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Updated: July 15, 2025


Freight was hauled by the same company in wagons known as the "J. Murphy wagons," which were made in St. Louis. These wagons went out from Leavenworth loaded with six thousand pounds of freight each. A train usually consisted of twenty-five wagons and was known, in the vernacular of the plains, as a "bull-outfit"; the drivers were "bull-whackers"; and the wagon master was the "bull-wagon boss."

Russell stayed on the books, and Majors was the operating man on the Plains. The trains were wonderful to me, each wagon with its six yoke of oxen, wagon-masters, extra hands, assistants, bull-whackers and cavayard driver following with herds of extra oxen. I began at once making the acquaintance of the men, and by the end of 1854 I knew them all.

Soldiers from the garrison on pass, idle plainsmen, bull-whackers, adventurers of all kinds stranded here because of Indian activity, stray cowboys from the nearby valleys, thronged the numerous dives, seeking excitement. Women, gaudy of dress, shrill of voice, flitted from door to door through the jostling crowds.

"No more bull-whackers and mule-skinners 'whooping-it up'; no more Blackfeet and Piegans drinking alcohol and water, and cutting one anothers' throats. A nice, quiet time coming on the border Abe, eh?" The man looked at her queerly. She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes.

She knocked him down with a stove-lid lifter, and the admiring bull-whackers bore him off, leaving the lady in full possession of the ranch. When I visited her she had a man named Crow Joe working for her, a slab-sided, shifty-eyed person who later, as I heard my foreman explain, "skipped the country with a bunch of horses."

It was kept by a very capable and very forceful woman, with sound ideas of justice and abundantly well able to hold her own. Her husband was a worthless devil, who finally got drunk on some whisky he obtained from an outfit of Missouri bull-whackers that is, freighters, driving ox wagons. Under the stimulus of the whisky he picked a quarrel with his wife and attempted to beat her.

Smith and Davis agreed with the train captain, Jondo, in taking no chances, but most of the one hundred sixty bull-whackers stampeded like cattle against precaution, and rebelled at his rigid ruling. He had begun to tighten down upon us as we went farther and farther into the heart of a savage domain.

I couldn't get nothing out of them Mexican bull-whackers neither what they know'd wasn't half as much as the kid and I had to give it up. "Well, we kept moving along without having any more trouble for a week; them Ingins never following us as we 'lowed they would. I really enjoyed the trip such as I never had before.

We each had fifty dollars when we got to the gold country, and with it we bought an elaborate outfit. But there was no mining to be done save by expensive machinery, and we had our labor for our pains. At last, both of us strapped, we got work as timber cutters, which lasted only until we found it would take us a week to fell a tree. At last we hired out once more as bull-whackers.

Beverly and I were typical plainsmen in that we never spoke of these things to each other that is not the way of the plainsman. Our company had been organized at Council Grove three trains of twenty-six wagons each, drawn by three or four spans of mules or yoke of oxen, guarded by eightscore of "bull-whackers." And there were a dozen or more ponies trained for swift riding in cases of emergency.

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