Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, December 15, 1999

The cowtown of the Gulf Coast

At the end of the Civil War, soldiers came home barefoot and broke. They returned to South Texas to find vast herds of wild, unbranded cattle, there for the taking, and they took longhorns not branded, trail-broke them, and drove them to Kansas rail-heads where they were destined for northern cities hungry for beef.
   In 1866, 260,000 head of cattle went up the trail. This cheap Texas beef glutted the market and prices fell to next to nothing. The next year, 37,000 head went north. The value of the longhorn was reduced to the value of its hide, the tallow that could be rendered, and horns and bones used to make buttons. Slaughter houses, or packeries, were built from Corpus Christi to Galveston. The center of it all was a new town on Live Oak Peninsula - Rockport.
   Rockport's emergence is linked to the decline of St. Mary's. Most of the Florida lumber that built South Texas was unloaded at St. Mary's. But the town went into decline after its wharves were burned in the war and larger ships had trouble navigating around the reefs in Copano Bay.
   Down the coast, the owner of a packery at Flour Bluff, James M. Doughty, was unhappy with his location. It was too far from open water and his shipments had to be lightered across Corpus Christi Bay. Doughty looked over a site with high ground and deep water on Aransas Bay. For shipping purposes, it was far superior to St. Mary's. Vessels drawing eight or nine feet could pass the bar with ease.
   Doughty and partner Richard H. Wood built cattle pens on a rocky ledge overlooking Aransas Bay. Then came William Hall, a Maine Yankee, who built a packery, which was followed by a dozen others. The Coleman-Mathis-Fulton combine built a packery at Fulton, three miles up the coast. One large packery was at Frandolig Point, between Rockport and Fulton. Doughty and A.W. Clarke built a packery south of Rockport, on a site later occupied by Heldenfels shipbuilding.
   Across South Texas, longhorns were driven to the packeries. Packers would pay $4 to $7 a head for anything that would pass the brand inspectors. D.C. Rachal, a Confederate veteran, was one of the area ranchers who got his start by driving cattle for the Rockport packeries. At the packeries, the cattle were slaughtered and "shucked'' of their hides. The meat was boiled in cisterns for the tallow. Bones and horns were salvaged. The meat that couldn't be given away or fed to hogs was dumped into the bays or heaped on mountains of flesh covered with blowflies. A large packery employing 40 workers could process up to 250 head of cattle a day.
   At Rockport, ships loaded salted hides, barrels of tallow, and heaps of horns and bones. The ships brought nail kegs filled with silver dollars for exchange. By 1874, Rockport had two hotels, four churches, one county courthouse, a newspaper, the Rockport Transcript, and an assortment of gambling houses and saloons; the most famous saloon was named "The Finish.''
   Within a decade of the beginning of the packeries, harsh winter "die-outs'' and drought depleted the herds, meat prices climbed, and it was no longer profitable to slaughter cattle for hides and tallow alone. But Rockport continued to thrive on the shipment of live cattle by sea. In 1876, a one-year-old calf sold for $3.50 in South Texas. It cost $4 to transport it to New Orleans where it would sell for $12. The profit margin was cut if there was rough weather in the Gulf; some cattle would die and their carcasses would be thrown overboard.
   The coming of the railroad led to the end of shipping cattle by sea; the cattle pens were empty, no Morgan Line ships came to call, and the Big Wharf was eventually sold for scrap. Rockport turned to shipbuilding, fishing, and tourism, its economic mainstays today.
   In 1890, electric lights were installed and Rockport acquired mule-drawn streetcars that ran to the nearby community of Oklahoma. Rockport-Fulton was still a prosperous place in the 1890s when John H. Traylor built the Aransas Hotel, one of the largest resort hotels on the Gulf. It was famous for the "Big Dance'' held on Saturday nights, for the yacht available to the guests, for the orchestras that played in the dining rooms, for a menu that included turtle steaks and Taft Ranch beef. The hotel burned in 1919.
   The Rockport-Fulton area - pretty as a postcard - betrays little evidence of its past as the center of the gory hide-and-tallow business. All that remains of that era is the Fulton Mansion, built during the packery boom. You have to close your eyes and try to imagine what Rockport was like then; it certainly was like nothing in living memory. With its cattle pens and slaughter houses and dirt streets filled with wild-eyed longhorns and cowboys dusty from the trail, it was as much a cowtown as Fort Worth or Abilene or Dodge City ever was.
   (Sources include "Texas Coastal Bend'' by Alpha Kennedy Wood; "Aransas'' by Sue Hastings Taylor and William Allen; "Refugio'' by Hobart Huson; and various Caller-Times archive articles on the hide-and-tallow business.)
  

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