Cattlemen Read online

  Books by Mari Sandoz published by

  The University of Nebraska Press

  The Battle of the Little Bighorn

  The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire

  The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men

  Capital City

  The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande across the Far Marias

  Cheyenne Autumn

  The Christmas of the Phonograph Records

  Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

  The Horsecatcher

  Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings of Mari Sandoz

  Letters of Mari Sandoz

  Love Song to the Plains

  Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail

  Old Jules

  Old Jules Country

  Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections

  Slogum House

  Son of the Gamblin' Man: The Youth of an Artist

  The Story Catcher

  These Were the Sioux

  The Tom-Walker

  Winter Thunder

  © 1958 by Mari Sandoz

  Introduction © 2010 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Nebraska paperback printing: 1978

  Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Mari Sandoz, represented by Mcintosh and Otis, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sandoz, Mari, 1896-1966.

  The cattlemen: from the Rio Grande across the far Marias / Mari Sandoz; introduction to the Bison Books edition by Ron Hull.—2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8032-4376-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.) 2. Ranch life—West (U.S.)—History.

  3. Pioneers—West (U.S.)—History. 4. Ranchers—West (U.S.)—History. 5. Cattle

  trade—West (U.S.)—History. 6. West (U.S.)—History—1860-1890. 7. West

  (U.S.)—History—1890-1945. 8. West (U.S.)—History—1945- 9. West (U.S.)—

  Social life and customs. I. Title.

  F596.S212 2010

  978'.02—dc22 2009048982

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-8032-4599-0

  INTRODUCTION

  Ron Hull

  In the early 1960s on the mantelpiece of the faux fireplace in Mari Sandoz's apartment at 422 Hudson Street in New York City's West Village stood a statuette of a thin, hipless, gaunt, lanky ranch hand. This realistic portrayal of the "cow hand" was one of the many awards marking her publishing achievements. As I admired it, Mari Sandoz, sitting in her favorite wingback chair (where through the years she began in longhand many first drafts of her work), looked at me and said, "That's the kind of man I like." Looking at her I knew that she meant it.

  Growing up in the high plains country of northwest Nebraska, Mari Sandoz knew this man, his dreams, his independent spirit, his people, and the intricate details of the cattlemen's history he helped create. This region at the turn of the twentieth century was a harsh environment, and it was settled by tough, courageous, persistent, and determined people who had to overcome the blizzards, draughts, searing heat, prairie fires, grasshopper plagues, lawless elements in the population, and years and years of subsistence living.

  She was the eldest daughter of Jules Sandoz, whom she immortalized in Old Jules, considered by many the definitive story of homesteading on the Great Plains. Though her father was often a cruel and violent man, he also helped many settlers in the region and brought a wide range of fascinating people to the modest Sandoz house on the Niobrara River. It was here, as a child, that this plain, skinny daughter of Old Jules sat in the corner and heard with insatiable curiosity the tales of the cattlemen, the farmers, the adventurers, and it was here that she began to understand the people and the land of the high plains country and to write her own stories.

  Mari Sandoz encouraged people to write. Her mantra was: "Anyone with the power of literacy can learn how to write well enough to publish." In her teaching and her lectures she told people that it is important to work in a field with which you have strong emotional identity, with material that means something to you personally. Throughout her distinguished publishing career she followed her own advice. She knew firsthand the people she was writing about.

  Though she did not consider herself one of the very, very gifted writers, she wanted to be acknowledged as both a significant research person and a creative writer. She said, "Geniuses often don't know where their material comes from." This was not her case. Her work was a very practical kind of writing that took months, even years, of careful research, as well as interviews, observation of locales, writing, rewriting, throwing great sections away, and starting all over again. She refined, she polished, she reworked every paragraph, line, sentence, and word she put to paper. Supporting every word, thought, or description were her diligent, persistent years of research of the Trans-Missouri Region.

  I was working with Sandoz while she was accomplishing her research for The Battle of the Little Bighorn, her last major book, published posthumously in 1966. She recounted to me that while working on the material of the battlefield, she would take a commercial bus early in the morning that let her off some three miles from the site. Carrying her lunch with her, she walked over to where the battle took place, settled herself on the ground, and with pencil in hand made notes about every aspect of the area around her-staying all day, observing, studying the hills and every dimension of this locale. She wrote detailed sketches of the trees and bushes, the rock formations and rocks on the ground. She noted the sky, the position of the clouds, any wild animals that came within her range; she studied the grasses and the weeds and the flowers, moving here and there over the landscape, absorbing every detail of the place. When the sun began to go down, she knew she had to walk back the three or so miles to catch the bus and return to where she was staying. This she did for a number of days, until she was satisfied that she had intimate, firsthand knowledge of this historic place and could create accurate mind pictures for the reader of where Custer and his men met defeat.

