Contemporary Authors

Chris spent the summer he was sixteen working as a cowboy on a Colorado Hereford ranch where he herded cattle, bucked bails, fixed fences, rode a bronco in a rodeo, and fell in love with the American West.
Chris is a former staff writer and London Bureau Chief for Fortune Magazine. More recently he spent fifteen years on Wall Street, most of them as President of Knowlton Brothers, Inc., an investment management firm. He currently serves as a trustee of the Teton Raptor Center and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He and his wife, Pippa, divide their time between Wyoming and California. He is an avid fly fisherman, birder, and pool player.

Christopher Knowlton’s background might make you think him an unlikely candidate to write Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West (2017), the first major history of the open range cattle era in some four decades. A former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune, the Westchester County, N.Y., native spent 15 years on Wall Street, most of them as president of an investment management firm—big business experience that proved useful when researching the beef business. The avid fly fisherman, birder and pool player spoke to Wild West from Jackson, Wyo., where he lives with wife Pippa.

What led you to write about the Old West cattle industry?
Like most people, I have always been fascinated with cowboys and the tales of the Old West. Perhaps that comes from growing up with John Wayne Westerns and television shows like Rawhide. As a 16-year-old I leapt at the opportunity to spend a summer working on a cattle ranch in Colorado. I bucked bales, fixed barbed wire fences, herded cattle and even rode a bronco in a rodeo.

Many years later, after retiring from a job in New York City, I moved to Wyoming with my wife to write full time. While prospecting for a book idea (at the local library and on the Internet), I came across the story of the Johnson County War. From there I backed into the broader tale of the cattle boom. When I found the cattle ranch records in the American Heritage Center in Laramie, I knew I had hit pay dirt.

Your Wall Street background actually came in handy, yes?
I quickly realized this story had all the elements of a good business yarn, the sort of long-form journalism Fortune ran in its heyday. But the arc of the boom-bust was also very reminiscent of the financial debacles I had lived through as a money manager—the dot-com bubble and the more recent real estate and oil and gas booms and busts. I reasoned that if the story had resonance for me, it might have resonance for today’s reader. After all, our economy has become more prone to these traumas, and we need to learn from them. It also struck me that approaching the cowboy era from a business angle might offer a fresh perspective and new insights. I hope that’s true.

How did you go about researching the book?
A remarkable number of archives and library collections have been digitized. That helps. Still, I find there is no substitute for visiting the physical archives and snooping around. To see the actual receipts for every item a rancher bought while on a buying spree in 1884 in Cheyenne at the peak of the boom, or to hold the sheet music he used for playing the guitar and banjo, just gives you a more visceral, even tactile, sense of what life was like. The fun part of the research was visiting all the historical locales mentioned in the story and seeing firsthand, for example, the bullet holes in the barn at the TA Ranch where the Johnson County War shootout took place.

What did you uncover that surprised you?
The cattle boom was far more central to this country’s industrial development than I had realized. For example, the meat packers grew into the largest employers of their day and the first great American business enterprise. They also codified the managerial rules for corporations that would lead to American business preeminence in the century that followed. They even gave Henry Ford the idea for the assembly line.

How did European investment drive the cattle market?
We all know Great Britain sat astride the world throughout the 19th century, but readers may be surprised to discover what an active part the British played in the development of the American West. With centuries of experience raising cattle in Scotland and Ireland, they thought they knew something about the stock business. They also had the capital derived from the vast resources of their empire and were looking for better ways to invest it. Peers of the realm poured vast sums into Western cattle ranches and joint stock cattle companies, hoping to capitalize on the boom. It didn’t end well.

How did such innovations as refrigerated cars change the industry?
The late 19th century was, of course, the great era of American innovation. Both high-tech improvements like refrigeration and low-tech ones like barbed wire were formative developments for the cattle trade. I argue that barbed wire encouraged the range wars, contributed to the era’s demise and irrevocably shaped the American landscape. Refrigeration was equally important. Experimental refrigeration systems were erected in the holds of steamships, while ice was packed into the walls of railroad cars. Eventually, refrigeration allowed for the cattle to be slaughtered in Chicago, St. Louis or Kansas City and the cooled beef to be shipped in pieces, drastically lowering freight costs—a coup for the meat packers, who quickly came to dominate the business from the feedlots to steakhouses like Delmonico’s. Meanwhile, beef went from being a seasonal delicacy to a year-round staple, largely replacing pork, all thanks to refrigeration.

