Cattle Drives and Texas Fever by Dr. Conell J. Brown

On April 9, 1865 General Lee surrendered marking an official end to the Civial War. Skirmishes still continued in North Arkansas as weary soldiers began to return home. Harmon HOdges, in a letter dated June 4, 1865 from Fayetteville, indicated this continued guerilla activity(1). Returning soldiers must have had terribly mixed emotions, elation beyond words as they recongnized familiar landmarks, horror at teh devastation they encountered. The misery of the people surcviving in the no-man's land between Union oand Confedarate lines over which legitimate foraging parties and outlaw bands roamed is almost impossilbe to imagine.

An article in The American Heritage Magazine was recently brought to my attention concerning a herd of Texas longhorn cattle driven across North Arkansas during the summer of 1866. This article was of interest to me for three reasons. First, it gives some detail of the post-Civl War destitution in the area that is now Washington, Madison, Carrol, Boone and Marion Counties. Second, as a child my grandmother often told me of the hardships her mother endured as she, her sister and a crippled brother sought to evade various raiding parties. My great grandmother was a young war widow living near Baker's Prairie mentioned in the article. Third, this herd of longhorns likely distributed the Texas Tick Fever across these northern counties. A quarantine line along the northern border of Arkansas that restricted movement of Arkansas cattle and mandatory participation in an eradication program for the ticks was a legace of the trail drives of Texas cattle that came trough Arkansas.

Map of U.S.A. Showing Texas fever Quarantine Line

Most trail drives of Texas cattle to market began in the spring. The story of this drive began April 5, 1866 when an Ohio livestock buyer, Upton Bushnell, realized Texas steers coule be bought for $3 or $4 per head wnd would bring perhaps ten times that on the Chicago market. He traveled to Texas with four others that included Perry Case, a young Idiana farmer who became his trail boss. After acquiring the herd, Bushnell became ill and left the herd when it reached Fort Smith. Under Case the herd continued north. It is he who tells the story. He dictated this story to a relative, Mrs. Nancy Gay Hughes of Chicago, in 1926 shortly before his death.

After putting Bushnell on the steamer, Pilgrim, in Fort Smith on July 25, Perry Case commented, "There I was for the first time with all the responsiblity on me. There was only Bartlett, Fred, Dick and me, with what help we could get. Money was short. Everybody was blue."

Perry Case continued his story--"About a day's drive from Prairie Grove we came out on a big spring along the White River. It was rought country, with no feed or water for our cattle, but we stopped for water. They said the Union soldiers had burned up everything the year before. We saw two little boys who said they hadn't seen any bread for six weeks but they lived mighty well now. They had peas to eat.        "What the devil did you live on?' Bartlett asked.     
              "June bugs and field mice,' the boys said.     
             "These boys were war victims. We saw hundreds of people like these, left destitute by war. Histories of the north don't tell this, but this is how it was and I'm going to tell it.

"We drove on over the mountains; there was no water, no grass, nothing but rocks. What to do? The cattle's feet got sore on the stones, and yet we couldn't stop. We had to drive on for feed. We gave a man $5 to help us across Osage Creek and the Osage Mountains."

From there the herders drove their herd across Northern Arkansas into Missouri. Everywhere they went they encountered terrible desolation. "No houses in sight. There wasn't a house left standing The Union soldiers had burned everything(2)," Case recalled.

On August 23, Perry Case and his crew crossed over into Southern Missouri. Many other hardships were encountered including hositility of the Missouri farmers. They did not reach their final destination, Chicago, until November 3, 1866.

Perhaps a discussion of concerns assocaited witht he spread of Texas Fever will help understand the plight of Perry Case and subsequent problems of North Arkansas farmers with this disease.

In the spring of 1866 about a quarter of a million cattle moved out of Texas toward northern markets. Most of the herds took the old Sedalia Trail. They crossed the Red River at Rocks Bluff of at Colbert's Ferry and angled orth past Boggy Dept and Fort Gibson or else through the Kiamichi Valley into Choctaw country. The trail extended to Baxter Springs, Kansas, then northeast to Sedalia, Missouri, at that time the railhead nearest Texas. Prior to the war some herds had followed this route to St. Louis and Illinois(3).

