Photo of the Day

Change is opportunity dressed in new clothes.

The Civil War upended the business of cattle ranching.

During the War, while Texas ranchers were away fighting, their cattle herds scattered across the open range.

1906.

Their enslaved labor left.

And the market for beef changed.

A West Texas ranch, 1910. It’s big out there!

Markets in the South collapsed, but demand for beef surged in the North.

These changes brought an opportunity for Texas ranchers to get back on their feet.

A cattle roundup.

They realized that, if they could round up their cattle and get them north, to railheads in Kansas, Colorado and Missouri, their herds could be put on trains to stockyards in St. Louis and Chicago and other points east.

Branding.

And big money would come rolling in, making the hardships of such a venture worthwhile.

Vaqueros (Mexican livestock herders) at a ranch near Laredo, 1910.

So, the ranchers hired young men who were good on a horse to do this work — war veterans, teenage boys, Mexican men and freed Blacks — about 35,000 men in total.

Left: Photo caption: 'Coaly, the boy who could ride and rope anything that had four feet and wore hair.' Greer County, TX (now OK), c. 1870. Between 6,000 and 9,000 cowboys were Black men. Right: Nat 'Deadwood Dick' Love, wearing 'my fighting clothes,' c. 1907.

And these men became the cowboys of American legend.

A longhorn cow. This breed was self-sufficient on the open range and could withstand cattle drives lasting many weeks.

They would work in groups of ten on long cattle drives, moving herds of about 3,000 animals fifteen miles a day.

They’d work in shifts so the cattle could be watched 24 hours per day and would be accompanied by a cook and a man to tend the spare horses.

The most famous trail, the Chisolm Trail, was a thousand miles long. Traveling it with cattle took two months.

They’d give the cattle time to graze at mid-day and at night, so they’d maintain a marketable body weight.

Left: Farmer Joseph Glidden’s patent drawing for practical, easy-to-produce barbed wire, 1874.

The cowboy era ended around 1900, when barbed wire became widely available and people began using it to fence off their land.

It wasn’t a smooth transition at first.

Ranchers fought the introduction of barbed wire, sometimes cutting the fences of their neighbors.

They objected to the denial of their use of free and open natural resources they had grown accustomed to.

But farmers were insistent.

They wanted to keep stray cattle from trampling their crops and barbed wire was perfect for this purpose.

And, in time, even the ranchers realized that barbed wire could protect their ranch land from encroaching farmers and other ranchers.

Cattle drivers’ reunion, 1915.

So, it was the end of the cattle drive through the open range.

But, while it lasted, about 27 million cattle trekked north from Texas ranches.

Tom Mix comic book; Gunsmoke radio show; Rawhide television show; Bonanza television show.

And their stories from the trail lived on in print, film, radio and television.

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I’ll see you on Monday.

— Brenda