The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause Jeff Wells Mark A. Lause, The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West. London: Verso, 2018. 304 pp. $29.95. The title of veteran working-class historian Mark A. Lause's The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West refers to an 1883 strike by cowboys in the Texas Panhandle. The book, however, is not as narrow as its title suggests. This is a broad history of the American labor movement during the 1880s. The Great Cowboy Strike will be of interest to scholars of the Midwest and a variety of other fields, including readers interested in agrarian and labor organizing, Populism, and violence in the West. Lause applies Marxist analysis to his subjects. For example, when he confronts the mythology of the cowboy as a rugged individualist, he describes cowboys instead as "grossly underpaid and overworked agricultural laborers" (vii). But—thanks to his dogged research in long-neglected newspapers and histories published more than a century ago—the results herein are far from predictable. Lause makes an intriguing contribution to the ongoing debates on the origins of the Knights of Labor, Farmers' Alliance, and the Populist movement [End Page 156] by rescuing the Industrial Brotherhood from obscurity. In contrast to previous scholars, who have paid little attention to the Industrial Brotherhood, Lause observes that it expanded from Jasper County, Missouri, to become the "primary national organization of American labor between 1874 and 1878." (30). Joshua A. Bodenhamer, the publisher of the People's Press in Carthage, Missouri, launched the organization in 1874 after the Grange refused to expand its membership or engage in politics. Andrew Warner St. John, a schoolteacher and farmer near Carthage, used his affiliation with the group to emerge as a national labor leader. The Industrial Brotherhood, Lause argues, inspired the reorganization and reinvigoration of the Knights of Labor. Scholars of Populism contest whether the earliest origins of the Farmers' Alliance arose from the Texas-based southern Alliance or from the northwestern Alliance. The latter was organized in upstate New York but promoted by Milton George's Chicago-based Western Rural newspaper. Lause finds the roots of both regional Alliances in the Kansas Settlers' Alliance. As the Industrial Brotherhood grew across the border, D. G. Campbell, a Greenback leader and recent arrival from New York, sent material on the Settlers' Alliance back to his old home. A Farmers' Alliance soon flourished there, and information about the group eventually found its way to the Western Rural. Lause contends that other participants in the Settlers' Alliance followed the cattle trails south to Lampasas County, Texas, where the Knights of Reliance, a precursor to the Alliance, formed in 1875. Lause links the violence that framed the emergence of the Alliance in central Texas with the labor unrest that occurred a few years later near the Panhandle town of Tascosa. In the early 1880s, the cowboys that drove cattle from ranches on the Texas Panhandle to railroad stockyards in Kansas and Nebraska or to ranches on the northern range earned about $30 a month. In early 1883, as the big ranchers prepared to round up and send herds north, two dozen cowboys signed a strike call and demanded that their employers agree to their terms by March 31. The cowboys sought a monthly wage of $50 for hands and $75 for wagon bosses. The strike lasted two and a half months. Although there is no evidence that the ranchers recruited or hired strikebreakers, reports circulated that the strikers threatened violence against replacement cowboys. Newspapers, repeating information provided by the ranch owners, alleged that the strikers planned to burn ranches and cut fences. The employers intended that such reports and allegations would justify the use of the state's armed power. [End Page 157] In the end, the state did not send troops to end the strike, and there was no violence associated with it. Reports indicated that the strikers settled for a wage increase to $42.50 a month for hands. A year later, wagon bosses earned $75 a month. Although...