The Cheyenne Club and the Cattle Barons

In the eighteen eighties, a visitor arriving in Cheyenne from the east might have been surprised to find, in this frontier railroad town at six thousand feet, one of the most exclusive private clubs on the continent. The Cheyenne Club stood at Seventeenth and Warren Avenue, founded by young men from prominent eastern American, British, and European families who had come west to run cattle ranches on the open range.

Their timing was excellent. Beef prices were high, land was cheap by eastern standards, and the open range seemed inexhaustible. Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, founded in the early eighteen seventies, assembled at the Cheyenne Club to eat French cuisine, drink imported wines, and manage what historians have described as a de facto territorial government. Four of their members sat in the United States Congress. They shaped the laws that governed the territory they ranched across.

The system had a logic that suited them: cattle barons controlled the open range, set roundup rules, and employed range detectives to investigate rustling accusations, a category that sometimes included legitimate homesteaders who had simply registered a brand and filed a claim.

The winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighty-seven ended the golden age. Temperatures dropped far below zero across the northern plains; blizzards buried the range for months. The great die-off that followed, called the Big Die-Up, killed between fifty and ninety percent of cattle herds across Wyoming and Montana. The club's membership roster thinned considerably after that. The debts, the dead cattle, and a conflict with homesteaders that was still approaching would reshape everything the barons had built here.