1867 | Agriculture
Agriculture
Ranchers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving return to Texas in the spring to start a third drive of longhorns north to Fort Sumner (see 1866). Heavy rains and threats of Indian attacks slow them down, Loving goes ahead to bid on contracts, promising Goodnight that he will travel by night through Indian country; he takes only one man with him, becomes impatient, pushes on during the day, comes under attack, sustains a serious wound, sends his companion back to the herd, eludes capture, reaches Fort Sumner with help from Mexican traders, and dies there of gangrene September 25 at age 54. Goodnight continues the drive, shares its profits with Loving's family at Weatherford, and in the next few years will contract for delivery of herds on the Pecos and drive thousands of head into Colorado and Wyoming for sale to ranchers stocking the northern ranges (see 1871).
Chicago livestock dealer Joseph Geating McCoy, 29, buys 450 acres of land at $5 per acre in Abilene, Kansas; builds pens and loading chutes with lumber he has brought from Hannibal, Missouri; installs a pair of large Fairbanks scales, and promises Texas ranchers $40 per head for cattle the ranchers can sell at home for only $4 per head. Abilene is "a small, dead place of about one dozen log huts . . . four-fifths of which are covered with dirt for roofing," but it is the terminus of the Kansas Pacific Railway which despite its name operates only between Chicago and Abilene. The railroad has promised McCoy one-eighth of the freight charge on each car of cattle he ships East. He sends out the first shipment (20 carloads) September 5, and by year's end some 35,000 head of longhorns have passed through Abilene, a figure that will more than double next year (see 1871; Chisholm Trail, 1866).
Ohio inventor Lucien Smith files a patent June 25 for barbed wire whose barbs protrude from small blocks of wood strung along a wire strand, but no reliable machine exists to manufacture such wire in quantity (see 1873).
More than half of all U.S. working people are employed on farms and ranches.
U.S. wheat sells for $2.50 per bushel in late April, but the price falls to $1.45 by September and will soon drop much farther (see 1868).
The Grange, or the Patrons of Husbandry, is founded in the upper Mississippi Valley by Boston-born former U.S. Department of Agriculture field investigator Oliver Hudson Kelley, 41 (see National Grange, 1868).
Sugar beets are introduced into Utah Territory by Mormon leader Brigham Young, now 66, who has machinery from Liverpool carted across the continent to Salt Lake City by ox-drawn wagon, but the beet sugar factory he builds will be abandoned within 2 years (see 1880).
Prehistoric canals in Arizona Territory are cleared by the John Swirling Company to bring water from the Salt River to the fertile lands of the valley. The town of Phoenix begins growing (see Roosevelt Dam, 1911).
Iowa farmer William Louden, 25, modernizes dairy farming with a rope sling and wooden monorail hay carrier. Suspended beneath the peak of a barn, Louden's carrier enables a farmer to swing a load of hay without using a pitchfork, and the litter carrier hauls out manure, allowing a farmer to clean a stable or dairy barn in one-tenth the time it has taken until now. Louden's contributions will make possible the keeping of large, efficient dairy herds.
The Illinois and Wisconsin Dairymen's Association is founded.
A meeting of France's Central Agricultural Society at Paris hears the report of a grower from the administrative department of the Gard, on the west bank of the Rhône, who tells of a mysterious malady that has been affecting vines in his region for the past 2 or 3 years (see 1863; 1868).