1880

"Bronco busting" by Charlie Russell.

“A man could grow rich without his lifting a finger.” 

A “cattle boom” on the northern Great Plains has begun – and will eventually create a “bubble,” like the Dutch tulip bulb craze, or the housing bubble in this country in 2007 and 2008.

 

At first, raising cattle on the grasslands in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas looked like a can’t-miss opportunity. As Helena Huntington Smith wrote in “The Johnson County War,” the boom was fueled by “a rash of adventuring English Lords and Honorables, free grass, and the blessings of ‘natural increase’ provided by the prolific Texas cow. A man could grow rich without his lifting a finger.” (American Heritage, undated article, p. 51.)

 

*

 

Just days short of his sixteenth birthday, Charlie Russell arrives in the Montana Territory. (Famous later as the “Cowboy Artist,” he dies there forty-six years later, in 1926). (American Heritage, “Charlie Russell’s Lost West” by Brian W. Dippie, 5-211,89)

 

Born in St. Louis in 1864, the young man was always lured by the West. He hated school, although his family was highly educated, played hooky, and ran away from home twice. The year before, his parents sent him to a military boarding school in New Jersey, Burlington College. There he filled a sketchbook with pictures of Indians and Wild West scenes. So: Russell was sent to Montana to work on a sheep ranch. His parents hoped it would help change his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. 

Charlie later recalled that he was a poor shepherd. “I’d lose the damn things as fast as they’d put ’em on the ranch.”

____________________

 

“The west is still a great country but the picture and story part of it has been plowed under by the farmer.”

 

Charlie Russell

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He was quickly fired from the job and it was suggested that he pack his bags and go home. He fell in with a hunter soon after and soaked up Plains lore. In 1882 he got a job as a night wrangler on the Twelve Z & V ranch. For the next eleven years he “sung to the horses and cattle.” He later admitted he was “neither a good roper nor rider,” but, “I worked for the big outfits and always held my job.” It was during this era that Francis Parkman could write (1892) that “the Wild West is tamed.” Russell himself would later admit, “The cow puncher … is as much history as Parkman’s Trapper. The west is still a great country but the picture and story part of it has been plowed under by the farmer.” Even during these years, the cowboy was never without a pencil, paper, a few brushes and paints. He met a Kentucky girl, Nancy Cooper, and they were married in 1896. She was sixteen or seventeen when he made her his wife.

 

She remembered the impression he made when they met:

 

The picture that is engraved on my memory of him is of a man a little above average height and weight, wearing a soft shirt, a Stetson hat on the back of his blonde head, tight trousers, held up by a “half-breed sash” that clung just above the hip bones, high-heeled riding boots on very small, arched feet. His face was Indian-like, square jaw and chin, large mouth, tightly closed firm lips, the under protruding slightly beyond the short upper, straight nose, high cheekbones, Gray-blue deep-set eyes that seemed to see everything, but with an expression of honesty and understanding. … His hands were good-sized, perfectly shaped, with long slender fingers. He loved jewelry and always wore three or four rings. They would not have been Charlie’s hands any other way. (9)

 

His first one-man show, “The West That Has Passed,” was held in New York in 1911.

 

Russell was famous for his drinking, and loved to smoke cigars. Many afternoons he could be found at the Mint or the Silver Dollar, two Great Falls saloons.

 

In the early years of marriage, Nancy would hold up two fingers as Charlie headed away, setting the permissible limit on his drinking for that afternoon. Though it is questionable whether Russell’s consumption rate was ever as prodigious as legend would have it, one close associate was convinced that his wife saved him “from the life of a rounder.” By 1908, in apparent deference to Nancy’s wishes, Russell had sworn off alcohol altogether.

 

He still faithfully made his rounds, however, returning home punctually at five o’clock. For it was not whiskey but companionship that lured him. Downtown offered Russell an escape from the sphere a feminine control, if only for a few hours. It provided him the opportunity to talk with his kind of people, “nature loving regular men.”

“An outspoken friend of the Indian.”

 

He was, Dippie wrote, “an outspoken friend of the Indian.” He acquired a proficiency in sign language over the years. During the winter of 1888-1889, the artist spent six months living with the Blood tribe in southern Canada. He was adopted and named Ah-wah-cous, “The Antelope.” From that year forward, he always added a buffalo-skull outline as part of his signature. “It’s kind of a symbol of the Old West that’s dyin’, just like the buffalo did,” he explained.

 

In 1902, he wrote to a Montana state senator:

 

Speaking of gamblers reminds me several years ago when games were wide open  I sat at a faryo layout in Chinook   the hour was lat and the play light  a good deal of talk passed over the green bord  the subject of conversation was the Indian question the dealor Kicking George was an old time sport who spoke of cards as an industry…the Kicker alloud an Injun had no more right in this country than a cyote   I told him what he said might be right but there were folks coming to the country on the new rail road that thaught the same way about gamblers and he wouldent winter maney times till hed find out the wild Indian would go but would onley brake the trail for the gambler.

 

Russell was clearly a better painter than speller or grammarian. He was no fan of modern civilization. After visiting Chicago in 1916, he said he’d rather spend time in hell than in the city, because there’d be less smoke.

