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Trail Herd Watering, photochrom by Detroit
Publishing Co., 1905.
For discussion of the Detroit Publishing Company and its "photochrom" process, see
Yellowstone. Many of the Detroit Publishing photographs are
attributed to its manager, William Henry Jackson. Whether the photos were
actually taken by him is questionable. Note the remuda in the right background. For
discussion of remuda see Cattle III.
Ranching in Wyoming started in the 1850's but received its real impetus as a result of the end of the Civil
War and the coming of the railroad. Cattle valued at $5.00 a head in Texas would bring ten fold that amount at
a railhead. Thus, there began the cattle drives to railheads in Kansas and to
Cheyenne. As explained by Andy Adams (1859-1935) in the Preface to his 1895 work, The Outlet:
At the close of the civil war the need for a market for the
surplus cattle of Texas was as urgent as it was general. There
had been numerous experiments in seeking an outlet, and there is
authority for the statement that in 1857 Texas cattle were driven
to Illinois. Eleven years later forty thousand head were sent to
the mouth of Red River in Louisiana, shipped by boat to Cairo,
Illinois, and thence inland by rail. Fever resulted, and the
experiment was never repeated. To the west of Texas stretched a
forbidding desert, while on the other hand, nearly every drive to
Louisiana resulted in financial disaster to the drover. The
republic of Mexico, on the south, afforded no relief, as it was
likewise overrun with a surplus of its own breeding. Immediately
before and just after the war, a slight trade had sprung up in
cattle between eastern points on Red River and Baxter Springs, in
the southeast corner of Kansas. The route was perfectly feasible,
being short and entirely within the reservations of the Choctaws
and Cherokees, civilized Indians. This was the only route to the
north; for farther to the westward was the home of the buffalo
and the unconquered, nomadic tribes. A writer on that day, Mr.
Emerson Hough, an acceptable authority, says: "The civil war
stopped almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the
close of that war found the vast grazing lands of Texas fairly
covered with millions of cattle which had no actual or
determinate value. They were sorted and branded and herded after
a fashion, but neither they nor their increase could be converted
into anything but more cattle. The demand for a market became
imperative."
Cattle Trail, Harper's Weekly, 1867
This was the situation at the close of the '50's and meanwhile
there had been no cessation in trying to find an outlet for the
constantly increasing herds. Civilization was sweeping westward
by leaps and bounds, and during the latter part of the '60's and
early '70's, a market for a very small percentage of the surplus
was established at Abilene, Ellsworth, and Wichita, being
confined almost exclusively to the state of Kansas. But this
outlet, slight as it was, developed the fact that the
transplanted Texas steer, after a winter in the north, took on
flesh like a native, and by being double-wintered became a
marketable beef. It should be understood in this connection that
Texas, owing to climatic conditions, did not mature an animal
into marketable form, ready for the butcher's block. Yet it was
an exceptional country for breeding, the percentage of increase
in good years reaching the phenomenal figures of ninety-five
calves to the hundred cows. At this time all eyes were turned to
the new Northwest, which was then looked upon as the country that
would at last afford the proper market. Railroads were pushing
into the domain of the buffalo and Indian; the rush of emigration
was westward, and the Texan was clamoring for an outlet for his
cattle. It was written in the stars that the Indian and buffalo
would have to stand aside.
 Portion of Trail Herd to Wyoming, Oil on canvas,
W. H. D. Koerner, 1923
Philanthropists may deplore the destruction of the American
bison, yet it was inevitable. Possibly it is not commonly known
that the general government had under consideration the sending
of its own troops to destroy the buffalo. Yet it is a fact, for
the army in the West fully realized the futility of subjugating
the Indians while they could draw subsistence from the bison. The
well-mounted aborigines hung on the flanks of the great buffalo
herds, migrating with them, spurning all treaty obligations, and
when opportunity offered murdering the advance guard of
civilization with the fiendish atrocity of carnivorous animals.
