Home on the Range
by Dick Botkin
Title
Home on the Range
Artist
Dick Botkin
Medium
Photograph
Description
Open Range living between Scottsdale and Rio Verde. They'll trim your foliage and fertilize too!
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Unlike the eastern United States, the western prairies of the 19th century were vast, undeveloped, and uncultivated, with scarce, widely separated sources of water. Until the invention of barbed wire in the 1870s, it was more practical to fence the livestock out of developed land, rather than to fence it in.[1] As the United States government acquired western territories, land not yet placed into private ownership was publicly owned and freely available for grazing cattle, though conflicting land claims and periodic warfare with Native Americans of the Great Plains placed some practical limits on grazing areas at various times.
Free-roaming range cattle calved, were moved between grazing lands, and driven to market by cowboys. Branding was used to identify cattle belonging to different owners.[1] Unbranded cattle were known as "mavericks" and could become the property of anyone able to capture and brand the unmarked animal.
The invention of barbed wire in the 1880s allowed cattle to be confined to designated areas to prevent overgrazing of the range. In Texas and surrounding areas, increased population required ranchers to fence off their individual lands.[4] This initially brought considerable drama to western rangeland. Its invention made fencing huge expanses cheaper than hiring cowboys for handling cattle, and indiscriminate fencing of federal lands often occurred in 1880s, often without any regards to land ownership or other public needs, such as mail delivery and movement of other kinds of livestock. Various state statutes, as well as vigilantes (see "Fence Cutting War"), tried to enforce or combat fence-building with varying success. In 1885, federal legislation outlawed the enclosure of public land. By 1890, illegal fencing had been mostly removed.
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September 14th, 2012
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