Cattle Drives
Europe
had few cattle drives but in the 16th century the Swiss operated
one over the St. Gotthard Pass to the markets in Bellinzona and
Lugano and into Lombardy in northern Italy. The drives had ended
by 1700 when sedentary dairy farming proved more profitable.
Long-distance cattle driving was traditional
in Mexico, California and Texas, and horse herds were sometimes
similarly driven. The Spaniards had established the ranching
industry in the New World, and began driving herds northward
from Mexico beginning in the 1540s.
Throughout most of the 18th and 19th
centuries, small Spanish settlements in Texas derived much of
their revenue from horses and cattle driven into Louisiana,
though such trade was usually illegal. Cattle driving over long
distances also took place in the United States, although
infrequently.
In 1790 the boy Davy Crockett helped drive
"a large stock of cattle" 400 miles from Tennessee into
Virginia; twenty years later he took a drove of horses from the
Tennessee River into southern North Carolina. Relatively
long-distance herding of hogs was also common. In 1815 Timothy
Flint "encountered a drove of more than 1,000 cattle and swine"
being driven from the interior of Ohio to Philadelphia. The
stock in settled areas was gentle, often managed on foot.
Movement of cattle
Cattle drives had to strike a balance between speed and the
weight of the cattle. While cattle could be driven as far as 25
miles in a single day, they would lose so much weight that they
would be hard to sell when they reached the end of the trail.
Usually they were taken shorter distances each day, allowed
periods to rest and graze both at midday and at night. On
average, a herd could maintain a healthy weight moving about 15
miles per day. Such a pace meant that it would take as long as
two months to travel from a home ranch to a railhead. The
Chisholm trail, for example, was 1,000 miles long.
On average, a single herd of cattle on a
drive numbered about 3,000 head. To herd the cattle, a crew of
at least 10 cowboys was needed, with three horses per cowboy.
Cowboys worked in shifts to watch the cattle 24 hours a day,
herding them in the proper direction in the daytime and watching
them at night to prevent stampedes and deter theft.
The crew also included a cook, who drove a
chuck wagon, usually pulled by oxen, and a horse wrangler to
take charge of the remuda, or spare horses. The wrangler on a
cattle drive was often a very young cowboy or one of lower
social status, but the cook was a particularly well-respected
member of the crew, as not only was he in charge of the food, he
also was in charge of medical supplies and had a working
knowledge of practical medicine.
Texas roots Texans
established trail driving as a regular occupation. Before Texas
broke away from Mexico in 1836, there was a "Beef Trail" to New
Orleans. In the 1840s the Texans extended their markets
northward into Missouri. The towns of Sedalia, Baxter Springs,
Springfield, and St. Louis became principal markets. During the
1850s, emigration and freighting from the Missouri River
westward caused a rise in demand for oxen. In 1858, the firm of
Russell, Majors and Waddell utilized about 40,000 oxen.
Longhorns were trained by the thousands for work oxen. Herds of
longhorns were driven to Chicago, and at least one herd was
driven all the way to New York.
The gold boom in California in the 1850s
created a demand for beef and provided people with the cash to
pay for it. Thus, though most cattle were obtained locally or
from Mexico, very long drives were attempted. Australians began
cattle drives to ports for shipment of beef to San Francisco
and, after freezing methods were developed, all the way to
Britain. In 1853 the Italian aristocrat Leonetto Cipriani
undertook a drive from St. Louis to San Francisco along the
California Trail; he returned to Europe in 1855 with large
profits.
During the American Civil War before the
Union seized the Mississippi River in 1863, Texans drove cattle
into the Confederacy for the use of the Confederate Army. In
October, 1862 a Union naval patrol on the southern Mississippi
River captured 1,500 head of Longhorns which had been destined
for Confederate military posts in Louisiana. The permanent loss
of the main cattle supply after 1863 was a serious blow to the
Confederate Army.
However, in 1865 at the end of the Civil
War, Philip Danforth Armour opened a meat packing plant in
Chicago known as Armour and Company, and with the expansion of
the meat packing industry, the demand for beef increased
significantly. By 1866, cattle could be sold to northern markets
for as much as $40 per head, making it potentially profitable
for cattle, particularly from Texas, to be herded long distances
to market.
Illinois Cattle were
driven out of Texas well before the Civil War, and to
destinations beyond Louisiana and Missouri. Illinois was a key
site during this time, both as an intermediate stop and as a
final destination. Many cattle were taken there to be fattened
on rich prairie grass or Midwestern corn. Then their journey
continued to the major cities of the east. Others ended up at
the slaughter houses of Chicago, before railroads crossed the
state.
Many men participated during this period.
Tom Candy Ponting and George Jackson Squires drove from Texas in
the mid-1850s. Isaac Funk and John T. Alexander were fattening
cattle on their Illinois farms before sending them to slaughter.
Others combined those actions, either on a one-time, or more
frequent, basis.
Cattle drive era The
first large-scale effort to drive cattle from Texas to the
nearest railhead for shipment to Chicago occurred in 1866, when
many Texas ranchers banded together to drive their cattle to the
closest point that railroad tracks reached, which at that time
was Sedalia, Missouri. However, farmers in eastern Kansas,
afraid that transient animals would trample crops and transmit
cattle fever to local cattle, formed groups that threatened to
beat or shoot cattlemen found on their lands.