What did you learn about the role of range “executives”—ranchers, investors and the like?
Historian Lewis Atherton argued ranchers played a more important role than cowboys in shaping cultural events of the era. I agree. They were the entrepreneurs who took the risks, often betting their entire fortunes in efforts to convert the open prairie into profitable agricultural land. They created the jobs and the durable enterprises, even if their initial business model was soon proven wrong. By comparison, the cowboy was little more than an indentured servant on horseback, whose most important contribution may have been the creation of his own false myth, although admittedly it is a myth that has shaped American identity in important ways. The real success stories on the open range were those of men like Charles Goodnight, who arrived very early and formed his JA Ranch with his partner, John Adair, and the market timer Pierre Wibaux, the Frenchman who picked up the pieces after the Big Die-Up. Skilled Scottish managers, like John Clay, eventually brought the much-needed financial discipline. All were shrewd operators and survivors who knew how to game the system.

Which cattle towns resonated with you?
Today we’d call these pop-up towns. Who doesn’t love the story of how Joseph McCoy built Abilene from scratch but missed out on a fortune when he neglected to get his deal with the railroads in writing? Cheyenne was surely the most affluent of the towns, replete with cattle baron mansions and its world-famous Cheyenne Club, where a French chef served haute cuisine. The idea of British and American aristocrats gathering there after a game of polo, in white tie and tails, to swill champagne and smoke Cuban cigars in the middle of the American West in the 1880s, is certainly antithetical to our vision of the period, and yet it happened.

Could the ranchers have avoided the disastrous results of the hard winter of 1886?
Without the cash outlays for growing hay and building barns to store that hay, the ranchers had no way of avoiding the calamity. Ignorance of environmental sciences combined with economic illiteracy can be a toxic brew, as the cattlemen soon learned—and we will, too, if we are not careful. The ranchers fell prey to greed and the get-rich-quick lure of a frothy financial mania. And they failed to pay enough attention to Great Plains ecology and hedge against the possibility of a devastatingly cold winter. A few, like Theodore Roosevelt, saw tragedy coming but simply failed to act.

Just how violent was the open range era?
Not nearly as violent as we have come to believe. I looked at crime stats from the period and discovered the crime rate in cattle towns was about the same as in the big Eastern cities of the day. Homicides in the five major Kansas cattle towns totaled 45 between 1870 and 1885, and Dodge City accounted for 15 of those. Many cowboys couldn’t afford to own a handgun, let alone a pair—and didn’t want to. Revolvers were heavy, cumbersome and interfered with their work. Vice may have been prevalent in the towns, but violence was not, with a few obvious exceptions. The phony myth of constant gun violence was propagated by the dime novels of the day, and quickly spread to Hollywood and television Westerns, which require that heavy dose of drama.

Why do you refer to the Johnson County War as the “Watergate of Wyoming”?
Talk about cover-ups! Talk about fake news! The Cheyenne cattle barons used whatever power they had at their disposal to obscure and obfuscate what had happened during the Johnson County War. This wasn’t hard, as they wielded a great deal of power, from direct ownership of the local newspapers to complete control over the Wyoming Legislature, to say nothing of their topnotch legal talent on retainer. It took more than 100 years to uncover the truth, but we now know how and why it happened—and who really was to blame. They were, of cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

How does the period define who we are today?
Apart from its giant contribution to American business, the era gave birth to the conservation movement and one of the towering medical breakthroughs of the 19th century—how insects become disease vectors. The cowboy myth itself has informed our foreign policy in unexpected ways, encouraging episodes of vigilante-like conduct, to say nothing of shaping the public persona of numerous U.S. presidents. Look how many of them have styled themselves as cowboys: Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. The myth is especially useful if you are trying to mask your patrician wealth or your urban roots. Like jazz, the iconic cowboy image remains quintessentially American and, happily, is here to stay.

What’s next for you?
I may do a book about an early and forgotten cattle drive that endured a disproportionate number of Wild West adventures—in the vein of Red River and Lonesome Dove. But I need to do more digging in the archives to see if there is enough original source material to back up the story. WW

CHRISTOPHER KNOWLTON is a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune magazine. He spent fifteen years on Wall Street, most of them as president of Knowlton Brothers, Inc., an investment management firm. He is a trustee of the Teton Raptor Center and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He and his wife, Pippa, live in Jackson, Wyoming.

