What would he do, a fourteen-year-old boy on the loose in a vast new territory? Something would turn up. He liked animals, and something would turn up.
On the last night watch before they reached the Platte, the two-to-four, as he rode with Coker he asked, “Was it really your brother, the one you shot?” They made a complete circle, and Coker said, “He was my brother and you’re my brother.” They made another complete circle while Jim pondered this, and on the next turn Coker said, “If two fellas eat dust in drag position for four months, that makes ’em brothers, don’t it?” Jim weighed this, and on the next turn Coker said, “If you ever need help, Jim ...” He left the rest unspoken, and the long night passed.
On the night of July 12, 1868, Mr. Skimmerhorn announced at the last campfire, “Tomorrow we reach our pasture,” and the cowboys reacted in a way that surprised Jim, for each man broke out fresh clothing, used his hands to press his bandanna free of wrinkles, even polished his saddle. For the first time Jim realized how vain these men were, what pride they had in their profession, and when dawn of that last day broke, each man rode a little straighter and spoke with a quieter precision, for they had accomplished a considerable feat and they knew it. They had herded nearly three thousand longhorns thirteen hundred miles, with minimum loss, and they were proud.
When word of their approach reached Zendt’s Farm, the villagers became so excited at the prospect of receiving cattle from Texas that everyone walked out to watch. The cowboys, with a larger audience than expected, outdid themselves in crisp commands and boldly waved signals. Lasater even unholstered his revolver, using it to signal the lead steers into the water.
The crossing was so easy it seemed an afterthought. “Not much like the Arkansas,” Ragland said scornfully, but Mr. Skimmerhorn pointed to the farthest banks of the valley and told him, “You thank your stars this river isn’t in flood. It reaches from there to there.” But Ragland wasn’t listening. He had spotted a pretty girl.
“You did it, John!” the newspaper editor shouted as the cattle climbed up the north bank.
“He did it,” Skimmerhorn called back, giving credit to Poteet. “What’s more, he’s gonna do it for us again.”
Ahead, to greet them as they forded the river, stood Oliver Seccombe: “Well done, men. The cattle look fine.”
The crowd separated to let the herd through and Nacho Gómez drove his wagon past the ladies and on to the final camping ground. When Buck brought his remuda across, Mr. Poteet assembled the cowboys, who were pleased for another chance to posture among the townspeople, and told them, “Each of you is to pick one horse from the remuda. A present from Mr. Skimmerhorn. The other horses,” he said, raising his voice so that the townsmen could hear, will be sold, tomorrow noon.”
“Where?” the horse-hungry locals asked.
“We’ll bring ’em in town, so look ’em over.”
Insistently, as if they had a corporate will of their own, the cattle pressed north and the men followed. The last river had been crossed, the last danger repulsed.
Jim Lloyd had stayed on the south bank with Coker, who, wishing to display his horsemanship, made a great show of rounding up the strays, but Jim, behaving more sedately, scrambled his horse up the north bank, and as he came over the brow he found himself looking into the eyes of a young girl, the most astonishingly beautiful girl he had ever seen.
She had a dark complexion, black eyes and ebony hair, which she wore in ribboned braids. She was almost as tall as he, and her face had that brazen look which challenges men. When he stared at her, she stared back, her eyes like pools of clear water at the far edge of the Llano. He sat very tall in his saddle and smiled down like a conquistador.
She broke into a disrespectful laugh, and when he was past he asked Mr. Skimmerhorn, “Who’s that girl?” Skimmerhorn turned in his saddle and said, “That’s Levi Zendt’s daughter. She’s part Indian,” and Jim said quietly, “I’m goin’ to marry her,” and the herd moved on.
CAUTION TO US EDITORS: Please, please make your artist exercise restraint in illustrating this section. I have studied forty-seven photographs of groups of cowboys in the years 1867-68-69, and not one appear in chaps, tapaderos or exaggerated hat. All wear working clothes, plus high-heeled boots and bandanna. The Denver Public Library has nine photographs of R. J. Poteet in the early years before he put together his big ranch northwest of Jacksboro, and he is not gussied up. He shows no flamboyance but a good deal of solid character.
