Centennial (97 page)

Records
. The 89 buffalo that Amos Calendar killed in his stand did not by any means constitute a record. Authenticated reports of that period cite the following one-day kills: Charles Rath 107, Doc Zahl 120, Orlando A. Bond 293. Witnesses saw Tom Nixon kill 120 in forty minutes, but in doing so he ruined the barrel of his Sharps. Jim Cato, famous buffalo hunter working out of the Texas Panhandle, is credited with having shot 16,000 buffalo during the great extermination.

Guns
. It would be impossible to overestimate the emotional significance of guns to the westerner. If you want your head blown off, elbow your way into a crowded bar and mention gun control. One popular legislator wins perennial reelection with a simple slogan which he plasters over the car bumpers in his district: “The west wasn’t won with a registered gun.” The weapons mentioned in this report are especially favored by collectors. Pasquinel’s fine Hawkens sold for $17.68 in 1826; today it would bring around $1,200. Levi Zendt’s beautiful Melchior Fordney cost him $12 in 1844 but would now be worth $600. Buford Coker’s 1863, LeMat originally sold for $50; today it would fetch $1,000. And Amos Calendar’s buffalo Sharps cost him $53 in 1873; today it would be worth $1,250.

Book count
. It may seem improbable that operations as carefully financed and supervised as the great English and Scottish ranches could have allowed themselves to be bilked by fraudulent or misleading accounting, but the records are replete with instances. In 1882 the Holly and Sullivan Ranch was sold to Arkansas Valley Land and Cattle Company with 440,000 acres and a book count of 17,000 head of cattle. Fortunately, the buyer insisted on a downward escalating clause which depended on the actual count of the cattle, should one be made. The true count proved to be 8683. The Niobrara Land and Cattle Company carried 39,000 cattle on their books; in liquidation they could find only 9000. These errors came about principally because managers made rough estimates of their calf crops: “We have 1000 cows and it stands to reason 85 percent will drop calves, so next year we’ll have 1850 critters.” On the open range the true calf drop figured no more than 70 percent, so each year the gap between actual count and book count widened.

Intemperate press
. As editors required by libel laws to watch your words, you may find the quotations from the
Clarion
somewhat inflammatory. Where Indians were concerned, the Colorado press felt few restraints, and one finds in the files numerous invocations to genocide. Editorial policy called for the extermination of the Indian, and that did not mean removal; it meant killing every Indian within the state borders.

Colorado
. Warn your cartographer to be wary when mapping this region. The state was put together late by joining three vertical strips of unassociated territory—western, central, eastern—each with its separate dramatic history. 1492 Spain lays vague claim to entire area (Columbus) ; confirmed 1541 (Coronado). Western and central strips remain Spanish till 1821, then Mexican Empire; 1823 Republic of Mexico.
Western
: 1848 Mexico cedes to U.S. as consequence of war; 1850 Utah Territory.
Central
: Mexico till 1836, then Republic of Texas; 1845 Texas joins U.S. and retains northern lands; 1850 Texas sells lands to U.S., which immediately divides them between Territories of Utah (north) and New Mexico (south).
Eastern
: Spanish till 1682, then France (La Salle); 1763 back to Spain by treaty; 1800 back to France (Napoleon); 1803 sold to U.S. (Louisiana Purchase); 1805 Louisiana Territory; 1812 Missouri Territory; 1819 vague claim by Indiana but legally Unorganized Territory. In 1854 central and eastern strips combined, but immediately divided horizontally among Territories of Nebraska (north, including Zendt’s Farm), Kansas (central) and New Mexico (south); 1859 illegal and abortive Jefferson Territory proclaimed; 1861 Colorado Territory with boundaries of present state; 1876 statehood. Name
Colorado
derives from Spanish and can mean either
red
,
colored
or
a dirty joke
.

