Ranchers staked out homesteads often centered in a cottonwood grove, with ample water nearby; they grazed their cattle over thousands of acres of public domain. Barbed wire, a web of railroads throughout the Great Plains, and enforcement of federal land laws all put an end to the open-range cattle industry and the great trails. By the mid-1880s prudent cattlemen realized that the industry was overexpanded, the Great Plains overgrazed, and the price of beef declining.
The dry summer of 1886 followed by the terrible winter of 1886-1887 destroyed what remained of the original industry. The open range was ended. Blooded cattle were brought in to improve the stock. The cowboy who hated to work unmounted was often reduced to riding a haymow, mending fences, and applying medicines to sick cattle. Where once he had herded cattle up the trails to Abilene or Dodge, he now ran the line—the water divide between his ranch and his neighbor’s. There was still the semiannual roundup when cowboys representing several ranches rendezvoused and rode great circles, rounding up all the cattle they could find. They were then herded to a central place where cowboys from each ranch cut out its beasts and drove them back to the home range.
Glorified in thousands of novels and hundreds of motion pictures, the American cowboy is so mythologized that the reality and the legend are almost inseparable. Yet the reality is that the cowboy still exists because his work is essential to the industry. In many areas of the American West he still rides a horse, though he may carry it in a horse trailer behind his pickup truck to the point where the road gives out and a horse becomes indispensable. He may survey the ranchman’s spread in a small airplane that he pilots, and he may help his employer determine with a computer matters of feed, weight, and salability. But he still dresses like a cowboy because the garb is practical; he understands cattle and horses and gazes out upon the treeless expanse just as his predecessors did. His work and his workplace, in spite of encroaching population, are still there.