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Show their cattle. As historian Don Walker explains in The Cattle Industry of Utah 1850- 1900: An Historical Profile, "On the way west, [the gold-rushers] sometimes found their own oxen exhausted, footsore, unable to start across the remaining deserts. They were thus eager to trade for better animals-to the gain of the Mormons." (UHQ 32:183, 1964) Another element contributing to the continued growth of the cattle population was the area's untouched rangeland upon which the imported and traded cattle soon grew fat. In Glynn Bennion's descriptive piece, A Pioneer Cattle Venture of the Bennion Family, he records his father's boyhood reminiscences of daily driving the cows four or five miles westward from home to the community pasturelands where the grass was so tall that he and his companions couldn't see over it and were frightened about getting lost and separated. (UHQ 34:317,1966) As a result of the influx of animals brought by Mormon settlers or acquired from California-bound pioneers and the bounty of the early rangeland, by 1850, only three years after the arrival of the first pioneers, Utah's cattle population was well over 12,000. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Utah cattle provided the "horsepower" that built Mormon communities, functioned as an important part of the domestic meat supply and simultaneously became a territorial export. As other western areas became increasingly more populated, herds of Utah cattle were driven westward and sold to provide both food and power as well as the stock to establish ranching enterprises elsewhere. It was also during this time that the first outside cattle were imported, en masse, to the territory, an event which tied Utah's cattle industry to western ranching history. In Longhorns Come to Utah, Walker reports that "The march of Texas cattle to the Utah market apparently started in 1866, when John Hamilton Morgan and a friend contracted to drive a herd of long-horns from Missouri to Salt Lake City... ,the first of thousands to make the trek." (UHQ 30: 139, 1962) With this trail drive, Utah ranchers became part of a story that began 350 years earlier with Columbus' discovery of the Americas. As Joseph T Wilson wrote in Grizzley Ropers and Bald Grazers: A Mini- History of Cattle Ranching and Cowboying (The Cowboy Tour, p. 6, 1984), it was during Columbus' second voyage in 1494 that he introduced horses and cattle to the New World. Only 50 years later, Jean de Onate herded 7000 head of livestock to New Mexico and established ranching in North America. From there, cattle ranching slowly spread into Texas, westward to California and eastward as far as the Appalachians. But it was not until the 1860s, after the Civil War when the railroad lines were extended to the Plains, that this western cattle industry became nationally significant, not only to America's economy, but to Utah's. For the next decade, cattle from Texas and Colorado filled Utah's range-lands as a number of cattle-growing enterprises were established within the territory. It was an era when Utah's cattle production was moving toward its zenith and "by 1878,...Utah [cattle producers were] ready to export rather than import Cowboy Poetry From Utah |
