The Charles L. Wood Agricultural History Lecture Series

The Overemphasis of Texas as a Source of Western Cattle Ranching

Terry G. Jordan Walter P. Webb Professor University of Texas at Austin

Robin D. Lee, Series Editor

International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas

Other lectures in the series

Gilbert D. Fite, " Recent Trends in United State Agricultural History"

Joe B. Frantz, "Little Water, Less Wood"

Clark C. Spence, "Texas and the Age of Pluviculture"

Wayne D. Rasmussen, "The Family Farm in Historical Perspective"

Donald E. Worster, "Cowboy Ecology: A New Look at an Old West"

0 1992 by the International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-1036 All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America at PrinTech, Texas Tech University

Charles L. Wood 1937-1981

iii

Charles L. Wood was a son of the Great Plains and its agricultural heritage. Born into a farm family in Hemingsford, Ne­brask:a, Chuck Wood was educated at St. Benedict's College in Atchinson, Kansas, and at the University of Kansas, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history under the tutelage of Professors George L. Anderson and John G. Clark. Between 1963 and 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976, he served on the faculty of Hayden High School in Topek:a. Chuck joined the history faculty at Texas Tech University in 1976, where he taught agricultural history until his sudden death at the age of 44 in 1981. Although his stay with us was brief, Chuck commUni­cated his deep affection for the land and people of the Plains and energetically pur­sued his research on cattle ranching in the West. His articles on the range and cattle industry appeared in the Kansas Histori­cal, Quarterly and the Journal of the West, and in 1980 his monograph The Kansas Beef Industry was published by the Regents Press of Kansas. An Associate of the International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies at Texas Tech, Chuck Wood had begun to research the ranching industry in West Texas at the time of his death. Chuck's enthusiasm for his subject, his dedication to good teach­ing and careful scholarship, and his kind and gentle manner touched students and colleagues alike. Both agricultural history and Texas Tech are richer for the work of Charles L. Wood.

Joseph E. King Department of History Texas Tech University

INTRODUCTION

Terry G. Jordan is the Walter Prescott Webb Professor of History and Ideas at the University of Texas. A native Texan, his roots trace back for six generations in the Lone Star state. He earned his B.A. from Southern Methodist University and his M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin before leaving to study for a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. After a short stay in Arizona, he returned to Texas, where he served on the faculty of the University of North Texas for 13 years before moving to Austin.

He is best known for his writings on Texas, which include four books: Ger­man Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Fanners in Ninetheenth-Century Texas; Texas Log Buildings: A Folk Architec­ture; 'IHals to Texas: Southern Roots of Wutem Cattle Ranching; and Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy. He has also produced literally dozens of articles on Texan topics that range from wind­mills, barns, cemeteries and cattle ranching to vernacular place names. In addition, he has found time to author or co-author scholarly books on log build­ings (American Log Buildings: An Old World Heritage), the American frontier (The American JJackwood Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation [with Matti Kaups]), and the history of cattle ranching (North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers [forthcommg]) in ad­dition to textbooks on Texas and Euro­pean geography and a co-authored best­selling cultural geography textbook that is now in its fifth edition.

Professor Jordan has been honored numerous times for his scholarship, having received, among others, the Texas Heritage Award for Research, the Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History, the Theodore

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Saloutos Memorial Award in Agricultural History, and the Fred B. Kniffen pri7.e from the Pioneer America Society.

In the present work Professor Jordan again extends his interests beyond the boundaries of his home state to challenge the long-held idea that the origins of American cattle ranching may be traced to South Texas. Quite the contrary, Jordan maintains that Texas influence was both temporally and spatially limited and competed with cattle ranching traditions that had their origins in California and the Middle West. It is to the latter region that we should turn to encounter the source of the practices upon which the modem North American cattle industry is based. Jordan's well-reasoned analysis of the origin and diffusion of an important land use system and associated collection of cultural traits is an example of cultural geography at its best.

The following individuals served on the 1991-92 Wood Lecture Series Com­mittee: Paul Carlson, history, (chair­man); Marvin Cepica, agricultural sciences; Mark Friedberger, history; Joe King, history; Sharon Kohout, Southwest Collection; Robin D. Lee, International Center for Arid and Semiarid Land Studies (ICASALS); David Murrah, Southwest Collection; and Idris R. Traylor, Jr., !CASALS.

