The Mammoth Book of the West (20 page)

Among the songs the cowboys crooned were “Cotton-Eye Joe”, “Dinah Had a Wooden Leg”, “Saddle Ole Spike”, and “Sally Gooden”. One of the most beautiful was “The Night Herding Song”:

Oh, slow up dogies, quit moving around,

You have wandered and trampled all over the ground;

Oh, graze along dogies and feed kinda slow,

And don’t forever be on the go.

Move slow, little dogies, move slow,

Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

Oh say, little dogies, when you goin’ to lay down,

And give up this driftin’ and rovin’ around?

My horse is leg-weary and I’m awfully tired,

But if you get away, I’m sure to be fired.

Lay down, little dogies, lay down,

Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

Oh, lay still, dogies, since you have laid down,

Stretch away out on the big open ground;

Snore loud, little dogies, and drown the wild sounds,

That’ll go away when the day rolls around.

Lay still, little dogies, lay still,

Hi-o, hi-o, hi-o.

The crooning was not always successful. At night the
steers, their vision limited by darkness, were easily “boogered”. Stampedes were an ever-present menace. Thunder and lightning were amongst the most common causes. The only way to stop “running beeves” was for the riders to gallop alongside the front and side of the herd and turn the leading animals into the centre, creating a circular mill. At night this was a dangerous, terrifying task made strangely eerie by the blue flames which flickered at the tips of the steers’ horns – the result of friction from their jostling bodies. (The same friction also generated a heat that could blister the skin on the face of a cowboy who got too close.) Often it was impossible to turn a stampeding herd. A witness to a stampede in Idaho in 1889 reported the grisly – and typical – result. The stampede killed 341 cattle, two horses, and one cowboy, the latter “literally mangled to sausage meat”. Steers and men were scattered over a huge area by such runs. Reassembling the herd and crew was a laborious and costly business, made worse by the knowledge that a herd which had stampeded once was likely to be “spoiled” and do it again. The depressing and ruinous effect of constant stampedes was caught by George Duffield in his diary of a drive to Iowa in 1866.

May 1. Big Stampede. Lost 200 head of Cattle.

May 2. Spent the day hunting & found but 25 Head. It has been Raining for three days. These are dark days for me.

May 3. Day spent in hunting Cattle. Found 23. Hard rain and wind. Lots of trouble.

After five more days rounding up the scattered beeves, Duffield started on the trail once more. After only a week of progress, the herd scattered again:

May 15 . . . Cattle all left us & in morning not one Beef to be seen.

May 16. Hunt Beeves is the word – all Hands discouraged & are determined to go. 200 Beeves out & nothing to eat.

May 17. No breakfast. Pack & off is the order. All hands gave the Brazos one good harty damn & started for Buchanan.

Eventually, Duffield reached the Red River at the end of May. But no sooner was he out of Texas than the herd “spooked”:

June 1: Stampede last night among 6 droves & a general mix up and loss of Beeves. Hunt Cattle again. Men all tired & want to leave.

June 2. Hard rain and wind Storm. Beeves ran & I had to be on Horse back all Night. Awful night. Men still lost. Quit the Beeves & go to Hunting men is the word – 4 P.M. Found our men with Indian guide & 195 Beeves 14 Miles from camp. Almost starved not having had a bite to eat for 60 hours. Got to camp about 12M.
Tired
.

And so Duffield’s drive continued, with one stampede after another, all the way to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). By the time he arrived he had only 500 of the thousand steers with which he had started off.

He had also lost a man to the waters of the Brazos. After stampedes, the most feared hazard of a trail drive was crossing rivers. The Brazos, Red, Trinity, Washita, Canadian, Cimarron and Arkansas all flowed east across the path of the herd. If there was no ford, and the water was deep, the cattle had to be swum over. In spring, or after heavy rain, the rivers roiled and spat. It was considered good practice to approach the water at a brisk pace,
“crowding” the cattle, letting them build up a momentum which would carry them into the water. One seasoned drover, Colonel Andy Syder, had two “swimming steers” which were more or less trained to take the plunge, the herd instinct causing the rest to follow.

