Texas women operated 38, farms, a farm count greater than total farms in 28 states. Farms operated by Texas women cover over 12 million acres, more than total land in farms in 27 states. So how big is that in comparison? Only six states had total agricultural sales in excess of the level of cattle sales in Texas.
Texas cattle are more valuable than the total of all agricultural sales in the 43 other states. The Census of Agriculture confirms Texas as the perennial number one producer of sheep, goats and cotton.
In addition, it shows Texas farm-raising the most deer and having the largest number of llamas. Texas also has the largest equine population on farms by a country mile. More than 64, Texas farms have horse and pony inventory of nearly , Looking for a good mule or donkey? Texas has 21 percent of the U. Our farmers and ranchers are industrious too.
Also, more than 11, farms sold value-added products like jams, wines, cheeses and smoked meats. Finally, Texas farmers and ranchers are number one in resilience - all of this incredible output during the historic droughts of and These divisions are located in six counties Brooks, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, Nueces, and Willacy and contain terrain that varies from fertile black farmland to low-lying coastal marshes to mesquite pastures that mark the beginning of the Texas brush country.
King Ranch is still owned by the descendants of its founder and, today, is a diversified agribusiness corporation, with interests in cattle ranching, feedlot operations, farming cotton, milo, sugar cane, and turfgrass , citrus groves, pecan processing, commodity marketing, and recreational hunting.
Its retail operations include luggage, leather goods and home furnishings, farm equipment, commercial printing, and ecotourism. One summer day in , Charles Goodnight and a Mexican guide, who had told Goodnight of a giant canyon that nature had gouged through the High Plains, reined their horses at the rim of Palo Duro Canyon, south of present-day Amarillo.
Taking in the vastness that lay before him, the former Texas Ranger and pioneer cattleman immediately realized he had found perhaps the best location for a ranch anywhere in the Southwest.
What began as a high-interest loan evolved into a business partnership, with Adair having two-thirds interest in the ranch and Goodnight the other third plus a salary for managing the property. Growing from an initial herd of 1, cattle on 2, acres, at its peak, the ranch grazed , head on 1.
Two years later, Goodnight quit the partnership and started his own ranch. The ranch is still owned by Adair heirs. At its largest, the King Ranch never covered more than a third the size of the storied XIT—a Panhandle ranch that no longer exists.
Its founders were bean-counting businessmen from Chicago, not rugged individualists like Richard King, and by the time the ranch started stringing barbed wire across its vast holdings, the buffalo and the Indians had vanished from the High Plains like so many mirages. What makes the ranch unique is its connection to the red-granite State Capitol in Austin.
Once the biggest ranch in the world, the XIT spread over 3 million acres and stretched nearly miles long and up to 30 miles wide from Hockley County on the south all the way north to the Oklahoma border. The ranch covered parts of ten High Plains counties. At its height, enclosed by 6, miles of barbed wire fence, the ranch ran , head of cattle, had 1, horses, and kept cowboys on its payroll.
Their strategy would be to make back their money by breaking up the huge acreage the syndicate owned and selling smaller parcels as ranches or farms. Two-thirds of the ranch had been sold by , and by , the last XIT cattle had been sent to market. The final piece of XIT land was conveyed to another owner in The Matador Ranch is the third historic Texas ranch that once had more than a million acres inside its fence lines.
Alfred M. Lomax, and John W. Nichols founded the ranch in By , the Matador consisted of 1. Later that year, several investors from Scotland bought the ranch, renaming it the Matador Land and Cattle Co.
Under its Scottish management, the ranch prospered and grew. At its peak period of operation, the company controlled 3 million acres, counting substantial holdings in Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Canada. By , the ranch had been sold down to roughly , acres. Lazard Freres and Co. A year later, Fred C. Koch, co-founder of what later became Koch Industries, purchased a substantial amount of Matador acreage.
When Koch died in , his son Charles inherited the business. Today, the ranch is owned by the Matador Cattle Co. In addition to continuing its long history as a cattle and horse-raising operation, the Matador offers paid hunting and guest lodging.
Legend holds that Samuel Burk Burnett won the Four Sixes Ranch in a poker game holding a nearly unbeatable hand of four sixes. That makes a great story, but the brand that gave the ranch its name traces to , when the then year-old Burnett bought head of cattle with burned on their flanks from a cattleman in Denton County. Originally from Missouri, Burnett drove longhorn herds up the Chisholm Trail from South Texas and ranched elsewhere on leased land before acquiring the acreage in King County in that became the Four Sixes.
During its peak years, the Four Sixes had four separate divisions sprawling across nearly a third of a million acres. Three years later, though Burnett already was a wealthy man, producing oil wells came in on his Dixon Creek Ranch near the town of Panhandle in Carson County.
Shortly before his death in , Burnett opined that oil might make a rancher more money than cattle. The Burnett family holdings now consist of , acres, including the Dixon Creek Ranch. Today the ranch still raises cattle and thoroughbred quarter horses. Swedish immigrant Swante M. Swenson, who came to Texas in , personified the American rags-to-riches dream. When he arrived virtually pennyless in the U. As a merchant and hotelier in Austin in the s, Swenson began acquiring vast tracts of public land well beyond the frontier line in unsettled West Texas.
