Part 6
It would be interesting to follow the course of this sky-rocket among cities up to the present day, and tell how laws were evolved and courts established, and the complexities of the situation disentangled; but that is work for one of the many bright young men who write monographs on economic subjects at the Johns Hopkins University. It is just the sort of work in which they delight, and which they do well, and they will find many “oldest inhabitants” of this three-year-old city to take equal delight in telling them of these early days, and in explaining the rights and wrongs of their individual lawsuits against their city and their neighbors.
It is impossible, in considering the founding of Oklahoma, to overrate the services of Captain Stiles. Seldom has the case of the right man in the right place been so happily demonstrated. He was particularly fitted to the work, although I doubt if the Government knew of it before he was sent there, so apt is it to get the square peg in the round hole, unless the square peg’s uncle is a Senator. But Captain Stiles, when he was a lieutenant, had ruled at Waco, Texas, during the reconstruction period, and the questions and difficulties that arose after the war in that raw community fitted him to deal with similar ones in the construction of Oklahoma. He was and is intensely unpopular with the worst element in Oklahoma, and the better element call him blessed, and have presented him with a three hundred dollar gold cane, which is much too fine for him to carry except in clear weather. This is the way public sentiment should be adjusted. Personal bravery had, I think, as much to do with his success as the readiness with which he met the difficulties he had to solve at a moment’s consideration. Several times he walked up to the muzzles of revolvers with which desperadoes covered him and wrenched them out of their owners’ hands. He never interfered between the people and the civil law, and resisted the temptation of misusing his authority in a situation where a weaker man would have lost his head and abused his power. He was constantly appealed to to settle disputes, and his invariable answer was, “I am not here to decide which of you owns that lot, but to keep peace between you until it is decided.” In September of 1889 a number of disaffected citizens announced an election which was to overthrow those then in power, and Captain Stiles was instructed by his superior officers to prevent its taking place. This he did with a small force of men in the face of threats from the most dangerous element in the community of dynamite bombs and of a body of men armed with Winchesters who were to shoot him first and his men later. But in spite of this he visited and broke all the voting booths, wrested a Winchester from the hands of the man who pointed it at his heart through one of the windows of the polling-place, and finally charged the mob of five hundred men with twenty-five soldiers and his fighting surgeon, young Dr. Ives, and dispersed them utterly. I heard these stories of him on every side, and I was rejoiced to think how well off our army must be in majors, that the people at Washington can allow one who has served through the war and on the border and in this unsettled Territory, and whose hair has grown white in the service, to still wear two bars on his shoulder-strap.
It is much more pleasant to write of these early days of Oklahoma City than of the Oklahoma City of the present, although one of its citizens would not find it so, for he regards his adopted home with a fierce local pride and jealousy almost equal to a Chicagoan’s love for Chicago, which is saying a very great deal. But to the transient visitor Oklahoma City of to-day, after he has recovered from the shock its extent and solidity give him, is dispiriting and unprofitable to a degree. This may partly be accounted for by the circumstance that his only means of entering it from the south by train is, or was at the time I visited it, at four o’clock in the morning. No one, after having been dragged out of his berth and dropped into a cold misty well of darkness, punctured only by the light from the brakeman’s lantern and a smoking omnibus lamp, is in a mood to grow enthusiastic over the city about him. And the fact that the hotel is crowded, and that he must sleep with the barkeeper, does not tend to raise his spirits. I can heartily recommend this method of discouraging immigration to the authorities of any already overcrowded city.
But as the sun comes up, one sees the remarkable growth of this city--remarkable not only for its extent in so short a period, but for the come-to-stay air about many of its buildings. There are stone banks and stores, and an opera-house, and rows of brick buildings with dwelling-rooms above, and in the part of the city where the people go to sleep hundreds of wooden houses, fashioned after the architecture of the sea-shore cottages of the Jersey coast; for the climate is mild the best part of the year. There are also churches of stone and brick and stained glass, and a flour-mill, and three or four newspapers, and courts of law, and boards of trade. But with all of these things, which show a steadily improving growth after the mushroom nature of its birth, Oklahoma City cannot or has not yet shaken off the attributes with which it was born, and which in a community founded by law and purchase would not exist. For speculation in land, whether in lots on the main street or in homestead holdings on the prairie, and the excitement of real-estate transfers, and the battle for rights in the courts, seem to be the prevailing and ruling passion of the place. Gambling in real estate is as much in the air as is the spirit of the Louisiana State Lottery in New Orleans. Every one in Oklahoma City seems to live, in part at least, by transferring real estate to some one else, and the lawyers and real-estate agents live by helping them to do it. It reminded me of that happy island in the Pacific seas where every one took in every one else’s washing. This may sound unfair, but it is not in the least exaggerated. The town swarms with lawyers, and is overrun with real-estate offices. The men you meet and the men you pass in the street are not discussing the weather or the crops or the news of the outside world, but you hear them say: “I’ll appeal it, by God!” “I’ll spend every cent I’ve got, sir!” “They’re a lot of ‘sooners,’ and I can prove it!” or, “Ted Hillman’s lot on Prairie Avenue, that he sold for two hundred dollars, rose to three hundred in one week, and Abner Brown says he won’t take six hundred for it now.”
