There will be blood
It’s Calgary Stampede time again—the annual celebration of the traditional cowboy life. But the history of Canada’s Wild West reads very differently than the festival’s romanticized fable
BY Colin Snowsell
Illustration by Peter Mitchell
There is a moment in Red River, Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western, when John Wayne delivers the most convincing endorsement of the beef industry of all time. Surveying a vast herd, 10,000 head strong, about to embark upon what will prove to be the first successful cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to Abilene, Kansas—which just happens to be the only accessible Midwestern town boasting both a railroad and a banker’s briefcase—Wayne, as Thomas Dunson, appears to look back upon the life decision he’s made that has brought him to this point.
What compels this veteran of the Civil War and self-made rancher to embark upon a 1,500-mile odyssey through hostile Indian territory, past border gangs and freelance cattle rustlers, incurring by turn the threat of mutinous men and equally mutinous rivers? Why gamble away a modest life in a game that offers a small chance at big fortune but more commonly pays out in bankruptcy at best or belly up in some muddy gully at worst? Easy: John Wayne does not like to see Americans go hungry. Even easterners. Tenderfeets and dudes matching bowler hats to tweed? Beef ’em up. Wayne wants bankers from America’s breadbasket to allow the cattle industry to carve out space for its continued existence, so that hungry Americans everywhere may carve briskets and sirloins and all sorts of roasts named rump and round from the bovine flesh his Texan grass had grown. “Good beef. For hungry people. Beef to make ’em strong, make ’em grow,” is how he puts it.
The “Big Four” founders of the Calgary Stampede couldn’t have put it better themselves. When big ranchers George Lane and A.J. McLean teamed with big rancher turned big brewer A.E. Cross and the meat packer Pat Burns in 1912 to back Guy Weadick’s Calgary Stampede, they weren’t in it because they thought barebacking trickery and bolo ties were nifty. They wanted to make sure western Canadian beef, particularly the beef they handled, sold at the prices they set. Slaughterhouses and sausage grinders seldom feature on the annual Stampede posters, but they should. The Stampede celebrates the cowboy, but it also commemorates the death of his way of life at the hands of the big beef business trust that founded it.
The late-19th-century archetypes to which the Stampede pays tribute—the independent ranchman, the self-sure cowboy—existed and thrived in southern Alberta. Yet, as much as the journey west was made for economic opportunity, easterners and Europeans also came to escape social conditions that denied them opportunity to improve their lot in life. Imagine the frustration of these settlers, after having sought space and Big Sky freedom in southern Alberta, as they found themselves being chased by the very forces they believed they’d left behind: Big Business. It’s not the heirs of the Canadian cowboy who run Calgary and its heritage celebrations—it’s their enemies.
Around the turn of the last century, robber barons sang in rich baritones the praises of free enterprise publicly, while working privately within and outside the law to secure monopolies. The graft and corruption of churchgoing, God-fearing tycoons was as routine as their mutton-chop sideburns. In the Wild West, the hand of the market was stained scarlet. To remain invisible, it drew a Colt or wielded a policeman’s truncheon.
Or, in the case of the burgeoning meat-packing business, owners and their underlings broke the law and the backs of their immigrant staff with impunity. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his indictment of this industry in Chicago. Sinclair wasn’t much of a writer, but as a polemicist and a muckraker he had few equals. The Jungle works better than anything else he wrote because the failings of plot aren’t nearly as gruesome as the stories he collected poking about the stockyards where the immigrants working were as disposable as the animals they processed. Like hog carcasses strung up on the disassembly line, Sinclair hitches up one grisly tale after another to his narrative conveyor belt. Then he clicks the switch. “Each one of these hogs was a separate creature,” he writes. “[E]ach was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it—it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?”
Sinclair’s description of a hog hanging upside down, chain fastened to one leg, waiting for its throat to be slit—among many other horrific scenes—had an effect. In the United States, The Jungle led to the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Problem solved? Gail Eisnitz, in her 1997 book Slaughterhouse, the result of years of painstaking, detailed and frequently perilous investigation of America’s slaughterhouses, concluded that not only had conditions not improved, despite intermittent legislation—such as the 1958 Humane Slaughter Act—they have grown markedly, almost unimaginably, worse. Some comments from workers interviewed by Eisnitz: “A lot of times the skinner finds a cow is still conscious when he slices the side of its head and it starts kicking wildly. If that happens ...the skinner shoves a knife into the back of its head to cut the spinal cord.