Sponsors for the 1992 lecture were Texas Tech University's Arts and Sciences Honors Program, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Agricul­tural Sciences, Department of History, !CASALS, Southwest Collection, and the Ranching Heritage Association.

Gary S. Elbow Department of Geography Texas Tech University

The Overemphasis of Texas as a Source of Western Cattle Ranching

Terry G. Jordan

Cattle ranching and its associated culture in the West have usually been depicted in monolithic Anglo-Texas hues. According to this widely held view, Hispanicized Anglo-Texan neophytes dispersed the colorful, volatile range cattle industry throughout the West, filling a semiarid environmental niche in a remarkably short span of decades and implanting an enduring Texas-inspired pastoral culture.

The most articulate and influential advocate of the Texas-origins thesis was historian Walter Prescott Webb. He pointed to a diamond-shaped area in South Texas, with apexes at San Antonio, Brownsville, Laredo, and Indianola, as the hearth region of western livestock ranching. It was there, he felt, that Anglo-Texans learned the essential traits of cattle ranching-the management of semiwild livestock from horseback in the Mexican manner. It was from the diamond that the cattle-ranching industry spread throughout the semiarid West. ) Folklorist J. Frank Dobie, who had spent his formative years on a cattle ranch in this South Texas diamond, agreed with Webb concerning the pivotal importance of that region. Many other sc~olars, including Francis Fugate, echoed the Webbian message over the years. 1

The resultant "Texas system" of cattle ranching, aside from the manage­ment of stock from horseback, was characterized by a profound neglect of cattle, a subtropical practice of allowing the stock to care for itself year-round in stationary pastures on the free range, without supplementary feeding or protec­tion. Through such self-maintenance, the

stock was not merely to survive, but reach a grass-fattened maturity, ready for market.

Several major elements of the Texas­origins thesis require substantial revision, I feel. First, I would suggest, the interac­tion between Anglo and Hispanic cultures that was important in producing the western ranching complex did not begin in Texas, nor was Texas necessarily even the principal center of such interaction. The pine barrens of the American coastal South bad witnessed an earlier phase of Anglo cattle herding. 2 It is now clear that these southern cattle raisers absorbed Spanish influences all along the coastal belt, in Florida, where the Creek Indians perpetuated Hispanic herding; in the Natchez area of Mississippi; and in Spanish Louisiana. Even earlier, certain Hispanic herding techniques had been absorbed by British settlers in Jamaica, then transplanted in the 1670s to the South Carolina coastal pine barrens. Spanish loan words such as jerky and palmetto entered English there. 3

Almost certainly, the coastal prairie of southern Louisiana witnessed the most vigorous Anglo-Hispanic cultural mixing, between about 1780 and 1820, with Cajuns perhaps serving as diffusionary middlemen. We now know, for example, that the use of the lasso and roping from horseback was being practiced by Anglos in Spanish-ruled Louisiana by 1790, long before Texas was even a gleam in their eye. Spanish loan words such as lasso, cawyyard, and calaboose entered English there, not in Texas. Accordingly, southern Louisiana served as the place of

origin of the Texas system of cattle ranchina (Figure 1).4

The second among my proposed revisions concerns the spread of cattle ranching out of Texas. I argue that this spread was far less widespread than is commonly believed. Figure 1 is busy and bard to read, but the busier it gets the more the Texan influence. While the Texan expansion was impressive, it was confined laraely to the Great Plains~r. more exactly, to certain parts of the Great Plains-and, to a lesser extent, portions of southern New Mexico and Arizona. These are areas where Texans went and set up ranches, areas where the Texas ranchina system was implanted. 1bat is different from simply driving Texas cull steers to market, as happened over much of the West, particularly in mining districts. These marketing drives did not result in implantation of Texas-type ranching.

