Driving Cattle to Market

 Driving Cattle to Market 

The cattle industry in this country became a thing when people started looking around at the wild longhorn cattle running loose and multiplying on the plains of Texas. The virgin grasslands of Montana and the Dakotas beckoned as a place to fatten up the skinny critters and the trail drives were born.

Cattle drives born in the imagination of writers have earned a place in popular books and television fare. Take the novel “Lonesome Dove” where Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call drove a herd on the trail from Texas to Montana, or the tv series “Rawhide” where young Clint Eastwood’s character Rowdy Yates endlessly drove a herd around the country for about eight years.

If we want to get real and close at hand, though, we can relate a good story of a trail drive in Ransom County that took place in 1940. The lady rancher Freida Bohnsack came into possession of over 2,000 acres in the sandhills. Given the ranch by her father in the mid-1930s, she left an accounting job with the Gamble-Skogmo Company in Minneapolis to come and earn a living on the land. In addition, her dad started her out with a herd of six Holstein calves.

Bear in mind this was the drought and depression period in our history and the outlook was bleak. Along with the dust storms, the year 1936 gave us the coldest and the hottest recorded temperatures in North Dakota history, minus 60 degrees in Parshall and five months later a plus 121 degrees in Steele.

She now owned a large parcel of sandhill grassland with only a few head of her own to graze on it. An enterprising business person, she decided to make the grass available to others by leasing grazing rights, something which a number of cattlemen agreed to. As these things go, the cows and calves most likely did well. Then an article in the Fargo Forum dated September 18, 1940 states a trail drive of 600 cattle were going to be made that fall. However, it took the memories of one of her trail hands named Tex Bohm to clarify the event.

Tex worked for Freida the summer before his senior year in high school. A lover of all things Western, he liked his job, especially so when Freida arranged and coordinated an overland drive of 600 cattle to the West Fargo Stockyards. He would be able to participate in an old-time cattle drive. So many details have been lost or dimmed since that time 83 years ago, but he left a few.

He spoke of the winding route the herd took because fences or other developments stood in their way, but rights-of-way were followed when possible which provided enough room for the herd to pass through. None of the history of the event tells how long it took. One of the riders was an older man who rode sidesaddle. Tex asked why? His answer was it was more comfortable to ride that way when you have hemorrhoids.

The stockyards no longer exist, but try to imagine a cattle herd driven in on the hoof now with the commercial and residential development surrounding that site. Built in 1935, the facility stood alone and apart from any thing else, and in 1940 it was still that way. It is doubtful many herds came in that way. The history of the West Fargo Stockyards was published in 1985: “Through Chutes and Alleys: A Half Century of the West Fargo Union Stockyards.” It makes no mention of trail drives delivering stock. Trucks and rail cars were already serving that purpose.

The number 600 head being driven to West Fargo comes into question. When Tex died, his obituary stated he helped “when Freida Bohnsack drove 300 head of cattle from her Ransom County ranch to Fargo.” A city-born writer working for the Forum might’ve misunderstood and should’ve written that the roundup in September, 1940 separated the cow-calf pairs and 300 spring calves were driven to market, leaving 300 cows behind?

How much would they have brought on the market? The stockyards history stated that in 1940 136,904 cattle came bringing an average price per hundred weight of $6.80 for cattle, whereas 17,912 calves brought $8.00. Prices did increase through the years. In 1984, the last year recorded in this history, cattle brought $52.70 and calves $62.30.

November 30, 2020 was the market’s last day of operation.The manager stated, “There was little warning of the closure. We were doing dang good business, and they called and said in two weeks you have to lock the doors and shut it down.” With the encroachment of development surrounding the facility, he surmised the property was more valuable that the business was.

It’s not known when this independent lady rancher stopped leasing grassland to other cattle producers, but she eventually filled it with her own herd of Angus cattle that grew to 300 in number. Her successful management of the ranch earned her a spot in 2002 in the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In the state’s history several cowboys followed the herds up from Texas, found the area to their liking, and stayed: Ben Bird, Ott Black, Bill Molash, and more. They live on with their colorful pasts defining them. As for the fictional Lonesome Dove, it might be remembered from the story that Gus had two pigs that followed the herd to Montana. Unfortunately for them, after Gus died the ranch hands butchered them for a Christmas dinner. As improbable as it might seem, it could’ve happened. I have a true story where a sow followed a pioneer wagon from Iowa to the Enderlin area. Some day I might just pass it along.