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  THE GREAT COWBOY STRIKE

  THE GREAT COWBOY STRIKE

  Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West

  Mark Lause

  First published by Verso 2017

  © Mark Lause 2017

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-196-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-198-5 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-197-8 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the US by Maple Press

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction. How the West Was Made

  1.Mysteries of the Heartland:

  The Emergence of Postwar Western Radicalism

  2.The Wrong Side of the Tracks:

  The Dangerous Classes of the New American West

  3.The Panhandle Strike of 1883:

  An Appropriately Rough Interrogation of the Sources

  4.The Cowboy Strike Wave, 1884–6:

  Worker Persistence, Employer Responses, and the Political Implications

  5.Destinies of the Industrial Brotherhood:

  A High-Water Mark of Western Worker Militancy, 1886

  6.The Destiny of the Farmers’ Alliance:

  The Implosion of the Cattle Trade, the Union Labor Party, and the National Election Fiasco of 1888

  7.From Coffeyville to Woodsdale:

  Kansas Variations on the Uses of Political Violence

  8.The West Beyond Kansas:

  Murders and Range Wars—Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, and Wyoming

  Conclusion. Wizardry, Empire, and the Final Subjugation of the West

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Preface

  Strikes by the iconic American cowboy confront us with the inescapable realities of class, politics, and violence in the West. Exploring these events and their impact provides an opportunity to examine how these issues converge. And this process poses key questions about how we remember the past.

  That memory made the cowboy into a well-cultivated symbol of a rugged American past. That image entered into a symbiotic relationship with the culturally smudged self-image of the United States itself as the well-armed enforcer of virtue, justice, and fair play. In fact, the cowboys were grossly underpaid and overworked seasonal agricultural laborers.

  Beyond a remarkably small circle of specialists, class—much less class conflict—touches the least explored of these large questions we hope to address, barely acknowledged in the West. More conservative scholars generally associate the appearance of social class as a concept with the migration of radical exiles and their “foreign” ideas from Europe. More liberal ones identify it with the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard, rather than with regions generally seen as more industrially backward and less settled.

  Yet these newcomers to the West carried with them the old social order, its assumptions and its practices. The very first of them brought hired and bound labor with them. In the aftermath of the Civil War companies of unprecedented capital and power brought vast numbers of railroad workers to labor across great expanses of the transportation system, with particularly significant clusters at moving construction sites. Mining communities drew large numbers of hired workers in pursuit of the region’s mineral riches. During this period, cowboys assumed a vastly more visible and regionally distinctive importance that belied their smaller numbers and greater isolation than other communities of laborers. This alone makes them an almost irresistible subject.

  A touchstone of the increased visibility of genuine cowboys was their strike of 1883. Contemporary newspapers, chroniclers of Western lore, and serious scholars alike have found the event worthy of attention. Several have described it—erroneously—as “the only cowboy strike in history.” Others—equally erroneously—have described it as the “first organized protest against big business on the Great Plains.”1

  The 1883 strike in the Texas Panhandle certainly had greater claim to this honor than the rodeo performers’ strike in Boston. This latter event in 1936 took place during a period rife with what were then called “labor-management disagreements,” and represented a rare intrusion into an eastern metropolis by a trade usually associated with the rural heartland of the nation.2 The Texas strike took place over half a century earlier.

  More importantly, the early work stoppage represented part of a strike wave that swept across much of the American West from 1883 to 1886. One contemporary observer flatly acknowledged “many labor strikes on the range.” Literary scholar Jack Weston described “slowdowns, threats, intimidating behavior, and collective defiance” as part and parcel of life among the cowboys.3 The Great Cowboy Strike supports these assessments of an endemic labor discontent where the very existence of social classes seems to be understated, if not ignored by most writers on the region.

  Understanding these struggles—and how they came to be so obscured—requires seeing their context: in the broader insurgencies that politically challenged the unquestioned power of the large ranchers, the railroad owners, and the mine bosses. The Patrons of Husbandry (also called the Grange) began in Minnesota. The more political Industrial Brotherhood—which eventually became the Knights of Labor—and the Farmers’ Alliance emerged from immediate postwar conditions in Missouri, Kansas, and Texas.

  These groups based in the West generated the largest political insurgencies of the period. Greenbackism in the Midwest and Populism in the western heartland aimed at displacing one of the major political parties with one that would place people before profits. Each attained some real successes but faced obstacles that thwarted their efforts (and later permitted often grotesque misrepresentations of their goals).

