Continued from Part 1

Nor was this the only expense the farmer faced. Few prairie farmers (except in what we now call the Midwest, that is, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa) lived by streams, which had generally been long since claimed by the time they began filtering into a given neighborhood; the nearest one to the homestead might be 10 miles away, and most relied on shallow buffalo wallows to catch rainwater, or they made cisterns, in either case laying themselves open to "prairie fever," or typhoid, which ravaged whole families. Even if well-drilling machinery had been efficient or common (which it wasn't until the 1880's), the sodbuster had so little capital that he couldn't afford to hire it (an itinerant driller would charge $60 for a three-hundred-foot hole six inches in diameter, not counting the casing, which cost from 3.75c./ft. for quarter-inch black to $1.56 for six-inch galvanized), so he had to dig his own--with a "spring-pole" rig, which was basically a weighted drill bit hung by a rope from a springy pole and moving up and down in the well-hole like an old-fashioned pestle for grinding corn, if he was lucky and had a helper or two, and with a pick and shovel by hand if he wasn't. Often he had to go down 200-300 feet through hard clay and rock (20-40 was usually enough in the East), taking as much as two years to finish the job (as against perhaps 10 days for the Eastern farmer), with his family meanwhile hauling their water in barrels from wherever they could find it, and more than one was overcome by gases and died. Then once he had his well, he had to bring the water to the surface. In a dug well he could use a bucket on the same windlass that had brought up the excavated dirt, but with a driven or drilled one he had to have a pump, even though a good iron pump cost money--from $2.25 to $20, and most families would need at least two, a "counter pump" at the kitchen sink for indoor use and a sturdier, freeze-resistant model in the barnyard, or at least the barn, to water the stock (and sometimes the truck garden) and provide water for laundry (generally done outdoors as long as the weather permitted) and other large-scale jobs. In addition he would require not only the vertical tubing but more to lay out from the well to his buildings, and as the barn was generally 100-225' from the main house (for obvious reasons!), the final cost could be very severe indeed. The cheapest part of the operation was the windmill, which everybody had as soon as he could buy or make one--and making it was easy: any man with a slight mechanical turn could do it. All he needed was a tower (not a very high one on the flat plains), a fan of four to ten feet diameter to mount on it, and a vane behind to keep the fan angled into the wind. Ranchers built these too, especially beginning in the early '70's. An eight-foot wheel, including vane, cost $28.50-$46, a ten-footer $36-$56; the tower could also be purchased ready to build, at 60c.-$1.20 per foot (more for larger wheels), plus $4.50-$6 for a set of four anchor posts, and the shafting ran 37½-50c. per foot plus another 30c-$1.20 for boxing to enclose it. Some really big mills had wheels ranging in diameter from 13 feet ($90-$120 galvanized) to 18 ($285-$360 wood).

If he hoped to fence his acreage, the farmer faced yet another drain on his wallet. Though barbed wire, patented in 1873, made the enclosure of Plains land far easier than it had been theretofore, and the cost dropped steadily as the years went by--from 20c./lb. in 1874 to 10c. in 1880 and 4.2 in '85--it took considerable skill to string, and one ton of it made only two miles of three-strand fence. A quarter-section of land measures 2640 ft./side, which uses up that entire ton simply to demarcate its boundaries, to say nothing of dividing the space into separate parcels for different crops or for pasturage. At the very minimum, in the late pioneer period, the farmer therefore needed $84 for his wire, plus posts; if he was trying to do the job eleven years earlier, the price was $400--twice what his land was worth at the Government price.

Another great difficulty of the Western farmer lay in getting his crop to market: even after five great transcontinental railroads had been built (a process that took some 20 years), there were few branch or intersecting lines to serve the thousands of square miles in between. All the farmer could do, if he hadn't settled on railroad-grant land (which put him, generally, within 10 miles of the steel), was to load his crop into a wagon, consult his almanac, and set off for the nearest rail stop or steamboat landing; if the almanac was in error and he got caught in heavy rains, his wagon soon bogged to the axles, and even if the weather held good there was probably no grain elevator or other shelter at his destination, forcing him to remain there until he could arrange for sale or shipment. Then there were often ruinous freight charges, as Frank Norris's classic novel The Octopus vividly portrays. And meanwhile the farmer's family was left at home to hold down the claim, and his only option was to hope they didn't fall afoul of Indians, sickness, or any other calamity.

