With the brush removed, old springs and seeps once again came to life. Rocky Creek began flowing the year around. Brush control for water enhancement is part of the long-range Texas statewide water plan, though the state has done little of it so far. Ranching has always been financially hazardous. Cattle prices have long been cyclical, each high point followed by a sharp slide, then a painfully slow climb back from the bottom.
These movements have almost always reflected overall cattle numbers. When they are low, prices move up. When cattle raisers respond to higher prices by increasing their herds, prices break and cause a sell-off that further escalates the downtrend. Though at this writing cattle prices are at an all-time high, they have not been there long, and history indicates that present levels will not long endure.
Over the next three decades, many ranches that had been in family hands for several generations slid into bankruptcy. Cattle ranching — and sheep and goat ranching along with it — went through one of the longest periods of economic stress its participants could remember. Though predatory animals have been of relatively minor importance to the cattle industry, coyotes will sometimes take down small calves and even attack a cow or heifer while she is giving birth.
Predators have had a far greater impact on sheep and goat ranching, to a point that they have driven hundreds of operators out of that business and have caused major shrinkage in the outside perimeter of the sheep-and-goat producing area. Political pressures by animal-rights groups have made it increasingly difficult for stockmen to protect themselves against these predators.
The Texas livestock industry has experienced one great boon in recent times: eradication of the screwworm. This pest, spread by a specific type of blowfly, caused hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths each year and an incalculable toll on wildlife. Through the efforts of agricultural scientists, a method was developed to control them by sterilizing laboratory-raised screwworm flies in the pupae stage through exposure to nuclear radiation, then distributing them in numbers that overwhelmed the native population.
Ranchers accustomed to the old-fashioned way of neutering animals were highly skeptical about doing it to millions upon millions of flies. Despite their doubts, enough of them voluntarily took a gamble on this far-fetched proposition to raise funds for a pilot project that proved the process workable.
Texas is screwworm-free for the first time ever. The screwworm was gradually eradicated from Mexico, and a constant barrier is maintained at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to prevent its return. Beyond its positive effect on the livestock industry, the elimination of the screwworm caused a boom in wildlife numbers.
A high percentage of the Texas fawn crop each year used to die of screwworm infestation. Survival rates have skyrocketed in recent years, at times leading to a serious overpopulation and occasional die-offs through starvation.
Economic necessity has brought many changes to the livestock industry as ranchers have sought ways to supplement their lagging livestock income. A major development has been an increasing emphasis on recreation, especially hunting. Though landowners in the Hill Country had sold hunting leases for many years, ranchers in most other parts of the state took their wildlife for granted.
They did not recognize it as an economic resource. Because of landowner efforts and screwworm eradication, deer are more numerous today over much of the state than when the Indians held the land. On many ranches, particularly in the Hill Country and South Texas, income from hunting of deer, turkey, quail and other wildlife exceeds the income from livestock.
Ranchers have catered to hunters by providing special amenities, even to the point of building permanent hunting camps and landing strips, allowing their guests to rough it in comfort. Here and there, some ranchers have abandoned their cattle, sheep and goat operations and devoted all their attention to enhancing their wildlife and hunting potential.
Because Texas hunting seasons restrict native whitetail and blacktail deer harvest to late fall and early winter, exotic wildlife from other parts of the world, particularly Africa and Asia, have been introduced over much of the Hill Country to provide year-around hunting income. By law, native deer are considered property of the state until they are brought down. Exotics, however, belong to the landowner.
Exotics have not been without their problems. Some are highly competitive with native deer and can starve them out if not controlled. This has caused second thoughts among some ranchmen who have experienced a decline in native populations as their exotics increased. Today a trophy whitetail buck will bring a higher premium from hunters than most exotics. The law of unintended consequences sometimes comes into play. In the s a landowner near San Antonio imported Russian boars for sport hunting.
Some escaped, and today these wild hogs have become a menace to calves, lambs and kid goats in many Hill Country counties. Exotic wildlife do not necessarily remain where their owners put them. Many ranchers who originally invested significant sums to acquire them have seen them migrate to neighboring ranches whether they are wanted there or not. Double-high fences have been built in an effort to contain these exotics, as well as to allow at least some selection in the breeding of native whitetails to produce better antlers and greater body size.