Christopher Knowlton’s background might make you think him an unlikely candidate to write Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West (2017), the first major history of the open range cattle era in some four decades. A former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune, the Westchester County, N.Y., native spent 15 years on Wall Street, most of them as president of an investment management firm—big business experience that proved useful when researching the beef business. The avid fly fisherman, birder and pool player spoke to Wild West from Jackson, Wyo., where he lives with wife Pippa.

What led you to write about the Old West cattle industry?
Like most people, I have always been fascinated with cowboys and the tales of the Old West. Perhaps that comes from growing up with John Wayne Westerns and television shows like Rawhide. As a 16-year-old I leapt at the opportunity to spend a summer working on a cattle ranch in Colorado. I bucked bales, fixed barbed wire fences, herded cattle and even rode a bronco in a rodeo.

Many years later, after retiring from a job in New York City, I moved to Wyoming with my wife to write full time. While prospecting for a book idea (at the local library and on the Internet), I came across the story of the Johnson County War. From there I backed into the broader tale of the cattle boom. When I found the cattle ranch records in the American Heritage Center in Laramie, I knew I had hit pay dirt.

Your Wall Street background actually came in handy, yes?
I quickly realized this story had all the elements of a good business yarn, the sort of long-form journalism Fortune ran in its heyday. But the arc of the boom-bust was also very reminiscent of the financial debacles I had lived through as a money manager—the dot-com bubble and the more recent real estate and oil and gas booms and busts. I reasoned that if the story had resonance for me, it might have resonance for today’s reader. After all, our economy has become more prone to these traumas, and we need to learn from them. It also struck me that approaching the cowboy era from a business angle might offer a fresh perspective and new insights. I hope that’s true.

How did you go about researching the book?
A remarkable number of archives and library collections have been digitized. That helps. Still, I find there is no substitute for visiting the physical archives and snooping around. To see the actual receipts for every item a rancher bought while on a buying spree in 1884 in Cheyenne at the peak of the boom, or to hold the sheet music he used for playing the guitar and banjo, just gives you a more visceral, even tactile, sense of what life was like. The fun part of the research was visiting all the historical locales mentioned in the story and seeing firsthand, for example, the bullet holes in the barn at the TA Ranch where the Johnson County War shootout took place.

What did you uncover that surprised you?
The cattle boom was far more central to this country’s industrial development than I had realized. For example, the meat packers grew into the largest employers of their day and the first great American business enterprise. They also codified the managerial rules for corporations that would lead to American business preeminence in the century that followed. They even gave Henry Ford the idea for the assembly line.

How did European investment drive the cattle market?
We all know Great Britain sat astride the world throughout the 19th century, but readers may be surprised to discover what an active part the British played in the development of the American West. With centuries of experience raising cattle in Scotland and Ireland, they thought they knew something about the stock business. They also had the capital derived from the vast resources of their empire and were looking for better ways to invest it. Peers of the realm poured vast sums into Western cattle ranches and joint stock cattle companies, hoping to capitalize on the boom. It didn’t end well.

How did such innovations as refrigerated cars change the industry?
The late 19th century was, of course, the great era of American innovation. Both high-tech improvements like refrigeration and low-tech ones like barbed wire were formative developments for the cattle trade. I argue that barbed wire encouraged the range wars, contributed to the era’s demise and irrevocably shaped the American landscape. Refrigeration was equally important. Experimental refrigeration systems were erected in the holds of steamships, while ice was packed into the walls of railroad cars. Eventually, refrigeration allowed for the cattle to be slaughtered in Chicago, St. Louis or Kansas City and the cooled beef to be shipped in pieces, drastically lowering freight costs—a coup for the meat packers, who quickly came to dominate the business from the feedlots to steakhouses like Delmonico’s. Meanwhile, beef went from being a seasonal delicacy to a year-round staple, largely replacing pork, all thanks to refrigeration.

