We have many friedns who own cats.
The cat who was gotten first is alwasy teh Boss of the House.
Is this always the way?
Or are some more recently arrived cats to the household such strong personalities that They become the HeadCat?
Here are the stereotypes I have observed as a petsitter:
The Siamese is always the Alpha.
If there is no Siamese the tricolor (tortie, calico) is the Alpha.
If there is one girl among boys in the clowder (there’s your word of the day) she will boss the others around, though the Alpha male will loom over the other boys.
There is always an Alpha, though the behavior can be subtle to catch if there are only 2 cats. The more cats, the more apparent the hierarchy.
There is also who I call Pariah cat. In groups of 3 or more, there is always one cat the others either actively dislike or at best ignore. Pariah cat gets that slot either by being the last taken into the household, or being visibly intimidated by the crowd.
But the last can end up first. The fun begins when a second Alpha is introduced into a household. It’s Nature in action in your very own living room!
My first cat is not the alpha cat; nor do I have a pariah cat among my four cats. There is one who gets “picked on” a bit more than the others but that is because she’s so soft and gentle that the others take advantage sometimes - but they all do the same thing to all the other ones too. They clearly love her though; she is definitely not ostracized.
She’s the first and the biggest cat too, by the way.
Chalk up another one to google.
Quote from this site:
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This jives with my personal observations of living with cats for about 30 years.
The first of our three cats (adopted sequentially) is, if anything, the omega, not the alpha - she’s the one who just sits on the sidelines while the other two wage their daily battles. She seems vaguely interested in observing, but certainly has no interest in being #1. She’s physically the biggest by far, BTW.
She is also the only female, with two males, and she never ever bosses the boys around. She enjoys grooming the male who is amenable to it, but otherwise she pretty much leaves them to their own little games. If she is attacked herself, she defends in a serious way, with lots of growling and swatting, but she Never! Ever! seeks confrontation. And she is certainly not a pariah cat; none of them are. She’s just a little more retiring - like one who prefers watching sports to playing them.
All three are cheerfully independent, but it’s a rare day that goes by without all three cuddling up close in bed for a nap as well, and they voluntarily seek to hang around close to one another most of the time. If one meows, the others usually run in to see what might be wrong. Once when one got lost, the other two were clearly deeply upset and distressed until he returned.
Have to agree with breaknrun about the relative pecking order - there’s certainly no real pattern that applies generally, and even the pattern of your own clowder is likely to change frequently over the course of the day. It’s a routine repeated here daily for one cat to gallop through the room being chased by a second, and a minute later for them to gallop by in the opposite direction, with the formerly chased now the chaser.
P.S. breaknrun, play any nine-ball? 
Interesting. I have two cats, a nine-year-old black female, and a six-month-old calico tabby female. (Well, something like that, anyway.) I don’t think you could call either of them the ‘alpha’ cat at this point-certainly, the kitten has never backed down despite the vast difference in weight classes, and while this won her some respect from her older roommate, I think, that doesn’t matter much when they butt heads. Mostly, they’ve learned to stay out of each other’s way except when they both want to play. Up until a few days ago, this just meant ‘when the black cat wants to play’, but since the kitten got spayed on Friday, she hasn’t been quite as frisky. We’ll see what happens once she’s all healed …
Well, right now, our Top Cat, Noel, is the oldest and the head of the pack. But, our next cat, Misty, is NOT 2nd in command-that honor belongs to Gypsy. When we first got Gypsy and her sister Buffy, for some reason, Noel didn’t mind Buffy but she was really threatened by Gypsy-which just goes to show you that cats sense things-she sensed that Gypsy was a dominant type. When Tess came, Gypsy was pissed-it took her about three weeks to come around-and when she finally did, she loved Tess (because the little angel was NOT a dominant type).
Misty is very easygoing, although often she’ll cuff Gypsy, or she’ll grab Buffy and hold her down and give her a bath. Who knows?
Cat hierarchies are weird. When I was a kid we had this enormous tom, he was the biggest domestic cat I have ever seen, and not an ounce of fat on him. But this tiny little white cat from across the road would come into our backyard and eat our cat’s food while our cat just sat by in abject whimpering misery, apparently psychologically unable to do anything about it. Our cat had a nasty reputation for beating up some neighbourhood cats (we had to pay vet bills a couple of times) and was quite happy to take on and whup the arse of medium sized dogs, but this little white thing was untouchable for some reason in our cat’s head. Weird.
When I met my first husband I had 2 black and white cats who were siblings and mixed breeds born to a siamese mother. He had 2 red tabbies (sisters) who were sweet and shy. When we combined households, my cats terrorized the poor tabbies who, thereafter, spent their days in hiding and were only glimpsed as orange streaks to the food bowl or litter box and the back to their hiding place.