This is only the natural and fitting outcome of the bungling, incomplete bill which, rushed through at the hot, hurried end of a session, authorized the opening of this territory. The President might with equal judgment have proclaimed that “The silver vaults of the United States Treasury will be opened on the 22d of April, when citizens can enter in and take away one hundred and sixty silver dollars each,” without providing laws to prevent or punish those who entered before that date, or those who snatched more than their share. One would think that some distinction might have been made, in opening this new land, between those who came with family and money and stock, meaning to settle permanently, and those who took the morning train from Kansas in order to rush in and snatch a holding, only to sell it again in three hours and to return to their homes that night; between those who brought capital, and desperadoes and “boot-leggers” who came to make capital out of others. If the land was worth giving away, it was worth giving to those who would make the best use of it, and worth surrounding with at least as much order as that which distinguishes the fight of the Harvard Seniors for the flowers on Class day. They are going to open still more territory this spring, and in all probability the same confusion will arise and continue, and it is also probable that many persons in the East may be attracted by the announcements and advertisements of the “boomers” to this new land.
The West is always full of hope to the old man as well as to the young one, and the temptation to “own your own home” and to gain land for the asking is very great. But the Eastern man should consider the question very carefully. There is facing the passenger who arrives on the New York train at Sedalia a large black and white sign on which some philanthropist has painted “Go East, Young Man, Go East.” One might write pages and not tell more than that sign does, when one considers where it is placed and for what purpose it is placed there.
A man in Oklahoma City when the day’s work is done has before him a prospect of broad red clayey streets, muddy after rain, bristling with dust after a drought, with the sun setting at one end of them into the prairie. He can go to his cottage, or to “The Turf,” where he can lose some money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real estate to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate there. Once or twice a week a “show” makes a one-night stand at the opera-house. The schools are not good for his children as yet, and the society that he is willing his wife should enjoy is limited. On Sunday he goes to church, and eats a large dinner in the middle of the day, and walks up to the top of the hill to look over the prairie where he and many others would like to build, but which must remain empty until the twelve different disputants for each holding have stopped appealing to higher courts. This is actually the case, and the reason the city has not spread as others around it have done. As the Romans shortened their swords to extend their boundaries, so the people of Oklahoma City might cut down some of their higher courts and increase theirs.
I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed itself on me, because I think any man who can afford a hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities.
And the men who are at the head of affairs, who rose out of the six thousand in a week, and who have kept at the head ever since, if they had exerted the same energy, and showed the same executive ability and the same cleverness in a real city, would be real mayors, real merchants, and real “prominent citizens.” They are now as men playing with children’s toys or building houses of cards. Every now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes out of the South and West, and among these politicians and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men who only need a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what they can do. There are as many of these as there are uncouth “Sockless” Simpsons, or noisy Ingallses, and it is pathetic and exasperating to see men who would excel in a great metropolis, and who could live where they could educate their children and themselves, and be in touch with the world moving about them, even though they were not of it, wasting their energies in a desert of wooden houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie, where their point of view is bounded by the railroad tank and a barb-wire fence. It depends altogether on the man. There are men who are just big enough to be leading citizens of a town of six thousand inhabitants, who are meant for nothing else, and it is just as well they should be satisfied with the unsettled existence around them; but it would be better for these others to be small men in a big city than big men on a prairie, where the organ in the front room is their art gallery, book-store, theatre, church, and school, and where the rustling grass of the prairie greets them in the morning and goes to bed with them at night.