“If the hog is conscious ...it takes a long time for him to bleed out... These hogs get up to the scalding tank, hit the water, and start screaming and kicking... There’s a rotating arm that pushes them under, no chance for them to get out. I’m not sure if they burn to death before they drown, but it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing.
“The preferred method of handling a cripple at Morrell’s is to beat him to death with a lead pipe before he gets into the chute... If you get a hog in the chute that’s had the shit prodded out of him, and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole [anus]...and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I’ve seen hams’ thighs completely ripped open. I’ve also seen intestines come out.”
Perhaps we should scratch the whole industry? In the 1870s, during the ascendancy of the cattle industry, this was hardly an option. A continent of immigrants required animal protein to survive and thrive as they settled and developed the continent for the great and modern European civilization to come. John Wayne raised his cattle to feed the nation and make people strong.
But people cannot and do not want to eat meat off live cows. They need butchers to kill and dress the animal and inspectors to certify the meat healthy. They need railroads to get it to them; chilled storehouses to keep it cool for them. They need capital. The trouble with capital then, as the trouble with capital now, is that capital serves itself and no other.
Eastern industrialists determined that beef was about the best investment a man could make. By the turn of the last century, beef, once the product of independent entrepreneurial ranchers, was becoming the slapdash, flesh gizmo of rich men wanting to become richer quicker. The cruelties began to accumulate. As Sinclair observed, “[T]here seemed to be something about the work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity—it was literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.”
Would John Wayne’s Dunson have bothered with all that cattle-driving if he’d known the cruelty on the other end? The classic Hollywood western was revised by John Huston’s The Misfits in 1961. There’s one scene in particular in this film about three 1950s cowboys who set out to wrangle a six-pack of wild Nevada mustangs that conveys the sense of agony cowboys got when they realized their world had ended, and that they, through no fault of their own, remained nonetheless complicit in the ruination of the land and the life they valued.
Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach are riding with Marilyn Monroe to tame the last of the wild horses. It’s the only way they know to slow the inevitability of themselves being tamed as well. They are rugged and skilled men, and the fear in their eyes at the prospect of a lifetime of drawing wages pumping gas or making change in the shopping market is no less wild than the fear in the eyes of the stallion as he watches his mares and his colts as they’re lassoed and tied to the ground and as he hears the rope whistling behind his own ears. Marilyn Monroe asks Gable what’s to be done with the horses. Gable tells her that in the old days, they made great gifts for children. Toy ponies. Not anymore they don’t. Nobody wants stupid old-fashioned ponies. Kids today want electric gadgets and scooters. Now all wild horses are good for is meat for pets. Three cowboys save themselves from being ground up into wage slaves by capturing the last of the continent’s pitiable wild horses to be ground up into kibble.
Gable protests Monroe’s protest. “Somehow or other it all got changed around,” he says. “See, I’m doing the same thing I always did. It’s just that they changed it around.” Stasis becomes the basis for evil.
Gable looks into Monroe’s panicked eyes, but behind her lingers the ghost of John Wayne’s cattle-driving cowboy and Gable seems to see him, too. How did cowboying, which began as something good, get twisted around into something so cruel? It would be easy to blame this state of affairs on the ranchers and the cowboys themselves. It would also be entirely wrong. Cowboys provided meat to a continent fresh out of meat. Cowboys possessed a surplus of skill, endurance and grit, and kept millions from starving. The white men who killed the buffalo, the continent’s perfectly good, free-ranging supply of meat? They just had guns.
The nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy that inhabited Whoop-Up country—what is now most of southern Alberta, southwestern Saskatchewan as well as swaths of Montana, Idaho and British Columbia—relied entirely on the buffalo for their existence. The buffalo slaughter of the 1880s makes shooting fish in a barrel seem challenging. From his novel The Englishman’s Boy, here is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s account: “Ten days out from Sioux City, a herd of buffalo turned the channel black and bellowing and solid, so solid a man could have walked from bank to bank, using their backs as stepping stones... The gents on the hurricane deck poured fire down into the river, levering their Winchesters like pump handles, ejected casings making brass rainbows as they arced into the air. Some of the great beasts passed so close to the boat that men in steerage hung over the rails, touching the muzzles of their rifles to their humps as they fired. Dozens of the dead spun in the grip of the current, streaming tributary blood, the wounded roaring as they were sucked downstream. Hunters ran frenziedly from starboard to port, struggling for one last shot, whooping and swearing and jostling for vantage, throwing spent rifles to the deck and drawing revolvers which they emptied into the dark, struggling mass.”
Ignoring the buffalo massacre let North American politicians off the hook in two ways. First, doing nothing to end the mass extermination of buffalo killed Native Americans more effectively and more quickly than any form of direct action. Following from this, ridding what was once known as “the Great American Desert” of Indians freed up the plains for commerce. At the same time, ridding the continent of a free supply of meat created the need for both a controlled and marketable replacement supply. The capital needed to establish the meatprocessing infrastructure necessary to handle the buffalo meat gave eastern tycoons a head start on cattle processing. Now all they needed was cows. Texans, with those big hats of theirs, were happy to oblige.
The Chisholm Trail bellowed “Game on!” for cattle drives. In 1871, at the height of its cattle boom, Abilene processed upward of 600,000 cattle, mostly longhorns from Texas, to be shipped back east on the Kansas Pacific to feed northern cities made into industrial giants by the Civil War. Texas still had plenty of cattle to spare. In 1860, there were millions of cattle grazing wild in herds scattered across southeast Texas, an estimated 438 cattle for every 100 people compared to a national average of between 81 to 100. Introduced to Texas, then under Spanish control, in the 1500s by Spanish settlers, these cattle were descended from Andalusian calves. They were occasionally slaughtered for their hide and tallow, but it wasn’t until the 1850s, when gambling geeks rushed by the thousands to California looking for gold, that entrepreneurial Texans began to regard the thousands of stringy and semi-wild animals, which thrived in the vast Texas space, with its abundant grass and water, as T-bones on hooves. If you were, like John Wayne, a cowboy tough enough, skilled enough and desperate enough to drive them, either west to California, east to New Orleans, northeast to Missouri or, later, up the Chisholm Trail to whichever railroad head you could reach without getting yourself or your herd killed—basically, wherever men sat equipped with steak knife and bib—there was nothing but money to be made.
Eventually, even Texas started to run low on cattle. People got fussy. They grew tired of trying to chew Texas longhorn and started to hanker for more palatable beef, flesh from fat, lazy cows, not cows that had hoboed all across the continent. And so began the Beef Bonanza. Whatever this era’s faults, the Bonanza must always be pardoned for, at least, lending its name to both a television show that let Lorne Greene play a cowboy, and to one-half of a chain of economy steak houses (let us never forget Ponderosa) that introduced more young Canadians to steak than, possibly, any other. The ice cream bar at Bonanza should be commemorated on a stamp. No, that would be silly—why not commemorate instead the winter of 1886–87?
Beef barons were drawn to the cattle industry largely because grass-grazing cattle were cheap to grow. The entire industry was based on the belief that cattle did not need to be grain-fed, that everything needed to transform them into good beef was there for free. When, inevitably, the ranges of Montana and Wyoming became overstocked, American ranchers began to lease large tracts of Canadian grazing land. They joined there the likes of the Canadian senator and stock raiser from Montreal, Matthew Cochrane, who argued convincingly that now that the area was free of troublesome Indians, the time was right for an open-range cattle system in southern Alberta.
To prove his point, in 1881 Cochrane selflessly agreed to accept the first-ever leasehold granted in Alberta, thereby sparing the government the hassle of a public auction, as it had initially planned. Cochrane founded his Cochrane Ranche along the Bow River, about 40 kilometres west of Calgary, where his partner, Dr. Duncan McEachran reported, “The land is rolling, consisting of numerous grassy hills, plateaux and bottom lands, intersected here and there by streams of considerable size issuing from never-failing springs.” Cochrane took a cool 100,000 acres for himself. His business acquaintance and fellow senator, A.W. Ogilvie, took 34,000 acres of adjoining property. Edward Baynes, Cochrane’s son-in-law, showed good family spirit by accepting another 55,000 acres, also adjoining. The Cochranes knew blood is much thicker than water, particularly that of the Bow River, which was now their private property. Get off, or it’s Winchester time.
What to do with all that land? Not to worry. Cochrane, as it happened, had that same year just received from England the largest shipment of purebred cattle—including Angus, Hereford and Shorthorn bulls—Canada had ever seen. To flesh out the numbers, he sent his men to Fort Benton, Montana, to buy from the surplus of cattle there. On the northern ranges of Montana, thousands upon thousands of young, unacclimated “dogies” had been sent from the east and driven from crowded ranges further south to crowd northern ranges that by then were already over-grazed. As big ranches begun by eastern money crowded in upon each other, competing for the same land and water, the price of beef plummeted and the whole range system began to falter. By September 1886 there was estimated to be more than a quarter of a million Montana cattle on Alberta ranges.
