Free Great Plains by Ian Frazier

them like game, sometimes getting killed in the process, because longhorns were skilled at ambushing people in the brush. When the railroads provided a market for beef, suddenly the six million longhorns running loose in Texas were worth something. Cowboys drove them from the brush and herded them north. Steers which were wild and unwilling sometimes had their eyes sewn shut with linen thread. By the time the thread rotted, the animal was usually tame. Although longhorns were dangerous to cowboys and horses and each other, and so skittish that a man striking a match at night could put them into a stampede, they were also strong travellers, with long legs and an ability to cover miles without water. Each steer had a travelling partner which it walked with every day. Longhorns were skinny and dusty, of many dun colors—mulberry blue, cream, red, yellow, ring-streaked—and their meat was stringy. Sometimes, after months on the trail, they would keep on walking around and around in the freight-yard pens for a week or so after they arrived.
    Meanwhile, in the nearby saloons, the cowboys who had brought them drank and acted crazy. Cowboys were often kids who had grown up hungry in Texas during the Civil War. They had names like Bump Miskimmins and Real Hamlet (first name Real, last name Hamlet). At night, on the trail, they used the rotation of the Big Dipper around the North Star to tell when their watch was over, and rubbed tobacco juice in their eyes to keep awake. They sang a song about the trail, and every river they crossed—the Nueces, the Colorado, the Red, the Washita, and on up—had its own verse. They liked canned food, a new convenience at the time. Fads swept them; one day a cowboy named Charlie Colcord appeared on the streets of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, carrying a toothbrush, and soon every cowboy had one sticking from his vest pocket. Just as the cowboys were often from the South, so the saloonkeepers and marshals and livery-store owners and railroad brakemen and small farmers they met along the way were often former Yankees. Fights tended to be at distances where the flame from one man’s pistol would set the wadding of the other man’s coat on fire.
    People with money back East and in Europe quickly realized that the Great Plains cleared of Indians and buffalo meant endless acres of free grass. English lords, Irish dukes, Scottish linen manufacturers, Boston bank presidents, Edinburgh lawyers, St. Louis shoe manufacturers, the Cunard family, actors from New York and Chicago invested in cattle ranches bigger than Eastern states. The Earl of Aberdeen and Baron Tweedmouth founded a ranch called the Rocking Chair Ranche, which took up much of the Texas panhandle. Its offices were at 25 Piccadilly, London. The English-owned XIT Ranch had an English foreman whose name was Walter de S. Maud. By 1884, foreign interests controlled more than twenty million acres of Great Plains ranchlands. Many rich people came West to oversee their ranches themselves: East Coast Biddies and Aldriches and Sturgises, Winston Churchill’s Aunt Clara (wife of English-born cattleman Moreton Frewen), Baron Walter von Richthofen (grandfather of the World War I ace), Teddy Roosevelt (recovering from the death of his wife; he told friends he would never be happy again), and a Frenchman named Antoine Amédée Marie Vincent Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès. “I am weary of civilization; I long for wilderness; I want an absolute contrast to the old life,” the marquis said. He bought ranchland in the valley of the Little Missouri River in North Dakota and built a big house on a bluff. His wife, Medora von Hoffman, of New York, brought along silver hairbrushes in sets of two, for either a right-handed or a left-handed lady’s maid.
    In general, the rich people had a lot of fun on the plains. They drove around in fancy traps and four-in-hands, raised polo ponies, experimented with new breeds of