Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West

Christopher Knowlton, “Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West”  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, 353 pp.

Pay attention to dates: American men and boys tend to identify with the manliness of the West when the range was open, no fences.  They are not aware that the period only lasted from about 1870 (first cattle drives) to the 1886-7 Big Die-Off (half the Western open-range cattle died in that winter storm).  However, this book will surely reinforce the manliness part, short as the period was: (Snowflakes need not apply).  

“The job of a cowboy, whose career rarely lasted more than seven years, entailed an astonishing number of ways to get hurt or killed.  You could fall from your horse, you could be kicked in the head while roping a steer, you could be gored by a horn, you could drown while crossing a river, you could be caught in quicksand, you could be struck by lightning, you could be scalped by an Indian, you could be shot by a rustler or you could be involved in a barroom brawl.”  Albeit, not as dangerous as certain Chicago neighborhoods, but still challenging.  Getting killed even once is life-changing.

These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy.  (See my review on The Virginian, posted just before this entry).  Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.

My Notes:

Pg. 194f:  A cowboy was lucky to net a hundred dollars in wages (multiply by 23 to equate to today’s money) for participating in a four-month cattle drive, and twenty-five to forty dollars a month for his work on the range in the summer.  He might pride himself on his horsemanship and his skills with a lariat and consider himself a tier above most other western workingmen, but in reality he was paid poorly to do an unglamorous job.  The cowboy was an overworked, underpaid hireling, almost as homeless and dispossessed as a modern crop worker, and his fabled independence was chiefly the privilege of quitting his job in order to go looking for another just as bad.

Pg. xviiiff:  The Big Die-off of the 1886-7 winter ended one of the greatest speculative bubbles of the Gilded Age.  However, it is possible that no boom-bust cycle has had as lasting an impact on American society as the rise and fall of the cattle kingdom, and yet, oddly, this epic saga is largely forgotten today.  When the number of dead animals was finally tallied the losses totaled nearly a million head of cattle, 50 to 80 percent of the various herds across the northernmost ranges—the greatest loss of animal life in pastoral history.  Only the twenty years earlier extermination of the American bison can compare. (note: bison and buffalo are not synonyms—look it up!)

Pg. 7:  The tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad divided the bison population into two primary herds, one southern and the other northern.  The southern herd of some five million animals would disappear in a matter of four years, from 1872 through 1875.  Portions of the slightly smaller northern herd would survive until 1883.

Pg. 11:  The military on the frontier was a big contributor to the bison’s demise with its unwritten policy to deprive the Plains Indians of their most critical foodstuff—bison beef—thus ensuring their eventual dependence on the US government for food rations.  Historians still debate over how conscious and deliberate a plan this was, but there is no question that the military gave out free ammunition to hunters, and encouraged its own forces to engage in recreational hunting of bison. (By 1902 only two dozen bison remained.  From this surviving herd, the animals began a slow recovery.  Around 30,000 or so now roam public and private lands outside Yellowstone which has around 3,000).

Pg. 28:  At the peak of the cattle boom some forty thousand cowboys worked on the open range, a majority of them white southerners, many of them former Confederate cavalrymen.  By 1871 some 600,000 cattle were being driven up from Texas to the railroad railhead towns created just for their arrival.  The great migration of Texas Longhorns is the largest forced migration of animals in human history and by 1871 had begun in earnest.

Pg. 38:  The emerging cattle towns created a kind of stage set for exotic western activities, which eastern writers imaginatively described for their readers.  It was here that the new saloons threw open their bat-wing doors to gamblers and ‘soiled dove’ prostitutes.  It was here on the dirt streets that shootouts would take place, at least in the writer’s imaginations if not in fact.

Pg. 58:  Each cattle town, like any new business, was vulnerable to competition.  Another town could, and often did, spring up, farther down the tracks and closer to Texas, to compete with it.  Consequently, Abilene’s heyday lasted only four years.    Dodge City, the largest and the last of these towns, looked for a time as though it might survive much longer.  Ultimately, forces other than competition caused its downfall.

Pg. 64:  The speed of global transport leapt forward in 1869 with the completion of the US transcontinental railroad and the Suez Canal.

