Details of the "Great Cowboy Strike" of 1883.
A cowboy strike, in Texas? In a state now known for its right to work laws and general hostility toward unions? And cowboys–well, let’s just say that they are not often associated with the words “collective” and “bargaining.”
Yet these allegedly lonesome men on horseback, working from “can see” until “can’t see” in heat and dust, lightning storms, and northers cold enough to freeze them to their saddles, did rise up against big cattle syndicates back in March of 1883. And they fought the brief but good fight to regain the rights they had lost to greedy or inept corporate ranchers who had taken over the open range that fit the cowboy soul like a well-worn glove.
Before the syndicates moved in there was a sense of community on the smaller spreads. The best ranches brought together tough, hard-working, essentially decent and practical men who respected one another and shared not only the elements and the endless plains but a heritage of frontier cooperation born of necessity: In 1883, the Comanche threat was less than a decade in the past.
A cowboy then, on one of the smaller ranches, could take some calves in lieu of pay and combine them with mavericks he had “gathered” on the open range to form his own small herd, good for sales or to supplement whatever victuals he usually had from his own fire or from one communal cast-iron pot. The longer he stayed with a ranch, the more likely he was to have two or more horses to use, and the horses he was dealt improved with his tenure. This was a real life with a stake.
The syndicates came in, understanding the business world but often very little of the ranching life on the plains. Profits tended to be as low as their ignorance and speculative fever were high; so, as their heirs might do today, they blamed the people who actually did the work for the problem. They cut wages, disallowed horses for personal use, stopped the gathering of mavericks, and offered no more calves for pay. Then…they forbade drinking and gambling. This was not much of a life, with no stake.
Tom Harris was a seasoned and respected hand at the LS Ranch and decided he had seen enough. He rounded up some men from the LIT, the LX, the LE and the T Anchor, and made out a list of demands:
We, the undersigned cowboys of Canadian River, do by these presents agree to bind ourselves into the following obligations, viz:
First: that we will not work for less than $50 per mo. And we furthermore agree no one shall work for less than $50 per mo. after 31st of Mch.
Second: Good cooks shall also receive $50 per month.
Third: Any one running an outfit shall not work for less than $75 per mo.
Any one violating the above obligations shall suffer the consequences. Those not having funds to pay board after March 31 will be provided for for 30 days at Tascosa.
No one specified what made a good cook, or how much a bad cook should receive. Not much, probably.
Twenty-four cowboys signed the proclamation. The number of cowboys who supported it thereafter was as variable as the disappearing mavericks along the Canadian. Maybe upwards of three hundred had some ties to the strike. The LE and T Anchor fired the strikers right away; more cunning by far were the LS and LIT. They offered piddling increases to cowboys who stayed, and then they fired the rest. Then they picked up the leavings from the other outfits by paying the marginally higher wages, at least for a while.
The out of work cowboys drifted into Tascosa, as famous as Dodge City in its time as a stopping place for the big drives headed north.
The cattlemen would pause and water their herds along the Canadian, leaving the beeves under the disgruntled watch of the few hands who were not allowed to go into Tascosa for recreation. Here is what state historian Bill O’Neal tells us about Tascosa at the time:
“A cluster of dives a quarter of a mile east of Main Street was dubbed Hogtown, partially because of the presence of such less than glamorous ‘sporting women’ as Homely Ann, Gizzard Lip, Rowdy Kate, Box Car Jane, Panhandle Nan, Slippery Sue, Canadian Lily, and Frog Lip Sadie. In 1878, Billy the Kid and four other fugitives from New Mexico’s Lincoln County War arrived with 150 stolen horses, enjoying Tascosa’s bawdy pleasures for several weeks. During the 1880s there was so much rustling in the area that Pat Garrett was hired to lead a band of ‘Home Rangers.'”
In the midst of such gentility, the strikers claimed that they would be peaceful. Most probably were. Newspapers covered the strike and reported gossip likely planted by the syndicates that the strikers were plotting to kill the owners, burn down fences, and kill syndicate cattle at random. None of this happened.
On the other hand, a disturbing number of cows began to disappear from the syndicate herds.
