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The Carlisles: Cattle Barons of the Upper Basin
THE CARLISLES: Cattle Barons of the Upper Basin
BY DON D. WALKER
Southward toward the deep center of the Upper Colorado Basin, two magnificent ranges lift their forested shoulders out of the painted world of red sand and rock. Between what is now Moab and the Colorado border the La Sals rise to more than 13,000 feet, and to the south and west the Blue Mountains stand dark against the desert sky. Although some cattle were in this region earlier, the ranching history of the La Sals really begins with the arrival in 1877 of Tom Ray, his family, and 60 head of Durham milk cows. Seeking good pasture, the Rays moved southeastward around the mountains to Deer Creek, near what is now La Sal. Soon the Maxwells came with 2,000 head of cattle to settle on Coyote Creek, also on the south slope of the La Sal Mountains. And that same year the Taylors and John Shafer drove 3,000 head of cattle to the northeast side of these mountains.
By the late 1870's, great herds of cattle had also reached the Blue Mountains. First there, apparently, were Pat and Mike O'Donnel. Then in 1879 Spud Hudson, who had ranched on the "Picket Wire" near Trinidad, Colorado, brought in 2,000, making his headquarters at the Double Cabins, a few miles north of what is now Monticello. The next year a man named Peters drove another 2,000 head to the Blues, and left his name on Peter's Spring and Peter's Hill.
Yet farther south, in these same years, the longhorns of Texas poured across the San Juan on their way to the Utah ranges. A local historian of that region has described their coming: the
Some of these cattle trailed on to Elk Mountain; other longhorns took up range southward and eastward from South Montezuma Creek.
In 1883, according to one count, there were 15,000 cattle in San Juan County, the herds of pioneer cattlemen who had moved in or of small ranchers just getting a start. In either case, the cattleman was his own company, and he was usually both owner and manager. The only stock involved had four feet, an endless hunger for grass, and probably more horns than it needed. But the time was ripe for economic changes on the plains and in the canyons of the grazing West.
On May 31,1883, a news story in the Durango Daily Herald reported a significant new development in the range history of the Upper Colorado Basin. Eli Iliff and Harold Carlisle, identified as "the great English capatalist," had just returned from the Blue Mountains, where they had purchased 7,000 head of cattle. Behind this story was an interesting turn in international economics, for back of Carlisle's purchases was £150,000, $720,000 of British capital, invested in a new company, The Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company, Limited, just one of the many large companies putting Scottish and English money into the range industry of the American West.
Only a couple of months earlier Carlisle had been in London helping to organize the new company. Some time before 1883, he and his brother, Edmund Septimus Carlisle, had acquired nearly two sections of ranching property in Sedgwick County, Kansas. Now this property, plus the buildings and stock on it, became the Kansas part of the company. For $38,250 the Carlisles sold their holdings, taking in payment 796 shares, valued at £10 each, in the new company. In addition the company picked up the rights to a vast area of land along the south side of the San Juan River, this being the New Mexico part of the new enterprise.
With only something more than $700,000 of capital, this company was a rather small venture in the growing boom. Bigger outfits like the Matador and Prairie companies controlled at least a million acres of land, with a capitalization of $2.5 million. In 1884 a brokerage firm estimated the Scottish money in American cattle at $25 million, in an area from Montana south to Texas. In New Mexico alone, one paper reported, "English syndicates and noblemen" owned 21 million acres of grazing land.
Clearly the beef bonanza had become internationally known. Newspapers, magazines, and books having aroused dreams of ranching riches, all sorts of English men and women were ready to buy a piece of the American West. Some of these appeared on the roll of stockholders of the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company: gentlemen, merchants, lawyers, manufacturers, and farmers. Two occupations of Carlisle stock owners are particularly interesting: one member of the Carlisle family, Arthur D. Carlisle, was listed as a tutor at Hailybury College, and another stock owner, the holder of 50 shares, was Mary Bridgett, Liverpool, occupation spinster. As the great herds marched bawling across canyons and deserts, as violence flared in this wild world of men and cattle, always back there in Liverpool was Mary Bridgett, spinster. What did she know, one wonders, of all that far away frontier venture in which she held her 50 shares?
