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.
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