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Nebraska Cowboys of the Open Range “A Peculiar Set of Men”: Nebraska Cowboys of the Open Range (Article begins on page 2 below.) This article is copyrighted by History Nebraska (formerly the Nebraska State Historical Society). You may download it for your personal use. For permission to re-use materials, or for photo ordering information, see: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/re-use-nshs-materials Learn more about Nebraska History (and search articles) here: https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/nebraska-history-magazine History Nebraska members receive four issues of Nebraska History annually: https://history.nebraska.gov/get-involved/membership Full Citation: James E Potter, “‘A Peculiar Set of Men’: Nebraska Cowboys of the Open Range,” Nebraska History 94 (2013): 124-145 Article Summary: Potter explores the nineteenth-century lives of real cowboys, mostly hard-working, underpaid, transient laborers on horseback. They rarely appeared in history books unless they were accused of crimes. A few became prominent ranch owners or politicians when the end of the open range era eliminated cattle drives and roundups. Errata: The photograph of James Kelly was reproduced courtesy of the Dawson County Historical Society, Lexington. Cataloging Information: Names: James H Cook, John Bratt, James W and George H Bosler, Edward C “Teddy Blue” Abbott, Isom P “Print” Olive, Nels Rowley, Bartlett Richards, Louis “Billy the Bear” Iaeger, John Finch, Dillard R Fant, James C Dahlman, James Shaw, Jordon Smith, Robert “Arkansas Bob” Gillespie, James Kelly, Shelton Reddon, Dan Adamson, Charley O’Kieffe, Jasper Southard Nebraska Place Names: Schuyler, Kearney, Ogallala Keywords: James H Cook; John Bratt; Union Pacific Railroad; Burlington & Missouri River Railroad; herd law; Ogallala Land and Cattle Company; Bay State Livestock Company; herders (cowboys); Isom P “Print” Olive; Nels Rowley; Bartlett Richards; Louis “Billy the Bear” Iaeger; Western Stock District; Stock Growers’ Association of Western Nebraska; Northwestern Roundup; William Smith, The Cowboy: Reconstructing an American Myth; Richard Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas Photographs / Images: cowboys on the ranch of Charles F and Samuel B Coffee; John Bratt; cover of The Cowboys’ Secret League, a “dime novel”; detail from the 1885 Nebraska census of the Hot Creek basin showing cowboys who worked for the Coffees; James H Cook; James Kelly; Bartlett Richards and cowboy companions in Wyoming about 1882; maps of Nebraska from 1892 (just after the open range era) and 1875 (early in the open range era); inset newspaper headlines from sensational stories about cowboys’ misdeeds (Omaha Daily Bee, October 19, 1874); notice advertising specialty clothing for roundups published in the Sidney Plaindealer- Telegraph, April 4, 1883; cowboys at their chuck wagon dinner during the 1880s on Thomas B Hord’s “77” ranch in Wyoming; Louis “Billy the Bear” Iaeger with a friend; James Williamson’s original grave marker, carved by Iaeger; Texas cowboy Jordon Smith, convicted of the murder of a Kearney farmer in 1875 (shown as a civilian and later as a prisoner); inset text of “The Cowboys’ Farewell,” published in the Keith County News, April 27, 1888; Robert “Arkansas Bob” Gillespie; Mayor (and former cowboy) James Dahlman at Omaha’s 1924 Legion Rodeo; former cowboys who attended the Northwestern Roundup in 1912 A Peculiar Set of Men: Nebraska Cowboys of the Open Range BY JAMES E. POT TER 124 • NEBRASKA history s an American icon, the cowboy has few of men who work as ranch hands in cattle country A new exhibit, Nebraska peers. The iconic cowboy began to emerge and by those who straddle the broncos and rope Cowboys: Lives, Legends, Awhile the real one was still riding the the calves in Professional Rodeo Cowboys Associa- and Legacies, will be at open range. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show tion (PRCA) competitions and in scores of lesser the Nebraska History premiered in Omaha in 1883 and soon took the rodeos. Many other examples illustrate the persis- Museum in Lincoln from romanticized American cowboy abroad. “Dime tence of the cowboy as a cultural symbol. In September 23, 2013, to novels” featuring cowboy derring-do were com- The Cowboy: Reconstructing an American Myth, January 5, 2015. mon nineteenth-century fare. Owen Wister’s novel, William Savage termed him “the predominant fig- The Virginian (1902), solidified the cowboy hero ure in American mythology” but added, archetype. The Great Train Robbery (1903) initiated “Historically, the cowboy was an individual of little a stream of Hollywood films and TV series that or no significance.”1 helped create and then diffuse the mythological Unfortunately, as Richard Slatta notes in his 1990 cowboy worldwide. book, Cowboys of the Americas, “The real old-time The occasional cowboy Western still graces the cowboy is only dimly visible in the new sanitized, big screen, and who can forget the cowboys who