Cattle, Cotton, and Railroads Study Guide

The Texas Longhorns

• The longhorn was introduced to Texas via Spaniards in the mid 1800’s.

• Resulted from spanish breed mixed with english breeds.

• Ideally suited to the environment:

  • Hearty; withstand long hauls, limited water, & scrubby brush for food.

  • Not as meaty, but worth it.

  • Longer legs for further distances.

  • Horns for protecting young.

Texas Makes Some Moolah!

• During the Civil War, longhorns reproduce like CRAZY! There’s tons of them roaming all over the plains.

  • After being left alone during the civil war, there are thousands upon thousands of longhorns roaming the south.

  • The opposite was true for the north. They ran out of cattle and supply and demand. So cattle became super high demand for north and the south was like bet, we’ll sell them to ya!

• 1 head of cattle in Texas is worth $3 - $6.

• $40 per head for Kansas

• $80 per head for New York/Boston.

• Basically, the further north you are able to go, the more expensive longhorns become.

How?

• This became known as the cowboy era!

• Texas ‘drives’ cattle north.

• In the fall & winter, longhorns would roma wild, grazing on lush grass.

• In spring, cowboys round up mavericks (wild cattle) and brand them to claim them, then start taking them north.

4 Main Cattle Trails

• Not roads: they were trails cut through the wilderness.

• Not all of them coexist.

Sedalia (Shawnee) Trail

• First main trail.

• Goes through indian territory.

• Shawnee is an indian tribe.

• Named this because it was an old shawnee trading trail.

• Over time, people get frustrated because their stuff is getting trampled.

• Lots of longhorns carry ticks, and these nasty ticks lead to the Texas Fever.

  • Texas Fever kills longhorn/cattle.

  • This makes farmers/ranchers EXTREMELY ANGRY.

• Forced to shut down after about 20 years.

• Ended in 1867.

Chisholm Trail

• Entrepreneur Joseph McCoy devised a plan after the Sedalia trail shut down.

• He created a new trail to the west, avoiding the towns that the Sedalia Trail passed through.

• He called it Chisholm after Jesse Chisholm, a half Cherokee, half White fur trader who first created this trail as a trading path.

• McCoy convinces the Kansas Legislature to build a cattle town out of Abilene, Kansas.

• Kansas agrees and almost overnight, the population explodes. 💥

• 1 and a half million head of cattle went through this trail.

• This trail lasted 18 years.

• This trail avoids farms 🤣☹

• Eventually forced to close for the same reasons as the Sedalia Trail. 🚶

Western Trail

• Created in 1874

• The primary trail by 1879 until the close of the open range.

• From Kerrville, Texas to Ogallala, Nebraska.

• Also forced to shut down for the same reasons. 🙃

Goodnight-Loving Trail

• A collaboration of two buisness men 🕴

• They wanted to use this trail to transport goods other than cattle such as troops and mining camps.

• Heavily used southwest trail

• Began in San Angelo, TX, traveled west to Fort Sumner (NOT FORT SUMTER) New Mexico, then north through COlorado and terminated in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Transportation

Positions on a Cattle Drive

Trail Boss

• In charge

• Hires cowboys

• Assumes most risk

• Paid most

• Scouts ahead (sometimes miles)

Ramrod

• 2nd in command

• Rides to the right of the trail boss.

• Keep the others in line

Cowboys

• Split into 4 different groups:

  • Point

  • Swing

  • Flank

  • Drag

• Basically the more experience you have, the closer you ride to the trail boss. And if you’re a newbie, you start out as a drag. And it sucks. You’re riding all day with the cattle kicking dust in yo face like I don’t wanna do that.

• Also, if you’re a drag and a cattle runs off, you’re the one who has to go get that cattle. Good luck.

Cookie

• The 2nd most important member.

• THE COOK!

• They have NOTHING to do with the cattle.

• Don’t annoy Cookie, if you do, he won’t feed you!

Chuckwagons

“Chuck” is an old indian slang word meaning “food”.

Wranglers

• Deal with a separate horse herd.

• Provides ‘Substitutes’ for horses.

• Because if you ride the same horse over and over and over again, it will get sore.

Fencing in the Frontier

• Barbed Wire!!!!

