Chuck Wagons: Ranching and Driving in Context

The short but colorful heyday of the American cowboy began after the Civil War and ended gradually with the privatization and fencing in of the West from the 1880s until the early twentieth century. It is estimated that in Texas alone in 1860 there were some 3.5 million wild cattle grazing the unfenced land, the descendants of a few ancestors brought to the Americas by conquistadors and settlers. After the Civil War ended, freed slaves; former soldiers already hundreds of miles from home; other men with marital, legal, or financial problems; and young boys looked to the American West for their fortunes or at least for a good steak dinner cut from one of the millions of wild cattle.