Do not allow your artists to portray these cowboys as big men. Most of the good ones were slight. Boone McClure of that admirable Panhandle Plains Historical Museum just south of Amarillo is my authority for the statement: “We had this convocation of famous living cowboys, and three were picked as most representative. I’m only five-feet-six, and every one of those men was no taller than I.”
Few towering cowboys like those depicted by John Wayne and Joel McCrea, existed in those early days. From various photographs which contained reference points I have calculated the height of our thirteen men. We know that John Skimmerhorn was tall, like his father, say 6-1, but he was not a Texas cowboy. R. J. Poteet was not over 5-6, with Canby, Person, Calendar and Savage coming in at about that level too. Nate Person was a mite taller, but Gompert, Nacho, Coker and Buck were all 5-4 or less. Lasater might have run to 5-7, but only Ragland had any real height, 5-10 at the most generous. Jim Lloyd was a special case. At fourteen he was only 5-5, but he added some inches later.
Be careful how you handle John Chisum on that gigantic spread along the Pecos River. Don’t confuse him with Jesse Chisholm, 1806-68, after whom the greatest of the cattle trails was named, posthumously, as a matter of fact. Recent motion pictures have been making our Chisum a notable hero of the west. The facts do not support this. Tough? Yes. Fearless? I wonder. He never carried a gun on the theory that the code of the west forbade the shooting of an unarmed man, and he knew that a lot of people wanted to shoot him. He hired others to do his killing for him, and some say Billy the Kid was in his employ when finally shot. In protecting his assumed acres, he was ruthless, and in disciplining Mexicans he suspected of encroaching on the land he didn’t own, he was pitiless. I’ve read all that’s available on Chisum and find him at best an unlovely man. If you wish to cut him from the text, feel free.
On the other hand, I have tried to be restrained in depicting R. J. Poteet. In retrospect he seems better than I have said, a trail-hardened man who engaged in every aspect of range life without ever having been charged with a bad performance. In the 1870s he shot bandits and in the 1890s endowed a college. In the 1880s he ran squatters off his land, but in the 1900s gave land he owned for the founding of five different towns. He was the first to import to the prairies really good breed bulls from England, the first to bring in Black Angus cattle, the. first to experiment with irrigation.
A nice touch. In later years Poteet confessed that whenever he was on a dangerous trail he allowed Nate Person to carry the outfit’s money. “Not only was Nigger Nate the best hand I had, but if the outlaws did ride us down, there was little likelihood they would search Nate for the money, he being black and they being from the south.”
Trouble spot. Records of several long drives to the north indicate that many trail bosses took the eight cowboys who enclosed the herd—two points, two swings, two flanks and two drags—and rotated each man through each of the eight positions, clockwise, and some reader familiar with this may give you flak. R. J. Poteet argued that he wanted his top experts at the two points, with the best man riding left and the next best right. He also had a rule that if young or inexperienced cowboys wanted to ride with him, they had to prove themselves by making their first trip at drag, and so far as I can ascertain, he never wavered from this routine.
Technical point. Although Jim Lloyd riding left drag would eat dust during the westward leg of the journey, when the trail turned north, as it did once the Pecos was reached, the prevailing northwest wind would throw the greater burden on Buf
e Coker riding right drag.
Caption material. R. J. Poteet has a passage in one of his letters which you might want to use: “I was always impressed by the fact that although we Texans held the Mexican in contempt, our profession and its vocabulary were borrowed from Mexican experience in running cattle south of the Rio Grande. Chaps from chaparejos, lariat from la reata, sombrero, mesquite, latigo, tapadero, bandanna, buckaroo from vaquero, corral, rodeo, remuda, ranch from rancho. While coosie, a word we use for cook, came from cocinero.”