Pg. 77:  Evidence of the growing cattle bubble is contained in an article in the Colorado Live Stock Record: ‘Cattle is one of those investments men cannot pay too much for, since, if left alone, they will multiply, replenish and grow out of a bad bargain.”  (This reminds me of a conversation I had with my grandfather when I was about 17 years old, a man who had homesteaded in the Dakota's.  "We buy a couple of pigs, breed them, each sow has nine piglets...you do the math.")

Pg. 96:  Celebrated figures began to invest in western ranches.  They included the railroad and copper magnate William Rockefeller, brother of John D.; William I. Vanderbilt, a son of the Commodore; Marshall Field, who founded the eponymous Chicago department store; Oliver Ames, president of the Union Pacific
Railroad; C.W. Post, the breakfast-cereal magnate; and William C. Whitney.  Additionally, in London, investors in the cattle business read like a Who’s Who.  But just as herding and trail-driving cattle was a young man’s work, it was, for the most part, the sons and heirs of the rich who wound up owning or managing most of the new cattle ranches. 

Pg. 103:  The Chicago stockyards completed their consolidation in Dec. 1865, just in time for the first Texas cattle herds.  This new stockyard occupied 320 acres of former marshland south of Chicago. They could accommodate massive numbers of animals: 21,000 head of cattle, 75,000 hogs, and 22,000 sheep.  By the turn of the twentieth century, the site would process 82 percent of the meat consumed in the country, slaughtering some nine million animals annually.

Pg. 107:  The meatpacking firms came to be dominated by five giant national Beef Trusts.  These five—Swift, Armour, Morris, Cudahy, and S and S—came to employ more workers than any other industry in the country until the auto industry overtook them early in the twentieth century.  By the late 1860s, the value of meat-animal production amounted to $1.4 billion, or 20 percent of the country’s $17 billion gross domestic product.  Add in the meat-packing component and you exceeded 22 percent of the GDP, making meat—primarily beef, pork, and lamb—by far the largest industry in the US at the time. The industry would double in size by 1900, but its percentage of the GDP would shrink to 16.6 percent, a testament to how rapidly other components of the industrializing economy were growing.

Pg. 136ff:  By 1884 over one hundred companies engaged in the manufacture of barbed wire, some thirteen of those in the vicinity of DeKalb, IL.  The repercussions of barbed wire could hardly have been more far-reaching, not just for the future husbandry of cattle but for the fate of the cowboy as well.  In 1876 2.8 million pounds were produced; by 1880 it was 80.5 million pounds.  (In 1950 some 482 million pounds were produced).  The barbed wire had other sweeping effects on the history and culture of the open range.  It removed forever any chance of widespread rehabilitation of the bison herds or the numerous Plains Indian tribes who had once depended on them for their livelihood.  The open range could now be divvied up into ranches and homesteads. 

Pg. 178:  Teddy Roosevelt doubled the number of national parks from five to ten.  He would create eighteen national monuments and conserve an astonishing 230 million acres of wilderness preserves and protected areas.  Roosevelt’s conservation achievements stand out as the single greatest legacy of the open-range cattle era.

Pg. 181:  The year 1884 would mark the apex of the cattle boom.  By then some thirteen million cattle grazed over an area comparable in size to all of Western Europe.  The industry appeared to be entering upon a golden age of still greater prosperity and wealth but was, in fact, a speculative bubble.

Pg. 310:  The Johnson County War divides the Old West’s open-range era of the trail drive, the cowboy, and the giant cattle ranch from the New West’s world of the farmer, the homesteader, and the small-time rancher.  Doomed by false assumptions, by barbed wire, and by poorly conceived land laws and widespread ranch mismanagement, the cattle industry retrenched and then slowly began to restructure and rebuild.  (Grazing on public lands continues to this day, but small ranches have replaced the massive.)

Pg. 311:  Frederick Jackson Turner in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” argued that the frontier had now closed and, with it, the first chapter in American history.  More important, the frontier, and not our country’s European origins, best defined the US—its national character and its commitment to democracy.