In many parts of the West, therefore, the settler found that cultivation alone wouldn't support him, so he hedged his bets, raising cattle in fair numbers and becoming what was called a "stock farmer." (Cattle, of course, had the great advantage of being saleable locally--to the town butcher or the nearest military post--and of being able to get there on their own four feet; and if they were to be shipped East, it was generally possible to find, at any railroad town, a broker who would assume the responsibility of seeing that they got there, freeing the owner to make his way home within a reasonable length of time.) In those regions of Kansas close by the great trails, and probably elsewhere, farmers began at an early point to stock their farms with cattle, drawing on the Texas trail herds: they would take a cow or two in payment when a herd grazed or watered on their land or the crew bought some grain or farm produce, and the drovers generally also gave them any new calves (which couldn't keep up, and so had to be either given away or shot) and crippled animals. These farmers bred their new acquisitions to first-class Eastern stock, producing an excellent grade of animal. They also found the winter feeding of Texas cattle a profitable business, and it quickly became widespread. Even in regions like Iowa, devoted mainly to raising crops, a family often kept a dozen or more head of beef, which generally became almost wholly the responsibility of children as young as eight: Hamlin Garland, who grew up in this region, recalled friends who could "ride like Comanches" in pursuit of their duties. Even a hardscrabble rancher with 50 head needed 500-1280 acres to graze them, and while it took years to develop a top hand, the basic skills of herding were learned early. Boys rode herd at five and worked roundups at 12; some went "up the trail" (the youngest generally with their fathers) at 6-10, or left home to ride fence at 11, and by the time they were old enough to vote were masters of their profession indeed. Girls did it too: one was riding the range at 10, branding calves and building fence five years later, and broke her first horse at nine. Yet small-scale stock-raising was by far easier and more lucrative than farming. Even a 2000-acre ranch 10 years in existence could ship a car of stock (18-25 head) a year and be considered "prosperous"; Teddy Blue Abbott did this, and he raised seven children off the proceeds. (Many of these "small ranchers" were, like Abbott, former cowboys who'd learned their trade by doing it, saved up some money or perhaps married a wife who had a small competence, and decided to settle down and stop making someone else rich.) Cattle prices, of course, varied tremendously from year to year--as little as $8 or even less a head in 1884, $50 in 1870--but the stock farmer raised a good deal of his own food, and could hunt and fish in his spare time and often pick up part-time work, whether in town or on a roundup, to fill in the holes, besides following some manual at-home trade (such as gunsmithing) in the winter and frequently hunting for market or running a trap line.

It can be seen from all this that ranchers were much less likely to have wars with homesteaders than with each other--two big ranchers scrapping over a parcel they both wanted or feuding over some personal slight, big ranchers against small ranchers, or small ranchers against a single big one who seemed to be getting too full of himself. (When a cattle baron did hire gunmen--something he wasn't above doing--it was more usually to rid his range of rustlers.) To be sure, it took, in 1890, about $20 per head of capitalization to get started in the cattle business. Yet homesteaders in the Southwest were less likely to nibble away at big ranches than farther north, because Southwesterners tended to hold legal title to their land rather than depend on public domain; many were Texans taking advantage of its liberal laws or veterans or their assignees using bounty warrants, and others had gained whole or partial ownership (through lawsuit, marriage, or purchase) of vast Spanish land grants, especially in Arizona, New Mexico, and California. In 1877 20 years of ruinously low prices for farm produce commenced, and in the late '80's a major reversal of the climactic cycle occurred, resulting in extremely dry weather and even greater hardships for the farmers. From the late 1870's and over the next ten years there was a "Great Dakota Boom," and almost all the land east of the Missouri in what is now North and South Dakota was homesteaded, but when hard times followed the boom most of the newcomers left just as easily as they'd come; still 90 years later, livestock and stock products made up three-quarters of South Dakota's agricultural output. The same thing happened in western Kansas: c. 1878-9 the homesteaders moved in, fenced, and drove the range cattlemen out of the state, but a dry spell in 1880-2 and a succession of crop failures sent thousands of farmers fleeing, and men with money took over their lands in payment of taxes or loans or purchased cheap grasslands, on which they re-established cattle ranges, some grazing thousands of head. (When the rains took up again in 1883-6 many of the farmers returned, but presumably they found much land owned and therefore closed to them, and even this boom flattened out in '87.) Not until after 1896 did farmers invade the Northern plains in large numbers, and even then the prosperity they brought lasted only a few years. In eastern Montana the great surge of "honyockers" didn't begin till after the turn of the century; by 1909 they took up more than 1,000,000 acres, by 1910 almost five, and by '22 about 93,000,000. But when hard times hit in the late teens and early '20's, 11,000 of them abandoned their farms. And in one typical tract in Baca County, southeast Colorado, only one 160-acre homestead claim was filed in 16 square miles (1.5625% of the total area) prior to 1915. Land laws, money factors, and better knowledge of the country and its vagaries simply mitigated in favor of the rancher, and by the late 1870's, more than 22,000,000 acres of western Nebraska alone, from the Republican River north to the White and from the Platte Forks west to the Wyoming line, was controlled by open-range cattlemen.