Tell your artist to observe that the northern Texas cowboy invariably tied his lariat to his saddle horn, but a man from the Rio Grande, like Canby, would dally his, that is, give it a couple of twists around the horn, relying on friction to hold it. Dally comes from the Mexican dar la vuelta, “to give the turn.”
Llano Estacado. Be careful what you say about this and how you show it on your maps. Few problems in American history are more sticky, because delineation of the area varies radically from one source to another; it probably extended as far south as the route we follow, but some experts claim it halted farther north. The derivation of the name is totally confused, six major theses having been advanced: (1) Spanish legend says stakes were driven to mark the only trail across the desert. (2) Indians claim that their ancestors drove stakes to guide an unknown Great Chief who would come from the east to deliver them from their enemies. (3) Josiah Gregg, famed historian of western commerce, says the stakes marked the course between water holes. (4) Later travelers believed the stakes had been set and adorned with buffalo skulls to mark the route of the Butterfield Overland Mail. (5) Naturalists, asking the irritating question “In a land without trees, how did they cut stakes?” explain, “From a distance the yucca looks like a stake.” (6) Herbert Bolton, the noted historian of the west, is probably closest to the truth when he says that one translation of the Spanish noun estacada is palisade, and in the western reaches of the area there were many spectacular bluffs resembling palisades, tilted and glowing in sunlight.
Cattle. Even though I have used a cattle drive originating in Texas, and even though most novels and films have done the same, you must remember that the principal ranches of Wyoming, Montana and even Colorado received the major portion of their cattle not from Texas but from Oregon. The early emigrants traveling westward along the Oregon Trail took with them many first-rate British-bred cows and bulls, and on the Pacific Coast these animals proliferated. Consequently, the typical cattle drive of this period consisted not of scrawny longhorns coming north from Texas but of sleek, well-bred cattle heading east from Oregon.
Chapter 9
THE HUNTERS
Two of the most significant contributions to the use of land in Colorado were made in 1859 by a thirty-two-year-old Russian. He was a goldminer with the good German name of Hans Brumbaugh, and he happened to be a Russian because in the year 1764 his great-grandfather, a German farmer, listened when Catherine the Great, the German princess ruling Russia, issued one of the most enticing colonization promises in history: “Any German subject consenting to settle in my Russia will be given land practically free and will be insured freedom of worship, freedom from taxation, self-rule within your own German settlement, freedom to conduct education in your own language and perpetual freedom from military service.”
The Brumbaughs read this glowing invitation posted on the door of their little church in Hesse, where crops had failed for six years and war had ravaged the countryside for seven. They walked to the Baltic port of Lubeck, took ship to St. Petersburg, and sailed down the Volga River till they found a treasury of arable land at Saratov. The Volgadeutsch they were henceforth called, and for thirty-four years they enjoyed a prosperity and a freedom greater than they could have hoped for. They experienced the usual difficulties of all immigrants-learning Russian, mastering local systems of agriculture, preventing their daughters from marrying Russians-but they were happy, and few would have returned to Germany had they been given the opportunity.
But not even empresses live forever, and when Catherine finally died in 1796, her promises to her German settlements were forgotten, and in time the Volgadeutsch marched in Russian regiments just like other peasants, and their schools were nationalized and the old concordat became a scrap of paper. It was then that stubborn peasants like Hans Brumbaugh began to yearn for the freedom which had been stolen from them.
At age seventeen he started making himself a nuisance to the Russian authorities, so that his mother had to warn him, “Hans, be careful. The Czar’s men will hang you.” At nineteen he was with a group that attacked a military convoy, and that night he left the Volga and clawed his way out of Russia and back to Germany. At twenty-six he had the bad luck to buy a farm in Illinois from a man who did not own it, and when the rightful owner forced the sheriff to dispossess him, he decided to quit that state.
