Merced County CA Archives History - Books .....Cattle Industry And The No-Fence Law 1925 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/copyright.htm http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ca/cafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com February 1, 2006, 2:40 pm Book Title: History Of Merced County California CHAPTER XIII THE CATTLE INDUSTRY AND THE NO-FENCE LAW When those wagon-loads of immigrants began in 1868 and 1869 to pour into the country south of the Merced River, along Bear Creek and Mariposa Creek and down in the Sandy Mush and Dover countries, they found a situation existing such that there was bound to be a conflict before they could conquer the plains for wheat. Expressed in one word, the situation was "cattle." Wild horses likewise added to the picturesqueness of the situation, just as did also antelope, but these were no man's property—there was no one to raise his voice if the new grain-raisers dispossessed them. The cattle, while they may have looked just as wild to the casual eye, were property with strong and determined owners to fight for the wide pastures that made the cattle fat and the owners rich. We have caught a good many glimpses of this situation, along through earlier chapters, have seen how such men as John M. Montgomery, John B. Cocanour, John Ruddle, the Stevinsons and the Hildreths made trips to the States, largely to Missouri, and drove out bands of cattle along the long route which it took from early spring until fall to travel one way. These men knew pasture when they saw it, and it will help explain the growth of the cattle industry here if we remember the statement made advisedly by an experienced cattle man in 1924, that there are more cattle shipped from within a radius of twenty-five miles of Merced than from any other equal area in the world. Henry Miller knew cattle and cattle country, and it was not by accident that the Santa Rita, on the West Side of the county, became Miller's pride. The country was a cattle paradise, and men grew rich raising them. Cattle were the basis of practically all the fortunes built up in the county during the first fifteen years of its history. Cattle and Free Pasture.—The great plains, which later were to be reduced to private ownership and become the great wheat fields, were public domain, and the cattle roamed over them without charge or restriction and grew fat and multiplied. We have seen how, on the 1857 assessment roll, J. M. Montgomery was the richest man in the county, and how he was assessed for nearly 5000 head of stock and only 640 acres of land, the home ranch upon Bear Creek to which he brought his bride in the summer of 1854. The ranch was just a place to live, a base of operations. Even his rodeo ground was apparently not on this section but lower down the creek on public land. Before the end of the sixties Montgomery had come to be known as the Money and Cattle King of Merced County. Above him on Bear Creek and down near the modern Lingard were the Giveris family; out in the Le Grand section were William Johnson and Stoneroad and Kelly, down on Lower Bear Creek was John B. Concanour; at what is called the Shaffer Ranch now, were Neill Brothers, William and James; on the lower Merced were the Stevinsons, father and son; out towards where Planada is now was Harvey J. Ostrander, to mention only a few. Their cattle ran at will over the plains, mingled together. Once a year they held rodeos, gathered them up, branded them, sorted out one owner's stock from another's. Peter Fee, who was himself a cattle man in a small way, tells of attending a number of rodeos, and he quite frequently brought home a few head of his stock. By this annual roundup, aided by the gregarious instinct of the animals, did the owners convey to their stock the gentlest of hints about where home was. Naturally, except that they had less speed, the cattle roamed just about as freely and as far as the horses or the antelope. Not all were of the stock brought out from Missouri. We see on the 1857 assessment roll how stock cattle are divided into "American" and "Spanish." Some classified as "Spanish" probably were driven out from Texas; the greater part were doubtless of the stock brought in earlier by the Spaniards and Mexicans to the country just across the Pacheco Pass. A style of farming that raised such a product did not need much in the way of roads; the product walked to market on its own feet. The first market that attracted the pioneers of the industry was doubtless the mines in the nearby hills. Most of the cattle men had taken a brief try at the mines and knew from their own experience that there was a demand for meat. But the business outgrew this market and they drove cattle to San Francisco, Sacramento and Stockton. Sometimes it was the owners who drove them, sometimes professional drovers who came out into the cattle country and bought the stock. There were regular routes, regular stopping-places, varied sometimes as food and water requirements dictated. There were no banks except in the large cities, and payments were made in gold. Up in a big bend on the Cosumnes River a few miles this side of Sacramento, they used to hold the cattle on the way to that market for a few days to recoup from the long drive. E. W. Stockird, a grandson of Colonel Stevinson, tells or driving some three hundred head to Sacramento on one occasion and getting paid for them in gold—something like $15,000, and they carried it home on a horse in the saddle-bags on the horn of the saddle, and ruined the horse with the heavy weight on his shoulders. For the San Francisco market they used to drive the cattle to the Oakland side of the Bay, and the buyers would take them there. They began pretty early to run cattle and sheep into the Sierra Nevadas in the summer. Ostrander Lake and Peregoy Meadows are samples of place names in the mountains which commemorate this practice. John Muir, in his first summer in the Sierra Neva.das, went in to Tuolumne Meadows as a sort of consulting engineer to the sheep herder, and that was in 1869. Dr. J. B. Campbell, writing in Outdoor Life in August, 1922, tells of taking a