Therefore, the 1866 drive failed to reach
the railroad and the cattle herds were sold for low prices. By
the next year, a cattle shipping facility was built west of farm
country around the railhead at Abilene, Kansas, and became a
center of cattle shipping, loading over 36,000 head of cattle in
its first year. The route from Texas to Abilene became
known as the Chisholm Trail, named for Jesse Chisholm who marked
out the route. It ran through present-day Oklahoma, which then
was Indian Territory, but there were relatively few conflicts
with American Indians, who usually allowed cattle herds to pass
through for a toll of ten cents a head. Later, other trails
forked off to different railheads, including those at Dodge City
and Wichita, Kansas. By 1877, the largest of the cattle-shipping
boom towns, Dodge City, Kansas, shipped out 500,000 head of
cattle.
At the close of the war Texas had probably
five million cattle - but no market. Late in 1865 a few cowmen
tried to find a market,, and in 1866 there were many drives
northward without a definite destination and without much
financial success. Cattle were also driven to the old but
limited New Orleans market, following mostly well-established
trails to the wharves of Shreveport and Jefferson, Texas.
In 1868, David Morrill Poor, a former
Confederate officer from San Antonio, drove 1,100 cattle from
east of San Angelo into Mexico over the Chihuahua Trail. This
event, the "Great Chihuahua Cattle Drive," was the largest
cattle drive attempted over that trail up to that time, but the
market was much better in Kansas than in Mexico, so most drives
headed north.
In 1867 Joseph G. McCoy opened a regular
market at Abilene, Kansas. The great cattle trails, moving
successively westward, were established and trail driving
boomed. In 1867 the Goodnight-Loving Trail opened up New Mexico
and Colorado to Texas cattle. By the tens of thousands cattle
were soon driven into Arizona. In Texas itself cattle raising
expanded rapidly as American tastes shifted from pork to beef.
Caldwell, Dodge City, Ogallala, Cheyenne, and other towns became
famous because of trail-driver patronage.
Chisholm Trail Main
article: Chisholm Trail
The Chisholm Trail was the most
important route for cattle drives leading north from the
vicinity of Ft. Worth, Texas,across Indian Territory (Oklahoma)
to the railhead at Abilene. It was about 520 miles long and
generally followed the line of the ninety-eighth meridian, but
never had an exact location, as different drives took somewhat
different paths.
Cow towns Cow towns
flourished between 1866 and 1890 as railroads reached towns
suitable for gathering and shipping cattle. The first was
Abilene, Kansas. Other towns in Kansas, including Wichita and
Dodge City, succeeded Abilene or shared its patronage by riders
fresh off the long trail. In the 1880s Dodge City boasted of
being the "cowboy capital of the world." Communities in other
states, including Ogallala, Nebraska; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Miles
City, Montana; and Medora, North Dakota, served the trade as
well. Amarillo, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls, all in Texas;
Prescott, Arizona, Greeley, Colorado, and Las Vegas, New Mexico
were regionally important.
The most famous cow towns like Abilene were
railheads, where the herds were shipped to the Chicago
stockyards. Many smaller towns along the way supported range
lands. Many of the cow towns were enlivened by buffalo hunters,
railroad construction gangs, and freighting outfits during their
heyday. Cattle owners made these towns headquarters for buying
and selling.
Cowboys, after months of monotonous work,
dull food, and abstinence of all kinds, were paid off and turned
loose. They howled, got shaved and shorn, bought new clothes and
gear. They drank "white mule" straight. Madames and
gambling-hall operators flourished in towns that were wide open
twenty-four hours a day. Violence and ebullient spirits called
forth a kind of "peace officer" that cow towns made famous—the
town marshal. Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were perhaps the
two best-known cow-town marshals. The number of killings was,
however, small by the standards of eastern cities.
End of the line By the
1880s, the expansion of the cattle industry resulted in the need
for additional open range. Thus many ranchers expanded into the
northwest, where there were still large tracts of unsettled
grassland. Texas cattle were herded north, into the Rocky
Mountain west and the Dakotas. However, continued overgrazing,
combined with drought and the exceptionally severe winter of
1886-87 wiped out much of the open-range cattle business in
Montana and the upper Great Plains. Following these events,
ranchers began to use barbed wire to enclose their ranches and
protect their own grazing lands from intrusions by others'
animals.
In the 1890s herds were still occasionally
driven from the Panhandle of Texas to Montana. However,
railroads had expanded to cover most of the nation, and meat
packing plants were built closer to major ranching areas, making
long cattle drives to the railheads unnecessary. Hence, the age
of the open range was gone and the era of large cattle drives
were over.
Modern cattle drives
Smaller cattle drives continued at least into the 1940s, as
ranchers, prior to the development of the modern cattle truck,
still needed to herd cattle to local railheads for transport to
stockyards and packing plants. Today, cattle drives are
primarily used to round up cattle within the boundaries of a
ranch and to move them from one pasture to another, a process
that generally lasts at most a few days.
Because of the significance of the cattle
drive in American history, some working ranches have turned
their seasonal drives into tourist events, inviting guests in a
manner akin to a guest ranch to participate in moving the cattle
from one feeding ground to the next. While horses are still used
in many places, particularly where there is rough or mountainous
terrain, the all-terrain vehicle is also used. When cattle are
required to move longer distances, they are shipped via truck.
Events intended to promote the western
lifestyle may incorporate cattle drives. For example the Great
Montana Centennial Cattle Drive of 1989 celebrated the state of
Montana's centennial and raised money for a college scholarship
fund as 2,400 people (including some working cowboys), 200
wagons and 2,800 cattle traveled 50 miles in six days from
Roundup to Billings along a major highway. Similar drives have
been sponsored since that time.

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