Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys

"Plans were laid years in advance for monopolizing the cattle production of the Great Plains.

The Money Power financed the extermination of the buffalo.

A high price was offered for buffalo hides in whatever quantity offered.

All men who wished to hunt buffalo could get an outfit on credit and pay for it in buffalo hides.

On these terms, an army of buffalo hunters was organized.

After the initial carnage wrought by the buffalo hunters from trains the buffalo hunters lined the banks of the streams where the buffaloes came to drink and in two or three years, the buffalo, numbering many millions were exterminated.

Nobody but the money power could have effected the extermination of the buffalo.

"Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."

Only they had money enough to equip such an army of slaughterers.

Only they, in their immense world-wide commerce, had a market for such a vast number of hides.

The money power had been obtaining hides for their trade in leather, shoes, and other leather products, from Buenos Aires, in South America.

It was only necessary to substitute buffalo hides for South American hides, for two or three years, to secure the extermination of the buffalo.

The money power saw a grand enterprise in devoting the Great Plains to the production of beef.

As soon as the buffaloe were exterminated, they began to buy cattle in Texas, and cows and calves and young cattle in all the states, to start ranches on the Great Plains.

This caused a boom in cattle all over the country; and multitudes of enterprising Americans organized cattle companies, and started cattle ranches all over the West, from Texas to Montana, mortgaging their property, and taking money out of their business, in order to take stock in the cattle companies.

The boom in prices was kept up until the Great Plains were fully occupied with cattle ranches."

L.B. Woolfolk 1890

unique library index






Fair Use Notice


Copyright © Lawrence Turner
All Rights Reserved