Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon

by Tim Lehman

Overview

How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero?

Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago.

The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses.

Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421425900
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2018
Series:	How Things Worked
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	504,134
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.46(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tim Lehman is a professor of history at Rocky Mountain College. He is the author of Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1 How Cowboys and Longhorns Came to Texas
2 How the Cattle Market Boomed and Busted
3 How to Organize the Largest, Longest Cattle Drive Ever
4 How Kansas Survived the Longhorn Invasion
5 How the Trails Died and the Cowboy Lived On
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jon T. Coleman

An essential primer to the legendary cattle drives of the American West, Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail dusts off the cowboys, the cattle towns, and the livestock industry, giving students of all ages the basics and the background while updating them on the latest historical research. It’s a marvelous book.

Jeffrey Nichols

Tim Lehman replaces romance and legend with clear-eyed, well-documented explanations of how driving Texas longhorn cattle worked. This is a lively description of the realities of cowboy life and an account of how those scruffy working men turned into unlikely heroes. This short volume will be excellent for classroom use.

Michael D. Wise

This engaging book reveals the sensual and visceral worlds of the nineteenth-century cattle trail, illuminating historical landscapes of labor and leisure that have for too long been obscured. Beyond just debunking the mythology of the cowboy, Lehman gives us so much more by taking seriously and sympathetically the history of how human and nonhuman animals ‘turned the saddle into a workplace.’ All readers interested in the histories of business and capitalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, will benefit from Lehman’s perfect distillation of these vital issues.

Richard W. Etulain

Tim Lehman's book opens new paths: it traces the burgeoning cattle business from Texas to the arduous long trails running north to rowdy cattle towns, and then on to eastern markets or northern ranges. The account is fact-driven, diligently researched, and invitingly written. Saddle up and ride with Lehman. His revealing, valuable trail drive beckons you.

From the Publisher

A well-written and compelling book by a master storyteller.
—Cecil Edward Weller Jr., San Jacinto College, author of Joe T. Robinson: Always a Loyal Democrat

An excellent and highly accessible little book. With incredible economy, Lehman covers the rise and precipitous decline of the Texas System of range cattle management, with attention to the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of the enterprise.
—Andrew R. Graybill, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

Tim Lehman's book opens new paths: it traces the burgeoning cattle business from Texas to the arduous long trails running north to rowdy cattle towns, and then on to eastern markets or northern ranges. The account is fact-driven, diligently researched, and invitingly written. Saddle up and ride with Lehman. His revealing, valuable trail drive beckons you.
—Richard W. Etulain, University of New Mexico, author of Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West

This engaging book reveals the sensual and visceral worlds of the nineteenth-century cattle trail, illuminating historical landscapes of labor and leisure that have for too long been obscured. Beyond just debunking the mythology of the cowboy, Lehman gives us so much more by taking seriously and sympathetically the history of how human and nonhuman animals ‘turned the saddle into a workplace.’ All readers interested in the histories of business and capitalism, food and agriculture, nature and culture, will benefit from Lehman’s perfect distillation of these vital issues.
—Michael D. Wise, University of North Texas, author of Producing Predators: Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies

Tim Lehman replaces romance and legend with clear-eyed, well-documented explanations of how driving Texas longhorn cattle worked. This is a lively description of the realities of cowboy life and an account of how those scruffy working men turned into unlikely heroes. This short volume will be excellent for classroom use.
—Jeffrey Nichols, Westminster College, author of Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847–1918

An essential primer to the legendary cattle drives of the American West, Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail dusts off the cowboys, the cattle towns, and the livestock industry, giving students of all ages the basics and the background while updating them on the latest historical research. It’s a marvelous book.
—Jon T. Coleman, University of Notre Dame, author of Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

Cecil Edward Weller Jr.

A well-written and compelling book by a master storyteller.

Andrew R. Graybill

An excellent and highly accessible little book. With incredible economy, Lehman covers the rise and precipitous decline of the Texas System of range cattle management, with attention to the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of the enterprise.

Editorial Reviews

In Up the Trail Tim Lehman provides an astute and . . . thorough history of the Texas cattle industry from its inception to the mid-1880s. Lehman ably traces the beginnings of the cattle trade, moving quickly and logically from Christopher Columbus's importation of cows in the late fifteenth century to the massing of large herds in the early nineteenth century. Lehman does a good job of showing us how this U.S.–defined and defining activity owed much to the those who were among the first cowboys.

Journal of American History - Stanley Corkin

Perhaps the most iconic panorama in western movies is the cattle drive, with vast numbers of bawling Texas longhorns fanning out to cross the wide Red River, herded by a small fraternity of loose-limbed, laconic cowboys on horseback. Read this scene through the lens of Tim Lehman's Up the Trail, and it looks quite different.
—Christine Bold, Times Literary Supplement

This concise synthesis of life on the nineteenth-century trail drives north from Texas is ideal for the general reader as well as students in Texas or western American history classes. Tim Lehman deftly brings the long drives to life, thanks to copious primary source quotations from nineteenth-century reminiscences, diaries, publications, and newspaper accounts . . . Up the Trail does an admirable job of taking readers behind the tall tales to see the real lives of real cowboys on the great cattle drives as well as showing their transition from history to mythology.
—Richard W. Slatta, North Carolina State University, Southwestern Historical Quarterly

In Up the Trail Tim Lehman provides an astute and . . . thorough history of the Texas cattle industry from its inception to the mid-1880s. Lehman ably traces the beginnings of the cattle trade, moving quickly and logically from Christopher Columbus's importation of cows in the late fifteenth century to the massing of large herds in the early nineteenth century. Lehman does a good job of showing us how this U.S.–defined and defining activity owed much to the those who were among the first cowboys.
—Stanley Corkin, University of Cincinnati, Journal of American History

From the dust and ashes of the trails rose an American icon, the cowboy. Lehman traces this transformation in cogent fashion, from the night-herd songs and poems, to the "dime novels," to the Hollywood "horse operas" of the early 1900s. Gone from this legend were the hardship, the cruelty, and the extreme toll exacted from the land, the stock, and the men of the trail drives that we are given glimpses of in this appealing book.
—Tim Keane, Kansas State University, Great Plains Quarterly

From the Publisher

This concise synthesis of life on the nineteenth-century trail drives north from Texas is ideal for the general reader as well as students in Texas or western American history classes. Tim Lehman deftly brings the long drives to life, thanks to copious primary source quotations from nineteenth-century reminiscences, diaries, publications, and newspaper accounts . . . Up the Trail does an admirable job of taking readers behind the tall tales to see the real lives of real cowboys on the great cattle drives as well as showing their transition from history to mythology.

Southwestern Historical Quarterly - Richard W. Slatta

Perhaps the most iconic panorama in western movies is the cattle drive, with vast numbers of bawling Texas longhorns fanning out to cross the wide Red River, herded by a small fraternity of loose-limbed, laconic cowboys on horseback. Read this scene through the lens of Tim Lehman's Up the Trail, and it looks quite different.

Times Literary Supplement - Christine Bold

From the dust and ashes of the trails rose an American icon, the cowboy. Lehman traces this transformation in cogent fashion, from the night-herd songs and poems, to the "dime novels," to the Hollywood "horse operas" of the early 1900s. Gone from this legend were the hardship, the cruelty, and the extreme toll exacted from the land, the stock, and the men of the trail drives that we are given glimpses of in this appealing book.

Great Plains Quarterly - Tim Keane