What did you learn about the role of range “executives”—ranchers, investors and the like?
Historian Lewis Atherton argued ranchers played a more important role than cowboys in shaping cultural events of the era. I agree. They were the entrepreneurs who took the risks, often betting their entire fortunes in efforts to convert the open prairie into profitable agricultural land. They created the jobs and the durable enterprises, even if their initial business model was soon proven wrong. By comparison, the cowboy was little more than an indentured servant on horseback, whose most important contribution may have been the creation of his own false myth, although admittedly it is a myth that has shaped American identity in important ways. The real success stories on the open range were those of men like Charles Goodnight, who arrived very early and formed his JA Ranch with his partner, John Adair, and the market timer Pierre Wibaux, the Frenchman who picked up the pieces after the Big Die-Up. Skilled Scottish managers, like John Clay, eventually brought the much-needed financial discipline. All were shrewd operators and survivors who knew how to game the system.

Which cattle towns resonated with you?
Today we’d call these pop-up towns. Who doesn’t love the story of how Joseph McCoy built Abilene from scratch but missed out on a fortune when he neglected to get his deal with the railroads in writing? Cheyenne was surely the most affluent of the towns, replete with cattle baron mansions and its world-famous Cheyenne Club, where a French chef served haute cuisine. The idea of British and American aristocrats gathering there after a game of polo, in white tie and tails, to swill champagne and smoke Cuban cigars in the middle of the American West in the 1880s, is certainly antithetical to our vision of the period, and yet it happened.

Could the ranchers have avoided the disastrous results of the hard winter of 1886?
Without the cash outlays for growing hay and building barns to store that hay, the ranchers had no way of avoiding the calamity. Ignorance of environmental sciences combined with economic illiteracy can be a toxic brew, as the cattlemen soon learned—and we will, too, if we are not careful. The ranchers fell prey to greed and the get-rich-quick lure of a frothy financial mania. And they failed to pay enough attention to Great Plains ecology and hedge against the possibility of a devastatingly cold winter. A few, like Theodore Roosevelt, saw tragedy coming but simply failed to act.

Just how violent was the open range era?
Not nearly as violent as we have come to believe. I looked at crime stats from the period and discovered the crime rate in cattle towns was about the same as in the big Eastern cities of the day. Homicides in the five major Kansas cattle towns totaled 45 between 1870 and 1885, and Dodge City accounted for 15 of those. Many cowboys couldn’t afford to own a handgun, let alone a pair—and didn’t want to. Revolvers were heavy, cumbersome and interfered with their work. Vice may have been prevalent in the towns, but violence was not, with a few obvious exceptions. The phony myth of constant gun violence was propagated by the dime novels of the day, and quickly spread to Hollywood and television Westerns, which require that heavy dose of drama.

Why do you refer to the Johnson County War as the “Watergate of Wyoming”?
Talk about cover-ups! Talk about fake news! The Cheyenne cattle barons used whatever power they had at their disposal to obscure and obfuscate what had happened during the Johnson County War. This wasn’t hard, as they wielded a great deal of power, from direct ownership of the local newspapers to complete control over the Wyoming Legislature, to say nothing of their topnotch legal talent on retainer. It took more than 100 years to uncover the truth, but we now know how and why it happened—and who really was to blame. They were, of cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

How does the period define who we are today?
Apart from its giant contribution to American business, the era gave birth to the conservation movement and one of the towering medical breakthroughs of the 19th century—how insects become disease vectors. The cowboy myth itself has informed our foreign policy in unexpected ways, encouraging episodes of vigilante-like conduct, to say nothing of shaping the public persona of numerous U.S. presidents. Look how many of them have styled themselves as cowboys: Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. The myth is especially useful if you are trying to mask your patrician wealth or your urban roots. Like jazz, the iconic cowboy image remains quintessentially American and, happily, is here to stay.

What’s next for you?
I may do a book about an early and forgotten cattle drive that endured a disproportionate number of Wild West adventures—in the vein of Red River and Lonesome Dove. But I need to do more digging in the archives to see if there is enough original source material to back up the story. WW

Christopher Knowlton is author of CATTLE KINGDOM: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE COWBOY WEST, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 30, 2017. A former staff writer and London Bureau Chief for Fortune Magazine, he more recently spent fifteen years on Wall Street, most of them as President of Knowlton Brothers, Inc., an investment management firm. He currently serves as a trustee of the Teton Raptor Center and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Chris and his wife, Pippa, divide their time between Wyoming and California. He is avid fly fisherman, birder, and pool player.

History of the boom-and-bust cycles of the cattle industry in the wildest days of the Wild West.

Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton knows a good business story when he sees it, and if the business of America is business, the nation’s business of the late 19th century was conquering the frontier and converting it into a feedlot and granary. The open-range cattle scramble lasted only a few decades, but it gave the larger world the stereotype of the cowboy as a “curious blend of American everyman and chivalrous Victorian nobleman,” with a hint of crusading knight thrown in for good measure. Among the figures who populate the author’s set pieces are Teddy Blue, who came as close to that ideal cowboy as anyone on the prairie, and the well-studied Teddy Roosevelt, who sought to expand his fortune as a rancher on the Dakota plains. Knowlton moves dutifully from topic to topic, from the technological developments of wire fencing here to the makings of sonofabitch stew there, enough to satisfy readers with a passing interest in the Old West but only wet the whistles of buffs. Readers raised on the revisionist histories of Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick may find Knowlton’s emphasis on Anglo cattle barons and necktie parties a little old-fashioned. The author’s background in finance comes in handy when he turns to the economics of cattle, perhaps the best single aspect of the book: “The price of shares in existing cattle companies declined sharply,” he writes of one episode involving protectionist legislation, “making it impossible for new cattle syndicates to be formed or for existing ones to make more money.” Knowlton’s account of the so-called Johnson County War, pitting big business against small “nesters” in Wyoming, is excellent, a story complete enough to make a book within a book.

Though without the encompassing narrative fire of a Stegner or McMurtry, a pleasing contribution to the history of the post–Civil War frontier.

America’s Wild West is popularly remembered for its hard-drinking cowboys, “bat wing saloon doors,” and quick-draw gunfights, but Knowlton, former London bureau chief of Fortune magazine, triumphantly upends such familiar images. He describes life in the Wild West instead as a much richer and more diverse experience, where the hardships Westerners had to endure for the good of the cattle temporarily blended cultures and classes. Knowlton ties his narrative together by following a few historic figures from the inception of cowboy culture to its barbed-wire-induced death knell, sprinkling in lively stories about the birth of cattle towns and herds spooked by thieves. Englishman Moreton Frewen, Frenchman Marquis de Mores, and American Theodore Roosevelt represent for Knowlton the “cowboy aristocrats” whose optimistic and naïve leaps into ranching resulted in ruin for the first two and transformed the third into the future “conservation president.” Excerpts from trail driver Teddy Blue Abbott’s autobiography provide a cowboy’s perspective, demonstrating Abbott’s cheeky antics, well-founded self-confidence, and numerous life-threatening experiences. Knowlton’s quality book would be even stronger with more accounts from the cowhands, particularly from former Confederates fleeing the South or liberated slaves looking for pay equality. Knowlton’s absorbing work demonstrates that the years of lucrative cattle driving may have been short, but meatpacking and transportation innovations and the rugged individualist ideology of the West maintain their place of importance in American life.

This is one heck of a good book, so full of interesting historical facts and vignettes that you will be driving everyone around you crazy as you read by calling out repeatedly, “Listen to THIS!”

It tells the story of the open-range cattle era and the rise of the cowboy from the perspective of its economic origins. But if that sounds dry, don’t be deceived. Knowlton, a former magazine writer, understands how to hold your interest. As far as the story he wants to tell, it is one with contemporary relevance. He writes:

“One goal here is to shine light on the psychology and greed that drive an investment mania, and on the financial and human catastrophes that result from the bursting of a commodity bubble.”

He sees this history not only as a morality tale about those who devote all their dreams (not to mention money) on speculative financial bubbles, but as an opportunity to study the environmental disasters that were both caused by the cattle boom, and which contributed to its demise.

He also wants you to know the real story of the American cowboy, and how different the reality was from the iconic and heroic myth that has grown up around cowboys and that is portrayed in books and movies. He explains:

“The work was hard, dirty, and monotonous – hardly the exciting version depicted in the dime novels and the eastern press. . . .”

As one cowboy noted in his memoirs, it was “a continual round of drudgery, exposure and hard work which beggar description.” In addition, “the job of a cowboy entailed an astonishing number of ways to get hurt or killed: “You could fall from your horse, you could be kicked in the head while roping a steer; you could be gored by a horn, you could drown while crossing a river, you could be caught in quicksand,” etc. And there were many less-than-fatal perils of the job, such as the torment of insects, sunstroke, sun blindness, infections, lack of medical care, grueling hours, and the long winters with no work at all.

