Cattle Kingdom

Cattle in Texas

• Indian removal opened the Great Plains to the cattlemen.

• Cattle introduced by the Spaniards. • By the close of the Civil War 5 million

longhorns could be purchased for $3 or $4 a head, while similar cattle brought $40 a head on the northern market.

• This price differential was responsible for the spread of the cattle kingdom

• Starting in the Southwest, American cattle and sheep raisers spread through the Great Plains, an unclaimed land mass that had been avoided by settlers on the mistaken notion that it was too dry for growing crops.

• Defying Indians and outlaws – and sometimes common sense – they set up ranches from Texas to Montana and from Kansas to California.

• Nearly everywhere they went stock raising became the first lasting business.

• From 1866 to 1886, the heyday of Western ranching, more than 10 million cattle and one million sheep shipped to market in the East.

• Created jobs for some 40,000 cowboys and herders, funded communities inhabited by half a million people and kept another million in the East and Midwest busy processing and transporting meat products.

• Cheep or even free land for the taking in the early days, a number of cattlemen put together great ranches that covered several hundred thousand acres.

• Sometimes a million acres or more. • Survival was never easy. • In many places ranchers were on their own for

years and even decades before they could count on effective protection from soldiers, lawmen, and the courts.

• During that period they had to defend themselves against not only Indians but also rustlers, squatters and one another.

• Also had to cope with disasters beyond their control.

• There were winters of killing cold, summers of wasting drought, market prices that fluctuated unpredictably and financial panics in the East that undid years of perilous Western toil.

The Biggest Ranchers

• Usually the toughest and most resilient. • Texan Richard King fought for several years to

hold his ranch against organized rustlers, suffering the loss of some 50,000 cattle.

• Texan Charles Goodnight fought the Comanches as a Texas Ranger, went broke at least twice, then put together a million-acre domain in an enormous canyon in the Panhandle.

• Californian Henry Miller, an immigrant butcher boy who came West with six dollars in his pocket, built a ranching empire that spread over three states at the peak controlling around 15 million acres.

Age of the Cowboy

Age of the Cowboy

• It wasn’t just beef - it also created the single most beloved, celebrated, talked about, and sung about worker in the American history.

• Cowboys embody a very powerful – very American - myth of freedom and self-sufficiency.

• But from the cold, hard perspective on economic reality, cowboys were the poorest of the poor.

• Dirty, dangerous, lonely, and poorly paid, cowboy was a job for desperate men: – down-and-out ex-Confederates who had lost all

they owned; – liberated black slaves who, suddenly masterless,

found themselves at loose ends; – Indians, struggling at the bottom of the

socioeconomic ladder; and – Mexicans, sharing that bottom rung.

The Trail Drive

• On the ranch, the cowboy’s principal job was to ride over an assigned stretch of range and tend the cattle, doing whatever needed to be done.

• The most demanding labor was the trail drive, in which cowboys moved a heard of cattle – perhaps as small as 500 head or as large as 15,000 – to northern ranges for maturing or to market at railhead cattle towns like Abilene, Ellsworth, and Dodge City, Kansas; Pueblo and Denver, Colorado; and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

• Distances were often in excess of 1,000 miles over four principal cattle trails.

• Hazards of the trails were almost as numerous as the herds themselves: – storms, – floods, – drought, – stampede, – rustlers, – hostile Indians.

• Pay was about $100 for three or four months’ work.

• These drives began in 1866 when drovers started northwest from Texas with 226,000 cattle in bands of 100 head each, bound for the railroad at Sedalia, Missouri.

• Few reached their destination, for the resistance of Missouri farmers, and the difficulty of driving wild cattle across the rough Ozark Plateau, proved to be nearly insurmountable obstacles.

• To overcome these an Illinois meat dealer, Joseph M. McCoy, in 1867 built a new terminal point for the Long Drive at Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

• In he next four years 1 ½ million cattle were driven over the Chisholm Trail to that town.

• After 1871, most of the drives were to Ellsworth and later Dodge City as the railroad expanded.