Barbed wire tended to be more popular on the southern ranges; it came into Texas almost immediately upon its introduction, for experienced Lone Star cattlemen (some of whom had been on the ground for forty or fifty years) had realized by then that their tough, angular longhorns weren't the best beef animals in the world--they didn't have the weight, docility, or low feeding-cost factor of the "Oregon reds" (Herefords) and whiteface halfbreds becoming well established in the northern territories--and that fence would enable ranchers to breed selectively, trying out different strains without getting them mixed. Notwithstanding some degree of fence-cutting, it spread steadily, opposed not so much by cattle barons as by small cowmen who lacked the money or inclination to buy and fence land, and by 1883 was so widespread that it caused a violent fence-cutting war, worsened by the severe drought of that year, in which open-range cowmen found it very difficult to water their herds. The following year the Governor convened a special session of the Legislature and declared fence-cutting a felony, which brought the difficulty pretty much to a close. But further north it was less used: during the winters of 1880-1 and 1885-6, cattle drifted into Texas from as far north as Colorado, while masses of them piled up against the two great drift fences (one 170 miles long) in the Neutral Strip, and for the 20 years 1866-86 the Plains strip from the Front Ranges 500 miles east was virtually without fences from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Even the farmer, who had much more incentive to fence, did so only gradually, year by year, as money permitted, and meanwhile his children herded the cows.

In any given tract of land, there were likely to be from seven to ten major ranchers and perhaps twice as many small ones and a scattering of squatters, as well as a horse rancher or two. The designation was more or less arbitrary: a "big" rancher might own 5000-100,000 head of cattle, a "small" one 100-2000; anything in between was probably considered "of the middling sort," to use the phrase of the day. 3000 cattle wasn't considered a big outfit, as outfits were reckoned in the North; it was "just a nice little start," which with luck and patience might in time grow into a "real spread." How much land these animals required was largely a function of location. In some areas of the Southwest and Great Basin, where streams were dry much of the year and vegetation was sparse, it could take 50-60 ac. to support a single cow (i.e., 10.6-12.8 head to the square mile), but ranches grew as large as 1500 sq. mi. (960,000 ac., with 15,900 or more cattle). Even the bleak and sterile-looking sagebrush plateau could support one longhorn every 36 acres (17.7/square mile) on the thin ration of needle grass and balsamroot scattered among the sage. On the Great Plains, a rancher could plan to run one head of beef to every 10 acres if the underlying soil was good, 15 if it was dry and scrubby (c. 43-64 head/square mile); in the Nebraska Sandhills an average of 58 cows to the square mile--a bit better than the overall median--was common. In the rainier areas of the Mountain States, a ranch with good grass could support 25 head per square mile (25.6 ac. per), while those in the arid Great Basin would scarcely maintain two. In the northern ranges (generally agreed to extend from northern Colorado through Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas), holdings varied greatly in size, some running only a few hundred head, others 10,000 or more, but a ranch of 1000 sq. mi. was by no means unusual. George Iliff, a prominent Colorado cattleman, eventually exercised control over an unfenced range measuring 75x200 miles--9,600,000 ac. Horses took about twice as much space as the same number of cattle, since they trample as much grass as they eat, but a horse rancher tended to have less of them: even with three or four "stud bunches" of 40-50 mares apiece, plus his yearlings and two-, three-, and four-year-olds, his top figure was around 600-1000. Though technically a single bull could service 200 she-stuff, it was more usual to keep one to every 25-40 on good pasture, 15 in areas where grass was thin and cattle must spread out over a wide area, while a stallion properly handled could serve 20-30 mares. During the heavy-work season, spring roundup through fall ship, the free-range rancher would need on average one man for every 150-200 cattle, and 3-15 horses (average nine) per man; in winter most of the men would be laid off and the crew would shrink to perhaps 30% of the maximum. But 600-700 cattle under fence could be worked by a single hand most of the time, and many a small rancher made do with his own labor and that of his children, plus perhaps one or two hired cowboys in busy times.

Many a ranch had its vegetable garden, and some even raised modest quantities of fodder; this was, of course, likeliest to occur on the smaller spreads and the stock-farmers' places, since they had more of a farming mentality. The same was true of chickens, pigs, and dairy stock. The home compound--the house, bunkhouse, barn, corrals, garden, and ancillary buildings--would typically occupy 10-13 acres, usually fenced to keep out wandering range stock. Hay, which likes bottom land, could yield as much as three tons to the acre on good ground, though the average yield in a fertile field was 1½-2, often in two cuttings a year, or three in good years; 1000 bales of it would winter 25-30 cattle. (Modern farmers reckon on 1500-2000 lb. of hay per dairy animal per year, plus corn, but find, as did the old-time cattleman, that cattle prosper on brushy hillsides or rolling terrain that has to be kept in grass, and need hay and commercial feed only in winter; anyone who has driven through dairy country knows that the milkers are routinely turned out to pasture even when there are a couple of inches of snow on the ground. Horses, when pasture is unavailable, need 8-12 lb. of hay per day, supplemented, if at light work, with 5.3 oz. of grain per hundred pounds of body weight, up to 20 oz. if the work is heavy.) Most ranchers fed no more than half their stock in winter, chiefly the old or weak stuff, orphans, weaners, and cows with calves; dry stuff and steers were left out on the range to rustle for themselves. Often they were specialists of sorts: one cowman might focus on breeding and calf production; another brought in yearling steers and fattened them for sale as lucrative four-year-old beef; and yet another tailored his cattle for sale as feeders to Midwesterners, who packed on still more pounds with corn. Even townsmen got into beef: sometimes, as a sort of speculation, one of them would buy a bunch of cattle--say 1000 two-year-olds--and contract with a rancher to graze them; the owner furnished feed and paid an agreed-upon amount, say 60c., per head for the pasture, but the grazier had to guarantee the amount on delivery, either showing the hide as proof of death loss or paying for stolen or strayed critters over five head. (An arrangement such as this was especially attractive to the small rancher just starting out, who couldn't look for saleable stock of his own until he'd been in business three or four years, and not much of that at first: $600 was a good year's income for even a town-based family, let alone one that could supply a good deal of its own basic foodstuffs.) The cattleman reckoned, by and large, on a "normal" annual loss of 10% from rustlers, predators, and die-off, although in bad years wolves alone--forced to turn to the cattle herds for food after the buffalo were killed off--could account for that much. On paper, 100 cows could become a herd of 2856 in 10 years, provided that four out of five gave birth each year and that their heifers began calving at age two, but this didn't take into account stillbirths, sickness, killing weather, and the like; a more realistic increase figure is shown in "Doing the Math" below. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the rancher, the higher a proportion of his cattle he sent to market: Charles Goodnight regularly sold off 30% of his stock every year.

