English-born E. C. “Teddy Blue" Abbott, sporting the broad-brimmed hat and bandanna that were trademarks of the Texas cowboy in the 1870s, typified the adventurous young man attracted to life on the range. He reflected in his memoirs that cowboys “used to brag that they could go any place a cow could and stand anything a horse could. It was their life."
Oung Jim Daugherty tugged the sweat-soaked bandanna over his nose and mouth and scrunched his greasy sombrero tighter on his head, but they offered scant protection from the biting black buffalo gnats that peppered his skin. Putting spurs to his cow pony, he galloped up a grassy hummock, where a hot breeze from the west momentarily scattered the vicious insects. Turning in the saddle and wiping away the dust that sweat had caked on his face, he saw spread out below and behind him on the rolling Texas landscape a ragged line of cattle—his cattle. Their bony flanks shivered under the biting swarms, and they kicked up clouds of dust as they funneled their way into a shallow creek bed, splashed through the muddy water, and clambered up the opposite bank.
Jim Daugherty was a mere i6 years old, but he was destined to be recognized as one of Texas’s legendary cattlemen. Born James M. Daugherty in Missouri and transplanted to Texas as a baby, he had learned the cattle business down in Denton County near a little settlement named Dallas. He had just made his first business deal, buying 500 longhorn steers from his boss, James Adams, and with five hired cowhands he meant to drive that herd north to the new railroad that had recently penetrated into
Missouri and Kansas. The grueling journey might take the better part of two months, across nearly 500 miles of prairie marked by raging rivers, tornadoes, snakes, and—as things turned out-—marauding humans. But the longhorns might also bring the saddle-toughened i6-year-old five times the three dollars to four dollars a head that steers were worth in Texas—a handsome payoff
Young Daugherty wasn’t alone. Scores of Texas cattlemen had the same idea in the spring of 1866. Most were older, many of them veterans of the terrible Civil War that had ended a year earlier. Though fighting had scarcely touched Texas, the farms and ranches they had vacated were as tattered as their gray Confederate uniforms. But one resource that could put hard cash in a poor man’s pocket was virtually theirs for the taking: millions of longhorn cattle that roamed the unfenced grasslands.
Over the next 20 years, Jim Daugherty and hundreds of other drovers herded more than five million cattle up the trails from Texas to Kansas, where they were sold to cattle buyers and shipped off to the commercial markets of Chicago, New York, and other cities east of the Mississippi River. Supported by deep-pocketed entrepreneurs who established the markets, such cattle drives gave birth to boom towns
'7 believe I could walk along the streets of any town or city and pick out the real cow-boyy not by his clothes especially, but because one can nearly always notice that he has a very open countenance and almost innocent eyes and mouth. He is not innocent of course; but living in the open, next to nature, the cleaner life is stamped on his face. His vices leave no scars, or few, because old mother nature has him with her most of the time.""
Bulah Rust Kirkland, daughter OF A Texas trail driver
In Kansas and boom times In Texas. The legendary cattle drives of the i86os and 1870s helped to fuel the westward thrust of the railroads, create a burgeoning meat-packing industry, and put affordable beef on the tables of hungry American consumers. The drives also inspired an enduring body of fact, fable, and folklore about the American cowboy—from mournful ballads that soothed his cattle to the roar of the six-shooter that sometimes settled his quarrels.
The animals that Texans rounded up and trailed to market were longhorns, a distinctive breed descended from stock brought to the New World by Spanish settlers and toughened by three centuries of drought, flood, and blizzard on the open ranges of northern Mexico and the regions that were to become the American Southwest. UnI like domestic breeds, the Texas longhorn could fend off swarming insects, wolves, and rattlesnakes. Its long-legged, straight-backed, lanky body was built for speed. Its tapered head and narrow face gave It a mean, sullen look. Its graceful, pointed horns swept five feet or more from tip to tip, and they could gore I a cow pony or skewer its rider in the blink of an eye. A four-year-old longhorn steer stood nearly five feet high at the shoulders and averaged 900 pounds in weight—nearly half a ton of tough, belligerent muscle. Cattlemen said a longhorn could walk 15 miles to water and then make one drink last two days. The older it grew the meaner it got, and most cowboys would rather face a wounded bear or a charging buffalo than a provoked longhorn bull.
By the mid-i8oos, a motley mix of longhorns dotted the Texas grassland, and many were wild creatures that had never felt the touch of a rope or a branding iron. Wild longhorns naturally resisted being herded together; cows and their calves typically grazed in small groups, and mature bulls were almost always found alone. Some of these free-ranging animals bore an owners distinctive symbol, which had been burned into their hides when they were calves, but they grazed the open grassland just as if they were wild. To the cowboy a single mature ani-
Mal was a beef, and a herd of them were beeves. Newborn calves or strays whose owners had neglected to brand them were known as mavericks, after Samuel A. Maverick, a San Antonio lawyer and cattle owner whose negligent ranch hands gave rise to a new word for unfettered obstinacy.
Rounding up Texas beeves called for rough-and-ready men who knew how to use a rope and a branding iron. Some were native Texans, but the diverse lot of cowboys included vaqueros from Mexico, adventuresome immigrants from the British Isles and Europe, and former slaves from the American South; some authorities estimate that one in every four cowhands was black. In the cow hunts that were the forerunners of full-scale cattle roundups, a handful of cowboys might drive together several hundred wild beeves and the motherless calves they called do-gies. They learned to keep the cattle moving for the first two or three days just to tire them out, since burning a brand into a longhorn’s flank for identification was dangerous work. On the open range, before the days of specially built cattle pens, the usual practice was to rope the beast, but the grandstanding cowboy preferred a more daring maneuver. He would grab hold of the tail and either twist it around the horn of his saddle or “bulldog” the longhorn, wrestling It to the ground by its horns. The cowboy then tied the animal to a nearby tree or hogtied it, binding its feet together. His partners built a fire and heated a branding iron hot enough to burn through the animal’s matted hair and permanently sear its hide. In some cases a slash of the cowboy’s knife gave the beast a distinctive earmark, and If a young bull was destined for the feedlot rather than fatherhood, a castrating cut quickly altered him into a steer.
Lean and tough, the longhorns were admirably suited to enduring the rigors of the open range. Their meat was just as lean and tough on the table as It was on the hoof—fit for stewing, not for juicy steaks. Before the mid-i8oos in the eastern United States, the meat in most people’s diet came mainly from poultry and pigs, and cows were raised primarily to supply milk, cheese, and butter. Until 1845,
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