After crossing the Red River the hards were in Indian Territory. Prior to the war the Indians had not objected to the occasional herd of cattle passing but when suddenly in 1866 they were faced with so many large herds they sought to stop and/or control the movement. Herds were met at the border and a toll of ten cents per head were demanded. Some drovers paid the tax, some chose to shoot their way through and some turned their herds east into Arkansas and skirted the Ozarks from Ft. Smith northward, running the gauntlet of constant preying of outlaws who used the hills for cover(4). Perry Case chose the third option noting six other herds that also chose to turn east into Arkansas at this time.

The opposition of the Indians to passage was mild compared to the armed Missouri farmers they met at the border. Although they did not know the cause at that time, framers of Missouri and Kansas were unanimous in their opinion that Texas cattle brought the disease known as "Texas Fever or Spanish Fever" to them. This armed resistance and the quarantine law hurriedly passed by the Missouri legislature in the spring of 1866 caused a concentration of cattle herds near Baxter Springs. The result was a severe overgrazing of the range nearby and an opportunity for Jayhawkers to defraud and exploit the drovers. How various drovers cope with this situation probably caused Perry Case to turn his herd east across the northern counties of Arkansas.

As early as 1846 Texas steers were driven to Ohio for fattening. Texas cattle had also been fed in Missouri and Illinois prior to the Civil War. Because cattle taht came in contact witht htese early drives died, the resistance by Missouri farmers had developed. After the war more cattle moved up the trail to market and railroads were extended across Kansas to developing cowtowns such as Ellsworth and Dodge City. The confilict between drovers and farmers intensified regarding intermingling southern cattle with northern cattle that lacked immunity to Texas Fever. Invention of barbed wire, fencing of the range and quarantine laws in Kansas stopped the trail drives ad closed that window in history giving rise to the romance of the cowboy(5). The conflict owver mixing southern and northern cattle continued however. This was one of the first issues that led to the establishment of the Bureau of Animal Industry by the USDA.

An act of Congress in 1884 established the Bureau of Animal Industry to provide a means of suppressing diseases among domestic animals. The first task of this bureau was eradication of pleuro-pneumonia. The second assignment was to find the cause of Texas or Splenic Fever. Theobold Smith, the bureau's first pathologist, began systematic experiements on the disease in 1888. He soon found the disease was caused by a protozoan parasite in the blood of infected animals. Farmers had long suspected that the disease was assocaited with ticks. Cooper Curtice worked out the life cycle of the tick and F. L. Kilborne working with Dr. Smith showed the relationship of ticks as an intermediate host to the disease. Bulletin Number 1 of the Bureau of Animal Industry issued in 1892 told the story of this research(6).

The Texas fever tick was a major problem in Arkansas. Arkansas cattle producers had no real market. Locally cattle had little or no value and they were forbidden to ship cattle from tick infested areas, except for immediate slaughter, unless they had been dipped twice in ten days. Most Arkansas calves needed more feed before hey were ready for slaughter. Feed was seldom available at home and corn belt feeders would not buy calves from tick infested areas. Neither were producers able to brin in purebred breeding stock because they would die when exposed to infested cattle. It was estimated that there was about a $500,000,000 annual loss (in 1900 dollars) to calle producers in the state(7).

In 1915 the legislature authorized the establishment of tick eradication districts. Regulations were developed by of Board of Control in the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station in cooperation witht he State Veterinarian and carried out by field inspectors. When a county agreed to participate in the eradication progrom 25 to 40 concrete dipping vats were built so that farmers would not have to drive their cattle more than 3 miles. Cattle were dipped every 3 weeks in a solution of white arsenic, sodium carbonate and pine tar boiled in water. Much resistance to the mandatory dipping was encoutered. During the next ten years many law suits were tried but the authority of the inspectors and the Board of Control was upheld. The details of this most successful disease eradication may be found in Agricultureal Experiment Station Bulletins 90, 93, 101, 119, 132 and 160.

Notes:
1. Hodges, Harmon Willis. 1865, Letters from Headquarters. Flashback, Vol. 26, pp. 9-14
2. Case, Perry, 1960, The Long Drive, American Heritage, XI (3): 65-80. This article contains much excellent material on post-Civil War Northern Arkansas as well as the small amount quoted in this article involving Washington County only. It is hightly recommended reading to those wishing to add to their understanding of that region after the Civil War.
3. Wellman, Paul I. 1951 The Trampling Herd, Doubleday, Inc., New York, New York
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1956, Animal Diseases, USDA, United States Government Printing Office.
7. Strausberg, Stephen F., 1989, A Century of Research,  Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, Fayetteville, Arkansas.Dr. Brown in a resident of Fayetteville with a long association with the University of Arkansas.