Where's the Beef?

New Year's Day 1886 - a blizzard rocks the upper Midwest that puts an end to beef on the dinner table of America for many, many months.  1000s of cattle die and 100s of cattle companies are wiped out in one of the worst blizzards in recorded history.

Texan cattle fattened for the market in Montana and the Dakotas could not survive the severe winter of 1886-87 and were frozen solid where they stood in the fields.  In a 1887 report, that winter found 80% of all cattle between Canada and the Rio Grande dead and it was the end of the days of the big cattle companies.  It was well into the fall before the cattle markets were back, and then at a diminished capacity.  A Delmonico steak on the East coast pulled a pretty penny for months to come.

Next - The Case of Mistaken Identity

Neighborhood Problems

All this inhibitions of early Abilene was distasteful to the neighboring Methodist farmers of Kansas.  They viewed fornication and whiskey guzzling with anything but welcome. Eventually a law was passed through the Kansas legislature forbidding all the loading of cattle at Abilene which was a death sentence to the town's lively nightlife.

The cattle men simply moved on to Hays City down the railroad where by 1872 one million longhorns were boarded on railroad cars bound for steak lovers in Baltimore and Pittsburgh.

In retrospect, for the decade following the Civil War, Abilene was known as both a suburb of Texas and a suburb of Hell, depending on your viewpoint.  A good many of these  cow pokes stayed on and became Kansas residents in the boot hills of Dodge City and Newton, making a part of Kansas forever Texas.

Next - the cowboy persona...

Solving the Cattle Problem Post Civil War

In 1867, the Kansas Pacific Railroad was being built westward from Kansas City to Denver at amazing speed.  By 1868 the iron rails were already 164 miles west of Kansas City at a place named by its founders for no particular reason - Abilene.

With a few primitive livestock cars added, history began with the first Texan trail herds by rail to Chicago.
As the railroad moved westward, so did the cattle towns that grew up on those rail lines. Abilene, Hays City, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Newton, all began as "track towns" beside the railroad.  Boxcar depots, telegraph stations, water tank, windmill, underground post office and saloons sprang up along the tracks of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.

On a personal note - I grew up in such a track town in northern Indiana (Garrett) which only existed because the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran through the center of the town.

Abilene became the first of those cow towns and set the pattern for the western "Cow Town" and the stamping grounds of the Texan cowpoke.

Next we look at the similarity of the cow town and the mining town...