V
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS
V
RANCH LIFE IN TEXAS
THE inhabited part of a ranch, the part of it on which the people who own it live, bears about the same proportion to the rest of the ranch as a light-house does to the ocean around it.
And to an Eastern man it appears almost as lonely. Some light-houses are isolated in the ocean, some stand in bays, and some in harbors; and in the same proportion the ranches in Texas differ in size, from principalities to farms no larger than those around Jersey City. The simile is not altogether exact, as there are small bodies of men constantly leaving the “ranch-house” and wandering about over the range, sleeping wherever night catches them, and in this way different parts of the ranch are inhabited as well as the house itself. It is as if the light-housekeeper sent out a great number of row-boats to look after the floating buoys or to catch fish, and the men in those boats anchored whenever it grew dark, and returned to the light-house variously as best suited their convenience or their previous orders.
But it is the loneliness of the life that will most certainly first impress the visitor from closely built blocks of houses. Those who live on the ranches will tell you that they do not find it lonely, and that they grow so fond of the great breezy pastures about them that they become independent of the rest of mankind, and that a trip to the city once a year to go to the play and to “shop” is all they ask from the big world lying outside of the barb-wire fences. I am speaking now of those ranch-owners only who live on the range, and not of those who hire a foreman, and spend their time and money in the San Antonio Club. They are no more ranchmen than the absentee landlord who lives in his London house is a gentleman farmer.
The largest ranch in the United States, and probably in the world, owned by one person, is in Texas, and belongs to Mrs. Richard King, the widow of Captain Richard King. It lies forty-five miles south of Corpus Christi.
The ladies who come to call on Mrs. King drive from her front gate, over as good a road as any in Central Park, for ten miles before they arrive at her front door, and the butcher and baker and iceman, if such existed, would have to drive thirty miles from the back gate before they reached her kitchen. This ranch is bounded by the Corpus Christi Bay for forty miles, and by barb-wire for three hundred miles more. It covers seven hundred thousand acres in extent, and one hundred thousand head of cattle and three thousand broodmares wander over its different pastures.
This property is under the ruling of Robert J. Kleberg, Mrs. King’s son-in-law, and he has under him a superintendent, or, as the Mexicans call one who holds that office, a major-domo, which is an unusual position for a major-domo, as this major-domo has the charge of three hundred cowboys and twelve hundred ponies reserved for their use. The “Widow’s” ranch, as the Texans call it, is as carefully organized and moves on as conservative business principles as a bank. The cowboys do not ride over its range with both legs at right angles to the saddle and shooting joyfully into the air with both guns at once. Neither do they offer the casual visitor a bucking pony to ride, and then roll around on the prairie with glee when he is shot up into the air and comes down on his collar-bone, they are more likely to bring him as fine a Kentucky thoroughbred as ever wore a blue ribbon around the Madison Square Garden. Neither do they shoot at his feet to see if he can dance. In this way the Eastern man is constantly finding his dearest illusions abruptly dispelled. It is also trying when the cowboys stand up and take off their sombreros when one is leaving their camp. There are cowboys and cowboys, and I am speaking now of those that I saw on the King ranch.
The thing that the wise man from the East cannot at first understand is how the one hundred thousand head of cattle wandering at large over the range are ever collected together. He sees a dozen or more steers here, a bunch of horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and as far as his chance of finding them again would be, they might as well stand forty miles away at the other end of the ranch. But this is a very simple problem to the ranchman.
Mr. Kleberg, for instance, receives an order from a firm in Chicago calling for one thousand head of cattle. The breed of cattle which the firm wants is grazing in a corner of the range fenced in by barb-wire, and marked pale blue for convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in colors, like a patch-work quilt, which hangs in Mr. Kleberg’s office. When the order is received, he sends a Mexican on a pony to tell the men near that particular pale blue pasture to round up one thousand head of cattle, and at the same time directs his superintendent to send in a few days as many cowboys to that pasture as are needed to “hold” one thousand head of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The boys on the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which one man leads, and from one to another of which they shift their saddles as men do in polo, and go directly to the water-tanks in the ten square miles of land. A cow will not often wander more than two and a half miles from water, and so, with the water-tank (which on the King ranch may be either a well with a wind-mill or a dammed cañon full of rain-water) as a rendezvous, the finding of the cattle is comparatively easy, and ten men can round up one thousand head in a day or two. When they have them all together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station arrive, and take them off.
