I’m preparing to teach a college course on American history from 1877 to the present, starting two months from now. While studying for the course, several questions have occurred to me about the Old West that I don’t feel prepared to discuss with my students.
Why didn’t Western cowboys unionize, as the miners did (i.e. Western Federation of Miners and United Mine Workers)?
Did European countries have cowboys? I would think that European pastures were too small to need cowboys, but I’m not sure.
I saw a picture from 1890 showing a Kansas woman with a wheelbarrow full of buffalo chips (dried dung) she was going to use for fuel. I thought the buffalo were mostly killed off by the early 1880s. Were there still buffalo around in 1890 in Kansas, or did buffalo chips just have a very long life?
Faced with a shortage of trees, many Great Plains white settlers made their houses out of sod. Faced with the same problem, Plains Indians made tipis. The Indians’ reason for not using sod houses is obvious - can’t take a sod house with you in search of buffalo. But why didn’t the settlers adopt the Indian tipi?
Were sheep really more destructive to Western grass than cattle were, as the cattlemen clearly believed? Were either sheep or cattle more destructive than the buffalo had been?
Did the Taiping Rebellion play a major role in starting the emigration of Chinese to California?
Thanks for any help or sources anyone can provide.
I have a lot of old cowboys in my family. They are all dead, but they did talk a bit before they died…some of them talked a lot. So:
First of all cowboys weren’t necessarily all about the cows, but yes, the distances are vast here compared with Europe. At some point the cattle could be loaded onto trains and sent to market but they had to be driven, often considerable distances, in order to get to a point where there was a railroad.
I have no idea why they didn’t form unions, but I think part of the allure of being a cowboy was being fiercely independent. My great-grandfather was a cowboy in his youth who settled down on a ranch. He was also a farrier and blacksmith. His sons, including my grandfather, went through a cowboy stage, but most of them also settled down by the time they were in their late 20s, and all of them did by the time they were in their 40s. By the time a guy needed a steady income such as that guaranteed by unions, to pay the mortgage and raise young’uns, he was pretty much past the cowboy stage, as they were itinerant and usually single. In his ranching days my grandfather had two hired hands, who lived in an outbuilding on the ranch with their families, for years. But he also hired (or had the hands hire) extra help when needed, which was a couple of times a year. These were the young guys, some of whom came back for several years. One of my great-uncles (the one who didn’t settle down until his 40s) worked as a cowboy in Kansas and Oklahoma Territory for several years from the time he got out of high school, at 16. In all cases he lived with the family who owned the land, ate dinner with them, slept in a room in their house. In one case got as far as being engaged to one of their daughters. Kind of hard to unionize under those circumstances.
This great-uncle then became a school-teacher in Idaho, then became a telegrapher for the railroad, then became a travel agent, and ended his working life as a real-estate salesman.
It is my belief that buffalo chips and cow chips look pretty much the same. I know there were lots of cows in Kansas in the 1890s. I don’t remember buffalo figuring into any of the stories I heard.
The people in my family built their soddies as the first step in homesteading land in Kansas. In the oldest farm, still in the family, it was more of a dugout, then a frame house was built around it, then added onto and the dugout where they once lived became a root cellar (also useful to hide from tornados). Couldn’t do that with a tipi.
Sheep tear off the grass much closer to the roots. The ranchers in the family could put sheep in after the cows had grazed in a pasture for awhile, but once the sheep got through with it they couldn’t put cows in it, as nothing was left. Even in my lifetime, they let the sheep in closer to the house–for a nicely manicured lawn, no lawn mowing required!–and had the cows pastured out further, and moved them frequently to avoid overgrazing. But they overgrazed the land anyway. (When land is overgrazed, plants called “pioneers” are the first to come back. They are usually some kind of thistle or thorn, which most animals won’t eat, and which make the animals that do eat them sick, and they are a pain to get rid of.)
OK, a tipi is basically a tent. They are suited to the nomadic lifestyle (see Mongolian yurts for another example - lots of nomadic cultures have quite sophisticated tents) but not to permanent settlement. A soddie is warmer and more weatherproof than a tipi. If you’re a nomad you have to compromise and use portable housing, but I don’t know of any permanently settled culture that uses tents as their main shelter.