But while the government hesitated, the hide-hunters and the
railroads solved the problem, and the Indian's base of supplies
was destroyed.
Then began the great exodus of Texas cattle. The red men were
easily confined on reservations, and the vacated country in the
Northwest became cattle ranges. The government was in the market
for large quantities of beef with which to feed its army and
Indian wards. The maximum year's drive was reached in 1884, when
nearly eight hundred thousand cattle, in something over three
hundred herds, bound for the new Northwest, crossed Red River,
the northern boundary of Texas. Some slight idea of this exodus
can be gained when one considers that in the above year about
four thousand men and over thirty thousand horses were required
on the trail, while the value of the drive ran into millions. The
history of the world can show no pastoral movement in comparison.
The Northwest had furnished the market--the outlet for Texas.
Andy Adams worked as a cowboy for ten years in Texas, including eight years on
the trail prior to 1890. Subsequently, he became a writer of western fiction.
Although fiction, his works embody his experiences on the trail and are regarded today
as providing an accurate depiction of life on the trail.
Trail Camp, undated. Site believed to be
near Cash Creek, Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma).
But the first of the great drives was not to a railhead in Kansas, but was the epic drive by Nelson Story (1838-1926) to Montana. Story, a former
freighter on the Great Plains, made a fortune mining for gold in Montana. He realized that in the
mining camps, there was a pent up demand for beef. Thus, in 1866, he proceeded to Texas and purchased over a 1,000 head of
longhorns. With some 27 drovers and bullwhackers he proceeded northward. In Kansas, the drive was forced
westward by Jayhawkers. At Fort Laramie, Story resisted the Army's efforts to buy the stock on the cheap.
Instead, buying additionally arms from the fort sutler, Story continued along the "Bloody Bozeman."
Near Fort Reno, the herd was attacked by Sioux who stole a portion of the herd and stampeded the
rest. After recovery of the stampeded cattle, Story and his men then went after the stolen herd. Story later
recalled that it was the first time he ever killed an Indian. But by the end of the night, no
Indians were left to complain. At Fort Phil Kearny, because of the Indian peril, the
Army refused to allow the herd to continue, but at the same time insisted that the cow camp be
established away from the fort's protection some three miles distant. It
should not, therefore, have been a surprise for Col. Carrington to awaken
one morning to find that
Story, his men, and cattle had decamped during the dark of the night. Thus, was established the cattle industry in
Montana.
Although the cattle drives of the early 1870's were to railheads in Kansas, with the solution to the Indian problem
in 1877, Northern Wyoming and Eastern and Central Montana were opened to stock growing. It was discovered
that cattle fattened quickly on the grasslands of the Northern Plains. Thus, cattle were driven north from Texas to Wyoming and
Montana. In 1883, it was estimated that 260,000 head were driven north.
A typical herd consisted of about 2,000 head with a trail
boss and a dozen men, although some herds of up to 15,000 were driven north with much bigger crews. Life on the trail was hard. One observed:
"They had very little grub and they usually run out of that and lived on straight beef, they had only three or four
horses to the man, mostly wth sore backs, . . .they had no tents, no tarps, and damn few slickers.
They never kicked, because those boys was raised under just the same conditions as there was
on the trail--corn meal and bacon for grub, dirt floors in the houses, and
no luxuries."
Actually, it was rare to get "straight beef" on the trail, particularly on drives
conducted by "contract drovers" who were driving cattle owned by someone else. On the trail
there was no way of preserving beef and, thus, the menu was limited to items which
would keep, i. e. beans, biscuits and coffee, or the occasional "slow elk," a cow belonging to
another outfit. In the latter instance everything was used, giving rise to a
trail delicacy, "S.O.B. stew," made of tallow, tongue, liver, sweet breads, brains, marrow gut, and
anything else except hoofs, horn and hide.
Dinner Time on Roundup, Detroit Publishing Co., 1905
The above scene is more likely on a roundup rather than on a trail drive. On the
trail it would have been rare for the cook to have time to put up the canopy.