The London records show no exact figures of stock and acres, but from other evidence we can size-up this British-owned spread. The 7,000 head of cattle which Carlisle had purchased in Utah were the herds of Peters, Dudley Reece, Green Robinson, and a half interest in the herd of Spud Hudson. For these cattle the British syndicate paid $210,000, with as much as $35.00 going for yearlings. In addition to these Utah cattle and nearly 400 head in Kansas, the company had sizable herds in New Mexico. In the spring of 1884, the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Stockman reported the company had over 11,000 head of cattle ready for the spring market. In the spring of 1885, when the Carlisle cattle were rounded-up near the foot of Peter's Hill (north of Monticello), there were nearly 10,000 head. That year the calf tally was 5,300. According to Al Scorup, when about 1896 the Carlisles moved their cattle out, they drove 30,000 head to market.
If these statistics do not speak vividly, let us try another measure. Within this livestock empire the cattle were moved from range to range, in the spring to the Blue Mountains, in the fall to Pueblo Bonito. Twice a year the great herd moved through Mancos, Colorado. As Louisa Wade Wetherill remembered, the
This amusement was touched with suspense, for the watching children knew that cattle rustlers waited their chance to drive away bunches of the cattle and change their brands from "Three-Bar" to "Seven-Cross- Seven."
Although 11 different brands were registered in Utah Territory by the Carlisle Company in 1884, the "Three-Bar" became the herald of British ownership, the brand of the largest herd of cattle in eastern Utah or western Colorado. Peters, from whom some of the first Utah cattle were purchased, had owned the brand, three bars on the left hip. But as if to make a mark to be seen across great mesas and great canyons, the Carlisles separated the bars, putting one bar on the hip, one on the side, and the third on the shoulder. And soon the company was known as the "Hip-Side and Shoulder Cattle Company."
The first bearers of this bold brand were probably a mixed lot. The original herds of Hudson, Robinson, Reece, and Peters were Durhams. An additional 2,000 head Reece contracted for driving from Salt Lake to the Blues were probably Durhams too. But undoubtedly these shorthorns got mixed with ordinary western and southwestern cattle of the longer-horned sort. In fond Texas memory, the longhorn is a magnificent beast, tough, aggressive, able to walk thousands of miles while still putting on weight. And his meat, also in fond Texas memory, has a special flavor. But to the cattle buyer, especially Scotch and English buyers with a long tradition of well-bred cattle behind them, a herd of longhorns was not always impressive. By the early 1880's the longhorn was being replaced by other breeds, the shorthorn, the Galloway, the Angus, and particularly the Hereford. In January 1885, the Wyoming Hereford Association extended its operations into Utah. The first carloads of Hereford bulls and heifers arrived in February, followed by another shipment in April.
A similar action to upgrade range cattle came to the ranches of the Colorado Basin, partly the consequence of prejudice and preference in beef breeds, partly the result of legislation. By the middle of 1884, Colorado had passed a law preventing low-grade bulls from running at large on the public domain. The Colorado Live-Stock Record predicted that as a result of such a law 5,000 bulls would be imported that year. A week later the Record observed:
Utah passed a similar range law in 1892, requiring a bull (at least a halfblood) for every 20 cows. But well before the passing of the Utah law, the Carlisle brothers had begun the improvement of their herds. In February 1884, a report told of plans to ship a large number of fine bulls to their ranches. Another report indicated the superintendent of the New Mexico Land and Cattle Company had gone to Missouri to purchase high-grade bulls. Sometime after he began working for the Carlisles, Emmet Wirt, with Frank Allen and Frank Townsend, traveled to Fort Wingate, near Gallup, where they took delivery of 16 or 18 bulls. Brought back to the Gallegos, these were the first Herefords to reach the San Juan country. In 1885 Frank Silvey helped drive 75 head of yearling Herefords from Colorado to the Blue Mountain ranges.
