Colorado: The Highest State, Second Edition

10. Cowboys and Farmers

139 I’m up in the morning before daylight, Before I sleep the moon shines bright. This is how a favorite cowboy song, “The Old Chisholm Trail,” describes the workday of one of the West’s most popular characters. The cowboy has ridden the range in Colorado since the 1850s, although today he is found more often in a pickup truck than on a horse. The cowboy and his horse, the ranches, the long cattle drives, and the cattle towns have all become part of American history and folklore. Hardly a week goes by without an old movie or television program depicting the cowboy’s West. Colorado was, and still is, cattle country. Cattle were driven from Texas to the Pikes Peak country in 1859 because there was a good market for beef in the mining districts. Several of the major cattle trails, including the Dawson and Goodnight-Loving, came into Colorado. Cowboys drove the longhorns—long-horned cattle—over these hot, dusty, dangerous trails. The first cattle ranches were started because the miners wanted meat. The eastern plains of Colorado had once been called the Great American Desert, but cattlemen found the grass there very nourishing for their cattle. For that reason they established their ranches on the plains as well as in the mountain valleys. The range was open and free for anyone who had the courage to risk the hard life of ranching. Cowboys and Farmers 10 140 C o w b o y s a n d F a r m e r s open range The great days of ranching were called the open-range era. It lasted only about twenty years, from 1865 to the mid-1880s. After the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were removed from the eastern plains and the railroad arrived, Coloradans jumped into the cattle business. The industry boomed here, as it did in Texas, Wyoming, and Montana. By the mid-1870s, Denver was becoming the center of the livestock industry. Denver’s railroad connections and stockyards made it a logical place to buy, sell, and ship cattle, sheep, and hogs to meat markets and buyers. Operating a ranch looked easy. All a person needed at first were cattle , cowboys, and a branding iron. The grass and water were free. Owners turned cattle loose to graze on the open range. Once or twice a year the ranchers rounded up the cattle, branded them, and drove them to market or to a railroad loading pen. Each ranch burned its own brand into its cattle and calf hides for easy identification. The ranches had only a couple of quickly constructed buildings and a corral. Little money was spent on them. Horses were not expensive. Wages Cattle provided meat and milk for the thousands of people moving to Colorado every year—and their cats. Courtesy, Colorado state university, Fort Collins. C o w b o y s a n d F a r m e r s 141 for the cowhands averaged about thirty dollars a month, plus room and board. A top hand might receive as much as forty-five dollars. The number of cowboys needed changed with the seasons. More were required in the summer and during roundups and drives, but only a few were needed in winter. The phrase “Grass is King” described the days of the open range. The cattle grazed on free grass and multiplied naturally. Grass and cows seemed liketheroadtofortune. No one inColorado becamemore famous or wealthy by following this road than John Wesley Iliff. John wesley IlIFF John Wesley Iliff was no ordinary cattleman. He ran his cattle across a range that stretched more than 100 miles west from Colorado’s eastern border and ran 60 miles north and south—over 650,000 total acres. His chief ranch headquarters was 40 miles from Julesburg. Northeastern Colorado was his range. Iliff did not own all of this land, but he controlled the water. That meant the land was his to use because without water, the land was useless for other ranchers and farmers. The twenty-eight-year-old Iliff had come to Colorado during the 1859 gold rush and opened a store in Denver. He soon realized that there was a lot of money to be made in the cattle business, so he invested in a herd of cattle. Within ten years Iliff was purchasing 10,000 to 15,000 Texas longhorns each spring at $10...