Wars, when they occurred, were more likely to be inspired by access to water than by the presence of farmers or squatters as such. Like feuds, which they resembled, they could stem from a number of causes, but generally boiled down to either greed or vengeance upon one party for a wrong thought intolerable by the other, especially where statutory law was weak and judicial punishment of the offender unlikely. Rivalry over water, grass, or both, introduction of sheep, land frauds, horse stealing, hasty vigilante actions, theft of property, cattle disputes or rustling, the hiring of members of one faction to fight against the other by a third party, or--very commonly--the fencing in of water supplies by homesteaders (who were acting within their legal rights, but weren't being very considerate of their beef-raising neighbors), could begin such a difficulty.

One frequent instigator of violence was rustling--not the large-scale for-profit kind indulged in by professional outlaws, but small-time theft of a sort that amounted almost to class warfare. (Indeed, this kind was in many ways easier. A good-sized rustle needed to sweep up at least 200 head in order to be worth the thieves' time. But cattle on open range (as opposed to country where there is an abundance of natural cover, such as the Texas brasada) tend to congregate in small groups more or less widely separated (unlike horses, which gather, if left to themselves, in bands of a stud and as many mares as he can accumulate); the rustlers needed to find them, throw them together, and drive them off--and quite apart from the fact that cattle, like most grazing animals, always have a favorite range which they prefer not to leave, the tracks would tell the tale to any passing cowboy. Additionally, especially on smaller, fenced ranches, the owner and his crew were likely to be very familiar with their land and to know which cattle should be in which parts of it; if they began to miss seeing quantities of them (as opposed to simply one or two particular animals, which might simply be where they weren't looking or have met with an accident), they'd know something was off-kilter. But if they didn't even realize they should be missing the stock--as in the case of calves and young cattle that had never made it into the tally--they could be hoodwinked for some time.) Probably the majority of rustlers (professional and amateur alike) generally visited first the large herds owned by Easterners, foreignors, large corporations owned by numerous scattered stockholders, and such local owners as were big enough not to suffer from a certain amount of shrinkage or were little liked. Since "nesters" and small ranchers very often had to take paying work to make ends meet, and were likeliest to be able to get it at just such larger outfits during roundup times when temporary cowhands were hired on, they frequently had reference to "the long rope;" and because they had, or could easily get, a brand and earmarks legitimately registered, hiding their stolen stock in plain sight wasn't difficult. Assigned to ride circle in the spring, such a man might urge as many as 20 suckling calves and their mothers into secluded places in the back country, coming back to slap his own brand on the youngsters around weaning time in the fall; or he might leave a few yearlings penned up in little canyons or washes, and when the wagon moved on 10-15 miles the next day, these animals would be cut off from their herd. (Both kinds of practise were called "throwing back," and some big ranches hired guns to try to prevent it, but a hired gun could only be in one place at a time, which, in the broad acreage of the West, gave the rustler the advantage.) At the end of the roundup, he simply came back, picked them up, and drove them home with him. When he was with the crew, he might drive a few unbranded animals into the "cut"--the branded cattle being held for later release--during the night; these would scatter with the rest when camp was broken, and he could come back later to mark them. Or he would circle out ahead of the other riders, picking up promising stock and driving it back into an area previously passed over by the crew, an area that wouldn't be intensively worked until the next roundup. "Sleepering" was another common dodge; this consisted of earmarking calves to match their mothers so the regular hands would think they were already branded (the two normally being done at the same time) and pass them up in the shuffle, then coming back after they were weaned to brand them with the rustler's own mark and change their ear cuts to go with it, using new ones that destroyed the first, such as the "sharp" or "grub," or supplemented it, such as a double notch in one ear where the legitimate owner used only a single. "Hair-branding"--burning the legitimate owner's mark quickly through a wet blanket, which left what looked like a permanent scar but disappeared within a few weeks when the hair grew out, hence the name--was also done, as was the "running" (altering) of the brands of adult cattle (best done if your own mark could blend over it) or "blotching" (rubbing out the entire original brand with a hot flatiron or some other piece of metal, then placing your own brand beside the scar). Some small-time rustlers rode out between roundups in lonely places, looking for cows with desireable calves; when they found one, they drove her into the brush, shot her, removed her ears and cut out her brand, buried them, roped the calf, branded him, and hazed him off two or three miles from his dead mother. The cow, being dead, couldn't embarrassingly claim a calf carrying a brand not her own, and the scavengers would quickly pick her bones; a dead cow here and there excited no comment; and a rustler who was wary, well-mounted, a good roper, and lucky enough to stay unseen might do quite well. Other rustlers were primarily maverickers (or "grass pirates"), picking up weanlings and big calves that had been missed by the branding crews. The small-timer saw no harm in what he was doing; he reasoned that the "big auger" would never miss his takings, and knew that plenty of respected ranchers had gotten their start in the same way. The trouble was that he often couldn't control himself, and his herd would multiply suspiciously fast.