Nor was the Texan presence all that pervasive, even on the Great Plains. For example, in the Platte River Valley of Nebraska an~ Colorado, only 7 percent of the 498 cowboys working in 1880 were Texans, according to the census manu­script schedules. In the Arkansas Valley of Kansas and Colorado, only 22 percent of 367 cowboys were Texans, while in southern Arizona and New Mexico, only 4 percent of the cowboys were Texans. Enter the mountain West and the Texans disappeared almost altogether. For example, not a single Texas-bom cowboy was found on any ranch in the mountain parb of Colorado in 1880. Nor was one found in sample countries in the Great Basin, to the west of the Continental Divide.

Third, I would argue, the Texan ranching presence, even on the Great Plains, was very brief. The Texans, essentially, failed there. They occupied the Plains in an unusually wet and mild climate phase in the quarter~tury after

2

1860. When normal conditions returned, the Texans were virtually wiped out. Their system of ranching, developed in the humid subtropics, was maladapted to both severe winters and drought.

By 1885 the truth was evident to any intelligent observer. The Texas system simply did not work on the Plains. Frank Wilkeson, writing in Harper's Monthly at that time, wondered rhetorically where the million or more head of largely longhorn breeding stock were that had been driven north from Texas during the previous ten years. "In a suitable climate these cattle would have been alive tcHlay. Where are they? The bones of thousands •.•. lie bleaching on the wind-swept flanks of the foot-hills. They pave the bottoms of miry pools; ••• they lie in disjointed, wolf­gnawed fragments on the arid, bunch­grass ranges; they are scattered over the short buffalo-grass . . .. They have died of hunger; they have perished of thirst, when the icy breath of winter closed the streams; they have died of starvation by the tens of thousands during the season when cold storms sweep out of the North and course over the plains, burying the grass under snow." They have "frozen into solid blocks during blood-chilling blizzards. " 5 A year later the terrible winter of 1886-1887 wiped out most of what was left of the Texas system on the Plains.

Texas expansion, then, was both far feebler geographically than usually presented and very ephemeral. If I had to name one permanent Texas contribution to the ranching West, it would be the stiff­countered Nocona boot. All others that come to mind, such as the cutting horse, Stetson hat, and hemp lariat, originated well to the east or south of Texas.

If Texans did not create the cattle­ranching culture of the West, then who did'? My fourth revisionist point is that there were rival ranching systems compet­ing from the very first with Texans for

TEXAS SYSTEM :

- Origin, 1780 -1820

Easlern front ol the Rockies

C==:J Expanded hearth 11ea, 1820·1880

ff;;tiWfJ Early expansion nuclei, 1880-1880

[::=J Olhe< areas of substanlial influence

-Outer limils. ''Texas Exlended"

--Border, Texan ranching zone of penetration

·-• Arrival of Texas callle and/Ot personnel

o Selecled examples ol use ol word MAVERICK

~ Mexican vaqueros oulnumber Anglos. 1880 ( Tuu llKI Alll:ON onl1 )

---- Major Texan callle trails

0 100 200 miles

0 300 kilometers

1 NORTH PLATTE VALLEY 2 SOUTH PLATTE VALLEY 3 SOUTH LOUP VALLEY -4 REPU8l.ICAH VAi.LEY 5 SALINE ANER YAllEY 6 SMOKY HILL RIYEA VALLEY 7 ARKANSAS RIYIEA VALLEY 8 SAH JUAH VALLEY

9 PLAINS OF SAN AUGUSTIN

Fig. 1. Origin and spread of the •Texas system• of cattle ranching, 1780-1880. Source: Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching.

3

dominance. The systems had no genetic connection to Texas. During the develop­ment of the Anglo-Texan ranching system, a parallel but distinctive cultural exchange took place in California, yielding a second, fully independent nucleus of the western range cattle industry. Few writers have even ac­knowledged the existence of an Anglo­Californian cattle-ranching system, but one of the first to do so was cultural geog­rapher Fred Kniffen. 6 The Spanish roots of this ranching culture lay in Pacific coastal Mexico and, more remotely, in the cbarro culture of Jalisco, in the Guadalajara area. In California, it grew out of the successful Spanish mission system and then flowered into a thriving secular industry in Mexican times, between 1821 and 1846. The California system was adopted and modified by Anglos durina the Mexican period. One­fifth of all ranching land grants made by Mexico in California went to Anglos. 7 In comparison to Anglo-Texans, the Ameri­cans in California adopted much more completely the Spanish ways and made much more use of Hispanic vaqueros. The Anglo/Mexican hatred and prejudice typical of Texas, born of bitter conflict, was largely absent.