Even when the cattle started in the water, many things could go wrong. The steers were as easily “spooked” in the water as they were on land. An unusual wave, a floating branch, or a whirlpool could make the leaders stop swimming to the opposite bank and attempt to turn back. Hundreds of animals would then mill around, become exhausted and drift downstream to their deaths. To save the cattle, the cowboys had to swim their horses into the mêlée, and with blows and kicks get the Longhorns swimming straight. Many cowboys drowned in such situations. Their fear of river crossings was all the greater in that few of them could swim.

Stampedes and river crossings did not exhaust the dangers of a drive. Horses could step into gopher holes and throw their riders. A foot caught in a stirrup could mean a fatal drag across the ground. Lightning on the open prairie was a perennial peril. A Texan cowboy by the name of A. B. Withers was riding with his brother and a rancher called Gus Johnson when lightning struck: “It set Johnson’s undershirt on fire and his gold shirt stud, which was set with a diamond, was melted and the diamond never found. His hat was torn to pieces . . .” The bolt killed Johnson, and also blinded Withers’ brother in one eye. In camp, cowboys took off their spurs, pistol and any other metal objects, put them in a pile, and slept well away from them.

Although drives were rarely attacked by Indians, lone outriders were sometimes assaulted or the herd stampeded. The “Indian menace” faced by the drives tended to be either the toll the Indians demanded for passage over
their grounds or their begging for food. Andy Adams was witness to one such encounter:

We were following the regular trail, which had been slightly used for a year or two, though none of our outfit had ever been over it, when late on the third afternoon, about forty miles out from Doan’s about a hundred mounted bucks and squaws sighted our herd and crossed the North Fork from their encampment. They did not ride direct to the herd, but came into the trail nearly a mile above the cattle, so it was some little time from our first sighting them before we met. We did not check the herd or turn out of the trail, but when the lead came within a few hundred yards of the Indians, one buck, evidently the chief of the band, rode forward a few rods and held up one hand, as if commanding a halt. At the sight of this gaudily bedecked apparition, the cattle turned out of the trail, and Flood and I rode up to the chief, extending our hands in friendly greeting. The chief could not speak a word of English, but made signs with his hands; when I turned loose on him in Spanish, however, he instantly turned his horse and signed back to his band. Two young bucks rode forward and greeted Flood and myself in good Spanish.

On thus opening up an intelligible conversation, I called Fox Quarternight, who spoke Spanish, and he rode up from his position of third man in the swing and joined in the council. The two young Indians through whom we carried on the conversation were Apaches, no doubt renegades of that tribe, and while we understood each other in Spanish, they spoke in a heavy guttural peculiar to the Indian. Flood opened the powwow by demanding to know the meaning of this visit. When the question had been properly interpreted to the chief, the latter dropped his blanket from his shoulders and dismounted from his horse. He was a fine specimen of the Plains Indian, fully six feet
in height, perfectly proportioned, and in years well past middle life. He looked every inch a chief, and was a natural born orator. There was a certain easy grace to his gestures, only to be seen in people who use the sign language, and often when he was speaking to the Apache interpreters, I could anticipate his requests before they were translated to us, although I did not know a word of Comanche.

Before the powwow had progressed far it was evident that begging was its object. In his prelude, the chief laid claim to all the country in sight as the hunting grounds of the Comanche tribe, – an intimation that we were intruders. He spoke of the great slaughter of the buffalo by the white hide-hunters, and the consequent hunger and poverty amongst his people. He dwelt on the fact that he had ever counseled peace with the whites, until now his band numbered but a few squaws and papooses, the younger men having deserted him for other chiefs of the tribe who advocated war on the palefaces. When he had fully stated his position, he offered to allow us to pass through his country in consideration of ten beeves. On receiving this proposition, all of us dismounted, including the two Apaches, the latter seating themselves in their own fashion, while we whites lounged on the ground in truly American laziness, rolling cigarettes. In dealing with people who know not the value of time, the civilized man is taken at a disadvantage, and unless he can show an equal composure in wasting time, results will be against him. Flood had had years of experience in dealing with Mexicans in the land of
mañana
, where all maxims regarding the value of time are religiously discarded. So in dealing with this Indian chief he showed no desire to hasten matters, and carefully avoided all reference to the demand for beeves.