If any section of the United States ever enjoyed a true golden age, it must have been the cattle regions of the west in the early 1880s. There had been previous fine periods. The New England shipping industry in the 1840s had been magnificent, with whalers sailing distant seas and merchant vessels opening the Orient. The prosperity of cotton plantations in the early 1850s, when British markets were begging to buy, and slaves were docile and great ships from all parts of the world put in to rivers like the James and the Rappahannock to load bales, certainly deluded their owners into believing that cotton was king. And the hectic 1870s, when eastern manufacturers controlled the nation, sending their finished products out on the new railroads at huge profits, buying their raw materials cheaply from the south and west, working their labor fourteen hours a day and controlling the money market to suit their purposes, were a heyday long remembered.

But none of these earlier periods of exuberance surpassed the euphoria that settled over the west in the dazzling eighties. In those years winters were mild and cattle proliferated; investments in land produced enormous dividends; and citizens of all types saw before them a constantly expanding horizon. Like the men in earlier decades who had basked in the sun of fishing, or cotton, or manufacturing, the ranchers of the west truly believed that their golden age must continue forever, for if gold dazzles, it also blinds.

No group prospered more than those canny British who had long before spotted this part of the world as one ripe for development and hungry for investment. In later years it would be popular to lampoon these foreigners as “remittance men,” as if incompetent third and fourth sons were exiled to the west on small monthly payments to keep them out of trouble and, more important, out of sight. Many American dramatic companies, flitting from town to town on night trains, kept in their repertoire plays which made fun of these remittance men, relying on strange accents and unfamiliar customs to draw derisive laughter, but the truth was otherwise.

The sturdy merchants of Bristol sent out only first-class men to check on their considerable investments at the Venneford Ranch. The tight-fisted marmalade millionaires of Dundee did their best to run their great Chugwater Ranch effectively, and they did not dispatch nincompoops to do the job. In Texas the Matador Ranch, largest of all, was run primarily by shrewd investors from London, while over at Horse Creek the merchants of Liverpool were putting together a fine ranch under the leadership of Claude Barker. The most beautiful ranch of all, Beau Brae on the west bank of the Laramie River, was owned and managed by ultra-cautious Scottish businessmen from Edinburgh, and they intended to make money.

The Englishmen who supervised the railroads, protecting British investments there, were excellent people, and those who operated the mines were even better, for a more courageous type of man was required. The irrigation men were prudent, while those dealing primarily in land were bold. They brought their women with them, or sent for them after a short stay in America, and during these years along the Colorado-Wyoming border, English and Scottish patterns of life predominated. The land between the two Plattes could not properly be called an English colony, for the local political leaders were apt to be Dutchmen or tough-minded Kentuckians, but socially the area was an outreach of London-Edinburgh-Dundee-Bristol-Liverpool, and the hard-working Britishers were determined to enjoy themselves.

In September of 1880 a group of young American ranchers, educated at Harvard and Yale, accompanied Claude Barker of Wolf Pass on a ride down from Cheyenne to visit with Oliver Seccombe on a matter of some importance. Venneford was now almost a village, with sturdy buildings erected by the ranch carpenters and stonemasons. There were barns and corrals, of course, and a long, low range of sheds in which boss hands like Skimmerhorn and Lloyd worked, but the center of activity was the three-story red-stone Gothic mansion erected by the Seccombes. It was an imposing residence, resembling a castle on the upper reaches of the Rhine, and it became famous throughout the west.

Three rounded towers soared above the corners of the large house, with a four-sided battlement rising at the fourth corner. The roof contained eleven chimneys and was broken repeatedly by dormers. The ground floor was surrounded by a pillared veranda, while all doors leading into the house were made of heavy oak studded with brass fittings. It was possible to sleep eighteen guests in comfort, with four Negro servants to attend their needs.

“What we have in mind,” Claude Barker told the Seccombes, “is a club ... a gentlemen’s club. We’ve selected a suitable corner in Cheyenne and we’ll keep the membership exclusive. All of us here, plus a few others with the right kind of background.”

