Origins of the Texas Cattle Kingdom

Meta Chestnutt's arrival in Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, in 1889 coincided closely with the end of the great cattle drives that began in central Texas and traveled north through Indian Territory and into Kansas. The story of Silver City had always been part of the saga of the cattlemen's empire and the fabled Chisholm Trail. What were the origins of the tremendous cattle industry that was centered in post-Civil War Texas?

Beginning with Christopher Columbus's second voyage, the Spanish brought to the Western Hemisphere both horses and cattle. Along with the animals, they also brought a culture of ranching and horse breeding. Their plan was to establish "husbandry on a European model in the Indies."[1] Centuries later, the enduring vocabulary of the American cowboy points back to the Spanish origins of his world. The terms are numerous: lariat, lasso, remuda, corral, chaparreras (chaps), rodeo, etc.[2]

As early as 1716, missions in Spanish Texas raised cattle. By 1770, the Mission La Bahia del Espiritu Santo, near Goliad, boasted herds totaling 40,000 head. Missions and private citizens in Texas became wealthy when cattle were driven east towards New Orleans, or south and west into modern-day Mexico. Those drives of the eighteenth century were harbingers of greater things to come.

During the Mexican War (1846-48), ranchers in Texas sold beef to the military and drove some of their cattle to New Orleans. In the 1840s and '50s, some cattlemen identified St. Louis as an excellent market. Following what they called the Shawnee Trail, they drove their herds north and east through Choctaw and Cherokee country in what is now eastern Oklahoma, into Arkansas and finally Missouri. Their destination was the livestock cars at either Kansas City or Sedalia, Missouri. But not until the after the Civil War did the Texas cattle kingdom emerge. During the war, the Union was eventually able to blockade the South, which prevented drives eastward. Consequently, by 1865 perhaps as many a 5 million cattle grazed on the Texas prairies, many of them unbranded and wild.[3]

Texans who served in the Confederate military and were fortunate enough to have survived the war returned home to find that during the years of conflict local herds of Longhorn cattle had grown. But great numbers drove down local prices for cattle and beef. In 1866, longhorns in the central part of the state sometimes sold for as little as $4 a head. But in major cities far to the north and east, those same cattle might bring as much as forty dollars and more. By driving their herds from Texas north through Indian Territory all the way to railroad terminals in Kansas, ranchers could get their cattle to those places where they would sell at a premium.[4]

Notes

[1] William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 194. The authors cite Bartolome de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Agustin Millares Carlo. 3 vols. (Mexico City, 1951), book I, chapter 82, I:346-49.

[2] I was reminded of this by T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. Updated ed. (New York: Tess Press, 2000), 556. See also Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 302-04.

[3] Joseph A. Stout, Jr., "cattle industry," in The New Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 176; David Dary, "Cattle Drives," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed February 12, 2018); John R. Lovett, "Major Cattle Trails, 1866-1889," in Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, 4th ed., Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 116-17.

[4] Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 296-99.