In the spring of 1869 Print joined in his first drive north, adding 800 head to a herd being assembled by Captain E. L. Price. The drive terminated at Ft. Kearny, Nebraska.
After the longhorns had been delivered, Print and his sidekick Jim Kelley rode north into what is now Buffalo, Custer, Sherman and Valley counties, and was amazed by what he saw. On the river bottoms the bluestem grass reached to the shoulders of his horse. On the hills, hock deep, grew buffalo grass which even the Texans knew had wintered a larger number of buffalo per square mile than any other grass on the continent. Returning to Ft. Kearny they had ridden one hundred miles without seeing a single settler or a single Texas cattle thief. And all this within one day’s drive of the Union Pacific. He counted out his net from the drive and filled his saddlebag with $15,000 in gold coins.
“They start banks with $10,000,” he said to Jim.
Three very profitable years later, in May of 1872, Print, by now one of the real cattle kings of the plains, headed north out of the Olive pens with a herd of 3000 longhorns. The herd, which would have netted $20,000 in a Texas sale, promised a take of $60,000 to $70,000 at the Ellsworth, Kansas UP railhead. After a particularly difficult drive north, on July 19 he sold the herd for in excess of $71,000 in gold coins. The men had endured nearly three rough months on the trail, and Print opted for a three-day rest before heading back south. Cow towns being what cow towns were in those days, it will come as no surprise that the drinking and the gambling led to more than rest and relaxation.
The proprietors of the Ellsworth Billiard Saloon were no strangers to cowboy excesses and required those entering the establishment to place their guns and knives on the back bar. Print complied but could not suppress a twinge of uneasiness. For ten hectic years his six-shooter had almost never been out of reach, day or night. At least ten times this vigilance had saved his life. Times without number, he knew, the presence of the weapon had prevented violence.
Comply he did, and with complex consequences. An aggrieved gambler, one Jim Kennedy, took great offense at Print’s public characterization of him as “a no-good saloon cowhand who let the other Texans do the work and risk their lives on the trail while he devised means of taking their money away from them after payday.” Kennedy, fortified by the town’s chief and widely available lubricant, tracked Print down at the saloon’s poker table, walked up behind him, and drew a concealed pistol hidden under his shirt. Quick thinking by another player knocked Print to the floor but couldn’t stop Kennedy from firing two shots into a helpless Olive. They struck Print in the groin area, entering the hip close to the shrapnel wound he’d received at the Shiloh battle. Jim Kelley, never far from his friend’s side, disabled Kennedy before he could fire a final shot that would have clearly killed Olive.
The complex consequences of Print’s decision to table his gun?
For one, another near fatal encounter that Print vowed would be his last unarmed moment. And two, in the weeks it took for his wounds to heal, his room became a gathering place for the cattlemen moving through Ellsworth. Conversations and subsequent calculations convinced Print that the Platte Valley’s combination of grasses, soils, weather and proximity to the UP outweighed the similar considerations of his Texas operation. And he counted one big bonus in the Platte Valley column, no Texas rustlers. Print understood that the future belonged to the ranchers who maintained a permanent range near the railroad. That strong, straight-line steel wind from the east changed everything.
Radical Winds ~ by Steve Buttress, posted by Chuck Peek