As we were driving around Sheridan, we kept seeing signs on the highway for Trail End State Historic Park, so of course we had to go explore. John Benjamin Kendrick was one of the most remarkable politicians Wyoming has ever known. He rose from poverty to great wealth, and then later to the pinnacle of political power in the U.S. Senate. Born in Cherokee County, Texas, in 1857, John was orphaned at an early age. His father, Georgia-born cotton farmer John Harvey Kendrick, drowned in 1860 while attempting to ford a river. His mother was an Irish immigrant who died of fever three years after her husband, leaving two children to fend for themselves. Though John’s father had left behind a considerable estate, it was lost during the family’s backing of the Confederate cause during the Civil War. [This information and further information in this post about his history are from the Wyoming History Encyclopedia page on John Kendrick.
John’s childhood and life as a cowboy
For years, John and his younger sister, Rosa, were shuttled back and forth among aunts, uncles, and a variety of older half-brothers and sisters. Some were distantly affectionate, others downright brutal in their treatment of the two orphans. During these years Kendrick attended school sporadically, finally finishing for good around the fifth or sixth grade. Any education he needed thereafter he obtained on his own, usually around a campfire.
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. One of his first jobs was breaking horses for room and board. 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. [This was a significant connection for Kendrick over the years.]
Kendrick nearly died of stomach inflammation before he ever got out of Texas. Through the help 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, Kansas, across the North Platte River in Nebraska, and into the open ranges of eastern Wyoming Territory.
In 1916, Kendrick recalled that the trip took five months, from early April to the end of August. Moving three thousand head of rangy cattle, they averaged about eighteen miles a day.
In 1884, Kendrick made another trip to Wyoming, this time as foreman of an outfit owned by the Wulfjen brothers. This second trip was just as difficult, yet just as fascinating.
learning how to run a ranch
Kendrick’s first Wyoming home was on the Charles Wulfjen ranch north of Cheyenne [southern Wyoming], and soon he became foreman of the outfit. 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. [Lusk is still in southeast Wyoming but north of Cheyenne.]
In 1886-87, a disastrous winter brought financial ruin to most of Wyoming’s livestock industry. Cattle and sheep died by the thousands, and bankruptcy claimed dozens, if not hundreds, of victims. One of these was the Converse Cattle Company.
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. 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. 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.
In 1889, Kendrick moved the entire OW operation – cattle, horses and cowboys – to the Hanging Woman Creek drainage in southeastern Montana’s Big Horn County. Here he found plenty of water, forage and room for expansion.
purchased majority ownership
In January 1897, after much debate with the absentee owners, Kendrick purchased majority ownership of the Converse Cattle Company – including the OW – for the relatively low price of $38,000. The purchase price included all the company’s cattle at seventeen dollars a head (calves thrown in for free), 213 head of horses, plus a seventy-five percent interest in the ranch and all of its equipment.
This became the basis for the Kendrick Cattle Company, which eventually encompassed more than 210,000 acres of deeded and leased land in southern Montana and northeastern Wyoming.
time to settle down with a wife
Shortly after moving the herds to Montana, Kendrick became reacquainted with a young woman he had known for ten years. Eula Wulfjen (1872-1961) was the teenaged daughter of Charles Wulfjen, the man who had hired Kendrick for his first cattle drive back in 1879. Educated at finishing schools in Colorado and Texas, and known as an accomplished musician and artist, Eula was no delicate city girl. She had spent most of her childhood on the Mule Shoe ranch north of Cheyenne, where she learned to ride before she even learned to walk.
As reported by Frances Parkinson Keyes in Delineator Magazine, John and Eula first met when she was only seven years old. She grew very fond of him as a child and would tell people she planned to marry him when she grew up. But when she was seventeen, Eula, Keyes wrote that she “began to realize she had ceased to think of him as merely a friend of her father’s and to consider that her childish remarks about marrying him when she grew up had perhaps been prophetic.” The couple married in Greeley, Colorado, and moved to the OW following an extended honeymoon through the eastern United States.
life on the ranches
In the basement was a display about the ranches that the Kendricks’ family owned. The Kendricks had three ranches by the time they moved into Trail End. The headquarters and main ranch was the OW in Montana, which is where the family lived before moving into their mansion. Then they began building the LX Bar, followed by the K Ranch, both in eastern Wyoming. Eventually, the Kendrick Cattle Company grew to include seven more ranches: the E-U, Ceded Strip, Forks, 76, 77, Cabin Creek, and Hanging Woman Camps.
The Kendrick family’s main ranch, the OW, is in southern Montana and practically borders both the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations. Their daughter Rosa-Maye noted in her diary that in October 1913, she and her family went to the Crow Fair at Crow Agency, Montana, to watch a powwow, and then to visit the nearby Little Bighorn Battlefield. She stated that the “Reservation is one of the most beautiful communities in the North West. You can close your eyes and almost fancy that Bands of Indians and wild horses roam the range again.”
