How Cowboys Celebrated Easter

 

Out on the open range, Easter for cowboys was usually a quieter, more practical affair than the church-centered celebrations back East. Spring was a busy season in cattle country--calving was underway, grass was coming in, and long days in the saddle left little time for formal observance.  Still, many cowboys marked the holiday in simple, meaningful ways. If a ranch was near a town, they might ride in for a church service, trading dust-covered hats for a brief moment of reflection. More often, though, Easter was acknowledged right where they were: on the trail, around a chuckwagon, or beside a small campfire under the wide prairie sky. 

 Food played a central role, as it often does on holidays. The ranch cook might make an effort to prepare something a bit more special than the usual fare--fresh biscuits, maybe a pie if ingredients allowed, or even eggs if they could be had. Coffee was strong, conversation a little lighter, and the men might swap stories or speak of home, where families were likely celebrating in more traditional ways. For some, Easter was a reminder of distant loved ones and a life left behind, adding a note of quiet sentiment to an otherwise rugged existence.

 Though their celebration lacked ceremony, many cowboys still carried a personal sense of faith. A few might read from a small Bible kept in their saddlebags, or bow their heads briefly before a meal. In a landscape as vast and unforgiving as the frontier, moments like Easter offered a chance to pause, reflect, and find a bit of peace. Even without churches or choirs the spirit of the day endured--simple, resilient, and shaped by the rhythms of life on the range. 

Happy Easter,

 

Sandra 

 

Books available at Amazon 

 

The Great Die-up

The End of Open Range

Dec. 31, 1885. The day began with a sunrise that painted the sky purple/yellow. Strange. No one could recall the sky being that particular color. By the next day, snow began to fall, faster and thicker by the hour. It was the beginning of The Great Blizzard in Kansas, 1886.

Between January 1-3 Kansas experienced 36 straight hours of blizzard conditions. On January 7, the temperature dropped and the wind chill was 40 below. Two days later, the blizzard spread across the Great Plains with more than 16 inches of snow in most places. Fifty below zero wasn't unheard of.

The weather had played a cruel trick on ranchers. Through much of the 1870s and 1880s ranchers had enjoyed cool summers and mild winters, which meant that feeding their stock wasn't a problem. However, in 1885 the summer was blazing hot and the fall as dry as dirt. Ranchers hadn't put back enough feed and they were beginning to run short by November. So, when the blizzard hit, their cattle were already on the skinny side. Cattle begin to die of starvation by January first. When spring arrived, at least 100,000 cows and horses were dead. In fact, 90 percent of open range cattle were obliterated. Open range suddenly seemed like a foolhardy practice.

The aftermath of the blizzard became apparent when the snow finally slacked off enough for folks to see past their noses. Stagecoach drivers died sitting with the reins still in their hands. Trains filled with hogs were frozen solid. At least 100 people died, many of them only a few feet from their house or barn. Dead cattle clogged up rivers and streams, spoiling drinking water. The storm wiped out 75 percent of Kansas livestock. Many ranchers went bankrupt, while others migrated east where they hoped life was more hospitable.

Ultimately, ranchers learned a valuable lesson. Letting cattle roam far and wide was risky business when dealing with Mother Nature. They stopped keeping gigantic stocks of cattle and began farming to go along with their ranching and grow feed for their herds. They dealt with smaller herds that were kept closer to grazing territories and grain reserves. And they put up fences to keep the cattle in designated areas.

Few would forget the Great Blizzard and the hard lessons it taught ranchers. So, this winter when the wind blows in from the north and sends a shiver down your spine and you see the first crystal snowflakes dancing in the air, think about our forefathers who managed to survive fifty below temps and the devastating sight of thousands of cattle frozen in their tracks on the unforgiving prairie.

 

  

Much Ado About Mutton - Meg Mims

I confess. I stole the clever title for this blog post. The original was used for a conference workshop about mutton-eating in Detroit's old days. But it certainly fits the history of the cattle-sheep wars in the old West from 1870 to the 1920s. I also confess I had to do some quick research about the topic, since I haven’t read enough Western history of the cattle barons, trails, stockyards, open range and the like.

Cattle vs. sheep wars were not like the big, bad Johnson County cattle range wars -- not that I'm up on that history either. I discovered the most common states experiencing cattle vs. sheep troubles were Arizona, Texas, Wyoming and Colorado. Were murders and the slaughter of animals really rampant? Numbers prove it – over fifty men murdered and between 50,000 and 100,000 sheep slaughtered. Serious enough! 

Remember I’m an eastern greenhorn, born and raised in Michigan. Land of trees, the Great Lakes, lighthouses, beaches and cars. Yes, the automobile – which replaced horses after the turn of the 20^th century. And yes, prior to that, horses were common (along with horse dung) all across the country, whether for riding or pulling omnibuses, wagons and stagecoaches. So the “beef vs. mutton” dispute is news to me.

Let’s face it, cowboys (cow hands, really, since they were anything but boys) worked cattle drives on horseback. After the buffalo herds were slaughtered, the open range favored cattle driven northward on “trails” to stockyards where they were sent east to meat-packing plants in St. Louis and Chicago. Ranches could be small or huge, sprawling affairs, and disputes arose about rustling or branding mavericks to swell the herds. But sheep? Cowhands considered them an insult.

What factors played a role in the conflict between cattle and sheep men in the Old West? First, some believed that sheep with their smaller mouths grazed closer to the ground and ruined the range, and that cattle would not drink from water sources “polluted” by sheep. Second, ethnicity may have played a shadowy role – men of Spanish origin herded sheep, and herders worked the sheep on foot or burro, sometimes on horseback. The ratio of animals to men were far smaller with sheep than cattle. You can imagine how “outnumbered” the sheep and herders would be in a range dispute.

For example, Charles Goodnight’s cowhands drove over four hundred sheep into the Canadian River and drowned them after herders “invaded” their range along the Texas-New Mexico border in 1875. 2400 sheep were slaughtered in Oregon in 1903 by driving them off a cliff, or “rimrock,” and the survivors shot. Other sheep herds were stampeded or poisoned.

But some disputes turned into murder. The 1886-1887 Pleasant Valley war (not so pleasant, really) in Arizona between the Graham and Tewksbury feuding factions resulted in about thirty dead men. Plenty of books and movies, some factual and some far-fetched, were spawned out of these Old West range wars.

By 1920 disputes between cattle and sheep ranchers cooled down, since the “open range” had been fenced off by that time. I'm partial to beef burgers over mutton on my dinner plate, but I do enjoy gyros. That's about as close to a cow or sheep I'll ever get.

Here’s a few interesting books, blogs and movie resources.

Dane Coolidge, Hidden Water, 1910

Bill O'Neal, Cattlemen vs. Sheepherders: Five Decades of Violence in the West, 1880–1920, Eakin Press, 1989

http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/azs01

The Sheepmen – 1958 Glenn Ford film

Picture credits: 

Book cover and illustrations by Maynard Dixon, from the 1910 edition of Hidden Water – which I “rustled” from Ron Scheer’s BUDDIES IN THE SADDLE blog. Slaughtered sheep image from en.wikipedia.org

Meg Mims is the award-winning author of DOUBLE CROSSING (2012 Spur Award - Best First Novel, Finalist in Best Books of 2012 by USA Book News), available on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords, in e-book, trade paperback and hardcover. To the right is the cover for the HC large print edition from Center Point Publishing.

Meg is working on the sequel, DOUBLE OR NOTHING, and hopes to release it in early spring. Want a sneak peek? Check out her blog for The Next Big Thing!