Ranching Catalogue 

Catalogue Ten –Part Four THE RANCHING CATALOGUE VOLUME TWO D-G Dorothy Sloan – Rare Books box 4825 ◆ austin, texas 78765-4825 Dorothy Sloan-Rare Books, Inc. Box 4825, Austin, Texas 78765-4825 Phone: (512) 477-8442 Fax: (512) 477-8602 Email: [email protected] www.sloanrarebooks.com All items are guaranteed to be in the described condition, authentic, and of clear title, and may be returned within two weeks for any reason. Purchases are shipped at custom- er’s expense. New customers are asked to provide payment with order, or to supply appropriate references. Institutions may receive deferred billing upon request. Residents of Texas will be charged appropriate state sales tax. Texas dealers must have a tax certificate on file. Catalogue edited by Dorothy Sloan and Jasmine Star Catalogue preparation assisted by Christine Gilbert, Manola de la Madrid (of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage), Peter L. Oliver, Aaron Russell, Anthony V. Sloan, Jason Star, Skye Thomsen & many others Typesetting by Aaron Russell Offset lithography by David Holman at Wind River Press Letterpress cover and book design by Bradley Hutchinson at Digital Letterpress Photography by Peter Oliver and Third Eye Photography INTRODUCTION here is a general belief that trail driving of cattle over long distances to market had its Tstart in Texas of post-Civil War days, when Tejanos were long on longhorns and short on cash, except for the worthless Confederate article. Like so many well-entrenched, traditional as- sumptions, this one is unwarranted. J. Evetts Haley, in editing one of the extremely rare accounts of the cattle drives to Califor- nia which preceded the Texas-to-Kansas experiment by a decade and a half, slapped the blame for this misunderstanding squarely on the writings of Emerson Hough. In a foreword to his transcript of James G. Bell’s “Log of the Texas-California Trail, 1854”, which appeared in 1932 in volumes 35 and 36 of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Haley reminded his readers of the drives of the late 1840s and the 1850s from Texas to New Orleans, Natchez, Natchitoches, Shreveport, St. Louis, Sedalia, and even Ohio and Chicago. He might also have mentioned the Ohio Valley drives of 1805-1855 which Paul C. Henlein studied in The Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley. Frederick Law Olmsted in 1856 described the Texas-to-New Orleans cattle trade: “The herdsman’s sales are of steers which are sent to market at four years old. The beef is considered better at five years but the profit to the herdsman is less. In early summer, after the cattle are in good condition with the spring pasture, drovers make their appearance for the purchase. A con- tract is made by which, at a price agreed upon, the herdsman shall deliver a certain number of beeves, in marketable order, at a point where it will be convenient to add them to the drove for New Orleans. The range is then scoured and the requisite number obtained, including all steers found that have escaped the previous years.” Olmsted met a “driver” who hired twelve extra hands just to get his drove of prairie cattle across the Neches River but he still lost nineteen head, bogged down in the river bottom. He ex- plained, “If these wild prairie cattle are left behind or become separated from the drove, they can never be driven. There is danger that they will drive the drivers.” When Olmsted asked, “What became of the cattle you left?”, the man replied, “God knows. They got off into the swamp, I suppose, after awhile. There’s lots of beef cattle that stray off so from a drove and are never recovered. As nobody owns these cattle but the driver and they are all branded, so nobody else will claim them, and he never comes after them, I suppose they live out their natural life of beef-cattle.” According to E. E. Dale, the historian of the Southwest’s range cattle industry, it was found by trial and error that a herd of 2,500 cattle was of the best size for trailing. With more cattle than this, the herds tended to become hard to manage no matter how many cowpokes were available. With fewer head, it was just about as hard to manage a herd as with the 2,500 head. A drove or herd of this size formed a column about a mile long from “point” to “drag”. It required a dozen cowmen with four to six horses apiece, and the herd could cover about twelve to fifteen miles per day or from three hundred to five hundred miles a month. According to some sources of the 1880s, it cost $500 a month to drive such a herd across country; according to others, it ran to $1.00 a head no matter what the length of the passage. By 