The purpose of this publication is to show how, when, and where the cattle empire started. It's real start was when small herds were driven to Louisiana from Texas. The real start of the empire was when Thomas Jefferson did the Louisiana Purchase. This was the real start because there were thousands of wild cattle roaming in what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. These were the cattle being driven to Louisiana some forty years before the civil war ended and the trail drives began. The book has all the breeds of cattle and horses used in the trail drives and the cowboys-their clothes, equipment, and their workdays. It tells of the cow towns that started and grew, and when the trail drives ended, they dried up and became ghost towns, of which a few still exist. But most are copies, or movie sets. The towns in Kansas with a railroad became famous, and the most famous was Dodge City. It grew fast and was a wild place. It was a place where many legends were born. In the book, you can see where the trails were and how the cattle were driven. The cowboys faced danger continually-for instance, rustlers, Indians, snakes, stampedes, and river crossings, and for some, the danger was at trail's end. It was a sad time for some, and a time for some to become rich. An example is a cow in Texas was worth $1.50, maybe, but that same cow driven one thousand miles north to a railhead would bring as much as $20 plus, depending on demand. If a man drove four thousand heads from Texas to Kansas, and sold them at $20 each, he had $80,000 and was wealthy. The problem was getting home without getting robbed. The early cattle industry was responsible for thousands of jobs in these cow towns, and advanced the railroad much sooner than if they weren't started. The cattle drives were also responsible for most of the Wild, Wild West legends. Dodge City being the most famous. The book has a running outline of dates of ranching growth and the inventions that provided both food and water for all livestock. In closing, Hollywood has made cowboy's life and work look easy and romantic, with clean clothes, singing, and smiles. It wasn't like that at all, just the opposite. Another wrong example was Hollywood's Red River. To drive 10, 000 heads, it would take 100 cowboys, 300 horses, and the trail line would be two miles long. The average was 1,500 to 5,000 head. I hope you enjoy the book.

“A veritable Who’s Who of pioneer cattlemen.” —Elmer Kelton, from the ForewordJohn and Mahlon Thatcher were two of the many pioneers looking to begin a new life in the great open spaces of the West. In the 1860s, the brothers began a small mercantile in the town of Pueblo, Colorado. From a safe in the corner of their new store, the brothers founded what was to become the First National Bank of Pueblo, Colorado—and the beginnings of a financial empire that would encompass cattle companies from New Mexico to Canada.Together with such legendary figures as Frank Bloom, Henry Cresswell, O. H. Perry Baxter, William Anderson, Burton Mossman, and Mahlon T. Everhart, they created a cattle empire, financing and directing the Bloom Land and Cattle Company, the Diamond A Cattle Company, and the Hatchet Cattle Company. Their herds of cattle, horses, and sheep ranged on some eleven million acres of land. Great Plains Cattle Empire tells their stories, spanning the years from just after the Civil War through World War II.

Story of the three million acre XIT ranch.

In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California and Hawai'i underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American political and commercial domination, under which native residents lost land and sovereignty and faced demographic collapse. Environmental historians have too often overlooked California and Hawai'i, despite the roles the regions played in the colonial ranching frontiers of the Pacific World. In Cattle Colonialism, John Ryan Fischer significantly enlarges the scope of the American West by examining the trans-Pacific transformations these animals wrought on local landscapes and native economies.

The Texas state constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of public land in the Texas Panhandle in exchange for construction of the state’s monumental red-granite capitol in Austin. That land became the XIT Ranch, briefly one of the most productive cattle operations in the West. The story behind the legendary XIT Ranch, told in full in this book, is a tale of Gilded Age business and politics at the very foundation of the American cattle industry. The capitol construction project, along with the acres that would become XIT, went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in politics and business. Unable to sell the land, the Illinois group, backed by British capital, turned to cattle ranching to satisfy investors. In tracing their efforts, which expanded to include a satellite ranch in Montana, historian Michael M. Miller demythologizes the cattle business that flourished in the late-nineteenth-century American West, paralleling the United States’ first industrial revolution. The XIT Ranch came into being and succeeded, Miller shows, only because of the work of accountants, lawyers, and managers, overseen by officers and a board of seasoned international capitalists. In turn, the ranch created wealth for some and promoted the expansion of railroads, new towns, farms, and jobs. Though it existed only from 1885 to 1912, from Texas to Montana the operation left a deep imprint on community culture and historical memory. Describing the Texas capitol project in its full scope and gritty detail, XIT cuts through the popular portrayal of great western ranches to reveal a more nuanced and far-reaching reality in the business and politics of the beef industry at the close of America’s Gilded Age.