Ranching and Homesteading

While the Indian Wars were being fought in the north, a parallel economic revolution was transforming the southern and central Plains: the rise of cattle ranching, the long drives from Texas to the railheads of Kansas, and the slow grinding success of homesteading on short-grass land that earlier generations had written off. This lesson covers both stories. They share a single underlying plot — how a harsh environment was made profitable — but they ended up in conflict, culminating in the Johnson County War of 1892.

The Rise of the Cattle Kingdom

During the US Civil War, Texas cattle had been largely neglected. When the war ended in 1865, Texas ranchers found they had roughly 5 million longhorns running wild on open range, worth perhaps $4 a head in Texas — and between$4aheadinTexas—andbetween30 and $40 a head in the northern meat markets of Chicago, Kansas City and New York. The problem was simply how to move them.

The Long Drives and the Cattle Trails

The answer was the long drive: taking herds of several thousand cattle several hundred miles overland to the nearest railhead, where they would be loaded on trains for Chicago's slaughterhouses.

The main trails were:

Trail	Years	Route
Chisholm Trail	1867–84	San Antonio, Texas → Abilene, Kansas
Goodnight–Loving Trail	1866–70s	Texas → Fort Sumner, New Mexico → Colorado
Western Trail	1874–85	Texas → Dodge City, Kansas

The Chisholm Trail is the most famous. Named after the Cherokee trader Jesse Chisholm, who marked out sections of its route, it was opened up as a cattle highway by Joseph McCoy, an Illinois cattle buyer, who founded Abilene, Kansas as the first purpose-built railhead "cow town" in 1867.

McCoy's idea was simple and powerful. He bought land where the Kansas Pacific Railroad met the Chisholm route, built stockyards, hotels and loading chutes, and publicised the town to Texas ranchers. In 1867 around 35,000 cattle were shipped from Abilene; by 1871 the number was about 600,000.

Life on a Long Drive

A typical drive involved a trail boss, a cook with a chuckwagon, a wrangler managing the remuda of spare horses, and roughly ten cowboys for a herd of 2,500–3,000 cattle. The drive covered 10–15 miles a day over two to three months. Cowboys worked 14-hour days, slept rough, and earned around $30 a month. Perhaps a third of US cowboys were African American or Mexican — a point often missed by 20th-century Hollywood that is worth including in exam answers.

The Cow Towns

Abilene was the first cow town; others followed — Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge City — each a town that boomed briefly as the railroad extended further west and the cattle trails shifted to meet it.

Cow towns had a distinctive economic and social structure.

• Economic: stockyards, loading pens, saloons, hotels, banks, brothels, barbershops, laundries.
• Demographic: highly male and transient during the drive season; more settled in winter.
• Political: elected officials, sheriffs and marshals, but weak judicial infrastructure — which is why law and order became a major issue (Lesson 8).

By the mid-1880s, the age of the cow town was ending — partly because railways reached Texas itself, making the long drives redundant, and partly because of the shift you will see below to fenced ranching.

flowchart LR
    A[Texas longhorn surplus 1865] --> B[Long drives north]
    B --> C[Joseph McCoy founds Abilene 1867]
    C --> D[Cow-town economic boom]
    D --> E[Railways reach Texas 1880s]
    E --> F[End of long drives]

Homesteading on the Plains

Alongside the ranchers came the homesteaders — the farming families you met in Lesson 4, taking up their 160-acre claims. Their lives have become the stuff of American mythology, but the everyday reality was brutally hard.

Sod Houses

The treeless Plains offered no timber. Homesteaders cut blocks of sod — the thick mat of prairie grass roots — and stacked them into walls. A sod house (or "soddy") could be built in a week, kept cool in summer and warm in winter, and cost almost nothing. But it also leaked dust in dry weather and melted in storms, and the roof frequently dripped mud after rain.

Weather and Pests

Plains weather was the homesteader's greatest enemy. Dry years produced crop failures; wet years invited grasshoppers. The grasshopper plague of 1874 stripped Kansas and Nebraska fields down to bare earth within hours. Blizzards — notoriously those of 1886–87 — killed livestock and settlers alike.

Water and Fencing

Two technological innovations rescued Plains homesteading: