When was cattle ranching introduced

Other producers, like John Lytle and C. Slaughter, tried to start syndicates of their own. These failed, however, and Chicago packers eventually prevailed over the smaller Texas competition. As a solution, stockmen Murdo Mackenzie and John Lytle joined two rival associations into one lobbying group. After a decade-and-a-half of minor legislative gains, the Packers and Stockyards Act was finally passed in The Act ensured fair competition for ranchers, farmers, and consumers by regulating payment, investigating fraudulent practices, and prohibiting monopolies within the livestock industry.

It was a major step forward and crucial to preserving Texas ranching through the modern era. Technological developments such as railways, electricity, automobiles, vaccines, computers, and the Internet have not simply eliminated an old system of ranching. The costs of owning land and raising livestock have dramatically increased over time. As a result, ranchers have found ways to diversify their operations. These include oil and gas, alternative energies such as wind and solar power, hunting and wildlife, and tourism.

For others, it has become a necessary means of survival. The Fisher family in West Texas is one example. The Fishers have owned Bullhead Ranch for over a century, but cattle ranching is not the lucrative business it once was. The family now owns and operates their own oil wells, and the profits enable them to keep Bullhead Ranch and its cattle-raising tradition afloat.

Conversely, Texas oil tycoons such as the late T. Boone Pickens have found new profit in ranching. Pickens purchased 2, acres of land in the Texas Panhandle in Over time, he expanded Mesa Vista Ranch into a center of habitat conservation, quail hunting, and hospitality.

A number of historic Texas ranches have adapted in similar ways. In Central Texas, the YO Ranch was one of the earliest to lease out its land for outdoor recreation and game hunting, including imported exotic wildlife from Africa. The Matador Ranch of West Texas is still active in the cattle ranching business, but it has expanded into hunting as well.

The Guerra family of Starr County understands this better than anyone. Their ancestors came from Northern Spain to Mexico in They eventually settled in the Rio Grande Valley, where they became major figures in South Texas ranching and politics. Enrique Guerra was an important advocate for the preservation of Tejano culture and the beloved Texas longhorn through the twentieth century, and the family continues this legacy today. Finally, the spirit of Texas cattle ranching lives on in the livestock shows and rodeos of cities such as San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth.

These are more than a source of entertainment or a place for stock raisers to show off their hard work. They are also auctions where many kinds of animals can be bought and sold, both in-person and online. Most importantly, they encourage younger generations of Texans to actively carry on a proud tradition of stock raising. After more than five hundred years of change and adaptation, cattle ranching remains at the heart of the story and identity of Texas. The Spanish brought cattle to New Spain soon after they began colonization in the s.

The first cattle arrived in Texas in the s. By the s, missionaries were operating cattle ranches around San Antonio and Goliad. Anglo settlers who arrived in Texas in the s brought with them the skills for farming, but many were enticed by cattle ranching instead. In the s, during the Republic of Texas era, individual ranchers organized cattle drives to New Orleans.

They also established the Shawnee Trail to Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, where they could place the cattle on rail cars to be transported to the big markets in New York and Philadelphia.

When the California gold rush began in , Texas ranchers organized cattle drives to provide food for the "Forty-Niners. The California cattle drives ended after the market there went bust in In the s, the center of Texas cattle ranching shifted from South Texas to the frontier northwest of Fort Worth. Here settlers from Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas established new ranches in the rough brush country.

These settlers, many of whom opposed secession, faced vigilante violence during the Civil War, but eventually expanded the cattle business into a true industry. Early in the Civil War, Texas ranchers supplied the Confederate army with beef.

Federal troops seized control of the Mississippi River and New Orleans in , cutting Texas off from its southern markets. With most men involved in the war, cattle were left to roam. By , there were thousands of unbranded "maverick" cattle throughout the state. The economic devastation of the South after the Civil War meant Texas ranchers had to look elsewhere for profitable markets. The challenge was getting them there. Cow folk and their cattle traveled the famed Chisholm Trail that crossed the Red River and headed into Kansas in order to reach the rail heads that could take the cattle to market.

Kenedy fenced his ranch with smooth wire in , marking the beginning of enclosed ranching in Texas. In , Laureles was incorporated into the mighty King Ranch. As the United States recovered from the Civil War, the nation's industrial capacity developed at a revolutionary pace.

The overheated economy crashed in the Panic of , causing the value of cattle to plummet. The resulting depression caused many cattle ranchers to go bankrupt and temporarily sidelined the industry. Beginning in , a series of patents was issued to several inventors for strong, mass-produced fencing made from interlocking strands of wire, outfitted with sharp barbs that discouraged even the toughest cattle from muscling through it.

In , two salesman demonstrated barbed wire in the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio. Within a few years, the simple, revolutionary invention had ended the open range.

