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 selfsufficiency.
• 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:
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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.