hello class welcome to the lecture on counter ranching in Texas nothing gets more Texas than cattle now I like to start off by describing this image here this is an image of a calf that is about 10 minutes old she had just been born how do I know that yes where is this happened when I was growing up on the family farm the mama cow there is my favorite cow of all time raised her off a bottle brought her home on my lap in the cab of a truck so Sweet Pea and by this time she had so many calves we just we just started we just called this one little pea it was our last one that she had very special bow I know it sounds kind of goofy getting attached to to a bovine but they do have their own personalities and you know they're they're essential to to the history of Texas and so let's talk about cattle ranching in Texas because like I said I mean there's hardly anything more Texan than cattle because cattle cover almost everything they cover you know awful mascots for an awful university to to the beef that we that we so freely love again I apologize if you're vegan or vegetarian like I always say I you know I you know I don't see how y'all can do it but hey more power to you I respect respect the discipline and also it just means more meat for me so ah so some of our cattle ranch in Texas overall I mean when you look back throughout Texas history I mean the cattle industry is always been there it's always been a defining industry within Texas so you go all the way back to the 18th century which is the 1700s it was the main economic activity in Texas remember they're trying to establish those missions and Presidio's too so ranching can develop and thus an economy will develop and attract more people in the Texas and it becomes extremely important after the Civil War because pretty I think I'm pretty sure I've covered it or yeah well we'll definitely mom eyes will just dive right in - it basically during the ward I'm just kind of covering myself make sure cuz I thought I had cover this but for some reason it's those chemical reactions from brain aren't working alright so during the Civil War men go off to fight they're out there fighting and killing and the cows are doing what the cows are doing you know like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett sing say in their song the front porch song the Bulls work is never done and so when the men come back you know there's the cows have multiplied well more importantly what's of it so you have a huge cattle mark the Kurds have grown during the Civil War more importantly the United States as a whole has developed a taste for beet because you have men in the army and in order to get their protein you know the army in the Army's moving all the time they need food that moves preferably that moves on its own and so where we have an army you have a small herd of cattle these guys are eating eating the beef trust me it's a lot easier to transfer the the make cows walk around than it is to make chickens walk around in order to keep them in coops and hogs as well and so after the war everybody wants beef but boasts but in the south and in the north they've depleted their beef supply during the war and so everybody wants once beef and so Texas Ike yee-ha I got beef over here and so the price of beef goes up in Texans are going to be driving their cattle in the market and the main area that the cattle that the ranches are especially before the Civil War are going to be down is going to be basically from Austin down to the Rio Grande so more southern central to southern Texas is going to be the main area so like I said it Spanish background the Spanish gonna be the ones that introduce cattle you know with around the miss out with ranches around the missions and the towns the one and the most important breed of cattle it's going to be the Longhorns and now I mean yes the Longhorn has long horns it can defend itself but it makes Longhorns so so it desirable because I mean they're not a very big beefy cow what makes them really attractive is whenever you drive them whenever you have a herd and you take them to market they actually put on weight because in cattle industry weight is everything so the heavier the cow the more money you get be pay for the pound and so Longhorns are attractive because all other cattle when you drive on the market they lose weight but the Longhorns they gain it and so over time you know when more southerners come into Texas and a little bit more sedimentary ranches they're gonna start introducing some heavier breeds from the south like you know char lays beef masters and Angus you you name it what face always one of my favorites those are good taste in cows that's what we LS what we ate you know we raised a couple of cows and slaughtered them you know didn't bother me but definitely disturbed my mom especially when we started saying the cows name while we're eating it the first time but I know this made gross yeah but that's just the way it is I mean especially back then we you know our food no longer has a face on it because we get it at HEB so uh so the early cattle ranches are going to be simply open range this is this a Southern tradition you you know we talked about this in class you put thins around your garden and you just let the cows roam free you brand your cows you notch the ears on you pigs