Absentee-owned "company" ranches were especially vulnerable to the "neighborly" kind of rustling: they were too big to be effectively patrolled, and the small ranchers roundabout were often helped by the very cowboys the company employed; these, sympathizing with the neighbors' economic struggle, were likely to themselves be a little "on the rustle." So strong was the feeling against absentee owners that a cowboy loyal to one was sneeringly called a "pliers man," because he had to spend so much time mending the fence the rustlers cut. But many an unsympathetic large outfit, whose hands had to ride 50-75 miles of range, went out of business on account of some vigilant rustler whose little mountain ranch was near the usual grazing place of a band of cattle. Even though no individual of this type took very many cattle in any given season (probably 50 a year was about the limit), the cumulative total could be serious: Granville Stuart estimated that in 1893 Montana alone, cattlemen suffered a 3% loss from rustlers, and in some places it was probably rather worse. If the rustler wasn't stealing from popular cattlemen like Goodnight, Chisum, and Reynolds, no jury in cow country would convict him even if he got caught; the jurymen, especially if they were nesters or small stockmen (as opposed to town-dwellers), weren't above taking a calf or ten themselves if the opportunity offered, and they knew that the big company outfits wanted to crowd the little man out and saw the cowboy as just a piece of equipment, like a pair of fencing pliers or a windmill tower. The ranch manager, in turn, knew that they knew this, and was quite ready to believe the worst of his lesser neighbors if he found his count coming up short. All of this was the reason many cattlemen simply hanged a rustler wherever they found him--but if he had friends or family in the neighborhood, a nasty feud could result.

When a war got started, especially if it was incidental to a land grab, it usually got under way slowly and quietly. The custom was to begin with subtle tactics, trying to buy or scare the other side off; if that didn't work, the guns--and gunmen--came into play. The smartest grabbers would send a lawyer in ahead to bone up on local land laws and customs, and a man to the capitol to oil things up so that if anyone screamed, they were ready. If possible, they'd have themselves or one of their men made a deputy, so he'd have the legal right to force entry to a house where an enemy was hiding. The goal was to get people to sell out for as little as you could manage--from a penny to a quarter on the dollar, say. Since many farmers and ranchers had mortgages, whether to buy land or stock or to finance improvements such as wells or fence (as mentioned above), a very popular grift was to buy up their paper from the bank (a mortgage is legally negotiable tender and can be bought and sold), then foreclose if they didn't pay up--and sometimes, to hurry them along, rustle their stock till they went broke. Even those who lacked a bonded indebtedness could be rustled from until they no longer had anything worth selling; unable to pay their taxes or support their families, they could quickly be forced out. If a stream ran through your holdings to someone else's, you could dam it; if one of your victims had dug tanks on his range, you could mill a few horses around in each of them (three for ten minutes was plenty), churning up the tamped-clay liner so it wouldn't hold water; if he had windmills, you could destroy them, and if you knew where his water source was (a spring coming out of the ground, for example), you could drive a length of pipe into the ground just above it, pour some gunpowder down it, drop a lighted match in and run like hell--in a minute or two the whole thing would blow and the flow would be cut off permanently. (Of course, if you planned to keep the land for yourself, you had to consider how best to make sure that the stock you put there would have water. But if you intended to sell it to the railroad or mine it, all bets were off.)

