During the American Civil War, the Confederacy relied heavily on slave labor to maintain daily functions while many white men served as soldiers, and many of the men who later founded the 1867 Settlement were enslaved men trained as cattle drivers to move cattle to feed Confederate troops. After emancipation, these founders worked as cowboys at the nearby Butler Ranch. During Reconstruction, "cowboy" was a pejorative term for a black cowhand, yet cattle driving was one of the few professions in which black and white men were social equals: African Americans made up 25% of cattle drivers and were treated equally to whites in responsibilities and pay, and black and white cowhands even shared sleeping quarters, though racist roles resumed in towns and in front of women. The men working at the Butler Ranch drove cattle along the Chisholm Trail, which from 1867 to 1884 was the major route for livestock from Texas to the Kansas railways, and these cattle drives provided steady income that helped Texas recover after the Civil War. Expansion of the railroads, the invention of barbed wire, and the forced removal of Native Americans helped make the cowboy profession obsolete, and by the turn of the century the cattle drives had ended. As the need for cowhands declined, many African American cowboys faced a difficult transition because it was much harder for them to purchase land. Land for the 1867 Settlement had been given to Galveston County by Judge William Jefferson Jones to be sold solely to freedmen, and the settlers who built homes there farmed in addition to raising cattle so they could earn the money to buy the land over time. The 1867 Settlement became a thriving African-American community and was unusual because these cowboys were able to purchase land.