Cattle Drive

A classic glimpse of life on the Open Range. Such images romanticized cattle empires like Adair’s JA Ranch and helped fuel the Beef Bonanza, the investment bubble of the late 1880’s. It lasted until the barbed wire and the railroads ended free-range Cowboy life; just as they had helped put an end to free Indian life. The cattle drives in the Panhandle region largely stopped in 1887 (two years after Adair’s death) when the Santa Fe railroad came to Amarillo.Today’s iconic Marlboro Man echoes back to a period that, in fact, lasted no more than twenty years.