As the tempo quickened, the tactics became rougher. Stock was run off, mules poisoned, crops destroyed by fire or stampedes, poison sprinkled on salt licks to kill cattle; beef was driven into bogs, slaughtered on its bedgrounds, or run over bluffs. Wells were blasted, waterholes salted, fence wire cut and horses lamed. If a stud was out with some brood mares, he could be shot: the stallion was almost always the most valuable horse on the place. Haystacks, grass, and barns could be set afire, fights picked with a man in town where witnesses were plenty, an occasional cowboy killed in a "fair shootout." If you could get something, like harboring a fugitive, on someone whose time had run out or whom you were about to overwhelm, or even if you could just persuade the law that you had, and you knew this law was prejudiced in your favor, you could see that he went out and took your man off his place; after a day and a night of questioning, he'd be let go, but by then you'd have his land. The more unprincipled type of grabber might wait till one of his more stubborn victims was away from home, then have "some rough characters drop in" on his wife while "no one was there to protect her"; range men generally shied away from harming women, but there were always a few--primarily roughs out from the East, or border Mexicans if available--who could be persuaded to do the dirty deed. (If a railroad passed through the district, you could always start the rumor that tramps riding the rods were to blame.) An owner could be eliminated by a stampede or a fire, and his family pressured to sell out; if they wouldn't, you could see to it that a daughter just disappeared--it would be said she ran away with someone, "and who'll disprove it?" A really stubborn family could be dealt with by making it look as if they'd been wiped out by renegade Indians. It would take time and money--the minimum, besides your legal assistant(s) and standard range crew, was three or four good well-known gunfighters (the kind who charged $100 a month or more), six or seven average-tough hardcase riders, and a couple of dandies to work on and soften up the women if they were needed. But in the end, what made the difference was that the grabber was one man, and his victims were a dozen or more, with a dozen places to guard; unless they could band together to resist him--and often they didn't see their danger until it was too late, especially if their foe was working through one or more blinds, as the smartest ones did--they were lost. Fence wars were particularly bitter wars, with each side having to match the other man for man and gun for gun; and they bred rustling--as soon as the word got out, the off-scourings of the range began filtering in to pick up and run off what the fighters were too busy to watch or take care of.

In the end, what finished the free-range era wasn't rustlers, or nesters, or wire fence, or even falling markets; it was something no human can control--weather. Up till the late 1870's most ranching was by resident stockmen, but the boom which began at that time attracted large amounts of speculative capital from the East and abroad, especially England and Scotland. Mammoth companies like the Prairie Land & Cattle Co., with 7900 square miles of land and 140,000 head of stock in Texas, New Mexico, and the Nations, became frequent. So much Scottish and English capital came into Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana that in 1887 Congress (shutting the barn door after the horse had wandered off, as will be shown shortly) prohibited foreign companies from acquiring title to land in the Territories. Several large Texas companies moved their holdings wholesale into Wyoming or Montana or established subsidiary ranches there, to which cattle born in Texas were driven when they were about two years old, there to be matured and fattened for market in the cool, bracing climate, where they grew larger and heavier than they would have in the South. Like the large corporations of today, these company ranches were in it for the profit, and in order to show that profit, the superintendents on the ground overstocked the ranges, killing off the winter feed, or sold too many cows and calves. This irresponsible stewardship of the land so thinned the grass that by 1884 it took 10 acres to support one cow in places where four or five had formerly been enough. Four summers of drought in 1883, '84, '85, and '86, big prairie fires that took what grass they'd left, and the severe winters of 1884-5, '85-6 (in the blizzard of January 1, 1886, 50-75% of the cattle in Ford County, Kansas, alone perished), and '86-7 broke the back of the industry. Losses of 85-90% were not uncommon following the last of these, some of the Texas outfits suffering 65-75%, and some as much as 90-100%; native Northern beef did better, but 30-60% of those died too. Most of the foreignors, and virtually all of the Americans who had gone in for ranching more or less as an adventure, gave up and got out after this tragedy (though quite a few of the Englishmen remained, perhaps because the British have always been a nation of gamblers, and there is no gamble quite like the cattle business), their holdings were broken up and sold, and in the years immediately following the disaster, the grazing lands were rapidly fenced by hundreds of small ranchers homesteading claims--ex-cowboys who had worked for the now-bankrupt syndicates, Eastern farmers who had moved farther west, and even outlaws driven out of other localities (many migrated to Wyoming from Montana) by zealous vigilantes. Ranching, of course, never really stopped. The chief result of the bust was the abandonment of the open range and a drop in speculation; men of vision and adaptability now entered the business, and rebuilt it so quickly that by 1890 there were about 175,000 head on Montana ranges that had supported only 82,000 three years earlier. And not all of the older ranchers failed. Small operators withstood the die-off more successfully than the big company ones, perhaps because they were closer to their cattle, knew what was going on, and reacted quickly. Those in the Nebraska Sandhills particularly got through with low losses, for they were sheltered from the wind and owned and operated their own land, besides being seasoned Westerners who understood the range; but in all areas where foothills offered shelter, the death rate was less. Some not only survived but capitalized on the opportunities made available by the collapse of the large outfits, buying up what stock had made it through, for only the fittest had done so, and though these were often emaciated and unable to bear calves for the first year or so, the herds bred from them after they recovered were unusually sturdy; or they snapped up quantities of range cheap as the companies went bankrupt and their land was seized for taxes or unpaid mortgages. From such canny lesser ranchers, and from the Southerners who had acquired legal title to their range and weren't so badly affected by the blizzards, descend the cattlemen of the modern West.

