Cat Tales of the Old West

So I began my foray into the history of frontier cats, beginning in my extensive library of western histories and biographies. Unfortunately, I found only limited references to cats in those books. In desperation, I turned to newspapers.com and entered “cats” in the search function. Immediately, a window into the past opened up for me on Old West cats. Doing a search for “cats” in all publications in the newspapers.com database between 1860 and 1900 identified 7,149,178 hits. For comparison, I searched for “dogs” and found 4,484,133 hits. Cats, it seemed, were on the minds of pioneers much more than dogs.

Though I came nowhere near viewing all 7.14 million cat references, I went through hundreds of them and found a broader picture of the colorful and often noisy history of frontier felines. No animal in the settlement of the Old West was more revered nor more reviled than the domestic cat, thanks largely to the law of supply and demand. Where cats were scarce, the demand for mousers was so great that dozens of entrepreneurs reaped exorbitant profits meeting the needs for pest control.

In towns where the cat population ran wild, residents demanded their feline companions shut up for a change so everyone could get a good night’s sleep. In fact, the screeching, yowling and caterwauling of cats most certainly kept more folks awake at night in frontier communities than the gunfire of desperadoes or the whoops and hollers of cowboys celebrating on Main Street. Not only did frontier cats make mews, but also news in papers that stretched the breadth of the westward migration from Missouri to California. If those papers are to be believed, cats were both the boon and bane of frontier existence and so newsworthy that editors plugged in stories not only about frontier cats but also their urbane though no more civilized counterparts back east.