A couple of years ago I got a request for a reference from Kansas State University, in Manhattan. The university was evaluating the credentials of one of its scholars, James E. Sherow, for appointment to the rank of university distinguished professor. Since I am privileged to hold such appointment at NDSU, and because I work in the same general field as Jim, I was asked to provide an evaluation.
I did not think I was going out on a limb when I provided a ringing endorsement for the proposed appointment, which was duly made. If there ever were any doubt, let me point now to Jim’s new book, off University of Oklahoma Press--entitled The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy’s Great Gamble. Before proceeding to discuss this stellar work, I should mention that I have come to call my friend at Kansas State, Professor Sherow, “Wildcat Jim.”
It seems doubly appropriate to nickname Jim “Wildcat,” because in addition to his academic affiliation, there is the fact he is an environmental historian. This means a couple of things in regard to this new book on the Chisholm Trail, the fabled track that, following the Civil War, connected Texas cattle across the Indian Territory to Abilene and the other railroad-cattle towns of the central plains, Wild Bill Hickok and all that stuff.
The first thing to note is the book’s grassroots perspective. Wildcat knows about grasses, ticks, cattle breeds, and the other ecological details that allow him to build a story from the ground up. At the same time, Jim has a birdseye view of the subject, a global view that raises all sorts of questions we haven’t asked before about the Chisholm Trail.
Or trails, I should say. As Wildcat shows, it was the trails out of Abilene, not to it, that were crucial. The author takes us to the huddled masses and slaughterhouses and stockyards of New York and other eastern cities, where people sought to get inexpensive protein for a hungry population but also to solve the urban environmental problems that cattle brought to the city. Union stockyards were important in the process.
Now look more closely at those cattle in the yards, and you see they are infested with innumerable ugly insects--fanhead ticks that carried Texas fever. Texas fever caused farmers, stockmen, and state and local governments to ban shipments of the diseased cattle. This, too, was a barrier to be navigated, and one that made McCoy’s speculative venture an economic failure for him.
Wildcat has us think more deeply about the environment of the central plains and how the cattle trailing enterprise moved the process of history. Cattle herds held in the region, such as my native country along the Great Bend of the Arkansas River, grazed it hard, degrading the grassland formations from tallgrass to buffalo grass. Buffalo grass did not carry fire as well or root-bind the soil so tightly. Fire suppression enabled agricultural settlement by homesteaders, and thus the passing of the range cattle industry.
The same process went on throughout the Great Plains region--cattle yielding to crops as a matter of ecological succession. And those ticks Wildcat writes about, bloated bugs that infested Texas longhorns so severely as to conceal the color of their hides--I just realized an important connection to the northern ranges of Dakota Territory, to which Texas cattle were driven as stockers.
Texas cattle showed surprising vigor and made great gains on northern grasslands. I see now that much of this apparent vigor was because the beasts were finally rid of the load of parasites that debilitated them, the ticks, having no tolerance for cold, dying off at the first hard freeze. Well, we always say this is a healthy country.
~Tom Isern
