Between 1865 and 1887, the Great Plains experienced a dramatic faunal change as the vast buffalo herds were eliminated and millions of Texas cattle moved north onto the open ranges of Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Montana. Ranchers rarely bothered to acquire legal title to grazing lands; they simply “squatted” on what was still largely the public domain, creating a unique cattle kingdom. Eventually, the lure of immense cattle profits led to overcrowding and overgrazing, the problem exacerbated by the arrival of sheepherders and homesteaders to the region in the 1880s. As competition for grasslands increased, bitter range wars broke out between sheepherders and cattlemen in Colorado, Wyoming and elsewhere. And violence also erupted between cattlemen and farms, notably in the 1892 Johnson County Cattle War in Wyoming. But nature played the biggest role in bringing the open range cattle era to an end. A summer drought in 1886 was followed by the worst winter on record when blizzards, icy winds and unusually bitter cold blasted through the northern ranges. Millions of cattle, stranded in the snow, unable to paw down to the grass beneath, starved or froze to death. The ranchers who stayed in business after the so-called “Great Die-Up” learned to confine their herds to manageable fenced-in areas equipped with sufficient feed, water and shelter to sustain them year-round.

Outlaws like Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Butch Cassidy have become the stuff of legend, contributing to the “wild and wooly” reputation of the western frontier. In some places, that reputation was deserved. The mining town of Deadwood in Dakota Territory, for example, was in its brief heyday in the 1870s one of the most violent spots on earth, with brawls, gunfights and stagecoach robberies almost everyday occurrences. Equally turbulent was Tombstone, Arizona, site of the famous “Lucky Cuss” silver mine and the notorious 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral where “deputies” Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers killed Billy Clanton and the two McLaury boys. But by contrast Kansas cattle towns like Abilene and Dodge City had relatively few saloons and brothels and, by frontier standards, a low homicide rate. This was a tribute to their early establishment of law and order through the importation of professional gunfighters like James Butler (”Wild Bill”) Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson to serve as deputies and marshals. Hickok’s career as a lawman peaked when he was marshal of Abilene in 1871. Thereafter he toured with Buffalo Bill Cody (1872-1873), then settled in Deadwood where he crossed paths with the hard-drinking Calamity Jane. In 1876, he was killed by a shot in the back while playing cards.

It was on Spanish ranches in north-eastern Mexico that the skills employed later by the Great Plains cowboy first evolved. There too were developed the cowboy’s distinctive costume and equipment: the broad sombrero, the shaggy leather chaparejos or “chaps,” the high-heeled boots, the spurs, the high-horned forty-pound saddle and the lariat or lasso. But the cowboy’s humor, traditions and folk music were authentically American. Cowboys were a varied breed, including adventurous teenagers, Union and Confederate veterans, Irish immigrants and many blacks. Their duties consisted of driving cattle to pasture and water, branding them at roundups, riding the range to protect them from rustlers and wild animals, and escorting them during the long drive. These tasks required expert horsemanship and skill with the lasso and six-shooter. In dime novels cowboy life seemed romantic, but in reality it was full of hardship, monotony and danger. For low wages the cowboy had to spend long hours in the saddle with only a hard bed in a communal bunk-house to rest in at night. During the long drive, lasting as much as two months, he traveled in a continuous cloud of dust, trying to control hundreds of fractious animals. Little wonder that at journey’s end cowboys often went on the spree, squandering half a year’s wages on the doubtful pleasures of the cattle towns.

With the coming of the railroads to the Great Plains in the 1860s, Texas ranchers were finally able to link their native longhorns with the markets of the East. They did so by moving their herds on thousand-mile “long drives” to railheads in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, where booming “cow towns” grew at the junction of trail and rail. In 1867, Joseph G. McCoy laid out the Chisholm Trail form San Antonio to the Kansas Pacific railhead at Abeline, Kansas, buying 250 acres there for grazing land and stockyards. The cattle trade flourished in Abeline until 1872 when opposition from area farmers finally closed it down. But the long drives continued — to other railhead towns like Ellsworth, Dodge City, Ogallala and Cheyenne, as well as to burgeoning ranches on the northern Plains. Many difficulties beset the drovers on the trail. There were danger from floods, thunderstorms, stampedes, rustlers and Indians. Cattle sometimes lost so much weight on the trek they became unsaleable. Eventually, Kansas and a number of other states, in an effort to keep out dreaded cattle diseases like Texas and splenic fever, passed restrictive quarantine laws. These restrictions, together with the use of barbed wire on the open range, brought trail-driving to an end by the 1890s.