Charro garb was accepted, as was the Spanish single-cinched saddle. The famous Visalia saddle, of California manufacture, was a single-cinched model. By contrast, Anglo-Texans developed a cumbersome double-cinched saddle, a type rarely adopted by non-Texans. Horses could have their breathing re­stricted by the double-cinched type, and the California Visalia saddle eventually swept the West. In Oregon, for example, according to an old-time rancher, "single­cinch saddles were mostly used," though "a Texas rider would sometimes drift in with a double rig, or two-cincher. " 1

1be great achievement of Anglo-Cali­fornia ranchers was their expansion, after

4

1860, into the Great Basin, both from the Central Valley of California and from the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where California Hispanic methods had become implanted in the 1840s (Figure 2). The Great Basin was to the Anglo-Californians what the Great Plains were to the Texans. 9

Pastoral California Extended achieved its greatest impact west of the Mormon farming region in Utah and south of the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers. Some Californian influences were felt even farther afield, in British Columbia and the Montana foothills.

The Great Basin, also called the High Desert or Cold Desert, was less suited to cattle than the Great Plains. Much of it was covered with big sagebrush, unpalat­able to cattle. Many other stretches were largely devoid of substantial stands of grass. Even so, mountain ranges offered high pastures and moister conditions for summer use, and the basins usually had lakes near the center that provided tule grass marshes. Too, the winters were milder than those on the Great Plains, since the Rocky Mountains walled off the bitter polar air masses. In order to use both mountain pastures and basin marshes, the ranchers employed the system of vertical transhumance, season­ally shifting cattle between pastures many miles apart. 1° Figure 3 shows routes of bovine vertical transhumance still in use today, and stock trails leading to the high pastures are often marked. Such transbu­mance most likely derived from the older Spanish Californian ranching system and remained alien to Texas practice, both in Spanish and Anglo times. The practice of transhumance is perhaps one good index of Anglo-Californian influence in the West.

One can detect the pastoral imprint of California not just in transhumance and the Visalia saddle, but also in various other features of both material and nonmaterial culture. Ranching vocabulary

0 !00 200 miles

0 100 200 300 kilometers

I ) •.;. California land grants to Anglos. 1821 -1846

\ Ila Nucleus of Anglo-Californian System. by 1848

.. \ ~ Expansion of Anglo·CaUfornian System. 1848-1862

\ C::J California extended. 1862· 1890

",\\1,CJ i .. ~~E~~ii ~;~ ·· ~· C Californian material culture present in county S Californian Spanish loanwords in use in county

! Specific examples of

-----0 migration, 1860 • 1880

c \

\ Approximate border between Eastern and ~ Western Cowboy traditions (after Vernam) "' ¥ %\

~\

i I I r i ~ .. - .. - ...

I ·- ·- ·- 1

·-··-··-··-

i I r - -·-

0

·-.. - .. _r- ·· 1-.. -

i

Fig. 2. Origin and spread of the Anglo-Californian cattle ranching system, 1825-1890. Sources: Kniffen, ·western Cattle Complex,• p. 182; Vemam, Man on Horseback, p. 301; Rojas, Vaquero, pp. 8-9; 1ordan, North American CaJtle Ranching.

s

%1?~~~~~ Summer mountain pastures 0 100 200 300 miles

l'Y Herd migrations 0 200 400 kilometers

Fig. 3. Routes of seasonal cattle transhumance in the western United States, about 1975. Source: Rinschede, Wanderviehwirtschaft, p. 158.