The nature of the food was noted by James Peake Royston, a cowboy who rode on
a cattle drive for the Searight Cattle Company from Oregon, discussed below:
"When those cattle reached Boise City, Idaho, our mess wagon had to take on
a fresh supply of grub. The order was nine sacks of kidney
beans - eleven hundred and twenty five pounds - a thousand pounds
of sugar, coffee and dried fruits in proportion. It just occurred
to me that if these one hundred punchers, horse wranglers, night hawks,
silk tie foremen got their proportional part of those beans and sugar
there would be some sweet beans on the trail to Wyoming."
"Slow elk" were not always eaten. A bonus might be given for strays. William Owens,
who started as a cowboy in 1875 when he was orphaned at age 12, described a drive from
Texas to Montana:
"The first and only real drive I made was with Turk Beall. We drove the herd
from Texas to the section where Butte. Mont. is now located. We started out
with 1,200 head and had the usual sorefoot trouble with critters that had
to be dropped, had occasional stampedes that caused more or less loss, but
with the usual precentage of losses deducted, we still arrived with a herd
of 2,400 critters.
"Our orders were to pick up two strays for every one we lost in a stampede
and put the iron on the animals. We traveled through cattle country, more
or less, the whole distance and strays kept getting into our herd.
Us waddies were paid $1. as a bonus for each critter that we hold which
strayed into the herd.
"When the weather was pretty an everything going fair, so that a couple
waddies could take a little run off to look over the surrounding country,
we would do so. While looking over the country, if by chance, we run onto
good looking critters, which appeared lonesome and looking for company, we
would give these critters an invitation to join our herd and show the
animals which way to go.
"There was a bunch of 14 waddies on the drive and when the settlement was
made at the finish of the trip we divided $1,500 of bonus money.
[Writer's note: "Waddie" originally referred to a rustler. Later it meant a cowboy who
drifted from outfit to outfit. A bonus of $1,500 meant that some 1,500 strays were picked
up on the drive. Thus, Owens' math of starting out with 1,200 and arriving in Montana
with 2,400 head is fairly accurate. Such depredations are regarded by many as
a cause of the Johnson County War.]
Wyoming Trail Herd, 1880's. Photo by C. D. Kirkland
Another cowboy, John J. Baker, also noted the practice of picking up strays along the
drive. He commented that on a drive to Montana the contract drovers
"paid their waddies a bonus of 50 cents for each maverick found and branded. The 50
cent bonus caused many a good waddie to have eye trouble and they could not see the
brand on the critters that the mavericks were running with or know the range they were on."
Andy Adams described on incident where the boredom with the food was relieved.
After crossing the Niobrara, the crews from several wagons stopped to pick raspberries.
the cook from one wagon baked in a dutch oven individual pies for all of
the men.
The food at the home ranch might, however, be better. Louis Newman who signed on with
the Flying Circle Ranch on Thunder Creek as a wrangler at age 14 described the food:
Bob Burns came to the ranch from the East, where he had learned the trade and he had cooked in a number of
the leading Eastern hotels. Therefore, our food was well cooked and we
had a good varity of everything but the meat. Beef was our main meat
food with some bacon occasionally. However, the beef was from prime
yearlings and Burns cooked it in many different forms, so we didn't become
tired of the meat. Our vegetables were the canned goods. The bread
and pastery were made by the cooks and those items were well made.
In fact, out meals were equal to those served by the general run of
first class hotels.
Initially, the cattle trails ran
north to railheads in Kansas, but, as the eastern plains were taken over by farmers and
barbed wire and the scourge of Texas fever, the trails moved westward. The Texas Trail was
the last of the great trails, with the last drives in the 1890's.
