Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight established one of the first ranches in the Texas Panhandle, the JA Ranch, in 1876, and later that year Thomas S. Bugbee established the first cattle ranch in Hutchinson County. As beef prices soared, cattle ranching spread across this region of the U.S. In the 1880s, the Texas Panhandle's open range and expansive grasslands made it the preferred winter grazing site for cattle moving south from Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. This seasonal influx disrupted the practices of local ranchers, who worked hard to respect neighboring ranch boundaries. In 1882-85, members of the Panhandle Stock Association pooled their resources to build barbed wire barriers along a 200-mile stretch of the panhandle, including Hutchinson County, to keep cattle from drifting south into the fertile Canadian River Valley. The drift fence proved too effective in the winters of 1886 and 1887, when thousands of cattle heading south ahead of strong storms were halted at the fence line and froze or were trampled to death. Those heavy losses led to federal and state legislation limiting fencing on public lands, and the drift fence was removed or absorbed into private ranch fencing.