry propagandist, James Brisbin, was forced to admit that sheep made a better investment than cows.

The majority of ranchers, however, fought back. They complained that the sheep close-cropped grass they needed for their horses and cattle, and that cattle hated the pervasive smell of sheep and would not prosper where they ran. Exacerbating this competition was the matter of race. Shepherds were often non-White and immigrant; they were Mexican Americans, Basques, and Scots. Mormons, too, often owned sheep, and in the West all Mormons – many of whom were anyway immigrants – were regarded as unAmerican. To the Anglo-American cattleman, sheep
were an inferior animal tended by inferior men.

The ranchers were prepared to resist the rising white tide of sheep with violence. Something like open warfare existed on the western edge of cattle country for years. Cowboys slaughtered 600,000 sheep – mostly by driving them over the edges of cliffs – on the Wyoming–Colorado range alone. There were hundreds of injuries to humans. And not a few deaths.

Tonto Basin, Arizona, witnessed the worst of the West’s cattle versus sheep feuds. Pleasant Valley, in the early 1880s, was as attractive as its name suggested, and among those drawn to settle it were the family of John D. Tewksbury, an old man with three half-breed sons, and the families of brothers Thomas and John Graham. At first, the Tewksburys and the Grahams were friends, and rode together as cowboys for neighbouring ranches. They also did some petty rustling and “mavericking”. Then, in 1884, they had a dispute over cattle, probably because the Grahams were appropriating more than their fair share of stolen steers. The families became fierce enemies.

Matters might have rested there, except for the intrusion of history. The Grahams, with their increased stock, moved into a closer relationship with the region’s cattle barons. Meanwhile, the Tewksburys, denied the profits of their illicit labours, grew increasingly bitter. When, in 1886, Ed Tewksbury was accused of horse theft by the foreman of a local ranch, Tewksbury shot him. But the real trouble began when the Tewksburys broke the cardinal rule of Pleasant Valley. The Tonto Basin was cow country, and sheep were specifically prohibited. In the fall of 1886, John D. Tewksbury made a deal with prominent sheepmen from Flagstaff to graze sheep in Pleasant Valley. The cattlemen responded with violent fury. Sheep were slaughtered by the hundred and in February 1887 a Navajo shepherd was cold-bloodedly murdered.

By the summer, all the sheep were gone. The animosities, however, remained, and the families were impelled deeper and deeper into bloodshed by associates who stood to gain more than either of them. On 10 August 1887, Hampton Blevins, a friend of the Grahams, together with several riders from the powerful Aztec Land and Cattle Company (the Hash Knife brand), stopped by the Tewksbury ranch. According to the cowboys, it was an innocent visit and Tewksbury shot at them from his doorway unprovoked. The Tewksburys claimed that the men drew revolvers as they turned away. Whatever, Jim Tewksbury killed Hamp Blevins and John Paine. When a Graham associate tried to ambush Tewksbury, his marksmanship claimed a third victim.

Up to this point, Tom Graham had tried to restrain the violence. When, however, his youngest son was murdered he personally led a raid on the Tewksbury ranch, on 2 September 1887. John Tewksbury and William Jacobs were shot down in the front yard as they tried to find cover. For hours, the Grahams directed a hail of bullets at the ranch house. Suddenly, the front door opened and John Tewksbury’s wife stepped outside. The firing stopped. (The code of the West absolutely prohibited the shooting of a woman.) Mrs Tewksbury shooed away the hogs that were rooting at the body of her husband and his friend, and buried their bodies. When she returned indoors, the shooting started up again. It only finished when a posse arrived and drove off the attackers.

Two days later the long-haired Commodore Perry Owens, the new sheriff of Apache County, attempted to arrest Andy Blevins for the murder of two sheepmen in the feud. In the fight that followed, Owens, using a Winchester rifle, shot dead Andy Blevins, his brother and his brother-in-law. Another brother, John Blevins, was
wounded in the shoulder. Despite the steady loss of personnel, the feud continued. Determined to end it, the sheriff of Yavapai County, Willam Mulvenson, moved to arrest the leaders of both factions. John Graham and Charles Blevins were killed when they resisted arrest. The Tewksburys surrendered without a fight. When they were brought for trial for the murder of Hamp Blevins no one would testify against them. Fear was more powerful than conscience.

Pleasant Valley continued to echo with gunfire. By December 1888 only Ed Tewksbury and Tom Graham survived from their respective families (Jim Tewksbury had died of tuberculosis). In an effort to avoid further trouble, Tom Graham moved out of the valley. But the hatreds and issues had grown far beyond two families by then. The killings continued.

It was not until August 1892 that the Graham–Tewksbury feud finally came to an end. In that month Tom Graham, returning to Tonto Basin to settle his business affairs, was assassinated. His killer was Ed Tewksbury. With the demise of Tom Graham, the five-year conflict had claimed its twenty-first life. Pleasant Valley had become Arizona’s “dark and bloody ground”. Ed Tewksbury – the charges against him eventually dropped because of a technicality – became a lawman in Globe, Arizona.

Pleasant Valley was one of the cattlemen’s few victories. Elsewhere they were less able to hold back the trampling flocks of sheep.

By 1890 sheep on the Columbia plateau outnumbered cows four to one. The sullen, lowly sheepherder had triumphed over his mounted, romantic cowboy counterpart.

Time and defeat did little to alter the attitude of cowman to sheepherder. In his 1930 memoir of his life as a
cowpuncher,
Lone Cowboy
, Will James (born Ernest Dufault) still felt moved to write:

What turned the cowman against the sheepman from the first is that the sheepman came in their country after the cowman had found it, claimed his part and made the range safe against the Indian. The cowman had fought for it for all he was worth and soon as he had the Indian tamed down and raids was getting far apart, why here comes the sheepman to tramp down the grass the cowman had fought for. The blatting woolies and the herders had no respect for the cowman’s territory and not only trampled down his grass, but brought in a lot of loco and other poison weeds.

Contrary to James’s claim, it was actually overstocking by cattle which opened up the range to non-grasslike plants and herbs, since the cattle overgrazed the bunchgrass. Cattle could not thrive on the resultant weedy growth; sheep could. The great irony of the Cattle Kingdom is that the grandees’ own beeves were a fifth column working against them, literally preparing the ground for sheep.

More dangerous even than the “woolies” were the invaders from the East. Since the Civil War, settlers had been establishing themselves on range country, fencing off plots and filing claims under the Homestead Act of 1862, passed to promote settlement in the West. Under the Act, any citizen over 21 years could claim up to 160 acres of the public domain. If he lived on the land for five years, thus proving good faith, and built a house, put up fences and so on, then the land became his.

The homesteaders were all kinds of people: pioneer farmers who had worked their way westwards over the generations, war veterans, immigrants and cowboys who had lost their jobs during hard times on the range. A few were horse thieves, like those driven from the Montana range in 1882–3 by Granville Stuart and a group of cowboy vigilantes who became known as “Stuart’s Stranglers”. Their campaign was devastating, the most violent vigilante movement in Western history. Over a hundred bandits were killed after being marked for death on a list provided by Stuart. Some taste of the Stranglers’ activities is provided by Granville Stuart’s own candid autobiography,
Forty Years on the Frontier
: