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One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail - and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet.
The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy's vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post-Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy's way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys' vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London.
Joseph McCoy's enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation's stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.
One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail - and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet.
The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy's vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post-Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy's way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys' vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London.
Joseph McCoy's enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation's stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.
James E. Sherow is University Distinguished Professor and
Professor of History at Kansas State University, Manhattan, and the
author of numerous books and articles, including The Grasslands of
the United States: An Environmental History and the award-winning
Railroad Empire across the Heartland: Rephotographing Alexander
Gardner's Westward Journey.
James P. Ronda, is retired as Professor at the University of
Tulsa, where he held the H. G. Barnard Chair of Western American
History. He is widely recognized for his extensive scholarship on
the Lewis and Clark expedition, including the pathbreaking Lewis
and Clark Among the Indians. He is also a distinguished historian
of the early American fur trade, Astoria and Empire. Professor
Ronda's recent publications include The West the Railroads Made.
This engaging book, by a leading historian of America's central
plains, clearly and beautifully renders a sense of place and
explains how the Texas cattle trade contributed to transforming
wild prairie grasslands into today's domesticated landscape."" -
Jeffrey K. Stine Curator for Environmental History, Smithsonian
Institution, and coeditor of Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in
the Age of Humans
""Jim Sherow's new study of Joseph McCoy and the Chisolm Trail
deftly spans the continent, synthesizing economic and environmental
histories to reveal the fascinating evolution of one of the
nation's first big businesses - cattle. As Sherow reveals, beef
transformed America and Americans."" - Sara Dant author of Losing
Eden: An Environmental History of the American West
""It is Sherow's attention to the small-grained, technical details
of the Chisholm Trail that elevates his scholarship above a raft of
other works that have continually drawn the same yawning
conclusion. And by broadening the pathways trod by cowboys and
their cattle to include wider networks of capital and political
patronage, Sherow's book expands the reach of the cattle drive to
reveal that the significance of the Chisholm Trail travels far
beyond the I-35 corridor. More than just another volume of regional
literature, The Chisholm Trail will interest a wide audience of
readers; not only those in Kansas and Texas, but anyone concerned
with the historical and environmental roots of industrialized
animal agriculture."" - Nebraska History
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