Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910

ANDREW R. GRAYBILL

Policing the Great Plains Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910

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University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln & London

© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the

University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graybill, Andrew R., '97'Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and

the North American frontier, 1875-1910 / Andrew R.

Graybill. p.

cm.

"An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as "Rangers, Mounties, and the Subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, 1870-1885," Great Plains Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 85-99.Reprinted by permission.

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as "Rural Police and the Defense of the Cattleman's Empire in Texas and Canada, 1875-1900," Agricultural History 75, nO.3 (Summer 2005): 253-80. Copyright 2005 by the

Agricultural History Society. Reprinted by permission. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as "Texas Rangers, Canadian Mounties, and the Policing of the Transnational Industrial Frontier, 1885-1910," Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004): 167-91.Copyright by the Western History Association.

Reprinted by permission." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8032-6002-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Police-North America-History. 2. Texas Rangers

-History. 3. Royal Canadian Mounted Police­ History. l. Title. HV7909.G73 2007 363.209764' 09034-dc22 2006037640

Set in Minion by Bob Reitz.

UN1VERsmus· UNO STADT. ulBLIOTHEK KOLN fi A

For my family, with love and thanks

Contents

List of Illustrations . . . viii List of Maps . . . ix Acknowledgments . . .xi Introduction: "Similar Organizations in Other Parts" . . . 1 1 Instruments of Incorporation . . . 5 2 Subjugating Indigenous Groups . . . 23 3 Dispossessing Peoples of Mixed Ancestry

. .

. 64

4 Defending the Cattleman's Empire . . 110 .

5 Policing the Industrial Frontier . . . 158

Epilogue: "Deeds, Real and Imagined" . . . 201 Notes . . . 205 Bibliography . . . 249 Index . . . 269

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Illustrations

1. Movie poster from North West Mounted Police . . . 19 2. Comanches skinning a buffalo at Fort Sill, Indian Territory . . . 26 3. Mounted Police with a group of First Nations chiefs . . . 40 4. James F. Macleod . . 42 .

5. A Ranger camp in Menard County, Texas . . 47 .

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6. James B. Gillett . . . 49 7. Mounted Policemen and Peigan Indians at a Sun Dance . . . 57 8. Gabriel Dumont at Red River, Alberta . . . 65 9. A government survey team near Wood End, Saskatchewan . . . 72 10. Jerry Potts with an Indian family and two Mounties . . . 82 ll.

Leander H. McNelly . . . 92

12. Ranger camp at the King Ranch near Alice, Texas . . . 95 13. Ranger Company D at Ysleta, Texas, with a shackled Mexican prisoner . . . 108 14. The Texas State Capitol shortly after its completion . . 121 .

15. An 1889 wanted notice for fence cutting in Boerne, Texas . . . 129 16. The Bow River Horse Ranche . . . 131 17. Office of the Macleod Gazette . . . 132 18. Sam Livingston . . 135 .

19. Ira Aten . . 154 .

20. W. J. L. Sullivan . . . 159 21. Alberta Railway and Coal Company locomotive and shop staff . . . 169 22. View of Lethbridge, Alberta . . . 170 23. Ranger Company C on duty during the Southwest Strike . . . 176 24. Richard Burton Deane . . . 180 25. Ranger Company B at Thurber, Texas . . . 185