“What are you calling it?” Charlotte Seccombe asked.

“The Cactus Club,” Barker said.

“Oh, that’s delicious!” Charlotte cried, but her husband was more interested in the list of proposed members. They were all substantial cattlemen, except for the manager of the Union Pacific Railroad; of the initial twenty members, fourteen would be Americans, six British. Socially they were impeccable; in ranching, the most powerful.

“Will only twenty families be able to support such a club?” Seccombe asked warily. He and Charlotte were sorely overextended by the building of their mansion; true, she had put up most of the money, but he had had to sell off more Crown Vee stock to scrape up his share, and he did not relish the idea of added expense right now.

“We have a subsidiary list,” Bill Warsaw, one of the Americans said, and he showed Seccombe forty additional names, some less glittering socially than the original but all capable of putting up large sums of money.

“These are great years for cattle,” Barker added enthusiastically. “Ranchers have money.”

“If you enlarge the list to include this second category,” Seccombe said, “we’ll come in.”

Papers of incorporation were filed on September 22, 1880, and the famous Cactus Club of Cheyenne was founded. It retained that name only briefly, for at an early meeting Seccombe proposed, “Cactus seems rather repelling. Let’s call it simply the Cheyenne Club,” and the change was made.

Its rules were rigid. They were patterned after the fine clubs in London, to which most of the British members belonged, and their purpose was to create an ambience in which a conservative cattleman could feel at ease, protected from grubby merchants, importuning businessmen and small-time farmers. Fireplaces in the various rooms were decorated with blue-and-white tiles depicting scenes and quotations from Shakespeare, and the members who occupied these rooms were expected to conform to the highest standards of decorum. Offenses which called for immediate expulsion included:

DRUNKENNESS IN THE PRECINCTS OF THE CLUB TO A

DEGREE OFFENSIVE TO MEMBERS.

CHEATING AT CARDS.

THE COMMISSI
ON OF AN ACT SO DISHONORABLE AS

TO UNFIT TH
E GUILTY PERSON FOR THE SOCIETY

OF GENTLEMEN.

In addition to these major abhorrences, the rules decreed, perhaps optimistically, that no wager of any description be made in the public rooms of the club, nor any loud or boisterous noise on the premises. In view of the ebullient nature of the younger members, and the burgeoning and heady state of the cattle industry, both a blind eye and a deaf ear became the distinguishing marks of the Rules Committee. But upon any palpable breach of social etiquette, particularly one that might reflect upon a member’s behavior toward the fair sex, the board showed no hesitancy in cutting the hair that held the Damoclean sword.

The cost of belonging to the Cheyenne Club was high, but membership ensured amenities. There were billiard rooms, games for cards, three tennis courts, access to a polo ground, a library stocked with books from Paris and London and an incomparable dining room supervised by chefs with international experience. The menus were extraordinary, and included the choicest viands and game from the region, fresh oysters from the Atlantic and fish from the Pacific, the finest cheeses and delectable fruits, a side table piled high with a Viennese pastry cook’s most mouth-watering confections, and a wine cellar that was to become the object of envy in many London clubs.

But what gave the Cheyenne Club its real significance was that from its rooms the government of the territory was dictated. Here all decisions were made relating to land ownership, the rights of irrigation, the laws for branding cattle, the regulations for banks. Wyoming Territory was a democracy; its constitution said so and it had a legislature to prove it, but the members of the legislature who mattered were all members of the Cheyenne Club, and what they decided at private caucus within the club mattered much more than what they said in open meetings of the legislature. Wyoming was a splendid, unpopulated state admirably suited for the running of cattle, and the membership of the Cheyenne Club proposed keeping it that way.

