From Reality to Rodeos:
Dakota Cow Town Newspapers and the Cowboy Myth, 1877-1886

By Ross F. Collins, Professor of Communication, North Dakota State University, Fargo

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Introduction. Cowboys, cattlemen, and editors during the long drive era.

Dakota Territory was at the northernmost edge of the Western Trail, the greatest cowboy cattle trail in the West between 1877 and 1885. Cattle was herded from Texas north by the 99th meridian to Ogallala, Nebraska, and through that gateway to the northern plains of Montana, Wyoming, and Dakota territories. The number of beasts brought north during the two-decade long drive era following the Civil War reached at least five million; it is a wonder carnivores from the East could accommodate that much beef on their tables. Apparently they liked Texas beef: "huge demand needs huge supply," according to an 1884 report, and by then 2.5 million head had been shipped by rail from western cow towns to Chicago for processing. Kansas City and others at the eastern edge of the plains also became important meatpacking headquarters for cattlemen.

Great fortunes fed those great enterprises in the western plains. The cattle barons, as some frontier editors called the livestock financiers (sometimes a compliment, sometimes an epithet), came almost exclusively from the East and Europe to establish operations in western towns along the long-drive trails. Some Dakota Territory cattle owners came from Britain or, for the flamboyantly famous Marquis de Morès, from France. The big operators behind the cattle drives needed many herders to do the tough, logistically difficult job of moving thousands of beeves through enormous stretches to prairie. To make the long trips from Texas to the Canadian border between 1867 and 1886, they hired an estimated 35,000 wranglers, cooks and cowboys.

Why did they come, both cowboys and cattlemen? Primarily for the money. After the Civil War, Texas was economically poor, but rich in semi-wild longhorns. Northern states east of the Mississippi had cash but expensive beef. When a Kansas Pacific railhead reached Abilene in 1867, Texas cattlemen realized they had a way to ship cattle east at a profit. In fact, the profit could be enormous: at the beginning of the era, cattle barons could expect to receive 100 percent profit in three years This diminished to more like 60 percent in four years, but still well worth the risk for many financiers.

The investments spread through 1,500 miles of established cattle towns throughout the western plains. A general business rule estimated the cost of a long drive at 60 cents a head, and 80 percent of that money was spent in the cow towns along the way. In fact, the cattle industry at its acme dominated economy and culture of plains states after the Civil War. Observed noted western historian Robert Athearn, "They directed the social, economic and political scene for about 40 years."
Inevitably the towns directly catering to the cowboys grew economically, but at a price: cow town leaders catered to some of the less genteel of young men engaged in one of the West's most dangerous occupations. For those men, a night in town might be an opportunity to spend a lot, in both money and troublemaking. Cowboys took in about $35-$40 a month, perhaps $60 a month for top hands, but often squandered it at a dusty cow town, drinking, gambling, shooting and procuring prostitutes. "They invariably get drunk and become a terror to the inhabitants who, on the other hand, get as much profit out of them as they can," observed a French traveler in 1884 after visiting Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Cow towns balanced tolerance of cowboy behavior against economic threat of exerting too much control. In the cow towns of the Old West, festive cowboys still meant prosperity.

Quick to sense prospects for prosperity were frontier newspaper editors. The "ink-slingers," as they were fond of calling themselves, followed, or perhaps even preceded, settlement at nearly every tiny townsite throughout the western frontier. Like the cowboys editors usually were young, from the East, and with names and biographies mostly forgotten by history. Frontier editors generally found their voice in booming—that is, extolling the opportunities for health and wealth in the West, and particularly in their town, no matter how tiny. Nearly every town had a newspaper, perhaps several. In sparsely populated Dakota Territory, a contemporary report from the Sturgis Weekly Record, quoting from what it called a government pamphlet, in 1885 showed 275 newspapers. Settlers in Deadwood, now in South Dakota, could choose from four dailies, in what was then the largest city in the territory, with an 1880 census population of 3,677.

Aim and Scope.

This research examines development of the American cowboy as a mythical figure from its source, and at its beginning, considering Dakota Territory cow town newspapers when the Old West was still new.

Deadwood marked the largest Dakota stop of the northern cattle town trail. It represented a particular kind of frontier newspaper, covering a particular kind of news: the cattle papers of Dakota Territory, and the cowboy. How does one define a cattle paper? In the big cow towns like Abilene, it may have been a paper bankrolled and controlled by the big cattle concerns. In the smaller towns up and down the drives, it may have been a paper not controlled by, but still dependent on, the economy of the cattle drives. In all cases the towns chosen for this study were as close as possible to the Black Hills and Canadian cattle trails, as the north part was called. The Dakota Territory's actual cattle centers were Belle Fourche in what is now South Dakota, and Medora in what is now North Dakota. While not as famous today as Kansas cow centers such as Abilene and Dodge City, these Dakota Territory towns were particularly important to the cattle industry during the long drive era. Belle Fourche, fifteen miles north of Deadwood, became the world's largest primary cattle shipping center by 1890, and was pasturing 700,000-800,000 head by 1884. Medora, some 200 miles north, site of North Dakota's only round-ups, became a nationally famous cow town thanks to two most distinctive cattlemen who ranched there: the French aristocrat Marquis de Morès, and eastern politician Theodore Roosevelt. The 1886 round-up there and in eastern Montana was one of the largest in the history of the entire cattle industry. Three of the region's newspapers form the basis of this study, as described below.

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Note: An earlier version of this article was published online in Media History Monographs, Vol. 3, No. 1, http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/mediahistory/mhmjour3-1.htm.