Maps

1. The Great Plains . . . 7 2. Texas

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3. Western Canada

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9

Acknowledgments

I became an inveterate reader of acknowledgments when I started graduate school, and at that time I was struck by the number of people and insti­ tutions who were thanked by the various authors I read. I marveled that anyone could possibly need so much help in writing a book. Experience has taught me just how naive I was back then, and I would like to thank those individuals and organizations that have given generously to me of their time and expertise. This book began as a dissertation at Princeton University, where I had the good sense and great fortune to work with Andrew Isenberg. Drew gave me enormous amounts of direction and support, allayed my anxieties, and affirmed my belief in mentorship. When I told him once that he was the "Shaquille O'Neal of advisers;' he warmed to the sports metaphor but cor­ rected my analysis, writing that "if I'm trying to do anything as ad adviser, in basketball terms I'm a point guard: [I] dish off to my teammates (i.e., advisees) so they can score. And [I] help out on defense so that my team­ mates don't get beat." I guess that makes him the Tony Parker of advisers. I would like also to thank the other members of my PhD committee, Jeremy Adelman and James McPherson, as well as John Murrin, whose formidable mind is exceeded only by his thorough decency. My graduate school experience was much richer for the friends I made at Princeton, who provided a constant source of support and inspiration. Thanks especially to Denver Brunsman, Bill Carter, Genelle Gertz-Robin­ son, Holly Grieco, Drew Levy, Jarbel Rodriguez, Jenny Weber, and Amanda Wunder. Alec Dun and Nick Guyatt made my years in central New Jersey more fun than I could ever have imagined when we first met in the fall of 1997· I spent the 2004-5 academic year as a fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where I had time to revise and extend the manuscript in an incredibly collegial and stimulating environment. I was humbled by the generosity of the Center's faculty and staff, and I thank Andrea Boardman, Ruth Ann Elmore, Sherry Smith, and David Weber for making my SMU sojourn so rewarding. Brian Frehner, Ben

xii

Acknowledgments

Johnson, and Michelle Nickerson brought about the unlikeliest of personal transformations in me: a deep, abiding affection for Dallas, Texas. And spe­ cial thanks to Sarah Carter, Elliott West, and the other participants who critiqued my manuscript in a workshop held at SMU in September 2004. I finished the book at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I would like to acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues in the history department at UNL, who have made the Cornhusker State an exceptionally pleasant place to work. I offer special thanks to the department's chairman, Ken Winkle, who has been most supportive and who helped arrange for my leave. In Lincoln, thanks also to the folks at the University of Nebraska Press, particularly my editor, Heather Lundine; her assistant, Bridget Barry; and also Elizabeth Demers, who acquired my project during her tenure at the Press. And I am most grateful to geographer Ezra Zeitler for preparing the maps, and to copyeditor Ruth Melville for cleaning up the text consid­ erably. I couldn't have written the book without the assistance of numerous ar­ chivists and research librarians scattered throughout North America. In the United States, I'd like to acknowledge the assistance of the following indi­ viduals and institutions: the Center for American History at the University of Texas-Austin; the Howard Payne University Library; the Johns Hopkins University Library, especially Agnes Flannery-Denner; the libraries of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, especially Betty Bustos; the Princeton University Library, especially Alfred Bush and Mary George; the libraries of Southern Methodist University; the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University; the special collections divi­ sion at the library of the University of Texas-Arlington; the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, especially Judy Shofner; the Texas State Library and Archives, especially John Anderson; the Trinity University Library; and the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma, especially John Lovett. In Canada, thanks go to the staffs of the National Archives of Canada and the Glenbow-Alberta Institute, especially Jim Bowman and Doug Casso I am also grateful for the financial assistance that made my research trips possible in the first place, which was provided by the following: the history department and the graduate school at Princeton University; the Center of International Studies and the Council on Regional Studies, both at Prince­ ton; the Canadian Embassy (through a graduate student research fellow-