In the previous photo the Cheyenne are shown as visiting the family at their OW Ranch. John Kendrick’s standing rule was that any tribal member who visited was invited to stay for a meal. This was not only good hospitality, but a culturally-appropriate invitation to extend.
cattle companies
Mr. Kendrick got his first real break in the cattle business when he took over as superintendent of the ailing Converse Cattle Company in 1888. Devastated by the hard winter of 1886-87, the Converse was in receivership and about to go under.
One of John’s first actions was to move the CCC’s hungry herds—most bearing the OW brand—from the overgrazed land around Lusk, Wyoming, north to the splendid grasslands of Hanging Woman creek in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming. He also began making plans to buy the company from its absentee owners.
John Kendrick was a progressive thinker, especially when it concerned his cattle. He had seen too many animals die from drought and malnutrition to allow them to continue roaming the plains without a reliable source of food and water.
The K Ranch location along the banks of Powder River in eastern Sheridan County served as the center of his haying operation. It was also the site of an extensive irrigation project, including the Clear Creek dam that was built in 1916.
Although he started out with rangy Texas Longhorns, Kendrick was one of the earliest Northern Plains cattlemen to utilize registered livestock. His carefully controlled Hereford breeding program resulted in sturdy, marketable animals as early as 1900.
diorama of the OW Ranch on Hanging Woman creek in southeastern Montana
See the outhouse in the left-hand corner?
politics changed everything
Before John got into politics, he made all the decisions on his ranches. But after being elected governor in 1914, he knew he had to make some management changes. Rather than bring in outside influences, he relied on family—a brother-in-law, nephews, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews.
At that point John’s son, Manville Kendrick, took over the reins as president of the Kendrick Cattle Company and stayed in that role until the ranches were sold some 50 years later.
Kendrick in politics (information also taken from Wyoming History Encyclopedia page on John Kendrick)
State politics: After trying once for a local position and failing, Kendrick, well known around the state, he was finally elected in 1910 to the State Senate from Sheridan County. In 1912, the Republican presidential vote split bitterly between incumbent Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, who was trying for a third term as president under the new Bull Moose or Progressive party. The result was the election of the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. [We learned about this in part 33 when we were at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, ND.]
Early in his career, in an effort to protect his interests and those of the Democratic Party, Kendrick purchased controlling interest in two influential newspapers, the Sheridan Enterprise and the Cheyenne State Leader. Such connections allowed him and his party to balance the harsh coverage of the state’s leading Republican papers, including the Sheridan Post and the Cheyenne Tribune.
Also that year, state legislatures elected U.S. senators for the last time. In Wyoming, Democrats nominated Kendrick. Like the nation as a whole, the Wyoming Legislature was bitterly divided, and Kendrick lost his senate bid to the longstanding Republican incumbent.
Governor: In 1914 Kendrick ran for governor, and defeated a Republican a Cheyenne lawyer in a relatively civil campaign. In office, he advanced many of the Progressive causes of the time. As a state senator, he had helped secure the passage of Wyoming’s first game laws; as governor, he enforced them. As governor, Kendrick and the Legislature in 1915 established a state workmen’s compensation system, a public utilities commission, passed a constitutional amendment allowing for lending of public money to farmers, and worked to extend women’s rights, among other issues.
U.S. Senator: In 1916, after only two years as governor, people began pressuring him to run again for the U.S. Senate. He defeated the incumbent by a comfortable 3,000 votes, despite his opponent’s charges of corruption for having bought nearly 10,000 well-watered acres of state lands while he was governor and thus president of the state land board. These charges were true, and Kendrick had acted in violation of state law. But he proved to be too popular in a year when Democrats also were sweeping the national elections to be harmed by the negative publicity.
Because he was successful in getting bills passed that benefited his ranching and farming constituents, he remained enormously popular in Wyoming and was re-elected to the Senate two more times, in 1922 and 1928.
No matter what the newspapers said about him [in and out of the state], Kendrick remained unbeatable. It was suggested that in the election of 1934, he be nominated by both the Republican and Democratic parties and then unanimously acclaimed senator. His name was even bandied about in connection with the White House. Even so, Kendrick stated that he planned to retire at the end of his third term, in 1934. At age seventy-six, he was the oldest serving man in the Senate. He wanted to return to his Sheridan home, Trail End, to enjoy his grandchildren and relax during his remaining years.
Kendrick’s legacy
John Kendrick’s legacy to Wyoming is considerable. Not only did he help uncover the illegal leasing of the state’s oil reserves at the time of the Teapot Dome scandal in the early 1920s, he helped to establish compensation laws to benefit injured workers. He worked to bring an end to the meatpacking monopoly that was strangling American farmers and consumers alike. He was influential in movements to protect such landmarks as Yellowstone and the Tetons. And he worked to bring water to the state’s farmers through the Alcova, Seminoe, and Pathfinder projects. The federal Kendrick Project, bringing water to farmers along the North Platte River below Alcova Dam, bears his name.
He also established a firm example of long-term success as a Democratic politician in a Republican state. He did it with his humorous charm, thick skin, broad intelligence, and cheerful willingness to collaborate with political opponents. What a wonderful look at this man and what he achieved during his lifetime in Wyoming.
In the next post we’ll walk around the house and the grounds and see how the family lived while in town.
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