Stopping Stampedes

Two or three cowboys, usually the best riders, spurred hard to get out in front of the stampeded. Then depending sonly on "the sureness of the horse's feet to keep from changing hells," they reined back to try to slow the charge. Meanwhile other hands at one side of the point pressed in to turn the herd. If the cattle refused to turn, the cowpunchers flailed their slickers in the faces of the leaders, or fired six-shooters into the ground close to the stampeders' ears. The leaders might dodge and go down and other cattle trample them at heavy cost in dead steers and broken bones and horns. After three or four terrifying miles the cattle usually began to circle, then mill. For the hands this was one of the most dangerous times, with the cows jammed together so that a trapped horseman might be jostled from his mount. At the end of one stampeded near the Blue River in Nebraska, when the milling cattle had stopped and had drifted bak to their bed-ground the horrified cowboys came upon the remains of a comrade who had fallen to the ground beneath the circling crush of hooves. Nothing was left but a gunn butt.

But while the cattle were still in the full run of a stampeded they rarely hurt men. Normally the charging cattle would split around a fallen rider. However, cowboys rarely cared to test this trait and on many occasions took prudent refuge behind the chuck wagons. One cowboy, caught in a stampede, fell from his horse onto the backs of the running cattle and was carried along for a quarter of a mile till he finally rolled safely off to one side. Another shaken but unhurt victim of a stampede in Kansas in 1874 was a settler living in a dugout house; the cattle caved in his roof, and 800 pounds of cow landed feet up on his bed.

Usually the only harm done on a stampede was to the animals -- and the cattleman's profits. In a four-mile run on a hot night a beef could lose up to 50 pounds, and a spooky herd would arrive at the railhead looking might stringy and unpalatable to it's buyer. Worse yet, it might be minus a fair number of cows; in the thunder of a stampede cattle bruised, crushed and gored one another. In the worst stampede in history, in July 1876, a big herd plunged into a gully near the Brazos River in Texas, crushed by those behind; when it was over 2,000 steers were either dead or missing.