User:Jwilsonjwilson/drafts/Montana Cattle Industry
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The presence of cattle is first recorded in the area which would later become Montana, in the western intermountain valleys in the 1840's. These cattle were used to supply many products and services needed locally. In addition, they were traded with immigrants traveling west, usually on the Oregon Trail. This constituted the first incarnation of Montana's cattle industry, which then became the latest instance of a regional cattle industry as were being established throughout the new world in the wake of the wave of immigration then sweeping over the Americas.
Cattle are not native to the western hemisphere. So far as is known, cattle were first introduced into the new world ancillary to the Spanish conquest. These cattle formed the basis for herds which roamed on the land-grant ranchos of the Spanish grandees, tended largely by slave labor derived from the conquered native americans. The cattle supplied meat, hides, candle-wax, milk and other products to the Spanish settlors and soldiers. They were also used for heavy labor in pulling loads, turning grist mills and other things. The resulting economic traffic evolved into a cattle industry, the first known example of that in the new world.
Over the next 400 years, cattle from these and subsequent importations in many places spread throughout most of the Americas, following European and Asian immigrants as they occupied the land. And as herds were established in areas, cattle industries emerged in those areas. So it was in Montana starting around 1850.
When the gold rush reached the Montana area in the early 1860's, a nearby market for beef quickly emerged. This drove rapid expansion of the western herds as well as expansion onto the eastern plains. Herds began to be imported from other areas, such as Oregon and Texas. With the advent of large trail drives, Montana entered the era of the cowboy. Rail transport in the United States began to penetrate what was by then Montana Territory in the 1880's, effectively opening distant markets for Montana cattle and marking the beginning of the end for trail drives. The Montana Stockgrowers Association was formed. The aftermath of the disastrous winter of 1886-87 sounded the death-knell for the open range and the trail drive era, and for the predominance of cattle on Montana's ranges.
After this, the Montana cattle industry settled into a long period characterized by large stable ranches and smaller ranches which came and went with economic cycles, in eastern and western Montana. After 1887, sheep and horse ranching became increasingly competitive for range space. Indeed in 1900 Montana was the nation’s number 1 producer of wool. 1900-1916 was a period of abnormally high precipitation in Montana. This coincided with a drive by railroads for more business and the advent of dryland farming techniques to trigger a homesteading boom in the state beginning in about 1908. Homesteaders took over prime lands from ranchers who had not established actual title to them, and employed the deep plowing techniques of dryland farming to these lands. When general drought set in in 1918 and crop prices plummeted following the conclusion of World War I, the lands ceased to be sufficiently productive to support the homesteaders and they staged a mass exodus. In their wake they left topsoil no longer bound by the deep roots of prairie grasses and the northern plains experienced their first dust bowl, into the mid 1920's. After a respite in the later 1920's, severe drought prevailed through most of the Great Depression. Established ranchers were usually able, with help from the government, to weather these adverse times. In the 1970's, large energy companies brought up mineral rights in eastern Montana ranches and reservations with the intent to strip mine for coal. In about the 1980's, various factors (taxes, children not wanting to run ranches anymore, the price of beef, advent of feedlots, etc.) began to make ranch ownership less attractive for the descendants of the original ranchers, and ranches increasingly were sold to outsiders of means, who wanted them for various reasons. This trend is ongoing. There is also a movement gathering momentum to return substantial tracts of land to their pre-ranching era condition.