The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy's Great Gamble by James E. Sherrow (review)

Sherrow's view of the Chisholm Trail is not the typical vision of a lonely cattle trail connecting Texas cattle with Kansas railroads. Rather, it is a conceptually and spatially enlarged portrait of cattle movements that links Texas longhorns to New York dinner tables, and it places cattle herding at the center of the nineteenth-century ecological transformation of the Great Plains. Railroads as well as steamships transported cattle to meet the urban demand for beef, and in Sherrow's expansive treatment, all forms of cattle locomotion were equivalent in that they relied on "stored solar energy," either grass or coal. At the heart of his analysis is the risk-taking cattle entrepreneur Joseph McCoy and the Chisholm Trail, the cattle path that enabled the alteration of the Great Plains from a grassland managed by bison-hunting Indians to a cultivated landscape shaped by American farmers.

Sherrow's understanding of this enlarged Chisholm Trail leads to important insights. Under the pressure of cattle grazing, tall grasses (mostly bluestem) were replaced by shorter grasses, especially buffalo grass, which eventually succumbed to wheat and other domesticated grasses. Sherrow argues that cattle movements created a transitional ecosystem that cleared the way for American farm culture. He is especially strong in his analysis of prairie fires, common and life-sustaining under a tallgrass-bison regime but suppressed by cattle drovers, ultimately making cultivation easier for farmers. Another significant contribution of this book is the detailed attention to climate data, which explains why the open range system of cattle grazing, so common in Texas, did not work in the colder Kansas climate.

Such a sprawling reach gives the book a wide embrace, but also leads to some repetition and rambling digressions. A tighter focus would allow for more attention to the nature of longhorns, so good on the trail but so bad on the railroad car or dinner table. The conflict between Native nations who saw water and grass as rightfully theirs, and Texas drovers who viewed public domain water and grass as "free for the taking" (122), might be explored more fully, especially for McCoy's complicated role in this fraught relationship.

As the subtitle suggests, Joseph McCoy saw his investments in the Chisholm Trail as part of a great cattle faro game. This makes a wonderful unifying metaphor for the book and suggests that McCoy's great gamble is still a drama in progress.