Assimilating the Frontier Code in Society

Eventually the western cattlemen's associations added the Code of the West to their body of strictly enforced rules that covered matters such as cattle breeding, land use and water rights.This helped the Code work well enough in the general population, but there was a dark side to the Code as well.

Wherever the law was weak or men were impatient with the delays to enforce the Code laws, vigilantes stepped in to "hurry things along."  A powerful ranch owner who insisted on the strict standard of behavior on his own lands and with his own cowhands, took revenge when his cattle were stolen by professional rustlers.  He hired gunmen to shoot suspected cattle thieves before the law could solve the problem.  Sometimes they got the wrong man, sometimes it was just an excuse to frighten off legitimate ranchers.

The spiraling vengeance of the West's blood feuds found its basis in the belief that cattle and sheep could not co-exist on the same open range.  Sheep ranchers were not welcome anywhere near a cattle ranch.  It wasn't until the turn of the century that it was discovered that if properly handled, there was no reason why cattle and sheep could not share a range.

Such was the economic case in the 1880s of the Tewksbury-Graham feud in Arizona that ended up taking over 25 lives.  What began with family quarrels soon became linked with the bitter struggle for the use of the open range by cattle and sheep.  The Grahams and their allies supported the cattle owners, the Tewksburys, the sheepherders.  During one bloody raid on Tewksbury land, a determined Tewksbury woman marched out amid flying bullets to bury one of her clansmen.  The firing immediately stopped to allow her to do her duty...after all, the Code of the West did not allow shooting unarmed females.

Next time...The End of an Era
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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 20, 1833,  President Benjamin Harrison is born in North Bend, Ohio. You might say he came from a political family...at the time of his birth, Harrison’s father was serving Ohio in the United States House of Representatives, while his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, was serving as a senator from Indiana and only eight years away from becoming America’s ninth president. His great-grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Harrison, had served as governor of colonial Virginia and was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Startin' Up the Ranch

Before the days of the great cattle barons, there was little distinction between a cowhand and a rancher.  Many men were both.  When a would-be rancher was just starting out, he often hired himself out for a season or two to earn money to start a herd.  Once he had enough money for 30 head, he could look for a piece of land in Texas, Arizona, Wyoming or Montana.  Land itself was cheap, even free under the Homestead Act.  Most cattlemen didn't bother with legalities, they just squatted and let their cattle take over the surrounding acres.

Early years for a rancher were rough, waiting for the cattle to fatten and multiply.  The rancher worked alone, no money to hire help, so he rode around his lands keeping watch on his herd.  His home might be a dugout, a buffalo-hide tent, a wagon or a crudely built cabin.  But if he was wise, an initial investment of $100 could turn into $700 in just two years.  Profits went back into the business for the first years until he could build a proper house and hire a few cowhands.

Even when a rancher could hire cowhands, he still continued to work the ranch alongside the men, riding along the edge of unfenced lands.  He participated in the twice yearly round-up, where strayed cattle were rounded-up and new calves were branded.

Reginald Aldridge, visited a ranch in the Texas Panhandle and wrote an accurate description of the layout of a ranch in the late 1800s:  "it was considered the most comfortable in the Panhandle.  There was a good five-room house where the proprietor lived together with his foreman and a woman who cooked.  A little distance there was a smaller house, containing a kitchen and a dining room, and beyond was a picket house where the men slept, one room fitted up as a blacksmith's forge and another as a saddle-room.  There were besides a milk house, a store-room for provisions, a vegetable garden, a small horse pasture and a field of rye.  The owner claimed to have about 2,600 head of cattle."

Next time..."It's a Cowboy's Life
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Today in Pioneer History: "On July 30, 1619, in Jamestown, Virginia, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World–the House of Burgesses–convenes in the choir of the town’s church.

Houston What's the Problem?

In the 1840's the cattle drives were driven overland to Shreveport and New Orleans, Louisiana, but the Civil War changed all that, opening up possibilities for a huge Northern market for beef.

After the Civil War, the Texas ranchers had a problem.  During their absence fighting as soldiers, their longhorns had been wandering wild and free on the vast ranges of Texas, increasingly in huge numbers.  So huge that the ranchers claimed that if the war hadn't ended when it did, the whole south of Texas would have "sank under the weight of the cows".

The local markets who had once  handled so much of the cattle supply and driving herds to the slaughterhouses  and was inefficient for the number of cattle.  The slaughterhouses in Cincinnati, St Louis and Chicago were a long way away and cattle were poor travelers.  They need special handling, special feed, cleaning and care just to make it to the local markets and survive.  There was no way they could be driven overland to Chicago with enough meat on their bones for profit.

In 1867 news reached the Texan ranchers that could be the solution to their problems...the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

Next time...the railroad brings the solution