His first question, instead, was to know the distance to
Fort Sill and Fort Elliot. The next was how many days it would take for cavalry to reach him. He then had us narrate the fact that when the first herd of cattle passed through the country less than a month before some bad Indians had shown a very unfriendly spirit. They had taken many of the cattle and had killed and eaten them, and now the great white man’s chief at Washington was very much displeased. If another single ox were taken and killed by bad Indians, he would send his soldiers from the forts to protect the cattle, even though the owners drove the herds through the reservation of the Indians – over the grass where their ponies grazed. He had us inform the chief that our entire herd was intended by the great white man’s chief at Washington as a present to the Blackfeet Indians who lived in Montana, because they were good Indians, and welcomed priests and teachers amongst them to teach them the ways of the white man. At our foreman’s request we then informed the chief that he was under no obligation to give him even a single beef for any privilege of passing through his country, but as the squaws and little papooses were hungry, he would give him two beeves.

The old chief seemed not the least disconcerted, but begged for five beeves, as many of the squaws were in the encampment across the North Fork, those present being not quite half of his village. It was now getting late in the day and the band seemed to be getting tired of the parleying, a number of squaws having already set out on their return to the village. After some further talk, Flood agreed to add another beef, on condition they be taken to the encampment before being killed. This was accepted, and at once the entire band set up a chattering in view of the coming feast. The cattle had in the mean time grazed off nearly a mile, the outfit, however, holding them under a close herd during the powwowing. All the bucks in the band, numbering about forty, now joined us, and we rode
away to the herd. I noticed, by the way, that quite a number of the younger braves had arms, and no doubt they would have made a display of force had Flood’s diplomacy been of a more warlike character.

The drive to the Kansas railheads took three months, the drive to Montana or Dakota six months. Most of the men, horses and cattle endured. And then, after all the Indians, stampedes, rain, choking alkali dust, heat, 14-hour days in the saddle, mosquitoes, rustlers and short rations, it was the end of the drive. And time to go to town.

“EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA”

When a drive reached its destination, the cowboys were customarily given their wages. With money jingling in their pockets they mounted their ponies and galloped to the excitements of the trail town, desperate to forget the back-breaking monotony and dangers of the drive. They wanted to eat, drink, gamble and dance with painted women – to “hell around”.

The names of the towns into which they rode were Abilene, Ellsworth, Caldwell, Wichita, Newton, Hays, Dodge, Miles City, Cheyenne, and Ogallala. What they were called or where they were hardly mattered. To the cowboy rushing in on his pony, firing his pistol in the air – “just to raise a little excitement and let people know he is in town,” as the Dodge City
Times
put it – cow towns were virtually identical to each other: a collection of shabby false-fronted buildings strung out along a long dirt street. They milled with people and dinned with the noise of cattle, carousing cowboys, and the constant sound of gunshots. “The firing of guns in and around town,” recalled
one resident of Newton, “was so continuous it reminded me of a Fourth of July celebration from daylight to midnight. There was shooting when I got up and when I went to bed.”

Although the citizens of cattle towns made their money out of cowpunchers, they tended not to like them or their ways. The Topeka
Daily Commonwealth
editorialized in 1871 that: “The Texas cattle herder is a character, the like of which can be found nowhere else on earth . . . He generally wears a revolver on each side of his person, which he will use with as little hesitation on a man as a wild animal. Such a character is dangerous and desperate, and each one had generally killed his man.” The fears of the townsfolk had some justification. Ellsworth, Kansas, had eight homicides during its first year as a cowtown; Dodge City had ten. Attempted homicides with guns were probably around three times these figures.