The cattle drives faced the constant threat of attack by American Indians. In a series of battles known as the Red River War, the U. Army defeated a large force of Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Comanche at Palo Duro Canyon, by capturing and killing their horses. The agents examined remaining longhorns, selecting only the purest specimens to serve as the base stock. Private citizens also helped preserve the breed. One such individual was J.

Cattle ranching is still an important part of the Texas economy. The Lone Star State is number one in beef cattle production in the United States, and Texas is home to , farms and ranches totaling Twice a day, nearly every day of the year, the cattle drive era is reenacted at the Fort Worth Stockyards where Texas Longhorns sauntered down the streets. I personally know many a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan praying for that next Super Bowl win. Broadway St. If you like this post, please subscribe to our blog via RSS or email.

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Download a free copy today! Google Tag Manager. Blog Contact Us Donate Menu. Header goes here. Tags: heritage travel. A cow knows her calf by its smell, and Goodnight found that when he had several calves on the wagon, their scents got mixed. So he had his cowboys place each calf in a sack and number the sacks so that the same calf went into same sack each morning. They spent the day in sacks on the wagon and spent the night with their mothers.

While on the trail, the Goodnight outfit made use of home remedies for illnesses. Coal oil was used to combat lice, and prickly-pear poultices were thought to help wounds heal. Flowers of the bachelor's button plant were used to cure diarrhea, salt and bison tallow were used for piles, and bison-meat juice was drunk as a general tonic. The first cattle drives from Texas on the legendary Chisholm Trail headed north out of DeWitt County about , crossing Central Texas toward the markets and railheads in Kansas.

The trail was named for Indian trader Jesse Chisholm, who blazed a cattle trail in between the North Canadian and Arkansas rivers.

That initial trail was expanded north and south by other drovers. The trail was not one fixed route. As one historian remarked, "trails originated wherever a herd was shaped up and ended wherever a market was found.

A thousand minor trails fed the main routes. Another popular route approximately paralleled the main trail, but lay farther east. The peak year on the Chisholm Trail was After interstate railroads came to Texas in the mids, trailing cattle to the Midwest became unnecessary. The Chisholm Trail was virtually shut down by the season. The Goodnight-Loving Trail was one of the first of the post-war trails to be blazed across part of West Texas. After serving in the frontier militia during the war, Goodnight rounded up his cattle in the spring of and headed for the Rocky Mountain mining region.

To avoid Indians, he decided to use the old Butterfield stagecoach route to the southwest, follow the Pecos River upstream and proceed northward to Colorado. This route was almost twice as long as the direct route, but it was much safer. While buying supplies for this trip, he encountered Oliver Loving, and the two decided to join forces. The combined herd numbered about 2, head when they left their camp 25 miles southwest of Belknap on June 6, With this drive, the Goodnight-Loving Trail was born.

Goodnight and Loving used this trail several times before Loving was mortally wounded in an Indian attack in New Mexico in September Just before he died, Loving made Goodnight promise to see that he was buried in his home cemetery in Weatherford.

Loving's remains were temporarily interred in New Mexico while Goodnight and his outfit completed the drive. Returning to New Mexico, Goodnight had his cowboys flatten out all the old oil cans they could find and solder them together to make a tin casket. Loving's remains were placed into a wooden coffin, which was then put inside the tin casket. Powdered charcoal was packed between the two containers, and metal lid was sealed, and the whole contraption was crated and transported to Weatherford for burial.

Loving's grave in Weatherford's Greenwood Cemetery has a Texas state historical marker. Soon after the cattle drives began, stockmen and farmers in Missouri, incensed at outbreaks of "Texas fever," demanded that Texas cattle be banned from the state.

Although called Texas fever, the tick-borne splenetic fever was first noticed in Pennsylvania as early as , when cattle from the South were introduced. In the early s, cattle from Georgia and South Carolina were banned from Virginia and North Carolina because they carried the disease. Texas fever was noticed in Arkansas and Missouri after cattle from Texas were driven through in the s, but since the Texas cattle remained healthy, their role as the carrier of the disease was discounted at first.

But the rangy, tough longhorn was immune to Texas fever; cattle in other states were not. When the South Texas longhorns were trailed through, the ticks dropped off and found local cattle to feed on, transmitting the deadly disease. Some cattle drives from Texas were met with armed mobs in southeast Kansas, southern Missouri and northern Arkansas.

Even Texas cattlemen, principally Charles Goodnight and other Panhandle ranchers, posted cowhands armed with rifles at the southern boundaries of their lands to keep out tick-infested South Texas cattle, in what has come to be called the "Winchester Quarantine," in honor of the weapon used to enforce it.

It was not until that researchers isolated the tick Margaropus annulatus as the carrier of Texas fever. An immunization was finally developed in by Dr. By the turn of the century, a dipping process to rid the cattle of ticks had been developed and was widely used.