 

His wife eventually bought an Oldsmobile, but the cowboy in him preferred horses to automobiles, which he called “skunk wagons.”

"Through the Alkali" by Charles Russell 

"Smoke of a .45" by Russell.

According to the Sid Richardson Museum, which holds many Russell paintings:

 

American Indian courtship especially intrigued Russell in the 1890s. It was common practice for an unmarried man to take his horse to water, then loiter by the stream to admire, and be admired by, a young woman who had caught his fancy. Russell’s bold suitor has obviously decided to take the direct approach and has found an American Indian maiden who is, for once, without her chaperone. He surprises her with his attempt at courtship – but perhaps the young man’s attentions will actually be welcome.

 

*

 

Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) publishes the first of the Uncle Remus series. The racism is pretty thick, I believe (haven’t ready any). 

Even Reuben Post Halleck, writing about American literature in 1911, displays a casual brand of racism.

 

Here’s his description:

 

Joel Chandler Harris was born at Eatonton, in the center of Georgia in 1848. He alludes to himself laughingly as “an uncultured Georgia cracker.” At the age of twelve, he was setting type for a country newspaper and living upon the plantation of the wealthy owner of this paper, enjoying the freedom of his well-selected library, hunting coons, possums, and rabbits with his dogs, and listening to the stories told by his slaves. The boy thus became well acquainted with many of the animal fables known to the negroes of Georgia. Later in life, he heard a great many more of these tales, while traveling through the cotton states, swapping yarns with the negroes after he had gained their confidence. His knowledge of their hesitancy about telling a story and his sympathy with them made it possible for him to hear rare tales when another would probably have found only silence. Sometimes, while waiting for a train, he would saunter up to a group of negroes and start to tell a story himself and soon have them on tiptoe to tell him one that he did not already know. In many ways he became the possessor of a large part of the negro folklore. He loved a story and he early commenced to write down these fables, making of them such delightful works of art that all America is his debtor, not only for thus preserving the folklore of a primitive people in their American environment [emphasis added], but also for the genuine pleasure derived from the stories themselves. They are related with such humor, skill, and poetic spirit that they almost challenge comparison with Kipling’s tales of the jungle. The hero is the poor, meek, timid rabbit, but in the tales he becomes the witty, sly, resourceful, bold adventurer, who acts “sassy” and talks big. Harris says that “it needs no scientific investigation to show why he [the negro] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness.” Sometimes, as is shown in The Wonderful Tar Baby Story, a trick of the fox causes serious trouble to the rabbit; but the rabbit usually invents most of the pranks himself. The absurdly incongruous attitude of the rabbit toward the other animals is shown in the following conversation, which occurs in the story of Brother Rabbit and Brother Tiger, published in Uncle Remus and His Friends:

 

  “Brer Tiger ’low, ‘How come you ain’t skeer’d er me, Brer Rabbit? All de yuther creeturs run when dey hear me comin’.’

  

“Brer Rabbit say, ‘How come de fleas on you ain’t skeer’d un you? Dey er lots littler dan what I is.’

 

“Brer Tiger ‘low, ‘Hit’s mighty good fer you dat I done had my dinner, kaze ef I’d a-been hongry I’d a-snapped you up back dar at de creek.’

  

“Brer Rabbit say, ‘Ef you’d done dat, you’d er had mo’ sense in yo’ hide dan what you got now.’

  

“Brer Tiger ‘low, ‘I gwine ter let you off dis time, but nex’ time I see you, watch out!’

  

“Brer Rabbit say, ‘Bein’s you so monst’us perlite, I’ll let you off too, but keep yo’ eye open nex’ time you see me, kaze I’ll git you sho.’”

 

The glee of the negro in the rabbit’s nonchalant bearing is humorously given in this paragraph:

 

“Well, I wish ter goodness you could er seed ‘im ‘bout dat time. He went ‘long thoo de woods ez gay ez a colt in a barley-patch. He wunk at de trees, he shuck his fisties at de stumps, he make like he wuz quoilin’ wid ‘is shadder kaze it foller ‘long atter ‘im so close; en he went on scan’lous, mon!”

 

The three books that contain the most remarkable of these tales are: Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892). In the volume, Told by Uncle Remus (1905), the same negro relates more stories to the son of the “little boy,” who had many years before listened to the earlier tales. The one thing in these books that is absolutely the creation of Harris is the character of Uncle Remus. He is a patriarchal ex-slave, who seems to be a storehouse of knowledge concerning Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B’ar, and indeed all the animals of those bygone days when animals talked and lived in houses. He understands child nature as well as he knows the animals, and from the corner of his eye he keeps a sharp watch upon his tiny auditor to see how the story affects him. No figure more living, original, and lovable than Uncle Remus appears in southern fiction. In him Harris has created, not a burlesque or a sentimental impossibility, but an imperishable type, the type of the true plantation negro [emphasis added].

 

Halleck also makes mention of Harris’s stories where he “writes entertainingly of the slaves and their masters on the plantation and of the poor free negroes, in such stories as Mingo and Other Sketches (1884) and Free Joe (1887).”