However, an undesirable side effect can be intensified grazing and browsing competition by the exotics to the detriment of fenced-in natives. But on larger ranches he still spent a major part of the year out with a chuckwagon, sleeping on the ground, taking his meals from a line of Dutch ovens after a cook prepared them over hot coals or an open fire.
Though the boss in town might have electric lights, the ranch probably did not. His wages had not improved much since trail-driving days.
World War II and its manpower shortages forced drastic changes upon the ranching scene. Much of the workforce went into military service. Ranchers had to streamline operations for efficiency, automating wherever possible, cutting pasture sizes, substituting machinery for manual labor, pickup trucks for horses.
Most of these changes became permanent, for much of the pre-war manpower never returned. Former cowboys found higher paying jobs in the oil fields and in town. Many innovations appeared in the first decades after the war: crossbreeding, artificial insemination and computerization being only a few. A seven-year drought in the s drove home severe lessons in range management, bringing a greater awareness of proper stocking rates, encouraging rotation grazing, grass reseeding, new methods of brush control.
Ranchers today tend to know more about conservation than their forebears, calling upon the accumulated experience of past generations as well as their own. Their drain on groundwater supplies is minimal. However, ranchers can be affected by both surface and underground pollution, usually coming from outside sources such as oil fields, mining or chemical runoff from cultivated fields.
The condition of the range affects both quality and quantity of runoff water that finds its way into rivers, streams and reservoirs. A relatively new development in certain areas is landowner sale of water rights to towns, cities and industry, which critics see as having a potential to drain underground reservoirs and leave future generations without sufficient water.
They point to experience with the great Ogallala aquifer, which underlies much of the Panhandle. It has been reduced markedly over the last 50 years, largely by irrigation and municipal pumping at levels far exceeding the modest natural recharge rate. Further shrinking of the water table could force irrigation farmers back to dryland operations and leave ranchers without water for their livestock.
Wind has been a constant part of the Texas environment, especially in the western part of the state including the Panhandle. Early plains cattleman Charles Goodnight once remarked that wind became such a part of daily life that he noticed it only when it stopped. Texas today is regarded as being urban. In terms of population, that is true. Most Texans today live in one of several major urban areas.
Yet, all of those areas if lumped together in a single mass would barely cover Presidio County in the Big Bend. I personally know many a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan praying for that next Super Bowl win. Broadway St. If you like this post, please subscribe to our blog via RSS or email. Subscribe to the Real Places, Real Stories blog by email. Start your next adventure with the THC's new statewide travel guide, which highlights historic destinations in all 10 Texas Heritage Trail regions.
Download a free copy today! Google Tag Manager. Blog Contact Us Donate Menu. Header goes here. Tags: heritage travel. Your name. E-mail Your email will only be used to respond to you. It will not be shown publicly. More information about text formats. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically. Lines and paragraphs break automatically. The Spanish government also encouraged the cattle industry in the Coastal Bend, where liberal land grants often developed into feudal estates.
The Cavazos San Juan de Carricitas grant in Cameron County comprised fifty sitios a sitio was 4, acres , and other grants were even larger. Though few are still owned by the descendants of the original grantees, many ranches in South Texas predate the American Revolution. At first, Spain severely restricted commerce, but during the brief Spanish rule of Louisiana — , barriers to trade were relaxed, and Texas cattlemen found a wider outlet for their animals to the east.
However, Indian raids in South Texas increased in scope and intensity, forcing many rancheros to leave their herds behind and flee to the settlements for protection. In Mexican Texas , beginning in , conditions improved.
Land policies of Mexico and the Republic of Texas were less liberal than those of Spain, but were still favorable to range husbandry. Individual citizens, until crowded out by settlement, had access to vast areas of public land for grazing. American colonists flooding into Texas during the s were primarily farmers and not ranchers, but they quickly saw the significance of lush pastures where cattle could thrive with minimum care.
Men who came to Texas to plow and plant became cattle raisers. Cattle raising remained a domestic industry during the republic and early statehood, supplying the small urban population, immigrants, and the bartering trade.