Furthermore, the stories about “cowboys and Indians” were exaggerated as well. Relatively few skirmishes took place between these two groups. In fact, by the time the cowboy movement began out West after the Civil War, the numbers of Native Americans had been drastically reduced by disease and starvation, and in any event most had been moved to reservations.

How and why did it get portrayed otherwise?

As it happens, the story of the cattle era is also a story of fake news; news manufactured to spur immigration to aspiring new states, to drive profits, to justify killing Native Americans and lynching rivals, and to build up the careers of those wanting to capitalize on this particular definition of the American character. Knowlton argues that the cowboy myth, so appealing to Americans, has even influenced America’s foreign policy.

Finally, this book focuses on three young men in particular who were drawn to participate in the cattle boom: a rich Englishman, a rich Frenchman, and a rich American, Theodore Roosevelt, who of course went on not only to become the U.S. President, but also to be one of the leading conservationists in American history.

When the Civil War was over, the Confederate economy was devastated, and the impoverished young men of the South had no way to make a living. It was in Texas, the author reports, that the era of the Cattle Kingdom was born. Thus, as the author reports, at the peak of the cattle boom a majority of cowboys were white southerners, many former Confederate cavalrymen.

In Texas, there was an abundance of cattle, although before the Civil War, cattle were not valued for meat, but rather for their hides and tallow. Americans ate more pork than beef, because pork was easier to preserve. But that was about to change, thanks to the incentives and innovations of the cattle ranchers.

At the peak of the migration, “the largest forced migration of animals in human history,” some ten million cattle would be driven north out of Texas, accompanied by half a million horses and some 50,000 cowboys.” (Knowlton also devotes space to the rise of prostitution out West. It was in fact in Dodge City, one of the cowboy towns that sprang up, that the term “red-light district” was first coined, derived from the name of the red glass panels in one of the brothels.)

And here’s a question for “Outlander” fans: What did the Highland Clearances after the Battle of Culloden have to do with developments of the American cowboy movement? The answer is surprisingly relevant, because the British were very big investors in the American West. But I’ll let readers discover the answer to that one by reading the book.

Some of the most interesting information in the book has to do with all the innovations and changes that the cowboy era brought, such as the rise of the meatpacking industry, and the influence of its automation innovations. In fact, as the author reports, meatpackers developed the first assembly lines, and it was from studying the process at Chicago slaughterhouses that Henry Ford came up with the idea of using a similar method to produce cars. The meatpackers also radically changed the American system of business procedures and management practices. Even the story about how Chicago got to be the epicenter of the meat business is fascinating.

And as refrigeration was developed to get all this beef to eastern markets, Americans began to switch their eating habits. A trio of restaurants in New York known as Delmonico’s helped popularize eating steak. Delmonico’s is also credited with being the first American restaurant to allow patrons to order from a menu à la carte, as opposed to featuring fixed menus. Who knew?

Then there was barbed wire, which, invented to help solve the problem of wandering cattle, totally changed the husbandry of cattle. And, as the author points out, it would also come to play a significant role in the incarceration of people as well as livestock.

As for environmental disasters, perhaps the biggest one was the killing off of the bison. As Knowlton stated, “if the cattle were to come, the competing buffalo would have to go.” He declared:

“. . . nothing could match in numbers, poundage, and sheer waste the slaughter of the bison, or the speed with which this animal approached extinction. …in a stunningly short period of time, less than twenty years, the bison were forced to the edge of extinction, with no more than 325 surviving south of Canada.”

There were a number of contributing factors to the bison slaughter, not unrelated to the cattle boom. One was the expansion of railroads and telegraph lines, especially in response to the needs of the cattle business. Advances in firearms made killing these generally docile animals “the big-game equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.” The U.S. military also abetted the slaughter in their efforts to deprive Native Americans of food so as to facilitate their “herding” into reservations. Even the fact that female bison hides were preferred by hunters led to the animals’ rapid extinction.

And what about the demise of the cattle era and the bursting of its economic bubble? Overgrazing, drought, corruption, greed, incompetence, growing conflicts between cattle barons and cowboys, and absentee management all played a role. But the nail in the coffin came from the brutal winter of 1886-1887, later known as “the Big Die-up.” Temperatures in the Great Plains went as low as sixty degrees below zero in places, accompanied by high winds and deep snows. It was the coldest winter on record. When it was over, nearly a million head of cattle were dead, some 50 to 80 percent of the herds across the northernmost ranges. Knowlton describes it as “the greatest loss of animal life in pastoral history” – at least, from environmental, rather than human causes.