  The following passage from The Cattlemen is evidence of this kind of painstaking research and the lifelong accumulation of knowledge she brought to her writing:

  The region was without a rock or tree or even a shrub beyond a few little buckbrush patches or perhaps a dwarf willow shorter than the stirrup, in some low spot. The only thorns to make the Texans feel at home were those on the low clumps of re-hipped prairie roses in the grass, the spears of the soapweed clumps on the sandier knobs, and an occasional patch of bull-tongue cactus-patches like greenish hearthrugs scattered around, the sections small and dainty to the eye accustomed to prickly pear that grew taller than a man on horseback, with the gray-blue sections over a foot long, the barbed spines the size of darning needles.

  She had an accurate, expert eye in discerning the details of the high plains country, and she had the literary ability to paint these pictures for us indelibly.

  Mari Sandoz had an ambitious dream. When she was twenty-one years old she made up her mind that she would make a six-book study-a nonfiction narrative of modern man's incumbency on the stone age era, then on to the iron age, and on up to the present. She chose geographically the Great Plains, or the Trans-Missouri Region, as she referred to it. As she said, "Through the discovery of this region, this one drop of water, I hope to discover something of the nature of the ocean."

  She started the series with what she knew-Old Jules and the homestead period, with which she had the greatest emotional identity. Then she went back in time and covered the Indian Agency period in Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas. This was followed by
Cheyenne Autumn, which covers the rebellion against the Agency period and, incidentally, was made into a film by John Huston. Next in the series came The Buffalo Hunters, which disposed of all the buffalo, and following that she plunged into the enormous research involved in writing about the great cattle era and up to the present with The Cattlemen. She saved until last the most difficult one of the series, The Beavermen, because it had to go back so far in time. This was the coming of iron and what the Stone Age man must have been like. Unlike the other books in this series, this one had to be a novel; she didn't know who those Indians were, so she had to make up her characters, and she had to make up, as nearly as she could, an adequate picture of their cultures.

  The Cattlemen is an exciting read and I think of more interest to us now than when it was first published in 1958. In recent years television, both public and commercial, has done much to stimulate our interest in knowing about who we are as a people, where we came from, what motivated us, our history, and the development of a distinct American character. Throughout these pages, Sandoz captures the essence of the, as she puts it, "tough as old range bulls" men who brought about the great cattle era of our country. This story fairly gallops along, synchronous with the drive and spirit of the cowboys, the ranchers, the legendary figures like Sam Bass and Wyatt Earp, men who move the story forward with breathtaking speed.

  This is a historic adventure you can experience by simply reading this book. No film director, no television producer, no one can spark the imagination as well as when we tell the story to ourselves through reading. The author's responsibility is to trigger the imagination in the reader, which Sandoz accomplishes well, and the rest is up to you. I'll wager that once you are well into these pages you will surely hear the "whoops" and "hollers" of the cowboys, the rushing torrent of hundreds of hoofs of cattle. You'll suffer the myriad physical and mental pains of the trail, feel the elation of finally reaching the markets, and come to realize the chances these people took with their lives, the fortunes they made and lost, always remembering that we are literally the great-great-grandchildren of these pioneers of the American West. This is our story too.

  The Cattlemen vividly chronicles a century of American his-tory, from the first cattle brought to the Great Plains, the early cattle drives, encounters with the Indian tribes of the plains, the land and cattle companies of the 1880s (financed not just by the Yankee dollar but also by Pounds Sterling from Scotland and England), on to 1955, when Omaha became the world's largest livestock market and meatpacking center, with Nebraska the leading beef state of the Union.

  When I arrived in Nebraska in 1955, I was seeing the place for the very first time. My first television assignment was to produce a weekly series with the Nebraska State Historical Society called Yesterday in Nebraska. James C. Olson, director of the Society, was often on the program, and one evening I asked him what book or books I should read to better understand this place. His response was immediate: "Read Old Jules, Mari Sandoz's account of homesteading in Nebraska, and after that read Crazy Horse, her remarkable achievement in capturing Indian culture on the plains. She got it right." His comments embarked me on a major literary adventure exploring the Sandoz canon.

  One afternoon as we were walking past Love Library on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus, Sandoz paused and, looking at the building, said, "My books are my children." She invested her life in her writing, and she left us a magnificent legacy of exciting storytelling, which, as she had hoped, helps us understand who we are.