Ogallala, Nebraska, undated
The Texas Trail, originally blazed by John Lytle in 1874, was not a
clearly defined road or path, in the sense, say, of I-25. Sometimes it would
be over twenty miles wide, running from Red River northward, with various branches, all
ultimately leading to Ogallala, in the words of Andy Adams, the
"Gomorrah" of the cattle trails. Indeed, Ogallala was so bad that
at least one cattle company which on drives would allow its boys the freedom of
Dodge City, declared it off limits, thus giving the town the reputation of being
"too tough for Texans." Indeed, the owner of one hotel told an eastern
visitor that there was only one woman in town, the hotel owner's wife, all the others
were "ladies." The "ladies" would usually be brought in from Omaha for the "season."
Wyoming Stockgrower, Edgar Beecher Bronson, trailed 1500 cattle to
Ogallala in 1882 and in his 1908 Reminiscenses of a Ranchman described the town at the height of the
season:
A wonderful sight was the Platte Valley about
Ogallala in those days, for it was the northern
terminus of the great Texas trail of the late '
70s and early '80s, where trail-drivers brought
their herds to sell and northern ranchmen came to
bargain.
That day, far as the eye could see up, down, and
across the broad, level valley were cattle by the thousand—
thirty or forty thousand at least—a dozen or
more separate outfits, grazing in loose, open order
so near each other that, at a distance, the valley
appeared carpeted with a vast Persian rug of intricate
design and infinite variety of colours.
Approached nearer, where individual riders and
cattle began to take form, it was a topsy-turvy
scene I looked down upon.
Wyoming Trail Herd, 1880's. Photo by C. D. Kirkland
The town itself consisted of
The one store and the score of saloons, dance halls, and gambling joints that lined up south of
the railway track and formed the only street Ogallala could boast, were packed with wild and woolly,
long-haired and bearded, rent and dusty, lusting and
thirsty, red-sashed brush-splitters in from the trail
outfits for a frolic.
And every now and then a chorus of wild, shrill
yells and a fusillade of shots rent the air that would
make a tenderfoot think a battle-royal was on.
But there was nothing serious doing, then; it was
only cowboy frolic.
One of the principle saloons was the Cowboy's Rest. Inside
was
a rude pine " bar" on
the right invited the thirsty; on the left, noisy "
tin horns," whirring wheels, clicking faro " cases,"
and rattling chips lured the gamblers; while away
to the rear of the room stretched a hundred feet
or more of dance-hall, on each of whose rough
benches sat enthroned a temptress—hard of eye,
deep-lined of face, decked with cheap gauds, sad
wrecks of the sea of vice here lurching and tossing
for a time.
* * * *
The room was packed: a solid line of men and
women before the bar, every table the centre of a
crowding group of players, the dance-hall floor and
benches jam-full of a roystering, noisy throng.
At the moment all were happy and peace reigned.
But there was one obvious source of discord—
there were " not enough gals to go round"; not
enough, indeed, if those present had been multiplied
by ten, a situation certain to stir jealousies and
strife among a lot of wild nomads for whom this
was the first chance in four months to gaze into
a woman's eyes.
And while Bronson was standing in the corner having just been introduced to
a Miss De Puyster, Bill Thompson, brother of the infamous shootist Ben Thompson, popped in
the door and did a quick shot at proprietor, Jim Tucker. Tucker fell.
Thinking Tucker dead, Thompson turned to leave. But Tucker was not dead. Only three of his fingers
had been shot off. Tucker coming to, grabbed a shotgun, followed Thompson out the door, and
levelled the gun across the stump
of his maimed left hand, and emptied into Bill's
back, at about six paces, a trifle more No. 4 duck-
shot than his system could assimilate.
The festivities were only briefly interrupted. Bronson continued:
erhaps altogether ten minutes were
wasted on this incident and the time taken to tourniquet and
tie up Jim's wound and to pack Bill inside and
stow him in a corner behind the faro lookout's chair,
and then Jim's understudy called, " Pardners fo' th'
next dance! " the fiddlers bravely tackled but soon
got hopelessly beyond their depth in "The Blue
Danube," and dancing and frolic were resumed, with "Miss De Puyster"
still the belle of the ball.
