COWBOY

The cowboy, a person who rounded up and "drove" large herds of cattle, figured prominently in U.S. life from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. During this 20-year period the cattle industry in the West grew rapidly.

After the Civil War (1861–65) demand for beef increased, and butchers in the East and North were willing to pay handsomely for it. At the same time, large herds of cattle, produced by bulls and cows left behind by the early Spanish settlers, roamed freely on the open ranges of Texas. Seeing the business opportunity, cattle ranchers hired cowboys to round up the cattle, brand them (burn the skin with a rancher's mark or symbol), release them again onto the open range, protect them from rustlers, and at the end of the grazing season, round them up. The cowboys then ran a trail drive—guiding the cattle as far as 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to the nearest railhead, where the animals were loaded into railcars and transported eastward. The train terminals at Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, made those cities into "cow towns," frontier boom towns of the cattle industry.

By 1870 cattle ranches had spread northward into present-day Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana. Between 1860 and 1880, the cattle population in these areas increased from 130,000 to 4.5 million. Where the cattle went, so did the cowboys, conducting roundups twice a year. Though there were probably no more than 100,000 cowboys (also called cowpokes or cowhands) in the West, they captured the American imagination and came to symbolize the days of the "Wild West." (As many as 25 percent of the mounted cowboys were African Americans.) The innovation of barbed wire (1874) allowed ranchers to fence in their lands, and by the 1880s the railroads reached into previously remote areas. The long cattle drives became a thing of the past and the need for cowboys declined.