However, if new bulls were coming to the herds, if a new and different blood was being added to the cattle, the old breed of men still rode the Carlisle ranges. At the level of man to cow in the new cattle empire, it was still old-time know-how, mostly Texan, that handled things. John Mosley, apparently one of the first Carlisle foremen, was a pioneer cowman of Kansas. Foreman in 1885 at the Utah headquarters, east of Monticello at Piute Spring, was Mack Goode, an old Texas cowboy, with a crew of men nearly all from Texas. The next year the outfit moved its headquarters to the Double Cabins, six miles north of Monticello, and W. E. Gordon became foreman.
Gordon, better known as "Latigo" Gordon, epitomized the tough, colorful men who rode the Carlisle ranges. Good-looking, intelligent, and ordinarily kind and peaceable, he nevertheless had his streak of wildness, brought out particularly by a keg of "red eye." On his right hand he had no fingers, and according to story his body was marked by several bullet scars. The fingers he had lost to a rope loop while showing how to throw a cow. The bullet marks he had got in a shooting fray at the Double Cabins. After that fracas, a Denver doctor gave Gordon one week to live. The Carlisle foreman is reported to have replied: "G — d d — n you, I'll be riding the range when you are dead." Two years later the doctor died. Gordon still rode the range.
During its first 10 years of operation, this English cattle company felt most of the tensions and became involved in many of the conflicts of the rapidly changing frontier.
The first of these developed as the result of the application on the rangeland of a new American invention, an invention which perhaps more than any other single factor transformed the cowman's world. In the history of the cattle trade, one can properly speak of time B.B.W., before barbed wire, and time A.B.W., after barbed wire. In 1874 Joseph F. Glidden won his first fight over barbed wire patents and began putting the great rolls of barbed fencing on the market. After a slow start, the result of initial unwillingness of the cowman to string the spiked stuff across his free world, the manufacture and use of barbed wire increased rapidly, from only 40,000 tons in 1880 to 190,000 tons in 1890.
The advantage of the wire to the small farmer was the protection it gave him against the crop-eating and crop-trampling livestock of other men. The advantage to the big cattle companies was the exclusion of the homesteader and small rancher from the great ranges needed for the immense herds of cattle. If there had been enough rangeland to divide fairly, all would have been well. Or if big and little could have fought each other with equal economic power — in this instance equal miles of barbed wire — a crude competitive justice might still have prevailed. But economically the matching was clearly unequal: the small rancher rarely had money for wire and the large company was often backed by impressive sums of domestic or foreign capital.
Unfortunately, the story of the Carlisle Cattle Company is not clear at this point. Because of scarcity of information, we do not know exactly how much range was fenced, if any, and what measures were taken to resist the fencing. However, there were reports of "immense" or "very large" areas of the public lands enclosed. James L. McDowell, special agent of the U.S. Land Office, wrote from Durango, on August 4, 1883: "Whilst in Montezuma Valley and on the Dolores River, I was informed by reliable persons that the Carlisle Cattle Company . . . were fencing a large tract of land in the vicinity of Blue Mountain." This land, he observed, "is said to be the best grazing land in the Southwest;... most of the herds in the San Juan country are in that vicinity, or going there, and there is likely to be trouble and complaint if the Carlisle Company is allowed to inclose and control the range." But if there were outbreaks of violence, if Utah cowboys rode armed with wire cutters as well as Winchesters, we do not know. The Texas fence cutters won national notice; on February 3, 1884, the Salt Lake Tribune reprinted on its front page a defense of their action. And in other areas of the West, threats and counter-threats grew heated. At intervals along some fences were posted signs such as "The Son of a Bitch who opens this fence had better look out for his scalp."
