A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY SOME
It seemed like a good idea at the time – to capture the energy and enthusiasm that surrounded the creation of the West’s first great livestock grazing collective, the National Stock Growers’ Association, by throwing a huge feast at the close of the Association’s first convention, January 1898. More than two thousand delegates, representing every state west of the Missouri River, crowded into Coliseum Hall in Denver to bring into being a brand-new organization dedicated to the political and economic advancement of the range stockgrowers, the thousands of men and women who ran cattle and sheep on the western prairie. It was an era typified by the rise of the trade association, and the notoriously independent livestock operator lagged behind the efforts of other industries. Said one rancher at the time, “Turn in whatever direction you may, and large interests are protected by associated effort – the insurance men, the national banks, the stockyard corporation – each speaks with a single voice.” And now, thanks to the efforts of the conventioneers in Denver, the cattle and sheep growers out West would step into the ring to compete toe to toe with other established business combines.
At the end of the successful convention, the mood was as ebullient as the planned feast was lavish. In a symbolic nod to the passing of the wild frontier in favor of agrarian settlement, convention planners opted for what one historian called “the last great feast on the wild meat of the plains.” The venison was to be served alongside the flesh of the newly arrived livestock. Five bison, four elk, two bears, fifteen pronghorn, ten beeves, thirty sheep and two hundred opossums went into immense barbeque pits supervised by veteran chuck wagon cooks. Meanwhile, chefs working indoors whipped up 15,000 loaves of bread, thirty-five barrels of yams, and 10,000 pickles – all to be served with coffee brewed from 500 pounds of beans and three barrels of loaf sugar.
The feast was to be held outdoors in a huge stockyard enclosure, and the diners were to be shuttled in special trains from the Denver Union Station downtown near Coliseum Hall out to the stockyard at the edge of town. Convention planners issued tickets free of charge. Unfortunately, no provisions had been made for screening the recipients of the tickets, so anyone who showed up claiming to have been part of the convention received a pass for a free meal. The bums’ rush was on. So great was the jam at Union Station, wrote historian Alvin Steinel, “that an iron fence which protected the tracks was broken down and people rushed pellmell to fill the waiting cars.” Others made it out the stockyards any way they could until, according to newspaper estimates, 30,000 people attempted to jam into the feasting area. One main reason for the rush was news of free beer. Three hundred kegs had been tapped and stood alongside the columns of tables groaning under loads of barbequed meat, yams, bread, and pickles.
In the end, Denver’s hoodlums had a field day, not only blocking access to legitimate conventioneers, but also making off with as much booty as they could get their hands on. By the end of the day, they had lifted 1,000 steel knives and forks, 2,000 tin cups, fifty serving platters, twenty-five iron pails, twenty meat hooks, a lot of cleavers, and all of the beer glasses. Said historian Siedel, “this affront to the stockmen came from the scum that rises on the stagnant pool of vice. . . . Women and children were trampled, and one murder occurred.”
But the stockmen had troubles of their own percolating beneath the jubilant surface of their convention success. The mob violence in Denver was but a taste of what was yet to come boiling up from within their own ranks. That first convention which created a “national stock growers association” included sheepmen as well as cattlemen – hence the mixing of mutton and beef in the bloody stew served up at the stockyard. Range conflicts between beef men and mutton men had already occurred in Texas, Arizona, and other places, but the worst occurred in Wyoming and Colorado where an all-out war had erupted, and was still ongoing at the time of the Denver convention. In 1894, the first dramatic acts of violence broke out in Garfield County, Colorado, where cowboys drove a herd of 3,800 sheep over the cliffs above Parachute Creek and shot their owner, Carl Brown, in the ass. More violence followed, including the murder of two Wyoming sheep herders, killed along with 300 animals by Colorado cowboys. If the formation of the omnibus National Stock Growers Association was in part an attempt to bring sheep men and cattle men into some kind of lasting accord, the attempt failed. The range wars dragged on through the first decade of the new century with more murders of shepherds and their flocks. What put an end to the violence was not the efforts of the new Association, but the actions of a jury in the case of the 1909 Ten Sleep murders in Big Horn County, Wyoming. Seven masked men killed a sheepherder named Joe Allemand along with two companions, burned to death in their wagon. A jury found five of the killers guilty and sentenced them to prison – the first time cattlemen were fully brought to justice for their depredations against their grazing competitors.
The same animosities sundered the National Stock Growers Association, which soon splintered into separate entities, an American National Cattlemen’s Association and more than one organization dedicated to the growers of lamb and wool. That brawl in the Denver stockyards in 1898 was but an ironic portent of things to come.