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The Overland Cattle TradeMassey, Travis Leon 08 1900 (has links)
One of the most fascinating subjects in all American history is the story of the great cow country. Its heyday was the twenty-year period from 1868 to 1888. It extended from below the Rio Grande on the south to well up in Saskatchewan in western Canada on the north. East and west it reached from the Rocky Mountains to about the Missouri- Arkansas border. It occupied a region nearly 2,000 miles long and from 200 to 700 miles wide--almost a million square miles in one vast open range. For countless years this region had been the home of millions of wild buffaloes, but in a very short time after 1868 it was transformed into a gigantic cattle kingdom. After two decades of spectacular existence, it just as suddenly passed away, and the cattle industry entered a new and in many ways an entirely different era.
Texas cattle and Texas cattlemen played leading roles in this great drama of the West. The warm southern plains of Texas were the breeding place-the "incubator"-f or thousands of longhorn cattle, the broad prairies to the north were their feeding grounds, and the newly established railroad towns in Kansas and other states were the shipping points.
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Cattle Capitalists: The XIT Empire in Texas and MontanaMiller, Michael M. 12 1900 (has links)
The Texas Constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of Texas public land in exchange for construction of the monumental red granite Capitol that continues to house Texas state government today. The Capitol project and the land went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in business and politics. Austin's statehouse is a recognizable symbol of Texas around the world. So too, the massive Panhandle tract given in exchange -- what became the "fabulous" XIT Ranch -- has come to, for many, symbolize Texas and its role in the nineteenth century cattle boom. After finding sales prospects for the land, known as the Capitol Reservation, weak at the time, backed by British capital, the Illinois group, often called the Capitol Syndicate, turned their efforts to cattle ranching to satisfy investors until demand for the land increased. The operation included a satellite ranch in Montana to which two-year-old steers from Texas were sent for fattening, often "over the trail" on a route increasingly blocked by people and settlement. Rather than a study focused on ranching operations on the ground -- the roundups, the cattle drives, the cowboys -- this instead uncovers the business and political side of the Syndicate's ranching operation, headquartered in Chicago. The operation of the XIT Ranch looked more like other Gilded Age businesses employing armies of clerks, bookkeepers, and secretaries instead of how great western ranches have been portrayed for years in popular literature and media. The XIT Ranch existed from 1885 to 1912, yet from Texas to Montana the operation left a deep imprint on community culture and historical memory.
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