THE Trail—and Trail deserves to be capitalized—pointed to the North Star. Like rivulets feeding into a stream which joins other streams to make a river, the Trail increased its flow until it strung out hundreds of thousands of cattle over hill and prairie to the horizon’s infinity, carrying them to market somewhere to the north. In one year 700,000 walked the Chisholm Trail, the most storied of several from Texas to Kansas—an almost continuous file of hoofs and horns.
Of extraordinary endurance, they were an ungainly-looking group, for they had no consistent color but were stippled, dappled, dirt-colored, ugly—unless you owned them or had some reason to be sentimental. Everyone remembers their horns, though most of those which hang in offices and gamerooms have been heated and melted and stretched and shaped. Nature, less poetic, gave some Texas cattle horns that were thick and short-curved like buffalo horns, or again one horn shooting up and its mate turned down, while some were true collectors’ items spreading ninety inches or better from one gracefully curved tip to another.
They were a part of the American epic, celebrated and cheapened and made a cliché through excess, as is the American wont. But once the epic was real, and it saved a state from the economic readjustment that ten other states faced following the collapse of the Confederacy. Texas was lucky when the range-cattle industry came to rescue it from the financial doldrums of Reconstruction. The nation was lucky also, for the range-cattle era placed an indelible stamp on the American character that transcends Texas, the West, and the frontier. In a way, that era represents the story of the United States in a capsule.
It started with Cortés, the Spanish conquistador. Back in Andalucía Spanish sheep and cattle ranged. Cortés unloaded horses in Vera Cruz to scare the daylights out of the confronting indios, and Gregorio de Villalobos came along shortly after with that Spanish-Moorish bovine, and then both animals ranged upward and inward into Mexico. Coronado took them on journeys of thousands of miles into the high plains of the Southwest, and those two redoubtable padres, Eusebio Kino and Junipero Serra, led other cattle and horses into Arizona and California.
When the Spanish built a chain of missions across Texas, cattle and horses moved with the Spanish cross. Loosely tended, the livestock multiplied. Although at first Indians were terrified by horses and then in the gentlemanly tradition of the Spanish caballero were forbidden to ride because they were servile people, they soon learned to handle the horse because the Spanish needed hired hands on horseback to cover the vast breadths of the ranges. In the New World the Spanish developed a hacienda system, adapted a system of cattle tending to the ranges of Mexico’s plateau, and built a considerable hide trade within Mother Mexico and in California. Meanwhile the cattle which came to Texas were almost as feral as the handfuls of people who lived there.
Before Mexico ever separated from Spain, haciendas had been established on either side of the Rio Grande. The Mexicans continued the system, and the Anglo-Texans inherited it. At the time of the American Revolution Mission Espíritu Santo near La Bahía was herding 15,000 head of cattle; Mission Rosario, 10,000 head. That country of low chaparral between the Nueces and Rio Grande became, as we have seen, disputed territory between Mexico and the Republic of Texas, ripe for raids. And the raids occurred. The Texans stole the Mexicans’ cattle and were labeled patriots by their fellow Texans, branded as banditos by the Mexicans. The Mexicans ran off Texans’ cattle and were branded as bandits by the Texans, and labeled as patriots by their fellow Mexicanos.
Over the eons the Spanish cattle themselves adapted to the New World, growing taller and lankier while their horns spread into the storied longhorns. They were built for travel, because they had strolled their way a thousand miles from Vera Cruz; and they grew long horns because they had to learn to fight off predators in the brush. In the days of the Republic of Texas and thereafter they cross-bred somewhat with cattle brought in from the Old South, which helped their beef content without destroying their mobility. Like two-legged Texans, they operated best when left essentially alone, and they needed looking after only at twice-a-year roundups—one for branding and one for slaughter.
With God providing the grass and the brush and the Spanish providing the cattle and mustangs to tend them, the situation was ripe for the perceptive Anglo to move into the ranching business. Consequently into the no-man’s-land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande came one of the more remarkable though little-known adventurers in a state pockmarked with freebooters. Henry Lawrence Kinney came to Texas at the start of the Republic and moved right into the center of trouble at Brownsville. By 1841 he was ranching on a large scale near Corpus Christi, a town he helped to found, and was trying to buy out all the small ranchers in the area. Whether “buy out” or “euchre” is the more nearly precise verb is debatable. But he proved that an Anglo could ranch the country, although he himself was not a money-maker. His talent lay in promotion with other people’s money, and contributed that oft-repeated social role of a speculator—he opened an area to trade and settlement.
