Beef, Steel, and Black Gold; Agriculture and Industry on the Frontier
The story of Texas Frontier at the turn of the 20th Century is about a wild place thrust into modernity by rapid settlement and an economic evolution. By 1875, America repaired the rift of the Civil War and Texas was once again apart of the Union. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Federal troops continued their campaign against the Comanche to make way for settlement from the East. At the same time, thousands of buffalo hunters came close to pushing these vast and importantherds into extinction, ending the Indian way of life on the Southern Plains of Texas.
With the removal of the Comanche and the buffalo, ranchers built cattle empires that depended on railheads in Kansas. By 1900, though, Texas had undergone a transportation evolution by laying 10,000 miles of track and creating railroad towns like Abilene and Lubbock. These towns now handled the bulk of Texas beef, shipping the cattle back East. Now that railheads were closer ranchers did not need cowboys to drive cattle to railheads in the North and barbed wire replaced the free range to protect cattle and increasingly, cotton and other crops.
Along with fences came the modern conveniences and social trends of the East. Cities grew and the frontier began to change. It was no longer cowboys and outlaws, but ranchers and railroad men. Cars took the place of horse drawn carriages, electricity lit up the dark and the oil boom that transformed East Texas eventually consumed the Frontier. Texans still portrayed themselves as larger than life people, spurs and all, but the land and the people on it had changed. Between 1875 and 1925, just a fifty-year period, the frontier of Texas grew from a harsh open prairie to a land of towns and cities connected by railroads, a land divided by fences and dotted with oil wells. Industry had replaced the frontier.