Texas Cattle Drive

The Texas Cattle Drive

Most of us now days have never been on a cattle drive or have even witnessed one. Our perception of a drive is formulated by what we have seen in the movies and television shows like Rawhide.

The truth is a little less dramatic than these shows and was on the verge of being downright boring.

The problem was that there were millions of the wild longhorns in Texas and millions of consumers "back east" who wanted beef. However, there were no railroads to ship the cattle. Indian Territory was without a single railroad after the Civil War and the closest ones were in Missouri and Kansas. The solution seemed to be that the cattle would have to walk 500 to 1,500 miles to the railhead at Ellsworth and Dodge City, Kansas.

The first known cattle drive occurred in the early 1830's when a herd was driven from Austin to New Orleans. In the 1840's and 1850's, some ranchers drove their cattle over the Shawnee Trail to Illinois and the Midwest. By the mid 1850's, outbreaks of "Texas Fever" halted these drives with the legislatures of Missouri and Kansas quarantining the "southern cattle". The gold rush in California caused some ranchers to drive herds west to California where an $8 steer could easily fetch $100.

During the Civil War, the Texas ranches were virtually abandoned as the young men went to war. The cattle herds were neglected and they multiplied unabated for years. In 1866 a test was made for shipping cattle. Herds were driven to New Orleans and shipped by boat to St. Louis and Illinois. This proved to be a very costly endeavor.

Oliver Loving and Charley Goodnight drove cattle from their Panhandle ranches near the Palo Duro Canyon to Colorado to sell their cattle to the silver miners. Others tried moving their herds over the old Shawnee Trail to Kansas City. Still under quarantine, the herds were often impounded or killed.

In 1867, Chicago cattle buyer Joseph McCoy persuaded the Kansas Pacific Railroad to put in the necessary sidings and he built holding pens in Abilene, Kansas. The first year, McCoy bought 35,000 head at Abilene. By 1873, more than 1.5 million cattle had been driven to Kansas.

Contract drovers began to drive the cattle for the ranchers. They would charge the ranchers a fee that was usually $1 per head. The more cattle that arrived alive in Kansas, the more money the drovers made. The waddies received $25 to $40 per month. The trail boss received $100 per month, the ramrod and cook received $75 per month and the wranglers received $50 per month. While the waddies were usually young boys, the ramrod, cook, wranglers and trail boss were mature men in their twenties.

The Texas cattle trail started in Brownsville and made its way to San Antonio. This was the central location where most drives were made up. The ranchers would have a general roundup in the very early spring around the first of April. The grass was just starting to turn green and the cattle could eat their way to Kansas. Each trail herd usually numbered between 2,500 and 3,000 head of cattle. That was about as many cattle as a dozen cowboys could safely handle.

Since there was open range, the cattle would become mixed up in the herds. Ten or twelve ranches would furnish cowboys to gather and sort the cattle according to the rancher's particular brands. The calves that were born during the previous year were not branded. The first chore after rounding up the mother cows was to brand the calves. Since a calf follows its mother, a calf was given the brand of the cow it was following.

The first task of the rancher was to hire an experienced trail boss. The trail boss in turn hired a ramrod and ten to fifteen cowboys, a cook and wranglers. The cowboys or "waddies" were young boys ranging in age from twelve to eighteen years old. They were available for seasonal work as the drives took from six weeks to six months and a single company could make only one drive each year.

Horses were an integral part of the cattle drive. Each cowboy required five or six horses. A horse could not make the trip if ridden every day from sunup to sundown. So, every morning the cowboy would go to the remuda (extra horses) and choose a fresh horse.

The wrangler's job was to keep the horses together and safe from attack. The two most hostile tribes to be encountered along the trail were the Comanche and Kiowas. They were mostly in west Texas and the western part of the Chickasaw Nation. These tribes cared little for the cattle and mules but they would creep into camp in the night and steal all the horses. This would bring the cattle drive to a halt.

One pioneer reported that while on a cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail, in the 1870's, such an occurrence happen to his company. The Indians stole all but one horse. The next morning the trail boss sent a lone cowboy to a ranch seventy-five miles away to buy one hundred more horses. Often, the ranchers would ship great herds of horses with their cattle. Some of these horse herds would number as high as a thousand head.

When the herd was trailing, the chuck wagon would lead the way looking for that evening's campsite. This would usually be a place with plenty of wood and water. Following the cook was the remuda and the wranglers. Next followed the herd. Two waddies rode "point" at the head of the herd, one on either side. Next were the waddies that rode "flank" on each side of the herd. At the end of the herd were the waddies that rode "drag". It was a dusty, nasty position in the herd and was often reserved for greenhorns and those who needed a little discipline.

At the head of the herd was a "lead steer" that had learned how to lead the herd in an orderly fashion. Some of these steers were so good at leading the herd and not given to be frightened easily that when the herd reached Kansas the lead steer was returned home with the cowboys. It has been reported that one steer made many trips to Kansas and was used for many years.

Weeks of drudgery were punctuated by thunderstorms, stampedes, river crossings and a rare Indian attack. If the Indians were not hostile, they were there usually begging for flour, sugar or coffee. Many times the Indians simply wanted five or six head to feed their people. Most of the trail bosses refused to allow the waddies to carry pistols since they were prone to accidentally discharge and stampede the herd.

The quarantine of Texas cattle resumed in 1885 with a new outbreak of Texas fever. The Western Trail and the Chisholm Trail continued to serve as the main trails to Kansas. Drovers were required to continue to use the Chisholm Trail until the 1890's.

Maybe the greatest fear of the drovers for Indian attack was not the Comanche but rather the taxman. The Chickasaw light horsemen met each herd at the Red River and collected a grazing fee for each critter at a rate of ten cents each. That would cost the rancher $300 for a herd of 3,000 head. The Chickasaws used this money to fund their educational system.

The Light horsemen also checked regularly to see that each herd was moving at a rate of ten to fifteen miles per day. The herds were not allowed to stop and graze except at night. If a river was flooding, they could remain in one location for up to three days. The Light horsemen also enforced a restriction on where the herds could be driven along the trail. Herds had to remain within ten miles, either side, of the center of the Chisholm Trail so as not to stray upon a Chickasaw rancher's range and strip it clean of grass.

The grub on the trail was pretty much the same everyday, beans and bacon or bacon and beans with a cup of coffee. Often when a herd was near civilization or a remote farmhouse was encountered, the trail boss would take a sack of flour to the house and have the woman bake as many biscuits as she could. Flour was scarce on the prairie. The boss would trade a sack of flower to the woman for making the biscuits.

Often the local ranchers in Indian Territory might have fifty or a hundred head they wanted to sell and the trail boss would buy them and put them in the herd. All brands were registered in Kansas City. If a herd came in with different mixed brands, the trail boss had to produce a bill of sale for the cattle for each brand. If he could not do so, the stockyard would mail a check to the registered owner of the brand.

By 1890, the railroads had crisscrossed Indian Territory. The Rock Island lay along the 100th meridian near the Leased Lands. The Santa Fe was completed in 1886 through the middle of the Chickasaw Nation and the Katy Railroad was in the eastern part of the Nations.

It soon became cheaper and quicker to ship the cattle by railroad than to trail them to Kansas. Water and feedlots were set every few miles along the railroads to periodically unload the cattle and rest them. This reduced the problems with "shipping fever".

And so, the railroads and barbed wire fences put an end to the Texas cattle drives which lasted only about twenty years.