The next conflict was more traditional, one more instance of a centuries-old clash of frontier interests. The Salt Lake Daily Herald of July 8, 1884, carried a story headlined RAIDED BY REDS, a report of a Ute Indian attack upon the roundup camp of Wilson, Carlisle, and Johnson. Two whites were badly wounded, said the news story; five Indians were killed and a number wounded. However, other accounts gave a somewhat different view of the affair. The Indians, bronco Indians, camped a mile from the cattle roundup, were invited to eat with the roundup crew. After dinner four cowboys rode back with the Utes to their camp. But then the social graces dissolved when one of the cowboys, believing he saw one of his own horses in the Indian horse herd, uncoiled a lariat. Drawing his knife, a mounted Indian spurred toward the cowboy, only to be shot by another of the cowboys. Then, as one might say, the show really got exciting. Chased by the Indians, the four cowboys raced back to their camp. There the roundup crews, with only seven rifles besides their revolvers, fought off the Utes until they could flee across the Colorado line, leaving to the Indians their horse herd and chuck wagons. The casualties so far: two wounded cowboys and three dead Indians.
Some 12 days later, 84 cavalrymen and 45 cowboys caught up with the Indians out in the rimrock country where they had taken up their defenses. There two more whites, a cowboy and a civilian packer, were shot as they tried to penetrate the barricades on foot. With this failure, the whites retreated, and the Indians went their own way.
The battle had ended, but the trouble had not. Late in August, Harold Carlisle telegraphed to Denver reporting that the Utes had driven off more stock horses and killed more cattle. "Unless the military take some prompt and decisive steps," the report said, "the white settlers will be driven out of the country and their property destroyed."
This of course was an old cry, one which had been repeated again and again since the first Indians had tried to hold or regain their lands. For a cattleman like Carlisle, as for many settlers before him, the frontier lands were divided fairly: the Indians belonged on their reservations, and the cattle belonged on whatever else was left of the public domain. Treaties of 1863 and 1868 had created a reservation in Colorado and New Mexico for many of the Ute bands, but another treaty in 1873 had reduced this reservation by subtracting the San Juan region in Colorado. In 1875 the reservation had been enlarged by executive order; in 1882 another order had returned the added lands to the public domain. In 1880 the Southern Utes and the Uncompahgre had been settled on the La Plata and Grand rivers, and the Northern Utes, after the Meeker massacre, had been moved to the Uintah Reservation in Utah. In all of this action, however, the Indians had been "protected," if that is the right word, by being permitted to retain certain rights. For example, the treaty of 1873 had affirmed the right of the Indians to hunt upon lands which they had ceded, "so long as the game lasts and the Indians are at peace with the white people." Clearly, the exercise of this right, on ranges filled with cattle, would lead to misunderstanding, if not bloodshed.
Indeed, bloodshed was not long coming. Almost on the anniversary of the shooting in 1884 six more Indians were killed or "assassinated," as Rocky Mountain News put it. 48 Indian Agent Stollsteimer's report of the shooting, said the News, proved that "early on the morning of June 19 a large party of cowboys fired into a teepee containing a number of sleeping Utes, and that six of the Indians were killed by the fusilade." But on this frontier, newspapers as well as cowboys and Indians were fighting. If the News was sympathetic to the Indians, the Denver Tribune-Republican was sympathetic to the cowboys. On July 9, 1885, it carried a story in part as follows:
On the same day, the News published Stollsteimer's statement that the villains were horse thieves, not cowboys.
Such conflicts, however, were not limited to clashes with the Utes. Another choice piece of Carlisle range lay in Canon Gallegos, New Mexico, some 15 miles east of the Navaho reservation. When 50 Navaho families moved off the reservation and into the canyon, the Carlisle foreman called on the military to remove the trespassers. Harold Carlisle is reported to have said that "he would rather lose thirty-thousand dollars than have to give up this range, as it was a most desirable one."