From Ogallala the trails would split off. One followed the Platte to Fort Laramie and westwardly
to provide cattle for the Fort Washakie and Crow agencies in Wyoming. Another
crossed the Niabrara River and ultimatly connected to the Cheyenne River. From there it
headed northward to Powder River and up to Miles City.
An N Bar herd crossing Powder River, 1886, photo by
Laton Alton Huffman.
The N Bar was a brand owned by E. S. "Zeke" and Henry H. J. Newman's Niobrara
Land and Cattle Company. The company started in Texas and in 1878 trailed 10-15,000 head
to Nebraska. In 1882, the Company trailed 12,000 head to Powder River. The
Company failed as a result of the winter of 1886-1887.
Powder River has been described as being "a mile wide and an inch deep." Yet because of the
war cry of cowboys, picked up by American troops, "Powder River, Let 'er Buck," the river has a fame
well beyond its size. According to Lander cattleman, Edward J. Farlow (1861-1951), author of
Powder River, Let 'er Buck (Annals of Wyoming, Vol 11, No. 1, 1939) and Wind River Adventures: My Life in Frontier Wyoming,
the expression originated with a cattle drive along Powder River to Casper:
Some hands trailing cows to the railroad at Casper in the autumn of 1893 bedded down near the
headwaters of Powder river, near the present Hiland, Wyoming, one night. They
talked about crossing Powder River repeatedly the next morning, and spoke of
getting their swimming horses. The next morning one cowboy, Missouri Bill
Shultz, changed horses to get a good swimmer. Making thir various
crossings, they discovered that in the fall at that place, Powder River was just deep enought to wet a
horse's hoof, and had barely enough energy to trickle from one hole to another.
When they got to Casper, Missouri Bill toasted the hands like this: "Boys, come and
have a drink on me. I've crossed Powder River" They had the drinks, then a few more
and were getting pretty sociable. When Missouri Bill again ordered he said to the
boys, "Have another drink on me, I've swum Powder River," this time with a
distinct emphasis on the words Powder River. "Yes, sir, by God, Powder
River," with a little stronger emphasis. when the drinks were all set up he said, "Well,
here's to Powder River, let 'er Buck!"
Soon he grew louder and was heard to say, "Powder River is coming upeeyeeep! --
Yes sir, Powder River is rising," and soon after with a yip and a yell, he pulls out
his old six-gun and throwed a few shots through the ceiling and yelled, "Powder
River is up, come an' have 'nother drink." Bang! Bang! "Yeow, I'm a wolf and it's
my night to howl. Powder River is out of 'er banks. I'm wild and woolly and full
o' fleas and never been curried below the knees!"
Bill was loaded for bear, and that is the first time I ever heard the
slogan, and from there it went around the world.
According to Fred L. Beger, writing in The Stars and Stripes, January 31, 1919, the war cry of cowboys was picked
up by American troops during World War I from the Montana National Guard.
The war cry has been used by the University of Wyoming since at least the 1930's when the expression was used
in Lorna Kooi Simpson's Come On, Wyoming:
Come On, Wyoming
Come on, Wyoming, you've got to fight today.
For we want a victory.
Come on, Wyoming, you've got to win today,
for the university.
Come on, Wyoming, we all depend on you;
We are loyal through and through
Powder river, let're buck, let'er buck, Wyoming!!
[Writer's note: The name Powder River is used without the definite article "the." Indeed,
noted Colorado historian Hebert O. Brayer has been critized for referring to
the waterway as "the Powder River."]
Powder River, near Leiter, Sheridan County, Wyoming
Nevertheless, like a caravan, the herd would proceed at a rate of about ten miles a day from Texas northward to Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Montana. And as it proceeded further to the north, the more likely it was
to run into the thunderstorms of the great plains and the possibilities of a stampede.
Music this page, Lorena popular with Confederate veterans.
Next Page: Cattle Trails continued.
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