The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark Lause (review)

Mark Lause, who has published extensively on eastern labour movements and the working class in the post-Civil War era, turns his attention to the US West in The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West. As Lause argues, the western extension of the battle between corporations and their workers that emerged in the post-bellum era is a natural, albeit relatively untouched area for labour and working class historians to investigate. The persistent and romanticized myth of the cowboy has obscured the reality of their struggles to wrest a living, and Lause argues that cowboys and the cowboy strike needs to be understood within the context of labour insurgency during the post-Civil War era. His thesis is clear: "One cannot discuss labor struggles - or political insurgencies - in the West during these years without encountering the reality of coercive violence, recognition of which clarifies much about the progression of cowboy strikes and insurgent movements generally." (xi) Indeed, themes of violence, coercion, and class conflict connect the cowboy insurgency with other working-class efforts throughout this work.

The preface, introduction, and first two chapters provide labour history background and context for the cowboy strikes. Lause introduces readers to the emergence of immediate post-Civil War groups who presented political challenges the powerful: Patrons of Husbandry (Grange), Industrial Brotherhood (which became the Knights of Labor), and the Farmer's Alliance, while arguing that corporate and political powers chose to protect "their property, profits, and prerogatives" through violence and coercion rather than give in to workers' demands. (xii) The introduction sets the context for the rise of the cattle industry in the West, discussing the rise in national demand for beef, and the Red River War of 1874 against Texas Native Americans, who, once defeated and placed on reservations, opened immense territory for large-scale corporate ranching. Lause introduces the reality of cowboy work, countering a romanticized view with depictions of low paid working-class cowboys kept in line by corporate ranch owners, and concludes by discussing the role of the railroad and the development of western towns after 1869, the development of stockyards, and of large cattle drives to Kansas railheads. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss in more detail the rise of post-Civil War labour organizations such as Grangers, International Brotherhood, and Lause relates these organizations to the difficulties and insecure employment Texas cowboys endured. Cattle ranchers' increasing concern with the bottom line of their commercial-scale operations encouraged them to criminalizing longstanding traditions, such as branding mavericks, which had traditionally allowed workers to rise out of wage labour into ranch ownership. Thus the stage is set for a labour conflict between cattle ranchers and their hired hands.

Chapters 3 through 6 get to the heart of the topic, as Lause describes the high ranch profits and stagnant wages of cowboys that initiated the strikes. Guidance from cowboys and sympathizers familiar with insurgent labour movements in the East, combined with knowledge of when ranchers would be most vulnerable, led to successful strikes. But as Lause argues, while cowboys won strike battles, especially during the years 1883 to 1886, in the long run they lost the war for improved wages and job security. By failing to organize into a union, cowboys involved in strikes found themselves blacklisted or facing violent retribution from hired guns employed by ranch owners. Lause pays a great deal of attention to labour organizations, events, and leaders in the East, often to make just a brief connection to the story of the cowboys' situation in the West. The discussion of the Great Cattle Die-Up of 1886 and 1887, which Lause connects with Theodore Roosevelt and the elite ranchers in Montana, had a promising start to explain the difficulties cowhands faced, although more detail on the declining cattle industry's effect on cattle hands overall would have been welcome.

The remaining chapters shift focuses to labour...