An 1880 Cattle Drive Through Porterville

deadheadcutflowers

Aug 23, 20237 min read

In 1880 Oscar Reed, among others, drove 6300 head of cattle to Porterville, intending to cross the Snake River there (where wouldn't be a bridge for another 25 years). When one of the riders, Henry Bishop, drowned during the attempt the crew instead went north to Eagle Rock (Idaho Falls) and paid the ferryman three cents a head to get their cattle to the other side. Having probably come from Oregon, they were headed to the Mason-Lovell Ranch in the Bighorn Basin, which was within 95 miles of the Northern Pacific Railroad in Billings, Montana.

There may have been some longhorns in the herd Reed was trailing (a Soda Springs resident claimed that all cattle at that time had horns, including the War Bonnet Cattle Company's first herd of 3000 shipped out on the railroad in 1882), but more likely their herd had been crossed with shorthorns, herefords and Galloways (what we now call an "oreo" cow") in order to get rid of the longhorns' cumbersome headwear and improve their meat quality.

The longhorns' themselves were crosses. There were no cattle and horses at all in North America until the Spaniards brought them. In the west the Spanish "Mayflower", the San Carlos, stopped with six or seven at San Diego in 1769, and due to the Mexican government granting 4400 acres to anyone who took 100 head to the province there were nearly a million by the turn of the century. Between 1800 and 1848, an estimated five million hides were exported from California--in a process called the matanza, ranchers skinned their animals, boiled down the tallow and left the meat to rot since no market existed for beef. Vacqueros reportedly once roped forty grizzlies at a matanza site, the easy feed a favorite location for the bears. A hide was called "a California banknote" and was the basis for most trading between the mainlanders and European ships that patrolled the coasts for that product and tallow.

The Spaniards had earlier established a small population of cattle in east Texas in 1713 to use for food, hides and tallow but there was no other market at that time. Still, in a broad area south of San Antonio, three million cattle supposedly roamed by 1835. Throughout the intervening decades, predation by natives decimated much of the populations and many of the remaining cattle bred indiscriminately and became "wild cattle", reportedly more of a challenge than buffalo when encountered. These eventually crossed with English breeds that had been brought to the east coast and the southern states, creating what was known as the longhorn.

As early as 1848 Texas cattle were being driven north to Missouri to commercial markets. 1854 saw fifty thousand longhorns crossing the Red River at Preston, and by 1860 over a quarter million were annually going north. The Civil War put a pause on the big cattle drives most Americans are familiar with, though, with the abandoned herds roaming free and breeding indiscriminately, thus expanding rapidly in numbers.

The war depleted the northern cattle stock, re-opening a lucrative market for Texas cattle. In 1873, 156,000 ended up in the Chicago stockyards, just one of six major sale points for livestock. It is estimated that by 1884 nearly four million Texas cattle had been driven to northern markets.

After the Civil War, longhorns were mostly a curiosity to those in the northeast, where they had been disparaged for some time. One 1855 correspondent said they "would balance if suspended by the neck", their horns heavy and their bodies lean--so lean that, though weighing 1000 to 1200 pounds, only four hundred pounds of meat and bone remained when they were butchered. Their meat was once described as "juicy as a boiled grand piano". FIfteen states outlawed longhorns, fearing tick fever that local cattle weren't immune to, further limiting their importation.

Shorthorn bulls were imported to improve the breed, the offspring doubling in value immediately, but the four million longhorn cattle in Texas in 1875 would have required fifty thousand bulls to fully hybridize the breed so the process was slow. Still, by 1883 weights had improved by forty pounds, with the price per head rising from $14 to $40.

Galloways, too, were used to improve the cattle herds. They were a polled, shaggy breed that could survive nasty Scottish winters. Another breed, the English Red Poll, was used for a time but fell into disfavor by the turn of the century.

The shorthorns, by far, were preferred. First imported to the U.S. in 1817, they were not just good beef cows but good milkers.

The first registered shorthorns in Texas appeared in 1867, and ten years later there were 227. Herefords also became popular, were first registered in Texas in 1878, soon outstripping the shorthorn as the preferred breed. A big Wyoming herd, Swan Land and Cattle, kept mostly Hereford crosses on their southern range and Oregon Shorthorns on their northwest pasturage, so apparently the northwest and intermountain areas were quicker to adopt the newer breeds. The idea, as one rancher put it, was "why not raise butcher's meat instead of horns?"