politicized, symbolic cowboy.”2 Slatta’s conclu- rode the television ranges of Rawhide, The Big sion applies as well to Nebraska’s “real old-time” Valley, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza. Larry McMurtry’s cowboys. While the work they did and the lives 1985 novel, Lonesome Dove, became a best seller they led are generally understood, most of these and was made into a TV miniseries. Cowboy poetry hard-working, underpaid, transient laborers on get-togethers are frequently held, and magazines horseback remain anonymous. A few, however, can Brothers Charles F. and Samuel B. Coffee, both such as Cowboys & Indians and American Cowboy be glimpsed more fully in the historical record via from Texas, were among find an eager readership. Authors who write about recollections, documents, photographs, or personal the first to establish a ranch the West, both fiction and nonfiction, affiliate in the possessions they left behind. Such is most often the in Sioux County, where their Western Writers of America, an organization whose case for those who made headlines for murder and descendants still ranch bimonthly magazine is Roundup. Cowboy imagery other crimes and for the comparative handful that today. Several cowboys recorded in the 1885 often appears in music and advertising. made the transition from cowboy to ranch owner, Nebraska census of the Hat The old-time cowboy of the nineteenth-century law officer, or politician after their range-riding Creek basin worked for the American West is represented today by the handful days were over. Coffees. NSHS RG2555-3-18 FALL 2013 • 125 John Bratt’s autobiography, vehicles. No longer was the cowboy exclusively Trails of Yesterday (1921), an equestrian. provides many details Although a few Texas cattle were driven to about the lives of cowboys who worked Nebraska’s Nebraska Territory before the Civil War, such as a open range in the herd of 750 from Fort Worth that crossed the Mis- nineteenth century. souri River at Nebraska City in July 1860, the war’s NSHS RG2411-571d outbreak in 1861 foreclosed cattle from Confeder- ate Texas reaching northern markets.6 Once the war was over a surplus of cattle in Texas, combined with a growing, increasingly industrialized nation, provided both the supply and the demand for beef. If cattle were driven from their southern ranges to the railroads pushing westward across Kansas and Nebraska, they could be transported quickly to eastern slaughterhouses and packing plants. Moreover, post- Civil War negotiations with the Plains tribes, such as the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 establishing the Great Sioux Reservation, provided for the government to feed the Indians (including a pound of meat daily for each Indian over age four) while they learned to practice agri- culture. By the mid-1870s, with most Plains tribes on reservations and the bison being hunted nearly to extinction for their hides, thousands of acres of Great Plains grasslands became available to raise cattle, both for market and to supply the reserva- tions and the army posts that surrounded them. The Rise and Fall of Nebraska One reason so little is known about most of the Open-Range Ranching men who trailed the longhorns north from Texas or The vast herds of bison had already demon- worked Nebraska’s open ranges in the nineteenth strated that the Plains grasses could sustain large century is that the period in which they flourished ruminants year round. Proprietors of trailside em- was so brief. Again quoting Slatta, “Extensive open- poriums of the 1850s and 1860s known as “road range ranching came and went in the American ranches” successfully wintered oxen and other West in the space of a single lifetime.”3 Although domestic cattle, albeit sometimes putting the term “cow boy” can be traced back to AD 1000, up hay to supplement grazing. “Squire” Lamb, its early usage meant literally a youth who tended who operated such an establishment on the cows. In North America, “cow-boy” in its modern Platte Valley trail near present Alda, Nebraska, usage was first a nickname for cattle thieves roam- wrote his brother in January 1865 that cattle did ing the Texas-Mexico border during the 1830s.4 In well on the winter-cured buffalo grass: “They its more honorable context, meaning a salaried graze as in the summer.”7 laborer working cattle from horseback, the day M. H. Brown is said to have brought the first of the American (and Nebraska) cowboy lasted Texas cattle to the Platte Valley near North Platte, only from the end of the Civil War to about 1900. some eight hundred head, in the fall of 1868. A Subsequently, hired laborers on ranches, often still year later he drove a herd of seventeen hundred called cowboys, began to do much of their work as to Nebraska, which he sold to local entrepreneurs pedestrians while building fences, putting up hay, Keith and Barton. In 1869 John Bratt, in partner- and repairing windmills. As former cowboy James ship with Isaac Coe and Levi Carter, bought 2,500 H.
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