Chapter 18, Section 2
Ranchers and Farmers (pp. 531-536)
ranchers




cow towns
 railroad towns for marketing and shipping
cattle
 yearly event to drive cattle to these towns
 260,000 head of cattle at a time
 Abilene, TX
 Dodge City, KS
 Cheyenne, WY
cattle drives
 Long Drive: herding cattle 1,000+ miles to
railroads
 left Texas in the spring
 plenty of grazing grass on route
 underweight cattle wouldn’t sell
 Chisholm Trail: central Texas to Abilene
 Goodnight-Loving Trail: west into NM, then
north
 Life on the Trail
 hard work … 15+ hours a day in the
saddle
 rain, dust storms, loneliness, blazing sun
 trail hazards and violent storms
 “rustlers” … tried to steal the cattle
 driving cattle across fast-slowing rivers
Spanish-bred longhorn cattle
used brands to mark ownership of cattle
Texas: mostly open-range
Missouri Pacific Railroad
 reached Sedalia, MO
 ranchers can sell East & North
 price of cattle rises (from $3 to $40)
“Wild West”
 discrimination in the west … minorities rarely
became trail bosses and got less pay
 after the cattle were delivered … PARTY
TIME!
 gambling, fist fights, and gunplay
 Dodge City and Abilene known for unruliness
and violence
Cattle Kingdom
 over 5 million head of cattle moved
 comes to and end in the 1880s
 overgrazing killed the grasslands
 too many cattle pushed prices down
 winters of 1885 and 1886 killed lots of
cattle.
 ranching moved to the Northern Plains
 ranchers begin building fences
 grew hay to feed cattle during harsh
winters
 competition with farmers for land closed
the “open range”
Homestead Act
 1862: 160 free acres of land
 pay a $10 filing fee
 live on the land for 5 years
 thousands of new settlers come to the Plains
 married women couldn’t claim land, but
single women or widows could
immigrants
 oversees marketing increased the number of
settlers
 railroads made deals with the steamship
companies to help sell the tracts of land
along the railroads
 105K+ Swedes and Norwegians settle
Northern Plains in 1882 … mostly MN, ND,
SD
Exodusters
 African American settlers
 end of Reconstruction meant fear for safety
 40K African Americans move into KS by
1881
 many return East due to lack of money
Oklahoma Territory
 Congress had designated OK as “Indian
Territory” in the 1830s
 1889: years of pressure from land dealers
leads to Congress opening the Oklahoma
Territory to white settlers
 April 22, 1889
 10K people lined up to stake their claim
 many “boomers” discovered that other
settlers had already slipped into the territory
 “sooners” had already claimed the best land
end of the frontier
 shortly after Oklahoma was opened to
settlement
 1890 census - no more frontier
 Native Americans realize their needs don’t
matter to US gov’t.
sodbusters
 Plains farmers
 before farming could begin, the prairie had to
be removed … “sodbusting”
 housing shortage
 no trees = no lumber
 carve a dugout on the side of a hill
 build walls with sod “bricks”
 sod cut into rectangles that resembled
bricks
 sod houses were common … “soddie”
 many sod houses would last for years
 difficult life
 climate (torrential rain or drought)
 fire in times of drought
 plagues of grasshoppers
 severe winters with howling winds and
deep snow
 irrigation was difficult ... land was very dry
 dry farming (plant seeds deep in the
ground for some moisture)
 did not produce large crop yields
 farming was not very economical on the
Plains
 160-acre land grants were too small to
make a living on … 300-acres required
 farmers go into debt trying to buy more
land and advance farming equipment
 too much debt led to loss of farms
altogether
 steel plows had to be used to break the
tough turf … invented in the 1870s
 windmills were erected to pump what little
water there was
 barbed wire … Joseph Glidden of DeKalb,
IL!! … wire fencing to protect the land