While Kinney was building up a retinue of followers in the brush country, a sixteen-year-old named Richard King was developing a career as a steamboat pilot on Alabama rivers and taking part in Florida’s Seminole War. In Florida young King met Mifflin Kenedy, veteran clerk and substitute captain on river steamers from the Ohio and Mississippi to Florida. The Mexican War brought both men to Texas, where they helped transport troops and supplies for Zachary Taylor’s army. After the war Kenedy ran a pack train to Monterrey and kept a herd of sheep in Hidalgo County. Meanwhile King, still only twenty-seven, bought Santa Gertrudis, a Spanish land grant of 75,000 acres. In early December 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, he sold half of the tract to Kenedy; and for the next eight years the pair engaged in large-scale ranching, steadily increasing their ranch holdings from profits made in supplying European buyers with Confederate cotton.
Out of this partnership grew the famous King Ranch, at one time the largest ranch in the United States and still a name with which to conjure. When the partnership dissolved in 1868, it took thirteen months to round up and divide the stock in cattle, sheep, goats, and mules, which ranged from the Nueces to the Rio Grande. Kenedy kept the Laureles division of the ranch, which he enclosed in 1869 on three sides with thirty-six miles of smooth wire fence—one of the first Texas ranches under fence. Eventually he expanded the ranch to 242,000 acres, all fenced, and sold it in 1882 to a Scottish syndicate which renamed it the Texas Land and Cattle Company. As for King, the King Ranch is still the King Ranch, with its headquarters in Kingsville, though it is now run principally by the in-law side, the Klebergs.
Whatever money Kinney, King, and Kenedy made in cattle came principally from hides and tallow. Cattle as beef were almost a drug on the market. During the Civil War the women and old men left behind had too many other things to do to tend cattle, and the hide and tallow industry proved difficult to maintain. So Texas cattle disported themselves biologically, found the grass good, and multiplied.
Before the war Texas cattle had been trailed to points on the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, but the drives had not been particularly profitable. Nonetheless the range cattle industry spread onto the upper Texas prairie. Cattle were herded through the sites of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Denton for decades before those towns existed. Indians and Civil War halted the western movement of the cattle industry, but after the war the ranchers began to move up onto the higher plains. By 1876 they had moved beyond the 100th meridian into the eastern Panhandle. They also moved onto the plains to the north and into New Mexico and Colorado.
The beef situation boiled down to a simple problem of practical economics. Every year Texas was salting down and pickling some of its finest beef and feeding millions of pounds to the hogs or to the Gulf of Mexico, cooking it first to render the tallow. Millions of cattle, estimated as high as 5,000,000, ranged over Texas. Up north were new-rich appetites with new-rich money. The resource existed. The market existed. And a thousand impossible miles separated the resource from its market. In Texas people were outnumbered by cattle by up to ten to one. In New York appetites were denied beef at almost any price. This is the kind of profit problem that calls out the American genius.
Texas was rescued by a twenty-six-year-old from Illinois, Joseph G. McCoy. McCoy persuaded the Kansas Pacific Railroad, building west, to erect a full-grown cattle town at a whistle-stop known as Abilene and then went south in 1867 to persuade Texas cattlemen heading north, generally toward Sedalia, Missouri, to take the more westerly route to that unheard-of town. His must have been a masterful salesman’s performance, for no one from Texas knew McCoy and no one on the trail had an opportunity to check on his credentials. But they arrived to find that Abilene was indeed what McCoy had promised—a reasonably complete town with everything from loading pens and corrals to gambling dens and soiled doves. Abilene became the first of a string of cattle depots which dotted the West and gave rise to millions of words and millions of feet of film, the whole cowboy myth celebrated from Moscow to Manila.
