We don’t normally think of cowboys going on strike as a protest against unfair labor practices and big corporations because cowboys are usually too busy being iconic for such diversions and because, as we all know, a cowboy’s work is never done.
In 1883, in the wild and wooly cowtown of Tascosa on the banks of the Canadian River, a group of cowboys got mad as hell and announced to the owners of five big Panhandle ranches that they weren’t going to take it anymore. For a little more than two months in 1883, somewhere between 160 and 200 cowboys (estimates vary) went on strike in what is known as the Great Cowboy Strike of 1883, even though it wasn’t all that great.
The strike happened at a time when both the cattle business and the wild plains country of the Panhandle were in transition. The buffalo were gone and with them the Comanche, who depended on the buffalo. The cattle drives were over and the railroads had arrived. A lot of the old ranch owners were also gone, their places taken by investors who were apt to refer to the cowboys as “cow servants.”
The LIT was owned by Scottish investors. The LX and LS were owned by East Coast bankers. Businessmen William M.D. Lee and Albert Reynolds owned the LE Ranch and its more than 20,000 head of cattle. The biggest of the area ranches, the XIT, was owned by a Chicago syndicate that owned more than two million acres of Panhandle land in exchange for building the state capitol. The other big ranch, the Anchor-T, fired all of its striking cowboys as soon as the strike was announced.
Cowboys were among the original long-hours, low-pay workers. They worked sunup to sundown in all kinds of weather doing frequently dangerous work, eating two meals a day and sleeping on the ground unless they were among the pampered few who had tents. On average, they received $30 a month, or about a dollar a day. The work has always been romantic only to those who are not actively engaged in it, and that was especially true for these hired hands.
In the old days before the syndicates and absentee owners, cowboys might receive some calves in addition to their salary, or they could take some unbranded mavericks and work their own herds out on the range; many a future Panhandle rancher got his start that way.
The syndicates put an end to all that up-by-the-bootstraps nonsense. They didn’t give away calves, and all mavericks found on ranch property became property of the ranch. This change, more than salary, was at the heart of the cowboys’ discontent. “There was even talk among the ‘big bosses’ of firing men for wearing six shooters or getting drunk,” Frederick Rathjen noted in his book “Tascosa: Its Life and Gaudy Times.” “What next?”
... After the strike ended there was a dramatic increase in rustling from what some have called The Get Even Cattle Company. The ranchers brought in Pat Garrett, famous as the alleged killer of Billy the Kid, to control the rustling.
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