Ranching on the Right Side of History

Ike Blasingame had a good horse, a blood-bay gelding he called C Heart, under him that warm spring day of 1905 as he approached the east bank of the Missouri River. He considered the proposition of crossing the ice to get back to Matador headquarters on the west side, in the grazing lease on the Cheyenne River Reservation. The horse was shy of the honeycombed ice with pools of water on the surface, but Ike had liquored up in the cattle-shipping town of Evarts, and he spurred his mount across. He had stayed too long in town; he should have been back on the job. As things turned out, he was lucky he made it at all. The hardy horse clambered out of trouble again and again, at one point pulling himself out from a hip-deep immersion. “Both of us were thankful to get off that river,” recalled Ike, no stranger to dangerous scrapes. “By sundown, the ice burst apart, booming like a cannon as it split in a thousand directions.” Range memoirs, such as Ike Blasingame’s Dakota Cowboy,1 are fi lled with hair’s-breadth escapes from deadly peril and with second-guessing of decisions made at the time. Reading the broader history of the range cattle industry during its heyday on the northern plains likewise offers opportunity for second-guessing with benefi t of hindsight— always a dubious undertaking. Nevertheless, the chronicle fairly shouts a catalog of lessons for riders of the northern range in any generation of the livestock industry. The biggest lesson is this: do not let yourself get situated on the wrong side of things, like Ike did that day in 1905. The record of the livestock industry as to staying on the right side of history is checkered at best. Too often stockmen have been swamped by developments they ought to have foreseen and navigated. The fi rst problem in learning from the early experience of ranching on the northern plains is to overcome collective memory. Over time we, professional historians and the public together, have fashioned a grand narrative, a certain way of telling the story of the range, that does not necessarily refl ect what happened on the ground. Our grand narrative goes like this. The North American range cattle industry began in south Texas, being Hispanic in origin—its methods of handling cattle, its genetics both bovine and equine, and its very extensive nature. The Hispanic system of ranching, once co-opted by Anglos, became the Texas system. Following the Civil War the Texas system dispersed north with the long drive, whereby southern cattle were delivered to shipping points in Kansas and Nebraska. Longhorns not shipped east to packers or feeders were wintered or, once Indian confl icts had wound down, driven on north to mature and fatten as well as to establish breeding herds. These rangers, as the Texas longhorns were called, were the stock and trade of the Cattle Kingdom of the 1870s and 1880s. The Cattle Kingdom of Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota reached its pinnacle in the early 1880s. Prompted by such enthusiastic tracts as Cattle-Raising on the Plains of North America (1885)2 by Walter Baron von Richthofen (uncle and godfather to the Red Baron, World War I fl ying ace), eastern and foreign investors poured capital into the cattle industry. The northern range became seriously overstocked. Then came the hard winter of 1886–1887. Following a droughty summer, cattle entered the winter in poor shape and with forage depleted. Winter arrived early, the blizzards came one after another, and temperatures were 40 below