Cowboy Crime

The cowboys’ unemployment rate increased at the end of the nineteenth century because the cattlemen’s need for employees abated with the decrease in the size of their herds and because their methods of controlling and transporting herds improved rapidly with the passage of time. Livestock that had already been famished and weakened by the summer drought of 1886 were then starved, suffocated, or frozen to death by the winter blizzards of 1886/1887 and killed by barbed-wire fences that prevented the cattle from escaping the snow drifts that accumulated on the fenced-in frontier. In the 1890s, economically depressed cattlemen cut expenses by building more fenced-off enclosures, by shipping their stock to market over railway lines that crisscrossed the West, and by firing cowboys who had guarded the cattlemen’s livestock on unenclosed pastures and who had then driven livestock to market. Now unable to find positions in ranching, and unwilling to settle down in town as merchants or businessmen, cowboys sometimes resorted to cutting the fences and to rustling the stock of their former employers. Stealing, rebranding, and selling the cattle that they stole allowed cowboys to support themselves by using skills that they had acquired as workers on the unfenced frontier. Often, however, they were caught by the cattlemen’s livestock detectives, tried in courts for their crimes, convicted by juries, and condemned to serve time in prison.

Noting the former occupations of convicts in rosters, western prisons suggested a correlation between the decline of the cattle industry and the development of a depressed cowboy class, which attempted to survive by turning to cattle theft in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1892, for example, the Wyoming prison in Laramie held six men who referred to themselves loosely as ‘cowboys.’ It held eight of these men in 1893, fourteen in 1894, sixteen in 1895, and twenty-six in 1896. . . . Cowboys appeared more frequently in New Mexico’s prison system than any other professional group, with the exception of miners. Few of them passed through the system in the 1880s and 1890s, but nineteen cowboys had served time in the penal institution by 1902 and fourteen had served for having rustled livestock from ranchers and cattlemen. . . .

[Cowboys] also constituted a significant percentage of Montana State Prison’s population. . . .These records show that no cowboys entered the prison in the 1870s, when the cattle industry expanded and prospered. But one to four cowboys reported to prison each year during the following decade, and even more men did so in the years after that. The records list seven cowboys in 1892, eleven in 1893, and, in 1894, twenty-six men who describe themselves as ‘cowboys,’ ‘herders,’ ‘horsemen,’ ‘horsebreakers,’ and ‘horsetrainers.’

^{Source: Allmendinger, Blake. The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 86-87.}