The Miserable Long Drive of 1866

A young Iowan named George Duffield,  who owned 1000 head of Texas longhorn in 1866, began his journey on the Long Drive to Missouri.  He recorded his journey:  "Traveled 10 miles.  Big Stampede, lost 200 head of cattle."  Two weeks later: "Big Thunder Storm.  Stampede lost 100 beeves.  Hunted all day.  Found 50.  All tired.  Everything discouraging."  Beyond the Red River Duffield wrote:  "Stampede last night, am in Indian Country.  Believe they scare the Cattle to get pay to collect them."

Eventually Duffield and what remained of his herd made it to Missouri where he found the citizens there less than hospitable.  The longhorn spread the disease, Texas fever,  to which the Texas cattle were immune, but the Missouri cattle had no such such immunity to the tick-born disease.  Missouri had a law that forbade the entry of diseased cattle into the state, and the Missouri farmers, in armed posses, confronted the cattle drivers, including Duffield.

Duffield had another problem - the wandering outlaw bands travelling the country after the Civil War.  Using the excuse of Texas fever, these bands attacked the drivers, rustled the herds, and sent many cowboys to an early grave.  One account reads: "The southwestern Missouri roads leading to Sedalia were scenes of the worst work of outlaws...outright murder or flogging the drivers until they promised to abandon their herds and leave the country."

Few cattlemen made it to the rail yards against these obstacles in 1866.  Herd after herd came to a dead stop at Baxter Springs, Kansas near the border of Indian Territory and Missouri.  While waiting for the blockade to end, the grass died causing thousands of cattle to die of starvation.  If the cattle were turned east or west to go around the blockade, their weight loss made them almost worthless by the time they reached trail's end.

The Long Drive of 1866 ended mostly in despair.  Business would prosper if trails leading to new and more open markets would become available.  In the spring of 1867 those trails would indeed be blazed.

Next time...Destination Kansas
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On July 2, 1809, alarmed by the growing encroachment of whites squatting on Native American lands, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh calls on all Indians to unite and resist in the Old Northwest and Deep South.  Together, Tecumseh argued, the various tribes had enough strength to stop the whites from taking further land. By 1810, he had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandot nations.