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Home / Periods / Old West and Frontier America / Cattle Drives and Cowboy Era

Phase

Cattle Drives and Cowboy Era

1866–1890 CE

The cattle-drive era followed the Civil War as Texas cattle were driven north to railheads in Kansas and beyond. Cowboys, ranchers, drovers and traders moved herds across long distances through dangerous and contested territory. The work was hard, seasonal and racially diverse, despite later simplified myths.

It mattered because cattle drives became one of the central images of the American West. They also connect markets, railroads, land use and frontier violence. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and many western novels use this world for friendship, endurance, masculinity, loss and the end of an open range.

Related people for Cattle Drives and Cowboy Era

Charles Goodnight1836–1929 John Wesley Hardin1853–1895 Roy Bean1825–1903

Series

Series about Cattle Drives and Cowboy Era (3 series)

Lonesome Dove in Order

by Larry McMurtry 4 books 4.7(49,123)

The Lonesome Dove quartet follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call from their first service as young Texas Rangers to old age at the closing of the nineteenth-century frontier. Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon trace their early experiences during the Republic of Texas, the Santa Fe expedition and…

Drift Fence in Order

by Zane Grey 2 books 4.1(1,178)

The Drift Fence and The Hash Knife Outfit are linked Arizona cattle-country novels set in 1889–1890. The first centres on a controversial barbed-wire project intended to protect a ranch from drifting cattle and theft; the sequel follows the continuing consequences through rustlers, endangered families and an outlaw seeking…

Knights of the Range in Order

by Zane Grey 2 books 4.0(1,026)

Knights of the Range and Twin Sombreros form a connected Colorado-New Mexico ranching sequence. The first brings a group of range riders together around a threatened ranch in the mid-1870s; Twin Sombreros moves an important character into the lead in 1880, combining ranch violence with a murder mystery…

Books

30 Best Novels About cattle drives and the Cowboy Era