and then you round them up every so often and take them in the market and so by 1860 it's estimated about three and a half million cattle in Texas West Texas is going to start slowly integrating into ranches started adopting ranches but really not until after the Red River War that's the last you know it's the the final defeat for the Comanches sokka Manchuria is is completely open so this is when ranchers are going to be established out in West Texas first cattle drives and Texas are going to start occurring before let me skip over cuz I don't know I have these guys here but some of the earliest cattle drives are going to start off in the 1840s and basically there's you know it's gonna be you know like the Chisholm Trail I mean if you really think about if you look at the Chisholm betrayal on here that's going to become a little bit more popular after the war but you know that's high thirty-five so you can tell that I thirty-five was a coming is was basically designed mostly on this cattle drive but basically in the 1840s a Shawnee trail it's not listed here but it goes east of Dallas mainly because Dallas isn't established but I mean you do have some settlements and there's gonna be some problems you know because whenever you drive cattle through and there's a settlement cows tend to do it cows do they eat so they're eating the crops for those peoples cows they're going to be breaking into gardens and trust me cows love getting in the gardens and also they're transmitting diseases so wherever you know foreign cows come in or you know non-local cows they're you know whatever disease they have they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna spread it to the local herd it's like I said during the Civil War herds really aren't cared for a Bulls work is never done he's you know taking care of the ladies and making a whole bunch of calves and so they're allowed to you know reproduce uncontrol I mean there's gonna be some culling of the herd where they're pulling out and shipping it off to war but not not too many and so by time you know the civil war ends there's about five million cattle in Texas so put things in perspective right before the Civil War 3.5 million when they come back there's five million the Bulls were pretty busy and so they're roaming they're you know they're yeah and so when these guys come back they really see that you know with the cattle prices going up Texas is the place to be so economically Texas is untouched by the war then you have the cattle industry just shoot up Texas is a place to be so this is another reason why people from the South are coming into Texas because there's money to be made if not through ranching but you know being a cowboy so you're going to have drives in the main area the main destination early on after the war is going to be Abilene Kansas because there's a rail station there and so basically you're going to be driving them up to that location they're going to load them up on trains and then ship them to to the various markets predominantly it's going to be up in Chicago because the meat industry you know Chicago is kind of the hub of the meat industry of the time period and so you're going to have roundup and cattle drives let's look at some of the prominent cattlemen and Texans oh they're sweet pea and little pea you got John Chisholm Charles good knot in George Littlefield are gonna be some big names on their little field you know he's he's a pretty important guy in Texas history not only is our town named after him out in West Texas it's the birth in in that town is the birthplace of Waylon Jennings and a whole bunch of Jennings still lived there so if you ever get a chance it's just down the road from where my wife grew up in wit Harold you drive through a little field and you'll see you know Jennings mailboxes and their relatives Waylon Jennings the famous country singer hopefully you all know who he is if not look him up particularly you know just some good old bones I'm not gonna sing anymore but never meanin no harm just watch the diksa Hazzard he also did the the narrate the narration for Dixon Hazzard if they even show that on TV anymore and so and so these so these guys are gonna be having ranches they're gonna be you know there are still kind of free-range they're organizing cattle drives and are going up into the you know along the Chisholm Trail named dr. John going up instead of selling their cattle in Kansas it's time-consuming driving cattle you know farmers whenever they you know they see a herd coming they're going to try to prevent they're gonna be using guns they're gonna be shooting at people they're going because again they don't want their crops trampled they don't want to being spread to their cattle and so what as you can see there's more and more attempts to find a different route and so I include this one because later on when the destinations will be Fort Worth because that's something we'll talk about here it's the second so I'll go right back to it and so the draw it so the the cattle drives are going to be going further west and west to avoid all these settlements as the frontier gets pushed west so do the cattle drives and believe it or not there are some cattle drives to Louisiana and all the way to California as well but these that are listed are just some of the more