Only two months after the strike began on March 31, 1883, it was over. The efforts of Tom Harris and his comrades did not so much as delay the May roundup. If they did nothing else, though, they gave the late, great Elmer Kelton a subject and title for his novel The Day the Cowboys Quit. In those pages find the real dust of the plains.
As for Tascosa, whether from Hogtown or the few respectable precincts, some remained optimistic. The railroad would come to town, finding its way past buffalo bones and through the attenuated grass. The syndicates would pour cattle into waiting trains, which would blow out steam and sound their whistles in their urgency to depart. Surely some of the money would come back to the plains.
There are two books on Tascosa. In reviewing John L. McCarty’s Maverick Town, in 1947, Walter Prescott Webb was characteristically direct regarding the fate of Tascosa: “It is useless to look on a modern map for Tascosa because the town is not there. It died so long ago that the map makers have forgotten it.”
The Rock Island railroad had bypassed Tascosa in favor of Amarillo. The Oldham County seat moved to Vega. In the end, years later, only the former prostitute Frenchy McCormick remained in Tascosa, her husband and tavern-keeper, Mickey, having gone to his reward twenty-nine years before her death in 1941. She had continued to live alone in their crumbling adobe home, without electricity and running water, insisting that Tascosa would come back to life.
Before Tascosa died, a volatile brew of syndicate hired guns, disgruntled ranch hands, and the insalubrious atmosphere of Hogtown erupted in a gunfight in 1886 at the Jenkins Saloon. Unlike the “ambush” of Billy The Kid, Webb says, this “was a real fight between the cowboys [gunmen] of the big LS outfit and the little men of Tascosa. Three LS cowboys were killed, along with an innocent and too-curious ‘poverty-laden’ immigrant named Jess Sheets.”
A great review of the more recent book on the town, Frederick Nolan’s Tascosa: Its Life and Gaudy Times, came from Bill Neal in 2008: “Tascosa was located in a land beyond the law, a fact that many frontiersmen found appealing….Pioneer cowman Charles Goodnight pronounced Tascosa ‘the most lawless place on the continent.'” It was said that one resident, perhaps Bill Gatlin, “used to kill men just to see if his pistol was loaded.”
Reading Neal’s review, I came across the name of Cape (Caleb Berg) Willingham, and was reminded that some of my relatives hailed from western Oklahoma and West Texas. Cape Willingham had a solid reputation as a lawman and rancher, indicating that he actually knew how to do some practical things. I therefore dismissed him as a possible ancestor until I found out he had also run a saloon.
Said to have been the first sheriff of Tascosa, he carried the true standard weapon of lawmen in those days, a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. One day, while relaxing in the Equity Saloon, one of the town’s few “respectable ladies” burst in and screamed that a man outside had just killed her duck. Perhaps intrigued that, for once, a killing had not involved a human, the sheriff went outside to investigate. His concern was also enhanced because he had instituted what may have been one of the state’s earliest gun-control measures–he had banned firearms from Tascosa.
Clay Coppedge of the Country World’s Texas Trails tells the story:
“The duck killer turned out to be Fred Leigh, foreman of the LS Ranch, who had a habit of taking his guns to town in defiance of Willingham’s ban. The sheriff notified Leigh that he was now indebted to the woman for the fair market value of a duck and he might have been trying to figure out an exact sum when Leigh did something a lot dumber than shooting a duck — he went for his pistol. Willingham blew him out of the saddle with his shotgun, which ended the negotiations.”
Now, there remains in me a trace of the boy from Waco, Texas, who played cowboys and Indians, and “Army,” and watched westerns on TV, and that would get a kick out of claiming Cape Willingham as an ancestor. And the duck story almost pushes me to the point of prevarication. But, alas, Cape’s branch of the clan came west from Virginia through Georgia, and mine through Tennessee, so any connection is remote.
Cape Willingham, Charles Goodnight, the good hand Tom Harris, and the woman with the dead duck– all would be amazed to know that in 1939, not far from Boot Hill in old Tascosa, Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch was born. Frenchy McCormick was still around by then to see it, and no doubt feisty at age 87. And that, my friends, one-ups the duck.
Article written at The Edge of Freedom.
Comments