  There existed a working-class component of these insurgencies, particularly associated with what labor historians have called “the Great Upheaval.” The Knights of Labor attained unprecedented numbers, reaching nearly 800,000 members. The group not only produced the modern American Federation of Labor but also sparked a dynamic wave of labor parties in 1886, including Henry George’s campaign for mayor of New York and numerous local efforts that showed remarkable potential as a national third party. To a great extent, the presidential election of 1888 was a test as to whether these efforts could come to fruition.

  The full meaning of the cowboy strikes escapes us without facing this political insurgency. As we shall see, the Greenback movement in Texas, broadly associated with the Farmers’ Alliance, sheltered and defended the cowboy militants. The strike movements in Wyoming also directly influenced the rise and course of Populism there.

  Scholars regularly downplay the importance of these insurgencies. These third parties disappeared, we are told, because the adoption of their concerns by one or the other of the major parties made them irrelevant. That the major parties frequently adopted and co-opted the rhetoric of insurgents is obvious; a reference to some of the most modest proposals of the Greenbackers or Populists, however, could still end the career of any major party politicians today.

  The often ignored institutionalization of political violence in the nineteenth-century United St
ates provides a much better explanation for the demise of opposition of all sorts. Starting with the ethnic cleansing essential to settlement, an ideology centered around civilizing nature and its savagery sanctioned the use of unrestricted violence against any persons and practices that got in the way of the imperatives of the marketplace.

  This observation is hardly novel. In addition to Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, Richard Slotkin’s trilogy—Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation—reveals the importance of the West on eastern thinkers.4 Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for non-Native Americans’ fear of “savagery” prevailing on the frontier, Slotkin points to the roots of a mythology that sanctioned efforts to neutralize conflicts arising from industrialization and imperial expansion.

  Recognition of coercive violence as an innate, systemic feature of social control over the population provides the missing link between the racial violence aimed at indigenous peoples (and African Americans) and that employed on foreigners. Seeing lynchings in the postwar South as simply a large number of confused responses to accusations of rape, for example, misses the social and political intent of the unrestrained brutality visited on lynching victims. Tolerating such activities—rendering them legally unaccountable—suited the needs of the ruling elite to intimidate sections of the population that could cause them considerable difficulties if they became unmanageable.

  So, too, numerous “feuds” across the West actually represented political conflicts carried beyond the ballot by bullets. This was blatantly true for most of the so-called “Range Wars.”5 Particularly in Texas, these touched the lives and experiences of many cowboys, including the strikers.

  One can barely discuss labor struggles—or political insurgencies—in the West during these years without encountering coercive violence. The powers-that-be proved to be far more likely to respond to a serious threat to their power by arranging for someone to shoot it down, rather than by compromising their own hold on power and wealth—and on the future of the country.

  History—well, popular memory and the commercialized marketing of the past described as “heritage” in the United States—remembers all this very differently, of course. The reasons for this are quite straightforward. The ongoing security of legitimacy required the projection of violent intentions onto the designated targets of institutionalized violence. Southern Democratic leaders, for example, discussed a War of Northern Aggression. The Civil War did not result from their seceding from the Union and firing on U.S. troops, both nothing more than prudent self-defense against violent seizure of the government in Washington by antislavery voters. Later, these Southern Democrats donned their sheets and asserted their defense of law and order against the alleged brutal savagery of the former slaves and their well-wishers.

  No less so, postwar elites generally represented themselves as struggling against the implicitly violent imposition of unjust restrictions on them and their property, profits, and prerogatives. After blazing a trail of corpses, shattered lives, dashed hopes, and broken promises, they described celebrating U.S. history as a grand highway to progress. No book-length study can provide such an explanation, but we hope that this book underscores the need to do so.

  Introduction

  How the West Was Made

  In 1869, the Ingalls family moved out into the empty expanses once known as the “Great American Desert.” They settled on the Kansas prairie, some thirteen miles southwest of what would later become Independence. The modern tourist can still sigh wistfully in a period schoolhouse recalling how the Ingalls children poured over their McGuffey readers there. One of them, Laura, became a schoolteacher herself and wrote their Little House on the Prairie into the fictional landscape of a series of very popular children’s books.

  The American West was not won but made. Residents of the United States did not simply push a line of settlement westward across a geographic area. Rather, they radically reshaped the environment of that area and, even more radically, conjured a way of thinking about the region that ascribed mystical transformative powers to it. They cleared troublesome occupants—buffalo, wolves, and Indians—to build their towns, railroads, and booming cattle trade, which introduced the kind of savagery they told themselves they wanted to civilize. The railroads that cut through their cow towns physically demarcated the respectable aspirants to middle-class civilization from those parts of town to which they hoped to confine the seasonal tide of savagery that drove the longhorns from the range to the rails.

  Remarking the West: Eco-Cleansing

  The first wave of permanent small farmers and ranchers faced severe crises. In 1862, the Homestead Act permitted landless persons to occupy parts of unclaimed public lands and gain ownership if they developed them. Vast numbers began turning up after the Civil War.

  The Ingalls and their contemporaries had arrived at what would become the geographic heart of the United States. Indeed, only a few years after the family settled there, others established the town of Lebanon, later recognized as the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight states. Long deemed unsuitable for farming, an earlier government survey had designated it a “desert.” Though it was not actually a desert in the modern sense, it inspired a succession of mirages.

  At the time the Ingalls moved to Kansas, the line of white settlement seemed to be moving inexorably and irreversibly westward. The movers and shakers had largely completed the “civilization” of Missouri, Arkansas, and much of Texas. The tide seemed to be moving rather predictably and relentlessly across western Kansas, along the northern end of the cattle trails from western and northern Texas at their southern starting point, with the Indian Territory between them. The spread of settlement from the scattered towns and mining communities of the Mountain West lagged a bit and migration to the upper reaches of the West—Wyoming and its neighbors—came even later.

  To the Ingalls and their neighbors, it seemed as though ownership of the very land beneath their feet quaked continually. The Ingalls’ farm sat on land recently taken from the Osage Indians. The authorities rationalized this by casting the native peoples there as merely nomadic savages who had no use for the land themselves. However, that description fit neither the Osage nor the Cherokee, who had been given the land by the U.S. government. In fact, they shrewdly held on to the land in the most “civilized” fashion in response to the increase in market values as the whites encroached. Of course, violence or the threat of violence underscored everything about such transactions.

  In a larger sense, the entirety of Euro-American history came apart when the line of its settlement reached the area. The white masters of the continent had few concerns about slavery until the prospect of Kansas statehood thrust the question to the fore and the balance of sectional power toppled into civil war. The winners oversimplified that conflict into a struggle for freedom and equality before resuming their onslaught on the native peoples of the West.

  The recent experience of civil war had not only stalled westward settlement but actually reversed it over much of the heartland. It depleted the populations of what had been settled districts in the eastern Indian Territory, southwest Missouri, and much of Arkansas, all of which were resettled and repopulated in the aftermath of the conflict.

  Six years before and thirteen miles away from the Ingalls farm, one of the more grisly scenes of civil war had transpired. Although the Osage people remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Union during the Civil War, Confederate emissaries made overtures to and secured a treaty with one faction, threatening their already tenuous relationship with the U.S. authorities. On May 22, 1863, Charley Harrison, a thug who had run Denver’s Criterion Saloon, tried to lead a handful of other guerrillas from Captain William C. Quantrill’s band back toward Colorado, claiming commissions from the Confederate Army to recruit there. As the guerrillas passed through Osage lands, they took a few potshots at the Indians to discourage their pursuit. Unimpressed, the Osage followed in a two-mile running fight th
at ended with the massacre of the guerrillas.1 The victors decapitated the white corpses and presented them to the local U.S. Army, ostensibly as a sign of loyalty but also, no doubt, as an expression of the tough negotiating stance they intended to take on the future of the land.

  Nevertheless, the American heartland actually drew from this self-inflicted disaster a triumphalist faith in progress. A few years before the Ingalls children attended their little one-room schoolhouse in Kansas, in Wisconsin the young Frederick Jackson Turner came to share his father’s interest in local history and settlement.

  God’s will, Manifest Destiny, and Social Darwinism are distinct concepts, but all generated a faith in progress that rationalized the U.S. holy war of the market economy on the natural world. Expanding American civilization both destroyed the existing world and built a new one, as determined by the God-given laws of supply and demand.

  Insofar as settlers drew less comfort from simplistic religious or nationalist principles, they were bolstered by the discovery of a well of knowledge in the natural world. Tapping into underground reserves of water provided the basis for illusions of “scientific agriculture” based on irrigation. At the close of the decade that brought the Ingalls to the region, the government issued official tracts reinforcing the claims of developers that “rain follows the plow.” In reality, farming came to be dependent on draining the massive but finite Ogallala Aquifer, underground waters gathered through an unimaginably long prehistory.2 Science provided mirages for the Great American Desert that were no more substantive than those of faith.

  Over time, those illusions became even less substantial. Over a century after Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her children’s books, television transformed them into a kind of therapeutic comfort for the millions of adult Americans shocked by several decades of confrontation with an unrelentingly changing world. Well known as a real-life proponent of what the media touted as “traditional family values,” Michael Landon portrayed the Ingalls paterfamilias, combining the patrician values and vision of the Cartwrights in Bonanza with the troubled experience of an often desperately poor brood of sodbusters. One wonders what Wilder and her contemporaries might have made of it.