Doing the Math
How a Cowman's Herd Grows

Assuming that 80% of cows give birth each year, that they begin to do so at age two, that 50% of calves are female, that steers are sold at age four and cows at 10, and that overall losses are 10% per annum, a stockman starting out in Year 1 with 100 two-year-old heifers and 80 calves would have:

Year 2: 90 cows, 72 calves, 72 yearlings=234
Year 3: 113 cows, 91 calves, 65 yearlings, 32 2-year-old steers=301
Year 4: 131 cows, 105 calves, 82 yearlings, 29 2's, 29 3's=376
Year 5: 155 cows, 124 calves, 94 yearlings, 37 2's, 26 3's, 26 4's=482
Year 6: 182 cows, 145 calves, 112 yearlings, 42 2's, 33 3's, 23 4's=537
Year 7: 214 cows, 171 calves, 130 yearlings, 50 2's, 38 3's, 30 4's=633
Year 8: 251 cows, 201 calves, 154 yearlings, 58 2's, 45 3's, 34 4's=743
Year 9: 295 cows, 236 calves, 181 yearlings, 69 2's, 52 3's, 40 4's + 43 old cows=830
Year 10: 308 cows, 247 calves, 212 yearlings, 81 2's, 62 3's, 47 4's + 45 olds=957
Year 11: 332 cows, 266 calves, 222 yearlings, 95 2's, 73 3's, 56 4's + 49 olds=1044
Year 12: 496 cows, 397 calves, 239 yearlings, 100 2's, 85 3's, 66 4's + 73 olds=1383
Year 13: 488 cows, 391 calves, 357 yearlings, 108 2's, 90 3's, 76 4's + 72 olds=1510
Year 14: 535 cows, 428 calves, 352 yearlings, 161 2's, 97 3's, 81 4's + 79 olds=1654
Year 15: 569 cows, 455 calves, 385 yearlings, 158 2's, 145 3's, 87 4's + 84 olds=1799
Year 16: 610 cows, 488 calves, 409 yearlings, 173 2's, 142 3's, 130 4's + 90 olds=1952
Year 17: 652 cows, 522 calves, 439 yearlings, 184 2's, 156 3's, 128 4's + 96 olds=2081
Year 18: 698 cows, 558 calves, 470 yearlings, 198 2's, 165 3's, 140 4's + 103 olds=2229
Year 19: 747 cows, 598 calves, 502 yearlings, 211 2's, 178 3's, 148 4's + 110 olds=2384
Year 20: 799 cows, 639 calves, 538 yearlings, 226 2's, 190 3's, 160 4's + 118 olds=2552
Year 21: 855 cows, 684 calves, 575 yearlings, 242 2's, 203 3's, 171 4's + 126 olds=2730
Year 22: 915 cows, 732 calves, 617 yearlings, 259 2's, 218 3's, 183 4's + 135 olds=2924
Year 23: 980 cows, 784 calves, 659 yearlings, 278 2's, 233 3's, 196 4's + 145 olds=3130
Year 24: 1048 cows, 838 calves, 706 yearlings, 297 2's, 250 3's, 210 4's + 155 olds=3349
Year 25: 1121 cows, 897 calves, 754 yearlings, 318 2's, 267 3's, 225 4's + 165 olds=3582
Year 26: 1200 cows, 960 calves, 807 yearlings, 339 2's, 286 3's, 257 4's + 177 olds=3849
Year 27: 1284 cows, 1027 calves, 864 yearlings, 363 2's, 305 3's, 257 4's + 189 olds=4100
Year 28: 1374 cows, 1099 calves, 924 yearlings, 389 2's, 327 3's, 274 4's + 203 olds=4387
Year 29: 1470 cows, 1176 calves, 989 yearlings, 419 2's, 350 3's, 294 4's + 217 olds=4698
Year 30: 1573 cows, 1258 calves, 1058 yearlings, 445 2's, 377 3's, 315 4's + 232 olds=5026
Year 31: 1683 cows, 1346 calves, 1132 yearlings, 476 2's, 400 3's, 339 4's + 248 olds=5376
Year 32: 1801 cows, 1441 calves, 1211 yearlings, 509 2's, 428 3's, 360 4's + 266 olds=5750
Year 33: 1926 cows, 1541 calves, 1297 yearlings, 545 2's, 458 3's, 385 4's + 284 olds=6152
Year 34: 2062 cows, 1649 calves, 1387 yearlings, 584 2's, 490 3's, 412 4's + 304 olds=6584
Year 35: 2206 cows, 1765 calves, 1484 yearlings, 624 2's, 526 3's, 441 4's + 325 olds=7046
Year 36: 2361 cows, 1889 calves, 1588 yearlings, 668 2's, 562 3's, 473 4's + 348 olds=7541
Year 37: 2527 cows, 2021 calves, 1700 yearlings, 715 2's, 601 3's, 506 4's + 387 olds=8070
Year 38: 2691 cows, 2153 calves, 1819 yearlings, 765 2's, 643 3's, 541 4's + 397 olds=8612
Year 39: 2884 cows, 2307 calves, 1938 yearlings, 819 2's, 688 3's, 579 4's + 425 olds=9215
Year 40: 3085 cows, 2468 calves, 2076 yearlings, 872 2's, 737 3's, 619 4's + 455 olds=9857
Year 41: 3301 cows, 2641 calves, 2221 yearlings, 934 2's, 785 3's, 663 4's + 487 olds=10,545