Acknowledgments

xiii

ship) ; the Clements Center for Southwest Studies; and a Rawley Fund Grant from the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. On the ground, thanks to Karen Dinitz, John Greenman, Dianne Hardy-Garcia, and Martin Jones for putting me up (and putting up with me) while I was away from home. Along the way, I have benefited enormously from the suggestions of many fellow scholars. In the United States, thanks go to Steve Aron, Gregg Cantrell, Mark Ellis, Laura Ehrisman, James Gump, David Gutierrez, Pe­ kka Hiimiiliiinen, Carol Higham, Fran Kaye, Pete Maslowski, Karen 1¥rrill, Marilyn Rhinehart, Alan Taylor, Sandra VanBurkleo, Richard Voeltz, and John Wunder. In Canada, thanks to David Breen, Warren Elofson, Simon Evans, Sterling Evans, Max Foran, Walter Hildebrandt, Greg Kealey, Bob Macdonald, Kent McNeil, and Jeremy Mouat. I am particularly grateful to several historians of the Texas Rangers, who-though they might disagree with some of my conclusions-nevertheless responded generously to my questions and pointed me in the direction of helpful primary and second­ ary material. Thanks to Harold Weiss and the late Frederick Wilkins, and especially to Bob Utley, who went so far as to e-mail me copies of his vo­ luminous notes on Ranger efforts to combat fence cutting and labor agita­ tion, saving me countless hours of toil. When I expressed my gratitude a few years ago, Bob stated simply his belief that established scholars had a responsibility to assist young and struggling ones. Consider it duly noted. Several chapters from the book appeared as articles in slightly to signifi­ cantly different form, and I would like to acknowledge the journals and their editors that published those pieces and to extend my thanks for per­ mission to reprint them here: Claire Strom at Agricultural History; Chuck Braithwaite at Great Plains Quarterly; and David Rich Lewis at the Western Historical Quarterly. Of course my biggest debts are to my extended family. I'm truly blessed to have the Ebingers in my corner, and I consider Chuck, Lynn, Sara, Brad, and Margaret nothing less than blood. My sister Lisa has helped immeasurably to keep my feet on the ground. And my mom and dad are simply the finest people I know, without whom this project-and frankly anything else I've ever done-would not be possible. But where would I be without Jennifer Ebinger? She alone knows how much lowe to her. I am privileged to be her husband, and I look forward to sharing with her and Fiona all the joys and challenges that lie ahead.

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Policing the Great Plains

I

Introduction "Similar Organizations in Other Parts"

In April 1919 a novice instructor at the University of Texas named Walter Prescott Webb wrote to a government official in Ottawa inquiring about the history of the Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP).l Webb was looking for information on the Mounties that might add depth to the master's thesis he was writing at Austin, a study of another famed North American rural constabulary, the Texas Rangers. Webb had been inspired to undertake the project by the controversy roiling the force that spring, when the Texas state legislature had launched an investigation into alleged Ranger atrocities committed against Mexicans after a failed uprising in South Texas.2 For his part, the Canadian official promised Webb his as­ sistance and-attempting perhaps to allay the young historian's concerns about the spread of Ranger notoriety-added amiably that the Texas con­ stabulary still enjoyed "considerable reputation in [ Canada] and it would be too bad should they be allowed to fall into disrepute."3 Whatever Webb made of the dusty, fire-damaged annual reports sent to him that fall from the RNWMP 'S headquarters in Regina, Saskatchewan, he did not say; the Mounties do not receive even a passing mention in his sprawling 1935 study of the Texas state police. Maybe the prospect of extensive archival research in Canada (in the dead of winter) did not appeal to him; or perhaps Webb was simply conserving academic energy for his massive study of the Great Plains, which appeared in 1931. To be sure, in the years since the publi­ cation of Webb's book on the Rangers, scholars of each constabulary have of­ ten noted the parallels between what Webb's Canadian correspondent termed "similar organizations in other parts." But such comparisons have usually been fleeting and superficial, merely reminding readers that the Rangers and Mounties are likely the two best-known police forces in the world.4