Evaluation: I can’t begin to tell you all the fascinating things you will learn in this book. It’s a book I never thought would interest me, and yet it is one of the most absorbing and even exciting books on history I have ever encountered. I can’t sing its praises enough. Jim loved it as well, even though I spoiled much of it for him by reading many interesting parts to him while I read it first. Highly recommended!

The open-range era helped define what most Americans—not to mention people from around the globe—think of the Old West. Yet it was also big business. New York native turned Wyoming resident Christopher Knowlton uses his business and financial background (in stints on Wall Street and working for Fortune magazine) to provide true insight in the first major history of the cattle era published in more than four decades.

But don’t expect Cattle Kingdom to read like a business journal. Knowlton’s narrative style should appeal to scholars, history buffs and casual readers alike—and his take is utterly fascinating. Of course he covers the basics and staples, from cowboy Teddy Blue Abbott to rancher Theodore Roosevelt and cow towns such as Abilene, Kan., and Cheyenne, Wyo. But he also discusses how Gilded Age innovations and technological improvements touched the cattle industry, and how European influences drove the market.

Knowlton chronicles more than business. He vividly describes the terrible back-to-back winters in the mid-1880s—aka the Big Die-Up—that wiped out many ranches and changed the industry. He then moves on to the violence in Wyoming of the late 1880s and early ’90s. Not every historian is likely to buy into his interpretation of the source of rustling during that time, but there’s no denying his original thinking makes for an intriguing idea. As is his assessment of the Johnson County War, which, he writes, “illustrates how easily, even in a democracy, those in power can doctor the truth.” In short, Cattle Kingdom offers a fresh take on an old subject.

I have read extensively about the history of the American West. It’s a book like Cattle Kingdom that excites me about the fact that the myths that oftentimes inhabit our historical understanding – can and will be displaced – and rewritten – when exquisitely talented authors like Christopher Knowlton take the reins.

The depth and breadth of the research that this work contains supports the authors thesis – confirming that history is subject to unearthing new and yet unrevealed discoveries – that can provide the sinew for a new understanding. Knowlton unequivocally demonstrates this unique journalistic talent. Knowlton’s prose and storytelling ability are hypnotic and mesmerizing.

This is distinctly not a story that requires a preference for tales about the American West. The manner in which Knowlton weaves his story – and brings life to the characters and context – will draw readers who simply desire a really, really good book.

I must admit I had some reluctance deciding whether or not to purchase this volume. I overcame that and am really glad I did.

Many aspects of this book will bring tears to your eyes, ripping your heart apart. You’ll get angry and disgusted. The drama that Knowlton brings to life is addictive…it’s a page turning pleasure. The decimation of the Bison herds had me smelling the carnage that Knowlton described.

For those with an affinity for garnering a better understanding of the American cowboy, the influences in the development of the American West, the cattle industry, the origins of the nature of land ownership in the Western U.S. psyche, the influence of capital in the development of the American West, the beef industry, conservation, wildlife management – and – again – those who desire to be immersed in a truly fascinating true tale – well – this book is for you.

I honestly can’t imagine anyone selecting this book to devour and not coming away completely satisfied about their decision.

Frankly, I urge you to select Christopher Knowlton as your guide to the hidden history of the cowboy West. You’ll be delighted you did. Trust me…believe me…A PHENOMENAL BOOK!!!

YEEHAW!!!

Cattle Kingdom is a flat-out amazing read. Christopher Knowlton has written a book that switches almost seamlessly from the level of the individual cowboy--particularly E. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott, whose memoirs I now have to read--to the ranch owners to the system as a whole. He does a great job at every level. Whether you want to know what it was really like to be a cowboy, or what drove the great cattle barons, or how the great cow towns flourished and faded, or what larger economic forces drove the whole thing, this is the book.

There are a few places where Knowlton wanders into asides, which could have been relegated to footnotes or appendices. Other than that, my only complaint about Cattle Kingdom is that, at 350-odd text pages, it's too short.

I have the impression that Cattle Kingdom hasn't gotten the attention or promotion it deserved. I heard about it by accident, on the radio, and I had some trouble finding it in the bookstore. That's a real shame. Read this one.