Year 42: 3532 cows, 2825 calves, 2377 yearlings, 999 2's, 841 3's, 706 4's + 521 olds=10,523
Year 43: 3780 cows, 3024 calves, 2542 yearlings, 1070 2's, 899 3's, 757 4's + 558 olds=12,072
Year 44: 4044 cows, 3235 calves, 2722 yearlings, 1144 2's, 963 3's, 809 4's + 596 olds=12,917
Year 45: 4328 cows, 3463 calves, 2911 yearlings, 1225 2's, 1030 3's, 867 4's + 638 olds=13,824
Year 46: 4631 cows, 3705 calves, 3117 yearlings, 1310 2's, 1102 3's, 927 4's + 683 olds=14,792
Year 47: 4956 cows, 3965 calves, 3334 yearlings, 1403 2's, 1179 3's, 992 4's + 731 olds=15,829
Year 48: 5302 cows, 4242 calves, 3568 yearlings, 1500 2's, 1263 3's, 1061 4's + 782 olds=16,936
Year 49: 5674 cows, 4539 calves, 3818 yearlings, 1606 2's, 1350 3's, 1137 4's + 837 olds=18,124
Year 50: 6071 cows, 4857 calves, 4085 yearlings, 1718 2's, 1445 3's, 1215 4's + 895 olds=19,391
Year 51: 6496 cows, 5197 calves, 4371 yearlings, 1838 2's, 1546 3's, 1300 4's + 958 olds=20,748
Year 52: 6951 cows, 5561 calves, 4677 yearlings, 1967 2's, 1654 3's, 1391 4's + 1025 olds=22,201
Year 53: 7438 cows, 5951 calves, 5005 yearlings, 2105 2's, 1770 3's, 1487 4's + 1097 olds=23,756
Year 54: 7959 cows, 6367 calves, 5356 yearlings, 2252 2's, 1894 3's, 1593 4's + 1174 olds=25,421
Year 55: 8516 cows, 6813 calves, 5730 yearlings, 2410 2's, 2027 3's, 1705 4's + 1256 olds=27,201
Year 56: 9112 cows, 7290 calves, 6132 yearlings, 2578 2's, 2169 3's, 1824 4's + 1344 olds=29,105
Year 57: 9750 cows, 7800 calves, 6561 yearlings, 2759 2's, 2320 3's, 1952 4's + 1438 olds=31,142
Year 58: 10,433 cows, 8346 calves, 7020 yearlings, 2952 2's, 2483 3's, 2088 4's + 1539 olds=33,322
Year 59: 11,164 cows, 8931 calves, 7511 yearlings, 3159 2's, 2657 3's, 2235 4's + 1647 olds=35,657
Year 60: 11,945 cows, 9556 calves, 8038 yearlings, 3380 2's, 2843 3's, 2391 4's + 1762 olds=38,153
Year 61: 12,782 cows, 10,225 calves, 7645 yearlings, 3617 2's, 3042 3's, 2559 4's + 1885 olds=39,870
Year 62: 13,247 cows, 10,598 calves, 9202 yearlings, 3440 2's, 3255 3's, 2738 4's + 1954 olds=42,480
Year 63: 14,305 cows, 11,444 calves, 9538 yearlings, 4141 2's, 3096 3's, 2929 4's + 2110 olds=45,453
Year 64: 15,267 cows, 12,214 calves, 10,300 yearlings, 4292 2's, 3727 3's, 2786 4's + 2252 olds=48,586
Year 65: 16,348 cows, 13,079 calves, 10,993 yearlings, 4635 2's, 3863 3's, 3354 4's + 2411 olds=52,272
Year 66: 17,490 cows, 13,992 calves, 11,771 yearlings, 4947 2's, 4171 3's, 3477 4's + 2580 olds=55,848
Year 67: 18,716 cows, 14,973 calves, 12,593 yearlings, 5297 2's, 4452 3's, 3754 4's + 2761 olds=59,785
Year 68: 20,026 cows, 16,021 calves, 13,476 yearlings, 5667 2's, 4767 3's, 4009 4's + 2954 olds=63,966

(Note: Young bulls would be counted among the 2's, 3's, and 4's, and would not be sold; thus, you should deduct from the saleable figure one for every 15-40 mature cows. Steers might be sold at any season, but old cows wouldn't go till their calves were weaned in the fall, which would probably restrict them to local sale--butchers, Army posts, reservations, mining camps--unless there was a rail stop in the area. If you were raising longhorns, you couldn't consider them fully grown till they were five (800-900 lb.), and they didn't hit full weight (c. 1000) till they were six or seven; so, unless you could sell by head-count alone, you would hold off on marketing them until they reached that age, which would skew the figures. Given that the average trail herd numbered 2500-3000, you can see from the above counts why even big cattlemen were likely to send their beef to market as part of one, rather than selling them independently.)

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