We had moved into a new apartment so the territory was neutral. My cats definitely had the siamese personality and were dominant.
We live in a 2-family, and our downstairs neighbors are friends, so we have an open-door policy between our homes during the day. When we decided we wanted to adopt cats, our neighbors did too. We ended up with 2 cats each, all from the same litter. They have a male (black with white markings) and a female (grey with white markings) and we have 2 males, (one solid black and one solid grey.)
At first, we let them roam freely between both households, separating them only at night. After a while, though, one of each pair established primacy in their own homes (the black cat upstairs and the female downstairs) and this became a problem when they couldn’t decide who was in charge when each was in the other’s territory. It finally came to a head when I caught the female peeing in one of my daughter’s toy boxes while staring defiantly at my 2 cats. We have kept them separated ever since.
Recently my dominate cat became ill. (He was peeing blood something awful. He’s on antibiotics and steroids and apparently with the special diet he’ll be okay.) This was an opportunity for the other cat to attempt a coup. He followed our poor sick cat around the house growling and hissing at him, took over the other cat’s special spot on the back of the chair, etc. This didn’t last long, fortunately (they were waking us up with their fighting) and order has been restored.
A group of cats generally has a very different social structure from a pack of dogs.
In a pack of, say, 12 dogs, there’s a definite hierarchy, and every dog knows whether he’s #1, #2, #3, all the way down to #12. There’s constant jockeying for position (like #8 fighting with #7, to move up a notch). If those dogs live with a family of humans, those dogs include the humans in their perceived hierarchy. They may view the father of the household as Alpha Male, but vie with his wife or kids for social status within the extended pack.
Within a pack of cats, there tends to be ONE dominant cat… but all the other cats under him are roughly equal in stature. There’s rarely a clear #2 cat, or a clear #3 cat, and the cats don’t do nearly as much jockeying for position. To use a crude analogy I once saw elsewhere, a dog pack’s social structure is like a ladder- each dog occupies a higher or lower rung on that ladder, and each one knows where the others stand. Cat groups are more like a wagon wheel, with the leader of the pack at the hub, and all other group members on the periphery of the circle.
And if those cats live in a human household, the cats will PROBABLY view one of the humans as Alpha Cat, and will act as equals, all subordinate to the boss human.
I agree that Humans and Dogs get caught up in the cat pecking order. Here is my household:
My wife
Medium sized male cat, acquired 6th,
Very large male cat, acquired 3rd,
Medium female dog, acquired 4th,
Small female dog, acquired 1st,
Me,
Very Small female cat, acquired 5th,
Large male cat, possibly brain-damaged, acquired 2nd.
Criteria include: who gets the most/best/first pick of food, who gets to sit/sleep in the desirable locations, who gets to play first/most when the toys come out, who gets “dominated” by posture (i.e. dogs putting their feet on you, etc.), who has control of the checkbook (really only relevant between my wife and I).
8-ball and 9-ball are good lighthearted fun. I play on a couple 8-ball teams. When I’m feeling masochistic though, I play straight pool. It’s an ol’ timers game though so not many folks play anymore. </hijack>
I’ve tried to analyze the pecking order in our house and it looks like this from my cats’ pov wrt sleeping arrangements:
Morpheus (appropriately named, male cat aquired last)
Athena (female cat aquired first)
Diefenbaker (female dog aquired after Athena)
Valkyrie (female dog aquired in conjunction with Morpheus)
my wife
me.
Wrt food it’s another matter. Diefenbaker thinks she’s Alpha Dog of the World. Athena places herself higher than Morpheus but not higher than either of the dogs. Morpheus places himself higher than me. So the pecking order definitely changes based on situation. We humans get no respect.
In my house, it goes something like this:
Sammy (Medium-sized, orange longhaired tabby) Alpha male
BooBoo (Small, black, paranoid Bombay) Beta male
Punkin (Huge, Orange Maine Coon) Disinterested Omega female
Now, this is all well and good, but the wife and I are soon going to add 2 more cats to this mix, which sould prove interesting. They are:
Marmalade (Medium-sized, orange shorthair) Thinks he’s alpha over ME, and is possibly bipolar and has what I’d like to call “cat-turet’s syndrome”, meaning he can be sweet and loving one minute, then the next try to chew your hand off.
Mo-Mo (Medium-sized Russian Blue) Very loud and lovey, but deftinitely the beta of the 2.
I think that I could probably get a guest show on “animal planet” when we get these 5 together. 
That, or the real-life emergency room show. Should be interesting.