predominant ones so let's see what's going on after the war things are going to start changing for the cattle industry technology is going to improve which is going to radically alter the process of of the the cattle industry so let's look at some of these one is obviously the railroad we already talked a bit about the railroad one of the one of the technological advances besides having stock cars to haul the stock around so when I say stock cars when talking about NASCAR it's like a stock trailer it's normally what you use to drive livestock around it is you're gonna have a refrigerated car so this is where Chicago comes an important so where I talked about meat industry this is work kind of you know everybody likes to say Henry Ford was the one that created the oh I'm drawing a blank here is the conveyer system or I know there's a line hopefully it'll come to me before the in a lecture I know this term I yeah I know the answer not right now yeah hi Sorensen what I can't think of it they're really gonna revolutionize industry because they're the ones that come up with the idea of being the most efficient with the product and so literally at the slaughterhouses in Chicago they make the cows walk up this big ramp to the top or the kill the cow and then they hang it up and then let gravity bring the carcass down it'll stop it I just had it and I forgot it and I lost it but the cat the carcass will go down one station is skinning send it down you know to use gravity and it's just slowly going down you know one part one part of the the line cuts off the legs another you know in improv and butchers the entire cow being as efficient as as as possible with it with the cattle and so refrigerated cars allowed them to to ship this meat throughout the country now refrigeration means they're not having you know AC units or refrigerated units what they're doing is they're harvesting ice from Canada and sticking it in these rail cars where the air enters in and circulates and keeps the air cool within the railcar is insulated and whatnot to keep that meat from from spoiling and so now you're even more instead of distributing it through the railroads you know look at the cattle the cattle are just going up to Chicago and being distributed in some cases you're going to have other processors that are going to be more local that are gonna be able to do the same thing such as you know for troops such as Fort Worth so if you ever get a chance to go to the stockyards there in Fort Worth there's some really good food I mean I recommend Jyoti Garcia's it's just down the road from the stockyards mmm some of the best Mexican our tex-mex food I've ever had in my life Billy Bob's is down there some really good musics and really if you want some good steaks go down there they do a cattle drive every day down there little mock cattle drive but they're real cows they're just like really alright yeah they're stop and imposing for pitchers like take my picture this is my good side kind of thing enough for the comedy and so you're gonna have these dark yards you know when you have like the Fort Worth Stockyards no longer a need to ship them all up to Kansas so the drives are going to be much more shorter and and this kind of goes and convenience with with what's going on with the changes in the ranching industry with the fencing off of their land and no longer using free-range and so basically what people what Rangers start doing is they start purchasing their own property free-range a lot of times it wasn't even their property it was just state property they were running running their cattle on our public lands sorry and so when neighbor ranchers are eyeing property the one there's really yeah a few things that are driving their their pic of land but water is always one they've got to have a water source salt it's or salt there that's vitally important because I mean there's nothing more vital to to livestock than salt and so they're gonna be you know and also they weigh and they're gonna start fencing it and you had the invention the barbed wire fence I know I've already talked about that some but you know it's just basically a fence that you know the cows leaning on they go out move out move out and then they stop leaning and they stay where they're supposed to stay you can now more scientifically breed your cattle once you're able to do that and so and so basically by this point the cattle industry is becoming extremely expensive and so it's very difficult to really break in if you didn't already own the land or had the the proper capital and so but there are some some instances where where you gonna have some late comers to the game and nothing symbolizes more than the British syndicate which will eventually start the XIT ranch there we go that's there that's one that that's the brand for the XIT ranch because what happened is Texas is in trouble now the capital building had burned down here's a picture of the Capitol building burning and Texas in courses Texas is hail and rich cash poor and so Texas was rebuilt as capital but doesn't have the money and so in Texas basically says is hey if anybody can purchase the supplies and help us rebuild our capital we'll give you three million acres of land and so you're gonna have a group of British investors that are going to go through a bank in Chicago