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Men will

CHAPTER XI

HILE I had been a guest several times of the Cheyenne Club, it was only in 1883 that I became a member and habitue of that famous place. congregate, find some common meeting place. In old days it was Babel; in modern London it is Trafalgar Square where any one except in war times can spout his ideas; in the sporting world it is Epsom Heath; and so on it goes till you reach Plymouth Rock and all that lies west of it. So in Cheyenne, a little town lying like a mirage in the desert, the cowmen of the West found a common meeting place, and all that was good, bad and indifferent found a congenial home in the "Club." It was a cosmopolitan place. Under its roof reticent Britisher, cautious Scot, exuberant Irishman, careful Yankee, confident Bostonian, worldly New Yorker, chivalrous Southerner and delightful Canadian all found a welcome home. Today I still have rooms there but the glory has departed.

As the brave band dispersed through death, hard times, extravagance or other causes, the club of dePrato days has shrunk, almost shriveled up. The rooms seem haunted. Even the copy of Paul Potter's bull which John Coble bored a hole through with his six shooter has been spirited away to a back room. Photos of racing cups hang still on its walls, memories of old days when Brooks, Kuykendall, Irvine and others were amateur jockeys. A picture of Rainsford's black cow pony with all the trappings supplied by that eccentric, hospitable genius is still hanging on its walls and Albert Bierstadt's steel engraving of his famous picture “In the Heart of the Big Horns" presented by him to the Club, brings back the thought that little over half a century ago this wild land was still a terra incognita except to the trapper or men like Dunraven who pierced its solitudes in search of

sport, or a Mormon prophet seeking a sanctuary by the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

Shortly after 1867 when the Union Pacific pierced these arid solitudes, it was soon found out that cattle could winter on the native grass. A lot of thin work oxen, turned loose on the Laramie Plains to die, as their owners thought when they abandoned them, came up fat and sleek in the spring. But those were days of virgin pasture. The cow business soon developed, and as said above Cheyenne became the center of business and the Club was a natural development. While it was intended as a purely social home for the residents and non-residents, it became really the business center also. In the old Borderland we used to slip into a public house, old and dingy, and seal a bargain with a dram of "Scotch," and so in the above well furnished cafe many a bottle of "Phiz" paved the way for a big trade. For herds of cattle were tossed about in the most reckless way. The year 1882 saw cowpunching in all its glory with a color of carmine around it. It was fashionable. The hunter for big game from European shores had told the wondrous tale of free grass and fat beef, of buffalo, elk and antelope, of a wild, free life with little restraint, of invigorating days under the shadows of mountains that almost matched the Alps, of champagne air that was a tonic to body and soul; and dangling before them, as a result of these charming surroundings, was wealth and the ease and dignity that comes with it.

It was a painting with a rich glow over it, but as events will show it was only an after-glow, not the real thing. The men who came from the other side of the Atlantic were young, mostly worthless in a business way, many of them dissolute, and when you rounded them up a very moderate lot. Very few of them have survived the ordeal of hard winters, overstocked ranges and other vicissitudes. A few have branched into other lines and won success. The ne'er do weel at home was exported to the West with generally disastrous results, not only to himself, but more especially to the friends who were asked to take him in charge. Then there was a

great influx of Harvard and Yale men who were more adaptable, but in the end not much more successful. They were nearer home and in every way more amenable to discipline. Many of them, after the experience they gained in the West, broke away from the life and have made successful ventures in other ways. For if you went at your work in cow camp and hayfield you laid a splendid foundation for the future. Another class, men who were workers, thinkers, men of the type of T. B. Hord, the Guthries, Vantassell, Hec Reel and others of that ilk were the backbone of the business, members but seldom attendants at the Club. Lastly there was a tail-end. Where they came from, God knows, but they got sandwiched in. Some found a place on the range, others kept books. They hung on and when the dissolution of 1886-87 came they slipped away unseen and soon were forgotten.