Re: Unions
The very idea of unions is pretty much antithetical to American mythology that supports the notion of the fiercely independent person. Note that nearly all unions in the U.S. were founded among recent immigrant groups where large numbers of Europeans had been accepted or imported to provide mass labor. (Once a union gets going, second and third generation Americans may keep it going, but to get it started, you need a lot of people willing to band together for a common cause in ways that Yanks just don’t seem willing to do.) Cowboys, particularly, were more likely to identify with their employers , (“riding for the brand”), than would permit organization against the employers with the feeling that if they didn’t like things, they could always saddle up and move to a better location. Cowboys also tended to be quite young, with rather few having wives and children to support, so were not inclined to fight for better pay or more security for their families.
In addition, that same lack of feeling for group organization provided a culture in which it was easy to get the law to oppose union organization. Most of the unions of the 19th century were born in bloodshed with most of the blood being shed by the organizers who were atttacked by agents of the companies (or attacked by the police or army) and then charged with violent crimes for defending themselves. This is not to say that no organizers were violent, (see the Chicago Haymarket), but the majority of violence in the 19th century originated with the company owners and the law enforcemant agencies.
Re: Taiping Rebellion
With a period of social disruption covering nearly half the country resulting in 20 million deaths, it is pretty certain that the Rebellion did persuade many Chinese to accept the lure of jobs building the U.S. railroads for more pay. However, it is not a topic that many U.S. histories address, so I am not sure where you would find much information. (In fairness, U.S. histories rarely discuss European events when discussing immigration, either, usually refering vaguely to “religious freedom,” “poverty,” or “repressive governments” without actually examining the particular event that spurred a particular migration. The Irish Potato Famine being a singular exception to that trend and the anti-Jewish pogroms of Russia echoing that in a minor key.)
I would guess that they were simply cattle chips/cow pies, rather than decade old buffalo chips. (The picture could have been mislabeled, either by year or by the type of cattle.) There were still small herds of bison in the areas where settlement was slower (otherwise we would have no bison, today), particularly in the Dakotas and Montana, so it is possible that she really did have buffalo chips if the photo was taken in a more remote location.
Most of this is IMO, based only on a history minor (and a Western childhood), so take it FWIW:
The itinerant nature of cowboy work would not lend itself to unionization. In addition, the danger and health hazards of mining that made the poor salary seem unjust – those factors did not exist to nearly the same extent for punching cattle. Also, as Tomndebb says, unionization in the Western mines was a dangerous and sometimes violent ongoing conflict, cumulating in the assassination of the governor of Idaho in 1905 by a former union member who was allegedly acting on behalf of mine owners who wanted the crime pinned on the unions. Cowboys tended to be young, poorly educated, itinerant, and, yes, independent. It’s hard to see that they would have the inclination to put in the serious effort required for union organization in the face of serious hostility to the concept by their employers.
Not European, but other North and South American countries had their own versions of the “cowboy”, the most familiar of which is probably the Argentinian gauchos.
It’s hard to think that NO people tried to leave China due to the Taiping Rebellion, but my understanding is the majority of Chinese immigrants to the American West in the mid-19th century were uneducated single men, attracted by the wages of working in the gold fields or on the railroads. They mostly did not intend to stay in the U.S. but to work to earn their fortune and then return to China. This doesn’t seem consistent with a mass permanent emigration due to political factors. But this is one of those instances where I think the answer will depend on what you mean by “a major role.”
There is also the fact that most white settlers would rather starve than do anything “Indian.” A lot of them did. The ways of the Native Americans were almost never adopted by white settlers on the Great Plains. Thus, soddies rather than tipis. Plus all the reasons given above, ie weatherproof, warm, tornado-resistant, etc. My grandfather built a soddy when he emigrated to Kansas. The farm house grew around it.
Because, being farmers rather than buffalo hunters, they had no desire to take their houses with them. Is this not equally obvious? (Not trying to be snarky, but it seems to me the question as posed answers itself. Am I missing something?)
The Ukraine was the Wild West in the East as the Mongols retreated in the 15th C. Anyone who had the means of escaping serfdom headed there to carve out lives among the Cossacks. (cite: I once assumed that the Cossacks were the descendants of the Vikings in Russia, but everything I read disabused me of this)
The Steppes extend into Hungary, including the Puszta, a large, flat plain where the cowboys eat goulash instead of beans.