to to invest in built in get the the pink granite cut and hauled to the to Austin most of us coming in from Burnett so if you take the train from Cedar Park just north of Austin part of that dry train ride you can see some of the remnants of the discarded pink granite alongside the railroad it's really kind of fascinating to think that you know that's been sitting there for over a hundred years and so what this and so and so you have the the formation of the XIT ranch just three million acres handed out this is going to be around the Palo Duro Canyon area which is still on my bucket list I lived in Lubbock for two years I never made it to Palo Duro I drove by it but never ride up to it they even have a rendition of Texas so it's kind of like the play Oklahoma but with Texas they do down there and so with this you're gonna have you know I've already talked about fence cutting I'm not gonna talk too much about that you know fix the fence cutting becomes an issue free rangers or you know cutting down fences for these new ranches and you can't really blame the ranchers because they they've invested a lot of money they want to really they want to produce superior cows and so that's the kind of the best way to control their herds and protect their herds but there's gonna be other problems besides fence cutters you're going to have cattle rustlers you know for some time you know Indian raids and weather is always an issue because trust me I mean lightning can kill several cows in one strike droughts floods you name it all that can can have an impact on your herd and so by this time the these ranchers are getting so big you know the drives are so short that the cattle that the owner no longer is going on this cattle drives are just hiring out managers to take care of everything and so as we said you know I'm not gonna this want to go real quick you know that the trails keep going west and west and you have the establishment of other prominent trails and the last great trail is a good night loving trail and still just love that name for some reason I don't why but you're gonna have some giant red cattle ranches in Texas and again this is what everybody thinks of Texas everybody thinks of Texans living on farms with a whole bunch of cattle trust me you know whenever I don't even see my cousin's I'd go up I have cousins up in Ohio and I go and visit them and they'd you know and them and their friends would be like well do you have any cows you ride a horse to school and I'd have to say well yes we do have cows but we are the oddballs because I mean I think I was the only kid in my high school that actually had cattle that lived on a farm and so it always blew people's minds and everybody wanted to come over and pick mushrooms which always had to discourage don't be picking mushrooms from cow turds yeah so we can be here Lucinda genic but I don't recommend it not that I ever tried trust me never tried that just the idea of eating something that grows off of poop has never been appealing to me all right so what you're going to have these ranchers are buying these huge parcels of land just how big you know for example Charles goodnights J a ranch is going to be about 700,000 acres in a Palo Duro Canyon the shoe bar ranch in the panhandle quarter of a million acres the King Ranch in South Texas we've talked about the King Ranch several times that's going to be over a million acres in size Matador landing cattle company which was purchased by Dutch investors about three hundred thousand acres the XIT ranch about three million acres of land now you may think well why do you need three million acres well trust me there's not much growing in West Texas at that time since the buffalo herds or had disappeared the ecology had changed and you need that much land to run a whole bunch of cattle whereas you could probably put a couple of cows per acre out you know in other places in the United States and Texas you need you need several acres per cow so it's vitally important that they're that they are pretty big and so overall these cattle ranches extremely profitable and have a direct impact on the culture of Texas but of course we can't yeah livestock without including sheep and goats we've already talked a little bit about this the Spanish surely will be the first ones that bring in sheep and goats you know they they they serve their purpose sheep produce wool goats produce milk you can eat both get some nice cabrito from the goat hmm making myself hungry talking about beef and capital in class in class not too big on lamb and sheep and it's not big on it but basically like I said before you raise cow for prestige but you you raise sheep for profit because they you get a lot more money over time with with the sheep and the sheep and the sheep and goat ranches are gonna be predominantly in the hill country all right where the land is a little bit cheaper and the land is more suitable for goats goats can live on hills whereas cows really can't and so of course one of the bigger names of the the goat industry is and so here's a field of sheep don't get too excited now but a whole bunch of sheep and biggest name is Charles Shriner so if you ever go to Kerrville everything has Shriners name even there's a university out there Shriner University even owned a bank and you can tell just how