The Cattle Drives, Longhorns, the Chisholm Trail, and the Open Range

In the spring of eighteen sixty-seven, a cattle dealer from Illinois named Joseph McCoy built a set of shipping yards next to a railroad in Abilene, Kansas, and sent word south to Texas: bring the longhorns north. What followed was one of the great mass movements of animals in American history. Texas had emerged from the Civil War with millions of half-wild longhorn cattle roaming the open range, most of them unbranded and technically ownerless.

They were worth three to four dollars a head in Texas and thirty to forty dollars in the eastern markets that the new railroads could reach. The math was obvious to anyone willing to make the drive. The trails north were brutal.

The most famous, the Chisholm Trail, ran from South Texas through San Antonio, Fort Worth, and across the Red River into Indian Territory and on to Kansas. Drovers pushed herds of two to three thousand cattle across eight hundred miles of open country, fording swollen rivers, moving through the territories of nations who charged tolls or sometimes contested the passage entirely, riding through lightning storms that could start stampedes that killed men and animals alike. A cowhand on the trail earned roughly thirty dollars a month.

Between eighteen sixty-seven and eighteen eighty-six, somewhere between five and ten million cattle walked north out of Texas. The exact number is unknown; the record-keeping was informal at best. The drives ended not with a dramatic moment but with a gradual close: barbed wire fencing cut the open range into parcels, drought hit in eighteen eighty-six, a catastrophic blizzard that winter killed hundreds of thousands of cattle on the northern plains, and the long cattle-drive era was essentially over.

What it left behind was a mythology that proved more durable than the industry itself.