In January of 1859 he heard of the discovery of gold in Jefferson Territory, as Colorado was then calling itself, and he walked across Missouri and Nebraska, a husky, stoop-shouldered, obstinate man willing to face weather that would have killed an ordinary traveler. Like thousands of others, he stopped briefly at Zendt’s trading post to acquire provisions for the last stage of his journey to Pikes Peak. He was pleased to find in Levi a fellow German, and for the better part of two days they talked in that language; Levi’s long stay in Pennsylvania had corrupted his mother tongue as much as the Brumbaugh family’s exile in Russia had altered his. A purist would have shuddered at what they called German, but each made himself understood.
As they talked, Brumbaugh complained of the high prices Levi was charging, but Levi explained, “What I bring in from St. Louis has to be expensive. But what I grow here you will find to be cheap,” and Brumbaugh saw that this was true. During his last day at the post he inspected the land Levi was using along the Platte.
“Good land,” he said.
“Where there’s water,” Levi replied, and this remark caused Brumbaugh to examine the benches up from the riverbed, and he listened attentively when Levi said, “Nothin’s ever been grown up here, it bein’ so far from water, but if you could get water to it, I’m convinced it’s the same land as that fruitful stretch down by the river.”
Brumbaugh proceeded to the gold fields, lost himself in the frenzy of Pikes Peak and found not even one nugget. At the end of three months, his supplies gone, his stomach empty and his temper frayed, he developed the first of his significant ideas. He was seated with a group of eleven miners endeavoring to entertain each other with stories, and it occurred to him that they were talking so avidly in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they were starving.
They had money. They had energy. But there simply was no food other than flour at twenty-two dollars a barrel and bacon at six dollars a pound, and as one of the men gallantly opened a last can of beans, passing it out among the ravenous miners, Brumbaugh said to himself, Folly! Men more interested in gold than food. The real money is in the farm.
That night he left Pikes Peak, one of the dreariest spots he had ever seen, and three days later, passed the bend in the Platte where the city of Denver was burgeoning. On the fifth day he was back at Zendt’s, asking, “How can I get hold of some land?”
Levi said, “For a farm?”
“Yes.” And there followed those intricate maneuverings which were becoming common throughout the west.
Levi explained how things stood in 1859: “It’s impossible to say who owns the land. McKeag and I staked it out long ago, but we’re still not a legal territory. In law it still belongs to the Indians, so you can’t squat on it and say, ‘This land is mine,’ because it isn’t yours. It’s theirs.”
“You have land,” Brumbaugh pointed out.
“Correct. It was land owned by my wife’s mother. Full-blooded Arapaho. She gave me a paper, which I filed in St. Louis, showing that I had paid her for it.” Levi stopped to recall the solemn day when the transfer was made. Clay Basket had ridiculed the idea, but old Alexander McKea
g, who couldn’t read or write, had a Scotsman’s reverence for legal documents, and he insisted that the paper be drawn, witnessed and filed, even though at that time there was no proper place for filing. He himself had carried it to St. Louis for deposit with an official of the Missouri government, witnessed by Cyprian Pasquinel, the congressman.
“So I claim about eight hundred acres,” Levi concluded, “and I have a legal paper proving it, but whether it’ll be recognized when things get straightened out, I don’t know.”
“What can I do?” Brumbaugh asked.
“You can squat on Indian land and hope that when law comes this way, title will pass to you, or you can buy some of my land and hope that the title I give you will some day be honored.”
“How much an acre?”
Levi considered this for some time, then said tentatively, “For good land along the river, where we know things will grow, ten dollars an acre. For barren land on the benches, two dollars.”
“What I’ll do,” Brumbaugh replied, “is buy twenty of your good acres at two hundred dollars and borrow the other forty from the Indians.”
In this way the farm of Hans Brumbaugh was started, and in the spring of 1859 he was planting vegetables, including a large crop of potatoes. Harvesting them as early as possible, he sold some to Levi Zendt and carted the rest to Denver, where he made more cash than he could have trying to find gold fields. Potato Brumbaugh he would be called henceforth, the canny Russian who had quit the gold fields to go where the real money was.