  To the old-time hard-bitten, hard-driven

  cowmen, the greatest believers in next

  year, and the year after that—

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  BOOK I. THE RELUCTANT IMMIGRANT

  CHAPTER

  1. First Cow upon the Plains

  2. Noble Ancestry

  3. The Cow Walks Again

  BOOK II. INDIVIDUAL RANCH SPREADS

  1. Some Dedicated Men

  2. Pulling for New Grass

  3. The Moving Trails

  4. The Indian Summer of Old Dodge

  5. Deepening Dedication

  BOOK III. ORGANIZATIONS, CORPORATIONS, AND BUGGY BOSSES

  1. Disciples under the Oak and the Cottonwood

  2. The Bonanza

  3. The Big Die-Ups

  4. The National Trail

  5. Of the Giants—The XIT

  BOOK IV. PRIVATE EMPIRE

  1. The Threat

  2. Stetsoned Crusaders

  3. Scattered to the Winds

  4. Cow Horse and Betting Blood

  5. Kings of the Fenced Range

  BOOK V. BEEF FACTORIES AND FESTIVALS

  1. New Breed—

  2. Ritual and Restoration

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT for assistance is due: the Nebraska State Historical Society for almost thirty years of gracious help, from Myrtle D. Berry and Donald F. Danker in more recent years; Ina Aulls, the Western History Division, Denver Public Library; the Colorado State Historical Society; Lola M. Homsher, Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department; Gene M. Gressley, Library, University of Wyoming; Illerna Friend, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas; C. Boone McClure and the Jack Hughes' of the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum; Oklahoma Historical Society; Kansas State Historical Society; War Records and Indian Records, National Archives; American History Room, and Map and Newspaper Divisions, New York Public Library; Sylvester Vigilante, New York Historical Society; Senator D. J. Cole and Pat Hooper, Nebraska; J. C. Eaton, Denbigh, North Dakota, and many, many others, including my five brothers and sisters running cattle in the sandhills of Nebraska. They and many others keep me aware of the problems facing the rancher with no oil wells, no bank stock, just cattle.

  M. S.

  FOREWORD

  On all the Great Plains, reaching like a thumb down from Canada deep into the country of the Rio Grande, the one enduring figure has been the man who works with cattle. He came with the first Spanish cows, saw them multiply thick as the buffaloes on the prairie. He watched the Stone Age Indian turn into a mounted rifleman, the hide hunters sweep the buffalo away, and the starving Indians finally depart for the reservations. He had to see the newly freed range vanish before the homesteader, perhaps permanently, at least to be paid for in hard cash.

  The first rancher I can remember was a tall man riding past our home on the upper Niobrara River. He sat his saddle so the fringe of his gauntlets barely stirred in the long easy trot, his horse a fine star-faced, well-coupled black, spirited but not shying from the small girl who ran from her grandmother's grasp to see. That rancher, I know now, was not very different from the old Texas cowmen of the 1850's, not in saddle, use of rope, or in the slant of his eye over the range— not even very different in these things from the early vaquero. Although my first glimpse of the rancher was back in the homestead period, when much of the higher Plains region was still free grass, government land, he could be riding through my home region today, with the same saddle and coiled rope. Even if he was in a range jeep or a light plane his eye would still slant in the same way over the grass and the stock.

  Some people consider our rancher, next to the farmer (without whom we would all starve), as the most important man of our meat-rich nation. Many who are concerned with the problems of mankind upon the earth point to the population explosions in the low-protein regions, and during such meat-hungry times as wars. It is true that in the buffalo days the Plains Indian had little difficulty spacing his children so no woman was encumbered by more than one child too young to flee on his own legs from an enemy attack or a buffalo stampede. Now, on a poor man's starchy diet, our Indian population seems to be increasing at something like the appalling rate of the protein-starved peoples of Asia.

  But to most of the world the cattleman and his cowboys, goo
d and bad, are not known for the significance of their beef production. Instead they are the dramatic, the romantic figures of a West, a Wild West that is largely imaginary. To some of the rest of us, however, the rancher is the encompassing, the continuous and enduring symbol of modern man on the Great Plains. His number has grown vast and varied through the long years since the first Spanish cows trailed their dust eastward from the Pecos, and his stories have become as numerous as the Longhorns that burgeoned in the new land. I have tried, through a few selected individuals and incidents, to show something of the nature and the contrasts, something of the conflicts and the achievements of the cattlemen as a whole. I have tried to take the reader to a high ridge, where all but the nearest arroyos and canyons are hidden, where the cactus and the sage blend into the greening sweep of prairie that reaches far into the hazy horizon of May.

  MARI SANDOZ

  BOOK I

  THE RELUCTANT IMMIGRANT

  CHAPTER I

  FIRST COW UPON

  THE PLAINS