| The great days of the "cattle kingdoms"
in America began shortly after the Civil War (1861-1865), when Texans drove
thousands of longhorn cattle north to the rail towns in Kansas, Nebraska,
and Wyoming for shipment to meat packers in Kansas City, Missouri, and
Chicago, Illinois. Other thousands of cattle were driven to grazing lands
in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. These lands were part of the public
domain, owned by the government, but the cattle kings ran their herds on
millions of acres of grasslands while government agents looked the other
way. The big cattle companies also bought out homesteaders who found they
could not make a living on Ihe dry, wind-swept high plains. Then, in 1877,
the cattle kings persuaded Congress to pass the Desert Land Act, which
meant that, for only 25$ an acre and a promise to irrigate the land within
three years, a person could obtain 640 acres of Federal dry land. Much
of this was good grazing land, and the cattle kings had the ready cash
to grab most of it.
One of the first and greatest of the cattle
kings was Charles Goodnight who, with his partner Oliver Loving, pioneered
the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail out of Texas to the northern plains of
Colorado, Montana, and
Wyoming. Goodnight became one of the first
ranchers in Colorado in 1868 but, after the economic depression of 1873
left him bankrupt, he moved into the Texas Panhandle and started the JA
Ranch. There he developed one of the West's finest beef herds bv crossbreeding
lanky longhorns with fat Herefords.
During the great days of the cattle kingdoms,
range cattle that were worth $7 or $8 a head in 1878 sold for $30 to $35
by 1882. More cattle were driven from Texas to the northern plains, while
Scottish and English financiers bought up ranches and hired veteran cattlemen
to manage them. The English-financed XIT ranch sprawled over nine counties
and controlled 15,000 sq. miles (38,000 sq. km.) of Montana range.
By 1885 the northern plains were too heavily
stocked to support more cattle, and the oversupply of beef on the hoof
caused the Chicago packers to slash prices back to $8 a head. While the
cattle kings were reeling from this blow, the terrible winter of 1886-1887
killed thousands of cattle and ruined even some of the biggest cattle companies.
Soon the cattle kingdoms of the open range were replaced by the stock farms
and fenced ranches of the 20th century.
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