In their profit-seeking, cattlemen learned a number of things. By traveling west of the population line, they avoided quarantine laws against Texas cattle, brought on by the fact that the latter dropped a tick to which they were immune but which devastated local herds by carrying a sort of bovine typhoid quickly branded as “Texas fever” (although Texans naturally called it “Spanish fever”). Further, the cattle fattened on the trail north. Cattlemen also found that northern grass was considerably richer, though the growing season was shorter, and so they stocked the northern ranges with Texas cattle. The market for stock cattle soon equated with the market for beef. When Northerners found that cattle could survive rugged winters, the cattle industry spread like the large end of a cornucopia onto the plains of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and even into Alberta and Saskatchewan. Texans found what any entrepreneur likes to discover—that the price of Texas cattle increased from $5 a head in Texas to $30 a head and upwards in the North ($85 in New York was the likely highest known price), and that a considerable profit margin lay in between. And every year nature restocked the range, so that your capital resource never seemed to dry up. As one stockman observed, raising and selling cattle resembled running a house of prostitution—no matter how often you sold your product, the inventory was always there to sell again.
Some of the profits were fantastic, and stories of the beef bonanza reached all the way to western Europe. Narrators undoubtedly exaggerated their accounts of profits, and though the listeners probably suspected it, nevertheless greedy Germans and careful Scotsmen rushed to sink their money into the western plains. The influx of European capital again provided a kind of lend-lease to the United States, freeing American capital for other sorts of development. Meanwhile Texas and the other plains states raised their own entrepreneurs, who followed no set stereotype except one of men who knew what to do with opportunity.
Thus Major George W. Littlefield came stumping home on his crutches from the Civil War, mustered out months before its end because of his wound. In Texas he found that his mother had taken care of the home place, but that Army worms and June flooding proved as formidable enemies as Yankee guns. He was also paying 2 percent interest a month. As his debts grew heavier, his creditors demanded pay in gold instead of paper. Come the spring of 1871, and like other Texans with cattle and horses, he pointed them north, 600 head of his own and 500 more bought on credit. At Abilene he found a “sporty looking” man who bought his herd at from $40 to $50 a head.
Back in Texas, Littlefield paid off his debts, freed himself from his interest chains, and thenceforward hired men to do the trailing for him. When he died years later he owned the LFD and LIT ranches in the Texas Panhandle and in New Mexico; was founder-president of the American National Bank of Austin, which he had organized in 1890; had been a member of the board of regents of the University of Texas for nine years; had owned Austin’s historic Driskill Hotel; was widely known as a philanthropist; and had a town named for him in the Texas Panhandle.
Even multiplying such individual accounts as one-generation wealth on the range does not equal the significance of the discovery that the Great American Void, the reputed Sahara of the United States, was habitable and, glory be, profitable. While no accurate account of the number of cattle driven over the trails exists, me 1880 census estimates that the drive to Abilene, 1867–1871, totalled 1,460,000; to Wichita and nearby depots, 1872–1875, 1,072,000; to Dodge City—“the Bibulous Babylon of the Plains”—and Ellsworth, 1876–1879, 1,046,732; to Dodge City and Caldwell, 1880, 382,000. Estimates for the whole period to 1890 run as high as 10,000,000 head. Eventually Texans became acquainted with the land from Texas to Montana, dropping off men along the trail as they also dropped off cattle.
Several factors appeared to close down the open range. Naturally any profitable venture attracts investors and speculators. Too many ranchers and would-be ranchers got in the act, violated natural laws governing good range, and overstocked. They destroyed the grass, or so reduced the range that when the first drouth came along, the range virtually disappeared and the cattle dried up and died. Then too, the longhorn was a traveling animal who incidentally carried beef on his bones. Consumers with taste demanded better beef while breeders with taste began an effort to improve the quality through upbreeding, gradually phasing out the longhorn until he became an endangered species.
Furthermore, the virgin land of the prairies, never broken by plow, attracted farmers. Having gone broke in Kentucky or in East Texas, they decided that new soil could help them recoup their finances, and so they moved out onto the grasslands with their farming tools. With their somewhat tidy minds they filed for titles, slicing athwart the open range like a vein of stubborn gristle through the center of a fine roast. The Industrial Revolution contributed its bit through the invention of barbed wire, which the nesters used to fence out range cattle and which the ranchers eventually used to fence in their own charges. Cattle profits attracted huge syndicates which could both buy land and fence ranges and hastened the closing. The advance of railroads into Texas relieved the necessity of trailing to Kansas, while the transfer of the windmill onto the plains to tap a hitherto unknown but quite adequate ground-water supply finished the process. In short, orderliness and system replaced romance.