In protecting their interests they could be ruthless. Take the roundup law, for example. With nineteen-twentieths of the state an open range, cattle from one ranch could wander for a hundred miles without being detected, so when the cows had calves it was essential that some kind of general collection of animals be held, to enable each ranch to identify and brand its stock. Without this safeguard, a small-time rancher with a few cows and a flexible sense of property could round up cattle fifty or a hundred miles from any ranch headquarters and slap his iron on thirty or forty unbranded calves in no time, and after a few years of this he would wind up with a sizable herd, all reared by someone else.

“What kind of cattle do you figure is best for Wyoming?” a rancher asked one day at the Cheyenne Club.

“Without question, the Cravath breed.”

“Don’t believe I know it.”

“It was developed by Dan Cravath on his little place on the Laramie.”

“What are its characteristics?”

“Extreme fertility of the cow. Dan had only twelve cows bearing his brand, but every year they each had five calves. And this can be proved, because each year he branded sixty, sure as hell.” The members had to laugh over their wine and cigars, for all had been victimized by rustlers like Cravath.

To halt the depredations of such men, the big ranchers bullied the Wyoming legislature into passing a law without parallel. Henceforth it would be illegal for anyone except owners of the big ranches to conduct a roundup. At their roundups any calves not specifically belonging to one of the big ranches would be thrown into a common lot and sold, the proceeds to go for the hiring of officers to enforce the law. Thus big cattlemen like Oliver Seccombe and Claude Barker were legally deputized to police the range, to their own enrichment.

Now the little man like Dan Cravath, who had been running a few head on public property, would be squeezed out of business. Of course, Cravath was entitled to look on at the big roundups, but if his calves were not properly branded, they would be taken and sold. He would thus be paying the salaries of the officers whose job it was to drive him out of business, and the majesty of the state could be called upon by the big ranchers to toss him in jail if he protested.

The members of the Cheyenne Club did not abuse their privilege. A few difficult mavericks like Dan Cravath and Simon Juggers north of Chugwater were shot, but everyone knew that they had been stealing calves and it was conceded that the range was better off without them.

The members had a strong sense of stewardship where the range was concerned. They had opened it to cattle, cleared it of predators and supervised it, and whereas a distant government in Washington claimed to own it, effective ownership resided in these tough-minded men. At one hearing before the United States Senate, R. J. Poteet, the prominent rancher from Jacksboro, testified as follows:

LAMBERT: Tell us in your own words what a rancher means by the doctrine of contiguity.

POTEET: We’ve always held in Texas, and throughout the west generally, that a rancher has the right to run his cattle on any part of the open range that lays contiguous to his holding.

LAMBERT: Do you define
contiguous
as a matter of a mile or a hundred miles?

POTEET: Well, east and west, I’ve seen my cattle wander a hundred and fifty miles. North and south, they’ve gone halfway to Kansas, that’s better’n a hundred and sixty miles. And they did so because the open range was contiguous to mine.

LAMBERT: Aren’t you claiming, Mr. Poteet, that the range contiguous to your barn reaches from Canada to Mexico? (Prolonged laughter.)

POTEET: You know, young man, I’d never thought of it that way, but you may be right. I remember in 18 and 69 when I trailed a bunch of cattle from Reynosa in Old Mexico, across the Rio Grande and up to Miles City, Montana. Using the western trail, we traveled getting on for two thousand miles, and in all that time we crossed only two roads, the Santa Fe Trail along the Arkansas and the Oregon Trail along the Platte. We saw no fences, no gates, no bridges. We swam our cattle across so many rivers that my left point, fellow named Lasater, said, “Them critters has swum so much water, they’s growin’ webbed feet.” I guess our contiguous range did reach from Canada to Mexico, and it would be a good thing for this nation if it did so again.

Members of the Cheyenne Club quoted this testimony with approbation, for it represented their thinking.

The glory of the club was the social life that centered upon it. Charlotte Seccombe exclaimed one night, “At dinner this evening we had four peers of the realm sharing oyster stew with us. You couldn’t better that in London!”