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provides numerous examples. Anglo­Califomians, like Anglo-Texans, bor­rowed and corrupted many Spanish words, but they did so in distinctive ways. Some loan words common in the Califor­nian system that ring alien in the Texan ear include buckaroo, the uniquely Californian corruption of vaquero; macardy, a fiber rope, from mecate; taps, the leather hood over stirrups, from tapaderas; cavry, a group of saddle horses, from cavieda; theodore, a hack­amore and rope knotted to a leather knob at the end of the reins, fromfiador; chinks, short fringed chaps reaching below the knee, from chinquederos; and riata, a rawhide lariat, from reala. 11

Several other form elements of ranching material culture common in pastoral California Extended but absent in the Texas tradition have Hispanic origin. An example is the Spanish windlass, a device to extract mired cattle from boggy ground in tule marshes and used even as far north as interior British Columbia (Figure 4). In the words of one British Columbian cattleman, ''we cut a pole nine feet long and about six or eight inches thick," then, with an axe, "sharpened one end like pencil and cut a groove right close to the other end all the way round the pole.'' The pointed end was jammed at a slant into the damp sod to "a depth of two or three feet, behind a willow root." Then, after the cowhand fit a rope into the groove at the top of the post, the other end ''was taken back and tied as a guy rope to a willow or to another ·small stake driven into the ground. " Using a second rope the cowhand cast a lasso over the horns of the mired animal, pulled it tight around the windlass post, and tied a bowline knot. ''Through the loop formed by the bowline, we placed a good stout pole,'' resting behind the post. Then ''we started walking round and round the upright post, causing it to tum and wind the rope onto it" and pulling the cow

7

free. A horimntal log at the base of the windlass post kept the rope from sinking down into the marshy ground and drown­ing the stranded animal. The buckaroo then beat a hasty retreat, since the newly freed animal was usually in a foul mood. 12

Another wooden windlass of Califor­nia Spanish mission origin, the beef wheel, stood in the killing pen and served to hoist the carcass of a slaughtered cow during butchering (Figure 5). Found in various parts of pastoral California Extended, especially eastern Oregon, the beef wheel consisted of two vertical posts, upon which rested a windlass shaft, or drum. On one end of the shaft was mounted a wheel or square frame. Pulling a rope attached to the frame or pressing against the projecting wheel spokes turned the shaft, winding a rope and raising the gambrel bearing the carcass.13

Diverse other herding techniques em­ployed in the Anglo-Californian system also derived from Hispanic practices. Most of these borrowed methods were in some way associated with management of cattle from horseback, the most enduring legacy of Spanish California, and many differed from Texas practice. This was perhaps most obvious in "dally" roping, or "dally welta," a term derived from the Spanish dar la vuelta, or "to give a twist." The "dally man" wound half­hitched loops around the saddle horn, as slack to be released when needed as the rope became taut, a tricky technique which, if carelessly performed, could result in the loss of a thumb. Texans, by contrast, simply tied the rope to the horn or bow, letting the double-cinched saddle absorb the jolt of the suddenly tightened line. The consensus holds that Califor­nians were far better skilled ropers, while Texans excelled as riders. The Texans relied to a much greater extent upon the nimble cutting horse in herding cattle, having taught their mounts the back-and-

.. .

Fig. 4. A Spanish windlass, used to pull mired cattle from wet places. Source: Bulman, Kamloops Canlemen, follows p. 96.

A

----~ ·- ·--~

~~ .~: :--- .: __ .:~· --... ~-·-=--- .,. J:.;:;:.~~::..:;;__ ~ ~

Fig. S. Two beef wheels, a material legacy of Hispanic Californian cattle ranching incorporated into the Anglo-Californian system. A, near Frencbglen, Oregon; B, near Juntura, Oregon.

8

forth techniques of herding dogs. As a result, the rider was often just dead weight to the cutting horse. 14

Hispanic, too, was the Anglo­Californian method of breaking wild horses. They used hackamores rather than bits for this purpose, unlike the Texans. The backamore consists of a braided leather noseband, or bosal, held in place by a light leather headstall and a woven cotton cord. As a result, cow ponies, when tamed, reputedly remained "soft­mouthed," or more responsive to the bit and reins. IS

Some very large-scale operations de­veloped within the Anglo-Californian cattle ranching tradition. These equalled or exceeded the largest of the Texas ranches and enjoyed a better access to market in the growing west coast urban centers. No operation was grander than that of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, who owned or controlled over one million acte8 of rangeland in three states (Figure 6). The cattle king does not belong exclusively to Texas. 16

In the long run, the Anglo-Califor­nian ranching system also collapsed. It, like the Texas system, was based on livestock neglect and was derived from a warm lotus land. Severe drought in the Great Basin in the late 1880s, coupled with unusually bad winters, virtually wiped out pastoral California Extended.

