Long Cattle Drives example essay topic

As the Indians were dying out, the cowboys were starting to move into their territory. Cattle and buffalo were competing in the Spanish borderlands. The cowboy was composed of white men, African-Americans, Mexicans and Indians. The average age of the cowboy was 24 yrs old. The cattle industry was evident even in the early colonial times, but the practices changed over the years. The poetic times of the open-range cattle industry seemed from its Mexican roots.

The Texas longhorns were known more for their speed and endurance than for thier quality of steaks. This presented probelms with their value due to their long distance from the larger beef markets, so they often had to be driven to the markets in Texas. The number of cattle that roamed the grasslands in Texas had risen to 5 million after the Civil War. In other parts of the South, however, the cattle crops had been killed off by the war, so this made these Texas herds in great demand. Some of the herds could be had just for the effort of rounding them up and driving them to the needy states. This type of cattle drive renewed its popularity after the Civil War, but on a much greater scale.

These routes sometimes proved to be unstable to due hostility met on the trails through the populated lands. As railroads were being built, new opportunities to drive these cattle herds were being explored. These routes were generally through vacant lands, that proved to be safer. With the expansion of the railroads, also came the rapid growth of the cattle industry. Cattle were now being placed on the freight cars and being shipped east. Some of the cattle though, could not handle such a long journey across the country.

They would be very ill, and some would have even died enroute to New York. Gustav as Swift developed a mechanical refrigeration system that would allow the slaughtered carcass to be shipped across the country to be sold at the larger markets. This invention made him a fortune and helped with the continuing growth of the cattle industry. With the expansion of the railroads, this started the decline of the cattle drives across open ranges.

The long cattle drives started to play out due to the unsafe conditions on the trails, the charges imposed by crossing the Indian lands, and the wear and tear on the men and cattle. The cowboys started to agree that they could best work alongside the railraods with getting the herds across the lands. They were also starting to experience probelms with keeping the herds together, and not mixing with the other owner's herds. Joseph Glidden developed the first effective barbed wire used to help keep the cattle in the correct pastures. This helped with some of the probelms, but as usual, it made some of them worse.

With the addition of the barbed wires now surrounding the ranges, range wars started to develop. The cattlemen and farmers were crowding into these areas, causing overcrowding of the lands. Farmers and cattlemen started cutting through their neighbors fences, which made tensions worse. The weather started to play an important part with the cattle industry, there was not enough grasslands for all the influx of the cattle to graze. In 1886 and 1887 the farmers suffered two unusually harsh winters, followed by ten long years of drought. So even those cattlemen and farmers that did survive these rough conditions, they still had to face the legal aspect of getting their lands titled and fenced appropriately.

With all of these problems they had to face, the end of the open range was more and more evident. The rise and fall of the cowboy era had come and gone in only two decades, 1866-1886.