Spurred West. Ian Neligh

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      CHAPTER 5

      CATTLE, BLOOD, AND THUNDER

      Terry Florian walks along the suspended walkway, surveying the cattle below. The distant sounds of traffic and the bellowing of the cattle below are punctuated by the regular, easy staccato of his boots on the weathered boards of the raised platform. Always vigilant, he says he still has run-ins with modern-day cattle rustlers.

      “We had some not-so-nice people that were stealing stuff here,” Florian admits. The brand inspector supervisor carries a pair of well-worn manual shears and a narrow clipboard in both of his back pockets. The shears are used to get a closer look at a cattle brand to identify ownership, and the clipboard to keep track of his various charges. The tools of the trade haven’t changed much in the last hundred years, nor has the type of person called to this unique career field. Just as they did more than one hundred years ago, brand inspectors still spend their days preventing the theft of livestock and, when able, returning them to their rightful owners. They’re statutory peace officers with the power to arrest criminals, though they don’t carry firearms anymore. Thefts happen somewhat frequently, but they rarely escalate to become a dangerous situation. Of course, there are exceptions.

      The Producers Livestock Marketing Association, a Greeley cattle sale barn, is still largely quiet as we looked out over the pens below. A few cattle call out to each other as the sun burns away the overcast morning sky. A veteran of the business for thirty years, Florian is the latest in a long line of inspectors dating back to a time before Colorado was even a state. As we stand there and wait for a shipment of cattle to be dropped off, Florian recalls a rustling incident that took place almost twenty years ago involving some violent men who had stolen their neighbor’s livestock.

      “I called for the sheriff to go, then he figured out where I was going and said it was in my ‘best interest to look the other way,’” Florian says. “They had shot at one of the sheriff’s cars who went into their yard like three months earlier. That’s why he said he wouldn’t send any of his guys out there. I said, ‘Well, I’m going anyway, with or without you.’”

      Florian called one of his fellow cattle brand inspectors to tell him where he was going and then drove in his pickup truck to the property with the stolen calves. He told the men they were suspected of cattle rustling, which they accepted without issue. “They knew they were caught,” Florian tells me, adding they already knew him and got along with him well enough. Brand inspectors eventually meet and get to know everyone in their district regardless of their potential for future cattle thievery. “They didn’t see me as a threat, [but] I was scared,” Florian says, chuckling at the memory. He doesn’t seem like the type to scare easy.

      “There were four or five of them guys and they’re pretty good sized, and they’re just kind of moving around your pickup wondering what the heck you’re doing there,” Florian says. “You tell them and they kind of hear what you’ve got going on, you know, ‘what’s the scoop?’ We got it worked out.”

      But not entirely in the way he had hoped. The neighbors were ultimately too afraid to press charges against the men. “The people who owned them said, ‘You know, that’s a $300 calf and they could do $10,000 of damage to my place,’ [and] because it was their neighbor, he said ‘I don’t care. They can have the calves,’” Florian says. The men ended up just paying for the stolen animals.

      Brand inspectors have roamed the shrinking frontier, looking for lost and stolen cattle and horses since 1865. The job of cattle inspector was established for a very good reason. The history of rustlers is a terrible and bloody one, proving again and again the necessity for the specialized Western lawmen.

       Bonanza

      When gold was discovered in Colorado in 1859, those desperate to make their fortunes raced across the plains in a frantic scramble. Likely the thought of changing their economic destiny overnight caused many to risk life and limb. In the winter of 1860, the Rocky Mountain News did its best to warn the soon-to-be-arriving waves of hopeful prospectors and miners about the realities of living in the unforgiving mountainous climate. “Thousands will no doubt set out for Pike’s Peak only intent upon getting there, without any provision for subsistence or comfort after their arrival, content to ‘trust to luck’ and let tomorrow provide for itself. To such we say, stay at home until you learn better sense, or you will stand a good chance of acquiring an education more rapidly than agreeable. We have barely sufficient provisions in this country to subsist those already here …”

      That gold rush drew an estimated one hundred thousand people to test their luck and resolve in the Rockies. It was dangerous, back-breaking work and gold was found only by a lucky few, but as the Rocky Mountain News predicted, the area just wasn’t prepared for the influx of people seeking their fortunes. Indeed, there wasn’t enough food to support the miners, merchants, and others trying to make a living in the shadow of gold’s discovery. Local ranchers couldn’t keep up with the demand for beef and a solution was desperately needed to feed the growing state. In time that riddle would be solved by legendary former-Texas-Ranger-turned-cattleman Charles Goodnight, who began driving cattle into the area as early in 1866.

      Before long, there was a cattle boom in Colorado. This bonanza soon saw other Texas ranchers driving their cattle into the state, and other Western regions, as the local stockman scrambled to keep up with demand. While there were significant dips and valleys in the economic reality of raising livestock in the West, its long-term profitability was arguably more sustainable than the gold locked deep in the neighboring mountains.

      With the creation of the Colorado Stock Growers Association in 1867 and other similar groups, books listing cattle brands were soon published to help curtail theft and determine the origin of the free-ranging cattle. Not unlike a mailing address, the brand could tell where and who a cow belonged to. Like the state’s gold rush, the beef business became extremely lucrative to those who could stick it out, especially in the early 1880s. The all-time high price of beef, then almost $40 a head, brought in unheard-of levels of investment in the industry across Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana. Fortune was fickle and often an illusion, but those who could find opportunity grabbed at it and held on for dear life, because if you didn’t—and many couldn’t—you hit rock bottom with a bone-crushing thud. The line between legal and illicit was often just determined by who had the most friends in the right places or simply whether you were caught in the act. Almost from the beginning, beef proved to be an easy business to steal into, and cattle thefts soon became a rampant and violent problem that escalated СКАЧАТЬ