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Up the Trail

How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon

Tim Lehman

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How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero?

Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago.

The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys...

How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero?

Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago.

The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses.

Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.

Reviews

Reviews

Perhaps the most iconic panorama in western movies is the cattle drive, with vast numbers of bawling Texas longhorns fanning out to cross the wide Red River, herded by a small fraternity of loose-limbed, laconic cowboys on horseback. Read this scene through the lens of Tim Lehman's Up the Trail, and it looks quite different.

In Up the Trail Tim Lehman provides an astute and... thorough history of the Texas cattle industry from its inception to the mid-1880s. Lehman ably traces the beginnings of the cattle trade, moving quickly and logically from Christopher Columbus's importation of cows in the late fifteenth century to the massing of large herds in the early nineteenth century. Lehman does a good job of showing us how this U.S.–defined and defining activity owed much to the those who were among the first cowboys.

From the dust and ashes of the trails rose an American icon, the cowboy. Lehman traces this transformation in cogent fashion, from the night-herd songs and poems, to the "dime novels," to the Hollywood "horse operas" of the early 1900s. Gone from this legend were the hardship, the cruelty, and the extreme toll exacted from the land, the stock, and the men of the trail drives that we are given glimpses of in this appealing book.

A well-written and compelling book by a master storyteller.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
184
ISBN
9781421425900
Illustration Description
7 halftones
Table of Contents

Prologue
1 How Cowboys and Longhorns Came to Texas
2 How the Cattle Market Boomed and Busted
3 How to Organize the Largest, Longest Cattle Drive Ever
4 How Kansas Survived the Longhorn Invasion
5

Prologue
1 How Cowboys and Longhorns Came to Texas
2 How the Cattle Market Boomed and Busted
3 How to Organize the Largest, Longest Cattle Drive Ever
4 How Kansas Survived the Longhorn Invasion
5 How the Trails Died and the Cowboy Lived On
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index

Author Bio
Tim Lehman
Featured Contributor

Tim Lehman, Ph.D.

Tim Lehman is a professor of history at Rocky Mountain College. He is the author of Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations.