Book Review - Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West
First off, as I suspected even before I began reading the book, the subtitle "The Hidden History of the Cowboy West" is a bit hyperbolic. Perhaps a more accurate subtitle would have been "An Economic History of the Cowboy West," but of course that wouldn't have sounded nearly as sensational. The history here is not "hidden" in the sense that the author makes any startling new discoveries or revelations, but rather turns the spotlight on aspects of Old West history that few Americans have read or heard much about.
The book opens with a few chapters on how the open-range era began—the post-Civil War demand for beef, the development of the big Texas drives to move the cattle to market, and the subsequent growth of the boom towns and railroads in consequence. But the book's main thrust is a fascinating look at the massive investments of capital (on the level of millions) in cattle ranches by wealthy stockholders from the East and across the Atlantic, with a particular focus on the investments made by English and Scottish aristocracy and nobility. And how a combination of too-rosy sales pitches, financial mismanagement, ignorance about ranching, and sheer overgrowth of the industry led to an ultimate collapse of the cattle boom, with the devastating winter of 1887 providing the death-blow. I found one theory of Knowlton's particularly interesting: that one reason for the eventual collapse may have been the industrialization of a livelihood that was in essence agricultural. The emphasis on mass-production, faster delivery, higher profits and so forth went along with overlooking the variables of weather, disease, natural predators, and what would happen if the projected herd growth didn't materialize—and in the end, the top-heavy cattle companies reaped the consequences.
It puts a thought-provoking new complexion on the concept of the range war that we're familiar with from fiction and film when you realize that the "big ranchers" fighting the small rancher or homesteader were not necessarily just tough individual men trying to strong-arm their way to prosperity, but rather multi-million-dollar corporations with millionaire industrialists and foreign aristocracy for its investors, trying to keep their profits from being cut in on.
I am glad that I came to this book already pretty well grounded in the history of the American West, because I do feel that Knowlton sometimes makes some sweeping generalizations when dealing with the era and the region as a whole. To take just one instance, on page 115 when discussing the types of ranching done in different parts of the country, he dismisses Arizona and New Mexico in half a sentence as "too hot and arid to provide suitable forage for cattle"—yet I've personally read a good deal of fiction and nonfiction set in those states that described cattle ranching being carried on there. Overall, though, it's an intelligently-written, readable look at an area of American history that could very much use more serious treatment, with expected streaks of more modernist thinking—e.g. Darwinism, contemporary views on environmentalism and so forth—showing through on occasion. (I had to snort at the suggestion that the eventual criminal behavior of wealthy Wyoming cattleman came about because the Cheyenne Club was a microcosm of an all-male society.)
The chapters on the Johnson County War were the most jaw-dropping for me, because I'd never really read up on that event in detail. If it's true that only recent scholarship has sifted out an accurate assessment of the facts, then I'm rather glad I came to it late and received my impressions fresh. Without being an expert on the subject, I can only say that the version of events presented by Knowlton has a strong ring of plausibility based on the character of the people and entities involved. (What? State and federal government officials helping Big Money frame and assassinate innocent people and escape punishment afterward? Why, whatever gave you that idea? #sarcasm) One thought I had: if the Johnson County War did indeed tarnish the reputations of the "big ranchers" ever afterwards, could it be that the PR campaign at the time trying to portray them as "honest Americans" helped, however inadvertently, to obscure the role of Eastern and foreign investors in the biggest ranches?
I did disagree significantly with one argument in the concluding chapters. Knowlton, like so many others, follows the standard path of crediting Owen Wister with being the first author to write serious fiction set in the West. The statement on page 335 that in 1891 "no one" had yet made use of the West as a setting is ingenuous, as a number of writers not so well known today had been publishing novels and short fiction set in the American West since at least the early 1880s. (For a more in-depth look at this subject I recommend the first volume of Ron Scheer's How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, 1880-1906.) Wister's The Virginian was to Western fiction what John Ford's Stagecoach was to Western film: its commercial success helped elevate the genre from sensational kiddie fare to something worthy of serious adult notice. But within a few years of its publication there were numerous writers in print, many of them born or at least raised in the West, who were actively engaged in myth-busting with their stories and trying to present a more authentic view of Western life to the public. Yet Wister is still afforded more credit and authority than any of them in the literary world. It begs the question: did his lasting success owe anything to his own connections among the wealthy and influential?
In conclusion, I think perhaps the best aspect of Cattle Kingdom is the way it connects the story of the cattle boom to American life and history as a whole—its influence on things ranging from the invention of barbed wire to the development of refrigerated railroad cars and the introduction of the famous Delmonico steak. I've long wanted to see the Old West treated as an era of American history, and by and large Cattle Kingdom does that. I'd like to see others take it even further. There seems to be a good amount of material out there on the common people, the cowboys and the homesteaders; this book deals with the wealthy and powerful players involved—now I’d like to see someone turn their attention to the smaller ranchers, the men who started from the ground up and carved out a self-sustaining livelihood by ranching, without having empire as their goal. That’s another story I would like to read.
A footnote: the "ranch near Lame Deer Creek" in Montana where the minor Indian uprising described on page 181 occurred was the Alderson ranch, and the cowboy named "Sawney Tolliver" who shot off the Indian's hat was actually Alderson ranch hand Hal Taliaferro, whose nickname was Old Sawney. The incident is described in Chapter 8 of Nannie Tiffany Alderson's memoir A Bride Goes West. (If the name Hal Taliaferro sounds familiar, Nannie's nephew Floyd Taliaferro Alderson later appeared in many Western movies under that screen name.) [2021 update: I've since written an in-depth post about both men named Hal Taliaferro.] Interestingly, historian Helena Huntingdon Smith was the as-told-to collaborator on both Nannie Alderson's and Teddy Blue Abbott's memoirs, and Teddy Blue is Knowlton's source here—it's rather surprising nobody made the connection.