The Trail Drive Company

Commercial cattle-trailing companies delivered more than half of all Texas cattle driven to the Kansas railheads, offering ranchers an economical alternative when large ranches did not want to spare men for trail drives lasting one or two months and smaller ranches needed family members at home for daily chores. Established in 1874, the Lytle, McDaniel, Schreiner, and Light Cattle Company became the most famous cattle-trailing company in Texas, contracting with ranches to drive selected cattle to the railhead for a delivery fee of $1.00 to $2.00 per head and also buying cattle on the range in hopes of higher prices in Kansas. This company drove up to 90,000 head of cattle each year up the Western Cattle Trail to Dodge City, Kansas, and expenses often totaled only one third of the fee, leaving substantial profit. Before the Civil War, drovers carried food and supplies in sacks behind their saddles, on pack animals, or in small wagons, but as trails grew longer and crews larger they turned to lightweight freight wagons driven by full-time cooks. In 1866 Charles Goodnight mounted a cupboard, or chuck box, on the rear of a wagon, with a hinged back panel that opened into a work table, creating the first chuck wagon; its shelves, drawers, and storage spaces held condiments, tableware, medicine, personal items, cookware, bedrolls, and bulk supplies, and these wagons served as kitchen, office, and hotel for trail and roundup crews throughout the Plains. The term cow boy began with young herders in medieval Ireland, followed Irish indentured servants to colonial America, gained an outlaw image during the Revolutionary War, was popularized again in the 1830s by Texas colonists raiding Mexican cattle, and eventually became attached to Texas horsemen in the national imagination through Kansas newspaper stories, though cattle workers were also called drovers, crackers, vaqueros, and, in the 1870s, cowpunchers. The Civil War disrupted ranching in Texas, leaving herds to range free, and after 1865 returning men spent months on cow hunts to claim and brand scattered or unbranded cattle; by then unbranded cattle were commonly called mavericks after Samuel A. Maverick's unattended herd of 1844, and the Tally Law of 1866 allowed cattle to be gathered regardless of brand and driven to market, with proceeds later distributed to the rightful owners, while ranchers on the open range often held cooperative roundups and divided livestock by brands and ear markings.

Frisco, Texas · United States