band of horses from down towards San Luis Obispo across the San Joaquin Valley through Merced County and up the Stanislaus and down the Walker River into Nevada. When they reached the Walker they hadn't had any fresh meat for quite a while, and Dr. Campbell killed a calf. He says if Colonel Stevinson or any of his descendants are alive he extends his apologies for taking their calf. One of Colonel Stevinson's descendants, who is very much alive, assures us that such an apology would have been accepted as a matter of course—that it was the custom of the country to take an animal for food by anyone who was thus in need of it. But while such retail taking was entirely all right, woe to the taker who extended his operations to a wholesale scale. Down on the San Joaquin River near Fremont's Ford there stood for many years after the American occupation a bleached dead tree that was at once a landmark and a warning to cattle rustlers. In the latter part of 1852 the tree was alive; the country was then of course a part of Mariposa County. Sometime between August of that year, when J. J. Stevinson bought James Waters' place, and December, when he married Louisa Jane Cox, he was one of a group of cattle men who caught six Mexicans and a German rustling cattle. The seven were tried, found guilty and hanged to the branches of the tree. That the tree shortly afterwards died may perhaps have been taken as a grim omen by any gentleman inclined to go and take some other gentleman's cattle. Summary and outside the letter of the law, of course; but the main point, and the one usually missed by those who make novels or movies out of the story of the West, is that these men here on the plains, just as the miners were doing in the hills, were working out, with deliberation and their Anglo-Saxon capacity for self-government, the problem of supplying an orderly government where that which was more formally established was too far away and too weak to extend its arm to cover the situation. They went openly by day where the modern lyncher goes secretly by night, and that was the measure of the difference between them. These pioneers were working out one of the community's problems—and by and large, working it out justly, even if roughly. If most of the hanged were Mexicans, that was because most of the rustlers were Mexicans. Up between Snelling and Merced Falls the present county road runs between two large oak trees, and a story from early times that some stock rustlers had been hanged on their boughs, received practical corroboration a few years ago when some human bones were brought to light when the road was being .graded. As all human institutions are imperfect, however, this rough and ready justice sometimes made mistakes, and when it did they were hard to correct. Oldtimers over Snelling way tell of two Mexicans having been caught. By way of cross examination one of them had had a noose placed around his neck and the other end placed over a limb. His captors had just lifted him off the ground when the other Mexican chose that moment to make a demonstration by dashing off and firing a revolver which had not been taken away from him. As the demonstrator had expected, all of the Americans joined in chasing him; but as he had not expected, the one who had been holding the rope took a turn around a snag before joining the chase, and by the time the running Mexican had been caught the hanging one was dead. There were enough Mexicans who were lawless; and there was enough race feeling, so that old time cattlemen will tell you they used to be careful to keep their eyes on every Mexican they met so long as he was within the length of a riata of them. But it should not be concluded that all Mexicans were lawless, or that those who were law-abiding did not get a square deal. We have read in the files of the paper how Judge Belt shot a Mexican and gave himself up, and was discharged after an examination before a magistrate. We can also read in the files of a Mexican shooting and killing a county official and walking into Snelling and giving himself up, and pleading self-defense and being released by the examining magistrate. Square dealing and the capacity to govern themselves distinguished the men of those days, and it was this that enabled them, when the problem of adjusting themselves to the new order of things arose with the coming of the grain-growers, to settle that problem without human bloodshed. The grain men killed a considerable number of cattle; the cattle men or their vaqueros drove their cattle in the beginning upon some grain crops by night. But the representative men on both sides approached the problem soberly and with a real desire to solve it justly and peaceably. The nearest approach to human bloodshed seems, from the testimony of reliable men who were here at the time, to have been that referred to in the following particularly poor specimen of writing from the Argus of June 18, 1870, and with reference to this it may be truly said that the matter had been settled before this time. "Fight on the Plains.—A couple of ordinarily peaceable citizens of this county, residing near Plainsburg, having each fancied himself aggrieved, in consequence of the operation of the Trespass Law, got at loggerheads, and meeting on the open prairies a few miles south of that place, concluded to settle the dispute between the farmrs and stockmen by single combat. Each being armed with a Colt's revolver, they exchanged several shots, when both coming to the conclusion that prudence would dictate to them the necessity of holding one or two loads in reserve, ceased firing, as if by mutual consent. They fought on horseback, and charged and countercharged furiously as the battle progressed. Both the combatants escaped uninjured, we are pleased to say, yet it is reported that horseflesh suffered considerably." A reporter on a paper today who should turn in a story which concealed so many interesting facts, including the names of the fighters, would probably lose his job; but if you should chance to find a man now who was here at this time, it is probable you would find him just as reticent as Steele was in this story in