Forced to leave Texas in because of his opposition to secession, Swenson stayed in Mexico until after the Civil War. Moving to New York, he began a banking business. Meanwhile, Swenson retained all his inexpensively purchased land in Texas. But that asset became a liability when the Texas Legislature began organizing new counties in West Texas and his extensive land holdings suddenly became subject to taxation. The earliest ranches were those of Spanish missionaries.
By the midth century, these were joined by competing private ranches. V aqueros were the first cowhands on these early ranches. Most vaqueros were from lower castas — socio-racial classes used by the Spanish government — like mestizo of American Indian and Spanish ancestry , mulatto of Spanish and African ancestry , American Indian, or African. They worked as independent contractors, owning their own horses, saddles, and ropes but remaining unbound to a hacienda or a patron unless they chose to be.
The Spanish crown saw an opportunity in the growing number of cattle in the region. In , the crown imposed the contentious Fondo de Mestenos Mustang Tax on all unbranded cattle and horses.
Cattle drives out of Texas also began at this time, mostly to provide military rations of beef. Written records from suggest that cattle were driven to Louisiana to feed Spanish soldiers fighting against the British in the American Revolution.
The arrival of the cattle remains unconfirmed, but it would have been the first-ever drive out of Texas.
The Mustang Tax was revoked in , and drives spread more rapidly to new markets. As a result, there was a major decline in cattle by the turn of the century. This was made worse by the turmoil of the Mexican War of Independence beginning in By the end of the war in , the Spanish ranching economy had effectively dissolved. Over time, their eastern cattle bred with Spanish cattle and the Texas Longhorn was born. By the s, settlers had blended eastern ranching techniques with those of their Spanish-Mexican predecessors.
Cattle and beef were abundant in the Colony. Over the next decade, the upheaval of the Texas Revolution and Mexican-American War left large quantities of land and cattle abandoned by Mexican ranchers. American settlers began to spread into arid northern and western Texas, and the longhorn went with them. When the United States annexed Texas in , it distributed public lands for railroads and settlement. This expanded new markets for Texas cattle. Land was abundant and economic demand was growing.
Ranching required open ranges, periodic roundups and cattle branding, and management of cattle on horseback. Cowhands lived meagerly, splitting their time on the range and in small line shacks at the ranch. Over-land drives were most important of all. They were essential to moving large herds to markets across the South.
The Texas longhorn was uniquely suited to this style of ranching. Lean and sturdy, it was self-sufficient on the range and could withstand long, hard drives.
The domestic cattle economy was growing, too. With the expansion of railways in other parts of the country, cattle were gradually driven west to gold fields in California. Drives also went north to Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, where beef was packed and distributed to northeastern urban markets. The Shawnee Trail was essential to this first push north. The trail had been used for drives as early as the s and followed routes established by American Indians, traders, missionaries, military, and pioneer settlers for years.
The trail passed from Austin through Waco and Dallas and north to St. Louis and other Missouri cities. The s saw an outbreak of Spanish Fever, a deadly and highly contagious disease spread among cattle by ticks. Use of the Shawnee Trail slowly declined as a result of fears of the disease and because civil war the following decade.
By the start of the Civil War in , the United States had developed a national demand for beef. The country looked to Texas ranches to provide. During the war, a federal blockade of the Mississippi River closed access to longtime cattle markets in New Orleans. The war also devastated much of the South and its local markets.
These factors led to an overabundance of cattle in Texas. At the same time, there was a surge in demand from northern cities.
By the end of the war, a Texas steer bought for six to ten dollars could be sold for thirty to forty dollars in the northeast. The golden age of the Texas longhorn had arrived.
Concerns over Spanish Fever persisted in the North, prompting the enactment of cattle quarantines by Missouri and Kansas. Still, national demand was high and northern markets were lucrative. In , Illinois businessman Joseph G. Scot-Cherokee trader Jesse Chisholm had used this route since to transport goods from Wichita to Indian camps across the Southern Plains. The route eventually came to be known as the Chisholm Trail. The Chisholm Trail was critical in bringing Texas cattle to markets in the North by ; there were nearly 15 million beef cattle nationwide.
Conditions on cattle trails were unpredictable and treacherous. Dangers included harsh weather, cattle thieves, difficult river crossings, stampedes, and conflicts with American Indians. These dangers, combined with the sheer number of cattle being driven at once, meant that steer needed to be rugged and relatively self-sufficient. Steer transported directly to market went to canneries, where the lowest-quality meat was processed. Some stock raisers responded to this problem by driving their cattle north in the winters, to the colder climates of Colorado or Wyoming, where they could be fattened before going on to sale.
In the American imagination, the classic cowboy is a tough-talking outsider who looks like John Wayne. In reality, the Texas ranch, range, and trail were home to a diverse network of cowhands, men and women alike.
The vaqueros had been herding and driving cattle and wild horses for hundreds of years before Anglo American ranchers arrived in Texas.
Instead, they became essential to the growth and modernization of a national industry.
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