One of the most dramatic shifts in the kaleidoscope of American history was the replacement of millions of buffalo that had roamed the Great Plains by cattle, and of the Indian and the miner by the cowboy and the cattle king. The territory between the Missouri and the Rockies, and from Texas to the Canadian border - an area comprising one-fourth of the United States - was the Cattle Kingdom, the last and most picturesque American frontier.

The development of the Cattle Kingdom - and its unique culture, economy, and society - in the 1870s and 1880s was due to a peculiar combination of factors: the opening up of the public domain, the elimination of serious dangers from the Indians, the annihilation of the buffalo, the extension of railroads into the high plains, rapid increases in population at home and abroad, which in turn increased beef consumption, the invention of the refrigerator rail car and the growth of great packing centers in Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City.

As early as 1856, a drove of Texas Longhorns had pastured their way to Chicago, but it was not until the late 1860s that the “long drive” became an institution. Cattlemen like Charles Goodnight and Jesse Chisolm marked out trails on which thousands of herds beat a path sometimes a quarter mile broad. Altogether over six million cattle were driven north along these trails.

Though the Cattle Kingdom collapsed by 1890, it left a lasting impact on the American popular imagination - an appeal to which a vast body of fiction, film and television still caters. It is not surprising that Theodore Roosevelt should have ranched in the Badlands of South Dakota, that Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song was Home on the Range, or that President Eisenhower’s favorite reading was Westerns.