23 April 2003
How the West Was Closed
After 1869, it was the freaking Wild West out there once the flood of immigrants, investors and settlers began to board to the cars of the new railroad and head west.
Californians came East. The West was suddenly open, once the spike was driven at Promontory Summit.
Oh, it did not happen all at once. Development happened along the rail corridors, as two other major rail lines commenced, and a thousand spurs to new mining centers. There was silver fever in Utah and Colorado and Arizona; cattle fever in Wyoming and Nebraska.
Foreign money flooded the open frontier, mostly from London, whose imperial capital was busy bankrolling the new world from Laramie to the pampas of the Argentine.
The Wild West was not all about the six-gun, though there was plenty of that. We live in times where we have become accustomed to much more chaos as part of normal life, if we counted body for body. All the violence on the frontier is surpassed by a single season in a modern American big city. The opening of the west was also about claim law, and mineral rights, and water and grazing. The law applied old principle to modify the notion of land as one thing, center of the earth to heavens, and instead decreed that land was actually a bundle of rights, surface and subsurface.
Minerals and metals tended to stay where they were, though it was possible to split the rights out of the bundle. Surface rights could be retained for a rancher, for example, while the rights to what was below could be sold. The law, based on English precedent, changed and adapted to a dynamic environment.
All the pent-up energy that had been devoted to the sprawling war between the states was now free to exploit the west, and the remarkable American energy that was manifested in the building of the rails flowed from them into the great common areas.
Collisions were inevitable. You can still see the scars on the land. One of my pals recalled seeing the wagon ruts in the earth near the site of the Fetterman Fight outside south of Sheridan, Wyoming, part of the old Bozeman Trail. The short cut up to the Montana gold fields that the Plains Indians fought a war over.
It was at night, after one of our frantic continental drives from Detroit to Salt Lake City. He was sharing a cool Strohs beer with other pals who had made the move to Park City. The road from the reservation to Sheridan was dotted with flowers and small crosses for the dead who had crashed their trucks while driving drunk. The most popular brand to drink locally was Pabst Blue Ribbon, and it was worth driving to Evanston to get it from Utah.
Through the 1870’s, the Indians continued to resist the encroachment of the white man onto the Native common lands, and the willful disregard of the limiting provisions of the papers signed in the elegant Indian Treaty Room at the Department of War, State and the Navy on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. George Armstrong Custer died with his men in 1876, seven full years after the rail link between the coasts was completed.
Some of the public policy issues were unsettled. In 1884 the first commercial oil strike in Wyoming was made in the Wind River Basin. It was a harbinger of things to come, but cattle was still king on The Common of Wyoming and Montana.
The big boys called them rustlers, and accused them of re-branding their cattle, and selling the meat on the side to the voracious appetites of the railroad men. As the rail network expanded, immigrants flooded the fertile areas of the vastness. By the time the 1880s arrived, the network was perfected to deliver cattle fattened on common public lands to trains for shipment to the stockyards of Chicago. The cattle roamed on the commons, and the great round-ups of Spring brought them together in manageable herds.
There was no central control, and the animals mingled and calved without supervision. It was said that a man with a mule and his own branding iron could amass a small fortune if he was aggressive and got his brand on the mavericks. Or maybe changed someone else’s brand.
Acrimony between small settlers and the big land owners intensifying after the bitter winter of 1886. Although that devastating season hit other parts of the Union hard, the intense cold of that winter was the worst recorded in the northern tier of Western states. The consequences of the season began a series of events that culminated in a remarkable little war, and ended the Open Range era, and with the Johnson County War in 1892, can be said to mark the closing of the West.
The snows came earlier than usual, in early November. The summer had been unusually hot and dry, with numerous prairie fires and water sources often dried up. In the fall of ‘85, beavers and muskrats grew unusually heavy coats, consumed more food than usual built their lodges twice as tall as in normal years.
When the temperatures fell in November they went through the floor. Freezing temperatures killed humans and animals. In some instances, people got lost close to their houses and froze to death very close to their front doors. The storms forced the herds before them until they ran into obstacles and then froze to death standing. The immense kill-off was not discovered until spring finally came and the astonishing number carcasses were found in the fields and washed down in the streams.
The animals that survived were weak and thin, lowering their cost at market.
The British-owned Swan Land & Cattle Company, Ltd, headquartered in Chugwater and Cheyenne, lost half its calves and nearly a quarter of its total herd. It fell into bankruptcy the next year, sending shockwaves through the state.
Somewhat warmer winters in ’88 and ’89 did not bring the ranchers back to health.
The very next year Panic of 1890, which radiated out of the City of London just as the sub-prime melt-down shook the world from America. Only an international consortium could save Baring’s Bank, which was judged “too big to fail” despite the ill-considered investments in the Argentine cattle marker.
The commodities market slumped the world over. Range Beef was just another casualty.
Problems arose out of the loss of open range. Larger ranchers attempted to dominate the range by either controlling water or appropriating it for themselves on a "customary use" basis.
Control of water meant control of useful grazing land. One outfit acquired strategic property with riparian rights on the Chugwater and Sibylee Creek and gained de facto control of the land between them. Others were simply brazen, fencing off public lands for their own exclusive use.
Others consulted their lawyers and constructed an intricate scheme to control public land without paying for it. It is quite remarkable, and explained more lucidly than I can by G. B. Dobson on his wonderful Wyoming Tails and Trails website:
“(In) "checkerboard control," … the large cattle company would buy or lease alternating sections… in a six mile by six mile grid so that odd numbered sections will always be surrounded on four sides by even numbered sections and vice-versa like the red and black squares of a checkerboard. By owning all of the odd or even sections, a cattle company could erect a fence along the borders of owned sections and preclude access to the non-owned sections…”
(Map of fence around holdings of Douglas-Willan Sartoris Cattle Co., Albany County, 1889.)
If you follow the jagged line around the fenced are, you can see how the fencing was constructed in the odd-numbered sections, four inches in from the line. The effect was to fence in 200 square miles of publicly owned lands in even-numbered sections, with controlling access to water on both ends. The scheme was held by the Territorial Supreme Court to be legal. (See United States v. Douglas Willan Sartoris Co., 3 Wyo 287, 22 P. 92 (1889).
So the Commons idea about shared use in the wide wild west was dying. The economics forced efficiency, since the decline in commodity prices were squeezing the system hard.
but that was nothing like what was about to come to Nick Champion and Nick Ray in Johnson County. We will have to get to that tomorrow, or not.
I have to be traveling again early tomorrow, to the Windy City where the stockyards processed the cattle of the western commons. We will see where we pick this threat up again. Public policy and the extraction of natural resources can be dry stuff, but the evolution of the law is pretty interesting when you can almost smell the gunsmoke on the documents..
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com material “fair use” by permission.