Cattle Drives in The United States - Shawnee Trail

Shawnee Trail

The Shawnee Trail, also known as the Texas Trail, played a significant role in Texas as early as the 1840s. But by 1853, as 3,000 cattle were trailed through western Missouri, local farmers blocked their passage and forced the drovers to turn back because the longhorns carried ticks that carried Texas fever. The Texas cattle were immune to this disease; but the ticks that they left behind infected the local cattle. By 1855 farmers in western and central Missouri formed vigilance committees, stopped some of the herds, and killed any Texas cattle that entered their counties, and a law, effective in December of that year, was passed, banning diseased cattle from being brought into or through the state. Several drovers took their herds up through the eastern edge of Kansas; but there, too, they met opposition from farmers, who induced their territorial legislature to pass a protective law in 1859. During the Civil War the Shawnee Trail was virtually unused. After the war, Texas was overflowing with surplus cattle for which there were almost no local markets. By 1866 an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 surplus cattle were gathered to drive overland to market.