In the 1870s, there was no faster way to fortune than to set up as a cattle baron in the American West. Or so the boosters promised. “Cattle is one of those investments men cannot pay too much for,” one promoter declared, since the worst that could happen was that the animals would “multiply, replenish and grow out of a bad bargain.”

Supply and demand have seldom meshed more neatly. The Southwest had cattle and little else; the Northeast had fast-growing cities awash in new wealth and new appetites. Join the two — bring Western cattle to Eastern dinner tables — and a man could grow rich! Millionaires and would-be millionaires raced to get in the game. Rockefellers knocked elbows with Vanderbilts and Whitneys; dukes bumped up against earls and barons. Even the famously cynical P. T. Barnum plunked down his cash.

Early on, they watched in wide-eyed exultation. Cattle on their way to market were money on the hoof, and there were hooves galore. A decade after the Civil War, the hordes of cattle in transit would constitute “the largest forced migration of animals in human history.”

The easy-to-overlook people in that scene were the men on horseback toiling to herd the cattle along. These were cowboys, to this day among the reigning American icons. Christopher Knowlton’s aim in “Cattle Kingdom” is to place those emblems of freedom, and their whole industry, in its true context.

In their heyday, cowboys numbered 40,000. Nearly all were young and reckless, which was fortunate. “The job of a cowboy entailed an astonishing number of ways to get hurt or killed,” Knowlton writes. “You could fall from your horse, you could be kicked in the head while roping a steer, you could be gored by a horn, you could drown while crossing a river, you could be caught in quicksand, you could be struck by lightning, you could be scalped by an Indian, you could be shot by a rustler or you could be involved in a barroom brawl.”

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Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West
Christopher Knowlton
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Knowlton, a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune, has a sharp eye for details — in cattle towns, boardinghouses featured communal toothbrushes dangling from strings — but his real aim is the big picture. “Cattle Kingdom” is a cautionary tale of boom and bust. Despite the gunslingers and cowpokes, this lively history evokes the headiest days of the housing bubble of the early 2000s or the tulip mania that hypnotized Holland in the 1600s.

The analysis does not bog down the storytelling. Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird’s-eye views. We learn countless details — how to make rotgut liquor (don’t forget the tobacco and red peppers) or what to do if the horses pulling the stagecoach in which you are a passenger run wild (don’t jump out — sit still and hope for the best). More important, we learn why the story played out as it did — why beef overtook pork in the national diet, why the city of Chicago and not St. Louis grew huge, how the rise of barbed wire contributed to the fall of the cowboy.

Knowlton structures his tale around three eager novices, each convinced that he would soon accumulate a fortune too vast to count. The first and most outlandish was an English aristocrat named Moreton Frewen. Stylish but notoriously foolish in his investments (he was nicknamed the Splendid Pauper), Frewen spent most of his 20s chasing foxes and fashionable young women, though he paused long enough to write a college thesis on hangover cures. In time he would use his family inheritance to buy one of the largest cattle ranches in the West. At his peak, Frewen made a splendid figure. He married the daughter of a rich American who was so pampered, she claimed, that she had never tied her own shoes, and he built himself (in the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming) an immense, imposing home that the locals called Frewen’s Castle.

The second figure in the cast is a French nobleman who sported a waxed mustache and a grand name. The Marquis de Morès worked on Wall Street, but he had visions of a life unconfined by office walls. A cousin had thrilled him with tales of the Dakota Badlands. When he settled there, the marquis told a friend, “I shall become the richest financier in the world.” He ended up an anti-Semitic French imperialist killed by tribesmen in the desert of Tunisia.

Teddy Roosevelt is Knowlton’s third star. In the 1880s the future president was a young, wealthy, nature-loving New Yorker still reeling from the loss — on the same day — of both his wife and his mother. Roosevelt and several chums from Harvard days had invested in cattle, and done well. Now he decided the time had come to take up cattle ranching in earnest. He would transplant himself to the West, in the firm belief that “there was a great chance to make a great deal of money, very safely, in the cattle business.”

It was not to be. The grand era of cowboys and cattle barons would last less than two decades. Heedless of overgrazing, ignorant of drought, unprepared for brutal winters, the cattle men had done well to make it even that long. The winter of the Big Die-Up, in 1886-87, dealt the last blow. Hundreds of humans died, along with a huge but unknown number of cattle. The lowest estimates placed the death toll at 15 percent. In Abilene, Kan., once a thriving, rowdy cattle town, sunflowers stretched high in the middle of the streets.