The Spanish were herding cattle on horseback long before they exported the practice to the Pampas and northern Mexico.
Being a complete tenderfoot, the practical realities of tipi and soddie living are not as obvious to me as to others. Possibly unrealistically, I envisioned a sod house, especially a dugout-style one, as being prone to cold, damp and leaks, and imagined tipis with their double hide construction and warm air layer in between to be perhaps warmer and more weatherproof than they actually were.
I considered the idea that settlers would reject Indian tipis for reasons of prejudice. But the equally prejudiced settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries adopted Indian corn, Indian tomahawks, Indian moccasins and buckskins, Indian ambush tactics, and so on. So that explanation did not seem adequate to me.
A note regarding the unions: the average wage for a silver miner in Virginia City, Nevada during the 1870s was $4 a day, which by my calculation would have been about $100 a month, assuming a six-day work week. An ordinary cowboy wage during the same time period was $25 a month. Obviously both jobs required skill and were very dangerous; was the miners’ wage higher because they needed more skill and/or underwent more risk, or because unionizing gave them more bargaining power?
The main thing I’m concerned with regarding the European cowboy question is the origin of the cowboys’ skills and culture. From what I’ve seen so far, it appears I would be on solid ground describing the first American cowboys as learning their skills on the job and/or from the Mexican vaqueros, rather than continuing any European cowboy tradition, correct?
Slithy Tove posted while I was in the middle of composing my response. So there were cowboys on the steppe and in Spain, then? But I would think that the American cowboys would not have been beneficiaries of the steppe cowboys’ skills; in the 1870s, almost all Russian and Hungarian immigrants to America lived in the East, yes? And the Spanish tradition of cowboying would have come to the Americans indirectly, through the vector of the Mexicans?
I dare say a substantial number of cowboys were Mexican, or black. Without a doubt the skill set was not European.
As for the prejudice against Native American foods and ideas…I was reading several of Roger Welsch’s books last month, where he goes on at length as to the foods the whites wouldn’t eat because they were “Indian,” and therefore starved in the midst of plenty.
They may well have been, but soddies were more permanent. And permanence was important when homesteading.
Everybody in my family who was a cowboy had room & board in addition to the wage. The folks in my family who went into the oil patch also had company-provided housing. I think this may have inclined them away from organizing, although I know some miners also got housing and had a company store.
Pretty much on the job. There is some dispute about the “cowboy” appellation–all the actual cowboys I know say it derives from the Spanish “caballeros”–horsemen, and a certain kind of gallantry and flair is implied, whereas dictionaries will say it comes from cow + boy. There may have been, in Europe and the American eastern states, boys who took care of cows, and hence were called “cowboys,” but the Western cowboy, at least in his own mind, is more than that. There’s a code, unwritten, like pirates. Nobody who merely took care of cows would be entitled to call himself a cowboy. It was equally important–maybe more important–to know your way around horses. On the job, they might refer to themselves as punchers. But a man who never had anything to do with cows might also call himself a cowboy, if he had something to do with horses.
Could this be due the the economics/profitability of mining, vs. raising cattle?
Did miners work for larger corporations while cowboys often worked for smaller, family-run businesses?
Mind you, it’s not that the Plains tipis were bad - they were quite good - it’s just that they were housing for nomads. Keep in mind, too, that the smoke hole was just that - a hole at the top to let the smoke out. It also let heat out and rain in. They definitely kept the wind out, and that was hugely important on the prairies where the winds can really get up to speed, but when the natives settled down (either by choice or by force) they built solid homes
A badly built soddie could certainly be nasty, but keep in mind that the prairies were drier (on average) than the Eastern forests, which kept down the damp. A good roof would keep out leaks. A soddie was often half-sunk into the ground - a technique used in many parts of the world both to cut down on construction materials needs and to take advantage of the moderating effects of the ground (cool in summer, warm in winter, relatively speaking) - with walls a foot or more thick, which not only provided insulation to keep heat inside in winter, but also to keep it {i]out* in summer when temperatures soared into the triple digits. There are accounts of well-constructed soddies actually being more comfortable temperature-wise than frame-built houses of the time.