Before railroads were built in Texas, cattle had to be herded on cattle drives to the nearest railroad. The first railroads in the United States ran from east to west. After the railroads were built that ran north and south, the Texas cattle ranchers had less distance to cover to reach a railroad for transport.
Before railroads were built in Texas, cattle had to be herded on cattle drives to the nearest railroad. The first railroads in the United States ran from east to west. After the railroads were built that ran north and south, the Texas cattle ranchers had less distance to cover to reach a railroad for transport.
Before the arrival of the railways, cattle had to be herded to market, often over a long distance.
The first railroads built in Texas were used to transport cattle from the open range to the Chicago markets. With their completion the age of cattle drives and cowboys came to an end.
The quick easy answer is..The open plains were cut up by "Barbed Wire" Barbed wire put an end to the great Cattle drives of the old West and to a certain extent The Cowboy.
The big major cattle drives ended around the early 1900s, when the railroads became more and more accessible for ranchers to herd their cattle to. Then came the engine-powered trucks that could be brought directly to the ranches to haul cattle away to the rail station. When that began, then that was officially when the cattle drives ended.
the market for cattle in texas was too small
It started in Texas
Cattle
To get them to the railroads for shipment east.
Not really, railroads were built in all of the western states, not just Texas, so that yes, cattle could be shipped to the eastern markets.
It was how the cattle was taken from the open ranges in cattle regions like Texas to the cow towns like Abilene where the drives would meet the railroads. From there the cattle would be loaded on rolling frieght and shipped to either the markets in the cities, or after the invention of the refrigerated rail car, shipped to meatpacking plants in Chicago or Green Bay, where they were butchered. with the advent of barbed wire and the opening of the Great Plains to farming cattle drives became less common. These factors combined with a glut (too many cows = falling prices) on the cattle market led to the end of the "open range cattle drives"