People have an unfailing knack for telling themselves what they want to hear. In 1881, an observer in the Montreal Gazette assured potential Bonanza investors, “For the purposes of the stock raiser it suffices to know that for a great part of the winter much of the surface is free from snow and that it seldom or never attains the depth sufficient to prevent animals from feeding.”
Not quite. The snow the winter of 1886–87 was thick and the cold was brutal. Anyone who has experienced a prairie winter will understand this. Turns out cows are not the new buffalo. They did not have centuries to acclimatize to the northern freeze. Unlike buffalo, they lacked the instinct to forage beneath the snow for frozen grass. Also, they lacked fur. Scrawny 1880s Texas longhorns were no better equipped to face a prairie snowstorm outdoors than skinny 1980s headbangers clad only in tight GWGs and Iron Maiden concert shirts. Across Alberta, Wyoming and Montana, cows in the millions froze to death. Estimates were as high as 90 percent of all stock on the northern ranges. Young stock from southern ranges had sought shelter among trees and had died there. More experienced steers staggered on in search of food, hundreds of thousands of them dying, many against the barbed wire that eastern investors had insisted be put up to protect their grazing property from rival ranches. Emaciated remnants of once-great herds, with frozen ears, tails and legs, tottered down the slopes of the mountains of the dead. That year was the worst. But it had been happening, to varying degrees, every time winter came around. In 1883, for instance, 3,000 of Cochrane’s cattle died, stretched out along the Bow River. It was said you could cross a gully on the bodies of cattle frozen to death without ever touching the ground.
Cochrane then suggested trying sheep. Bad idea. In the spring of 1884, hundreds of sheep, having survived the winter, ploughed into melting sloughs and, sheep being sheep, kept on pushing each other until they all drowned. That same year, Cochrane, in his eastern wisdom, ordered his foreman, William Kerfoot, to fire a shepherd who had lost a sizeable number of sheep under his care. Kerfoot refused. He defended the man, arguing he had done all he could and that sheep-raising in Alberta was hard work even during good times. So Cochrane, in his eastern wisdom, fired him. Bad idea.
A Virginian, Kerfoot was the son of an American Civil War veteran, a distinguished Confederate cavalry captain. He had been hired two years previous in Fort Benton and was the most experienced cowboy of the operation and arguably of the entire area. Many regarded him as one of the best horsemen of his era. Kerfoot sued Cochrane’s spin-off company—the British American Ranche Company—for wrongful dismissal. The case was heard in Calgary in April 1885, with no less than James Lougheed representing him. A successful businessman, future Canadian senator, British knight and legal partner of future prime minister R.B. Bennett, Lougheed had, in 1885, recently hung out his shingle. He was a lawyer, and though there never has been an Albertan with more prestige and advantage, Lougheed tended to take the side of the westerner in all arguments. Western Canada has not yet reproduced such a strong voice. Lougheed being Lougheed, Kerfoot being Kerfoot, they won. Kerfoot’s son later wrote that Kerfoot thought Cochrane was a boob, his company having the “happy knack of getting together a lot of good men and then ignoring their recommendations, usually with heavy loss to themselves.”
His herds were growing, but by the late 1880s, political pressure was mounting and Ottawa was forced to shift away from enormous acreages in favour of settlement by the many. Big business cleared out and homesteaders moved in. In 1887, Cochrane began winding down operations in Alberta. The senator himself died in 1903 and his family sold the last of their western land in 1905—all but the mineral rights on what proved to be oil-rich land. Kerfoot, as did many good men who had been hired to work for Bonanza businessmen, stayed on and set up a modest ranch of his own. Free to follow up their own recommendations, the animals of knowledgeable ranchmen like Kerfoot, not just in it for the money, prospered. Properly fed and properly housed cattle could survive Alberta winters and could thrive on the region’s grasslands the rest of the year. What they couldn’t do, these independent cattlemen, was make a living given the meat packers and the railroad monopolies with which they had to do business.
“The [British] Commonwealth of Nations,” Canadian economist Harold Innis wrote, “is [a] monument to Anglo-Saxon snobbery and greed.” Innis, who had studied the Canadian fur trade, was among the first to observe that Canada was just a bigger-than-usual margin to be materially exploited to fatten the imperial centre. Canada was never meant to develop. It was meant to develop things that bourgeois British fancied. One such fancy, albeit a trifling one, was Alberta beef.
