Stampedes

Nights of lightning and rain, with the air full of tension, seemed to tighten the cattle's nerves to the point of stampede. And then a cannon shot of prairie thunder would set them off. But, even on clear, tranquil nights in the back of every herder's mind was the uneasy thought that a thousand things could make the cattle rise and run. Some of these things were ordinary, even trifling - a coyote's yelp or a horse's whinny, a startled jack rabbit or a jumping deer, the rattle of cooking pans, the flare of a match as a cowboy lighted a cigarette. One herd was spooked in daylight when a hen from a settler's cabin flapped across the trail; the cattle, when finally rounded up, refused to pass that cabin again. On another drive a shred from a cowboy's pouch of chewing tobacco lodged in a steer's eye, setting off a raging charge that resulted in the death of two riders and the loss of 400 cows.

Occasionally the mass of animals would take off for no reason at all. A herd that had broken once or twice was likely to go again and again (conversely, a herd might go the length of the trail without ever stampeding). In a number of herds half a dcozen troublemakers might take a "chronic fright, from which they never do recover," wrote Joesph McCoy. "They would rather run than eat, anytime. The stampeders may be seen close together at all times, as if consulting how to raise cain and get off with a burst of speed." McCoy held that "it is actually economy to shoot down a squad of these vicious stampeders." A few cowmen tranquilized stampeders by sewing shut their eyelids; by the time the thread rotted, in about two weeks, the animals were considerably meeker.

Oddly, when the cattle stampeded they uttered no sound at all. A trail hand sleeping off-watch would suddenly be aware of a deep rumbling, a trembling of the sod beneath him. He would know that the cattle were off, and as the trail boss bellowed "All hands and the cook!" the crew would run, stumbling through the dark to mount their night horses for a blind dash toward the point. The longhorns, though angular and ungainly to look at, ran with surprising speed, their hooves pounding and their horns clashing as they thundered along. A stampeding herd looked, in the words on one cowboy, like a "tempest of horns and tails". Charles Goodnight testified that stampeding cattle gave off bodily heat that "almost blistered the faces" of the men who were riding on the lee side.