At the station the agent of the Chicago firm and the agent of the King ranch ride through the herd together, and if they disagree as to the fitness of any one or more of the cattle, an outsider is called in, and his decision is final. The cattle are then driven on to the cars, and Mr. Kleberg’s responsibility is at an end.
In the spring there is a general rounding up, and thousands and thousands of steers are brought in from the different pastures, and those for which contracts have been made during the winter are shipped off to the markets, and the calves are branded.
Texas is the great breeding State from which the cattle are sent north to the better pasture land of Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming Territory, to be fattened up for the markets. The breeding goes on throughout the year, five bulls being pastured with every three hundred cows, in pastures of from one thousand to ten thousand acres in extent. About ninety per cent. of the cows calve, and the branding of these calves is one of the most important duties of the spring work. They are driven into a pen through a wooden chute, and as they leave the chute are caught by the legs and thrown over on the side, and one of a dozen hot irons burning in an open fire is pressed against the flank, and, on the King ranch, on the nose.
An animal bearing one of the rough hall-marks of the ranchman is more respected than a dog with a silver collar around his neck, and the number of brands now registered in the State capital runs up to the thousands. On some ranches each of the family has his or her especial brand; and one young girl who came out in New York last winter is known throughout lower Texas only as “the owner of the Triangle brand,” and is much respected in consequence, as it is borne by thousands of wandering cattle. The separating of the cattle at the spring round-up is accomplished on the King ranch by means of a cutting pen, a somewhat ingenious trap at the end of a chute. One end of this chute opens on the prairie, and the other runs into four different pens guarded by a swinging gate, so hung that by a movement of the foot by the man sitting over the gate the chute can be extended into any one of the four pens. With this mules, steers, horses, and ponies can be fed into the chute together, and each arrive in his proper pen until the number for which the different orders call is filled.
It is rather difficult to imagine one solitary family occupying a territory larger than some of the Eastern States--an area of territory that would in the East support a State capital, with a Governor and Legislature, and numerous small towns, with competing railroad systems and rival base-ball nines. And all that may be said of this side of the question of ranch life is that when we are within Mrs. King’s house we would imagine it was one of twenty others touching shoulder to shoulder on Madison Avenue, and that the distant cry of the coyotes at night is all that tells us that the hansoms are not rushing up and down before the door.
In the summer this ranch is covered with green, and little yellow and pink flowers carpet the range for miles. It is at its best then, and is as varied and beautiful in its changes as the ocean.
The ranches that stretch along and away from the Rio Grande River are very different from this; they are owned by Mexicans, and every one on the ranch is a Mexican; the country is desolate here, and dead and dying cattle are everywhere.
No ranch-owner, whether he has fifty thousand or five hundred head of cattle, will ever attempt to help one that may be ailing or dying. This seems to one who has been taught the value of “three acres and a cow” the height of extravagance, and to show lack of feeling. But they will all tell you it is useless to try to save a starving or a sick animal, and also that it is not worth the trouble, there are so many more. In one place I saw where a horse had fallen on the trail, and the first man who passed had driven around it, and the next, and the next, until a new trail was made, and at the time I passed over this new trail, I could see the old one showing through the ribs of the horse’s skeleton. In the East, I think, they would have at least pulled the horse out of the road.
But a live horse or steer is just as valuable in Texas as in the East--even more so.
The conductor on the road from Corpus Christi sprang from his chair in the baggage car one day, and shouted to the engineer that he must be careful, for we were on Major Fenton’s range, and must look out for the major’s prize bull; and the train continued at half speed accordingly until the conductor espied the distinguished animal well to the left, and shouted: “All right, Bill! We’ve passed him, let her out.”
The Randado ranch is typical of the largest of the Mexican ranches which lie within the five hundred miles along the Rio Grande. It embraces eighty thousand acres, with twenty-five thousand head of cattle, and it has its store, its little mission, its tank, twenty or more adobe houses with thatched roofs, and its little graveyard. There is a post-office here, and a school, where very pretty little Mexicans recited proudly in English words of four letters. Around them lie the cactus and dense chaparral cut up with dusky trails, and the mail comes but twice a week. But every Saturday the vaqueros come in from the range, and there is dancing on the bare clay floor of one of the huts, and the school-master postmaster sings to them every evening on his guitar, and once a month the priest comes on horseback to celebrate mass in the adobe mission.