Why Walk Cattle a Thousand Miles? Moving Value That Moves Itself

Cattle raised on open grazing far from any market are worth little where they stand and a great deal where people want to eat them, and before rail reached the grazing country there was no way to close that gap except to move the animals themselves. Cattle have the useful property of transporting themselves and feeding on the way, so the cost of moving them is labour, supplies and losses rather than freight. That works only if the price difference exceeds those costs, which it did dramatically in the American case after the Civil War, when cattle worth a few dollars in Texas were worth many times that at a railhead in Kansas, and the difference funded an entire industry for about twenty years.

The operation was organised and its constraints were specific:

• •A herd of a few thousand animals handled by around a dozen people
• •Progress of ten to fifteen miles a day, since driving faster loses weight and therefore value
• •Routes chosen for water at intervals a herd can manage
• •Grazing along the way, which required the route to be wide and not already eaten out
• •River crossings, which were the most dangerous part for both animals and people
• •Stampedes, which scattered a herd and could be triggered by almost anything at night

The practice lasted a short time and several developments closed it together. Railways extended into the grazing regions, which removed the reason to walk animals to a distant railhead. Barbed wire, patented in 1874 and adopted rapidly, enclosed the open range across which the trails ran, and fenced land cannot be driven through. Quarantine laws restricted the movement of southern cattle carrying a tick-borne disease to which they were resistant and northern herds were not, which closed routes by legislation. Overstocking degraded the range. And a catastrophic winter in the mid 1880s killed enormous numbers of animals and bankrupted many operations. Within about twenty years of beginning at scale, the long drive was essentially finished.

The people who did this work have been mythologised beyond recognition and the record is more interesting. Crews on American drives were young, poorly paid and worked eighteen-hour days for a few months at a time, and a substantial proportion were Black, Mexican and Native American, with estimates commonly putting the non-white share at around a third and in some outfits higher, which the popular depiction of the period almost entirely omitted for a century. The work was seasonal and most did it for only a few years. Wages were low enough that a whole season's pay could be spent in a week at the railhead. The equipment, vocabulary and techniques were largely inherited from Mexican practice, including the saddle, the rope work and a great deal of the language.

Long-distance droving was not an American invention and the parallels are instructive. Scottish and Welsh drovers walked cattle to English markets for centuries along established routes with their own inns, stances and rights of way, many of which survive as paths, and the trade supported a financial network since drovers carried money and issued notes. Hungarian and Spanish droving networks moved animals across whole regions under legal protection. Australian drovers moved stock enormous distances, and stock routes remain legally defined and are still occasionally used. In every case the same forces ended it, being rail, then road transport, then refrigeration, which allowed the animal to be killed near where it was raised and only the meat to travel.

Cattle transport themselves and feed on the way, so walking them to a distant market works whenever the price difference exceeds labour and losses, which it did enormously after rail reached Kansas. Herds moved ten to fifteen miles a day along routes chosen for water. Barbed wire, advancing railways, quarantine laws and a catastrophic winter ended the practice within about twenty years.