But if the cattlemen resented Indians, they had equal objection to sheepherders. By 1886, through an expenditure of over $5,000, the same
Gallegos Canyon range had been improved with air pumps (windmills) and water tanks. Then Mexicans began to bring their sheep herds onto this pasture which the Carlisles regarded as their own. On January 31, 1886, the Rocky Mountain News had another story, a new story but reported with the same old bias: "Mr. Carlisle's cowboys in the Southwestern part of the state have been fighting again, this time with some sheepmen, who dared to intrude upon that portion of the public domain which Mr. Carlisle claims as his particular cattle range." More detail appeared in a New Mexico newspaper:
But no number of such news reports could give the whole significance here. On this frontier, long after the last bullet had been fired, long after the last sheepherder had bit the dust, the battle of letters and telegrams would go on. The trouble started on January 23; on January 27, after a hearing before a justice of the peace, the cowboys were released. Then on February 5, Governor Ross of New Mexico wrote to the Carlisles expressing his concern and saying that he trusted they would find it to their interest "to employ men . . . who will not disregard the law or the rights of others on the public domain." Edmund Carlisle telegraphed from Durango on February 9: "It is reported in newspaper that you have issued a reward for the capture [of] the white men who took part in recent fight. These men have already been tried before the justice and honorably acquitted through the testimony of the Mexicans themselves. Will you not stay all further proceedings and suspend your judgment until you have an opportunity of perusing the evidence taken before the justice." On the same day the governor's office issued a printed response and warning. To the governor, the behavior of the cowboys had betrayed the arrogance and threat with which so often the cattle interests had held their control. "I understand very well," wrote the governor, "and so do you, what a cowboy or cattle herder with a brace of pistols at his belt and a Winchester in his hand, means when he 'asks' a sheep herder to leave a given range. It means instant compliance or very unpleasant consequences to the herder and his flock. That has been the unvarying history of the controversy between cattle and sheep men in the Territory." Furthermore, the governor questioned the justice of the hearing which had acquitted the cowboys. He had learned that the cowboys had taken "into the courtroom, at their pretended trial, their arms and equipment — wearing their pistols and ammunition in their belts and their Winchester in their hands — that a cocked Winchester was held upon one of the Mexican witnesses while testifying, and that the Mexicans actually gave their testimony under duress and in danger of their lives — " "You sent these men," the governor accused Edmund Carlisle, "with your cattle, upon a quarter of the public domain that has been occupied exclusively by these Mexican sheep herders for a generation or more — to which you had no shadow of priority of right or title, not even, if I am correctly informed, the common right of American citizenship."
Carlisle fired back a barrage of letters and telegrams. Lee Hamblett, the cowboy who had started the fracas, was not even employed by the company. The Carlisle men, when they had become involved in defense of the pump house, had fired in self-defense. The range was not the traditional pasture of the Mexicans. And the governor was incorrectly informed : Edmund Carlisle was an American citizen. Still others, apparently at the behest of Carlisle, got into the act. J. D. Warner, of the Beef Cattle and Horse Growers Association of New Mexico, sent the governor a telegram from Las Vegas. But the governor held his ground. To Warner he wrote: "I have, officially and otherwise, sufficient information to satisfy me that the Carlisle Cattle Company is what is known in common parlance as a 'hurrah outfit,' reckless, and to a degree irresponsible."
In this judgment the governor was not alone. In other conflicts of rights and values on the Basin frontier, the Carlisles and their cowboys sometimes seemed arrogant, lawless, and wild. And perhaps the wildest of all images of the San Juan cowboys was that left in the memories of the Mormon settlers at Bluff and Monticello.
About 1890, at the close of the quarterly stake conference in Bluff, arrangements were made for a "rousing dance and social party to wind up the conference gathering." In the spirit of good will, the Mormon leaders sent out invitations to the cowcamps. However, someone apparently underestimated the numbers and social enthusiasm of the San Juan cowhands. When it appeared that the affair would be overrun with outsiders, the invitation was modified, to the natural resentment of those who were invited to stay away. When the dance was held, some cowboys were permitted inside to dance; others remained outside to jeer. But "the hostile party," remembered Kumen Jones, "... carried the trouble no farther than 'shooting' with their mouths, until after the party was out, when they mounted their ponies and yelling and shooting off their guns rode out of town at full speed."