In the s and s ranchers continued to drive small herds to New Orleans. A few hardy souls headed north, principally on the Shawnee Trail , seeking feeder areas in Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, where they could fatten their cattle and ship them to markets in Philadelphia and New York.
Herds also were trailed west through hostile Indian country to the California goldfields. By Texas cattle ranching was shifting from Southeast and South Texas to the north central frontier. For the first time cattle brought cash revenue to Texas, although the annual increase in herds far exceeded exports.
During the Civil War Texas furnished beef to the Confederacy until the summer of , when federal armies closed the Mississippi River to traffic.
Cattle multiplied until they were estimated at eight per capita of the population. At the end of the war, steaks and roasts were selling in eastern markets at twenty-five to thirty cents a pound, while a mature, fat Texas steer could be bought for six to ten dollars.
The same steer was worth thirty or forty dollars at the end of the trail. Texas was cattle rich, but the way to market was through storms, across swollen rivers, and into hostile Indian country. Within two decades more than five million head had been trailed to outside markets. In the late s, after the Indian menace ended in Texas, the cattle industry leap-frogged to fresh pasturage in the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend, and on the plains of west Texas. Contrary to general views, the Texas cattle industry was not founded entirely on "free grass.
O'Connor, Richard King, Mifflin Kenedy , and scores of other antebellum ranchers operated on their own land from the beginning. Other cattlemen who wisely bought land after the Civil War while their neighbors were scorning it included Charles Goodnight, William T. Waggoner, C. Slaughter, S. Swenson, and William D. Early Anglo-American ranches generally consisted of a primitive headquarters surrounded by open range. In the earlier-settled part of Texas, ranchers owned the land on which their improvements were built, but as the frontier advanced, stockmen set up quarters without benefit of title or surveyor's lines.
When the real owner appeared, the squatter moved farther into the unsettled domain. Before the advent of barbed wire in , few stockmen acquired land on which to graze cattle. Their primary need was a favorable site from which to work cattle and to control the water, which in turn controlled the range. Even foreign capitalists who invaded the range country in the cattle boom of the early s bought only enough watered land to hold the range.
As markets could not absorb surplus Texas cattle, ranchers soon looked north to the unpopulated range that extended to the Canadian border and covered the entire Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains.
While sending mature steers to slaughter markets, they moved breeding stock into New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, Colorado, the Cherokee Outlet, and western Kansas and Nebraska to start new herds.
Methods of handling cattle, range terminology, and range practices developed in Texas spread with the herds across the western part of the United States. The Panic of momentarily crippled the cattle industry, but beef recovered rapidly and zoomed into an unprecedented boom that peaked ten years later.
Pamphlets describing the "Beef Bonanza" flooded Great Britain, and English and Scottish money at the Matador, Rocking Chair , and other ranches competed with eastern capital in acquiring herds and range rights. The industry had grown up as individual enterprise, usually managed by the owner; now the corporation entered the field with all the advantages of mobilized capital but with the disadvantages of nonresidence and hired managers.
By the end of the nineteenth century the transformation of ranching to the closed range was practically complete. Open-range drift fences were superseded by a complete enclosure of the ranch holdings. Railroads invaded ranch country, and corporations subdivided their holdings into smaller pastures for better range utilization, improved livestock management, and sale. Panic and drought in brought hard times, but the men who owned their grass and were free of debt were doing business when the upward tide returned.
During World War I the cattle and horse market boomed, but the decade of the s brought deflation and bankruptcies. The owner-operator who resisted the temptation to speculate came through safely. Price recovery from the slump was slow, however, and another setback followed the bursting of the stock-market bubble in Cattlemen and their financial backers were soon in deep water, and a desperate government, for the first time in history, extended aid to the cattle industry through agricultural credit agencies.
Although the help was of some benefit, prices continued downhill, droughts plagued the land, ranges were overstocked, and grass was scarce.
In the government intervened with a desperate remedy—a program to buy and kill cattle to buoy a depressed market.
As the government generally destroyed the culls—sick, crippled, and scrub cattle—many ranchers used the payments to upgrade their herds.
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