1886, trail herding of cattle ap- proached something of a science as compared to Cyrus Loveland’s day of amateur cowboys. In one month of 1886 some fifty-seven herds crossed the Arkansas River. They ranged in size from This essay on trail driving appeared as the introduction to Richard H. Dillon’s edited journal of Cyrus C. Love- land, published under title California Trail Herd: The 1850 Missouri-to-California Journal of Cyrus C. Loveland(Los Gatos: Talisman Press, 1961). We reprint Mr. Dillon’s essay here because it remains an important reinterpretation of traditional lore concerning the Texas cattle industry. We thank Mr. Dillon for his kind permission to reprint his fine essay. A copy of the printed Loveland journal will appear in a forthcoming part of our Ranching Catalogue. Sloan Rare Books seventy head to 3,300. But, of the entire fifty-seven herds only five were composed of less than 1,000 head of stock. Dr. Herbert E. Bolton found that cattle were driven from Texas missions and ranches to New Orleans as early as the later 18th century but that the first western drives of any conse- quence came with Texan independence. In 1837–38, cowboys rounded up wild cattle between the Nueces and the Rio Grande to drive them in herds, ranging from three hundred head to a thousand head, to various towns of Texas. By 1842, droves were being conducted overland to Shreve- port, Louisiana, for transshipment by flatboats down the Red River and Mississippi River to the growing cattle market of New Orleans. With the annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845 and the emigration of Americans into the new Lone Star State, the cattle industry there began to expand. By 1860 there were more cattle in Texas than in any other state of the Union. The cattle industry began to boom in ante- bellum Texas, and the profits of the business were given wide publicity. More and more drives were made to New Orleans, and herds were also sent to the Crescent City by ship from now-for- gotten ports like Indianola, on Lavaca Bay, or from Galveston. One trail led from south and west Texas to Liberty, on the Trinity River, then to the Neches at Beaumont, then across the Sabine into Louisiana where, after swimming, fording, or ferrying the Calcasieu and Mississippi Rivers, the cattle reached New Orleans. Another trail, from eastern and central Texas crossed the Sabine to Shreveport, to Natchitoches or Alexandria, and then downriver (by boat) to New Orleans. Soon, however, the supply exceeded the Louisiana demand. It was with hopes of better prices that Texans turned their attention to the far-distant market of Gold Rush California. The herds of ’49 and ’50 were few. But by 1853 and 1854 quite a number were on the trail, and the returned Texas Argonauts brought word home of high prices for cattle in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. The meat supply there could not keep up with the supply of miners pouring in. Tex- ans soon found that their cattle, bought for five to fifteen dollars a head at home brought sixty to one hundred and fifty dollars each in the San Francisco of 1854. More and more herds headed westward on the trail blazed in 1849 by W. H. C. Whiting and W. F. Smith. It began at San Antonio, struck west to Franklin and El Paso and then headed for the Gila River and the Colorado by the Apache-battered towns of Santa Cruz, Tubac, and Tucson. Crossing the Colorado Desert into California, herds were trailed to Warner’s Ranch and then to Los Angeles or San Diego. From these southern California cities, the cattle were trailed north to the population centers–San Francisco and Sacramento. The SacramentoState Journal in 1854 reported that 9,000 cattle were imported that year over this Gila Trail. But that figure seems much too modest. According to Ralph Bieber, another cattle trade historian, the Western Texan of June 1, 1854, reported that at that very moment “between seven and eight thousand head of cattle and stock of all kinds” were en route to what the San Antonio paper called, “the Modern Ophir”. By the mid-1850s not only were herds being trailed from Texas to California but from Missouri, Il- linois, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory. Cattle were also being driven from the upper Brazos to Missouri to supply trains of California-bound emigrants. The trail led through Dallas, crossed the Red River at Preston in Grayson County, and then led northeast to Boggy Depot and Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, thence to the west or south border of Missouri. The long drive from Texas to California was but the first of the great cattle drives.

Load more