At Monticello, however, events were not even this peaceful. According to a local historian, when the town was first settled, Harold Carlisle and "his horde of cheap, riffraff employees" decided the settlement was a threat to the Carlisle "empire." Under orders, company "gunmen" shutoff the stream flowing to the town and threatened anyone daring to break their dam. Furthermore, to intimidate the townspeople, they "raced back and forth in the streets of Monticello, firing their pistols, and pouring forth Comanche howls which the coyotes in the hills heard with envy." On one occasion the Carlisle cowboys came into Monticello and shot up the schoolhouse. According to story, someone tied a bottle to the school bell and challenged the marksmen. Then extending the target, the cowboys shot through the windows until the students thought their end was at hand. On another occasion, a woman counted 75 cowboys racing and shooting in the streets, counted them "by the light of their own guns."
If these last escapades were noisy but harmless cowboy capers, other adventures were not. At the July 24th dance in Monticello in 1894, a Carlisle cowboy named Tom Roach, becoming drunk and rowdy, was ordered off the dance floor. However, "he had the invincible strength and courage of a pint of whiskey," writes a historian of the region, "and he had his six-shooter within the swing of his right hand. He threatened the floor manager, he threatened the whole houseful of celebrators, and ordered them at gun point out of the room. He held the terrified company in the moonlight, swearing he would shoot anyone who tried to leave the crowd." When Roach's friend Joe McCord attempted to reason with him, Roach attacked McCord, first with violent words, then with a bullet. And before the night's wildness had ended, Joe McCord was dead, and, in one of those tragic accidents with which such nights are flawed, so was Mrs. Jane Walton, the mother of two grown daughters and a son. No one seemed to know for certain who fired the bullet that tore through her heart.
In the perspective of such events, it may seem unlikely that the world of the cowboy and the world of the Mormon settler ever met except to clash, as if the chasm that separated them was like one of the deep canyons that ran through their land. Yet the complete story shows that, challenged by lawless outside forces, even "lawless" cowboys and law-abiding Mormons could come to cooperation and understanding.
About 1886, William Ball, foreman at the L. C. Ranch, was killed while chasing horse thieves. A posse of cowboys, led by Mack Goode, Carlisle foreman, rode down into Bluff and asked for guides to help in running down the killers. Amasa M. Barton and Kumen Jones agreed to go along. Led by these Bluff Mormons, the posse then rode west and north, down Red Canyon to the Colorado River. Here they hailed Cass Hite in his boat across the river and promptly arrested him. For apparently helping the thieves and killers across the river, the cowboys were ready to lynch Hite then and there. However, Barton and Jones objected, and after talking with the guides Goode cooled down enough to agree, but not without a warning to Hite: "In case any of the boys of this party are under the necessity of following horse thieves or other outlaws to this ferry in the future and find that he has put them over the river and taken no step to notify the proper authorities, he need look for no mercy again." At camp that night, friendly conversation developed. Apparently the cowboys were curious about the Mormons; obviously the Mormons were willing to talk about themselves. "On breaking camp the next morning," Jones would remember, "the friendship of the great majority of the boys was apparently warm and sincere, and altho I have never met but very few of that posse I feel sure most of them would always remember some of the things they heard that quiet night at the Dripping Spring in the wilderness west of Bluff."
The mid-nineties brought more changes in the course of men and cattle. A period of drought blighted the ranges. The price of beef remained low. Then sheep began coming in. According to one report, in 1883 there were only 900 sheep in San Juan County; by 1900 there were nearly 60,000. Cattle would continue to graze the canyonlands but never again in such freedom and in such numbers.
The cattle barons were gone too. For four years in the early nineties, the Carlisle Company had been shipping out its stock. Then its remaining interests were sold to local Mormon ranchers. The beef empire in the Basin was now history. But when in 1900 the Kansas and New Mexico Land and Cattle Company, Limited, ceased its operations, Mary Bridgett, spinster, still held her 50 shares. Obviously she had not grown rich; perhaps she was a good bit poorer. What had it all meant to her? What had it been like to own some of the cattle that trailed and bawled through those redrock canyons 8,000 miles away? Here our history must end.
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