Another nail in the longhorn's coffin was barbed wire. Hardy, rangy animals, they did well on open scrublands that, being public lands, were free to use, but in less than a decade those lands diminished through private ownership and the use of fences--in Bee County, Texas, the 25 miles of fences in 1879 expanded to the whole county being fenced by 1883. The added expenses shrank profits considerably and necessitated better breeds than the longhorn.

The 1880s railroad's appearance in Soda Springs and then Blackfoot and eventually Montana brought in bigger consortiums and ranches to the area. The War Bonnet, funded by Londoners, began operation along with The Bar 70 Bar, a Vermont company, The Burke Land and Cattle, partly based in Nebraska and American Falls, the sizeable LDS Church herd, and a number of others. Burke grazed what is now the reservoir bottoms, though the firm of High and Stout--two familiar names in Blackfoot history--ruled most of that Tilden area.

It was a wild time in the cattle business, partly due to the new technologies of railroad refrigerated shipments and canning. In 1880 there were 10,000 tons of beef shipped nationwide, in 1884, just four years later, 170,000 tons. It was also a time of booming investment in the British Isles. From 1877-1880 British investment capital doubled, and with U.S. interests competing favorably with British meat (imports had increased 80%) cattle ranching seemed lucrative. Newspapers portrayed the business as requiring no barns, the grazing lands being mild in temperature even in Montana (where Japanese trade winds kept winters warm), and perhaps most importantly, needing only minimal work except at roundup time and hence, low labor costs. There was good, free grasslands for feed (buffalo did well, why not cows?), and herd mortality was placed at only two or three percent. A few reckless Americans may have failed, but no Scotsman or Irishman had. Articles claimed a ten thousand pound investment would yield 8,800 pounds in just three years.

So fast and furious was investing that herds were often bought by "book count"--a paper trail of numbers branded, cows bought and sold--allowing the unscrupulous to operate freely. Some companies returned big dividends early, much as a pyramid scheme would do nowadays in order to generate interest and a basis for more investment: some companies returned 19% in 1881, 27% in 1882 and 20% in 1883. By August of 1882, 1581 new companies held by British investments had formed in the prior year in the U.S., Australia and Mexico. Skeptics soon emerged, with an 1884 audit of one company finding just 13,000 cattle though 31,000 had been reported on the "whitewashed" book count.

Closer to home, Oregon saw cattle bringing $22 a head in 1870 but dropping to just half that by 1877, ushering in a downturn longterm cattemen are familiar with. 1880 saw low prices but soon after, a five year rise took place. 1870 records show some cattle shipped from western Idaho to San Francisco, and 30,000 a year went that direction from Winnemucca. But by 1875, as rail service expanded, western cattle started being driven eastward to railroad shipping points. Two buyers from Omaha and Cheyenne were scouting Oregon, Washington and Idaho for ten thousand head, and Lang and Ryan became primary buyers shortly after, as did N.R. Davis and Rand and Briggs. A hundred thousand northwest cattle went eastward in 1878. Judge Peck at Camas Prairie claimed 180,000 head passed through in 1880, in addition to 50,000 sheep--Oscar Reed's herd may have been among them.

the 1880-1881 winter decimated the industry with losses hitting 83% in the Yakima valley, resulting in small shipments eastward. Just a year later, in 1882, the last big drive from Oregon took place, as Lang and other buyers could no longer find enough cattle to take on such a long excursion--northwest markets had emerged as competition. Rail competition drove the cowboy out of the long drive business. In 1885, 1800 train car loads of cattle and horses were shipped on the Oregon Short Line from Idaho--36,000 head--eliminating the need for the cattle drive and replacing it with the cattle "ride". A year later, the 1886-1887 winter, chronicled as "the Big Die-Up" and more fierce than the one just a few years prior, further crippled the industry both in the west and midwest where hundreds of thousands of cattle starved and froze to death. Still, 1.5 million cattle were in the west in 1889, fifty percent more than five years earlier.

The prevalence of the longhorn in 1865 being so strong, James Shirley's 3000 cattle herd that he drove from Texas to Fort Hall was likely that breed. Fifteen years later, Mason and Lovell's herd that tried to cross at Porterville may or may not have been all or part longhorn, but by then crosses had been introduced that probably had eliminated, or at least diluted, that classic breed of Western lore.

The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, expands upon the century long extension of a frontier from the Snake River Plain's edges into its core. Purchase it locally at Kesler's Market and The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

An 1880 Cattle Drive Through Porterville

Recent Posts

Comentarios