the Argus. This incident, as already remarked, occurred after the fight was really all over with. Anyone who makes an examination of the early laws of California as to what should constitute a lawful fence, must be struck with the fact that an exceedingly good fence was required, better almost than might be expected to be required today. He will probably be surprised at this until he realizes that the few farmers had to fence the stock out instead of the owners fencing it in, and that the strength of the fences required before they should be liable before the law for the trespasses of their animals reflected the strength of the stockmen politically. The Trespass Law, the so-called No Fence Law, first passed in 1866 and applied to Marin, Yolo and part of Sacramento Counties, was therefore a revolutionary piece of legislation. It marked the beginning of the end of the old unrestricted cattle ranging. The act was entitled "An Act to Protect Agriculture, and to Prevent the Trespassing of Animals upon Private Property." It provided that an owner or occupant could take up animals trespassing upon his land, hold them a given number of days, give notice to a justice of the peace, and if the owner did not pay the damage they had done and pay for their keep at a rate provided, could have the trespassing animals sold to pay the damage and keep. It was by an amendment approved March 26, 1870, that this act was extended to apply to the part of Merced County east of the San Joaquin, as well as to some half a dozen other counties and parts of counties—Stanislaus, San Joaquin and parts of Solano, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Los Angeles. This extension of the act to these counties marked the end rather than the beginning of the fight, so far as Merced County was concerned at any rate. In 1868 a man named Pixley had about 1700 acres of grain on the banks of the Merced River. A bunch of cattle ran over a big part of it along in the spring before it had begun to joint and trampled a good deal of it into the ground. It looked pretty badly damaged and Pixley went to some of the cattle men for satisfaction. A group of them, Neill Brothers, Colonel Stevinson and several others, who amongst them owned the cattle that had done the damage, got together and named Colonel Stevinson to arrive at a settlement with Mr. Pixley. The result reflected a good deal of honor on both sides. They agreed that Pixley should harvest the trampled grain separately from the untrampled, keep account of the acres and bushels in each lot, and that the cattle men would pay him for the loss shown in this way. When the grain was harvested, Colonel Stevinson came around to settle, and Pixley reported that instead of their owing him money, he owed them. So they let it stand as it was. There were losses along during 1868 and 1869, as we have already seen from the paper of the time—crops trampled out by cattle. There were some cattle shot by the irate farmers, particularly some bulls. The oldtimes of near Merced will tell you of how they used to patrol their crops, how they used to drive the cattle and the wild horses away down towards the San Joaquin. The cattle men set their vaqueros to help keep their cattle off the grain, because they did not want them killed and also because they were fair men. But the vaqueros were far too few. In the spring of 1869 the stockmen and the grain men called a meeting at Patrick Carroll's ranch, known now usually as the Sheehy place, to adjust their differences. John M. Montgomery was a leader among the cattlemen and was known as just man. A good many wanted him to act as chairman. He declined on the ground that there were more grain men than cattle men, and that the chairman ought to be a grain man. Warner Oliver, a Methodist minister, and at that time the owner of the greater part of the site where Merced now is, was chosen chairman. Among the cattle men were Mr. Montgomery, the Neill brothers, William and James, N. B. Stoneroad, W. C. Turner, J. B. Cocanour, "Claibe" Dean, E. T. Givens, and a lot of others. Among the grain men were the two Healy brothers, former cattle men, Warner Oliver and his brother William, who lived on the north side of Bear Creek, L. R. Fancher, W. P. Fowler, and a still larger number of others. This meeting was about the end of March or the beginning of April. The stockmen, led by Mr. Montgomery, agreed that they would have to recognize the rights of the men who had bought the land. The two factions held separate sessions when it looked as if they might not be able to agree. The stockmen agreed that they would hold a big rodeo at the end of May and that they would move their cattle out of the grain lands, northward or southward, according to where they had ranged. Both parties agreed to do all they could to keep the cattle off the grain, and the grain men agreed not to kill cattle. They carried this out. The cattle men moved out. Montgomery with his cattle formed a partnership with W. S. Chapman, who had become the owner of an immense lot of land in the Valley, and the Chowchilla Ranch was the result. Down on the road towards El Nido on the left-hand side of the road, may still be seen a small part of the redwood picket fence of which Montgomery built about seventeen miles along the north border of the 48,000 acres that Chapman put into the partnership against Montgomery's 12,000 to 15,000 cattle. He built it out of redwood logs brought by water to Dover and split into pickets, and hauled overland by wagon, a line set between the old order and the new. Additional Comments: Extracted from: HISTORY OF MERCED COUNTY CALIFORNIA WITH A Biographical Review OF The Leading Men and Women of the County Who Have Been Identified with Its Growth and Development from the Early Days to the Present HISTORY BY JOHN OUTCALT ILLUSTRATED COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME HISTORIC RECORD COMPANY LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 1925 File at: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ca/merced/history/1925/historyo/cattlein329ms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.poppet.org/cafiles/ File size: 18.5 Kb