Exaggerated Mayhem

When a cowboy came into Abilene, Dodge City or Wichita after months on the trail, he wanted booze, music, merriment and women.  The townspeople were eager to cater to them within reason, but unwilling to turn the entire town over to these cowboys.  The merchants, in their zeal to keep order, were known to hire the wrong people to uphold the law.

Case in point - during the panic of 1873 when thousands of unsold cattle and restless cowboys flooded the town of Ellsworth, the town hired an illiterate, loud-mouthed guy with a trigger-finger always ready for action named "Happy Jack" Morco.  Morco alienated the Texans so much that the cattlemen threatened to burn down the town and take their business elsewhere.  At that, the local merchants dismissed Morco,  who refused to disarm and was shot dead by one of his own policemen.

Transition from law enforcement to law breaking was not uncommon.  Marshal Henry Brown of Caldwell, a former gunfighter, held up a bank in the nearby town of Medicine Lodge, after two years on the police force.  He killed two people.  The town's outraged citizens promptly shot the marshal and lynched his three henchmen proving that vigilante justice has it own justice.

Generally, though law enforcement was pretty lenient and effective.  From 1870-1885 the homicide rate for the five major cattle towns was just 45.  Some of the incidents, such as the shooting of a woman by her drunken husband had no connection to the cattle industry.  Few were the famous gunfights of novels and movies.

Cowboy were required by law to check their guns at the sheriff's office while in town.  As Granville Stuart writes in 1925:  "The first place cowboys went for in a town was the livery stable where they saw to it that their horses were properly cared for, then the barber shop.  The noisy fellow in exaggerated costume that rode up and down the street whooping and shooting in the air was never a cowpuncher from any outfit.  He was usually a would-be bad man from the East decked out in paraphernalia from Montgomery Ward's in Chicago." 

Cattle towns were indeed raw and colorful, but such goes our legends of the shoot-em-up Wild West...just a legend made up to sell novels, newspaper and the movies.

Next time...The Expanding Range
_______________________________
Today in Pioneer History: "On July 16, 1779, American Brigadier General Anthony Wayne launches a coup de main against British fortifications at Stony Point, New York, on the orders of General George Washington. He earns the moniker “Mad” Anthony Wayne for the ensuing maneuver.  Wayne was victorious at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near what is now Toledo, Ohio, and gained much of what would become Ohio and Indiana for the U.S. in the Treaty of Greenville.

Kansas - The Glory Days

Abilene prospered as a cattle town from the start.  35,000 cattle passed through the town in 1867 - by 1877 the number had risen to 700,000.  The drive northward took a steady toll on men and animals by drownings in rivers, ambushes, and disease.  As the ranchers drove their herds northward, the cattle seemed to thrive on Kansas grass.  Was it really necessary to go so far north when Kansas offered all that was needed - abundant grass, water, and empty land.  Why endure the dangers and expense of driving cattle further north?

As the extension of the railroads grew, cattle towns sprang up to the south and west - Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City.  Each town enjoyed a central role in the cattle business for a time.  Most of Kansas, however, was too fertile and too well-watered to be left to cattle ranchers.

By the 1870s, the farming frontier was taking over cattle land.  Backed by the state legislature, the region was deemed best for homesteading instead of ranching.  More and more of Kansas was declared off limits to the herds.  The herds trampled crops and spread the dreaded disease of "Texas fever."

By the 1880s nearly all of Kansas was closed to the cattle drives.  The Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads now crossed Texas and the cattlemen no longer needed Kansas.  Cattle country itself had expanded far to the north and west.  Railroads made ranching possible in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.  The Texas longhorns were no longer the king of the range, being replaced by mixed breeds more adaptable, more desirable and more profitable.

Next time... The Wicked Cattle Towns
_______________________________
Today in Pioneer History: "On July 10, 1889,  in a drunken rage, “Buckskin” Frank Leslie murders his lover, the Tombstone prostitute Blonde Mollie Williams.  Leslie was an ill-tempered and violent man, especially when he drank. He sometimes claimed he had been trained in medicine and pharmacy, and he even boasted that he had studied in Europe. Supposedly, he earned the nickname “Buckskin” while working as an Army Scout in the Plains Indian Wars.

Solving the Cattle Problem Post Civil War

In 1867, the Kansas Pacific Railroad was being built westward from Kansas City to Denver at amazing speed.  By 1868 the iron rails were already 164 miles west of Kansas City at a place named by its founders for no particular reason - Abilene.

With a few primitive livestock cars added, history began with the first Texan trail herds by rail to Chicago.
As the railroad moved westward, so did the cattle towns that grew up on those rail lines. Abilene, Hays City, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Newton, all began as "track towns" beside the railroad.  Boxcar depots, telegraph stations, water tank, windmill, underground post office and saloons sprang up along the tracks of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

On a personal note - I grew up in such a track town in northern Indiana (Garrett) which only existed because the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran through the center of the town.

Abilene became the first of those cow towns and set the pattern for the western "Cow Town" and the stamping grounds of the Texan cowpoke.

Next we look at the similarity of the cow town and the mining town...