During this time he invested most of his wages in cattle, which he convinced his employers to let him keep, despite the fact that on Wyoming ranges at least, (most ranchers frowned on cowboys owning personal herds. Despite his inexperience as a manager, Kendrick made a success of the OW, returning profits to the owners on an annual basis despite weakened herds and an overgrazed countryside. The absentee owners – non-ranching businessmen from Chicago, Milwaukee and Omaha – hired Kendrick to take over operation of the main ranch, known as the OW, on Old Woman Creek north of Lusk. One of these was the Converse Cattle Company. Cattle and sheep died by the thousands, and bankruptcy claimed dozens, if not hundreds, of victims. In 1886-87, a disastrous winter brought financial ruin to most of Wyoming’s livestock industry. Kendrick at the age of around 13, in Texas, ca. Later, he relocated to a ranch near Lusk, where he eventually hired on as foreman of the Converse Cattle Company, a large cattle operation running out of east-central Wyoming. Kendrick’s first Wyoming home was on the Charles Wulfjen ranch north of Cheyenne soon he became foreman of the outfit. … The element of danger that was a part of almost every day’s experience did not detract from the fascination of the trip. This second trip was just as difficult, yet just as fascinating:Īfter a hard night’s work, with stampeding cattle and the elements, every man would swear that that trip would be his last, but I never knew a man to give up his work on the Trail because of its physical hardships, and I knew men at that time who had been over the Trail eight or ten times. In 1884, Kendrick made another trip to Wyoming, this time as foreman of an outfit owned by the Wulfjen brothers. I do not remember coming in contact with or seeing a wire fence between Fort Worth, Texas, and the head of the Running Water in Wyoming. We never saw a single habitation of man from a point in Texas, fifty miles south of Red River, until we reached Dodge, Kansas, a distance of 400 miles. Moving three thousand head of rangy cattle, they averaged about eighteen miles a day: In 1916, Kendrick recalled that the trip took five months, from early April to the end of August. Through the ministrations of the camp cook, he survived and rode the dusty end of the herd through Oklahoma’s Indian Territory, past the wild life of Dodge City, Kan., across the North Platte River in Nebraska, and into the open ranges of eastern Wyoming Territory. Kendrick nearly died of stomach inflammation before he ever got out of Texas. The turning point in his life came in 1879, at the age of twenty-two, when he signed on with the Snyder-Wulfjen Brothers of Round Rock, Tex., to help bring a herd of steers from Matagorda Bay on the Gulf of Mexico to the grasslands of Wyoming. One of his first jobs was breaking horses for room and board. Kendrick rarely spoke of his early childhood, preferring to begin his personal anecdotes around the time he first went out on his own as a fledgling cowboy. Any education he needed thereafter he obtained on his own, usually around a campfire. During these years Kendrick attended school sporadically, finally finishing for good around the fifth or sixth grade. Some were distantly affectionate, others downright brutal in their treatment of the two orphans. and his younger sister, Rosa, were shuttled back and forth among aunts, uncles and a variety of older half-brothers and sisters. Though John Harvey had left behind a considerable estate, it was lost during the family’s backing of the Confederate cause during the Civil War.įor years, John B. John Harvey’s widow, Irish immigrant Anna Maye Kendrick, died of fever three years later, leaving two children to fend for themselves. His father, Georgia-born cotton farmer John Harvey Kendrick, drowned in 1860 while attempting to ford a river. John Benjamin Kendrick, one of the most remarkable politicians Wyoming has seen, rose from poverty to great wealth and later to the pinnacle of political power.īorn in Cherokee County, Texas, in 1857, he was orphaned at an early age.
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