Indians, Cowboys, and Farmers: 1865 - 1910 by James Lincoln Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2001-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The following summer there was a drought across the northern Plains, where the Cattle Kingdom was now focused. The grass was sparse, and cattle crowding around streams and water holes trampled down what grass remained in these areas. Then that winter, 1886–87, there came blizzards like none that anyone could remember. Temperatures dropped to as low as 46 degrees below zero, so that the cowboys had to huddle by their stoves for days at an end, rather than tend to the cattle. All winter driving snow and fearful temperatures slashed at the cattle. It was, one rancher said, "Hell without heat." Cowboys trying to save the cattle in the deep snow could hardly save themselves. "The horse's feet were cut and bleeding from the heavy crust, and the cattle had the hair and hide worn off their legs to the knees and hocks." When spring came ranchers found the lands littered with rotting cattle, and in the swollen streams dead cattle were rolling over and over. President-to-be Theodore Roosevelt, who loved the West, was utterly discouraged when he visited his own ranch that spring. He said, "In its present form, stock-raising on the plains is doomed and can hardly outlast the century. . . . We who have felt the charm of life, and have exulted in its abounding vigor and its bold, restless freedom . . . must also feel real sorrow that those who come after us are not to see, as we have seen, what is perhaps the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting phase of American existence."

Roosevelt was surely romanticizing the hard life of the cowboys, and the pain the loss of the buffalo had brought to the Indians, but he was right in saying that the day of the old-fashioned cowboy was gone. Ranchers went bankrupt, investors pulled out; most of the usable open land was now fenced off, or being settled by sheep and wheat farmers. Cowboys still spent many hours in the saddle, but now they were as likely to sleep in bunkhouses as on bedrolls on the prairie, eat their dinners in a ranch mess hall instead of around a campfire. Cattle ranching was becoming a business like any other.

From beginning to end the Cattle Kingdom and the cowboy life of our romantic fiction had lasted a mere twenty years. But its effect on the mythology of America has been profound. None of the other great epics of American history—like the suffering of the Mayflower Pilgrims, the battle to create our great Constitution, the tragic story of the Civil War—has played so large a role in the American mind as has the tale of the cowboy of the Great Plains. There are cowboys in the American West today—thousands of them; but few ride horses and fewer still carry revolving six-shooters.

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