In the Beginning, Cattle Wasn’t Used for Food

Cattle has been a popular industry in North America since well before the colonies were settled into what is today the United States. Europeans, who first started to settle North America in the late 15th century brought their own cattle over the seas and started an industry that has become large to this day. It took three centuries as America became independent and Texas was won from Mexico before it became what it is today.

Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and the Mexicans that had homesteaded Texas left, leaving their cattle behind. It was boon for Texas, which was now an independent country with intentions of becoming one of the United States, but not because of the beef. Eating meat wasn’t as popular as the skins that came with the cattle, and it wasn’t for several decades that the beef became popular enough to make many ranchers very wealthy.

The Civil War actually boosted the cattle ranching industry. Texas ranchers left their farms to fight for the Confederacy and, even though the Confederates lost the war, it proved to be a big boost for the Texas economy. The cattle ranchers in Texas saw their economy destroyed, but that meant that there was a new market in the north. It is estimated that there were more than five million longhorn cattle in Texas and, if they could transport their cattle to the north, there was a huge market for them.

The market was bigger than the Texans expected. They found that if they could get their cattle to the north, they could make as much as 10 times the amount they were making in the south. The beef was becoming as big as the profits the ranchers were making from the skins.

A livestock trader in Chicago, Joseph McCoy wanted to bring more livestock to the north, and then distribute the cattle to the East. It worked for McCoy who built what was one of the first “cow towns’’ in Abilene, Texas. Abilene was near the end of a trail that had been established during the Civil War that stretched through Kansas. Homesteaders who had established themselves in Kansas objected because much of the cattle carried a tick that killed other animals that were indigenous to the area, but McCoy capitalized on the burgeoning freight industry to transport his livestock and it paid off well for him.

McCoy spent more than $5,000 on advertising and promised a good price for cattle that was sold in Abilene. In the next two decades, McCoy sold more than two million cattle from Abilene to Chicago. His reputation gave rise to the term “The Real McCoy.’’