The Land of the Desperado

By Emerson Hough in 1907

For many years, a vast and largely uncharted domain lay to the west of the Mississippi River, a realm that remained shrouded in mystery for nearly three centuries after the arrival of white civilization on the continent. Even as the nation secured its independence and rose to prominence on the world stage, this Western expanse remained largely unknown to its most intrepid citizens. The United States acquired this immense territory, undertaking significant financial obligations, often without a clear understanding of the riches and challenges it contained.

Eastern politicians and leading figures in Congress voiced concerns about the wisdom of incorporating this territory into the already extensive American domain. They argued that the region was unsuitable for settlement and that attempts to civilize it would prove futile. Even prominent statesmen like Daniel Webster expressed reservations about westward expansion, fearing that these territories could never achieve statehood, that the East would suffer economically, and that the West would ultimately prove a burden to the Union.

Given this widespread skepticism and disdain, the great West was effectively relegated to the status of an outcast. Deemed perpetually uninhabitable, it might have been expected to descend into complete lawlessness. Branded as unsuitable for Eastern populations, it was perhaps inevitable that it would attract a unique and often unruly populace.

And so it did. The frontier, stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific, experienced periods of lawlessness. This wasn’t always the fault of the pioneers who ventured westward. The rapid pace of westward expansion often outstripped the ability of legal institutions to keep pace. In the absence of established courts and law enforcement, individuals were forced to act as their own judges and juries, defending themselves and their property through their own means. This environment, predictably, attracted those who sought to evade the constraints of the law: individuals who prized license over liberty, who embraced crime rather than order, and who sought to seize what was not rightfully theirs through force and intimidation.

Historians in 1855 recognized the challenges of establishing morality and virtue in both densely populated cities and the untamed wilderness. In urban centers, individuals could become lost in the crowd, their actions obscured from public scrutiny, allowing them to commit crimes with relative impunity. Conversely, in sparsely populated wilderness areas, the reach of the law was limited, and crimes often went unobserved or unpunished due to a lack of resources and enforcement. Both environments, therefore, became havens for desperadoes. The early settlements of the West became magnets for fugitives from justice, suspected criminals, and escaped felons seeking refuge. Counterfeiters and robbers found safe havens or new opportunities to ply their illicit trades.

Theodore Roosevelt, a man who knew and loved the West, offered a more evocative depiction of the land beyond the Mississippi. He described a plains country stretching from Texas to North Dakota and westward to the Rocky Mountains. This was a region characterized by limited rainfall, short grasses, and cottonwood trees lining the winding streams, which alternated between raging torrents and mere trickles of water.

The landscape was punctuated by gray sagebrush plains and expanses of natural pasture, broken by the stark beauty of the Badlands – sun-baked wastelands in the summer and desolate, arctic landscapes in the winter. Beyond the plains rose the Rocky Mountains, their slopes cloaked in coniferous forests, the trees growing sparsely. Further north, the forests grew denser, the peaks soared higher, and glaciers descended into the valleys from fields of eternal snow. Brooks and rivers cascaded down the mountains, teeming with trout, rushing towards the great oceans.

Southwest of the Rockies lay vast, unforgiving deserts, waterless expanses of sand and barren mountains, punctuated by occasional fertile strips of land. Rain was scarce, and the sun beat down relentlessly. Rivers flowed through deep canyons or disappeared into the scorching sand, leaving smaller watercourses dry for most of the year.

Beyond this arid region arose the sunny Sierras of California, adorned with flower-covered slopes and groves of giant trees. Further north, along the coasts of Oregon and Washington, rain-soaked mountain ranges were covered in dense, towering evergreen forests.

This, then, was the land of the desperado, a vast and varied territory that long served as a refuge for those who lived outside the bounds of established society, often taking the law into their own hands. These figures can be broadly categorized as either "bad men of the mountains" or "bad men of the plains," depending on their primary habitat and the resources they exploited. In the early West, before the advent of widespread agriculture, the two primary resources were minerals and cattle. The mines of California and the Rockies, and the cattle of the Great Plains, largely defined the story of Western desperadoism.