By the turn of the century, a third Anglo-American cattle-ranching culture had risen to dominance and survives to the present day. Its roots were neither Texan nor Californian. Instead, its origin lay in the Midwest and mountain South. Largely devoid of Spanish influences, the midwestem system of producing range cattle was largely of British highland oriain. A third of a century ago, Paul Heolein became the first scholar to recognize the existence of the midwestem system, but his work has largely been ignored, in favor of emphasis on the

9

Texans. 17 Peter Simpson is one of the few to see the importance of the Midwest to western ranching. In his words, •'a different technique for cattle raising spread from the Midwest directly across the continent. " 18 In some areas of the West, midwestem graziers led the way as pastoral pioneers, while in others they arrived as secondary settlers and their herding system displaced earlier Texan or Californian ranching (Figure 7).

Fundamentally different from its Hispanicized western competitors, the midwestem herding system was distin­guished mainly by greater attention to the welfare and quality of the livestock. Pursuing methods that were both more capital- and labor-intensive, the mid­westemers exercised greater diligence in the care of cattle than either the Texans or Californians, achieving in the process herd docility. They provided winter feed for their range cattle; strove to upgrade the bloodlines of their herds through selective breeding and even importation of British stock; shifted livestock seasonally between different pastures, often so profoundly as to involve transhumance; early formed stockraisers associations; possessed rather minimal equestrian skills; made extensive use of stock pens and erected, at their early convenience, pasture fences; and produced lean cattle for overland driving to areally segregated Com Belt fattening districts.

In many parts of the Great Plains, midwestem cattle raisers arrived before ranchers from the South implanted the Texas system. In so doing, they placed their cultural stamp on the vast region from the very first and, in the long run, shrugged off Texan attempts to seire the Plains. As a result, today most of the Great Plains belong to the vernacular Midwest. In particular, midwestem graziers entered the Great Plains along the axes of the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, an east-to-west movement that countered and

OREGON CALIFORNIA

0 100

0 100 200

-~ .. . . .. ...~ ._

200 miles

300 kilometers

IDAHO NEVADA

"'Los Angeles

N

;, ' Ranch Holdings of 0 t' Miller and Lux,

Late 19th Century

Fig. 6. Ranches and other landholdings of the California-based enterprise of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, representative of the cattle kings of the far West. Source: Treadwell, Cattle King, endpaper.

10

Outer limit of tattle ronc!W>g

1950 ....._ - Major eastern centers ol the Midwesletn System before 1850

• Holol>lt ""Rood Ranch""

o Selected rancher of Missouri. towe, "' llinOis bitth end/Of remova)

6 Midwestern cattle itltroducHon

f:: :".·.J Major nuclei ot Midwe1tern System in the W.SI

i i i i j i

··- --.!-.. - .. - -..,...-..J\ ) ---.. ..-.. \ "'· . ...--.

0 100 200 300 400 -

0

·- ·- ·- ·- ·- ·-1 ( .,

i i

.. ~ i

r · i I

! .... ,

\ ' \ .i I

~

Fig. 7. Spread of the midwestem system of cattle ranching from nuclei on the eastern margins of the Great Plains through the West, 1850-1900. Source: Jordan, North American Canle Ranching.

11

overwhelmed the south-to-north migration of the Texans. The earliest pastoral pioneers founded numerous so-called road ranches along the trails, especially in Nebraska, as early as the 1850s. Subse­quently, the road ranch became an occupance form closely linked to the spread of the midwestem cattle frontier in the West. The word ranch perhaps entered their vocabulary during the Mexican War of 1846-1848, or, more likely, by way of the Santa Fe trade. The proprietors of the road ranches traded with migrants headed to the Pacific states, exchanging healthy cattle for the trail­weary, weakened "pilgrim" stock belonging to the emigrants. As early as 1852 a road ranch had been established near present Ogallala, Nebraska, long before that place acquired a railroad and became famous as a depot for Texas longhoms. 19

As a result, midwestem pastoral practices became established very early on the Great Plains, providing a marked contrast to the Texas methods. The most obvious such difference could be seen in the careful tending of stock inherent in the midwestem system, a practice which produced far tamer cattle. In the Arkan­sas River Valley of eastern Colorado, an 1878 &C(X)UDt described "constant handling" of the cattle, by which "they become thoroughly domesticated.'' The labor-intensive Plains practice of "blab­bing" calves-attaching a nostril board to wean them-probably had midwestern origins and presented a marked contrast to the customary Texan method of slitting the calf's tongue. Plains observers repeatedly noted that Texas longhorns were wilder or more "timid" than •'northern'' cattle, reflecting the essential difference in frequency of tending.»

As earlier suggested, provision of winter feed, usually hay, also formed an essential aspect of the more labor- and capital-intensive midwestem system on

the early Great Plains. Clarence Gordon observed in Wyoming in 1880 that "the man from Iowa or Missouri works well in the hay-field, but the Texan dislikes agri­culture" and would "rather get his time than bother the ground.' ' 21

Midwestern influence, present from the earliest years on the Great Plains, grew steadily as the Texans experienced repeated setbacks due to climatic maladap­tation. When the ill-advised Texas system finally collapsed in the late 1880s, midwestern methods rose to unchallenged dominance throughout most all of the Plains. Well before the end of the century, the midwestern preference for British-derived breeds and fenced pastures swept even through Texas itself, ending the day of the longhorn and open range in the very cradle of the Texas system.

The same succession was repeated in pastoral California Extended and other parts of the West. Midwestern methods either dominated ranching from the very first or else replaced the careless Califor­nia practices. Look at the genealogies of most ranchers in the mountain and intermontane West, and you will find midwestern roots. Observe how they ranched, and you will find midwestern methods.

The preponderantly midwestem character of the mountain western ranching frontier was well exemplified by one particular ranch, in the Beaverhead Valley of Montana, for which a rather detailed 1876 description survives. At the ranch headquarters in the valley, about 500 acres were enclosed, a fifth of which was cultivated and the rest in haymeadow. A good, solid dwelling and enormous horsebarn, the latter measuring SO by 78 feet, dominated the ranchstead. About 3,000 cattle, including some shorthorns, were raised on the place, in addition to a like number of sheep and 500-<><ld horses. Two wood fences spanned the entire width of the valley, from slope to slope,

12

enclosing an astounding 19,200 acres of pasture, with a divider fence to separate winter and summer ranges. 22 While this ranch may have been exceptional in some ways, it demonstrated the ascendance of midwestern ways in the western moun­tains.

In conclusion, I am proposing that (1) the Texas system of frontier cattle ranching influenced only a small part of the American West, and only for a brief time; (2) the Texas system was, in any case, of coastal southern and, in particu­lar, Louisiana origin; (3) Anglo-Califor­nians instead of Texans shaped most frontier ranching west of the Continental Divide; and (4) the midwestem system of cattle ranching prevailed almost every­where in the West by 1900, even in Texas, and owed little to either Texas or California. If you seek the origins of the western cattle culture complex, look not only or even principally to Texas, but also

· to California, Ohio, Kentucky, and Mis­souri-"mother of the West. " 23

13

Notes

1. Walter P. Webb, 1.he Great Plains (Boston, 1931), chapter 6; 1. Frank Dobie, 1.he Longhorns (Boston, 1941); Francis L. Fugate, "Origins of the Range Cattle Era in South Texas," Agricultural History 35 (1961): 155-158.

2. Terry G. Ionian, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattk Ranch­ing (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1981).

3. Terry G. Jordan, Nonh American Cattk Ranching Frontiers (Albuquerque, in press, 1993) chapters 3, 4, 6; 1ohn S. Otto, "The Origins of Cattlo-Ranching in Colonial South Carolina, 1670-1715," South CaroUna Historical Magazine 81 (1986): 117-124.

4. Ionian, Nonh American Cattk Ranching, chapters 6, 7.

5. Fraiik Wilkeson, "Cattle-Raising on the Plains," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 72 (April 1886): 788-795.

