Old West Group

It’s been often said that Wyoming’s cattle industry started by accident. That’s a bit of stretch, actually.

As the tale goes, Seth Ward, a sutler to Fort Laramie, left cattle out to graze the open range in the winter of 1852-53 along Chugwater Creek north of what is now Cheyenne. He expected to find carcasses in the spring. Yet when he returned he found “the oxen,” as he called them, thriving.

Popular history provides a series of similar stories: In 1854, Alex Majors, a freighter and provisioner, tried the same experiment in the same vicinity with considerable success; Mormons outside Fort Bridger also began leaving cattle out all winter.

These stories may be true, but they resist documentation. Alex Majors’ Seventy Years on the Frontier, for example, mentions nothing about wintering cattle in Wyoming. But historical veracity matters little in this case. Wyoming would have had a bovine boom even without the discovery that cattle could survive winters without supplemental feed. Between 1840 and 1870 a series of events combined to bring an inevitable surge of livestock to the northern plains.

As is so often the case in major economic shifts, a war—in this case, the Civil War—combining with changes in demographics and technology, laid down the foundation for a cattle boom.

It began with changing demographics. People were moving west. University of Wyoming historian Phil Roberts estimates that between 1841 and 1860, roughly 350,000 people “crossed what is now Wyoming.” As early as 1836, pioneers and freighters drove wagons over the Oregon Trail to Idaho. Mormons began passing through Wyoming on their way to Utah. A gold discovery outside Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848 vastly increased the traffic.

These new arrivals brought clashes with the Plains Indian tribes, primarily the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne. In 1849, to protect these emigrants, the U.S. government bought Fort Laramie, located near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers, from the American Fur Company for $4,000.

Fort Laramie housed up to 350 soldiers, and they needed to eat. Provisioners like Ward and Majors obliged them by supplying beef to the quartermaster, thus establishing local demand.

At the same time, railroads began to revolutionize beef transport—both for live cattle and chilled, butchered beef. In 1851, the Missouri Pacific Railroad laid down the first tracks west of the Mississippi. Simultaneously, the New York-based Ogdensburg and Lake Champlain Railroad began shipping butter in refrigerated cars to Boston. In 1857, the first car of chilled beef left Chicago for eastern cities. It was a flawed system and failed. But the tinkering and improvements began.

Then there was the Civil War. This epic conflict left two enduring changes in the American cattle business: centralization of the beef-packing industry and a huge surplus (around five million) of Longhorn cattle in Texas.

Packing plants had been known in America since the late 1680’s when William Pynchon of Springfield, Mass., began packing cuts of pork and beef into barrels with brine. Still, the local butcher reigned supreme.

The Civil War brought on an unprecedented demand for first barreled and then tinned beef. Packers, now mostly in Cincinnati and Chicago, set up what they called disassembly plants, says Nebraska State Historical Society senior researcher, John Carter.

In a Nebraska Educational Television documentary, The Beef State, Carter explains, “You walked the animal in one end where it was greeted by an army of butchers who would slaughter the animal, cut it up, and actually developed a finished product – canned meat – which it would then sell to the government for the Union army. Now you had an industry that was producing food on a scale that could feed a nation.”

Paradoxically, while demand for beef in the East and the upper Midwest climbed during the war, it dwindled in Texas. By 1863, the Union Army controlled the Mississippi River, preventing the Confederacy from accessing Texas beef. Furthermore, young cowboys from the Lone Star State left ranches to fight for the Southern cause.

Untended, the herds grew. Supply soon outstripped demand. At the end of the war, a 3-year-old steer in Massachusetts sold for $86.00, according to an 1867 Department of Agriculture report. The same critter in Texas, probably a little leaner, went for only $9.46. Cattle buyer Joseph McCoy said of this era: "Then dawned a time in Texas that a man's poverty was estimated by the number of cattle he possessed."

New railroads, improved refrigerated cars and pent-up postwar demand for beef put an end to this dynamic. Among other things, the Civil War helped turn around a decades-old pattern of declining beef consumption. In a controversial thesis called The Antebellum Puzzle, University of Munich economic historian John Kolmos showed that American consumption of beef per capita declined steadily from the mid-1830s to around 1870.

If there was an accidental angle to Wyoming’s beef boom, it was geography. For example, the fact that railroad surveyors decided to route the Union Pacific through Cheyenne, not Denver, was much more influential in establishing a Wyoming cattle industry than a series of mild winters.

Wyoming Territory was also handily located between Texas and Montana—the latter a site of various gold strikes.