much money you can make off a sheep when you basically own a very prominent town in Texas now the one thing that really changes everything and this is a good foray into the next lecture is the development of railroads in Texas so we kind of already hit upon it a little bit here because railroads were used to transport the cattle but let's just incorporate this because this is a good set up for the next lecture and it's related to the cattle so railroads in Texas we talked about before is begins it didn't expand very quickly until after after reconstruction you got way too many issues going on in reconstruction and then he even had the panic of 1873 which you know herd building building railroads are investment across the nation and so the stay is gonna finance a railroad entry so if you remember back to lecture where I talked about you know the the alternating parcels of lamb being given to railroad company so because again Texas is land rich cash poor so they're able to give that land to the railroad companies they sell that land to generate revenue to help our capital to build to build the railroad while at the same time it increases the value of the lands around so the state will make more money off of it in the end and so basically overall Texas gave about 32 million acres of land to railroad companies that's just mind-boggling that's almost the size of Alabama again it's tough to explain to people just how big our state is and so also local governments are going to try to come up with ways to attract the attract railroads I'll give you a couple of examples one is I'll throw out a West Texas example then we'll go to East Texas because II sex is one's a bit more interesting out in West Texas you know I went to college in Abilene and there's a small town just southwest of Abilene called Buffalo Gap and it's called Buffalo Gap because there you have even though Abilene is really flat there are some Hills there and there's this gap and it was the gap that the the Buffalo used across this area and at the time Buffalo Gap was the county seat for Taylor County and it had big plans on being the next great city in Texas so most y'all probably think Buffalo Gap Texas you know yeah don't worry I never heard about it either until I got there but at the time it was it was you know they had they had big plans because I mean they even established College Street and University Street because this is what they're planning on doing there and they they were trying and they thought they had a lock-in on the railroad because of that gap but there was a little bit better route further north and that was through Abilene and so Abilene was able to attract the railroad then became the county seat and Buffalo Gap is just kind of dried up the only things in Buffalo Gap you know you have a historic village there where somebody brought all the historic buildings into one place it's actually kind of neat and you have so one of the best steak houses in the state of Texas a Perini's steak house just outside of Buffalo Gap hmm good stuff Oh again making myself hungry in this lecture it's not fair all right but the other one is Jefferson Texas now probably I've mentioned Jefferson before most y'all probably never even heard of Jefferson before this class but Jefferson Texas in 1870 was the sixth largest town in Texas why was it so Lawrence because it had a connection to the Red River the red river connected to the Mississippi River and Mississippi River went through New Orleans and so you basically have a direct connection between Jefferson Texas and New Orleans and so life is good well railroad magnify me with Jay Gould comes into town and says hey I want to build the railroad through here and Jefferson's heightened borough nah we don't want you we were good we got the river and so he passed him instead built the railroad through Marshall Texas so Marshall Texas is pretty big town sized town today Jefferson is just kind of a blip on the map it's an interesting town if you ever get a chance because think about this it was a very big town back in the day and then it dried up so you have a lot of prominent buildings from the 18th like 1860 1850s that are still there so the architect and the architecture is very similar to New Orleans because that connection but it dried it dried up and to add insult to injury Jay Gould eventually put a railroad car there in town to remind everybody hey you could have had me and Ben bigger oh I didn't even tell you why it shrunk up it shrunk up because Army Corps of Engineers decided they were going to break up this natural dam in the Red River and so it dropped the river levels to where steamboats can no longer get up to Jefferson anymore and so it was virtually isolated at that point and so Jefferson is still a cool little town to go to I've been there once too got some great antique stores I'm not a big fan of that but hey it's something to do some really good food and just really interesting architecture there and so just like you know Buffalo Gap tried to get the railroad but they were out they were outdone by Abilene so today Abilene is a much bigger city and Buffalo Gap is just kind of a you know I'll use a phrase from a guy went to graduate school with it and I won't use it because I like Buffalo Gap but think of it as just kind of an insurable - rivalled