’If those cattle behind us are stampeded tonight, they will run right over our herd.’
Outlaws, rivers, and stampedes made cattle drives a dangerous business in 1879. Still, money was to be made, and the large herds continued to move north.
As trail boss, Gabe Hawkins wanted his herd to be one of the first on the Western Trail. The young cowboy bossed his first trail drive at age nineteen. This would be the seventh herd he led north from Texas to Kansas and would likely be his last. Times were changing. Barb wire and tick fever kept pushing the large herds farther west. Railroads were expanding as well and would soon connect the Southern cattle to their Northern markets.
Joseph Gallagher owned most of the cattle on this drive. The man was most certainly a greenhorn when it came to livestock, and Gabe told him so. Still, Gabe liked him. Gallagher was a savvy businessman, and if he wanted to hire Gabe and his riders to trail the cattle north, they would take the herd through. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Gallagher’s daughter was easy to look at either.
Join Gabe and his cowboys as they trail over three thousand head of longhorn cattle hundreds of miles to buyers in Dodge City, Kansas.
While the long cattle drives only lasted twenty years, those herds and the cowboys who trailed them left an indelible mark in our American history.
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