 

* 

One observer described Chicago in 1880: “The river stinks. The air stinks. People’s clothing, permeated by the foul atmosphere, stinks. No other word expresses it so well as stink.”

 

*

 

People never change. On the census, under “occupation,” a 15-year-old Wisconsin girl, Catharine Cudney writes: “does as she pleases (Time; 3/30/20, p. 12)

 

*

 

This was a worksheet I prepared for students.

 

LABOR UNIONS

 

1. If you joined a labor union in 1880, what usually happened? (workers were fired and then blacklisted)

 

2. What must a new Loveland teacher do—as far as unions go? (our contract required new teachers to join the teachers’ association or pay a “fair share” fee, instead of regular union dues)

 

3. A person who works during a strike is called a ____. (scab)

 

4. A worker who was injured on the job in 1880 would be ____. (fired; there was no sick leave and certainly no sick pay)

 

5. Most workers today spend ____ hours per week on the job. (40; my students didn’t seem to know this)

 

6. By law, you receive ____ pay if you work more than 40 hours per week. (overtime; again, students did not always know how to figure out “time-and-a-half”)

 

7. “Seniority” protects older workers now; the rule under most contracts is first ____, last ____. (first hired, last fired)

 

8. What is “picketing?” (workers organize to try to block companies from bringing in replacement workers; picketers try to publicize their demands, with signs, singing, getting on the news)

 

9-11. What are three “fringe benefits” most workers receive today? (paid vacation, sick leave, double time on holidays, health insurance, pensions, 401K matching funds)

 

12. Today a worker injured on the job may receive ____. (workers’ compensation payments)

 

13. Workers or their families recently sued a N.C. chicken factory after a fire. What had the factory owner done that made him liable (or: open to be sued)? (he had padlocked some doors so workers couldn’t sneak out)

 

14. What happened at the Triangle Shirt Factory in 1911? (unsafe conditions, including blocked exits led to panic during a fire and 146 workers died, some jumping from the eleventh story windows)

 

15. How did regular Bengals players damage property when scabs took their place during a strike by NFL players? (you can tell this was an old worksheet; regular players actually lay down in front of a bus bringing in replacement players; several Bengals regulars “keyed” the cars of “scabs”)

 

16. Government now tries to control business monopolies. What big company was broken up in a court battle in the 1980s? (AT&T)

 

17. Players just won a court fight against the ____, arguing the NFL was a monopoly. (owners; in 1993, players won the right to become free agents)

 

18. Mr. Viall’s contract allows him to save up to 240 days of sick leave and cash a portion of them in when he retires. The “payout” would be worth about ____. (on the day I retired in 2008, my sick leave payout was $40,000)

 

19. A workplace with a “closed shop” is a place where workers must do what? (join the union)

 

20. Overtime pay is at a rate of ____x’s regular pay. (one and one-half)

 

21. Name two teachers with high “seniority” in this school.

 

(True-False)

 

22. Workers in 1880 made about $1 per day. True

 

23. Monopolies are rarely able to raise prices unfairly. False

 

24. Mr. Viall’s contract allows him to take a year off to write and be paid the difference between what he makes and the teacher who replaces him. True

 

25. Shannon Chaney’s mom has no health insurance coverage through work. True (teachers, if you’ve never done this, my students loved it when I included their names in questions on worksheets or even as joke choices on multiple choice tests)

 

Bonus: Joe Myers’ dad makes $18 per hour; what would his overtime hourly rate be? ($27)

 

Bonus: Ned Viall works in a shipyard in San Francisco. If he goes to sea to test engine repairs, how many hours per day is he paid for working? (my brother worked in an era when shipyard workers had a powerful union; when he was out on one sea test for 96 hours, he was paid for all 96, meaning he had 56 hours of overtime, too = so 40 + 56 + 28 or 124 hours of regular pay; in the mid-80’s, however, owners started sending work to shipyards overseas)

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: If I were still teaching today, I might focus on companies that have shifted work overseas to places like Bangladesh. Safety rules there are lax, and workers earn pennies on the dollar, compared to U.S. workers. In 2013, a factory overloaded with heavy equipment and crammed with workers collapsed. More than 1,100 workers were killed.

 

You have, also, the issue of immigrant labor, which does tend to depress wages (which in no way means we should disparage the workers, themselves). You could cite Texas, where many construction workers are undocumented.

 

You could point out the case of Citizen Donald J. Trump, who used undocumented Polish workers in 1980, to tear down the building where Trump Tower in New York City now stands.

 

You could focus on the bad side of unions, Jimmy Hoffa, for instance. I read recently that unionized coal miners made about twice as much as non-union miners, etc. It might also interest students to know that wages for most workers have been stagnant (when adjusted for inflation) since about 1983. (In my experience, I also saw some of the negatives of labor unions, including protecting lazy workers.)

 

IN COVERING THIS TOPIC, HOWEVER, A TEACHER WOULD BE WISE NOT TO LET HIS OR HER OPINIONS ENTER THE DISCUSSION, UNLESS ASKED.

 

When asked by students what I thought, I would tell them, but always noting that it was my opinion, and my opinion was no better than anyone else’s.