Scots of the Wild West
By Bowen Pearse
The American West began to be widely settled by people of European descent after the Civil War ended in the mid-1860s, and as usual, when it came to exploration, the Scots were in the vanguard. Driven from their native land by brutal landlords, punitive governments and poverty—or in some cases a love of adventure and the urge to start a new life somewhere else—the Scots who settled the West helped to put their stamp on the development of the United States.
Of course, Scots had been emigrating to the U.S. for more than 200 years. One descendant who helped settle the West was John Chisholm who developed a business trading with Cherokee Indians in North Caroline and Tennessee. In 1814 he represented the Cherokees in Washington, D.C.
John's son Ignatius, a slave trader, married the daughter of the Cherokee Chief, Cork Tassle. Their son, Jesse, became an Indian representative and when the tribes were cleared from their homelands, Jesse Chisholm began marking out a wagon road from Kansas to the Indian Territory. Sadly, he died of cholera in 1868, never knowing that his name would be given to a major cattle trail based on the route he had marked out.
Scots followed many trades out West. A large number of Highlanders were among the first fur traders. A good number of these early Scottish settlers married into the Indian tribes. One of many successful marriages of Scots with Native Americans was that of Scotty Philip and a relative of Crazy Horse. Because of his wife's status, Philip gained access to Indian lands and made a great success of ranching near Pierre, South Dakota.
The general aim of the West's post-Civil War farmers was to increase the size of the herds in all the main species of cattle such as Longhorns. Now the Scots who had learned the "drover" trade back in Scotland became adept at moving herds of cattle over desolate distances between railheads dotted over the landscape of America. Major foreign investment in U.S. cattle—half of which was to be organized and funded from Scotland—was planned. A leading investor in the Rocking Chair Ranch syndicate, which had a cattle operation southeast of the Texas Panhandle, was a relative of Sir Dudley Coutts Major banks.
It's not surprising that in this environment, some Scots revered to the bad old ways of cattle rustling. Given the number of Scots in America however, these outlaws were just as likely to be shot dead by a Scottish sheriff leading a posse of Highlanders as they would have been had they poached cattle back in the old country.
Frontier life was tough and unforgiving. Even though employed, drovers, shepherds, cowboys and gauchos were often thought of as only marginally on the right side of the law. Their fellow settlers dreaded payday when local cowboys would come galloping into town anxious to spend their hard-earned dollars on whiskey. One witness noted that such occasions were "as rowdy and drunken as any Falkirk Fair."
The cowboy as Wild West icon was created as early as the 1840s but didn't capture the general imagination until around 1913 when Zane Grey's hugely successful novel Riders of the Purple Sage was published. Shortly thereafter, cowboy stories were developed for silent movies with actors such as William S. Hart and Tom Mix and later in the talkies, John Wayne. And Scots had been very much a part of that part of American history.