  • Invented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1873, it is wire with a bunch of sharp hairpins twisted on it at regular intervals and another straight wire wrapping around the whole thing to stabilize the poor hairpins 🧷

  • Cheaper than dirt, lighter than air

• Cowboys HATE barbed wire

• Farmers & ranchers LOVE barbed wire.

Range Wars

• Cowboys start to clip fences because they’re in the way of the cattle drive.

• Farmers & ranchers get pissed and hire armed men to warn and then shoot at the cowboys if they tried to clip the fences anyways.

• This messed up the postal services.

• Farmers & ranchers started to fence lands that didn’t belong to them.

In 1884, Governor John Ireland called an emergency legislative session to pass a bunch of laws regarding the Range Wars.

• Now it is a crime to clip fences.

• Fence owners have to add a gate every 3 miles for postal services or emergencies.

• Illegal to fence lands that you didn’t specifically own.

They deploy the Texas Rangers to enforce these new laws.

End of the Open Range

By the early 1890s, the open range is all but gone. It vanished as quickly as it came. 4 main factors contributed.

Farming/Barbed Wire

Farming takes over because of barbed wire, as explained above!

Sheep Ranching

• With barbed wire, sheep ranching exploded.

• Sheep are even hardier than cattle.

• Sheep & goats can eat anything

• Cowboys HATE this, so when they happen to pass a sheep ranch, they take it upon themselves to shoot the sheep by the thousands 🤦🐑

• Raised in Edwards Plateau, which was a huge hub for ranching at the time.

• Raised for their wool

• Sell wool because it is cheaper than cotton.

Extreme Weather

• There were several summers of awful drought.

• Following winter, there was a horrible major blizzard.

• The cattle go south after the drought looking for water just to encounter a huge blizzard that freezes many to death.

• 90% of cattle die in this time.

• Known as the “Big Die-up”

Railroads

We will talk A LOT about this next:

Here Come the CHOO CHOOS!

• During the open range, Texas did not have a lot of railroads.

• Rail lines connect the following cities:

  • Galveston -> Houston -> Austin in 1871 (This was the only major railroad before and during the open range.)

  • Galveston -> Denison -> St. Louis, Missouri -> THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES!!!!!

  • 750 miles of track laid between 1876 -1879.

• At this point, it was a race to see which company could lay down the most amount of rail. And that company would be able to build a Trans-Texas railroad. 🤯

• The company that wins is the Texas and Pacific Railway (T&P): It connected California and Texas.

  • They created the first Trans-Texas railway

  • That railway was called the Union Pacific National Line.

  • In the 1880’s, 6000 miles of track laid in Texas alone.

  • The thing in front of the train was the cattle catcher because cattle are STUPID and they don’t move when the train comes so the cattle catcher is there NOT TO PROTECT THE CATTLE, BUT TO PROTECT THE TRAIN 🤣

  • The “Crash at Crush, Texas” was a stage train wreck staged by William George Crush. It was a disaster and the two gas tanks exploded and killed 3 people and injured dozens more.

Effects of Railroad Expansion

• Goods now easily shipped out of state.

• New towns: Abilene, Sweetwater, and Big Spring are established.

• Junctions (where 2 lines meet) created major city growth. Examples include:

  • Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Galveston, Austin, and El Paso

• It a train track bypassed your town, the town would likely “dry up” and become a ghost town.

• Railroads promote the building of farms.

• In 1870: 61K farms increased 350 K farms in just Texas.

Farming Changes

• NEED WATER

• Windmills extract water from the ground.

• Without windmills, large-scale farming in the west would be IMPOSSIBLE.

Other Farming Advancements

• Dry Farming

  • Using terraces to prevent erosion, retain soil moisture and catch rainfall runoff.

  • It also saves precious water.

• Growing more drought-resistant crops like sorghum, wheat, and cotton.

• Threshers

  • Separate grain and seeds from the plant.

COTTON

• Cotton becomes the BIGGEST CROP of Texas

• Kansas starts to farm cotton and drops Texas prices

• Texas is annoyed and is determined to farm the better cotton so the prices for prime farmland skyrockets.

• This tactic worked and the Texas cotton is more popular than the Kansa scotton.

• Boll Weevil also created problems via mass infestations of cotton crops.

  • They lay the eggs inside the cotton bud and the larvae eat the baby cotton before it can even bloom.

• Still, despite these challenges, Texas farmers continue to profit more by producing cotton than they would with other crops.