2

Introduction

The absence of a sustained analytical comparison of the Rangers and Mounties is surprising, both because such a project seems so obvious and also because insights can be gleaned by juxtaposing the two forces. On the most fundamental level, measuring the constabularies against each other challenges the notions of historical exceptionalism that animate most his­ tories of the Rangers and Mounties and also of the regions they policed. The forces were created at almost the same moment in the early 1870S, for a strikingly similar reason: to extend the power of the state to outlying re­ gions. More broadly, looking through the institutions themselves to the areas they patrolled undermines the tendency among scholars to describe nineteenth-century Texas and the Canadian prairies in singular terms. The myth of the sui generis North American frontier runs especially deep in both places, but collapses when one realizes, for instance, that the Lone Star State's cattle kingdom had a robust counterpart in southern Alberta, or that the "last, best West" so heavily promoted by Ottawa in the 1890S looked just as bleak to Canadian Indians as the West lying to the south of the 49th parallel appeared to their American counterparts. Beyond this challenge to exceptionalism, a comparison of the Rangers and Mounties offers fresh perspectives on the Great Plains. Writers and scholars have long confined their studies to either one side of the 49th parallel or the other, imposing intellectual parameters seemingly no less arbitrary than the international border itself.5 The very existence of these rural constabu­ laries at opposite ends of the region, however, as well as the remarkable overlap between their missions emphasizes the transnational reach of the Great Plains. That the two forces policed nearly identical populations-in­ cluding Indians, peoples of mixed ancestry, homesteaders, and industrial workers-reinforces the notion that Texas and the Canadian North-West were bound by conditions of ecology, economy, and demography that tran­ scended North American political boundaries. Moreover, because the en­ forcement of international borders was so central to the work of each force, comparing such efforts by the Rangers and Mounties establishes that the Great Plains belong in any academic discussion of the "borderlands," which for many decades has served as a sort of shorthand referring exclusively to the American Southwest. 6 Most importantly, linking the histories of the Rangers and Mounties brings into sharp relief the common process by which states incorporated their frontiers during the late nineteenth century. The first step involved the

Introduction

3

confinement or removal of indigenous peoples in order to prepare the hin­ terlands for occupation by white farmers and entrepreneurs. In Texas, the Rangers-who were driven by decades of brutal native-white conflict within the region-secured the state's borders by forcing Kiowas and Comanches north across the Red River into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and by pushing Apaches westward into New Mexico, where the Indians then became the responsibility of the federal government. Though employ­ ing far less violence, the Mounties were no less effective in the North-West, since they confined Blackfoot and Crees to reserves, where (it was hoped) the First Nations could then be assimilated into broader Canadian society. Next came the dispossession of peoples of mixed ancestry, whose com­ munal resource use threatened the privatization of valuable natural re­ sources. For the NWMP, this meant breaking the grasp of the Metis on the river valleys of Saskatchewan, which were coveted by Eurocanadian farmers moving west from Ontario. The Mounties imposed Ottawa's decree that lands throughout the North-West would be divided into square tracts (and not the oblong lots with narrow river frontage favored by the Metis), and then the police worked to quell resistance to federal surveys and land sales. The Rangers, on the other hand, used terrorism and lethal force to protect the cattle of Anglo ranchers from Mexicans (who for their part insisted that many of the animals had been taken from them by whites in the years fol­ lowing the Mexican-American War) . The Rangers also suppressed Mexican resistance to the privatization of communal salt deposits in far West Texas, which for decades local residents had used for their livestock or to generate extra income in times of want. The police then defended cattlemen and ranching syndicates from the protests of the rural poor. With the spread of barbed wire throughout Texas during the 1870S, farmers and smaller ranchers found their access to the free water and grass of the public domain under siege by the wealthy, who enclosed their lands (legally and otherwise) in order to feed their animals and provide for selective breeding. When an intense drought hit the state in 1883, angry nesters retaliated against their more powerful neighbors by de­ stroying fences and stealing livestock. The state government responded by sending out the Rangers, whose primary mission in the mid-1880s involved the eradication of fence cutting. At the other end of the Plains, the Mount­ ies faced the inverse problem: keeping the poor from erecting enclosures (usually along river bottoms) on public lands that had been leased by Ot-

