Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:22:13.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cattle Trailing in the Nineteenth Century: A Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

David Galenson
David Galenson
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In responding to Mr. Dennen, I welcome the opportunity to clarify several points that may have been misunderstood by the readers of this Journal. Mr. Dennen makes three main criticisms, which I will deal with in the order he raised them.

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 461 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gard, Wayne, The Chisholm Trail (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 65Google Scholar.

2 Quoted in Dykstra, Robert, The Cattle Towns (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 36–37Google Scholar.

3 Quoted in Gard, The Chisholm Trail, p. 66.

4 McCoy, Joseph G., Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (Washington, D.C.: reprinted by the Rare Book Shop, 1932), p. 65Google Scholar.

5 E.g., Dykstra, The Cattle Towns, p. 54, gives evidence of violations by drives to Wichita.

6 Though even then Dykstra writes that “[t]he 1885 act closing all Kansas to summer importation of southern cattle did not abolish the through trade at Caldwell”; ibid., p. 348.

7 Dennen, “Cattle Trailing in the Nineteenth Century,” p. 458.

8 Ibid., n. 3.

9 Many historians have recognized 1885 as the last year of the Long Drive. Frederic L. Paxson wrote: “A growing consciousness that the range was about gone protrudes through the sources for 1884 and 1885. … The long drive of 1885 was broken up almost beyond recognition. … [T]he long drive was no longer possible”; “The Cow Country,” American Historical Review, XXII (October 1916), 76–81Google Scholar. Wayne Gard stressed that by the end of 1885, the Long Drive's two great trails had been closed: “After the season of 1884, the Chisholm Trail was virtually closed. … Dodge City, left with only one main trail, had its last big year as a cow town in 1885. After that, use of the Western Trail, too, tapered off rapidly”; The Chisholm Trail, p. 259. Others who date the conclusion of the Long Drive in 1885 include Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), p. 32Google Scholar; Drago, Harry Sinclair, Great American Cattle Trails (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1965), pp. 180, 192Google Scholar; Freeman, James W., ed., Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States (New York: reprinted by the Antiquarian Press, Ltd., 1959), p. 538Google Scholar; Billington, Ray Allen, Westward Expansion, Fourth Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 588Google Scholar; Frantz, Joe B. and Choate, Julian E. Jr., The American Cowboy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), p. 67Google Scholar.

10 Drovers' rates of return in 1885 were the lowest of the twenty-year period; see Galenson, David, “An Economic History of the Long Drive, 1866–1885,” Senior Honors Thesis, Harvard University, 1973, pp. 120–121Google Scholar. The series of the number of cattle driven annually is given by Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman, p. 32.

11 Evidence on the size of the northern drive of 1886 is poor compared to earlier years. This is due in large part to the relatively unorganized nature of the drives, as many more trails were used than in earlier years. One source estimates the size of the drive through Colorado at about 180,000 head; Peake, Ora Brooks, The Colorado Range Cattle Industry (Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1937) pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

12 Stammel, J. H., La Grande Aventure des Cow-Boys (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1974), p. 188Google Scholar.

13 For examples of decisions of individual drovers to quit, based on economic considerations, see Skaggs, The Cattle-Trailing Industry, pp. 23, 56, 97.

14 Gard, The Chisholm Trail, p. 260.

15 Quoted in U.S. House of Representatives, Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Fiftieth Congress, 1888–89 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1889) Vol. XII, Miscellaneous Document 139, p. 333Google Scholar.

16 Hughes, H. Stuart, History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper and Row 1964), pp. 75–76Google Scholar.

17 There was a drive from Texas to Ohio as early as 1846. Drives from Texas to California began in 1850. During the 1850's, some drives went to market in St. Louis, while many reached Chicago by 1856. New Orleans was the chief market for Longhorns before the Civil War, and drives there continued during the war. What marks 1866 as the first year of the Long Drive is not that there were no drives prior to that year, but that it was the first year in which a substantial number of cattle (260,000) were trailed over essentially a single trail to a single destination. Webb, Walter Prescott, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931), p. 211Google Scholar; Gard, The Chisholm Trail, pp. 23–24, 27–28, 31, 38; Dale, Edward Everett, The Range Cattle Industry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), pp. 7–8Google Scholar; McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, p. 32.

18 Galenson, David, “The End of the Chisholm Trail,” Journal of Economic History, XXXIV (June 1974), 363Google Scholar.

19 U.S. Senate, Reports of the Committees of the Senate of the United States for the First Session of the Fifty-First Congress, 1889–90 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1890), Vol. 3, No. 829Google Scholar, “Testimony taken by the Select Committee of the U.S. Senate on the Transportation and Sale of Meat Products,” p. 6.

20 Galenson, “The End of the Chisholm Trail,” p. 363.

21 Peake, The Colorado Range Cattle Industry, p. 36.

22 Dennen, “Cattle Trailing in the Nineteenth Century,” p. 460.

23 Galenson, “The End of the Chisholm Trail,” p. 361.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., Table 2, p. 356; also see U.S. Department of Agriculture, Statistical Bulletin No. 16, Prices of Farm Products Received by Producers (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1927), p. 239Google Scholar.

26 Dennen's final minor criticisms can be dealt with briefly. In p. 460, n. 10, he raises the issues of grades of beef and seasonal price variations. The prices quoted are all for Texas Longhorns, and the grade of beef was constant between 1866 and 1885 due to the failure of attempts to improve the breed; see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Vol. 5, p. clviii, and Freeman, ed., Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States, pp. 739–740. Adjustment for seasonal price variation is unnecessary because all prices are used in ratios: since each ratio consists of prices of both yearlings and fours for the same dates, mere seasonal variations in cattle prices cancel out.