Cattle Trails of the Prairies by Charles Moreau Harger

Cattle Trails of the Prairies

The number of cattle reaching Abilene in 1870 bounded to three hundred thousand, and almost a continuous line of bovine travelers was pouring over the Chisholm Trail. In order to facilitate the herds’ movements, surveyors were sent out to straighten the trail from the point where it entered Kansas to the shipping station. Fresh mounds of earth were thrown up to mark the route, and the drovers found considerable saving in distance. They spread the news of the efforts being made to accommodate the cattlemen, and the Texas ranch owners, appreciating these advantages as well as the rapidly increasing prices of stock in the Eastern markets, prepared to send forward still greater supplies.

Old Abilene, Kansas vintage postcard.

The ranches were, for the most part, in southern and southwestern Texas, and the hundreds of young men who, at the close of the war had sought fortune in the far Southwest, were just coming into a position to put some of their salable stock on the market. In 1871 nearly a million cattle were driven north. Six hundred thousand came to Abilene alone, while Baxter Springs and Junction City received half as many. For miles around the chief shipping points the stock was herded awaiting a chance to sell or ship. From any knoll could be seen thousands of sleek beeves, their branching horns glistening in the sunlight and their herders watchfully riding in the distance. Several counties of central Kansas were practically turned into cattle yards, and it seemed that the industry would soon absorb the energies of the entire state.

But it was the height of the wave. Prices fell off; wet weather and cold winds injured the cattle’s condition, and the so-called Spanish fever, always a terror to the Northerners, and which seemed ineradicable from the Texas cattle’s blood, was causing more trouble than usual The herds were held on the grazing grounds until fall, in the hope of better prices, but to no purpose. Finally, shipping was stopped entirely, and over three hundred thou-sand cattle were unsold. Every year there had been some carried over, either because of their being unsalable or as has been so general in late years, to fatten on the Northern corn; but this number was unprecedented. The drovers took their stock westward to the buffalo grass region, it being impossible to procure hay and corn in central Kansas for the great throng.

At the beginning of winter (1871-72) came a storm of sleet, putting an icy coat over the sod; and multiplied thousands of cattle and hundreds of horses died of cold and starvation. Some of the carcasses were skinned, but the majority were left for food for the wolves. A hundred thousand hides were shipped from three stations after the storm. The winter was severe throughout, and it was estimated that less than fifty thousand cattle lived through it. From herds of sixty and seventy thousand, only a few hundred survived. Like other booms in which the West has overreached itself, this one had its collapse.

Abilene's prestige was gone. Ellsworth, forty miles further west, became the shipping point on the Kansas Pacific. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad being nearly completed through the southern portion of the state, began to compete for the trade. Newton, where the road crossed the trail to Abilene, stopped many of the herds, and with Ellsworth, divided the claim to the title Abilene had held for several years, “The wickedest town in the West.”

Dodge City, Kansas, 1876.

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This description was afterward appropriated by Dodge City, and then, with the opening of the mining regions of Colorado, passed from the state and became the property of Leadville and Deadwood. It was of the new shipping point that another picturesque saying became popular, “There is no Sunday west of Newton and no God west of Pueblo.” Wichita, too, claimed attention from the drovers, and eighty thousand head went from there in 1872, while three times as many were shipped from the other towns combined. In 1873 four hundred and fifty thousand head were shipped from Kansas, and then again came a back-set in prices and weather conditions, but not equal to that of two years previous.

Soon after, Dodge City, on the Chisholm Trail's western offshoot to Ellsworth, being reached by the Santa Fe, took the more northern station’s trade as Newton had absorbed Abilene's, and for twelve years was the acknowledged shipping center for Texas cattle in the state. While the drives never reached such proportions as in 1871, they continued to be extensive until the building of the railroads across the Indian Territory and the establishment of shipping points in Texas itself. Even then they did not wholly cease, and many thousand head came straggling across the line each year, being marketed for Dodge City, Wichita, or other railroad points.

The opening of Oklahoma, in 1890, made another barrier, however, and the season of 1891 saw the last of the bovine exodus that through more than two decades had furnished employment and profit for a large portion of the West’s workers. Neither advantage nor convenience is now found in that method of marketing, and henceforth the only herds to wind their slow length over the once populous thoroughfares will be the young stock taken leisurely through the season from the warm climate of the Gulf region up northwesterly, skirting the foothills of the Rockies, to reach, after a six months’ journey, the highland feeding grounds of Wyoming and Montana. A year or two later they will go to market, sturdy and hard – fleshed beeves, ready for the export trade.

The task of the drover and his assistant cowboys in getting the herds from the Southern ranches to the Northern shipping points was one involving both skill and daring. Only a man of unflinching courage and quick movement could succeed in handling animals whose characteristics were rather those of the wild beast than of the creature bred for the sustenance of man. The Texas steer is no respecter of persons. For the man on horseback he has a wholesome fear; he seems to have something of the savage’s conceit that the combination is irresistible. Separately, neither man nor horse has any more chance in a herd fresh from the range than among so many wolves or jackals. With their long, sharp-pointed horns these steers rend an enemy with ease, and the fights among themselves have all the ferociousness of contests in the jungle.

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Culinary historian Barbara Haber takes a unique approach to the history of cooking in America, focusing on a remarkable assembly of little-known or forgotten Americans who helped shape the eating habits of the nation. As Curator of Books at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library, Haber had access to more than 16,000 cookbooks from which she has drawn inspiring and often surprising stories of the way meals have shaped America's past. Peppered throughout with recipes, Haber's fascinating survey adds a delicious new dimension to America's cultural heritage. New, paperback.