4

Introduction

tawa to Alberta's biggest stock growers. The NWMP thus drove off squatters whose shacks and fences impeded the access of fine-blooded animals to water and forage. Lastly, the police defeated the threat to nascent industrial development by intervening in strikes at the largest collieries in Texas and the North-West. Mountie involvement at the Alberta Railway and Coal Company helped that corporation through more than a decade of labor disturbances, and saw the police evolve from relatively honest brokers between the two sides to-what many strikers considered-little more than company muscle. The Rangers enjoyed a nearly identical relationship with Colonel Robert D. Hunter's Texas and Pacific Coal Company, with some members of the force even serving in Hunter's private security detail in order to gain more lever­ age over the dissidents. Over the course of their fifteen years in Thurber, however, the Rangers became less enthusiastic (and consequently less effec­ tive) in defending management from the strident efforts of labor activists to unionize the T&PCC workforce. The convergence of the constabularies' work frames the political objec­ tives and economic imperatives shared by authorities in Austin and Ot­ tawa at this moment, while illuminating police strategies for facilitating the absorption of the hinterlands. While the methods of the police may have diverged sharply-contrast the Rangers' enthusiastic dispensation of violence with the relative restraint of the Mounties-the goals and the net results of their efforts were virtually indistinguishable. Beyond merely link­ ing together the Rangers and the Mounties or the geographical extremes of the Great Plains, such a discovery serves to integrate the frontiers of North America into a global story of economic transformation in the industrial age.

1 Instruments of Incorporation

In September 1878 the Saskatchewan Herald published a poem by an author identified only by the initials W. S. titled "The Riders of the Plains;' the piece celebrated the valor of the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), who had arrived on the prairies four years earlier to establish Canadian author­ ity in the region. After describing the myriad challenges met and overcome by the constabulary during its famed march to the West in 1874, the poem reaches its crescendo in the final stanza: Our mission is to plant the right Of British freedom here­ Restrain the lawless savages, And protect the pioneer. And 'tis a proud and daring trust To hold these vast domains With but three hundred mounted men­ The Riders of the Plains. The poem soon became the best-known verse about the Mounties, and in­ spired later writers to add their own stanzas to the original. l Although W. S. no doubt believed the Mounties were peerless, just six years later a Texas woman named Mary Saunders Curry drafted a paean to the Texas Rangers that echoed the tributes heaped by the Canadian poet upon the Mounted Police. Of the typical Ranger, Curry wrote in 1884: He stands our faithful bulwark Against the savage foe; Through lonely woodland places

6

Instruments of Incorporation

Our children come and go. Our flocks and herds untended 0' er hill and valley roam; The ranger in the saddle Means peace for us at home.2 While Curry's poem seems to have been intended only for the amusement of Captain L. P. "Lam" Sieker and the men of Ranger Company D, it, too, enjoyed broad circulation, suggested by its reprinting in a state periodical some eight years later.3 The parallels between the verses are striking. For instance, both writers evoke the forbidding landscapes of their respective Great Plains frontiers, and each identifies the chief responsibility of the police as protecting (white) settlers from "savage" Indians. And yet even a passing glance at the poems uncovers some revealing differences. W. S. emphasizes the Old World tra­ ditions undergirding the NWMP, as well as the aim of the force to "plant the right of British freedom" in the West-in other words, to bring justice to areas then beyond Ottawa's control. There is no mention of such high­ minded duties anywhere in Curry's poem; rather, she stresses throughout the importance of Ranger vigilance in keeping Anglo-Texans safe from the terrors of murder and theft. Though of dubious literary quality, the poems are useful in opening a window onto the Rangers, Mounties, and the transnational Great Plains frontier they policed during the late nineteenth century. For one thing, the verses attest to the powerful resemblances linking the two constabu­ laries, which were formed at virtually the same moment, for nearly iden­ tical reasons, and to patrol similar environments. Moreover, the authors' unabashed celebrations of the police underscore the intensive process of mythmaking that has surrounded the constabularies from the moments of their inception right up to the present. But no less than such similari­ ties, the poems also call attention to the significant differences between the conditions faced and the means employed by the Rangers and the Mounties as they incorporated the hinterlands of Texas and the North­ West. If in the end their efforts produced overlapping results at the far edges of the Plains, Ranger violence contrasted with Mountie restraint reveals much about the forces themselves and the societies that deployed them.

1. The Great Plains

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