Unflinching Courage by Kay Bailey Hutchison

Author:Kay Bailey Hutchison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Part VII

TRAIL DRIVES AND RANCHES

1860s–1920s

Kate Malone Medlin

Bettie Matthews Reynolds

Amanda Nite Burks

Hattie Standefer Cluck

Eliza Bunton Johnson

Molly Dunn Bugbee

Margaret Heffernan Dunbar Hardy Borland

Lizzie Johnson Williams

Mollie Taylor Bunton

Henrietta Chamberlain King

Molly Dyer Goodnight

Henrietta King

Molly Goodnight

Bettie Matthews Reynolds

Eliza Bunton Johnson

Lizzie Johnson Williams

Mollie Taylor Bunton

The popular image of the cowhand is invariably of a man—sometimes young and restless, at others mature and weather-beaten, but always hardened, tough, and solitary. The same is true of the rancher, who may be either a cowhand with ambitious hopes or a well-heeled frontier entrepreneur, although he is permitted to have a wife stationed demurely in the background. Given the demographic imbalance in the West during the nineteenth century, most ranch hands, trail drivers, ranchers, and cattle dealers were undoubtedly men, but not all. Against the odds and the prejudices of the times, a surprising number of women took up these vocations as well, and some of their stories have survived.

However devoted Texas ranchers were to ranching as a way of life, to stock raising and breeding, to the landscape, and to their comrades, from the humblest vaquero to the so-called cattle barons and queens who sometimes attained the status of aristocracy, in nineteenth-century Texas the cattle business was above all a business—difficult, precarious, and dangerous even in the best of times. Weather, disease, price fluctuations, and predators—human and animal—were constant threats to solvency, well-being, and even life on the cattle trails. This was especially true when the markets for beef on the hoof shifted increasingly to destinations north and west of the ranches in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest.

Ranching was introduced to Texas by the Spanish in the early eighteenth century, initially to provide beef for the missionaries, soldiers, and settlers in San Antonio and a few other locales, and later by entrepreneurs who secured large land grants. A small number of these early ranchers were Mexican women or members of families from the Canary Islands who settled in San Antonio. María Bentacour, Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, and Ana María del Carmen Calvillo were among the women who acquired large landholdings, often through inheritance, and raised cattle. But the roots of the boom in Texas ranching were implanted a century later, when settlers from the United States and Europe began arriving in large numbers.

The destination of the first cattle drives from Anglo Texas was Louisiana’s markets, and some herds were shipped over water to New Orleans. By the mid-1840s, however, the preferred destinations were in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Ohio, and other points north. At the end of the decade, the discovery of gold in California created a profitable market on the west coast that was interrupted only by the Civil War. Sales could be lucrative, but drivers had to cross long arid stretches where water and grazing were scarce and predators plentiful. Stockmen risked losing their cattle and trail hands their lives to Comanche and Apache raiders and American rustlers.

The potential profits led to a proliferation of trails, most of them leading north to Missouri and Kansas (see maps following Introduction).

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