Closing the range led to another violent period in which cattlemen cut fences to get at water, which invariably the farmers had enclosed. Texas courts seldom convicted a man for fence-cutting, because so frequently the violator was faced either with cutting or with ruination. Fencing also reduced the success of rustling, a way of life by which a number of later respectable cattlemen started their herds. Finally, the first great efforts at fencing were financed by eastern and European capitalists, so that fence-cutting could be sold to local juries as a last-ditch stand of embattled Texans against the greed of outsiders. Gradually morality seeped into the scene, the Texas legislature in 1884 made fence-cutting a felony, and a threat of actual civil war in Texas was averted. Altogether, estimates of damage by fence-cutting run as high as $20,000,000. And as of today it remains against the law in Texas to carry a pair of wirecutters, even in your automobile.
Even though the open range shut down, Texas has retained its open range image. Too much acreage is needed for a steer to survive for ranching to be intensive, so the Texas rancher snorts at Californians for referring to their ten-acre prune farms as ranches. To a Texan a ranch has to have vastness, and its soils must not be exposed to the plow except to produce truck to be used around the house. Exceptions are made to this rule. To speak of your wheat ranch is legitimate. But raising cotton over thousands of acres, as many West Texans do, does not permit the owner to speak of owning a “cotton ranch.” Cotton has an association with 40 acres and a mule and stoop labor, and in no way, no way, can a cotton farmer ever evolve into a cotton rancher.
With enclosed ranching the Texas cattle industry lost some of its more spectacular characteristics. No longer did men have to lie with or sing to the herd at night, cattle grazed rather than ranged, and eventually herding by helicopter and pick-up was introduced. Still in 1954 there were at least nineteen Texas ranches with 150,000 acres or more. The largest was the King Ranch, which retained almost three-quarters of a million acres in Texas plus lesser ranches in pre-Castro Cuba, Montana, and Australia. Several other ranches had more than 400,000 acres. The longhorn was confined to wild life refuges, to breeders of exotics on tourist ranches, and to a relative handful of sentimentalists. Instead, the white-faced Hereford served practically as a symbol of Texas, along with Durham, Angus, and Brahman. And the cowboy became a deromanticized employee.
If any romance surrounded sheep and their culture, Texas would have carved another chapter in this branch of the livestock industry. Like cattle, sheep had come in during the early Spanish era, starting in South Texas and gradually moving up into the state. A myth grew that sheep and cattle could not inhabit the same range because sheep cropped the grass too short. While calm observation has refuted this belief in part, the fact remains that where grass is short and scarce, sheep and goats can just about ruin an area.
Sometimes sheepmen and cattlemen fought each other for ranges, with results not always pretty. Courts almost always decided for the cattlemen, possibly because they wielded more power rather than on the legal merits of the case. By 1880 the Texas range included more man six million sheep, after which the industry declined somewhat until 1930. By World War II the sheep count, which had declined to less than two million early in the twentieth century, had increased to nearly eleven million, after which it dropped off again.
Angora goats were introduced from Turkey to the hill country of Texas in 1849. More than four million goats with a value of $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 now range the Texas countryside, and three-fourths of all Angora goats in the United States live on fewer than 8,000 ranches in a few counties from San Angelo to Uvalde. San Angelo, in fact, is the nation’s largest market for sheep and wool, as well as for goats and mohair. About 100 wool and mohair warehouses lie in the San Angelo vicinity, both to serve the industry and to provide lamb feedlots.
The value of Texas sheep has run as high as $155,000,000, and Texas as the leading state in the nation contains about one-fifth of all the country’s sheep. But few Texans know this statistic, and none mention it. The goat situation is even more unmentionable, for Texas produces 97 percent of all U.S. mohair. Texas has its share of wool and mohair millionaires, but they never make the movie scripts.
The cowboy has his chroniclers and poets. Without doubt he has been heroized until he would have been almost unrecognizable to his contemporaries, and yet in today’s complex world he appeals to the poetry in today’s urban soul as he appealed to the professional poet in previous ages. Sometimes those poets caught him, perpetuated him, and tied him particularly to Texas, so that the Texas myth is wrapped around his saddle and chaps.
Here then is the Holy Trinity of Texas. What the cod and fisherman and God meant to New England, the mustang, long-horn, and cowboy meant to Texas. They symbolized a freedom which probably never really existed, but which people like to think existed. Most Texans would no more know what to do with that freedom than would any other American, but they perhaps delude themselves in believing that they understand the hunger for freedom as no one else.