According to Cunfer, ranching had a bad patch to be sure, an “ecological and economic collapse in 1885-87,” but cattle raising actually increased on the Great Plains with biggest nineteenth-century boom coming between 1890 and 1900. Farmers, not ranchers, “populated the Great Plains with up to 13 million cattle between 1890 and 1900,” and that “the core of the plains livestock industry through the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century was the eastern cropland plains, not the western rangeland plains.” “The collapse of the ranching boom in the mid-1880s was not an ecological failure caused by overgrazing. It was an economic failure caused by an insufficiently developed agricultural system.” With smaller ranches, winter feeding, sheltering of livestock during the harshest winter storms, and by developing new water sources after 1900, ranchers created a necessary agricultural infrastructure. This new grazing regime maintained itself until the 1930s when the current practice of fattening cattle on grain took over*. Cunfer, On the great plains, 48.

 

Cunfer is not concerned with the railroads, but if his conclusions are true the promotion of the cattle industry by the railroads did only temporary harm. Seemingly, he and I cannot both be right. Nineteenth-century cattle raising on the Great Plains cannot be both benign and an environmental and economic disaster. The difference between us, however, is relatively narrow. Cunfer is right that cattle numbers did increase in the 1890s as a whole, but cattle numbers fell for most of the decade. [1] The increase came only in the last few years of the century and it did not come everywhere. Taken as a whole the states with a range cattle industry, with the exception of Texas, suffered a long and sustained drop in cattle numbers. Cattle numbers were lower, often much lower, in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico in 1900 than they had been in 1886. In the Dakotas where cattle numbers fell early in the 1890s, (see visualization on Spatial History Project Web Site, "Cattle Production in the American West, 1867-1935"), they would have fallen even further if, in the usual manner, Indians had not been forced to bear the burden of corporate misfortune and had their reservations and largely undamaged grasslands opened up to white cattle corporations.

 

Cunfer is again correct to say that cattle raising increase on farms and not ranches, but this did not anticipate feedlot cattle: it was feedlot agriculture if by feedlot we mean fattening cattle on corn. The country lying between the 98 th and 100 th meridian, or in the case of the Dakotas and northeastern Nebraska well to the east of this line, became, in Cunfer’s words, “the core of the plains livestock industry.” This was more accurately the far fringe of the Corn Belt- Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, southeastern Nebraska, and eastern Kansas. An increase in beef production in what was an area best considered part of the Corn Belt is not a sign of successful ranching in the rangelands of the Great Plains. The connection between corn and cattle shows up quite clearly when these things are both represented on a single map. The increase of cattle on these farms did not diminish the reach of the catastrophe in the grasslands and that catastrophe was not ephemeral.

 

See also on the Spatial History Project website: "Union Pacific Shipping from Nebraska: Forwarded/Received" and "Union Pacific Shipping from Nebraska: East/West."