Although the idealized image of the desperado might be someone who acted outside the law for reasons other than personal gain, the most prevalent form of early desperadoism involved the unlawful acquisition of another person’s property.

The discovery of gold in California triggered a massive influx of people, both virtuous and villainous, from across the globe. The era of terror in California, when vigilantes assumed the role of law enforcement, has been chronicled extensively. Later, the rich placer mines of Montana and other territories produced a torrent of gold rivalling the earlier California Gold Rush. This attracted a diverse array of restless and reckless individuals, including those who deserted or escaped from the opposing armies of the Civil War, all drawn westward by the lure of gold.

The cattle days marked another significant chapter in the history of the land of the desperado, reaching their peak soon after the Civil War. The North sought new opportunities for its young men, while the Southwest sought an outlet for its burgeoning cattle herds, which had multiplied during the conflict. The cattle country, initially dismissed by miners and early explorers as the "Great American Desert," became a magnet for men as wild and untamed as the cattle they drove.

The Long Trail, a network of pathways connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North, stretched for over two thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, traversing Texas, the Indian Nations, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, and extending as far west as Utah and Nevada, and as far east as Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois.

Even today, remnants of this historic trail can be traced from its origins in Mexico, across Texas, and through the Indian lands. Its many intersecting paths still mark the landscape, and the furrows carved by countless cattle drives remain visible in the plains of Kansas. In the mountainous regions of the North, the trail can still be seen winding along the hillsides, a testament to the enduring legacy of the cattle range.

The Long Trail facilitated the gradual but steady expansion of the American cattle industry, connecting Spanish and Anglo-Saxon cultures. As Anglo-Saxon civilization advanced westward, displacing Native American tribes from the plains, railroads pushed into the vast, untamed empire. In 1871, over 600,000 cattle crossed the Red River destined for Northern markets. Towns like Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, and Dodge City blossomed into bustling, sometimes dangerous, centers of commerce.

The Long Trail extended its reach, penetrating every open park, mesa, and valley of Colorado and traversing the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laramie became familiar names, and drovers spoke of the perils of the Platte River. The trail continued its relentless march northward, eventually reaching the last of the great transcontinental rail lines in the British provinces. Through this remarkable expansion, the cattle industry transformed the land of the desperado.

The rise of the cattle industry gave rise to a unique population. The need to manage and protect valuable livestock led to the emergence of the cowboy. Simultaneously, the vast, unfenced ranges, where ownership was often marked only by a brand on the hide, attracted cattle thieves, known as "Rustlers," who sought to profit from the free-ranging herds. The temptation to steal was ever-present, and the story of their eventual capture and punishment mirrored the fate of the mine robbers who were brought to justice by vigilantes.

The construction of the transcontinental railroads brought about a period of profound transformation in the land of the desperado. These railroads connected the East and West coasts and spurred the rapid development of a vast inland empire on the plains.

Building the transcontinental lines was a challenging and perilous undertaking, attracting large numbers of tough individuals willing to endure hardship. These workers spent their wages freely, attracting gamblers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, social outcasts, and fleeing criminals to the rough settlements at the "head of the rails."

In those days, it was considered impolite to inquire about a man’s past. A significant portion of the population was lawless, influencing those who joined them rather than being reformed by them. The early days of railroad construction were among the most turbulent in the West. Towns like Newton, Kansas, where eleven men were killed in a single night, and Fort Dodge, where armed confrontations between cowboys, gamblers, deputies, and desperadoes were commonplace, became notorious for their lawlessness. These and other cow towns, where the rail lines met the great northern cattle drives, contributed significantly to the enduring image of the Wild West.

These were prosperous times for the Western desperado, who gained notoriety during this period. The advent of the telegraph and the newspaper, facilitated by the railroads, allowed for the dissemination of news and stories that had previously gone unreported. The influx of transient visitors, who witnessed the Wild West firsthand, contributed to its image as a strange and dangerous place. While the lawless activities of miners in California and Montana had largely gone unnoticed except in fiction, the exploits of the wild men of the plains were now documented and publicized, captivating a reading public eager for news from the new frontier. A turbulent era was now unfolding rapidly across the land of the desperado.