The President of the Club in those days was Phil Dater, a beau-ideal man for the place. As I have written of him in a former chapter, I pass on to Charles A. Campbell, who acted for one or two years in the above capacity. Whether he succeeded Dater, I cannot recollect. Anyway, he filled the position with dignity. Campbell came from Montreal and in the early days had done well. He was a splendid type of the Scotch-Canadian, solid, conservative, popular, loyal, with a fine practical knowledge of the cow business. The winter of 1886-87 was fatal to his business on the range. In his prosperous days he had joined Johnnie Gordon, the Wyoming poet and irrigation expert, in a land project on Horse Creek, but there also he met misfortune and, to use a western expression, he was "on his uppers. But he did not give up. He tackled any job and he began his business career again by doing odd jobs for the writer, buying cattle in the South, looking after special work on the range. Then he joined the forces of Clay, Robinson & Co., acting as solicitor for them on the Northern Pacific in the range season, buying cattle in Texas during the winter and spring. He was a handy man, never out of temper, full of tact, with a host of

devoted friends. When we opened our Kansas City office, or at least six months after its opening, he became manager and had begun to show fine results when he was stricken. with apoplexy and died in January, 1896. Unfortunately he had been drawn into the Rustler War in 1892, and the hardship he as well as others endured left a mark on him physically that was never rubbed off. He was slow to anger, but even the calmest temper was flurried in those days.

A gentleman called Mercer, editor of the Stock Growers' Journal, a Cheyenne publication, that had existed on the cattlemen's advertisements and other plunder that could be gathered from the cow business, had turned his back on his old friends. In a leading article he called the writer a murderer, although I was in Europe during the raid, unconscious of any cattle war, adding that Campbell was my hired man. The latter, who was in court on its adjournment, promptly went to the editor's office and took the change out of him with his fists. This was Campbell at boiling point, goaded to violent action by thieves, by harlots who incited the cowboys to steal and pay them in kind when they could not produce the price in gold, by persecution in the courts where lawyers milked you and judges were not above suspicion. It was not the gentle, lovable, sympathetic Charlie who occupied the chair at the annual meetings of the Club and made merry with his friends.

But the President who came after Campbell left the most vivid impression on my mind-Hubert E. Teschemacher. He was one of the unique characters who about 1879 or 1880 invaded the West and as he was typical of the great movement from Europe and our Eastern States to Wyoming, it may be well to dwell at some length on his career as an illustration and historical record of those frontier's men who if they did nothing else advertised the latent wealth of those sun-dried plains and rich valleys, waiting for water. "Teschie," as we loved to call him, was the son of an Englishman, who was of Huguenot extraction and was a California argonaut. He went there in 1846 and heard the golden echoes

that came from Sutter's mill wheel in the Sacramento valley. Another brother, Arthur, came at the same time to Cheyenne, but his path lay in other lines than cowpunching, so he returned to Europe, where gossip says he committed suicide on account of a Russian Princess whose name need not be repeated here. Our story follows the career of the elder brother. After "Teschie" graduated from Harvard his father sent him round the world. When he returned to Paris, where his parents lived, he happened to pick up Galignani's Messenger, the only newspaper printed in English in the gay capital of those days. In this was an article describing life on the plains, the very plains that the reader had passed over some weeks before. The picture caught "Teschie's" fancy. It whirled into a realm of imagination and great castles grew in the air. Here was opportunity. The great ocean of grass, free, boundless, home of the buffalo, a remnant of the Red man still to be found, lay before him. The imagery of Parkman's "Oregon Trail" was flashed across the screen of his young life.

So with all his youthful energy he left for the West, and while he was poorer in material gains after his long residence there, Wyoming was richer by his stay for he was the best type of an American. Though an Anglo-Saxon by birth, he was so much of an American that when he went to Europe he invariably sailed in a boat that hoisted the Stars and Stripes. And he carried that strong loyalty through every action of his life. When he came west, he took, like the rest of us, little regard of the future. He saw before him the painted prairie with its green grass free to all, the cattle roaming at will over valley and divide. There was before him the wild, free life of the cowboy, the morning cup of coffee, the long rides as they circled the cattle, the frantic scenes at the round-up, the calf branding in the afternoon, the foundation of a cattle owner's wealth, and at night sweet sleep under clear skies, breathing refreshing air. When the spring work was over they came back to town. They had a bachelor's house where an old servant gave them coffee and