Longhorns and Abilene

They were hardy beasts, to be sure, thriving on the scant plants and the few watering holes that dotted the vast landscape. It was the Longhorns’ sturdiness that encouraged Texans to raise them.

But long before the Americans began to settle in the southwest the Longhorns were thriving on the ranches of Mexico and what would become Texas. The land was all open range back then, no fences and next to no dwellings for as far as a man could see, and then some. It was here that the huge herds of Longhorns belonging to the Mexicans grazed and thrived in this enormous, unfenced area ranging from the Canadian border south to the Gulf of Mexico, then from the Rocky Mountains eastward to the Missouri River.

Back then the term “cowboy” was yet to be heard. Those swarthy, brave fellows of Spanish ancestry who herded these Longhorns were called vaqueros. It was from these men that the Americans in Texas learned the business of cattle ranching. Also back then, hamburgers and T-bone steaks weren’t the prime products being produced. The income derived from these four-legged sharp-horned critters, that were half-wild, were their tough hides. These rangy bovines were seldom heavy enough for good beef cattle. That major product would be looked upon later on down the trail. The grazing was just too scanty and the watering places to few for the Longhorns to put on enough weight, in comparison to their countless numbers. However, there were some that were passable for table use long before anyone got the grand idea of collecting a few hundred, or a thousand and more, into a bunch and moving them northward to feed the hungry homesteader and the civilized folks in the east.

But before cattle drives northward and westward took place another little incident had to happen, and it did. First off, in the summer of 1855, Kansas got everyone’s’ attention when the settlements that had began to creep westward over the Missouri line got into some big ruckuses over the slavery issue.

Fortunately, not all of these Kansas settlers were focusing on whether there would or would not be slavery on the Plains. Most folks were just interested in a little free land to build a soddie on and raise some crops to feed their families. So folks came to Kansas. And where enough of them would settle within a given amount of miles, towns were certain to sprout up. And they did.