6. Fred B. Kniffea, "The Western Cattle Complex: Notes on Differentiation and Diffusion,•• Western FolJclore 12 (1953): 181-182. See alilo Hazel A. Pulling, "A History of California's Range Cattle Industry, 1770-1912" (Ph.D. disserta­tion, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1944); Ionian, Nonh Ameri­can Cattle Ranching, chapter 8; and Io Mora, Californios: 1.he Saga of the Hard-Riding Vaqueros, America's First Cowboys (Garden City, New York, 1949).

7. David Hornbeck, "Land Teaure and Rancho Expansion in Alta California,'' Journal of Historical Geography 4 (1978): 388-389.

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8. Arnold R . Rojas, 1.he Vaquero (Char­lotte, North Carolina, and Santa Barbara, California, 1964), pp. 29-33; Annie R. Mitchell, 1.he Way It Was: 1.he Coloiful History of Tulare County (Fresno, Califor­nia, 1976), pp. 45-48; Herman Oliver and E. R. Jackman, Gold and Cattle Country (Portland, Oregon, 1962), p. 135.

9. James A. Young and B. Abbott Sparks, Cattle in the Cold Desm (Logan, Utah, 1985); Howard W. Marshall and Richard E. Ahlborn, Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Nonhern Nevada (Wash­ington, D.C., 1980).

10. Gisbert Rinschede, Die Wander­viehwinschaft im gebirgigen Westen der USA und ihre Auswirkungen im Naturraum (Regensburg, Germany, 1984).

11. Frederic G. Cassidy, ed., Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985), 1:411, 497, 575; William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert, A Dictionary of American.English on Historic Principles (Chicago, 1944), 4:1965; Craig M. Carver, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1987), p. 225; Eli7.abeth S. Bright, A Word Geography of California and Nevada (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 93, 108, 168, 174, 193.

12. T. Alex Bulman, Kam/oops Cattle­men: One Hundred Years of Trail Dust­(Sidn~, British Columbia, 1972), pp. 96-97, 111-112.

13. Giles French, Cattle Country of Peter French (Portland, Oregon, 1964), p. 38; Oliver and Jackman, Gold and Cattle, p. 161.

14. Dane Coolidge, Old California Cowbays (New York, 1939), pp. 28, 80-81, 85; Jo Mora, Trail Dust and Saddle Leather (New York, 1946), pp. 60, 63; David Dary, Cowboy Cullure: A Saga of Five Centuries (New York, 1981), p. 157; Glenn R. Veroam, Man on Horseback­(New York, 1964), pp. 306, 311; William Foster-Harris, The Look of the Old West (New York, 1960), pp. 217, 250.

15. Dary, Cowboy Culture, pp. 48, 157; Veroam, Man on Horseback, pp. 311-314; Mora, Trail Dust, pp. 67-68; Foster­Harris, Look of Old West, p . 253.

16. Edward F. Treadwell, The Cattle King: A Dramatized Biography (New York, 1931); French, Cattle Country of Peter French.

17. Paul C. Henlein, Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley, 1783-lB(j() (Lexington, Kentucky, 1959). See also Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching, chapters 6, 9.

18. Peter K. Simpson, The Community of Cattlemen: A Social History of the Cattle Industry in Southeastern Oregon, 1869-1912 (Moscow, Idaho, 1987); Peter K. Simpson, ''Studying the Cattleman: Cultural History and the Livestock Industry in Southeastern Oregon,'' Idaho Yesterdays 28:2 (1984), p. 7 (quote).

19. Nellie S. Yost, 1he Call of the Range: The Story of the Nebraska Stock Growers Association (Denver, 1966), pp. 27-36.

20. Reginald Aldridge, Ranch Notes in Kansas, Colorado, the Indian Territory and Northern Texas (London, 1884), pp. 64-66, 183, 204; George C. Everett, Cattle Cavalcade in Central Colorado (Denver, 1966), pp. 10, 17; Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (Kansas

City, Missouri, 1874), pp. 82, 216.

21. Clarence Gordon, " Report on Cattle, Sheep, and Swine, Supplementary to Enu­meration of Live Stock on Farms in 1880," Report on the Production of Agri­cullure as Returned at the Tenth Census (Washington, D.C., 1883), p. 1016.

22. Ernest S. Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Chicago, 1929), pp. 56-57.

23. Frederick Simpich, " Missouri, Mother of the West," National Geo­graphic Magazine 43 (1923): 421-460.

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