Today's Reading
There was a great demand for cattle, and Texas ranches were happy to meet it. Tens of thousands of livestock were sent by trail and rail to Wyoming, Utah, and Montana. After fattening up sufficiently on the sweet grasses, the "beeves" were pushed into railroad cars and shipped east for slaughter. There would soon be so many cattle barons that they would routinely fight over grazing land and fresh water. And like the dwindling Indian tribes had done with ponies, the ranch owners would steal stock from each other. The size of the herds bestowed wealth and power. And that is where cowboys came in.
The occupation was originally spelled "cow-boy." The initially derisive name referred to someone who tended cattle while on horseback and was derived from the Spanish vaquero, with vaca meaning "cow." One might think the American West created the cowboy, but the word first appeared in print in 1725, written by Jonathan Swift, the Irish essayist and author best known for Gulliver's Travels. Cowboy was also used in the early 1800s in Great Britain to describe the youngsters who managed cattle belonging to their families or the community.
In the United States, cowboy was being used as early as 1849, and two years later, there was a reference in print to a "cowhand." It took almost thirty years for another, similar name to be used—cowpoke. It referred specifically to the men who used long poles to persuade cows to get up into railroad cars. Other variations of the occupation were cowpuncher—mostly in Texas—and buckaroo.
As the ranches proliferated in Wyoming and its adjacent territories in the 1870s and 1880s and the population of cattle swelled, more and more cowboys were needed. There was no cowboy academy, of course, and many who filled in the ranks were raw easterners seeking adventure.2 The ones who survived did so against a lot of odds—extremes in weather, resentful fellow cowboys, stampedes, and many lonely nights—and the lifestyle offered little chance to improve oneself.
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2 For a pretty realistic (for Hollywood) portrayal, watch the 1958 feature film that is simply titled 'Cowboy,' with Glenn Ford as the leather-tough trail boss and Jack Lemmon as the greenhorn.
"Almost as nomadic as Indians, they moved from one big outfit to another as their fancy dictated, unhampered by family," writes Charles Kelly in his indispensable The Outlaw Trail, first published in 1938. "If some misguided cowpuncher with a few months' pay in his pocket planned to start a ranch of his own on a small scale, he found his efforts violently opposed by the large ranch owners, who had claimed all public domain, under the theory that it had been created and reserved for their special benefit."
According to Kelly, "The cowboy-outlaw era began about 1875, reached its climax in 1897, and ended about 1905."
While in the employ of the ranch owners, cowboys routinely collected and branded " mavericks"—loose cattle that had wandered off from their owners. This was a sort of rustling because, with very few cattle being born free, they had to belong to someone. And at times, the mavericks already had brands on them, ones that were altered after the beasts drifted onto the property of their new owner. As long as this did not become blatant theft, it was tolerated, and the numbers pretty much evened themselves out anyway.
But the equation began to change with the increasing number of cattle and the rising number of cowboys who wanted to make money for themselves, more than or in place of the wages doled out by the large landowners. As Kelly notes, "From branding mavericks to genuine rustling was but a short and easy step. A generation of cattle thieves sprang up within a very short time, the like of which was never seen before [and] the largest gang of outlaws the West ever saw was organized in the Utah-Wyoming-Colorado section."
It could be difficult for the big ranchers to keep the rustling to an acceptable level. Many of the sworn lawmen in the region were poorly paid part-timers with limited jurisdictions and little motivation to risk their lives to protect the stuffed pockets of high-handed ranch owners. In turn, an owner could not completely rely on his own employees to protect the ranch's interest because as many as half of them, or more, could be rustlers themselves.
And so, thousands of cattle (and some horses) were being stolen from ranches—a dozen here or there or sometimes a hundred or more. Early on, though, the thieves did not have what the owners did, which was a place to keep the cattle that offered enough food and water until they could be sold or shipped. A big bonus would be if the location
was impervious to posses.
When one such place was found, the first "bandit heaven" was born.
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