The Western Cattle Trail stretched from the southern most points of Texas to the Canadian border. It carried more longhorns a longer distance for more years than any other cattle trail. The trek across Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska and beyond required months of hard trail life for the drivers and herds. However, most maps show this trial ending at Dodge City, Kansas.
How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero? Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago. The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses. Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.
Since 1967, the authors have had one mission: to tell readers exactly where the Western Cattle Trail was located and to give a history of its place in the American West. Their first book, The Western, the greatest cattle trail, 1874-1886, presented the location and history of the trunk line during that time period. In this second volume, the entire trunk line is presented from Texas to Canada, showing its route before and after the Kansas quarantine of 1885, plus a discussion of the system's feeder, detour, and splinter routes. The project encompasses the history that surrounds the trail. Included in this tale are the trail's cattle towns, river crossings, cowboy and homesteader comments, the Texas cattle fever, quarantine lines, herd laws, and Indian encounters. What emerges is an overall picture of the cattle-driving industry from its conception in the 1840s on the first trail system going north, the Shawnee, to its demise in 1897 on the Western Trail System.
First published in 1948, this is the true story of John Benjamin Kendrick (1857-1933), a Texan cattleman who later served as a United States Senator from Wyoming and as the ninth Governor of Wyoming. Kendrick was raised on a ranch and in 1879, at age 22, he signed on with the Snyder-Wulfjen Brothers of Round Rock, Texas, to help bring a herd of steers from Matagorda Bay on the Gulf of Mexico to the grasslands of Wyoming. He settled on a ranch near Sheridan and raised cattle as a cowboy, ranch foreman, and later cattle company owner. Cowboys and Cattle Trails tells of the young Kendrick’s daring adventures and hard work along in the Old West.
E. C. Abbott was a cowboy in the great days of the 1870's and 1880's. He came up the trail to Montana from Texas with the long-horned herds which were to stock the northern ranges; he punched cows in Montana when there wasn't a fence in the territory; and he married a daughter of Granville Stuart, the famous early-day stockman and Montana pioneer. For more than fifty years he was known to cowmen from Texas to Alberta as "Teddy Blue." This is his story, as told to Helena Huntington Smith, who says that the book is "all Teddy Blue. My part was to keep out of the way and not mess it up by being literary.... Because the cowboy flourished in the middle of the Victorian age, which is certainly a funny paradox, no realistic picture of him was ever drawn in his own day. Here is a self-portrait by a cowboy which is full and honest." And Teddy Blue himself says, "Other old-timers have told all about stampedes and swimming rivers and what a terrible time we had, but they never put in any of the fun, and fun was at least half of it." So here it is—the cowboy classic, with the "terrible" times and the "fun" which have entertained readers everywhere. First published in 1939, We Pointed Them North has been brought back into print by the University of Oklahoma Press in completely new format, with drawings by Nick Eggenhofer, and with the full, original text.
Offers twenty-four essays about African American men and women who worked in the Texas cattle industry from the slave days of the mid-19th century through the early 20th century.