appendage to Texas that's a nice way of saying what I was going to say all right and so eventually Texas is going to connect into that Transcontinental system and goods can get full again you can come into Texas and gain goods come into Texas and in whatever products Texas is developing yeah cotton cattle lumber you name it is gonna get shipped out eventually gets connected to international lines and so now Texas is going to be shipping goods down to Mexico and vice versa and so but there's a major problem with the Rebbe's there's a constant complaint about them about the high freight rates which in some ways I can't complain I mean I could complain because I feel their pain I grew up in the country I understand that to live in a country in some ways is more expensive because the good you know you don't have direct access yeah I'm growing up it took me you know about 30 40 minutes get to the closest h-e-b and so we relied a lot to have you know more on local stores which were more expensive because it cost more money to get the goods out there kind of the same thing here because you have these railroad companies are having to traverse long distances with fewer goods so they're gonna charge more to make the compensate them for for their loss and so and so so Texas particularly farmers who are trying to ship their crops out are going to complain about the high freight rate because it's really cutting into their profits and so but there's other issues that the farmers are having and farmers are having to deal with you know you're going to have you know with the increase in Science and Technology it costs more to farm you got to have machinery in order to keep up with your neighbors but also there's an increase in production which brings the price of the crops down which means you have to produce more to kind of get back to where you were but by producing more you're bringing the prices down even more and so it's just kind of a cycle that never ends and so with the crease profits hoodie blank you blame the people that are cutting into your profits which are the railroad companies into also another large extent the banks and so by the end of the you know into the nineteenth century there's going to be a downturn in the livestock industry some of the reasons there's a major drought in the state of Texas so reduction the number of cattle you're also gonna have quarantine laws because the Texas cattle have what's known as quote-unquote Texas fever disease and so people don't want Texas cattle anywhere around and so because of this the price of cattle is going to drop also you're gonna have you know other states or particularly out west are gonna start getting into this business because by this time the frontier is closed so Montana Wyoming Idaho they're all going to be getting into the cattle industry California I never buy always free it's there's a little huge cattle you know a lot of ranches in Eastern California always tell people people in Eastern California can relate more to Texas than the people just the west of them so to wrap it all up cattle is is not a new addition to the Texas economy but it's a new source of greater wealth during the 19th century it's really important for the image of Texas mainly because Texas is trying to distance itself from the rest of the south I mean you're gonna have people that are trying to maintain that Southern heritage in misstatements go back to George little film kill all the way back to him and okay the gentleman on the bottom right you might have heard of the controversy of the Confederate statues and in Austin guess who funded those it's George Littlefield well he basically said is hey not only am I going to fund this but I want you you University of Texas I want you to change your history curriculum to be to be very Pro Southern because he's a Confederate veteran and so you can see where there's some remnants that are trying to hold on to that Southern heritage but the bulk of Texas is looking around they're looking at the south and they see the economic plight of the south and are like no no no we don't want to be associated with these people because they're not I mean even though we are culturally related to them that's distance ourselves we're going to make ourselves appear more Western so if you remember back to the very first lecture when I said there's a demarcation line and then I 3550 East Texas and West Texas and the cultural differences this is when the Texas makes an earnest effort to make that change to really focus more on becoming a western state and so the eastern Texas is gonna be where you know that's where Littlefield is living he's not out in West Texas it's just a town named after him but you know they're gonna try to hold on to their southern heritage why east from Texas is more southern western Texas is adopting this new culture this new identity to the point now where even people you know worry us here in Central Texas we identified more with the western Texas with the western part of Texas and we do with the eastern part of Texas and so trying to change the overall image of Texas and the cattle industry is what really allows Texas to do that and so with that it's a we're done with cattle ranching in Texas I feel free to contact me if you have any questions I hope everybody's doing well take care bye bye