Kerfoot and the many other ranchmen operating in the region had the land, access to the grains and the know-how to produce world-class beef—if there were a market for it, which there wasn’t domestically. Except for the tiny percentage of quality beef demanded by a British market dominated by cheaper and tastier cattle from Ireland and Argentina, Alberta ranchers fattened up quality cattle only at their own loss. The meat-packing monopoly paid a ridiculously low price and the railroads charged a criminally high price to get the cattle from the west to the abattoir. The domestic market would not bear the prices necessary for eastern industrialists to make good meat available in Canada. So, while dandies in London and, later, dudes in New York—the second empire served by Canada—dined on succulent and marbled (and expensive) Alberta steak, Canadians everywhere dreamt of the invention of a knife called Ginsu that might make possible the severing of heroically dense and indifferent hunks of brown flesh that scorned the advances of the sharpest of ordinary carving blades. By the 1920s, Canadians had developed a fondness for pork. Steak was a campfire story told to scare impenitent youth.
Canadian ranching historian Max Foran reports that in 1927, a member from the House of Commons described Canadians as “tough-jawed people,” for whom, presumably, Sunday roasts had become as much of an ordeal as the liturgical turgidity that preceded them. Chicken and pork sheltered a nation shellshocked from trenchant tales of over-the-top gristle and flesh so solid it felt frozen even when it was fresh. The Canadian Pacific Railway continued to serve only Canadian beef on its trains, but allegations swirled that this was out of upper-echelon patriotism and that most employees and customers of the company would have preferred to eat American beef. In Montreal, which should have been the primary market for western beef, only the worst cuts—cuts deemed unfit for export to Great Britain or the United States—were offered.
Canadians would have to wait another 30 years until domestic beef became consistently palatable. The 1950s brought Canada a higher standard of living and gave Canadians a significantly greater disposable income. This, coupled with a boom in population and the upgrading of commercial meat production, meant the cattle industry could raise top-quality cattle and make a profit by selling them domestically. Steakhouses began to dot the Canadian landscape.
In 1956, Hy Aisenstat opened Hy’s in Calgary—then, as now, arguably Canada’s finest steak house. Hy’s made famous “Only,” a 14-ounce New York steak that sold for $3. Suddenly, Canadians wanted nothing but the best and were willing to pay for it. And if they couldn’t afford the best and didn’t mind their steak on metal trays, Ponderosa, which opened in 1965, and Bonanza weren’t far behind.
Suddenly beef was affordable and delectable, the bloodier the better. So we did what we humans always do. We went in for overkill. Beef became bellicose. The overconsumption of red meat became a marker of archetypal North American masculinity. Take Norm Peterson (George Wendt), the rotund drunk from the popular sitcom Cheers. Obese and ambitious only in regard to the consumption of beer, Norm liked eating only what would kill him. His favourite restaurant? The Hungry Heifer. His usual? The Feeding Frenzy (for two), made up of 100 percent beef.
“What’s the good word, Norm?” Sam asks.
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”
“Oh, no,” Sam says, “not the Hungry Heifer...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah...”
“One heartburn cocktail coming up.”
At the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, you get your meal comped if you put down a 72-ounce steak meal in a single sitting. If you succeed, you will be able to tell your friends that you ate the biggest steak in Texas. Your doctor will be able to tell you that your colon no longer remembers what it ever thought it saw in you in the first place. A 2005 study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that heavy consumers of red meat increase their chances of both rectal and colon cancer.
To a large extent, studies on the adverse effects of overconsumption of beef support a behavioural change already made. The beef industry has been in decline since the mid-1970s. In the 1990s, for the first time, more chicken was consumed by Americans than beef. The popularity of low-carb and nocarb diets has provided some relief to the industry and it has worked hard to recover some of the market share it has lost. The Canadian cowboys who sought independence by raising healthy cattle properly in exchange for a fair price? They lost a long time before any of that.
In Calgary’s Dominion Exhibition of 1908, an expert horseman from Virginia by the name of Kerfoot rode down the streets of Calgary in that year’s edition of a parade that continues to inaugurate the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede. Just when Kerfoot was passing by, a band sounded off abruptly and unexpectedly. The racket spooked his horse, causing it to rear up and over a milk cow, and spill Kerfoot to his death. The first casualty of the Calgary Exhibition was a real cowboy who ranched independently. It was a harbinger of things to come.
