Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

Up the trail from Texas

On a small map of the United States, put the heel of the palm of your hand on South Texas. Stretch the fingers as wide as you can and imagine you had very long fingers. That gives you a rough picture of how the cattle trails in the last century fanned out from Texas. The trails stretched to New Orleans and Natchez in the east; to Chicago, St. Louis, and towns in Missouri and Kansas in the Midwest; to Denver and Sacramento in the West.
   The cattle trailing business is older than Texas. Cattle were driven from this part of Mexico across snake-infested Louisiana bayous to feed a Spanish army in the late 1700s. Victoria's Martin De Leon took a herd to New Orleans in the 1820s. After the Texas Revolution, "cowboys'' rounded up abandoned cattle in the Nueces Strip and drove them east for sale. In the 1840s, cattle were trailed to Ohio, Missouri, and to California after gold was discovered. During the Civil War, herds were driven east to help feed the Confederacy.
   But the great cattle drives began after the Civil War. Confederate veterans came home to find the ranges and chaparral teeming with longhorns that had never seen a rope. They were chased out of the brush, branded, and walked to market. It was like rounding up money.
   Driving herds to the railhead towns in Kansas began in the mid-to-late 1860s. South Texas ranchers Richard King, Mifflin Kenedy, Ed Lasater, Robert and Jeremiah Driscoll, John Rabb, Darius ("Di-reece'') Rachal and his brother, among others, delivered herds to Kansas. An old clipping from a Corpus Christi paper (the date is lost) reports that, "James Bryden starts off with the first drove of cattle for the Kansas market, his herd consisting of 4,120 head from Nueces County.''
   In 1866, 250,000 longhorns were taken on the trail. In 1869, 600,000 cattle went up the trail. The greatest drive in history happened in 1871 when over 700,000 head of Texas cattle went north. So many cattle were taken up the trails that they could not be sold; they were wintered in Kansas at a loss.
   Some ranchers conducted their own drives while others sold their cattle to a drover, who went from ranch to ranch buying cattle. The drovers gathered their herds in the spring, when the grass was coming up. The drive took from three to four months and they wanted to get them to market before rough weather set in. The cattle were fattened on the road and sold in Kansas. In 1873, a steer worth $8 in Corpus Christi sold for $23 in Abilene.
   For every 1,000 head in a herd, there were four to six cowboys on the drive. They were paid $30 to $40 a month, depending on experience. In addition to cowboys, sometimes called "waddies" or "screws," there was a trail boss, a horse wrangler, and a "biscuit-shooter.'' Some drives had a scout to choose places to ford rivers, to find a suitable bedding ground each day, and to kill wild game to help vary the diet.
   The chuck wagon, often pulled by oxen, carried bedding, rain slickers and provisions - axle grease, beans, flour, sugar, bacon, lard, Arbuckle's coffee. The staples would be replenished at Fort Worth or Doan's store on the Red River.
   In the early going, the cattle were driven hard, 20 to 30 miles a day, to get them away from their home ranges as fast as possible. Mixed herds were hard to drive. Cows - "she stuff'' the cowboys called them - were slower than steers and newborn calves even slower. Some killed calves because they couldn't keep up; sometimes a wagon would be used to haul the calves, but they were problems on the trail.
   Early on, a trail boss would try to spot and fire troublemakers. In one incident, four cowboys who were too quick to draw their guns were fired, their horses taken, and they were left sitting on their saddles under a clump of cottonwood trees.
   A typical herd after it was trail broken averaged about 10 miles a day. (Darius Rachal, a rancher at White Point on Nueces Bay, was famous for moving his cattle at a fast clip, then fattening them in Kansas; a trail boss trying to hurry his herd along would say, "Rachal 'em, boys, rachal 'em.'') The cattle would graze in the morning, nibbling along in the direction of the drive, then the cowboys moved them along at a fast walk in the afternoons. The herd leaders were flanked by cowboys riding on big saddles with high backs and pommels. When they reached the bedding ground, the cows were put in a bedding circle. Near midnight, the cattle would get up, stand around, then lie down on their other side, while the cowboys watched the herd.
   When they moved away from well-beaten trails, looking for better grass and water, drovers usually followed the stars. At night, the tongue of the chuck wagon was pointed toward the North Star. Next morning, the drive would take that direction.
   (This is the first in a three-part series. Part two will be in this space next Wednesday. Sources for this series will be printed at the end of the third column.)
  

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